“Our reputation is not what it used to be, I see.” Brandon gave me a wry smile. I could tell he was amused by my snottiness. “And it’s true that many Loric question the need for a defense at all during such a time of peace. Their mistake. But we have resources, Sandor. You’d have full access to our engineering and computer laboratories. Plus after six months you’d have weekend privileges. And I’ve been given authority to invite you to join the academy despite your, ah, uncharacteristically poor performance on the aptitude exam.”
I stopped in my tracks.
“You’d be close to the city,” he added. “Who knows? Maybe eventually, when you’re a little older, you’d be able to get some time off to visit the Chimæra.”
Clearly Brandon had more information on me than could be gleaned from security bulletins about my stunt at the Chimæra. He was pushing my buttons a little too precisely.
“You got a psych profile on me, Brandon?”
He only smiled. “Just decide if you’d rather spend the last few years of your adolescence playing with defense tech near the city, using your actual skills, or out in the Outer Terrritories shoveling Chimæra shit.”
“Outer Territories?” I felt my mouth go dry. Why had he said that? Had he heard something about my likely assignment?
“What do you know?” I asked.
“It’s not what I know, Sandor. It’s what I can make happen.”
And with that, he turned around and walked away.
CHAPTER 4
Exiting the transport van a few weeks later, I approached the front entrance of the Lorien Defense Academy warily, my bags over my shoulder. The school was a windowless gray cube plopped on a grassy stretch of land at the edge of Capital City. Somehow, for such a prestigious place, I was expecting something a little more lavish. Instead, the only thing that set it apart from any other Loric government building was a single statue of the Elder Pittacus.
Near the entrance, a few feet away from the statue, a few young Mentor Cêpans in shapeless blue tunics and loose black pants were talking in low tones with a Lorien councilmember, who I identified immediately from his tan robe. They had as little style or flair as the building itself. As I passed, the councilmember and the Cêpans looked up in neutral acknowledgment. I waved at them and then felt stupid.
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 here 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.
