by Claudia Gray
Nash sighed. “Sounds rough. On Alderaan, people are encouraged to learn and grow. All education is free, and people volunteer to teach various skills or crafts just for fun. Of course, someday the entire Empire will be like that.” Thane laughed, which made Nash frown. “What’s so funny?”
“You, thinking the whole galaxy can turn into starshine and flowers, all because of the Empire.”
“That’s what the Empire is for, isn’t it?” Nash tried to wipe sweat from his face with his shirt but, finding it even sweatier, grimaced and let it fall. “To take the best of every world, every culture, and spread it throughout every system?”
Thane shrugged. “That was what the Galactic Republic was about, too. At least, they probably thought so at the beginning. But things fall apart.”
“Don’t let too many people hear you say that, all right?” Nash glanced around them, but nobody was walking especially close. “They might think you’re disloyal. Whereas I, your friend, know that you’re merely a cynic.”
“Guilty as charged.” He’d learned his lesson the first time his parents sucked up in public to the same people they’d mocked in private: appearances were deceiving.
“Well, someday you’ll come to Alderaan with me and see for yourself how wonderful it is. Not even you could be cynical about my world.”
Thane could tell Nash was homesick, so he decided to take his roommate’s boasting about Alderaan at face value…for now. “It sounds like a good place. I’d like to go sometime.”
“Just wait, my friend. You’re going to love it.”
So Thane had a voyage to Alderaan to look forward to. By then every world he learned about had become a possible destination; what began as hunger simply to leave Jelucan had ripened into genuine wanderlust. A career in the Imperial Starfleet would allow him to stand in the deep snows of ice planets, to dive into the depthless oceans of a waterworld, to bask in the searing heat of a beach beneath a binary star system.
And he got to fly every day, sometimes all day. Sure, at that point the cadets mostly used simulators—but the academy’s simulators operated at a level of sophistication Thane had never seen before. (Plus, anything beat a crappy old V-171.) From the outside, the simulators were stark globes of dull metal; on the inside cadets found completely accurate cockpits, glowing control boards, and viewscreens that showed three-dimensional images of whatever starscape or planetary atmosphere they’d be training in that day.
The flying felt absolutely genuine, and the challenges presented were more immediate, terrifying, and plentiful than they were likely to encounter in real life—at least so far. One day Thane would try to bring a TIE fighter from deep space into atmosphere on a planet with gravity strong enough to crush a human. The next, he might maneuver a snowspeeder through a blizzard with winds that threatened to tear the metal plating from the hull. Some students tensed, panicking about their training scores or what it would be like when they had to do it in real life.
Thane actually felt more relaxed when he was piloting. He couldn’t wait to do it for real. Being at the controls of a vessel remained the purest kind of joy he knew.
His combination of enthusiasm and steadiness showed in his scores, too. The class rankings always had Thane in one of the very top slots for piloting—
—and one of the few names that ever came in above his was Ciena Ree’s.
They laughed about it together, congratulated each other for winning, and proudly declared they’d take back their title on the very next flight. Ciena had become his rival, but a friendly one. They saw each other more days than not, either in class or the main academy mess. Although the balance between maintaining their friendship and becoming “citizens of the Empire” was a delicate one, he felt they’d found it. While their meetings were often brief, they still got to hang out a couple of times a week—hours when they let the competition drop. Thane knew they’d always made each other better by striving to match the other’s skills; even at the academy, he and Ciena kept each other at the very top of their game.
“It’s ludicrous,” Ved Foslo said sniffily one night after Ciena had reclaimed the top spot. “She took your rank away from you. Why are you so thrilled the competition is making her a better pilot? You should be trying to knock her down, not pick her up.”
“There’s room for more than one of us in the graduating class,” Thane shot back as he sat at the edge of his bunk, polishing his uniform boots. “Besides, isn’t the goal to create the best Imperial officers possible? This way the Empire gets two great pilots, not just one.”
Ved shook his head. “Someday you’ll understand.”
From his place beneath the thin gray blanket of his bunk, Nash laughed. “Admit it, Ved. You’re only angry because Thane and Ciena always score higher than you! Despite your father being—what’s his rank again?”
“You know perfectly well,” Ved said. Written on his face was his displeasure at being regularly bested by not one but two kids from a hunk of rock in the Outer Rim. Without another word, he buttoned his pajamas to the neck, like he did every night. The guy never relaxed.
Otherwise, though, Ved wasn’t a terrible roommate. He was clean, he didn’t snore, and he didn’t mind explaining the finer points of military culture on Coruscant. Meanwhile, between room inspections, Nash threw his stuff everywhere in a truly spectacular display of messiness, but aside from a few arguments about why it was gross for Nash’s dirty socks to wind up on someone’s toothbrush, he and Thane were unshakable friends.
But the single best thing about Thane’s first months at the academy was seeing Dalven again.
For most of Thane’s life, he had been of an average height among his peers. Sometimes he’d looked at his statuesque mother, towering father, and lanky older brother in despair. There, too, he thought he’d be shortchanged. A few months before he entered the academy, however, his body started making up for lost time. His leg bones ached at night, and he didn’t seem able to eat enough to stop feeling hungry—and he needed new uniforms within three months of arriving.
As he stood in the sector dispensary, waiting for his turn to get larger boots, he heard a droid’s toneless voice: “Ensign Kyrell, H-J-two-nine-zero, packet ready.”
Thane frowned. He was still only a cadet, and his call number was AV547. Yet he was sure he’d heard the name Kyrell—
Then Dalven stepped out of the milling crowd of waiting officers, hastily retrieving a uniform packet. He seemed to be in a hurry to go, but when he turned and saw his younger brother standing there, he froze in place as if aghast.
“Dalven?” Thane didn’t know what to say. “Good to see you” would be a lie, for either of them.
“Well. So. You haven’t washed out yet. How astonishing.” With that, Dalven raised his chin, clearly ready to walk out—but Thane stood between him and the door, and he didn’t move.
“Ensign? You told us you’d made lieutenant.”
Dalven’s cheeks darkened. “I—well—the promotion is due to come through at any moment.”
Thane nodded. “Right. Sure. Which is why you’re picking up a new uniform, I guess….”
His voice trailed off as he saw the printed label on the bundle in Dalven’s arms: CLERICAL STAFF/THIRD CLASS.
“Good-bye.” Dalven hurried out, obviously determined to pretend Thane hadn’t seen anything.
Maybe it was cheap—even petty—but learning his overbearing older brother had been deemed better suited for desk chairs than Star Destroyers? It made Thane’s day.
That afternoon, as he headed up to the Sky Loop for an extra run, he imagined telling Ciena about the encounter. She loathed Dalven almost as much as he did; it almost seemed to Thane that he could already hear her laughter, see her dark eyes shining with satisfaction on his behalf.
Then he walked out onto the track to see several other cadets also working in additional exercise, Ciena among them.
She wore the same stuff as every other cadet: gray shirt, black shorts, and regulation shoes
. Ciena was only one of a few dozen people out there, at the farthest edge of the track. Yet he knew her instantly—even across the length of the Sky Loop, even with the sun blazing down so brilliantly. Thane recognized the way she ran, the shape of her black curls braided at the nape of her neck….
She’s beautiful, he thought, a realization that startled him, then made him feel stupid. How could he not have noticed that about a girl he’d seen more days than not for the past eight years? But that was precisely it. Thane knew Ciena too well to see her with any objectivity. Her face was as familiar to him as his own in the mirror—or it had been, until now.
The evidence of his blindness disturbed him. It was as if Ciena had transformed somehow and ought to have told him first. Possibilities he’d refused to consider in the past now pushed their way into his mind, possibilities that were both exhilarating and frightening. He felt a shiver along his skin that he had always associated with flight, that exact moment when he left the earth and grabbed the sky—
Thane decided not to think about it any longer. Instead he would run, fast as he could, until he was worn-out and half-dazed. When he saw Ciena again, he would be able to talk to her just like he always had. Nothing had to change.
FIRING HAND WEAPONS had never been something Ciena dreamed about, or practiced, and her initial marksmanship scores, while adequate, dragged down her overall ranking. So she spent a lot of free time on the practice range with the mock laser rifle, concentrating hard on improving her aim.
Or, as was the case today, trying to concentrate, with no help from her roommates.
“It was just an observation,” Kendy said, attempting to look innocent and doing a terrible job. She stood in the next booth over, her white practice coveralls contrasting with the metallic black surfaces of the training range. “You won’t even admit Thane’s looking good these days?”
Ciena focused on the holographic target coming toward her and fired three blasts at its head. Only when the target shattered into a thousand tiny lines of light did she reply, “He’s, um—filling out.”
“This is a normal stage of physiological development.” Jude sat on a bench behind the shooting booths, disassembling the laser rifle to see how quickly she could put it together again. “Although I must say that in Thane’s case development is proceeding very well.”
“You guys, come on. I can’t aim when I’m laughing.”
But Kendy wouldn’t let the subject drop. “Are you honestly not at all interested in him?”
“Romantic or sexual relationships between cadets are forbidden.” Jude could look very prim. “Besides, Ciena has known Thane since they were children. It would be rational to conclude that at this point their relationship is like that of brother and sister, and therefore no sexual feeling could be generated between them.”
Thane’s not my brother. It’s nothing like that. Ciena opened her mouth to say so, then closed it. Better for her friends to assume that was how she felt so they would stop asking her questions about Thane Kyrell.
The thing was she wasn’t exactly sure how to feel about him any longer. Before, they’d been together constantly, and she’d never had a moment to step back and wonder whether things could change between them—and, if so, how. Their lives were both more parallel and more separate than ever before.
When Thane edged her out in the rankings—or vice versa—they’d stare at each other in pretend anger that wasn’t wholly pretend. At times Ciena felt as if she could stand to be beaten by absolutely anyone else before she could endure it from Thane. Yet the next day, when she saw how well he had done, her face would light up with a smile. She’d seen him cheering for her in races and cheered for him in turn. Their rivalry generated electricity that could turn ugly or could become—
Concentrate, Ciena reminded herself. You’re here to hit your targets.
After the holograms came the droids, a dozen tiny spheres that darted through the range, daring her to hit them all. Ciena fired, red bolts blasting from her rifle, and refused to pause until she’d taken down every one.
“That’s much better,” Jude said, unnecessarily, as Ciena’s score blinked on the screen above. “Your accuracy scores are already above average for our class. Soon you’ll reach the top quartile.”
“Then you can stand alongside the sharpshooters, like me.” Like some pirate out of a spice-runner holo, Kendy twirled her blaster before holstering it, which made Ciena laugh.
She had no doubts that she would master shooting. It wasn’t arrogance—the demands of the Imperial Academy made her aware of her limitations every day. Instead, Ciena’s faith came from her sheer joy in the academy, and in Coruscant itself. Although she loved and missed her life in the Jelucani valleys, her universe had expanded a hundredfold, and every new part of it seemed wonderful to her. To walk along corridors with members of a dozen different races; to hear their various languages with their unfamiliar syllables, whistles, and clicks; to look into the sky and spot a dozen different types of spacecraft every single day—it enthralled her.
Sometimes Ciena felt as though she was whispering to her lost sister constantly. Look through my eyes. There were infinite wonders to behold, and finally she had a chance to see them all.
She experienced guiltier moments, though. Ciena found herself sometimes thinking of her former life as…backward. Her life in the valleys had always been a happy one. No, she didn’t possess any second-waver luxuries, but she didn’t particularly want them. Besides, Thane’s difficult family life had disabused her of any idea that wealthier people were automatically happier. Material things never had, and never would, mean much to her.
So it wasn’t the relative grandeur of Coruscant that tempted her. It was the richness of life here, the energy in the air, the lack of any need for ritual. Every forward step she took made her wonder if she was leaving her traditional values behind.
Not entirely. Never entirely. She would never abandon the concept of honor, of the absolute need to keep her word, no matter what. That was as much a part of Ciena as her bones. She would also always carry her sister forward with her, allowing Wynnet to look through her eyes.
Yet now Ciena’s perspective had been widened forever.
No longer did she look through the narrow prism of second wave versus valley. The huge difference she’d once perceived between her and Thane—it was nothing, really. It didn’t exist.
Ciena had believed in that divide for so long that she wasn’t quite sure what to think once it was gone.
Finally, they got to fly for real.
“About time,” Ciena said to Thane, who had walked into the low-altitude craft bay early, just like she had. She couldn’t help noticing how he came closer to her than any other cadet would—into her personal space.
“For what?” he said quickly, swerving away from her as though he feared an electrical shock. “It’s not time for anything.”
“…about time for us to fly.” Ciena gave him a look.
Thane smiled unevenly. “Oh, right. Of course. Definitely past time for that. I mean—never mind.”
Why is he acting so awkward? Then again, Ciena realized she was hugging herself as though it were a cold Jelucani morning. She and Thane still got along well, but they were starting to have these moments of self-conscious weirdness.
Maybe one of her friends had told someone that they were gossiping about how hot he was during target practice. Neither Jude nor Kendy would talk behind her back, but Jude might be socially clueless enough to say the wrong thing in front of Nash or Ved. That would be the worst—especially since it seemed to make Thane want to pull back from her.
I said there wasn’t anything between us. So he shouldn’t be behaving this way. Unless he wants there to be something between us. But he doesn’t, does he?
Do I?
Ciena snapped herself out of it. Mumma always told her not to make something out of nothing. She didn’t need to jump to conclusions. She needed to get in the air.
“You’ve practic
ed on the speeder bike simulator multiple times,” said the commander who taught Small Craft Flight. The several dozen pilots in Ciena’s section—including her roommates, as well as Thane and his—stood in the craft bay within the enormous structure of the academy. Outside, dusk had fallen and the city lights of Coruscant glittered. “It is the most basic form of low-altitude craft, and therefore the first you should master. Handling the bike should be well within the capacity of every cadet in this class.”
Ciena tried to disguise her excitement. She’d been in simulators too long; she was ready to go. And the speeder bikes seemed so easy—
As if he’d heard her, the commander continued, “In order to ensure that your first flight is both memorable and challenging, we’ve made it a competition. A race.”
“Is there a prize?” called Nash Windrider, which made people laugh. Unlike most instructors, the flight commander allowed some levity from time to time. He said it bolstered “martial spirit,” which they were supposed to cultivate.
The flight commander even smiled slightly as he replied, “Indeed, Cadet Windrider, but you should learn the task before you presume to perform it.” A hologram rose from the center of the bay, showing a three-dimensional map of the area surrounding the academy. Small, brightly colored points blinked in ten different places, from all the way down at ground level up to the Sky Loop. “What you see signposted here are Reitgen Hoops, each big enough for a single speeder bike to easily pass through. We’ve cleared the surrounding airspace, so you may choose your individual course and need only account for your classmates’ vehicles.”
Farthest first, Ciena immediately decided. Most people will get too caught up in trying to reach the nearest hoop, so you’ll have a clear course. Then you slip through the others on your way back here.
The commander concluded, “The first to fly through all ten hoops will be given fifty points in the rankings.”
