by Mana Sol
Four classes, four hours. By the time we reached our dormitories, I was exhausted and fully renewed in my life decision to never have children. Ever. Babysitting these two had drained my energy and I was certain I’d missed at least a cumulative page of notes in all the time I spent trying to keep Addison awake. And Genie? She was going to fail our quiz at the end of the week; I was sure of it.
“God! Finally!” Addy flounced over to her favorite couch and threw herself on it. “Now we can talk. Everybody sit, we’re going to figure this out before we go to dinner.”
I didn’t argue. Now was around the time everyone else in the Academy would rush over to the dining hall for sustenance, and I wasn’t looking forward to running into any of them. I’d seen Zedekiel in our Integrated classes already, but besides him, it was the fae girl from yesterday and her posse that had me concerned. I didn’t even know their names and they were already out for blood. The only reason we had dodged them at all was that she was too busy yapping with her friends to notice the professor had dismissed the class two minutes early. Staying here for a while longer seemed like a good idea if I wanted anything resembling a peaceful evening.
“Okay,” Addy announced once all three of us sat around the coffee table. “Me first. So, yeah, I lost us our winter leave, but it’s a moral victory because we would have been copping out if we’d accepted a bogus chaperoned visit back home. Also, I’m a thousand percent sure these people would have found an excuse to ding us later in the semester anyway for something else, so honestly, if you ask me, I didn’t really lose us anything so much as just got it out of the way so we wouldn’t be even more disappointed closer to the end of the semester and…”
I only half-listened. Two days with her and I was already becoming an expert at tuning her out. I pulled my legs up into my armchair and leaned to the side, arms wrapped around my knees. Genie was on the floor again in front of the coffee table, and the scorch marks she had left on our first evening here shone darkly in the soft light of the common room.
“Hello? Guys? Input? Did you even listen to anything I said?”
I’d stopped a while ago, but I’d been just aware enough to catch her last question. Genie wasn’t even trying; her chin was lolling against her chest. I eyed her for a second longer before turning my attention back to Addy.
“I have no special plans on breaking us out, no,” I said, voice crisp and sharp. “And you wouldn’t be underestimating these people, either. They wanted us here for a reason, and now we’re exactly where they want us. Do you think it’s going to be as simple as sneaking out and running all the way back home?”
“I was thinking more like busting our way through the walls. Or gate. Not sneaking.”
“Well, there’s your problem. If you think they wouldn’t come down on us with the full force of the resources at their disposal, you’re wrong.”
“Ha. And we’re supposed to be the insignificant ones. Guess they don’t look down on humans as much as they pretend to, huh?”
“First of all, we each have something exceptional they consider valuable, something that makes us valuable more than all the other humans in the Citadel who must have applied. But besides that - Addy. Do you really think they would let word get out about three humans slipping away from them? They want to control us. That’s why they’re talking about chaperones in the first place, but it’s more than that. They’re controlling the entire Citadel. Everything. It’s the crux of everything they do. Control.”
“…So, you don’t have a plan to get out.”
I sighed. “No. And we shouldn’t. We’re here for a reason, and even if we don’t like that we’ve been manipulated, we need to find out if what Olisanna is saying is true. About what’s beyond the Wall, about the Nether creatures having magic, everything.”
“Nether creatures have what now?”
It seemed she had missed a lot, whether it was because the deputy headmistress had simply told her less than she had me or because Addy had been shouting over her and had heard nothing. The latter seemed more likely. So I shared what I knew and we compared notes.
“Genie.” She shook the smaller girl by the shoulder to rouse her. “You can’t possibly be wanting to sleep right now. I feel like I want to destroy the whole school. Punch everyone in the halls on the way out. How are you not wired about this at all?”
“About what?”
“Hello! We’re stuck here! For good! Did you miss literally everything we were talking about?”
“Oh, that? It’s okay. I like it here. She said I’ll learn how to help people instead of hurting them from now on. That sounded pretty nice.”
I leaned forward, frowning. “What exactly did she tell you?”
“That I’m better out there than in the Citadel with other people. The only things we’ll find outside are just things that are okay to burn.”
“But you realize we’re freaking prisoners, right?” Addy waved a hand to get her attention. “None of us are going home until they think we’re squashed between their fingers and won’t spill our guts or whatever. What are your parents going to do when they find out you’re not going home? And you know they’re going to make us say something to our families like ooh, we wanted to study some more or whatever.”
“Oh…Huh.” Genie pulled her knees up to her chest and tapped the table with a thoughtful look. “I hope they let you go. Maybe they’ll change their minds. She was nice when we were talking.”
Addy shot me a sharp glance, one I returned with a frown. “Let us go? You don’t want your leave privileges?”
“I’m in a group home.” Genie looked up and frowned at her. “They’ve already given my spot to someone else. Once I graduate, I go find a place to live on my own, but I can’t go back now.”
“Oh…”
I remained silent. If it were my life, I wouldn’t want opinions, whether sympathetic or casual. It could be her parents had died, but the early mortality rate among humans was exceptionally low, making that unlikely. There were too few of us to fight amongst each other, and as far as I knew, none had ever gone past the Wall with the Otherkind soldiers on land survey expeditions. What was more likely was that Genie’s parents had simply been too destitute to keep her and had given her up when she was young.
But now I had to wonder: group homes in the Tenements were notorious for subpar care, and most of the children who passed through them struggled through school. The odds had already been stacked against Genie, and today had convinced me she was far from a strong student. Had Jupiter Gate selected her based solely on her potential for pyromancy?
I pulled in my bottom lip, pondering. It made sense considering everything I learned, but there was something about it I was missing, something important. I was sure of it. But what?
“Well, Genie,” said Addy. “If we somehow get our leave privileges back, you can come home with me. Only nerds stay at school over breaks.”
I frowned harder. “I did that sometimes.”
“And there you go.”
“Off-term programs are helpful, Addison.”
“Ooh, Addison. That’s how you know she’s super serious, Genie.”
“School’s the worst. I was gonna drop out in primary. And I only want to graduate so I can stop going.”
“Exactly. See, we know.”
“Okay, but you both accepted the invitation to come here, so…”
“So…” Addy mocked. “So what? I was on the fence for a long time. I only accepted because those Otherkind protestors didn’t want us to. That’s literally it. I wanted to stick it to them.”
“But you obviously did well enough in school to qualify to apply. You’re academic-minded.”
“Uh, my entire application was based on my physical assessments, Blair. What exactly did you think I came in on? Not everyone’s a Thaumaturgist like you, Princess Thing.”
Princess Thing. Okay. She certainly hadn’t made it in on wit. “I worked hard to get here,” I said primly. “Not just because I’m
a Thaumaturgist. I could have chosen another specialty and my results would still have been competitive.”
She rolled her eyes, and Genie giggled from the floor. “Competitive is right. Go on, then. Tell us all about it.”
“I won’t, because talk is cheap. It’s all about putting in the work.”
“Yeah, it used to be. But now we’re all here because we’re just fodder for those assholes no matter how good we are or how hard we worked.”
We fell silent. Even Genie’s expression stilled, and she tapped her fingers on the coffee table while the weight of our situation truly sank in for the first time. “When do we go out there?” she asked. “To fight.”
I shook my head. “As soon as they think we’re useful enough, is my guess. All we’re doing now is taking up space, and they won’t invest time and money into us forever. They’ll want to see the returns soon.”
“Will they put me back in a group home if I fail out?”
“I don’t think so…I don’t know if we’re even allowed to fail. We already know too much, and they won’t want to follow us our whole lives just to make sure we don’t spill our guts.” I pressed my lips together for a second. “Honestly, if they have to get rid of us by throwing us out there on the other side of the Wall even if we’re not ready, they probably will since we’d at least take a few of those Nether creatures or whatever with us.”
Addy made a disbelieving sound. “That’s murder!”
“It’s only murder if they considered us equals.” I dropped my legs from the armchair and crossed one over the other. “I always wondered why the Tenements circle all the way around the Citadel. It’s not efficient for us to settle and live in a long, narrow loop region like that instead of in a neat block section, and it’s not efficient for them either when they cart over our supplies. So maybe it was never our choice to begin with, and it’s because we were always meant to be meat shields. Line us up by the Wall all around the Citadel, and if it ever falls, we’d be the first to go.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. It could be a stretch.” I shrugged and looked up at the ceiling. “But learning there’s a threat outside the Wall they were never certain they could keep out puts a lot of things in perspective.”
“You really can’t be serious.”
“I can’t? I don’t know. I had to prove I was in the top point-five percentile to even apply for the Arcane Institutes scholarship programs, and that’s including the academies that already opened up to human transfer students. But you said you got in through physical assessment, and Genie? What did they ask from you?”
“I dunno. I’m not supposed to tell anyone, but I never applied because I knew my grades were too bad. But the counselor came to our apartment building and said I might be a good fit.”
“Hang on.” Addy waved her hand. “You didn’t apply? I did. I mean, I don’t have perfect grades, but I’m pretty close and still had to work my ass off to prove I’m good enough to compensate in other ways.”
“Oh. Huh…”
“And you had that guy break into your apartment block. That’s some luck. You didn’t even want to come here in the first place and he tried to come at you.”
That was right. The man who had put Genie all over the papers…But wait. Did that mean she had been hand-picked before she even made the news? I didn’t get my acceptance letter until a third of the way through summer recess. I had wondered whether Jupiter Gate had selected Genie purely because of the publicity and the potential fallout, but now…
“We should be careful,” I said slowly.
“No dip. But we have a massive target on our backs wherever we go.” Addy sighed and shifted so she could put her feet up on the table. “Your fae friends from lunch, the ones you told us about the other day. They were the ones sitting two rows back from us in History, right?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re not the only ones who were whispering trash. I have an ear for that kind of thing.” Addy tossed her head, blond tresses flying. “We’re in for a rough week, ladies.”
All three of us shared a meaningful look.
Rough was bound to be an understatement.
17
The rest of the week was a mess. It took almost running into the yet-unnamed fae girl and her flourishing posse four separate times before I realized I was going to have to make significant changes. I wanted to have as quiet a life as possible here, but if going to mealtimes at reasonable hours risked getting shoved into the girls’ room and getting the snot beaten out of me, then I was just going to stop being reasonable.
I was lucky that Addy had strange preferences to begin with and Genie - well, Genie didn’t seem to care when or what she ate, ever. So at six o’clock before most of the students got up, we were already on our way to the dining hall to fetch food to eat in our common room. That was one thing Addy could claim superiority in: she was a natural morning person whereas I had to force myself to roll out of bed. I always crawled out by half-past five, but by then Addy had already done her morning workout comprised strenuous exercises I frankly never wanted to have to witness, much less join her for.
“It’s good for you,” she argued as we hurried to the dining hall. “I’m going to get both of you to do it with me every morning, I swear. It’ll change your entire outlook on life. You’ll start your day with more power and energy and -”
“I don’t wanna,” Genie interrupted sullenly.
“You said that about waking up early, too. You were going to make Blair and me bring your food. But now look at you. Breakfast at six!”
“But I’m gonna go back to sleep when we get back.”
“Oh, come on. You’re already up, what’s the point of going back to bed?”
“More sleep.”
Addy sent her a disparaging look, then at me, an impatient one. I shrugged back. What did she expect me to do? I had no problem with Genie sleeping in, and if she could get away with it, then all the better. I liked the idea that she could do whatever she wanted while everyone else at Jupiter Gate had to tolerate it all. She hadn’t even bothered trying to hide how she slept in class this week; she’d simply folded her arms over the table or desk and nestled her head into the crook of her elbow as soon as the professor began lecturing.
In contrast, Addy grew more hyperactive by the day, by the hour - but I suspected it came from bitter frustration at our predicament, too. Though if this was her way of coping, then so be it. We only needed to sit tight until later today when we got our first real clue as to what was expected of us, the combat training. And then we would discuss what we had learned, what we thought, and share whatever ideas came to mind. Our priority was gathering information, nothing else. The rest would come later.
The only complication was Zedekiel. He was the one who would hold our hand through it, and unbeknownst to the other girls, he and I were already in a particularly rocky patch. Was he going to torment me the way the fae girl had promised? She’d made it sound as if it were inevitable that he would make my life hell as his personal punching bag, but all this week he had only glared at me while I industriously ignored him. Other than that, he hadn’t made a single move - and he could have. I knew better than to think otherwise. I was always within reach.
So what was he waiting for?
“I do hate running around like we’re scared,” Addy grumbled as we ate breakfast in our common room. “We’re only dodging those assholes because we’re trying to get on the faculty’s good side. But you know what they’re all thinking.”
“So don’t worry about what they’re thinking,” I said as I sawed my toast a tad harder than I should. “It shouldn’t bother you when we know we have more important things on our plate.”
“Ugh.” She scowled and returned to her food, while I breathed a sigh of relief that she hadn’t noticed how on edge I was, too. Because yes, she wasn’t alone. It scorched my pride that the fae girl and her friends all no doubt thought they had me on the run. And
maybe it was true, but not for the reason they assumed.
Ego. My Achilles’ heel. I pushed my tray away, appetite vaporized. “We should get as much of our homework done as possible before we go,” I said. “We don’t know what shape we’ll be in when we get back.”
“Seriously? You’re worried about homework? What are they going to do, kick us out because we didn’t do our essay questions?”
“It’ll make them watch us more closely.”
She threw her head back with a loud sigh. “This is insane. I just want to break out. I want to go. Genie, maybe you should just set this whole place on fire so we have an excuse to make a run for it.”
“I can if you want -”
“No.” I glared. It had seemed an awful lot like they weren’t just kidding around. “Genie, whatever you do, you cannot piss them off, okay?”
“…I wasn’t gonna.”
I glared harder.
“You guys are the ones that are upset.” She frowned back. “I’m just trying to help. And I’ll do it if we have to. I just don’t want to hurt anybody.”
“It’s not just about not hurting people. I mean, yes, it’s important, but…” I pinched the bridge of my nose and rubbed it, eyes closed. “More relevantly, we wouldn’t stand a chance out there. At all.”
“Speak for yourself!” Addy exclaimed. “I’m not soft like some people.”
Soft? I was about to lash back with a sharp retort but faltered when I realized I had nothing to say. It was true. I’d grown up considering my family poor, but we’d almost always had food on the table for us all. There’d been nights we went to bed far from full, but my eyes drifted back over to Genie. Not just small, I thought. Malnourished. She was our age but looked several years younger with her tiny frame and brown eyes too big for her face. And yet, out of the three of us, she was probably the one who’d make it on the streets the longest because she knew how to tolerate hardship.
