More orphans arrived every year. Five or 10, never too many, always enough to keep the orphanage full of voices. Soon there were Bradley's, Clark's, Holmberg's. We had been the largest class, a roundup of the most recent attacks. We grew up in the knowledge of our skill and weapons. We were assigned the new boys to train. At first it was the rudimentaries. Then in consecutive years we were assigned more and more responsibility to train. When we reached 16 we were teaching tactics of Mars guerrilla combat to the new boys. In our group, Cadmus taught weapon specs, I taught geography, and Balthasar taught formations and points of attack. Our supervisors, our teachers began to run mock drills pitting groups against one another. We were graded on how well our team of young boys performed in their mock battles. In our spare time we were taught ways in which to improvise our weapons.

This technology, our bodies, were an ever evolving experiment in physics and biology. You could tell who was experimenting by the size and duration of their bruises and wounds. Some of the kids in our age group began to experiment with their pulse beams. They were able to set it on low grade frequency and charge it fully to propel them skyward when they shot it at the ground. It created little damage to the dirt, and shot over 10 feet in the air. Soon they were able to time their pulse beams to create a sort of wave shaped air dance. It was as if they were yoyo's. The boys who discovered these innovations were rewarded with more authority and leverage in their groups and their age brackets. Soon it became a competition to see who could come up with the newest innovations. One of the kids, Dimitris Audland discovered the frequency setting of his arm could emit a pulse wave with no discernable evidence that it existed except for a small gust of wind. He used this successfully in mock drills, diverting the other group with a false movement meters away from him, then drawing them into his sight range. Dimitris was pale and pimpled and avoided conversation with kids his own age. He garnered a large group of devotees in the younger classes with his discovery. My own Balthasar discovered a way to set the frequency of his laser mode to correspond with any angle off of any metalic structure to create a web of laser beams. The physics were the same as billiards. The scope and breadth of the discoveries were wide and deep. When one was successfully accomplished, we spent months perfecting and practicing them. They became required coursework at the orphanage's school.

For me, I learned what they taught. I was never the best or the worst. I made due and I learned. I could complete all of the training necessary but I never excelled at any. I was able to lead a team, and with the aid of Cadmus and Balthasar we were one of the top ranked teams within our age group. I could never delve deep enough into the mechanics or the theories behind what our arms could do. I never had the patience. But I knew intrinsically that it was my arm. That I controlled it, and it did what I wanted. Beyond that was boring and confusing. I didn't care for the math of it, or the theoretically possibilities. I only cared that I could use it and it was a part of me. That was enough.

I don't care to tell you about what we talked about during that time. What does any child talk about growing up? What it is they say at any moment is not important at all. Whether they passed a class or switched allegience with friends. Whether I made fun of Cadmus, or Balthasar scolded me for not studying, this didn't matter. Talking about girls, movies, books, comics--none of this mattered. What mattered is the sum of all the words all the smells, and the sounds; these are the memories that catch inside of me as if stuck in web, that rattle and shake to break loose at the strangest moments. They say to me, listen, listen, do you hear how Balthasar's laugh explodes out of him like a spirit trying to escape? Do you still feel how your arm slides along the dirt like a shining snake, feel it--with no sounds--see it alone, moving, hugging the red dirt and welcoming its warm cradle? Can you taste the tang in your mouth, the hot prickles in your stomach, as if you swallowed a hot sponge the first time you were hit by the pulse beam? Can you smell that? That sweetness, that sweetness! That passes through the air and vanishes, that smell that told your soul to rejoice for 10 seconds while Mars released its grasp and opened its arms and it was vast, and the air was alive and and if you could keep the arms from grabbing you again you would, but rejoice for the moment it let go! See the top of the flame trees shaking, shaking, trembling, as if in supplication to the stark and terribly hard blue sky not falling out of grace from the sun! The steps down the hallway. The owl out your window. The sunbeam that lingered on your floor during April from 2 to 3pm. The ants in the tree and the sparrows.

These, these tiny mirrors, broken and tossed inside of us, these million mirrors make up the sum of a man.

The three of us were at the orphanage for 12 years. We were in the first class of graduates. There were 50 of us.