Still, when Brian and Peter assigned numbers to the recruits at random—their turn on the simulator—Calvin didn’t resent coming up after Edsel in line. He figured it would be good for him to see a few others try it, see what their mistakes were, and then evaluate Edsel from there, so that he could really trounce him when his own time came.
The most common problem that the recruits had was keeping their weight centered over the sawhorse when they leaned into the turns. They had no way of strapping themselves in, and unlike a horse, the saddle on the mimic didn’t have stirrups, just metal pegs with the pedals that controlled the wing flaps. Calvin studied the main body of the sawhorse, especially the shape of the fuel tank on top, and figured that if he squeezed his thighs tightly together when he leaned, he could hold himself up without having to rest his weight on the handlebars—an action that frequently resulted in the recruits over-steering or over-revving the lifter fans, sending them into a sideways spiral. Peter warned them several times that such an action atop a real mimic would most likely result in a “wipeout” at high speeds, from high up.
“What’s a wipeout?” Avery whispered.
“You either die, or wish you had,” Edsel grunted. “Seen a man come off a horse at full gallop, and he was in severe pain for days. Imagine falling out of the sky! Of course, the secret is to. . .”
Calvin tuned out the rest, unwilling to listen to another bloated Edsel lecture.
Cohen and Stitch did okay on their first turns, which lasted about ten minutes apiece. Rusty held on out of sheer stubbornness even when the red lights flashed and the simulation ended. When Brian tried to pry her off the sawhorse, she stiff-armed him and jerked her hips sideways, righting the thing.
“I ride horses, okay? I can do this.”
Thoroughly peeved, Brian cast a glance at the Commodore up in the control booth. McCracken only smiled, amused at Rusty’s grit, and Calvin silently cheered her on.
Edsel handled his first run rather skillfully, though it seemed to Calvin that the McCracken brothers didn’t pull the rubber cords very hard—especially not as hard as they did when Calvin’s turn came. Before he’d really settled his feet onto the pegs the sawhorse collapsed onto its right side, the right front cord having gone totally slack. Calvin’s knees bit painfully into the sawhorse’s flanks, just like he’d envisioned, and he pulled himself tight against the fuel tank to hold on.
“Whoops,” Brian said. He didn’t sound sorry.
Ride it out, Calvin thought. Brian was only going to make him better.
Exactly what he needed.
He righted the sawhorse and went at it anew.
*
After their session in the simulator, Commodore McCracken revealed a leader board with the cadets’ names across the top, and an aggregate score based on their performance in various areas: handguns, long rifles, the blunderbuss, the physical training, and the flight simulator. For their group, Calvin and Edsel were at the top, though it was rather close. They were at seventy-six and seventy-eight, respectively. It was their numbers in the simulator that brought them down. Calvin would have to get better at that.
The McCrackens then sent the cadets to a class on “orienteering.” Each recruit was issued a compass and a map of the continent, and then learned how to navigate from place to place using just their instruments. Calvin thought it tedious; he only took an interest in it when Stitch pointed out that they would need these skills to fly mimics, because technomancers mostly moved in the dark, like John Penn and his crew.
Calvin’s head swam with all the new information he had absorbed. At night he dreamt of the flight simulator, and he found himself itching to get back at it the next day.
It wasn’t on the morning itinerary; instead they went back to the stables where Peter had laid out sixteen identical black knives on a table, bidding each of them to take one. Calvin looked around and did a head count—sure enough, they were down to just sixteen cadets. More had washed out in previous days. He wondered where they were now.
“These knives are made of a special blend of metal,” Peter explained. “We call it ‘frosted iron.’ The mages’ spells break down in the presence of this metal. You can use them for just about anything.”
Calvin recalled the farm raid, stabbing the enchanted lock with Brian’s knife.
Avery held his knife up to the light. “Surface could be a little smoother. Edge isn’t great either. Wouldn’t be great at hunting or skinning.”
“Unless you’re hunting mages, right?” Edsel smiled at his own joke.
Cohen studied his knife more closely. “This is coated with silver, isn’t it? That’s where the texture comes from. It’s silver dust.”
“Correct. That’s one of the rarest metals on the continent. After the iron is coated, it’s treated in a gas chamber with another element called krypton. Very complex process, and we’re lucky to have discovered it,” said Peter.
“Stab a mage with this and his power will drop. Strike a blood vessel and he’ll lose his magic for days, even weeks. Stab him in the heart and he’s not coming back,” Brian said.
They practiced different knife-fighting techniques on wooden dummies and posts, which had been hacked at and stabbed and shaved by countless previous recruits. As Calvin went through the motions on the dummy, he thought of what Amelia had said in the pantry—lots of recruits leave, none ever come back. The people who’d left these marks in years past . . . where were they now? How many of them ever got to cut the enemy?
Was this training really working?
He wouldn’t know unless he got the chance to use it in the field. Holding this in his mind, he went to work on the dummy, committing the movements to memory.
Brian ended the day’s training and sent them to the dining hall in the mansion for dinner. As Calvin trudged to the house, Stitch chatted him up about the knives and how they would fare in a real fight. Calvin only half heard him; he was looking up at the windows, looking at Amelia, who’d pulled a curtain partway open and risked a wave at him. She had her hair braided into two tails, just like the day she’d brought him extra rations in the brig, and her golden-yellow blouse gave her a kind of glow against the colorful sunset. He just smiled, fighting the urge to wave back and raise suspicion. She disappeared, but her lingering image in his mind left him with a pleasant warmth.
Seventeen days had passed since his arrival at Mount Vernon. The feeling had snuck up on him, but as Calvin reflected on the past two and a half weeks, he felt like a different person—his own person; a more capable version of the boy who had left Baltimore. Maybe this was what it felt like to be a technomancer. As he drifted to sleep that night, he wondered how he had ever lived so long as a plain old duffer.
*
Saturday came. Peter announced that they would spend more time in the simulator starting on Monday, with the cadets being broken up into groups of four, and then assigned to the room in different shifts. Calvin could think of nothing else all day, even as they ran through Brian’s intense new forest obstacle course. It involved lots of sprinting, crawling, climbing, rolling through mud, keeping one’s weapons in order, and firing straight when tired. As had become the norm, Calvin and Edsel gravitated toward each other and silently pushed themselves harder, eager to exploit the other’s shortcomings.
The distance-running portion of the course brought them back to the training camp, scratched, filthy, tired, and hungry. Brian prodded the stragglers along, while Calvin and Edsel found reserves of energy to run all-out to the finish. They were so engrossed in the competition that they didn’t hear Brian screaming for everyone to take cover.
“Gryphon rider!” he bellowed. Calvin didn’t notice until Peter threw a rock to get their attention, and he glanced back to see an object in the sky, getting larger by the second.
“The house!” Brian said, urging everyone to the mansion.
The stables were on the far side of the estate, and a mad dash for the horse stalls would leave them exposed.
&
nbsp; “No time—the tarps! Go for the tarps!” Peter bellowed.
The cadets scattered. Last week Brian and Peter had shown them hidden tarps all over the grounds, painted and disguised so that from above they would look like the terrain. Rusty and Stitch took cover together under one tarp—usually only large enough to protect two—and everyone else buddied up in like fashion. Edsel, who had already run off into the trees, left Calvin on his own.
The gryphon flew so close that Calvin could make out the details of the rider’s harness. Desperate for cover, Calvin spotted an outcropping of rock to his left, surrounded by berry bushes. He remembered that there was a tarp there, and when he dove under it, he collided with someone who had already taken shelter there.
Amelia.
”Hi!” she whispered, throwing the tarp over him.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Stuff. Hush!”
They both went deathly still at the sound of flapping wings high above the tree line.
“What’s going on?” Calvin whispered.
“Scouts. They come through here sometimes. They can’t see the grounds for what they are, but you guys aren’t covered by the same guises. Hard to explain,” Amelia said.
“Shouldn’t you be in the mansion, though?”
“What, aren’t you glad to see me?” Amelia asked in falsetto, sticking out her lip.
“Of course I am.” He was glad for the mud on his face, so she couldn’t see him blush. Not that there was much light under the tarp.
“If my brothers ask, I was picking berries.”
“And the real story?”
“Playing with Father’s personal mimic,” Amelia grinned.
“There’s one out here? I’ve been all over these woods and I haven’t seen one.”
“It’s hidden. I really shouldn’t talk about it, so keep it a secret, okay?”
“I will. Promise.” He sniffed. “Something smells good. Not these berries, either.”
“Probably this.” Amelia rummaged around and produced a leather pouch full of herbs and leaves and flower petals. “I actually was gathering things—I put different fragrances into the soaps in our lavatory. My mother taught me how.”
“I’ve heard of lavatories, but I’ve never seen a proper one. Where I’m from, we just bathe with buckets,” Calvin said.
“I could show you sometime. When we’re alone, I mean.”
“We are alone,” Calvin pointed out.
“Not like this. Although. . .” she trailed off when her big round eyes met his, and he was suddenly aware of how close she was, how nice she smelled, how her blue eyes lit up even in the shade of the tarp—and how alone they were.
Amelia closed her eyes. Calvin copied her. He gravitated toward her lips.
A hand tore the tarp back. “Adler! The rider’s gone . . . hey!”
Calvin and Amelia leapt away from each other, but the damage was done. Brian McCracken loomed over them, furious. He grabbed Calvin’s collar in both hands and hefted him to his feet with one pull.
“Brian, no!” Amelia shrieked.
“My old man told you to bug off of my sister!” Brian roared.
“Or what?” Calvin snarled back, taking Brian by the wrists.
Brian rammed his forehead into Calvin’s nose. The shocking crack and ensuing numbness disoriented Calvin for a second, allowing Brian to recover and tackle him around the waist, pushing him deeper into the bushes.
Calvin was having none of it. He planted his feet and wrapped his own arms around Brian’s torso, then sank into a crouch and leaned back. Heaving mightily, Calvin grunted and pulled Brian off his feet. In a panic Brian released Calvin all too late—Calvin spiked him into the ground, the same way he used to wrestle with ornery rams at home.
Brian recovered fast. He was on his feet instantly, and the fight went to blows. In this Brian was quicker and more experienced, but Calvin endured it well and got in close where Brian’s haymaker punches couldn’t get any momentum.
After a brief moment of grappling and punching they fell to the ground and rolled through the thicket, earning several cuts and scratches from the sharp branches. When they stopped, Calvin was atop Brian who was face down in the mud with one arm wrenched behind his back.
Silence smothered all of Mount Vernon, all save for Calvin and Brian’s ragged breathing. That was when Calvin felt dozens of eyes on him. The other cadets stood in a wide circle around the bushes, staring in open-mouthed amazement.
Peter shoved his way between Stitch and Edsel, fixing Calvin with almost the same alarmed expression as Amelia. Immediately Calvin released Brian and got up, allowing the younger McCracken brother to come up for air.
Calvin just knew there’d be hell to pay for beating one of the trainers in front of the other cadets.
~
CHAPTER 7
“How are you not in the brig right now?” Stitch stared at Calvin in awe. Everyone had returned to the dormitories after washing up. Calvin sat on the corner of his bed and went about cleaning his equipment, lips pursed, eyes unblinking. Rusty and Avery flanked Stitch expectantly, as if Calvin had an answer for his question. He didn’t.
“No idea, man.”
Peter had ordered Calvin and the other cadets to get cleaned up. Brian had left without a word. Calvin was sure the elder McCracken brother had seen the whole mess play out. Both brothers in the end were more upset that their sister had been caught out on the grounds. Calvin wondered if they knew about her playing in the Commodore’s mimic—wherever it was.
“Well, you should be in the brig. That was way over the line, Adler,” Edsel said, taking a horsehair brush to his boots.
“Ain’t your call, Ed,” Rusty chided, craning her neck to look him in the eye.
“And? Just because you don’t like the person telling you a truth doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” Edsel said, pointing the brush at her.
“The brig’s not so bad.” Calvin fixed Edsel with a hard look.
“Maybe the second time will straighten you out,” Edsel said. Calvin noticed Cohen and Lyla hanging around by him, like kids to a ram. He narrowed his eyes—so, it was to be like this?
Not important right now.
A fleeting movement in the doorway caught Calvin’s attention, and he stared through it to the mansion beyond. When would the McCrackens come back to punish him? And what of Amelia? That question nagged him even worse than any ache or pain in his body, worse even than Edsel’s twittering. Was Jonathan McCracken chewing her out for talking to Calvin? He couldn’t bear the thought of her being punished for that. What did the old man have against Calvin anyway? Good enough to fight a war, but not good enough to make his daughter happy?
Any one of a thousand well-imagined punishments swam through Calvin’s head as he meticulously cleaned his gear, changed into fresh fatigues and stretched his toes before putting his boots on and getting into bed. Stitch, Rusty, and Avery kept hanging around and chattering about the fight, which did nothing to help clear Calvin’s head, but he stayed silent. Any moment now he expected one of the McCracken brothers to drag him outside with orders to “walk home.”
The order never came.
*
Sleep had finally taken him after midnight, but only held him for a quarter of an hour before a frightening noise filled the training grounds and pried every cadet from bed. Calvin snapped awake and his hand flew to his waist, snatching up the frosted iron knife. In the mental fog, he picked out a sound that his heart had learned well: the buzz of a mimic’s engine.
“You hear that? Sounds like a machine,” Stitch said a second later.
Rusty groaned and rubbed sleep from her eyes. Stitch put a brotherly arm around her shoulder and led her to the door as Calvin ran outside, gaining speed. In the moonlight he spotted Edsel right on his heels.
Prat, Calvin thought.
Following the noise, Calvin picked out a weak light moving across the blackened sky, getting closer. He and Edsel pointed at it together. While
Edsel declared to the others that he’d seen it first, Calvin’s eyes grew wide.
The mimic was coming straight for them.
It dropped down low and closed in fast. He would half-regret it later, but Calvin turned and knocked Edsel to the ground just as the machine whooshed overhead, hammering them with a blast of underwing pressure. The other cadets also leapt comically out of the mimic’s path as it plowed into the open stables, where it puttered to a halt.
“Whoa! What!” Stitch shouted.
Calvin was up and running to the barn in an instant. Dust settled in the darkness; Edsel told Avery and Lyla to light the lanterns. To Calvin’s dismay, they obeyed. Not only was he talking down to Calvin, he was gaining a following? Calvin wasn’t sure what to do about that.
Soft yellow light pushed away the darkness, revealing two new gutters that had been dug into the stable’s soft dirt floor, courtesy of the mimic’s landing gear. For its part, the mimic had landed on its feet, tipped forward with the nose almost touching the ground. Calvin took in the magnificent little machine, noting the familiar sawhorse body, fuel tank, handlebar controls, a short glass windshield, and a scaled metal neck ending in a sculpted cowl meant to look like a dragon’s head. Two short gun barrels jutted out beneath the neck, just over the air intake. A pair of wings with built-in lifter fans spread out from the flanks, and a short tail stabbed out of the back end.
He was smitten with it instantly. For having just come in on a rough landing, it looked to be in great shape, ready to fly again. Its rider hadn’t fared so well; he had flown over the handlebars and lay in a heap several feet beyond his machine, illuminated by the flickering headlight.
Calvin and Edsel rushed over to him. A foul odor assaulted Calvin’s nostrils and he gagged before he could reach the man. Covering his nose, he coughed and took a step back. Not even Edsel’s showmanship could propel him the rest of the way.
“Sweet simmering cesspool, what the hell is that smell?” Edsel wheezed through his fingers.
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