by K A Riley
Libra’s mouth hangs open. “You got power out of nothing.”
War shakes his head. “There’s no such thing as ‘nothing.’ There’s always something to salvage. It might be hope. It might be luck. It might be a bouquet of dead plasma leads. The point is, don’t give up. Just because something looks dead doesn’t mean it is.”
The next six hours are filled with War timing us, running us through drills, quizzing us on the names and uses of a wide range of auto parts, barking orders, hurling assignments, and whipping tools at us when we mess up.
When we’re too slow or when we puncture a patch or get ham-handed and break a seal, we get yelled at.
Surprisingly, Libra is the only one of us who really excels. She gets pretty much everything right.
That doesn’t stop War from growling at her, too, from time to time.
Ignacio leaps to Libra’s defense, asking War why he’s being so mean to her when she keeps getting the lessons right.
War towers over Ignacio, who stands rigid, his eyes fixed on the middle of War’s chest.
“Getting it right’s not good enough, kid,” War growls down at Ignacio. He whips around to loom over Libra whose proud smile drops in time with her slumping shoulders. “While you’re busy being happy with yourself because you managed to re-route that circuit,” he thunders at her, pointing toward the wall at the far end of the room, “a convoy of the Unsettled just clicked on a Systems Diode Dampener, undid your work, and shot you in the face!”
I’m two workstations down, but I can hear Libra gulp from here.
“You can’t give your full focus to the task at hand,” War bellows. “You have to fix the problem and protect yourself at the same time!”
His bald head glistening with sweat and with his face twisted into an angry knot, he storms over to where Sara is buried torso-deep under the hood of a skeletal, stripped-down military lorry.
Once he’s out of earshot, Libra comes over to my workstation and pokes me with her elbow. “This is almost as much fun as combat class was this morning.”
I know I’m supposed to hate her—after all, she’s a first-order plonker. But I clamp my hands over my mouth to stifle a giggle. Not because I’m afraid War might yell at me, but more because I don’t want Libra to think I’m encouraging her brain-frothing nuttery.
She leans over the systems-generator I’m working on and asks if I want a hand.
I tell her, “No,” but she plunges in like I’ve offered her an engraved invitation.
Fiddling with the acid-encrusted power pack on the worktable, Libra’s eyes flit over in War’s direction. “You really fought next to him?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you survived?”
I stare at Libra for a second before letting my eyes roll in a looping, sarcastic arc.
“Oh. Right. Of course you did,” she whispers with a self-correcting moan. “Sorry. But he makes me nervous.”
“Who—War?”
“He’s twice the size of anyone I’ve ever met. Bigger than Terk, even.”
“He’s got a few soft spots,” I whisper back.
“War? Really?”
“He once cried when he lost his pet vulture.”
Libra stops, her hands frozen in the air over the bundle of green and white wires spilling over the top of the micro-fuse port of the systems-generator. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Vulture?”
“Its name was Jeff. I never met him, but I hear he and War were as close as a person and a bird could be.”
“Kind of like you and Haida Gwaii?”
“Well, War’s a Typic. So he didn’t have the same sort of connection Haida and I have. But Jeff was definitely more than a pet to him.”
“Speaking of pets, have you caught how Mattea’s been fussing over Arlo like he’s a wounded puppy?”
I’m about to say, “Yes,” but then I decide I’d rather not get sucked into any of Libra’s blathery gossip. “We’d better get back to this,” I tell her. “War might have had a soft spot for Jeff, but I’m pretty sure that’s where his sympathy ends. And I’d rather not be the first person to get knocked out in two classes in a row.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Libra says, directing my attention to the generator, now tidy and humming with life on our workstation. “It’s fixed.”
“How—?”
Libra shrugs. “Haida’s more than a pet to you. Mechanical systems are more than just a collection of random parts to me.”
Libra may be annoying and a gossip, but she might also be a good person to have as a lab partner in Transportation and Mechanics.
Not a friend, I remind myself. Just a convenient classmate to have sharing my workstation. And if her talent helps me get a decent mark and stay on War’s good side, so be it.
After another few hours of taking things apart and putting them back together—all under the furious gaze of War and his relentless, angry barking—I’m starting to miss being out in the world and fighting for my life.
8
Challenge
After Transportation and Mechanics lets out, my Cohort and I, under a chorus of complaints, slog our way through a very groggy dinner before plodding back upstairs to the Dorm.
I never thought walking up a few flights of stairs would be quite this bone-crunching, muscle-mashing, or soul-sucking. But it’s all three.
“Well,” Mattea sighs, her hands on her knees with every aching step up the never-ending flights of stairs. “That’s Day One behind us.”
“How many more to go?” Arlo asks, his voice muffled from deep within his hood.
Libra counts off on her fingers. “Two classes per day. Four terms per year. That’s about eighty or ninety more classes of getting wrenches thrown at us by War.”
“And eighty or ninety more classes of Branwynne getting beaten up by Kress,” Ignacio jokes.
“Not funny,” I tell him with a growl and a two-handed shove that knocks him off balance and against the wall but doesn’t send him crashing down the stairs like I’d hoped.
“It could be worse,” Mattea announces to our Cohort. “At least with regular classes, there’s an end. With the one-on-one Emergent lessons…those could go on forever.”
She smiles when Arlo asks her what she means.
“It means there’s no timetable. We keep going until our mentor says we’re ready.”
“Ready? Ready for what?” Ignacio asks.
Mattea scrunches up her face and shrugs.
“Who do you have for your one-on-ones?” I ask, thankful that I get to have Kress as my personal mentor.
Mattea tells us she’s got Rain. “She’s helping me with identifying logic patterns in languages.”
“So how long do we have to do these…what did Wisp call them?” Libra asks.
“Apprenticeships.”
“Right. How long?”
“Rain says it’s for as long as it takes,” Mattea sighs.
“What’s that mean?”
“Well, she refers to our apprenticeships as ‘mastery learning.’”
“Mastery?”
“It means we don’t get passed along just because the Apprenticeship is over or because we’ve completed all the lessons and assignments. We have to keep going until we’ve each demonstrated mastery and retention.”
“That means we have to be experts?”
“Yes. In our individual Emergent skills. And we have to stay that way.”
“Oh,” Sara groans as she heaves herself up the final flight of stairs, her hand gripping the handrail. “Is that all?”
After what feels like a Himalayan level hike, we get to our floor, limp down the hall, and collapse in the Lounge.
In addition to the couches, chairs, and ottomans, the spacious room of wide-planked, yellow birch floors is furnished with all kinds of games and activities—a pool table, a ping pong table, foosball, darts, pinball, chess, holo-sim consoles, a set of VR goggles, and one entire wall that turns
into a giant movie screen.
But we’re all way too tired to take advantage of anything recreational at the moment.
Instead, we spend a full ten minutes melting into the furniture in chest-heaving, clamp-eyed exhaustion.
When I’m finally recovered enough to form words, I ask why Ignacio would challenge War like he did back in class.
“We’re here to be wolves, not sheep,” he replies, patting his chest with his fist.
“I hate to say it,” Sara says through a pout. “But I’ve got to agree with Ignacio. You’ve heard what Wisp and the others have been saying. This isn’t boarding school. It’s boot camp.”
“More like gladiator finishing school,” I giggle. “Easy-peasy.”
Chace looks up from her holo-pad. “What’s ‘finishing school’?”
“They were big in England,” I tell her. “Apparently, some old relative of mine went to one a long, long time ago. They were supposed to teach young women etiquette, social manners, grace, charm…things like that. Basically, a school to teach young girls how to be grown-up slaves.”
Sara says, “Ugh” and follows her grimace of disgust up with a derisive snort.
While Chace hunches over her holo-pad, writing frantically and chuckling to herself, Ignacio groans himself up and walks over to the pinball machine.
He plants his hands on either side of the console, his fingertips pressed lightly to the flipper pads, but he doesn’t actually play. Instead, he stares for a second before swinging his gaze over to where Lucid and Reverie are sitting hip-to-hip on the deep purple sofa.
“So…What’s with you two, anyway?”
Lucid and Reverie answer Ignacio with blank stares, first at each other, then at him.
“I heard you once brought someone back from the dead.”
“You heard wrong,” I interrupt.
But Ignacio ignores me and plows along with his interrogation. “And that you had something to do with Cardyn and Manthy getting killed.”
“Strike two,” I tell him. “They weren’t killed. Why don’t you leave them alone?”
“It’s okay,” Reverie says quietly, taking her brother’s hand in her own.
“No,” I insist, standing up and drilling my eyes into Ignacio’s. “It’s really bloody not.”
Ignacio puts his hands up and gives us all what I’m assuming is supposed to be an innocent look, but it comes off as mocking. “We’re supposed to be in training to bring justice and truth to the world. How are we supposed to do that when we can’t even be just and honest in here?”
“And how, exactly, does nagging the twins and being a chuffing wanker accomplish that?”
“Don’t you think it’s time we were all honest about what we can do?”
I don’t answer at first, because honestly, I sort of agree with him.
For the most part, we’re eleven strangers in a confined space. We have abilities whose origins we don’t know, whose uses we haven’t fully explored, and whose potential has gotten most of us imprisoned and all of us nearly killed at one time or another.
It’s an entire herd of elephants in the room. It’s like the questions only a bunch of teenagers would wonder about the virgins in their ranks:
Have they, or haven’t they? Who’s done what, and how far did they go?
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about what my classmates were capable of. I know some of my own strengths and a lot of my own limits. But I don’t know theirs at all.
Is there someone in this room who can save the world? Is there someone in here who might one day destroy it?
Finally, I remind Ignacio about how Kress doesn’t want us using our abilities without proper training.
“Says little Miss Teacher’s Pet,” he laughs. “You think you’re better than me just because you’ve been living here like a nun for five years while the rest of us were stuck back east, going to sleep and wondering if tonight’s the night when the True Blues make their move and blow the city up for good?”
“No,” I tell him, my voice steady and controlled. “I think I’m better than you because you’re a bully and a barmy arse.”
Ignacio swings away from the pinball machine and beckons me forward with a curl of his finger. “Kress went easy on you. I won’t.”
Although I’m not connected to Haida Gwaii or channeling her abilities, I skim across the space between me and Ignacio like a skater on ice.
Leaping up, Libra locks onto one of my arms, and Mattea locks onto the other before I have a chance to start swinging.
“Don’t waste your time on him,” Libra advises.
Mattea snaps a vicious glare at Ignacio. “He’s an instigator. He’s been like this as long as we’ve known him.”
Ignacio cracks his knuckles and tells the girls to let me go. They do, slowly.
He folds his arms across his chest and leans back against the pinball machine. “I hear you once walked through a wall.”
“That’s true,” Reverie whispers from the sofa. “It’s how she helped save me and Lucid in London.”
Ignacio stops and flicks his eyes toward her before locking them back onto me. “Think you can walk through a punch to the head?”
I push up the sleeves of my leather jacket and ball up my fists. “Try me.”
This time, he takes a giant step toward me, the muscles in his shoulders and arms twitching.
The lights in the Lounge flicker, and we all blink and stare up at the holo-strips running along edges of the ceiling. The lights dim, flicker again, and then go out completely.
In the dark, I hear Ignacio say, “What the hell?” and then shriek and swear when he bangs his shin against the steel corner of one of the glass-topped end tables.
The lights flicker for a third time, and it’s like they’re trying to decide if they’re going to go back to normal or else give up and die.
They must not have the strength to go on because they fizzle and fade, leaving the entire Lounge soaking in murky, near total darkness.
After several minutes of back and forth murmuring and nervous questions about what the frack is going on, I hear the lounge chair Sara is sitting on squeak as she hops to her feet. She tells me to go check the door.
I’m not a fan of being bossed around, so I tell her to go check it herself.
She swears at me under her breath and clomps across the Lounge toward the main door, which slides open to reveal a huge figure bathed in the harsh red glow of emergency lights in the corridor.
9
Flicker
Sara steps back as the figure lumbers past her into the long, thick shadows of the busy room.
“War!” I call out. “What’s going on?”
Grumbling from somewhere deep in his barrel chest, War runs his palm over his bald head and asks if we’re all okay.
We tell him we are, and he does a quick head count in the near-dark to make sure we’re all present and accounted for.
“So what’s going on?” Mattea asks. “Power surge?”
War shakes his big bald head. “Not sure. Rain is downstairs right now checking on the mag-generators. Kella’s upstairs to see if there’s a break in the solar cells.”
“We can help,” I tell him.
“No. You all stay here. Wisp just sent me to make sure you’re okay.”
“We’re fine,” I assure him. “We’ve been through a lot worse than a barmy little power-flicker.”
War surveys the eleven of us. With his back to the open doorway, he’s entirely in shadow, and I can barely make out the expression on his face.
Apparently satisfied, he gives us all a little nod and says, “Okay then.”
Bulky and slow as a cargo ship, he pivots on his heel and lumbers back out of the room, leaving the door open and leaving us in the dim halo-red of the hallway’s emergency lights.
“It’s just a power outage,” Sara sighs as she crosses the Lounge and hops up onto the edge of the pool table. “No biggie.”
“I don’t like this,
” Trax whines, wrapping his arms around himself.
“You’re not scared of the dark, are you?” Ignacio teases.
“I’m not afraid of the dark,” Trax protests. “I’m afraid of the monsters that leap out of the dark and suck out your eyeballs.”
“Forgive my little brother,” Chace sighs, her face a rainbow glow of neon over the top of her holo-pad. “He’s been watching old horror movies on his ocular viz-screen.”
“I’m not little,” Trax pouts. “I’m only six minutes younger than you.”
Chace lifts her eyes. “I lived a lifetime in those six minutes, Baby Bro.”
Mattea plops down into one of the Lounge’s deep, plush armchairs, her eyes focused on the open doorway and on the weak but fiery light that’s cast all of us in a web of eerie, angled shadows. “It’s not the dark. But War’s afraid of something.”
I shake my head. “I’ve known War for five years. Have you seen him? That man is not afraid of anything.”
“Trust Mattea,” Libra tells me evenly. “She reads people like we read words. If she says he’s afraid, he’s afraid.”
“Mattea’s right. War’s afraid. Something’s wrong.” Lucid seems stunned when we all swing around to look at him.
He runs his fingers through his black hair and clears his throat. Because he’s usually so quiet, to hear him talk at all is a bit of a shock. To hear him announce, with such casual indifference, that something—anything—might be wrong with War or with the Academy feels like a sledgehammer to the gut.
There’s just enough light for me to make out a crease of worry between Arlo’s eyes. He pushes back his hood and asks Lucid what he means by that.
But Lucid just stares and slips his hand into his sister’s.
Reverie squeezes his hand and seems sort of sad when she raises her eyes to meet ours. “My brother’s not wrong. There’s a hole in the Academy. There’s a thunderhead on the horizon.”
