Signal to the Fortified Residential Zone

One

The familiar rumble of a jet flying low over the building was enough to snap Rhyth out of her sleep. It shook the ramshackle hut she lived in and the poorly built shelf at the foot of her bed, causing her handful of possessions to come crashing down to floor.

Rhyth was only one of the 5,000 under-18 residents of the Fortified Residential Zone, a giant dome made out of concrete and steel. It had been built on the outskirts of Tokyo, conveniently led to by a well-monitored section of sewer. A rusting gate kept the mouth closed off from exit or entry, and the children inside it to exist under a ceiling of glass and steel beams, ignorant of what Tokyo had become.

Rhyth had been living here for close to ten years and could just barely remember what the city outside had been like. She mostly only grasped at snippets of better housing, lots of bright glowing lights, and cartoons on TV. She had only been 7 when she'd left it, but according to their protector, this was a wonderful thing.

"It's for your own safety," Rokkaku Goji had announced through a loudspeaker as the Golden Rhinos rushed children out of their old world homes.

He never went into detail, but Rhyth was positive he was someone she could trust. Her mother had kept to herself as she was taken, so obviously nothing he had said could have been wrong.

A loud banging shook her from her trip down memory lane.

"Another jet just went by," Beat announced, as she opened her crooked metal door to let him inside.

"No shit," she said, pouring the two of them a drink of some juice.

The liquid was almost amber in color and tasted neither pleasant nor foul, with no distinguishable fruit as its base ingredient. To anyone else, this drink would have been quite suspicious, but to the teens who'd spent over half of their lives drinking it and couldn't remember much else, it may as well have been an iced tea.

"I wonder what the Rhinos are up to now," Beat ventured. "Do you think someone out there is trying to attack us again?"

"I don't know," Rhyth conspired. "I can't believe they haven't gotten rid of what was coming for us after all of this time."

"It must be something really vicious," he said. "We've been here for a while."

Rhyth thought of her mother, sitting quietly in the corner as she and her small book bag were lifted out of her childhood home.

"I wonder why it doesn't attack our parents," she ventured. "We had to be taken to shelter but my mom was left in Rokkaku Dai Heights."

The pair sat in silence for a moment as they picked apart the possibilities. In almost every piece of action media she'd ever heard of or seen, danger was ubiquitous. What went after a parent almost always went after a child, and vice versa. So what could he have been protecting them from after all?

"Oh well," she finally said. "It's pointless to think about these things. It's time to get to our practice anyway."

The couple descended the winding staircases to get to the plaza on the bottom floor of the dome. Men in orange suits were already waiting there next to the Metal Giant with sticks, ready to strike at anyone who didn't deliver.

"Begin your exercises," one of the men yelled, signaling for them to take their positions. "And remember that the Giant is watching. If we don't catch you slacking off, it will."

About one hundred teens had been gathered and all were given their own seemingly pointless jobs to labor away at. 

Rhyth wasted no time hopping up on to the exposed pipe, starting a set of one hundred pull ups under the given reasoning of maintaining her upper body strength. She thought she could almost feel the Giant's stare beating down on her back. A man stood nearby and watched her, menacingly slapping his stick in his palm.

It didn't take exceptionally long for her to finish the initial set of exercises and to be moved on to balancing work. For the second task, she was to stand on one foot on top of the pipe, keeping as still as possible for as long as she could. If she couldn't hold form for fifteen minutes, the man would be waiting to punish her.

Her exercises went rather smoothly, leaving a few minutes of downtime before the whole morning group was set to advance.

"You all know your routes, now get to them," a gruff voice called.

She and Beat ran side by side, starting the long, torturous process of jogging up staircases, across uneven floors, over exposed piping, and through countless unnecessary obstacles. Goji may have built the place to protect them, but he didn't bother to make the layout of it make sense.

They were less than a quarter of the way through the workout when a boy in front of them fell to the ground, clutching at his gut.

"GET UP NOW AND GET MOVING," an orange suit screamed at him.

The boy continued to lie there, groaning in protest and pain.

The man took this as an opportunity to hit him. He slapped his stick repeatedly on the boy's body, eliciting blood-curdling shrieks. No matter how much the man swatted at him and how many times the official told him to run, the boy just laid there wailing and cowering.

The two did not linger at the scene and instead kept to their running, afraid the Giant would catch them at rest and bring the brunt of the attack down on them.

"He's weak," Beat observed, echoing a thought that Rhyth herself had been having.

Goji had always said that it wouldn't do to be weak there. If you couldn't finish your trainings, you couldn't claim your place. That's just how the world worked, even outside in Tokyo, and Goji had always made that unbelievably clear.

After finishing several hours of excruciating training, the teens were released for lunch hour. The day's offering was a stew composed of even more unidentifiable ingredients, yet the boys and girls picked hungrily at it as if it were a five star mixture, hardly remembering what it was like to taste delicious real food. They ate to fill a need, not to enjoy it.

After the meal, the group was shuffled to small group practice in the lower levels of the dome, where they were made to think about all sorts of logical issues. For example: Should Rhyth let one person die if it saved the lives of five others? These scenarios were tossed her way for a lot longer than the physical training had lasted. It always left her with a terrible headache, and was the only part she felt fearful of not making it through.

It was never hard for her to fall asleep in the early evening, even if she got back well before the sun had set on the dome. That night was no different. She rather peacefully drifted off to sleep, and didn't dream about anything while she was gone.