It was practically a relief when I entered the building. The lobby was as sparsely decorated as the building’s outside, but at least it was busy. Young Mentor trainees, about my age, single-file marching off to class. There were a few adult Mentor Cêpans, and even a couple of Garde kids laughing and chasing after each other in their tiny blue suits.
“Kloutus!” a Mentor shouted. With a sheepish look on his face, one of the young Garde slowed down.
Recognizing the Mentor as Brandon, I walked up to him. He’d been nice to me when he’d recruited me on the street, and the sight of a familiar face was suddenly welcome.
But if I was expecting him to be a new friend, I shouldn’t have. Brandon gave me a cursory up-and-down look like he barely knew me, and then was all business.
“What are these?” Without a word of greeting, Brandon plucked the bags off my shoulders.
“They’re my things from home,” I said, struggling to hold on to them.
“We’re going to have to confiscate them,” he said. “You’ll be issued everything you need in processing.”
“Those are my clothes!” I don’t know why I cared—of course I’d have to wear the LDA uniform now, so I don’t know what good my clothes would do me. Still, the thought of having them confiscated depressed me. My clothes were part of what made me me. Now I’d just look like everyone else.
Brandon shook his head at my foolishness. “You can arrange to have those shipped back to your parents’ place. They’ll be waiting for you when you graduate.” With a curt nod, he pointed towards the processing office and disappeared down a hallway.
Feeling worse than ever, I trudged to processing, where an LDA administrator curtly issued me three identical green tunics, wrapped in paper. After handing them to me, he stood there expectantly, and I realized I was expected to change right in front of him so that he could collect the clothes I was already wearing. Probably so he could take them off to whatever storage locker or incinerator the rest of my clothes were destined for.
“A little privacy?” I asked.
He turned around. I seized the opportunity to undress quickly, throw on the tunic, and hide my favorite Kalvaka T-shirt inside the folds of my scratchy new garment. One piece of real clothing was better than none.
“All done,” I said, shoving the rest of my clothes in the administrator’s hands, hoping that if I bunched them all up in a wad the guy wouldn’t notice he’d been shorted.
It worked. He gave me my dormitory assignment and told me to go there and await instructions for the rest of my orientation.
After being stripped of nearly all my worldly possessions, I made my way deeper into the building, trying to get a feel for the place. I walked past open seminar rooms, administrative offices, gymnasiums, labs, even a glass-walled Chimæra observatory where a clutch of Lorien’s legendary beasts chased after each other in circles, growling and snorting as they changed from one form to another, the shapes of their bodies shifting with liquid ease.
At least they were allowed to look how they wanted. I stood and watched them for a few minutes before moving on.
Finally I reached the long corridor of the dormitory section and arrived at my dorm, 219. This was my room.
I hadn’t been issued a key, so I took a deep breath, knocked, and waited.
A moment later the door opened and a guy with small, nervous eyes, a wide mouth and a bulbous nose greeted me. His green tunic was identical to mine, and I stupidly wondered how we were going to remember whose was whose.
“You must be Sandor,” the guy said stiffly. “I’m Rapp. Come in.”
I entered the room, doing my best to conceal my horror as I appraised the spartan bunk beds, the bare stone floors, the curtainless window staring out onto a sparse and underlit courtyard.
“How minimalist,” I said.
“Yeah,” Rapp said. “The LDA keeps it pretty simple. We’re here to defend Lorien, not to sleep comfortably, I guess.” At least he didn’t sound any happier about it than I was.
I flopped on the bottom bunk. The mattress was thin and hard.
“So we’re roommates, huh?” I asked. “Are you training for the tech department too?”
“Yep. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other, I guess. Between the two of us, you’re looking at the whole program.”
“What?”
“We’re it. There’s a corps of about twenty active engineers and fifteen active techs on the whole planet, but only two trainees at a time.”
Oh, man. This guy seemed nice enough, I guess, but if it was just us, he could be the coolest guy on all of Lorien and we’d still get sick of each other.
“It’s not so bad, though,” he went on, not registering my disappointment. “Even though we’re just trainees, the corps is so short staffed lately that they send us out on grid surveys, repair work on the electronic perimeters, stuff like that.”
“Exciting.” I didn’t mean to sound so sarcastic, but I couldn’t help it. This would be my new life for at least the next two years, and it was already a total bore.
Fortunately, Rapp was immune to irony. “It is. To know that I’m playing a small but significant role in keeping Lorien safe . . . I feel really blessed.”
I couldn’t take it. I lurched up from the bed.
“Safe from what?” I asked.
Rapp stared at me, dumbly. “What do you mean?”
“Keeping Lorien safe from what? There hasn’t been an attack on this planet for aeons. For all our explorations and recon missions, we haven’t even had direct communication of any kind with another planet for hundreds of years. What are we afraid of? A civil war? Loriens are all pacifists, even in the sketchiest part of City Center or the most backward parts of the Outer Territories, nothing bad ever happens. I mean, I’m considered a hardened criminal around here. And all I did was get caught at a Devektra show!”
Rapp looked taken aback, but I didn’t care. “Do you really think you’re making a difference?” I spat. “Please. All this stuff about ancient prophecies and attacks that will probably never come—it’s superstition.”
Rapp didn’t take my bait. Instead of answering, he solemnly walked to the door.
“I’ll come back in a little while to give you a tour of the grounds. But I gotta say if this is your attitude on day one, you’re going to have a pretty miserable time here.”
Yeah, I thought. No shit.
CHAPTER 5
It would’ve been nice if I could say my first week at the LDA passed by in a blur. Actually, it dragged on even more endlessly than I’d anticipated.
Rapp, it turned out, was still learning things in class that I had taught myself ages ago, so I couldn’t even count on my schoolwork to keep me interested. Sure, I could have told Professor Orkun that I already knew all this stuff, but I kept it to myself. Instead, I just kept my head down in three-person seminars, nodding along with the lesson and trying to pretend like it was all new to me.
I knew I was being stupid. If I had to be here, I might as well have tried to learn something. But, in a weird way, it felt like that would be letting them win. If I wasted my time, I was still getting away with something, right?
Things weren’t much more interesting in the commissary than they were in class. I kept pretty much to myself and so did all the other students at the academy. As for the Mentor Cêpans who’d been assigned their own Garde to train, they were pretty scarce around campus, and the ones who did eat in the commissary usually had their hands too full with their young Garde charges to mix with engineering trainees like me and Rapp.
The only people at the academy who interested me at all were the Garde kids, who were just coming into their powers and gave the school what little sense of life it had. On Lorien, Garde children are raised by their grandparents until their eleventh year, when they’re sent away to a place like the LDA to train with their assigned Mentor Cêpan. There are training academies for them all over Lorien, but LDA is considered one of the best—the Garde who wind up her
e are the ones who are expected to have some serious power going on.
Some of these kids racing the halls of the LDA had only started to manifest the very beginnings of their gifts, while others were already onto their second and third Legacies, but almost all of them were lit up, charged by the excitement of coming into their powers, not to mention living away from home for the first time. They had their whole future to look forward to.
Pretty much the only exciting thing that happened in my entire first week was that one of the youngest Garde, a dark-haired, mischievous-looking kid named Samil, almost destroyed the whole school. That was actually kind of fun—I guess Samil’d been showing off his emerging pyrokinetic Legacy to some older kids in an empty classroom, when things had started to get out of control. Before long, the fire was raging. The halls of the school filled with smoke as sirens blared and Cêpan raced to evacuate the students and staff while the older, more experienced Garde headed toward the fire in an attempt to contain it.
The rest of us were gathered on the lawn, waiting for it all to get sorted out and, for a few minutes at least, as black smoke curled from the building into the sky, it looked like maybe my stay at the Lorien Defense Academy would be a short one.
“So if this place burns to the ground they’ll send me home, right?” I asked Rapp.
“Don’t sound too disappointed, or anything,” he said disdainfully. When I didn’t reply, he just snorted. “Dude. You think this doesn’t happen all the time? The walls here are fireproof. Not to mention everything-else-proof. This school’s built to withstand just about anything. It’s what’s inside that room that you should be worried about. Like the poor kid who just found out being able to generate giant fireballs might not be as cool as it sounds.”
I felt instantly guilty that I hadn’t even considered that. Every year on Lorien there were stories about young Garde perishing in grisly accidents, killed by powers that they didn’t know how to control or, in some cases, didn’t yet know they even had. There had been the girl with the ability to manipulate temperature who’d accidentally frozen herself to death in the bathtub, and a boy with sonic flight who’d overshot Lorien’s gravitational pull and found himself caught in the unbreathable atmosphere many miles above the ground. It was the purpose of Mentor Cêpans to prevent such incidents. But accidents still happened.
“Sorry,” I mumbled to Rapp. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
He shrugged, and his expression softened. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”
I glanced over at Vatan, the Cêpan of the kid who’d started the fire. His face was pale and anguished, and I knew that if anything had happened to his charge, he’d never be able to forgive himself. But a few minutes later, a tiny figure crept from the smoke and flame. It was Samil, completely unscathed. He had an expression on his face that was equal parts shame, terror and exhilarated pride.
Everyone whooped with joy and relief, and, in the first show of real emotion that I’d seen since I’d gotten to the academy, Vatan ran across the field and wrapped Samil in a huge hug. The boy’s skin—just as fireproof as the walls of the school, it turned out—was still burning with heat. Vatan didn’t let go even as it charred the fabric of his blue tunic.
I was relieved too. I mean, of course I was relieved. I didn’t want anyone to die, much less an eleven-year-old kid. But at least the fire had been something. Once it was over, everything was just back to normal. And by now, I’d had enough normal to last me the rest of my life.
The nights at LDA weren’t much different from the days. At least I had Rapp to keep me company. Yeah, he took himself way too seriously, but at least he was someone to talk to. And he wasn’t quite as lame as I’d thought he was at first. He had no idea who Devektra was, but ever since I’d told him my story about meeting her, he’d wanted to hear all about it. Not just about Devektra, but about the Chimæra, and about how I’d managed to sneak in, and had I really been a regular there?
Plus, he let me copy his homework, which was nice because even though it was mostly easy, there was a lot of it.
Maybe if I’d thought there was a point to doing it myself, I would have been more interested. Back at home, I’d taught myself to tinker with machinery and electronics as a means to an end. It was a way to get out of class, to get into places like the Chimæra. To be whoever I wanted to be. It was a way to trick the system.
Here, it was the system. And it was a system I didn’t have faith in.
According to legend—or history, depending on who you listened to—the original Nine Elders had brought forth the Great Loric Age aeons ago when they’d discovered the Phoenix Stones. It was this ancient event that had supposedly awakened the Legacies of the Garde and called the shape-changing Chimæra out of hiding, making Lorien a place of prosperity and peace that was unprecedented throughout the known universe.
From that time on, Lorien’s ecosystem flourished. Where food and resources had once been scarce, there was now more than enough for everyone. What the planet itself didn’t offer up in excess could easily be provided by the strange, amazing, and endlessly varied powers of the Garde. On other planets, this was the stuff people fought tooth and nail over. Not here. Here on Lorien, we could just live.
But the Elders had also set forth a prophecy: that one day, when we were least prepared for it, a threat would come to test us—and destroy us. We wouldn’t know when that threat was coming, but it would come, and when it did, we would have to be ready for it.
That was why the LDA existed. That’s why I was learning to create and maintain ever more elaborate systems of defense against an enemy that I was pretty sure was mostly fantasy. Just in case tomorrow was the day we all woke up and found ourselves under attack.
Back home, everyone knew the deal, but no one seemed to pay much attention to it. The discovery of the Phoenix Stones was just a story, something that had happened so long ago it barely seemed real. And the ancient Elders’ prophecy—well, even if it did come true someday, it sure didn’t seem like it was going to happen anytime soon. While most good Loric paid lip service to the good work that people were doing at places like the LDA, ensuring that Lorien “stayed safe for generations to come,” even the most Loric among them didn’t seem to take any of it too seriously.
Things were perfect, after all. Why worry about what might happen someday?
Here at the academy, it was a totally different story. Everyone walked around acting like the prophecy was about five minutes away from coming to pass—like we were going to be under attack at any minute. When I’d told Rapp I didn’t really think it much mattered whether the grid, the vast defense system that scanned Capital City’s airways for potential intruders, was perfectly maintained at all times, it was like I’d insulted him personally.
“Some of us actually care about what we do here,” he said. He spoke slowly and carefully as he said it, but his voice was shaking. I could tell I’d really gotten to him. “While everyone else on Lorien is living in their little utopia, congratulating themselves for how perfect the place is, it’s people like me who are busting our asses to keep it that way. Without the grid, we’d be sitting ducks. And people just laugh at us.”
“Calm down,” I said, taken aback by how angry he’d gotten. “You’re acting like I just said Pittacus Lore’s a big loser or something.”
He scowled. “Yeah, well,” he said. “You probably think that too, don’t you?”
I paused. “No,” I said. “I mean, not exactly.”
Actually, I had no idea what the famous Pittacus Lore was like at all. I’d never seen him—even the statue of Pittacus outside the school wasn’t of the current Pittacus, but of one of the old ones, probably from like a thousand years ago or something.
The current Elders had the same names as the original nine who had supposedly discovered the Phoenix Stones all those years ago, but they were otherwise many times removed from the Elders of legend. The names were passed along like titles, along with the Elders’
special abilities, to specially picked successors who took on their forebearers’ role of watching over Lorien, of safeguarding our environment, and of protecting our traditions and way of life. I knew that they made occasional trips to the LDA to consult with the Mentor Cêpan and the instructors, but I had never seen them.
Aside from these brief interactions with the world, the Elders had long ago removed themselves from the day-to-day activities of life on Lorien. Even their exact whereabouts were unknown: some Loric said they lived deep in the mountains of Feldsmore, while others claimed they lived in a giant glass fortress deep at the bottom of the Terrax Ocean. Those were just some of the more plausible theories.
The only thing I knew was that it didn’t seem like the Elders did very much at all, and that most people at the LDA, along with the rest of the Lorien defense operation, were telling themselves stories about prophecies that would never come true.
CHAPTER 6
On my eleventh day at the LDA, I was woken by Rapp tugging on My arm.
“Come on, Sandor,” he said. “We’re going to be late.”
“Your mom’s a chimæra’s butt,” I mumbled irritably, shoving him away and pulling my thin, scratchy sheet over my head.
This had become a morning ritual between us. He’d try to wake me up, reminding me that it was my Solemn Loric Duty to rise and shine, and I’d come up with more and more colorful ways to tell him to leave me the hell alone. We were both getting sick of the routine.
“Fine,” said Rapp, turning to go. “I’ll just go to City Center by myself.”
I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. “City Center?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I saw Orkun at the commissary, she said class was cancelled and that we’re supposed to report to transport immediately. She wants us to use the time to do grid maintenance.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?” I was already out of bed, hurriedly throwing on my tunic, excited by the chance to go into the city.
I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: The Last Days of Lorien Page 3