Dia’s words returned to me. You don’t really think they’d let the daughter of Chaser fly for the DDF, do you?
I tried anyway. Furious—holding my pencil so tightly I broke the tip and had to get a replacement—I scrawled on my stupid test. Each question felt intended to break my will. Algae vats. Ventilation. Sewage. Places I supposedly belonged.
Daughter of a coward. She’s lucky we don’t just toss her into the vats.
I wrote for hours, emotions dogfighting within me. Anger fought naive anticipation. Frustration fought hope. Realization shot down optimism.
Explain the proper procedure if you think a vat of algae might have been contaminated by a coworker.
I tried not to leave any questions blank, but on well over two-thirds of them, my answer boiled down to, “I don’t know. I’d ask someone who does.” And it hurt to answer them, as if by doing so I was proving that I was incompetent.
But I would not give up. Finally the bell chimed, marking the end of the five-hour time limit. I slumped as an aide pulled the test from my fingers. I watched her walk off.
No.
Admiral Ironsides had returned and was speaking—now that the test had ended—with a small group of people in suits and skirts, First Citizens or National Assembly members. Ironsides was known for being stern but fair.
I stood up and walked to her, fishing in my pocket, fist closing on my father’s pin. I waited, respectful, as the students filed out for the after-test party, where they’d be joined by those who had already settled on other careers, and who had been spending the day applying for and being assigned positions. Those who took this test and failed would be given second pickings later in the week.
Tonight though, everyone would celebrate together, future pilot and future janitor alike.
Finally, Ironsides looked at me.
I held up my father’s pin. “Sir,” I said. “As the daughter of a pilot who fought at the Battle of Alta, I would like to petition for acceptance into flight school.”
She looked me up and down, noting the ripped sleeve, the dirty face, the dried blood on my arm. She took the pin from my hand, and I held my breath.
“Do you really think,” she said, “that I would accept the pin of a traitor?”
My heart sank.
“You aren’t even supposed to have this, girl,” she said. “Wasn’t it destroyed when he crashed? Did you steal someone else’s pin?”
“Sir,” I said, my voice taut. “It didn’t go down in the crash with him. He gave it to me before he flew that last time.”
Admiral Ironsides turned to leave.
“Sir?” I said. “Please. Please, just give me a chance.”
She hesitated, and I thought she was considering, but then she leaned in to me and whispered. “Girl, do you have any idea the kind of public relations nightmare you could cause for us? If I let you in, and you turn out to be a coward like he was…Well, there is no way on this planet I will let you into a cockpit. Be glad we even let you into this building.”
It felt like I’d been slapped. I winced. This woman—one of my heroes—turned to leave.
I grabbed her arm, and several aides nearby gasped softly. But I held on.
“You still have my pin,” I said. “Those belong to the pilots and their families. Tradition—”
“The pins of actual pilots belong to the families,” she said. “Not cowards.” She pulled herself out of my grip with a shockingly firm yank.
I could have attacked her. I almost did; the heat was rising inside me, and my face felt cold.
Arms grabbed me from behind before I could do it. “Spin?” Rig said. “Spensa! What are you doing?”
“She stole it. She took my father’s…” I trailed off as the admiral walked out with her collected attendants. Then I sagged into Rig’s grasp.
“Spensa?” Rig said. “Let’s go to the party. We can talk about it there. How do you think you did? I think…I think did terribly. Spensa?”
I pulled away from him and trudged back to my desk, suddenly feeling too exhausted to stand.
“Spin?” he asked.
“Go to the party, Rig,” I whispered.
“But—”
“Leave me alone. Please. Just…let me be by myself.”
He never did know how to deal with me when I got like this, so he hovered about, then finally trailed off.
And I sat alone in the room.
Hours passed.
My anger before had been as hot as magma. Now I just felt cold. Numb.
Echoes of the party drifted in from another area of the building.
I felt used, stupid, and most of all…empty. Shouldn’t I have been snapping my pencil, throwing tables about in rage? Ranting about seeking vengeance upon my foes, and their children and grandchildren? Typical Spensa behavior?
Instead I sat there and stared. Until the sounds of the party grew quieter. Eventually, an aide peeked into the room. “Um, you’re supposed to leave.”
I didn’t move.
“Are you sure you don’t want to leave?”
They’d have to drag me out of here. I imagined it—very heroic and Defiant—but the aide didn’t seem so inclined. She switched off the lights and left me there, lit only by the red-orange glow of the emergency lights.
Finally, I stood up and walked to the desk by the wall, where Ironsides had—perhaps accidentally—left the tests the children of the First Citizens had given her. I looked through the stack; each of them had only the name filled out, the other questions blank.
I took the one off the top, the first one handed in. It held the name Jorgen Weight, followed by a question.
Name the four major battles that secured the United Defiant Caverns’ independence as the first major state on Detritus.
That was a tricky question, as people were probably going to forget the Unicarn Skirmish—it didn’t get talked about as much. But it was where the fledgling DDF had first employed fighters of the second generation of designs, built in secret in Igneous. I trailed over to my desk and sat down, then answered the question.
I moved on to the next, then the next. They were good questions. More than simple lists of dates or parts. Some math questions about combat speeds. But most were questions about intent, opinion, and personal preference. I struggled on two of them, trying to decide if I should say what I thought the test wanted, or what I thought was actually the correct answer.
I went with the second both times. Who cared anyway, right?
By the time I was finishing up, I heard people talking outside. Janitors, from the sounds of their discussion.
Suddenly I felt silly. Would I scream and force some poor janitor to pull me out by my hair? I’d been beaten. You couldn’t win every fight, and there was no shame in losing when you were outnumbered. I turned over the test and tapped my pencil against it, still sitting mostly in the dark, working by the glow of the emergency lights.
I started sketching a W-shaped ship on the back of the test as a crazy idea began to form in my head. The DDF hadn’t begun as an official military; it had started out as a bunch of dreamers with their own crazy idea. Get the apparatus working, create ships from some schematics that had survived our crash on the planet.
They’d built their own ships.
The door opened, letting in light from the hallway. I heard a bucket get set on the ground outside, and two people complaining about spills in the party room.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” I said, finishing my sketch. Thinking. Wondering. Dreaming.
“Why are you still here, kid?” a janitor asked. “You didn’t want to go to the party?”
“I didn’t feel much like celebrating.”
He grunted. “Didn’t do well on the test?”
“Turns out it doesn’t matter,” I said. I gl
anced at him, but he was backlit, just a silhouette in the doorway. “Do you ever…,” I said. “Do you ever feel they forced you to be what you are?”
“No. I might have forced myself into it though.”
I sighed. Mother was probably worried sick about me. I stood up and wandered over to the wall where the aide had put my pack.
“Why do you want it so much?” the janitor asked. Was there something familiar about his voice? “It’s dangerous, being a pilot. A lot of them get killed.”
“Just under fifty percent are shot down in their first five years,” I said. “But they don’t all die. Some eject. Others get shot down, but survive the crash.”
“Yes. I know.”
I froze, then frowned and looked back at the figure. I couldn’t make out his face, but something flashed on his breast. Medals? A pilot’s pin? I squinted, and made out the shape of a DDF jacket and dress slacks.
This was no janitor. I could still hear those two out in the hallway, joking with each other.
I stood up straighter. The man walked slowly to my desk, and the emergency lights revealed he was older, maybe in his fifties, with a stark white mustache. He walked with a prominent limp.
He picked up the test I’d filled out, then flipped through it. “So why?” he finally asked. “Why care so much? They never ask the most important question on these tests. Why do you want to be a pilot?”
To prove myself, and to redeem my father’s name. It was my immediate response, though something else warred with it. Something my father had sometimes said, something buried inside me, often overshadowed by ideas of vengeance and redemption.
“Because you get to see the sky,” I whispered.
The man grunted. “We name ourselves Defiants,” he said. “It’s the central ideal of our people—the fact that we refuse to back down. And yet, Ironsides always acts so surprised when someone defies her.” He shook his head, then set the test down again. He put something on top of it.
He turned to limp away.
“Wait,” I said. “Who are you?”
He stopped at the doorway, and the light outside showed his face more clearly, with that mustache, and eyes that seemed…old. “I knew your father.”
Wait. I did know that voice. “Mongrel?” I said. “That is you. You were his wingmate!”
“In another life,” he said. “Oh-seven-hundred sharp on the day after tomorrow, building F, room C-14. Show the pin to get access.”
The pin? I walked back to the desk, and found—sitting on top of my test—a cadet’s pin.
I snatched it up. “But Ironsides said she’d never let me into a cockpit.”
“I’ll deal with Ironsides. It’s my class; I get final say over my students, and even she can’t overrule me. She’s too important for that.”
“Too important? To give orders?”
“Military protocol. When you get important enough to order an armada into battle, you’re too important to interfere with how a quartermaster runs his shop. You’ll see. There’s a lot you know, judging by that test—but still some things you don’t. You got number seventeen wrong.”
“Seventeen…” I flipped through the test quickly. “The overwhelming odds question?”
“The right answer was to fall back and await reinforcement.”
“No it wasn’t.”
He stiffened, and I quickly bit my tongue. Should I be arguing with the person who’d just given me a cadet’s pin?
“I’ll let you into the sky,” he said, “but they’re not going to be easy on you. I’m not going to be easy on you. Wouldn’t be fair.”
“Is anything fair?”
He smiled. “Death is. He treats us all the same. Oh-seven-hundred. Don’t be late.”
The elevator doors opened, and I looked out upon a city that should not exist.
Alta was primarily a military base, so perhaps city was an ambitious term. Yet the elevator structure opened a good two hundred meters outside the base proper. Lining the roadway between the two were shops and homes. A real town, populated by the stubborn farmers who worked the strips of greenery beyond.
I lingered in the large elevator as it emptied of people. This represented a threshold to a new life, a life I’d always dreamed about. I found myself strangely hesitant as I stood there, pack full of clothing over my shoulder, the phantom feeling of my mother’s kiss farewell on my forehead.
“Oh, isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” a voice said from behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder. The speaker was a girl about my age. She was taller than I was, with tan-brown skin and long, curly black hair. I’d seen her earlier on the elevator and noted her cadet’s pin. She spoke with a faint accent I didn’t recognize.
“I keep thinking it can’t be real,” she said. “Do you think it might be some cruel prank they’re playing on us?”
“What tactical advantage would they gain by that?” I asked her.
The girl took my arm in a much too familiar way. “We can do this. Just take a deep breath. Reach up. Pluck a star. That’s what the Saint says.”
I had no idea what to make of this behavior. People normally treated me like a pariah; they didn’t take me by the arm. I was so stunned that I didn’t resist as she towed me after her out of the elevator. We entered the wide walkway leading through the town, toward the base.
I’d rather have been walking with Rodge, but they’d called him in late last night to ask him something about his test, and so far I hadn’t gotten word of what that meant. Hopefully he wasn’t in trouble.
The girl and I soon passed a fountain. A real fountain, like from the stories. We both stopped to gape, and I extricated my arm from the girl’s grasp. Part of me wanted to be offended—but she seemed so genuine.
“That music the water makes,” she said. “Isn’t it the most wonderful sound ever?”
“The most wonderful sound ever is the lamentations of my enemies, screaming my name toward the heavens with ragged, dying voices.”
The girl looked at me, cocking her head. “Well bless your stars.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s a line from a story.” I stuck out my hand to her. Best to be on good terms with the other cadets. “I’m callsign: Spin.”
“Kimmalyn,” she said, shaking my hand. “Um, we’re supposed to have callsigns already?”
“I’m an overachiever. What room you reporting to?”
“Umm…” She fished in her pocket and pulled out a paper. “C-14? Cadet Flight B.”
“Same as me.”
“Callsign…callsign…,” Kimmalyn murmured. “What should I pick?”
“Killer?” I suggested. “Afterburn? No, that’s probably too confusing. Fleshripper?”
“Couldn’t it be something a little less gruesome?”
“You’re going to be a warrior. You need a warrior’s name.”
“Not everything is about war!”
“Um, it kind of is—and flight school especially is.” I frowned, noting the accent in her voice. “Where are you from? Not Igneous, I guess.”
“Born and raised in Bountiful Cavern!” She leaned in. “We call it that, but nothing really grows there.”
“Bountiful,” I said. It was a cavern somewhat close to Igneous, also part of the Defiant League. “That’s where the clans from the Antioch crew settled, right?” The Antioch had been one of the gunships in the old fleet, before we’d been driven into hiding here on Detritus.
“Yup. My great-grandmother was assistant quartermaster.” She eyed me. “You said your callsign was Spin? Shouldn’t you be something like Lamentation or Eats Enemy Eyeballs?”
I shrugged. “Spin is what my dad used to call me.”
She smiled brightly at that. Scud, they’d let this girl in, but had denied me? What was the DDF trying to do? Put toget
her a knitting club?
We approached the base, a group of tall, stern buildings surrounded by a wall. Right outside it, the farms gave way to an actual orchard. I stopped on the walkway, and found myself gaping again. I’d seen these trees from a distance, but up close they seemed enormous. Almost three meters tall! Before this, the tallest plant I’d seen was a mushroom that reached up to my waist.
“They planted those just after the Battle of Alta,” Kimmalyn said. “It must take brave people to volunteer for service up here so exposed to the air and to Krell attacks.” She looked up at the sky in awe, and I wondered if this was the first time she was seeing it.
We stepped up to a checkpoint in the wall, and I thrust my pin toward the guard there, half expecting rough treatment—like I’d always gotten from Aluko when entering Igneous. However, the bored guard only marked our names off on a list and waved us in. Not much ceremony for my first official entrance into Alta. Well, soon I’d be so famous, the guard at the door would salute me on sight.
Inside, we counted off the buildings, joining a handful of other cadets. From what I understood, around twenty-five of us had passed the test, and had been organized into three training flights. Only the best of the best would actually pass flight school and be assigned to full-time pilot duty.
Kimmalyn and I soon arrived at a wide, single-story structure near the launchpads. Flight school. I barely held myself back from running over to the glistening starfighters lined up for duty—I’d done enough gawking for one day.
Inside the building we found wide hallways, most of which appeared to be lined with classrooms. Kimmalyn squealed, then rushed over to talk to another cadet, someone she apparently knew. So I stopped by a window on the outer wall and looked out at the sky, waiting for her.
I found myself feeling…anxious. Not about the training, but about this place. It’s too big, too open. The hallways were over a meter wider than those of most buildings in Igneous, and the base’s buildings sprawled outward instead of being built on top of one another. The sky was just up there, always present, looming. Even with a forcefield between me and it—of the same invisible type that starfighters employed—I felt exposed.
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