Glitch

by Laura Martin

  “Well?” he said. “Who spotted it?”

  Five hands including mine shot into the air. He nodded his approval and pointed to Corban.

  “What do you think?” he asked, holding his hands out as the platform carried him in a slow spin for the class.

  “Is it your belt buckle, sir?” Corban asked, but from his tone I could tell this was a 100 percent shot in the dark.

  Professor O’Reilly shook his head. “This belt buckle is authentic iron from a forge in seventeenth-century London. What about you, Tess, what do you think?” he said, looking to my right.

  “Um,” said Tess, “is your hat the wrong shape?”

  “Wrong again,” O’Reilly said, relishing the moment as he whipped off his black triangle hat. “This is authentic too, my dears. Any more guesses?” He was just turning to call on me when a loud bang behind us made everyone turn. Regan stood there, cringing down at the copy of All the Gallant Men she’d dropped upon her not-so-sneaky entrance.

  “You must be Regan,” Professor O’Reilly said. “Glad you could join us.”

  “Yes, sir,” Regan said, stooping down to grab the book. I put my hand back in the air. I knew the answer to this.

  But Professor O’Reilly ignored me as he watched Regan. I pushed my hand farther into the air. I knew the answer.

  “Regan,” O’Reilly said as she plunked heavily into the seat next to mine, her backpack giving me a good whack in the side of the head for good measure as she settled in.

  “Yes, sir?” she asked, looking at him for the first time.

  “Do you see it?” he prompted.

  “Your buttons,” she said as though the answer was automatic and obvious.

  O’Reilly smiled. “What about my buttons?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, and I looked at his buttons for the first time too. I’d thought the discrepancy was something to do with his shoes. I silently crossed my fingers and wished for her to be wrong. Let it be the shoes.

  “That one,” she said, pointing to the second button down. “It’s too perfect. Buttons during that time period wouldn’t have looked quite so perfect.”

  “Well done!” O’Reilly said. “I’d heard you had an uncanny knack for this. You did not disappoint. Now, can you tell me what time period this jacket would have been produced in?”

  Regan’s face went pale, and I smiled smugly as my hand shot back into the air.

  “Well?” O’Reilly prompted.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Regan said, “but I don’t know. Maybe sometime around the American Revolution?”

  “It was the late eighteenth century,” I said, the words falling out of my mouth without my permission. O’Reilly turned to me, an eyebrow raised in disapproval at my blurting disruption. But it was like word vomit, and I couldn’t stop it now. “1775 was the start of the Revolutionary War, although the uniforms were probably made prior to that in 1774.”

  “Thank you, Elliot,” said O’Reilly. “Next time, please wait your turn.”

  “Or maybe I’ll just arrive late and expect special treatment,” I muttered under my breath. Regan shot me a look out of the corner of my eye that let me know she’d heard me.

  “Where were you?” I asked as O’Reilly called in another professor dressed head to toe in clothes straight from the 1970s.

  “My mom called to check in,” she said dismissively, never taking her eyes off the new professor. I squinted at the garish green-striped bell-bottom pants and yellow knit top. Maybe her earrings were off? I’d forgotten how much I hated this class.

  Around us our classmates were guessing, and I thought Serina had it when she pointed out that the professor’s shoes were rhinestone-encrusted cowboy boots, but apparently that was on-trend for the seventies. Weird.

  Beside me Regan raised her hand again, and I ground my teeth into my lip as she spotted the discrepancy in the professor’s hairstyle.

  “That you can remember?” I muttered as O’Reilly stepped back into the center of the platform to begin his lecture on ’70s fashion.

  Regan shrugged and turned her attention back to O’Reilly and his description of matching knitwear common to that time period. When the class finally ended, I shoved myself to my feet, my stomach snarling at the possibility of lunch. While everyone else walked toward the lunchroom with their partner, I hurried ahead to grab my lunch tray. I sat down at the same table we’d eaten breakfast at that morning, silently sulking over the fact that avoiding Regan was now physically impossible.

  A moment later someone set a tray down next to mine, and I turned, fully expecting to see Regan looking smug. Instead I saw the too-serious face of Sam. He was still wearing the bloody uniform, and I tried to scoot to the right without him noticing.

  “Are you a jerk?” he said, and I almost choked on the forkful of salad I’d just put in my mouth.

  “What?” I said once I managed to stop coughing.

  “A jerk,” he repeated. “Are you a jerk?”

  “No?” I said, but it sounded unconvincing even to my own ears.

  “Then stop acting like one,” he said. “Because if you don’t learn how to work with your partner, you fail.”

  “And you think that seems fair?” I shot back, glad I had an outlet for the anger that had been simmering under the surface of my skin ever since that morning’s disastrous study session.

  “Who in the world told you that life was fair?” he asked, eyebrow raised. I opened my mouth and then shut it again.

  “Here’s the deal,” Sam went on. “The way I see it, you get dealt a hand in life, and it’s up to you to choose how you play it. So, you can keep huffing and puffing about the partner you got stuck with, or you can make the best of it and become a phenomenal team. From what I saw back there”—he jerked his head toward the Sherlock class’s platform—“Regan is pretty dang good.”

  “Shocking, you’re already on Team Regan,” I said. “That girl has been skating through life like everyone’s favorite puppy. It figures the same thing would happen here.”

  “No,” Sam said. “But I recognize talent when I see it. Is that your problem? Everyone likes her? No one likes you?”

  “No one likes me?” I said. “Already?”

  Sam shook his head. “I’m not saying that. What I am saying is that the gigantic chip you’re carrying around on your shoulder is going to get in the way of you becoming everything you could be. You need to get out of your own way.”

  Before I could respond, Corban sat down, and Tess joined him a second later. I glanced behind them to see that Regan had apparently decided to forgo lunch to sit over in the simulation section by herself, the gigantic copy of All the Gallant Men open on her lap. And for the first time, I felt a stab of guilt for my behavior. She hadn’t gotten angry when I wasn’t spectacular during the Sherlock class. Meanwhile she’d been knocking it out of the park, a fact that I probably would have noticed if I hadn’t been so distracted by my desire to see her fail. Which, I reminded myself, was just plain stupid, since if she went down, I went down too. We were on the Titanic together, and I was over here yelling “Aim for that iceberg!” And I’d called her dumb. No sooner had the words gone through my head than I wished they hadn’t. I’d conveniently forgotten what I’d said to her back on the dock. Time for an apology.

  With a sigh I shoved myself to my feet and grabbed my salad off my tray. After a quick pass of the lunch counter to grab a second salad, I made my way across the atrium to where Regan sat, her forehead scrunched in concentration as she read chapter two. My first reaction was to roll my eyes that she was only on chapter two, but remembering Sam’s words, I shoved down my knee-jerk instinct and took a seat next to her.

  “Here,” I said, thrusting the salad into her hands.

  She looked up in surprise and blinked at me. “What’s this?” she asked.

  This time I couldn’t stop the eye roll. “What’s it look like? It’s food. Eat it. I don’t want you all fuzzy-headed for simulation training this afternoon.” She l
ooked from the salad to me and back again, a wary look on her face.

  “What?” I asked, making zero effort to hide my exasperation. “You think I spit on it?”

  “Did you?” she asked.

  “No!” I said, and it took everything in me not to let the old familiar anger fizz back to the surface. I took a deep breath and tried on a smile, which might have been a mistake because it made her look even more nervous. This was not going the way I’d pictured it. “It’s a peace offering. You know, for before,” I said, flapping a hand that I hoped encompassed twelve years of general rudeness and animosity. She still looked unconvinced, which, considering my peace offering was a lackluster salad with soggy croutons, was not all that surprising.

  She studied me for a second longer and then took a bite of her salad. “I can’t stop thinking about our schedule dissolving this morning,” she said. “The last few days have been so busy that I almost forgot about that Cocoon.”

  “Shhhh,” I said, glancing around, but no one was looking in our direction. “You can’t be serious?” I said. My own brain had been gnawing on that letter like a dog with a bone ever since that afternoon at the Academy.

  Regan snorted a laugh. “I know, unbelievable. But then that schedule dissolved, and it all came crashing back to me. As cool as this place is, and as excited as I am for a fresh start, it really isn’t one, is it? I mean, if something terrible wasn’t going to happen, we would never have found that letter in the first place.”

  “Right,” I said, and for the first time I didn’t have the desire to point out that being stuck with her as a partner felt like a terrible thing to me. Sam was right; pouting over my lot in life wasn’t going to change anything. “Or,” I said, “maybe we are here to prevent something terrible from happening. Maybe you and I become an awesome team and in five years we save some important event in history from a pack of Mayhem members.”

  “Maybe,” Regan said, sounding unconvinced. “But the letter seemed more urgent than that. I mean, we’ve already hit two of the bullet points in the letter. It doesn’t make sense that the other ones wouldn’t matter for five years.”

  “The next one is the one about a window,” I said, thinking out loud. “When the window breaks, grab me.”

  Regan wrinkled her forehead, and together we looked around the cavernous atrium of the mountain, where not one window was in sight.

  “Well,” I finally said, “I guess we just have to wait.”

  “I hate waiting,” Regan said.

  “Finally,” I said, “something we can agree on.”

  Regan smirked, glancing back down at the book in her lap. “Do you think our simulation this afternoon is going to be on this?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. Nothing is what I think it should be. I decided it’s probably better if I keep my expectations low.”

  “Yeah, probably,” she mumbled around a mouthful of salad as she turned her attention back to the open page in front of her. I watched her chew for a second, her eyes focused on the book, when something occurred to me.

  “Is reading hard for you? Or do you just not like it?” I asked.

  She glanced back up at me, her expression guarded.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because,” I said, pulling the book away from her. “Our study session was a disaster I don’t want to repeat.” She hesitated and I held up my hands. “No judgments. Promise. We’re on the same team now.”

  She sighed. “Hard. Always has been hard. Always will be hard.”

  “Explain,” I said.

  She shrugged. “There’s not much to explain. If my mom and my tutors hadn’t been working with me every second of every day since birth, there is no way I’d have made it this far at the Academy. Studying is impossible for me. The words just won’t stay in place, and my brain is apparently made of Swiss cheese.” She took another bite of her salad as she pulled the book back off my lap.

  I watched her try to study, my brain churning. I’d always loved to read, devouring book after book in the library in my free time. What did she mean by saying the words wouldn’t stay in place? Words didn’t move. It was one of my favorite things about them. I thought back to all the extra tutoring she’d received over the years, a fact that I’d always been more than a little jealous of. I’d always assumed it was yet another perk of being the commander’s kid and that she was just plain lazy and slacking off in classes. Before I could ask her any more, the bell rang, and we had to hurry to throw away our half-eaten salads before our afternoon of simulation training began. I ignored Sam’s nod of approval as I sat down next to Regan five minutes later. Partially because that nod was obnoxious, but mostly because I was too busy trying to remind her of every important piece of information we may need about the morning of Pearl Harbor. Which, as it turned out, was completely pointless since the simulation ended up being on the launch of Apollo 11. Figures.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Regan

  The days at the mountain quickly developed their own rhythm, despite the ever-changing schedule that always put Elliot in a foul mood. But I was getting used to the foul moods, even learning to read them a bit. It was like he had his own grumpy language, and if you hung around long enough you could pick up a word here or there. Thankfully he hadn’t directed all that grumpy at me recently. A fact I more than appreciated.

  Even if my mom did insist on checking in every few days, it hadn’t marred my fresh start at the mountain at all. If anything, I found her sporadic phone calls to be comforting. I hadn’t realized that I’d miss her like I did, and having that one connection back to the Academy made me feel more grounded in this new space. The mountain definitely wasn’t home yet, but it was beginning to feel more and more like one every day. I shifted in my bunk to a more comfortable position and tapped the screen of my tablet to wake it back up. It had gone dark while I sat thinking over things, and I only had a few more minutes before lights-out to study. The screen came to life, and I narrowed my eyes at the words as though if I just glared at them hard enough they’d behave and not jumble themselves up like spaghetti.

  “Whatcha doing?” said a voice at my elbow, and I jumped so badly that my head cracked the stone ceiling of my bunk. I winced and rubbed it as I turned to look at Tess. Her red hair was piled haphazardly on top of her head, and she was sporting an impressive black eye from our combat training that day. It had been a particularly interesting lesson, since all of us girls had to learn how to take someone down while wearing a gigantic hoop skirt from the 1800s. Tess had momentarily forgotten about her skirt and attempted a roundhouse kick, which sent one of the steel bars used to support the huge bell-shaped skirt right into her eye. She didn’t seem to mind, though, and she smiled at me as she peered over at my tablet.

  “We only get an hour of free time a night,” she said. “Why in the world would you want to spend it studying? Didn’t you get enough of that today?”

  “Oh, I did,” I agreed, remembering how Elliot had tried over and over again to help me remember the important information about the Gettysburg Address with limited success. My eyes automatically flicked past Tess, looking for her counterpart, Eliana, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  Tess noticed my glance and smiled. “She was hungry and decided to sneak out to grab something from the kitchen.”

  “We’re allowed to do that?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “But everyone does. The security here at night is, well . . .” She shrugged. “As far as we can tell there really isn’t any. The professors all go to bed, and the only one you have to worry about is Callaway, and half the time he’s raiding the kitchen for cookies and the worst thing he’ll do is share with you.”

  “Really?” I asked, thinking about the nightly patrols at the Academy.

  “Really,” she said.

  “I’ll have to remember that next time I’m hungry,” I said, wondering if Elliot knew about this yet. The lights flickered, signaling it was time for lights-out, and I made
a mental note to tell Elliot about it at breakfast the next day.

  But as it turned out, breakfast wasn’t on the agenda for the day.

  “Good morning,” Elliot said the second I walked out of the dorm the next morning. I jumped in surprise, my brain not fully awake yet despite the shower I’d just taken.

  “Geez,” I said, putting a hand to the cold stone wall to steady myself. “Don’t ever do that again.”

  “Sorry,” he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he waited for me to get myself together.

  “What’s all this?” I asked, gesturing at the bouncing. Was he smiling? He was! And it wasn’t one of his awkward smiles that always made him look like he was trying to keep a spider in his mouth by clenching his teeth together. It was a real smile. This was getting weirder and weirder.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “Come on.” Without waiting for me to respond, he turned and jogged down the hall. I watched him go, debating whether I could get away with going back into my dorm and hiding in bed. Perky Elliot was just plain bizarre. I stood there a second longer before deciding that he’d probably find me anyway, so I ran after him.

  The hallway quickly opened up to the atrium and I stopped, not sure which way he’d gone. A shrill whistle came from the left, and I looked over to see Elliot already sitting in one of the simulation chairs.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as I sat down.

  “We are studying,” he said as he quickly helped me attach the simulation probes to my arms and legs. “I have an idea, and Callaway said I could give it a go. You hate reading, right? The words move?”

  “And?” I prompted.

  “And I decided we should try out something new,” he said. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, right? You’ve tried studying the normal way your whole life, and it has never worked. What do you have to lose by trying it my way?”

  “Nothing,” I said as my stomach grumbled. “I just wish you’d waited until after breakfast.”

  “Stop complaining,” Elliot said, reaching over to stick the last probe onto my forehead. Apparently I still didn’t look convinced, because he rolled his eyes. “Worst-case scenario, you can always activate your cuffs and leave,” he said.