Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

It was instantaneous. If the bus-ship were a push bike, Reece would have said that the captain had back-pedaled, throwing the whole thing into a midair halt. The other Tens flew forward into their safety gear while Reece and the boy sailed down the aisle with strangled cries.

  The landing was, if not quite comfortable, still softer than Reece could’ve hoped for. And it had some bounce to it, as if the wall actually had give. Rolling down onto the floor for the third time in just a few short minutes, Reece groaningly looked over his shoulder. They had landed on, of all things, a grey inflatable life raft which was quickly deflating, melting down over their shaking bodies.

  “Bleeding bogrosh,” Reece muttered, lying down on his stomach with his arms spread at his sides. He glared at the nearest porthole window. Going by the fine blue sky outside, the ship had made it through Atlas’s atmosphere.

  “Hey.” Someone kicked the raft away from Reece. “You okay?”

  Reece pushed up onto his knees and returned the Pan’s strange blue stare without really registering the warmth sliding down his forearm. “Yeah…did you do that?”

  “What, save your life?” The Pan gave a wolfish grin and leaned back in his seat, satisfied.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” a warbling voice came over the intercom, “a medic will be circling the cabin shortly. Please remain stationary and raise your hand if you require attention. We will be making a smooth landing presently. Thank you.”

  With a small whimper, Bifocal Boy wriggled his way out from under the raft, clutching his broken lenses in a white fist and looking ready to heave. But what he did was look at Reece, look at the Pan, look at his bifocals, and then lay the side of his face flat against the cabin’s floor and raise his hand to wait on help.

  “I’m Reece Sheppard. What’s your name?” He couldn’t very well call him Bifocal Boy for forever, even if it did have a kind of ring to it.

  The boy opened one blue-grey eye and attempted a feeble smile. “Hayden. Hayden Rice.” Surprising Reece, Hayden rolled his eye up towards the Pan and said, “And you?”

  The Pan looked a little taken aback, and slouched deeper in his seat. “Gideon Creed. From Panteda,” he emphasized.

  “That was…good of you,” said Hayden matter-of-factly, but not unkindly.

  Gideon studied both Hayden and Reece with a kind of suspicious curiosity, his eyes narrowed, and said nothing.

  The medical assistant came, looking shaken and a little sick herself, and tended to Hayden, who had rolled his ankle. Reece waited patiently for his turn as he pushed up his sleeve and whistled at the impressive gash on his elbow. It didn’t really hurt, but it was messy, and everyone was staring at him, Hayden, and Gideon with eyes the size of cricket balls.

  “Is it true?” Reece asked Gideon suddenly. “What they say about Panteda?” He was referring to the war and the acid fog, but as soon as he’d spoken, he wondered if there were other, less nice things people said about Panteda that he’d never heard.

  Gideon straightened, his icy eyes measuring for an uncomfortably long moment. Then he suddenly grinned, and it was the kind of smile that made a person feel like they’d just made an ally.

  “Every bit’a it.”

  II

  (Almost) Plummeting to a Fiery Death

  Reece turned about in front of the four-paneled mirror for the third time, scanning and double-checking. Military-issued boots, laced and tied off tightly. The black uniform of The Owl, steamed and pressed and by some miracle, actually clean. The white patch of Atlas on his left sleeve, balanced by the pair of flight wings pinned to his right—what real pilots called a captain’s first feathers. Tonight, he’d take off those tiny gold wings and replace them with a bigger silver pair. If he didn’t completely botch up his test, that is.

  The student dormitories were as quiet as they always were on a testing day. For Eighteens, this day determined their level of success in their field. For the rest of the students, it just determined what marks they would be taking home to show their parents over the midyear holiday, but that was still reason enough to be studying rabidly.

  Swinging around, Reece put his fists on his hips and blew out a long breath. His and Hayden’s shared suite had been in chaos last night, its hardwood floors covered in books and flight graphs, its sofa turned into a bed for Gideon, who had stayed late claiming to help his friends study when really, he’d been reveling in the fact that testing day held no power over him. He already had his future figured. At this point, bad marks were more of a joke to him than anything.

  Hayden must have been up cleaning before dawn. The suite was back to looking like a handsome lounge. Both beds had been retracted into the walls, leaving a wide open space around Hayden’s crammed bookshelf and their pair of wardrobes. It was a standard suite, identical to every other on this floor, but it was more of a home to Reece than any place else. He’d be sad to leave it in another six months, when he and the rest of the Eighteens graduated.

  The handle on the bedroom door suddenly jiggled, and the door swung inward, revealing a frazzled-looking Hayden struggling with an armload of books. In eight years, he hadn’t changed much. He still wore secondhand spectacles and clothes that smelled like musty books and hung loosely over a very lean frame. He’d let his dirty gold hair grow out so that it brushed the back of his neck.

  “What are you doing?” Hayden exclaimed when he saw Reece. He dropped his books onto the sofa and dusted off the front of his wrinkled uniform. “You’re going to be late!”

  “I’ll be fine.” Reece carefully avoided the cloud of dust swirling around the sofa. “Where have you been?”

  Hayden hesitated, then fixed Reece with a level stare. “I took my test.”

  Reece scowled, scratching his jaw. It was important to be clean shaven on testing day. The judges were persnickety about these sorts of things. “Gid and I were supposed to be there to watch.”

  “I thought it’d be better to get it out of the way so I didn’t have to rush off after your test. Father and Sophie will want to congratulate you and visit, not hurry away to hear me recite theorems.”

  Chances were that was at least halfway true. Hayden’s twelve year old sister, Sophie, had had a liking for Reece since before she could walk.

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “Reece.” Hayden pulled a book out from his jacket and added it to the pile on the couch, his voice stern. “Today is important. We all know it. There’s not a chance of you getting liscenced to captain in the Streams as an Eighteen unless you fly loops around the judges, Palatine Second or not. Besides,” he suddenly looked embarrassed, and lowered his eyes to the floor, “I… that is, I finished my test kind of...quickly. I think I might have studied too hard.”

  “Of course you did.” Hayden probably could have taken his vocational test when he was a Fifteen and passed it with flying colors. Come to think of it, he probably could have taken someone else’s test and passed it with flying colors, and no matter that the test wasn’t even in his field. “I know what this is really about. You’re nervous because you know you’ll be out of a job if I don’t pass today. After all, I can’t give you a spot on my ship if I’m not promoted.”

  Hayden’s embarrassment grew till his face resembled a bright red beet. He busied himself with clapping more dust from his uniform. “Reece, you know I won’t really be joining your crew if you qualify for one, right? Not if I get offered a spot on Doctor William’s research team.”

  “Relax, I’m kidding. I know you get airsick.”

  “I don’t get airsick!” Hayden looked affronted, even more so when Reece raised his eyebrows disbelievingly. “I don’t!”

  “Right.” Scooping up his satchel, Reece gave the suite a final eyeball to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything and started for the door. “I don’t know what I’d do with you anyways. I suppose there might be a place for a physicist or a chemist or a doctor on an airship…but all three? One of your hobbies is going to have to go.”

  Hayden only smiled as he fol
lowed Reece into the corridor and shut the door behind him. The hallway, lit by photon globe chandeliers at intervals, was quiet enough for the clapping of their boots to sound awkward and loud.

  The brisk walk from their dormitory to the aerodome where Reece’s test would begin was nearly silent. Somehow, the silence made The Owl that much more beautiful, that much more serene. The tall oaks lining all the brick-paved paths, the black iron fences trapping off patches of meadow where students were sprawled, immersed in their studies…even the architecture had an elegance to it, a sort of dark, brooding design. On every road were columns wrapped in ivy, pointed rooftops and cornices, and windows trimmed in deep purples and greens. At night, when the fog over Atlas lowered onto the streets and the black lampposts were all lit, The Owl’s beauty became nothing short of eerie.

  Reece and Hayden had to circle the weedy grey lake in the middle of campus to get to the aerodome. The day was golden and fresh; if it weren’t testing day, the lake would have been full of punters. If it weren’t testing day, Reece would have jumped in without a thought for his nice clean uniform. If it weren’t testing day…

  Drawing up short, Reece stared, sure he was seeing wrong.

  “Who are they?” he coughed out, blinking hard into the sunlight.

  There were dozens of people crammed into the meadow next to the Airship Command Center, some in The Owl’s black uniform, but most not. He knew Hayden’s father was out there, and Sophie too, but Abigail had only made a halfhearted attempt at booking a flight off-planet, and the duke…well, Reece hadn’t seen the duke in going on two years. An imminent reunion seemed unlikely.

  “Fans, I suppose,” Hayden said, suppressing a smile. “It’s not every day the Palatine Second becomes a captain. They’re probably all here to apply for your crew.”

  Reece gave a shudder and swerved towards the AC’s side entrance. “Paperwork, lovely. See, Hayden, that’s why I need you.”

  “To do all the hard work,” Hayden said, hitching his bifocals up on his nose with a finger. There was nothing sharp at all about how he said it. But then, even if there was, Hayden had too honest a face for anyone to think he’d purposefully say anything hurtful.

  The AC, while having every appearance of being just another brick school building from the outside, was a labyrinth of desks on the inside. Most people didn’t know it, but it took a lot of work to keep track of who flew where, in what craft, and for what reason. Parliament had a ridiculously meticulous system for registering captains and their ships because there was always the chance of stolen cargo flying under the radar, and no Honoran lord was keen on unapproved goods getting to another planet. But it still happened. In fact, Reece knew things about Gideon’s Pantedan family that could’ve had the lot of them incarcerated. His grandfather, Mordecai Creed, had just recently traded stolen medicine for a whole crate of spicy Freherian tobacco.

  As Reece and Hayden maneuvered between desks and air officers talking into headsets and making notations on maps of the disc-shaped Epimetheus Galaxy, a deep, feminine voice declared, “Reece Sheppard. There you are.”

  Cringing before he could help himself, Reece looked up. Scarlet Ashdown was a nice enough girl. And not exactly an eyesore either, with her slender height, golden hair, and probing hazel eyes. But the fact of the matter remained: if the duke’s grandfather hadn’t abolished arranged marriages a century ago, Abigail would have tied Reece up in a ribbon and handed him over to the Ashdowns as soon as he came of age. Sooner, likely.

  Dressed not in uniform, but in a high-necked brown dress that made her olive skin glow, Scarlet glided across the foyer, twirling a white parasol over her shoulder with hands gloved in lace. Hayden slid behind Reece and was instantly engrossed in the buttons of his jacket. Girls could make him sweat where Yules’s Theory of Unstable Molecular Conjunction could not.

  “Tutor Clauson is looking for you,” Scarlet said, looking up at him from under long yellow eyelashes. “Everyone was wondering whether or not you would show. I told them you had probably overslept again. No one seemed surprised.”

  “Thanks for that. Where’s Clauson?”

  “In the flight tower, about to tell the engineers to power down your Nyad.”

  “They have me flying a Nyad?” Reece exclaimed. That part of the test had so far been kept a secret; he hadn’t known if he would be flying a heliocraft or an outmoded bus-ship. A Nyad was better than he could have hoped for. Small cockpit, sharp wings that could pull tight turns, and an Axil 59-Eight engine with a purr to put a baby to sleep. Nyads were all from the Aurelius line, which meant that each one had inherited some small clockwork piece of The Aurelius, one of the two original airships. The other was The Aurelia. She sat in The Owl’s museum, one of Honora’s most venerated historical artifacts.

  Scarlet smiled. Her parents had both been wealthy ambassadors before her father had passed away, so she’d grown up having her future in Intraplanetary Politics picked out in advance, but she was sharp all on her own. She probably even knew about the Axil 59-Eight.

  “I’ll go tell Tutor Clauson you’ve arrived,” she offered smoothly, then leaned in to kiss him on either cheek. When she was near enough, she whispered so only he and Hayden could hear, “There’s been some trouble with your Pantedan friend. I’ll do my best to keep Clauson busy for a few minutes, but you’d better hurry, Reece.”

  It was hard not to consider Scarlet a friend when she did things like this, and she did them often. Reece was inclined to believe it was because they’d practically grown up together, but then, who knew? He gave her a grateful grin before hurrying for the open archway leading to the observation platform. Gid now, Scarlet later.

  “Good morning, Scarlet,” he heard Hayden stammer behind him.

  “Good morning, Harold,” Scarlet replied politely.

  It turned out the crowd in the meadow was actually overflow from the observation platform, which was jammed with chattering students and tutors, most of them unfamiliar faces. Beyond the white platform with its columned rail stretched a strip of smooth grey land framed by blinking towers. Usually there were bus-ships parked on the airstrip, but today it was empty except for Reece’s Nyad, a sleek rust-colored ship with propellers on the undersides of its wings.

  Hugh and Sophie Rice stood out like geese in a flock of swans. They had the same habitually-haggard look as Hayden. Mr. Rice’s grey suit looked like it’d been pulled out of the dusty recesses of his closet while his bow tie drooped tiredly. The red lion head pin he wore on the breast of his jacket clashed wildly with the rest of him, so colorless. Hayden said Sophie looked just like their mother had before she’d died in the Five Year Pandemic. Straight, faded yellow hair and eyes that shone like a pair of polished blue marbles.

  “Reece!” Sophie half laughed, half screamed when she saw him, throwing her arms around his waist. “I knew Hayden could get you out of bed!”

  Reece ruffled her hair and threw Hayden a look. “Everyone has such faith in me. It’s moving, really.”

  “What’s this about Gideon?” Hayden asked worriedly as he took his turn hugging Sophie, whose sparkling smile wilted a little.

  “They wouldn’t let him in,” she explained, shaking her head. Attending a planetside school as she did, she got to witness the prejudice against the Pans every single day. Reece was sure she’d been hoping to outrun it, here.

  Reece and Hugh locked eyes, and Reece tried to keep his voice light as he joked, “He didn’t try to bring in a gun, did he?” It had happened before. In fact, it happened all the time.

  The joke was for Sophie’s sake, so Reece wasn’t bothered when Hugh didn’t smile. “He tried to bring Mordecai. There were some remarks made by the aerodome sentries, and…well. That’s not important. Miss Ashdown was of some help, but—”

  “Gid has to be here,” Reece said firmly. He hadn’t been nervous up till the moment he’d heard Gideon was in trouble. That in itself was nothing new, but trying to fly while worrying whether or not one of his best friends was
going to be spending the night in The Owl’s detention facility with his madcap pirate grandfather was going to take effort.

  Hugh nodded. “We’ll try to get him in. But you’d better hurry. Rumor has it Headmaster Eldritch has come to personally observe the test, and it’s a sorry soul that makes that man wait for anything.”

  Reece made a face, not disagreeing. Headmaster Eldritch made the duke look cute and cuddly, and Hugh probably knew as well as Reece how troubling that thought was, being the duke’s chief librarian.

  As Hugh and Sophie melted into the crowd with a round of good lucks, Hayden grabbed Reece’s elbow and pressed something small and metallic into his palm. “Here. Keep in touch.”

  Unrolling his fingers, Reece arched an eyebrow. The bit of brass was shaped like a flattened U, with one of its tails holding a microscopic speaker mouth. “Isn’t that cheating?” he whispered even as he reached up and slid the com link over his ear so that it hugged his temple.

  It was hard to tell in the sunlight, but Hayden might have actually paled a bit. “Of course not. I mean, not if I don’t tell you anything helpful. And I won’t.”

  “Why, that’s completely unhelpful.”

  “It’s for moral support.”

  “Thanks.” Reece paused, deliberating, and then added quietly, “You know if anyone finds out about Mordecai’s…pastimes…”

  Hayden had already started nodding. “I know. We’ll take care of it. Oh, and Reece…” He looked around, wary of who in the crowd could be listening. “Liem’s here.”

  “What?”

  “I saw him climbing the flight tower with Headmaster Eldritch.”

  This, of all things, turned Reece’s nervousness into a ball of hard anger sitting in the pit of his stomach. Reece’s association with Pans and bottom-class librarian’s sons had been a black spot on the thin imitation of friendship the stepbrothers had had since Reece had been a Thirteen. Five years later, Liem wouldn’t touch Reece with a stick if he needed pulling out of a Freherian marshbed.