Academy 7

by Anne Osterlund

THE NIGHT

  EVERY NIGHT THE NIGHTMARE CAME. FOR FIVE months. Dane tried to ignore it. He tried to eliminate it by applying himself to his studies and filling his brain with all manner of knowledge. He pushed his body to the edge, first in rehabilitation, then in training, hoping to exhaust himself, to make it impossible to dream.

  It did not work. When you have the same dream over and over again, your brain is trying to solve a problem, Pete always said. It knows there’s an answer.

  If there were answers in Dane’s nightmare, they had yet to reveal themselves. He awoke the final evening of the school year as always, sweat pouring down his skin, his mind determined once again to live and relive his last argument with his father. Lucky, the school nurse had said. If the fellow had punched you any harder, you would be dead.Luck had nothing to do with it. If the General had wanted to puncture a lung, he would have, and he would not have cracked the ribs if he had not wanted to.

  But Dane had been the one to inflict the deepest damage. He had chosen to sever his relationship with Aerin. Because he had not been able to face her, could not accept the fact that she had seen him at his weakest and most vulnerable.

  Again Dane struggled with the memory of her standing outside the sliding-glass door. Watching.

  He thrust the image away and rolled over, picturing her instead in the red dress. Was that what had sent the General over the edge? The dress? That had been Paul, enacting his revenge for Dane’s entrance into the school.

  Paul had never been able to stand being beaten by his younger brother. And it had happened before. Often enough that Dane had learned to recognize the pattern, and repercussions, at an early age. The General would blow up, blasting out accusations, and somehow Dane was always at the center of the blast. But his brother was the fuse.

  This time, though, there had been more to the fight than Paul. I caught her in that lie tonight at dinner,the General had said, and you rushed to cover her tracks.

  What lie? Dane had rescued Aerin from his father’s prying when the General had asked about her past. But what was the lie he thought he had discovered? And why would Aerin’s secrets about her personal life matter to Dane’s father? It was almost midnight when a thought took Dane in a new direction. His father had been probing Aerin at dinner. Looking for personal details, but his questions had not turned demanding until she had told him her own father’s name. Tony. No, Antony. Antony Renning.

  Dane had seen that name before.

  He sat up, shoving off the sheets. After tugging on a pair of pants, slippers, and a shirt, he hurried into the hallway. He had to talk to Aerin. Now.

  She was not in her room. He became convinced of that fact only after banging on her door and waking up half the girl’s wing. By the time he realized that she must have sneaked out her window, the wing monitor on night duty had arrived on the scene: Yvonne, still fully dressed in her uniform, an expensive watch, and a green necklace.

  Reminiscent of the one his father had secured around Aerin’s neck at Christmas, strangling Dane as he fastened the brass catch. He’d wanted to rip the false jewels off her neck, to accuse his father and brother of using her to get to him. Flaunting their power through her naivety. But he hadn’t known how to warn her of their insincerity without frightening her.

  It was yourself you were protecting. Admit it, his conscience taunted him.

  Hell yes, he’d been protecting his own secret. And it had almost cost him everything.

  “Problem?” Yvonne asked, arching a tweezed eyebrow.

  “No.” He hedged away from Aerin’s door, his brain clicking rapidly, hunting for a way to explain himself and keep Aerin off Yvonne’s radar. “I must have been sleepwalking.” He gave a sheepish grin. “Sorry.”

  The exotic girl bestowed him with her version of a placating look, an expression that reminded him of a feigning predator. She slipped an arm around his shoulders and ushered him back up the hall. “You’re sleepwalking in the wrong wing,” she teased, then, instead of escorting him back to his room, she stopped at the staircase. “Would you like to go down for some hot cider?”

  No. But the drink machine was on the first floor, and that would put him almost where he did want to be: outside looking for Aerin. He nodded.

  Yvonne let him open the door for her.

  They started down the steps. She kept glancing at him as though expecting him to say something. “Nervous about tomorrow?” she finally asked.

  He wrinkled his forehead, then realized she must be talking about the morning’s ceremony when the names of the returning students would be announced to the universe. He wished nerves were all that was keeping him awake. They were a good enough excuse. “I guess,” he replied.

  She traced a violet fingernail over his wrist. “I would have thought you of all people wouldn’t be worried. Your marks are even better than mine.” A hint of bitterness rifled her voice. “Yours and that . . . Heron-girl’s.”

  Dane squelched a desire to correct Aerin’s name. He had reached the bottom of the steps. The lobby stood before him, with the front door a mere ten feet away. “You know, Yvonne.” He tried to detach her fingers. “I think some fresh air might be better for me than cider.”

  She giggled, linking her arms around his waist and facing him. “You know I’m on duty, and it’s after curfew.”

  “I just think it might help get my mind off things a little.” He reined in the urge to pull away and lowered his voice in the name of a greater cause. “Maybe by the time I come back, you won’t be . . . on duty.”

  “Be back by two,” she whispered in his ear, then let go.

  That was one appointment he would not mind missing. Three smooth strides and he was out the door, closing it firmly behind him.

  Night had turned the garden into a forest like something from a dark fantasy. Dane garnered scratches and bruises as he picked his way through the shadows. A sickly sweetness clung heavy in the air, the chaotic blend of rampant, untended flowers. His eardrums were invaded by the high-pitched cry of tuneless crickets, eventually replaced by the shhh of running water.

  He found Aerin in a pool of moonlight by the fountain. Tree branches reached out their fingers toward her slender body; but the light seemed to emanate from her, pushing them away. Her back faced him; her long brown hair split down the middle and swept forward across her left shoulder; her thin arms bent at the elbows.

  She is beautiful. The thought slipped into his conscious as it had once before, when he had first seen her in the red dress. Suddenly the discovery that had brought him here felt less urgent. He needed to repair the damage he had done first, to explain himself and apologize. She deserved that much.

  “I never meant to place you in danger,” he said, stepping forward from the shadows.

  Her shoulders straightened, but she failed to turn.

  “I didn’t know my father would be there,” he added. “I would never—I should never . . .”

  “Your father didn’t touch me.” Her words wavered.

  He swallowed. This was hard, harder than anything he had ever done. “The General started hitting me when I was nine. He said . . .” Dane swallowed and struggled to keep his voice. “He said it was because I was a coward.”

  A strained sound between a laugh and a sob came from her. “So now you aren’t afraid of anything?”

  Unease crept over Dane’s shoulders. That was the idea, but it wasn’t reality. He had been trained never to show fear, never to admit it. “I was afraid of you,” he told her, “of what it meant to have you know.”

  There was a long, long silence. And just when he thought they might never surpass it, she spoke. “I’m the reason your father was angry. That night, he was upset because of me.”

  “Don’t.” Anger stifled Dane’s voice. Had his rejection made her think he blamed her? “He’s like a time bomb, Aerin. The same thing would have happened with or without you there. I just . . . I couldn’t talk about it . . . what happened that night. It had nothing to do with you,” he
rushed to say.

  She was shaking her head. “Yes, it did, Dane. Maybe you’re right about your father. If I hadn’t been there, something else might have set him off, but that night it was me. It was what I said at dinner. Your father, he wanted to know when my father died, but I couldn’t tell him. I was afraid if your father knew, he would want to know where I was after my father’s death, before . . . before I came here. I don’t . . . I don’t know how he knew—”

  “That you were lying.” The misshapen piece began to slip into place, and Dane felt a sudden rush of betrayal.

  “I didn’t intend to lie.”

  It was still a lie. She had been lying to him all this time. And she knew the deepest, most unforgivable secret Dane had. “Where were you then?” he asked, no longer willing to respect her privacy. “If you weren’t on a trade ship?”

  She caught her breath. He could see the muscles tighten in her neck. There was another long silence, and then she said, “My father died in that ship seven years ago.”

  Dane stared, not certain what to think.

  “In a crash,” she finished the thought. “I was with him.”

  Instinctively he reached out a hand to touch her shoulder.

  She yanked away. “The computer . . . it malfunctioned. My father was trying to take us to the next space station, but it was days off; and I couldn’t fly without the autopilot. I was trying to fix the processor.”

  “Seven years ago? But you would only have been—

  “Nearly eleven years old.” Her hand ran through her hair. “I’ve always had a gift with technology, but not enough of one. The ship went down and crashed.”

  “I thought you said you were days away—”

  “From the nearest space station, but not the nearest planet. We landed on Vizhan.” The name tilted off her tongue, jostling through his memory.

  His brain leafed through the stacks of material he had studied over the past months. “Vizhan?” he repeated.

  And then he remembered what little he knew. A minor X-level planet in the Dyan sector of the universe, ruled by a small group of people who subject the majority of the planet’s inhabitants to slavery and sporadic culling.

  Culling? The word bit into his gut. What was that? A polite word for murder?

  She stared into the fountain’s sheeting curtain. “I don’t remember much from right after the crash. I saw my father’s body and . . . I guess I was in shock. There were people. I don’t remember them trying to talk to me. They were more concerned with the ship. It was a long time before I realized they didn’t know what it was.”

  “The ship?”

  “Vizhan is isolated. The people there have no concept of flight.”

  His throat rejected the notion. He knew there were planets outside the Alliance that had lost scientific knowledge, but still, if the planet was inhabited by human life, the people must have come there by ship originally. “No concept at all?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I think the leaders must have rebelled against space travel at some point, though the man who owned the property where we crashed, he kept my father’s ship, even though he didn’t know what to do with it—left it like a monument in the field where it landed. He collected things: land, machines, people.”

  Dane’s hands clenched into fists. “You were a slave?” he asked.

  She paused. A shadow traced its way across her back. Then the words began spilling from her throat as if she could no longer contain them. “I was housed in a shed with over a hundred people. The smell . . . it was like death. There wasn’t enough food. You had to fight.”

  That was how she had learned the skills she used in combat and why she talked about them as if they were a matter of survival. Understanding slid into Dane’s mind.

  “We were herded to work in the fields,” she said, “flat-open areas where only a few guards with weapons could control dozens of people. The guards . . . they would stand up on platforms. If we were too slow, or made a mistake, or they just didn’t need us anymore, they would fire their lasers.”

  Bile rose in Dane’s throat. His hands lifted to her upper arms, and this time she did not pull away.

  “One day”—Aerin’s voice had gone sandpaper harsh—“the owner pulled me off field duty to fix an ancient computer. He had a lab filled with them, but they were almost all dead. He must have thought I might know something, considering all the machines on the ship. I fixed it, the computer. And nearly all his other ones. It kept me out of the fields a few days a week. In three years, through trial and error, I made everything in that house run by machine: the lights, the doors, the running water. Then there was only one computer left in need of repair. I stalled on it for months. Until the day he lost his temper.”

  Dane’s hands tightened on her arms.

  She reached up, covering his left hand with her palm, and pried his fingers away, then undid the top buttons of her uniform and eased the fabric over her shoulder. To reveal the dark lines of an X burned into her skin. “He branded me.”

  Dane’s body jolted. He could not accept that X and the pain it told him she had endured. It rivaled anything his father had ever done to him. Physically.

  “That night”—she took a deep breath—“instead of returning me to the shed, he locked me in the lab.” Her voice hardened. “That was his mistake. As soon as it was dark, I sabotaged his security system, shut it all down and let myself out. There was a forest running from the owner’s house to the field with the ship. The trees gave me cover. I never would have made it without them.”

  Tension ran under Dane’s skin. But the ship had been damaged before the crash. What if she hadn’t been able to fix it?

  “Hardly anything wasn’t damaged,” she said as if reading his mind. “I’d learned a lot in the lab, and I managed to fix the autopilot and part of the control system, but if the ship had failed . . .”

  She turned toward him, silent tears streaming down her cheeks. And then she was trembling, sobs escaping her throat. He knew now what she had done. A runaway slave committing sabotage and theft. A suicide mission really. Pinning her life on the chance, no matter how slight, of escape. No wonder she lived in fear, jumping at danger. No wonder she questioned her safety in the Alliance. No wonder she judged and doubted people without letting them close. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed her to his chest in a fierce embrace.

  “Aerin.” She heard Dane say her name through a thick down of cloudy memory. “What do you know about your father? I mean about his past—where he grew up, his family?”

  “I don’t have any family.” She spoke into his shirt.

  Dane began to pull away, and she didn’t want him to go, didn’t want to lose that strange, unreal feeling. Of safety.

  But the firm hands slid from her back, and the warm cocoon withdrew as he insisted on talking. “Your father must have had family though, at some point. He must have come from somewhere.”

  She shivered, trying to wipe away the tears that blocked her vision. “I don’t know. I’d give anything to know more about him.”

  Dane swam into view, a blurry figure blending with the darkness. “Then there’s something I need to show you.” He reached out for her hand and pulled.

  She found herself following him with an odd sense of detachment. Too shaken emotionally to think about much, she focused on his steps. He plowed ahead recklessly, willing her forward through the garden and across the grass.

  Not until he pulled a pair of lock picks from his pocket did she bother to wonder why he was taking her away from the dorm.

  “You remember that conversation at Christmas dinner?” He paused at the foot of the Great Hall.

  Hadn’t she just admitted it had haunted her for months?

  He scaled the sloping steps, then looked down at her. “You said you didn’t know how my father knew you were lying.”

  She eyed him with a frown. “It was almost as if—”

  “He knew when your father died.”

  She fro
ze, unable to react as Dane slid a small tool into the keyhole of the main door. His fingers moved with deft ease. Click, click, click came the response. And then the massive door was opening. He pushed it in and gestured for her to enter. She shook her head in refusal.

  He hurried back down to her, placed his hand beneath her elbow, and guided her easily with him.

  The hallway was dark. Too dark to see after the bright moonlight of the outside, but Dane did not wait for her eyes to adjust. “Stay here,” he said, then sprang up the stairs.

  “No.” She tried to stop him, but he disappeared in the blackness. The sound of creaking steps rose farther and farther above her, echoing in the high space.

  She fell back against the wall. What was she doing? Once before she had sat in this building alone, in that empty basement room, the terror of the dark ripping apart her sanity. And that instance, too, had been Dane’s fault. At the time, she would never have believed she would risk her place at the school. Yet here she was, putting herself in the same situation she had been falsely accused of eight months ago, and Dane had not even given her a real reason. What had changed in her world that she could accept this?

  Everything. Everything had changed.

  And nothing.

  “Aerin.” He was standing before her again. By now her eyes had adjusted, and she could see him. The light from the window played across his features: strong cheekbones, dark hair curling behind his ears, eyes shining with anticipation. He stepped closer. “You remember that day when Dr. Livinski made us clean the trophy room?”

  She remembered all too well. The punishment she would receive for this night’s excursion would be far worse.

  “Xioxang handed me a plaque,” Dane kept talking. “He ordered me to clean it. I wouldn’t have even looked at the thing, but it had my father’s name on it: Flight Team: Gold.”

  Her patience had worn out. “Your father won a million awards.” She pushed off the wall and turned to leave.

  “He did.” Dane blocked her path. In his hand was a rectangular piece of polished wood. “But every flight team has two members.”