by K A Riley
But it’s not distracting in the slightest. In fact, a wave of hyper focus washes over me, and it’s like I’m suddenly able to pay full attention to every touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell all at once.
The heel of Granden’s left boot shifts a fraction of an inch to the right and presses into the gravel. He’s bracing himself for a lunge and probably gearing up for another desperate leg sweep.
He doesn’t get a chance to start his next attack, though.
I dig the toe of my own boot into the gravel. In a flash, I kick a spray of it up into Granden’s face. He barely has time to register or react before I’m on him.
A sharp uppercut to the solar plexus knocks the wind out of him, and a side-fist hammer strike disorients him for a split second. Which is longer than I need to finish my attack with a side kick to the back of his knee.
I’m behind him now and have him in a chokehold before his knee hits the ground.
With my forearm locked in place by my other arm and pressed against his trachea, his body goes limp under me.
I barely feel his tap-out pat on my shoulder, but Wisp’s top-of-the-lungs cry for us to stop clangs in my ears like church bells.
My vision returns to normal. Too bad. I was getting a kick out of seeing the world through eyes and a buffet of other senses way more advanced than my own.
Huffing for breath and with his hands clamped to his knees, Granden tells me, “Nice job” and reaches out to grab my wrist.
At first, I think it’s some new, underhanded attack, and I tense up. But he raises my arm in the air as I slip the blindfold from my eyes.
“Cohort A,” he announces grandly, “that is one very superior warrior you have there!”
Except for Sara—who I think was really banking on me getting my arse shredded—everyone from my Cohort bursts into a refrain of fist-pumping cheers.
Even Cohort B offers up a round of tepid applause.
Haida Gwaii bursts up from her perch on Trax’s shoulder and flutters over to land on the railing circling the pit. She cackles out a phlegmy screech, spreads her white wings , and clenches and releases her grip on the rail.
Like slow-moving water in an icy river, her voice crawls into my head.
~ Did you think there was only one way to see?
I did. But now I know there’s more.
~ Then you really did win.
“So…wait,” I say out loud, blinking against the arena’s starchy white light and catching Wisp’s eye. “I won?”
Wisp assures me I did. “And in style,” she adds. “I’ve never seen anyone move like that.”
And then she says the three most beautiful, flattering words ever spoken:
“Except for Kress.”
I really wish Kress had been here!
As if she’s read my mind, Chace bounds up, her holo-stylus in hand.
“Don’t worry,” she beams. “I’ll make a whole illustrated story to show her!”
“Show who?” I ask.
Chace looks confused for a second, and then the wrinkles in her forehead smooth out. “Kress. I’ll make sure Kress knows about the competitions and about your final fight against Granden. After all, I’m the Chronicler, right?”
“Um…sure?”
Grinning, Chance bounds off to rejoin her Cohort.
Now, how did she know what I was thinking?
Before I have a chance to wonder any further, Libra and Ignacio flank me and get to gushing over how fast I moved.
“It wasn’t fast,” Reverie announces from behind us as we make our way out of the arena and start heading back down the aisle, past the obstacle challenges, and toward the door.
“What are you talking about?” Mattea laughs. “Branwynne made Granden look like he was a sick tortoise in cement shoes!”
“It wasn’t fast,” Reverie corrects her, her voice even and firm as if she was stating the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. “It was interdimensional.”
28
Date
It’s in the deepest, quietest part of the middle of the night when I slip out of bed.
After hours of revelry in the Lounge—with our two Cohorts laughing, bickering, and trading embellished stories about the competition we were all just a part of—exhaustion hit everyone hard. We were practically asleep before our heads hit our pillows.
Now, with everyone else purring, prone, and dozing, I snap awake and tiptoe out of the Dorm and into the hallway where Trax is already waiting for me. He’s leaning against the wall by the stairs, his arms folded across his chest.
Instead of our usual training kit, he’s in blue pajama bottoms and a form-fitting white tank top with the Academy crest, the same outfit most of us wear at night.
Because he’s not in my Cohort, I haven’t seen him looking quite this casual in a long time.
Great. All he needs now is a pipe and a leather chair, and he could be a seventeen-year-old version of my father.
Although he’s not quite as frail-looking as he used to be, Trax is still on the thin side. His forearm muscles are long and ropey, and his teeth are nearly as white as Libra’s.
His thick brown hair glistens in the dim light of the corridor. He must have wet it before coming out here.
Nice of you to make the effort.
With his combination of lanky limbs, lean muscles, pajamas, and military boots, he looks half-boy and half man as he grins a tight-lipped greeting to me.
He waits until I’m standing right in front of him before his small grin breaks into a big, dorky, cheek-crinkling smile.
“So,” he whispers, “you showed up.”
“A promise is a promise,” I whisper back.
“You look very nice,” he says. “Nightwear suits you.”
“About that date…” I make an exaggerated show of looking down both ends of the long corridor leading to all of the bedrooms and shower rooms in the Dorm. “I don’t see many pubs around here….”
Trax chuckles and asks, “Are you up for some fresh air?” He whips out a pair of jackets stashed behind his back and holds them up by their collars like they’re the puffy pelts of two dead, polyester animals.
“I was thinking maybe a stroll downstairs to hang out in the Tavern?” I tell him.
“How unadventurous of you. We spend every day down there.” He holds up three fingers and waggles them in front of me. “Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner.”
“We’ll trip a dozen alarms if we try to leave the Academy.”
Trax flicks his thumb toward the ceiling. “True. But not if we go up.”
“The roof?”
“Sure.”
“Which one?”
Trax smiles. He knows as well as I do that the Academy is huge. It’s got flat roofs, gabled roofs, parapets with stone balustrades, and even a set of dormers jutting up from the angled roofs around the fifth floor.
“The top,” he says with a wink. “Only one alarm, and I know for a fact you know how to deactivate it.”
He’s right. I do. Because I’ve been training with Kress for so long, she and Wisp gave me special access to the Academy’s highest flat rooftop where Render and Haida Gwaii roost with their six offspring. As a result, I’m the only member of either Cohort who gets to come and go as she pleases.
Not that anyone else really has any reason or desire to get out onto the roof. Other than the roost, there’s really not much there.
And, because our school overlooks the remains of the Valta, we have an unfortunately unobstructed view of the bombed-out town far below and the scorched woods around it.
“Wisp won’t be happy if she finds out,” I warn Trax, even as I slip into the hooded thermal jacket he holds out for me.
“And I won’t be happy if we don’t give it a shot. So I guess the question is, what’ll make you happy?”
“Fine,” I smile. “Let’s go.”
His hand brushes mine as he slides his arms into his own jacket. At first, I think maybe he’s trying to get me to hold hands, which is
n’t going to happen.
But he winds up walking ahead of me, so maybe it was just an accident.
After climbing the narrowing staircase to the Academy’s top level, I punch in the access code on the input panel, and the big steel latch clicks open. I push the heavy wooden door outward, and it creaks against the layers of snow and ice on the other side.
The sky is black and bleak, but the reflected light from a blood-red crescent moon is casting a hazy pink glow over the top of the Academy.
The wind is kicking up a fog of dry snow and a swirling vortex of stinging ice crystals.
“Hard to believe it gets so cold up here when it’s so hot down there,” Trax calls out over the whipping wind.
I wrap my arms around myself. “I know. It’s like the world doesn’t know what to do with itself.”
“Well, I guess that’s our fault, not the world’s.”
“I’m going to check on Haida,” I tell Trax as I make my way over to the makeshift enclosure Kress and Brohn built along a natural ledge running along the length of the rock face.
After the competition, I brought her back up here. I tried to connect with her, to thank for her advice and for cheering me on. But she was tired, and all I got out of her was an overwhelming desire to go to sleep.
Like all ravens, Render, Haida Gwaii, and their brood like to sleep in a group.
I poke my head over the stone wall designed to keep the powerful wind at bay.
Under the overhanging, rocky crag and tucked into the shallow roost, Haida and her six offspring are huddled against the cold and are deeply and quietly asleep.
Normally, Render would be with them, joining in and watching over his family. But he’s off on his adventure with Kress, and none of us who are left in the Academy have any idea when they’ll be back.
Sighing, I take a second to marvel at Haida and her six-raven brood. I’ve gotten to know the newest ravens really well over the years.
We named the biggest one “War Jr.” after our tank-sized teacher. Like our own War, this onyx-black is no gentle giant. He established his place in the pecking order right away, nudging his brothers and sisters to the sides of their nest and claiming the largest middle part as his own.
Cheyanne is our resident nuzzler. She loves human companionship, and Kress says she thinks Cheyanne is secretly a tender little human being under all those oily-black feathers.
The two smallest of the brood—the female Apache and the male Comanche—are mottled in an unusual black-and-white cheetah pattern. They’re also the only ones who’ll occasionally stand up to War Jr. when he’s being bossy. Alone, they’re easily intimidated. Together, they seem to think they’re indestructible.
Arapaho, one of the two white ravens, is probably the most independent of the bunch. He’ll disappear for days at a time, and no one knows where he goes off to, not even Kress.
Shoshone, the second of the two white ravens, is the largest of the females, bigger even than Haida Gwaii and nearly as big as Render. Kress and her friends named Shoshone in honor of the bombed-out shell of a high school they lived in during the drone strikes.
“It’s a strange feeling,” Kress once explained to me as she paused to look out over the Valta during one of our earliest training sessions, “to be terrified in the one place you rely on to feel safe.”
Right now, gazing over the sleeping brood, I wish I could crawl in and join them in their peaceful, unified slumber. Sure, I’ve always preferred solitude. But looking at Haida and her offspring makes me long for something else, a connection even beyond the telempathic Emergent bond Haida and I share.
I’m tempted to reach out with my mind and connect with Haida like Kress has been teaching me, but I know Haida way too well by now. Being woken up, even if it’s just to say a middle-of-the-night “Hello,” would make her as bonkers as a bag of ferrets, and she likely wouldn’t let me connect with her again for at least a week.
To my surprise, she must sense my presence because she shakes herself awake and greets me with a cheerful cackle.
~ Awake?
Yes. I’m on a date…sort of…with Trax.
~ Happy?
Am I happy? Sure. I guess so.
~ Let yourself be.
I’m trying harder. I really am.
~ Try softer.
Are you okay?
~ Missing Render.
I know. Join me?
~ Yes.
Her consciousness slips back out of mine as smooth and easy as a yolk from an egg, and I’m left as just myself again.
Haida lets me scoop her up and slip her onto my shoulder. I turn back to join Trax, who seems mesmerized by the way the angled rooftops of the Academy and its twin turrets rise skyward, melting into the jagged rocks leading up to the highest parts of the mountain.
He does a little double-take when he sees we’ll be joined by my blue-eyed, white-feathered raven companion, but, other than a nod of approval, he doesn’t comment on her.
Side by side, he and I walk across the flat part of the roof, past the exact same spot where we watched Kress, Lucid, and Reverie open a portal five years ago. We saw with our own eyes how Cardyn and Manthy walked into it and disappeared.
“This way,” I say to Trax, leading him over to the stone ledge where Kress and I often sit and talk during our Apprenticeship lessons.
I hop up onto the cold stone wall, swing around, and dangle my legs over the steep side of the Academy. From my shoulder, Haida bobs her head and stares at Trax for a second before hunching down and pressing her head against mine.
“Come on up,” I say, offering him a hand.
He peers over the ledge and down into the dark abyss below. “I think I’ll stand. Sitting’s for the birds.”
“Don’t let Haida hear you say that.”
“Oh, right. Is that an insult?”
“To someone who can fly, yeah.”
“My apologies,” Trax grins, reaching out with two fingers to pat Haida’s head.
“Come on,” I say again, offering him a hand this time.
Gingerly, like he thinks the stone blocks might crumble to dust under him, Trax eases his way up onto the wall next to me, only with his legs hanging over the flat roof and with his back to the valley.
“What do you think happened to them?” he asks, pointing to the roof. “Cardyn and Manthy, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think they…?”
“Died?”
“Well, they went somewhere. And they’re not here.”
“That’s not the same thing as being dead,” I tell him.
“It’s close enough.”
Haida adjusts herself, digging her talons into my shoulder, which makes me twitch at the sudden twinge of pain. Taking care not to hurt or startle her, I slip my hand under her cottony-white body and bring her down to rest in the crook of my arm.
“There,” I whisper to her. “Isn’t that better?”
“You’re like Kress with that raven,” Trax says with an impressed smile.
“There’s a lot about what Kress can do that I still don’t understand.”
“Tell me about it.” Trax bumps his shoulder against mine and directs my attention back to the rooftop. “What she and Lucid and Reverie did over there was insane. And for Kress to say goodbye to two of her best friends like that…”
“I didn’t really know Cardyn or Manthy all that well…”
“But?”
“But there’s two things I do know.”
“What’s that?”
“They left together. And they were happy.”
Trax takes a long look at the flat stretch of roof. “They really were happy, weren’t they?”
“You were there. Did they look sad to you?”
“Well,” Trax chuckles, “Cardyn seemed a little nervous, but I know what you mean. There was something…quiet about it.”
“Quiet?”
“Not like ‘dead’ quiet. More like the kind of quiet that h
as the potential to become sound. Does that make sense?”
“No,” I laugh.
Trax nudges my shoulder again and reminds me what War always taught us. “Things can leave or fade or disappear, but nothing’s ever really dead—not how we’ve been conditioned to think of death, anyway.”
I tilt my chin toward the mountain range and the deep valleys and the vast expanses of dark forests below us. “Do you think Kress and her Conspiracy are okay out there?”
“I don’t think there’s much they can’t handle. If anything, it’s everyone else who should be scared of them.”
“I wish I was with them.”
“I know.”
“It’s a little frustrating, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. I guess not being able to really control my Emergent abilities like Kress does.”
Trax says, “Ha!” and reminds me that I’ve walked through walls before.
“True,” I admit. “But only twice. And I can’t do it without Kress.”
“Really?”
“I’ll be able to on my own one day. That’s what Kress says, anyway.”
“You did great against Granden. It’s like you could see better blindfolded than most people see normally.”
“In a way that’s sort of true,” I confess.
“Does it have to do with your eyes?”
“My eyes?”
Trax locks his eyes onto mine. “They’re so…unusual. Black with tiny white flecks. It makes it hard to read you.”
“Good!” I laugh. “I’m not interested in being read. As for how I see the world, I don’t know how it works. And it doesn’t always work. There are plenty of times when I can’t do what Kress and our other teachers think I should be able to do.”
Trax blows into his hands and then plants them under his legs.
He leans over and kisses me lightly on the corner of my mouth.
I turn toward him and squint into his birch-brown eyes. “Why’d you do that?”
“I thought maybe it’d make you happy.”
I give him a huffy snort. “I think you thought it’d make you happy.”
