“Affirmative.”
John didn’t even know why he’d say that. The proposal was as ludicrous as anything could get. The word just slipped, like it did a thousand times over because in Selection that was the only thing he could say. It was the only thing he was supposed to say.
John looked at him. “You mean I could die?”
T-Eleven stepped aside from the chair like a sommelier and offered him the clipboard. “Sign here and you may leave.”
This was it. This was why only a rumoured two per cent finished Selection, and even less conquered it. John’s knees went soft, his guts churned because his heart had sunk right down to them. He touched the icy surface of the raw steel and started crying. T-Eleven strapped him in, fitted the silicone mask over his face, and the gas started hissing like a gloating serpent.
T-Eleven scribbled on the clipboard. His actions were insouciant, remorseless. It was just another day at the office. Even though there was neither odour nor pain, John wept because that was the only sensible thing left to do. The weeping rendered his large, leonine face flushed and moist. His strong, massive chest convulsed, and with tremendous effort he kept his roiling mind on Ginn and their daughter.
John rounded the last bend and drove along Changi Coast Road in the slanting, dappled shadows of the flanking trees. The gas was real, and instead of killing him, it put him in a coma for three days. Ginn came by the hospital only on the fourth day because they wouldn’t let her in before that.
They had told her it was heat exhaustion from the Selection’s endurance march and had expected her to believe that rot. Her eyes were red and bulbous, and in them John saw relief and anger all at once. He reached out to touch her cheek with a secret bitterness; he couldn’t tell her the truth. At the beginning of Selection, he’d signed the Maximal Secret Non-Disclosure Act.
Break it and it would be the gallows. No trial, no inquisitions.
The trail brought him to an old warehouse facility with rusting tin sheets for walls and a caved-in roof of spindly, twisted metal battens. A marshal made him leave his car on a patch of broken concrete and continue on foot.
John was blindfolded and led into an interior where he felt the tingle of air-conditioning on his skin. He counted descending steps and entered an elevator that went a long way down. Fifty-four paces later the blindfold was removed. Reflexively, he squinted in anticipation of glare and found that the room, with its walls of darkwood and steel, was warmly lit.
The marshal tapped a card on a reader. “Look into the eyelet, sir.”
He did and the wall before him slid open. By its thickness he could tell it was a vault door, resistant to most bunker-buster ordinances.
Beyond it, a sterile corridor stretched into the distance. The walls were steel and there were steel doors set into them with no knobs or handles. All of them had the same sheen as the surgical chair in the gas chamber and filled his chest with ineffable dread. He had to be careful with everything CODEX, even an interview. Many things could happen in a CODEX interview.
“You have the room number, sir?” the marshal asked.
“Yes. Could you tell me wh—”
“Then you may proceed, sir.” The marshal departed without telling John where room RX-4328 was.
Six minutes remained before the appointed time. Behind him the vault door rolled shut, and a deep hum filled the space, like the bowels of a great machine. Each door had a retina scanner, and above it a tiny steel button shaped like a rivet. At the top of each doorframe he found numbers and alphabetical prefixes etched into a piece of steel.
John broke into a run that took him past rooms bearing numbers that had no connection with one another. He entered another corridor, found no RX rooms, backtracked and turned two corners before he realised that the alphabetical prefixes corresponded mathematically to the room numbers.
When he finally unravelled the equation the answer brought him panting before a door like the others. He disentangled his nerves and pushed the rivet-like button. A pleasant chime, not unlike that of an expensive hotel room. The click of an opening latch. He nudged the door with a finger and swung it open.
“Most people would’ve expected it to slide,” said a voice.
John knew better than to appear tentative. He entered boldly and found the room lined with rows of common filing cabinets, all of them empty. There was a desk of white glass, and behind it sat an aged man with an olive-shaped face and large, hairy ears.
“Thaddeus,” said John, his heart jolting with a spark of recognition. “Should’ve guessed.”
“What’s the distance from your car to the spot where your blindfold was removed?” said the man, ignoring the condescension on John’s face.
“Cut the crap, Thaddeus. Just tell me if I’m in or out.”
“The world could’ve ended in the eight minutes you took to find me. The distance, please.”
John’s mind raced. Three hundred and fifty-six paces. He could do a hundred metres in 65 paces. Apply a factor for staircases, inclined surfaces. “Five hundred and eighty-six, give or take five metres.”
“I’ll cut to the chase.” Thaddeus peered at him over his reading glasses. “I don’t think you’re cut out for this.”
“Then why did you call me?”
“Because I don’t decide Selection alone.”
“Someone thinks I should be in.”
“I disagree.”
“What are you going to do, Thaddeus?”
“I could talk to the top, get you a raise or something, chart out a career path for you in the regular force.” Thaddeus laced his fingers over the table.
John laughed bitterly. “Is this part of a test? To see how badly I wanted this?”
“No, it’s not. Off the record, I don’t want to lose a good man in the team.”
“You speak as if you already lost one.”
“There are many things you don’t know.”
“I know enough to come this far.” John folded his arms across his broad chest. “Interior knows about the rift in CODEX as well as we do, and each faction is pumping in more resources than the other just to work their policies. Soon everyone will have to choose sides, Interior included. By taking on Selection I’m making my choice, just as you’ve made yours.”
Thaddeus shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“A fourfold pay hike, plus bonus. It’s in the contract, isn’t it?” said John. “You can speak to the highest of high in the regular force and still won’t get me half of this.”
“CODEX don’t normally take people like you.”
“What? Normal ones with families?”
“That’s right. Apart from the grief we get questions, and that’s dangerous.”
“I still get my fourfold pay hike.”
“You’re being irrational.”
“I’m being practical,” John rejoined sharply. “My family needs this and you know it better than anyone else. Ginn and I took seven years to conceive Fanny and I’m not about to give her up. She survived a near stillbirth and the doctor’s odds to die before she turns three when she got diagnosed with both PKU and the neuroblastoma. She’s turned five and no insurance company will grant coverage because she’s so damn special. She practically lives in the hospital four days a week and social aid won’t even pay a fraction of the bill. That’s over twelve grand a month, Thaddeus. Twelve grand.”
“My sympathies. But it doesn’t change anything.”