by Maura Milan
Her eyes focused on the friend she had to protect.
“My brother is coming for you, Tarver. You’ve seen Knives. He still has scars from their last encounter. Not to mention what happened to the previous headmaster, who, I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, is very much dead in the ground right now.”
Brinn’s face twisted. “Stop lecturing me,” she said sharply. “I’m not you. I don’t have the same type of survival training you have from being out in the All Black for so many years.”
Ia’s gaze seared through the gap. There were times they got along, but there were tense moments like this that she couldn’t explain. She thought that after what had happened with the Armada, they would understand each other more, but that wasn’t the case. Ia massaged her temples and stepped back.
“You don’t have to be me,” Ia said. “You just have to be clever. And I already know you’re good at that. I’m just giving you more tools to survive.”
Across the room, someone cleared his throat. Ia squinted her eyes, trying to pick out a face in the darkness. She saw him. The Nema wannabe. He even looked like the famed captain with dark brown skin and hair buzzed neatly against his head.
“Good. You’re here,” she said. Liam Vyking stepped to the red line that marked the edge of the ring. He was as broad-shouldered as ever and had maybe even grown a few more centimeters in the past month.
“What is he doing here?” Brinn asked.
Ia waved for Liam to join them and tried to ignore the growing blush on Brinn’s face. “You both need the training.”
Liam flashed a quick smile at Brinn before turning his attention back to Ia. Ia had sparred against Liam before, so she knew he was an adequate fighter, although he still had to work on his stance, his technique. But it wouldn’t hurt to have more muscle when it came to protecting Brinn. Ia knew Einn’s fighting style, so she could teach people how to defend themselves against his tactics.
She pointed to the two of them. “Square off.”
Brinn shot Ia a mortified look, her mouth open as if she wanted to say something, but Liam had already taken his place in the ring.
“Now what?” he asked, waiting for Ia’s instruction.
“Attack,” her voice rose out, ringing over the hum of the spotlight above. Liam threw a hesitant glance over at Brinn.
Brinn quickly shook her head. “Let’s get it over with.”
Liam lunged, his arms spread open, the length nearly inescapable from each broad palm to the next. Brinn hopped back, which made Ia frown.
“You need to be within striking distance to take him down.” Ia’s voice came out cold, stern.
“I’m trying,” Brinn gasped between hurried breaths.
Liam lunged again. Tarver brought her forearm up in an attempt to keep Vyking at bay, but his weight was too much.
“Watch your angles,” Ia screamed. “Keep your elbow up. Don’t lift your shoulder.”
But it was already too late. Tarver’s arm collapsed inward, and soon Liam had Brinn in a stronghold.
Ia shook her head in disappointment and then clapped her hands to stop the fight.
Liam loosened his arms and stepped back sheepishly. Brinn avoided his gaze, her face flushed redder than even the core radiation burns left on her cheeks.
That wasn’t good enough, Ia wanted to scream at her. She shook her head. They really had no idea. Of course they wouldn’t. Only a handful people knew that the crimes on her record were all planned by Einn, minus the ambush at K-5 Neptune. That gruesome death count was all on her shoulders. Not to mention he’d almost killed her. It was hard to acknowledge defeat, but it was there, staring right at her. If she fought her brother again…
Ia shuddered.
Taking Liam’s place in the ring, she lowered herself into a fighting stance. “I’m not going to hold back,” Ia said, her eyes narrowing at Brinn. “Now, are you ready?”
CHAPTER 7
KNIVES
KNIVES WAS HUNGRY. Why was he always on the verge of starvation every time one of these faculty meetings was called to session?
He pressed his lips together, trying not to conjure thoughts of semicrunchy ramen cooking in a pot of aromatic broth. The best bowl of ramen he’d ever had was from a street vendor in the Mio system. He made a mental note to make a stop there as soon as he had time in his schedule. Which was never.
“Headmaster?” a stuffy voice called out from across the room.
But Knives was still umami deep in his ramen fantasy.
“Headmaster Adams!” This time two voices called at him at once.
And Knives rocked forward in his chair, his head shooting up to see stern eyes staring back at him. Marik and Meneva were two of the smartest people he had ever met. One of them should have been given the role of headmaster. But, alas, the Star Force favored their officers, and he was the highest-ranking officer on the grounds, so the responsibility went to him.
Headmaster. Every time someone said that word, he still expected to hear Bastian’s voice, even just the hmms and hums that took up the spaces between his old friend’s answers. Those sounds were ones he truly missed.
Having finally caught his attention, Meneva leaned forward and tapped her finger on the tabletop. “What are we going to do about the core? The electrical structure keeps failing, and don’t tell me to fix it, because I’ve already tried.”
Marik’s voice edged in. “It’s impossible to get through a lecture without a power failure. How do you expect me to teach without my holomaps?”
Knives tapped his index finger hard against the table’s surface. “Use pen and paper. Draw on the walls if you have to.”
Marik grimaced as though Knives was some ancient earthworm. No one used ink and parchment these days. No one except for Bastian. So yes, no one.
“What do you all suggest we do?” Knives asked.
“I left you there to make decisions, not ask questions.” A voice boomed out from the speakers, crackling with the static of far-off audio waves, but even through the hiss, Knives knew who was on the other end of that line.
“General,” Knives said. “I didn’t know you had joined us.”
“I’ve been listening in since the beginning,” the general said through the speaker.
Knives cringed at the thought of his father sitting in his office at HQ, judging every word—or lack of words—he said.
Aphelion was in complete disarray. Once a bastion of strength and prestige, Aphelion was the oldest and most respected academy in Commonwealth history. But in its current state, it was no longer fit for that title.
Knives sifted through all the possible choices he could make.
“So what is your decision?” his father asked.
Aphelion had been his home for three years. Knives had followed his sister here, found his purpose, lost his way, and then discovered a new one. Whether he liked it or not, Aphelion had made him the person he was today. Rough and clever and aware.
He stared at the clear plastic speaker orb positioned in the middle of the conference table. Even through the silence, he knew his father was waiting for the right words to come out of his mouth. Knives was headmaster of Aphelion, and he had to make a choice.
“Well then”—Knives sighed—“we leave.”
Once the general had signed off on the decision, Knives was the first to stand, and thus the first to leave.
The door to the conference hall slid open. Cadet Tarver was waiting for him outside, her eyes tired and her body favoring one side as if she were nursing an injury. But at the sight of him, her body straightened, and she held her fist to her heart in salute.
Knives waved a hand lazily to dismiss her salutation.
“Sir,” she said, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
He started toward the canteen, too focused on checking the time to pay attention. It was well past lights out, which meant one very tragic thing: the kitchen was closed. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and glanced over at Tarver, his eyes painfull
y dry and tired.
“Do you have any food on you?”
Tarver’s eyebrows squiggled together like cursive. She patted down her pockets, which took a while since a regulation uniform contained no less than ten, of various shapes and sizes. Finally, she pulled out a twist of chocofluff buried at the bottom of her hip bag. “It’s a bit smushed.”
But Knives didn’t care. He snatched the piece of chocofluff from her fingers, twisted off the plastic wrapping, and popped it in his mouth. The chocolate on the outside melted immediately, exposing the light puff of sugar hidden inside. It was exquisite.
He hadn’t even swallowed when Tarver began to speak. “Sir—”
And Knives suddenly remembered that Cadet Tarver was not there just to give him a piece of old chocofluff.
“I think there are weaknesses in the core room security,” she said.
By this point, the temporary happiness from all the sugar had dissipated, and he was faced once again with the realities of his role. “And?”
Brinn cleared her throat, clearly surprised by his response. “Well, I thought you should know.”
If she had told him this months ago, even a day earlier, he would have cared. But now…
Cadet Tarver stared at him in expectation, but he merely turned away. “It’s against the rules to be out past curfew.”
Cadet Tarver raised her voice, and it carried sharply on scissored wings to his ears. “Headmaster Weathers would have addressed this. He would have—”
Knives was quick to interrupt her. “Well, Bastian’s not here, is he?” It wasn’t really a question, so he required no response. He turned and made his leave down the hallway toward the instructors’ wing.
He was ready for a long night of sleep to buffer him from his thoughts and worries, to shield him from these comparisons. Bastian had been in a league entirely different from his own. Knives was used to being compared to powerful people, skilled beyond their years. There were expectations that maybe, just maybe, he would come close to his father’s greatness. His sister, Marnie, had been under the same pressure when she was at Aphelion. But she was an actual prodigy, a master at flight. And Knives, well, he was just an average flyer with a photographic memory.
But this thing that people were now doing, comparing the new headmaster to the old, often made him sigh. The type of sigh that was summoned from the blood deep within his bones.
There was something tragic about photographic memories. You remembered every single detail, every single second. They were wounds that could never fully scab. Always fresh, always painful, and always there.
He wished more than anything that he could turn back time, knowing what he knew now. Maybe then he could be quicker, faster, and more clever than that monster called Einn. Maybe then he would have saved his dear friend’s life.
But he was no magician, he told himself.
On his way to his quarters, he stopped in front of a metal door with a large bronze nameplate screwed tight by the doorframe, familiar letters etched into it. He hadn’t been inside, not since Bastian was killed.
After Marnie’s death, Knives held on to their treasured places. He visited the Nest when he needed to fill his heart, to stoke the flames of his sister’s memory alive.
But when Bastian died, Knives stayed away from the familiar spaces, especially the one that reminded him of his old mentor the most. There were days he would stand there, his fingertips resting on this metal door without going in.
But tonight would be one of his last at Aphelion, so he pressed his fist against the entry sensor. The door slid open smoothly with a whoosh, just as he remembered it.
He took a breath and stepped inside.
Bastian’s office was large and airy, with minimalist wooden furniture breaking up the open space. Tiny cleaner units were still scheduled to attend to this room, and it was as spotless as ever. The aesthetic of the space had always been clean lines and greenery—a bit of nature on a planet where nothing grew. But now, the plants that had decorated the corners of the room were limp and brown in their ceramic pots, starved like forgotten prisoners.
Death lingered in the air, that suffocating smell of old soil and decay. It wasn’t a strong smell, but it reminded him that things were not as they used to be.
Knives walked around the headmaster’s desk, his fingers trailing against the smooth wood as if each crack and swirl was a message from Bastian himself.
He slumped into Bastian’s chair, then adjusted his posture, sitting as straight as he could. He clasped his hands on the wooden tabletop, absent of any clutter, so different from all the times he had visited Bastian’s office in the past.
Usually, there were papers—sometimes in neat piles, but oftentimes in scattered chaos all across the desk so you couldn’t see a patch of wood underneath.
What had happened to all of Bastian’s work? The headmaster was the type who never saved anything on his holodevices. Knives knew this because the Commonwealth was required to catalog an officer’s entries after death, but they had reported none of his personal work on those devices. Bastian had used them only for access to student files and for communication with Commonwealth HQ, while he kept his most important work analog, in a nondigital form. Einn had taken Bastian’s journal, the one Knives had memorized during the mission in Fugue. But what about everything else? All the scratchings, sketches, unproven theorems—where were they?
There were two main drawers on each side of the desk, big enough to hold Bastian’s files. Knives opened the drawer on the right. There was nothing inside but a bag of once-fresh bokhi beans from the Nakiv jungle, hand plucked by Jaspek finches and fermented from nesting.
The other drawers appeared to have been cleaned out and emptied. He stopped at the bottom drawer on the left, giving it a sharp tug, but it remained closed. Knives examined the handle and noticed a lock underneath, one that didn’t require fingerprints or pulse scans. It needed a key. Metal keys, like pen and paper, were barely used these days. But Bastian had always considered himself a traditionalist.
There had to be one somewhere. But there was nothing else in the other drawers and nothing remotely key-shaped on the desk.
“You always thought I was so talented,” Knives muttered, “but look at me, I can’t even open a miffing drawer.”
Well, perhaps it was meant to stay that way. Locked and forgotten. Buried like a corpse.
Knives stretched, feeling the weariness of sleep start to crawl over him. He walked to the wall of class photos, taken each year since Aphelion’s beginnings. There were hundreds of them, but if he was going to leave this place, he only needed to take one.
He went to the bottom row and grabbed the third-to-last frame, angling it in his hands so he could take a better a look. There was Marnie, standing in the last row with the second-year flyers.
“Better days and bigger dreams,” he said as he looked at Marnie’s face, forever strong and captured in time. He liked to think she wore the same expression in her last moments, but that was something he would never know.
Knives’s eyes flicked to the bottom portion of the photo and found himself in the second row with the First Years. In the picture, he was smiling. He barely recognized himself. This was a kid who thought a bright future was right in front of him, who was excited for the man he would become.
That version of him was much different from the man he’d grown up to be.
He shook his head and wedged the frame underneath his arm. He pressed the door sensor with his elbow and inched backward through the doorframe to take a final look at Bastian’s office.
A satisfying goodbye would have been a real handshake and well-wishes muttered underneath a hug. But this, this was another one of his snapshots, a memory to carry with him forever. So in a way, it would never be a true goodbye.
Because he would see it again, even if he didn’t want to.
CHAPTER 8
BRINN
THERE WAS ANOTHER late-night blackout, and the safest place for Bri
nn to be was in bed. Toes were less likely to get stubbed when they were underneath blankets. Her holowatch buzzed lightly on her wrist. Brinn swiped the display, and a small glowing screen appeared before her. A triangle with bold lines flashed in its center, a sign that there was a new message. She tapped on the icon to open it. It was from Faren.
There was nothing written in the body of the message. The only thing displayed was an article from the front page of her home planet’s readstream, highlighting Nova Grae’s main news stories.
She didn’t have time to read the headline; she was too focused on the photo that was right underneath. It was a protest in front of Commonwealth Hall, the one located in the center of her hometown. There were hundreds of faces filling the space of the image, and her brother was in the center of it all. He was standing on the hood of a Roader and holding up a sign.
This IS my home.
At the end of the month, the Council would meet to repeal the Sanctuary Act. Refugees who had been living in Olympus since the Armistice were banding together, ready to speak up for their right to stay within the Commonwealth, to keep their homes. For many of the children, the Olympus territories was where they had grown up. And for the elders, this wouldn’t be the first time a home was taken from them.
She rubbed her palm against her scalp, her short navy tresses as natural a color as the day she was born. Everyone on campus knew who she was now. That she was Tawny, a people who had been hated since the Uranium War broke out. Mungbringers, Citizens called them. That was why she had hidden it. She was scared of the disdainful looks that everyone would throw her way once they found out. Faren was better than her in many ways. He fought for people beyond himself, while she was only looking out for herself and her family.