Salvation

Dellian and Yirella shuddered in unison as they heard the distinctive drawn-out ululation of a lokak’s menacing hunting cry coming from beyond the estate’s perimeter fence. Thankfully, they rarely saw the agile, serpentine beasts slipping through the snarled-up forest outside. The animals had learned not to stray too close to the estate; but the fence and the sentry remotes that patrolled in endless circles were a constant reminder of how hostile Juloss could be to anyone who let their guard down.

The arena’s portal was on the edge of the sports field, sheltering under a small Hellenic roof. Dellian shook off his chill as he walked through. He and Yirella stepped directly into the arena, a simple cylinder with a diameter of a hundred meters, and seventy wide, with every surface padded. He breathed in happily, feeling his heartbeat rise. This was what he lived for, to show off his prowess in the tournaments and matches, for with that came the prospect of beating the opposing team, of winning. And nothing on Juloss was more important than winning.

The arena was in neutral mode, which was spinning about its axis to produce a twenty percent Coriolis gravity around the curving floor. Dellian always wished there was a window—the arena was attached to a skyfort’s assembly grid, orbiting 150,000 kilometers above Juloss, and the view would have been fabulous.

Instead he did what he always did when he came in, and studied the arena’s interior to see if the stewards had made any changes. Floating above him were thirty bright hazard-orange hurdles: polyhedrons of various sizes, also padded.

“They’ve bigged them up, look,” Dellian said enthusiastically, as he took in the hurdles, committing the positioning to memory. Alexandre had promised the senior yeargroup they would receive their databuds in another couple of months, uniting them directly with personal processors and memory cores that would handle all the mundane mental chores Dellian had to labor away at right now. He considered it monumentally unfair that all the clan’s adults had them.

“You mean they have enlarged the hurdles,” Yirella said primly.

“Saints, you’ve gone and joined the grammar police,” he moaned. At the same time he saw how intently she was studying the new layout and smiled to himself. They started to walk along the floor, necks craning up, his cohort studying the hurdle layout as attentively as he was.

The rest of Dellian’s yearmates started to show up. He saw the boys grinning at the larger hurdles suspended above them, relishing the extra bounce the wider pentagonal and hexagonal surfaces would give them—if they landed true, of course.

“Saints, we’ll reach the axis like lightning,” Janc said.

“Going to ace this,” Uret agreed.

“Is it going to be a capture the flag, do you think?” Orellt asked.

“I want to play straight takedown,” Rello said wistfully. “Just hit them and knock them out of the arena.”

“Inter-clan matches are flag captures,” Tilliana said loftily. “They allow a greater range of strategy options and cooperative maneuvers. That’s what we train for, after all.”

Dellian and Falar exchanged a martyred grin behind Tilliana’s back; the girl was always dismissive of any enthusiasm the boys showed to expand the tournament. Even so, she and her pair of muncs were reviewing the new arrangement keenly.

“Where are they?” Xante exclaimed impatiently.

They didn’t have long to wait. The visiting team from the Ansaru clan, whose estate was on the other side of the eastern mountains, came jogging into the arena in a single regimented line, their munc cohorts forming columns on either side. Dellian scowled at that; the Ansaru boys had discipline. With his own yearmates spread halfway around the curving floor, joking around, their cohorts scattered and jostling spiritedly, it already put the Ansaru team ahead on style. We should organize like that.

Alexandre and the Ansaru referee came in, talking together cheerfully. Dellian was grateful he had Alexandre as his year mentor; some of the other adults who looked after the clan children didn’t have hir empathy. He could still remember the day, six years ago, when he and his yearmates had it gently explained to them that they weren’t omnia like the adults, that their gender was binary, fixed—like people on Earth millennia ago.

“Why?” they’d all asked.

“Because you need to be what you are,” Alexandre had explained kindly. “It is you who will be going out to face the enemy in combat, and what you are will give you the greatest advantage in battle.”

Dellian still didn’t quite believe that. After all, Alexandre, like most of the adults, was nearly two meters tall. Surely soldiers needed that size and strength, and sie’d also told the boys they were unlikely to reach that height.

“But you will be strong,” sie’d promised. Only that was a poor consolation for Dellian.