Chapter 3: Militia
The adrenaline from Thorne’s speech lasted exactly as long as the walk to the Academy gates. Outside, the reality of District-1 settled back onto Ren’s shoulders like a familiar, worn-out coat. The sky was the color of wet concrete, promising a cold, drilling rain.
“That was something else,” Haru said, bouncing on the balls of his feet as they merged with the foot traffic. “Did you see the way that suit moved? It wasn’t just machinery. It was… alive.”
“It was efficient,” Ren said, but his mind was still replaying the Major’s final nod. Had it meant anything? Or was it just a speaker’s trick, making random eye contact to feel inspiring?
His wrist-comm buzzed. An urgent-priority family tag. He tapped it, and his aunt’s voice, clipped and staticky, filled his ear. “Ren. The delivery drone failed. Again. The sector commissary has our ration allocation, but someone has to physically sign. I need you to pick it up. The list is on the home server. Your father is… busy.”
Busy meant Kaito was lost in schematics or pain medication, or both. “On my way,” Ren said.
“Duty calls?” Haru grinned. “I’ll walk with you. Nothing waiting for me but a simulator module and a packet of vitamin paste.”
They turned off the main thoroughfare, leaving the polished composite and glass for the older sectors. The buildings here were pre-Event, patched and reinforced countless times, their façades stained with decades of particulate matter and damp. The crowd thinned, the mood shifting. The air grew heavier, smelling of ozone from the old street cleaners and the underlying, ever-present metallic tinge that no one could fully explain.
A single, flickering neon sign—“The Last Chance”—hung crooked over a boarded-up diner on the corner, its pink light bleeding into the gathering dusk. Its reflection warped in the rain-slicked pavement, where a single, broken umbrella lay abandoned in a gutter. The place had been closed since before Ren was born, a monument to a time when ‘chance’ was something people still believed in.
Three blocks from the commissary, they heard it first. A low-frequency thrum, not of machinery, but of many voices. A chant. It was coming from the next avenue over, near the district’s main redistribution hub.
“Ah, crap,” Haru muttered, his cheerful facade slipping. “Protest.”
They could see the edge of the crowd from the mouth of their street. Maybe two hundred people, mostly from the outer-rim refugee blocks, their clothes a drab mosaic of grey and brown. They weren’t holding fancy signs. They were just standing, packed together, their voices a ragged, hungry chorus. “Bread. Now. Peace. Now.” Simple. Devastating.
A line of Public Safety Officers in black polycarbonate armor stood between the protest and the hub’s sealed loading bays, their visors down, shock-batons held across their chests. Unmoving.
Ren’s gut tightened. He saw the faces in the crowd—pinched, tired, desperate. They were the same faces he saw from the transit pod windows. The people he swore he wanted to fight for. Up close, their desperation wasn’t inspiring. It was frightening. It was a raw, open wound.
“Let’s not stare,” he said quietly, turning his head away. He heard his father’s voice in his memory: Keep your head down, Ren. Compassion is a luxury. Observation is a risk.
“It’s just a food protest,” Haru said, but his tone was nervous. “They do this every few months when the ration algorithms glitch. It’ll fizzle out.”
They hurried the last block to the commissary, a fortified concrete bunker with slit windows. The procurement was swift, impersonal. A taciturn clerk scanned Ren’s family code, handed over a sealed crate of nutrient packs, protein bricks, and a small bundle of actual vegetables—the Ikawi family’s modest ‘civil servant’ supplement. Ren signed on a dusty dataslate without reading the terms. The crate was heavy, the handles cutting into his palms.
When they stepped back outside twenty minutes later, the world had changed.
The chanting was gone. Replaced by a sharper, more violent symphony: the electric crack-whine of stun batons, the truncated screams, the growled commands of the PSOs amplified through helmet vox. The protest hadn’t fizzled. It had been crushed.
Military vans, slab-sided and grey, were now pulled up on the curb. PSOs were dragging limp-bodied men and women towards them, not gently. A few individuals were still being subdued. Ren saw a woman in a faded blue shawl clutching a loaf of stolen bread to her chest. An officer wrenched it from her, crushed it under his boot, and shoved her towards a van. Her sobs were short, gulping sounds, like someone drowning.
A news drone hovered silently overhead, its single red recording light blinking.
“Don’t look. Walk.” Ren’s own voice sounded foreign to him, flat and cold. He adjusted his grip on the crate and set off at a fast, deliberate pace, heading for the side streets. Haru followed, uncharacteristically silent.
They could hear the heavy thud of van doors slamming, the whine of engines starting. The operation was clean, practiced. In five minutes, the avenue would be clear. There would be no evidence. Just the lingering smell of ozone from the weapons, and the crushed, powdery remains of a stolen loaf on the wet pavement.
They didn’t speak until they were five blocks away, the only sound the splash of their boots in puddles and the distant, fading sirens.
“They just… took them all,” Haru finally whispered. His face was pale. “Where do they take them?”
“The re-education camps outside Saitama,” Ren said dully, repeating the official term he’d heard on the state broadcasts. “For civic realignment.”
“That’s what they call it?” Haru let out a shaky breath. “My cousin got a ‘civic realignment’ notice last year. We never heard from him again. They said he ‘reintegrated into a frontier labor cohort.’” He made a vague, helpless gesture. “That was just for complaining about his housing allocation at work.”
Ren’s arms ached from the crate. The weight was a perfect focus. It was real. The protests, the arrests, the vanished cousin… it was all a chaotic, swirling storm. But the crate in his hands, the food for his family, that was a tangible duty. A simpler one.
“We can’t think about it,” Ren said, parroting the Academy’s first, unspoken lesson. “It clouds the mission. We have to be clear. We have to be focused. We clean the anomalies. That’s how we fix things.” He said it to convince himself as much as Haru.
Haru looked at him, his usual light completely extinguished. “Does it fix this?” he asked, jerking his thumb back towards the avenue.
Ren didn’t have an answer. Major Thorne’s words—‘a piece of our world handed back’—echoed, but they felt hollow now, drowned out by the sound of crushing bread and slamming van doors.
They reached the Ikawi’s street, a quiet lane of modest, attached homes. The silence between them was heavy.
“Hey,” Haru said, forcing a weak version of his smile. “Simulator tomorrow. Try not to beat my score too badly, okay?”
“You wish,” Ren replied, the automatic banter feeling like a worn script. He shifted the crate. “See you tomorrow, Haru.”
He watched his friend walk away, shoulders hunched against the damp, then turned toward his own front door. The house was dark except for the soft blue glow of a holographic schematic emanating from the living room window—The protest was over, the protesters gone, the street quiet. The only reminder was the tight, sour knot of anger and shame lodged just beneath Ren’s ribs, and the deep, chilling understanding that the world he wanted to cleanse was far more complicated, and far uglier, than any distorted anomaly zone.
He took a final breath of the metallic air, hoisted the crate, and went inside.