Rise Against the Faultless by Melissa Hardaway Read Free Book Online Page B

miss a training session. This is a zero tolerance
policy. Good luck to you.”
    Terra Sharp reclaimed the stage
and instructed us that our PIDs had been loaded with a map of the compound.
Today we were to make ourselves familiar with the compound and our schedule for
the next week. We would begin training sessions tomorrow morning. As soon as
the meeting was over, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see
Adrian beaming at me. He did not embrace me, which I thought was smart, we
still don’t know all the rules of this place.  The only rules that were obvious
were don’t leave, don’t talk about training, and don’t miss training sessions.
Maybe those were the only rules, but to be on the safe side, we should probably
avoid public affection.
    Adrian, Lo, and I wandered around
until we found the dining hall. In all the excitement we didn’t realize that we
had missed our lunch.  Unfortunately, I was right about the food, no better,
but it did seem a little protein heavy. I guess they’re going to try to bulk us
up for training. Rather than water, we had a thick, green, slightly sweet
tasting drink.  It took all I had to choke it down, but I took what I could
get. After lunch we helped Lo find her room, it was on a level two and on the
opposite side of the dormitory than my own room.  I was grateful for my view
after looking out of Lo’s room because she was looking at the side of another
building, however if I looked out towards the South, I could see one of the
three skyscrapers that I had noticed on our arrival.
    After checking each of our
schedules, we found our meeting rooms for the next day and memorized how to get
there. Adrian’s meeting room was full of technical equipment that I couldn’t
dream of operating, but he seemed impressed.  Lo’s room was relatively low tech
in comparison and full of training equipment, but more noticeably, it was
massive. My room contained only two shelves and a few chairs. I guess that
since it isn’t utilized as much as the other training rooms it doesn’t get
quite as much attention.
    “I heard some guys behind me
talking about the lounge on campus. They said that you can get drinks and
crackers there.” If they’re letting us freely eat and drink something, it
probably isn’t very tasty, but I still found myself feeling excited about it.
We got lost twice, but eventually found the lounge. Apparently we weren’t the
first to hear about it, because it looked like half the initiates were in
there.  I could see the table with the crackers on it, but it also had bread
and some sort of white dip with green flecks in it. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
A long line snaked around the room of excited initiates trying to get a taste
of the unregulated refreshments.
    The other side of the room had
an entire wall of readily bottled drinks in coolers. All you had to do was scan
your PID and select your beverage. I could see that there were a few with small
amounts of alcohol in them.  Alcohol had never really intrigued me as it had my
classmates. This would be our first opportunity to have it, but I could see a
sign on the wall above the coolers that said “Limit of two alcoholic beverages
per day- strictly enforced.” So that was why we had to scan our PID before
getting a drink, but not a snack. Adrian, Lo, and I decided that we should
probably wait until tomorrow evening before trying out the snacks because it
would probably take well over an hour just to get to the table today, but the
drink line wasn’t nearly as long and in ten minutes we each had our beverages
and were off to check out the rest of the grounds.
    From the map on our PID, it
looked like buildings on the Training Compound were grouped together in the
shape of a triangle. Our dormitories were on the far east side, just before the
fields of wind turbines. The three sky scrapers on the back of the grounds were
to the north, and there were large structures on the West side that I hadn’t
figured out