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their plane, and without their approval, you don’t get on.”
    The airman scribbled on his clipboard while the six drivers formed a tight wall around him. More argument, but the airman stood his ground, waiting for them to leave. When they were finally driven out, the airman asked if we knew what was going to happen next. A Japanese guy named Kumo stepped forward, ready to take us up in a plane. Words were brief. We were led into a large room inside the hangar, black-bagged, drugged, and then all thirty-two of us, one by one, slipped into dream and hallucination, time like a piston compressing and expanding until we reached our destination.
    We rose dressed in medical robes, dry-mouthed and foggy from a drug-induced haze, Kumo nudging us awake with a dirty bare foot. We found ourselves spread out on cots inside a mildewed plywood barrack, trees punching through sawed-out holes in the roof. My clothes were piled next to a sports bag full of my personal belongings. I leafed through the pile of clothes to find my Earth photo still tucked in the pocket of my undershirt. Briana and Chloe were hastily putting on their clothes under the covers.
    A case of water sat on the floor in the middle of the room.Each of us rushed to get one, but something was off. I did a head count.
    “Who’s missing?” Conroy asked. He had noticed too. Three guys were missing. Guzzling his water, he broke off and said, “Who the fuck are you?”
    Conroy stood in my vantage point, blocking my view. His dark, gun-barrel eyes danced in his head glaring at someone beyond his spiked-up jet-black hair. As he moved to the side, a figure emerged. We saw the grotesque form of a man appear. He sat furtively hunched over, the weight of his bulbous head pushing him into a coil. His lopsided jaw twisted sideways on his face, and his cheeks were severely sunken. His head was a fat club, body a stick, and eyes with round black pupils more animal than human. Around his neck, the skin was a splotchy café au lait.
    “Where did you come from?” Bunker asked.
    “The same place as you,” the stranger said. “The womb.”
    “Not from my mother’s,” Bunker said with a laugh.
    The man glared at him as if he were staring at an alien, reversing the look we were giving him.
    “Are you military?” I asked.
    “No,” the stranger said. “My name is Uriah, and I have come to train, just as you.”
    “When did the entrance requirements drop?” Bunker said.
    “I’ve earned my spot,” the stranger said.
    While the others looked on, Mir, the Peepshow Perv, shrugged and went back to pinning up centerfolds above his cot. “We’re out here now,” he said. “Expect the unexpected.”
    Bunker smirked at the comment, then began calling the man “Clubhead,” to which the stranger replied, “You’ll be the first one I make an example of.”
    As Bunker went at him, Kumo barged back inside, eyes aglow with the fresh morning heat. “Lineup outside. Now!”
    As Kumo turned, Conroy called out, “What happened to theothers?”
    “They were left. They never made it here. Now move your asses outside.”

Chapter 3
    “Nor ought we to believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.”
    -Archidamus, Spartan King
    The humid land gave us no clues to where we might be. Perhaps Africa. Perhaps Central or South America. Perhaps India. Perhaps Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Somewhere with sticky terrain and boiling air. Our bodies were in constant drip. Shirts were damp and mottled with sweat, our faces waxy and glistening.
    We were deep in a dense jungle surrounded by a rampart of trees. Animal, reptile, and insect sounds reached our ears—the howling of monkeys, the croaking of frogs, the layered screeching of a thousand different insects. Our voices thrummed strangely in tune to the cacophony in the midst of the bombed-size clearing we stood in. The whole jungle was a humungous