“Incredible,” said Endym. “Best I’ve ever seen her.”

“So,” I said, hopefully. “Any chance we could just forget you saw me here today?”

Endym smiled back at me. “None at all.”

CHAPTER 3

“If I weren’t so disappointed, I’d be impressed.” Principal Osaria was flipping through papers on her desk outlining my misdeeds, reading out charges as she went. “Charge: Tampering with the Truancy Register. Suggested punishment: expulsion. Charge: absences more than ten per semester. Suggested punishment: expulsion.”

She looked up at me. “Ten’s just a provisional figure of course. We’ve yet to sort through the Register’s data logs to get a precise estimate for how many classes you skipped.”

“Ten’s about right,” I admitted.

“That better not be sarcasm,” my dad said in a tired voice from the monitor on the wall of Osaria’s office, where his face crackled in by remote feed. My mother sat silently beside him. They were at their vacation home on the beaches of Deloon and couldn’t be bothered to make the two-hour trip to the capital to witness my expulsion in person.

“What does this mean, exactly?” my mother asked. As if she didn’t know. I’d been warned before. Cutting school and sneaking into the Chimæra was one thing—but this went way beyond that.

Osaria swiveled her chair to face the screen. “It means that my hands are tied. If it were just one or the other of these charges, I’d be able to exercise my discretion in meting out punishment.” She frowned deeply. “But in addition to the rules he broke at school, he also tampered with the ID scans at the Chimæra. I have no choice.”

“Oh no,” said my mom. She looked like she was about to cry.

“This is a surprise to you?!” My dad was turning red, nearly as mad at my mother as he was at me. “He’s always been like this.”

It was true. I’d always been a rule breaker, I’d always had a way of getting myself into trouble. I wasn’t ashamed of that; I liked that about myself. But it tended to flummox the people around me. Lorien was a happy, prosperous and law-abiding planet. The fact that I was always getting into trouble made me practically a freak of nature.

Principal Osario shifted uncomfortably in her seat, put off by my parents’ bickering, and quickly broke in before they could continue. “I must say I’ll be sorry to lose Sandor.” She turned back to me. “Attendance issues aside, you are one of our very best students—and I have to admit that your tampering with the security systems, while illegal and dangerous, shows a certain amount of”—she paused—“ingenuity. Now, as I see it, there are two options available to him. If he elects to stay in the capital—”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m not leaving the city.”

“—then we can arrange to have him placed as an apprentice with the Munis.”

My heart sank. The Munis? The Munis were the custodial corps of the city’s workforce. Maintenance work. Most citizens of the capital were conscripted for Munis service by lottery, for year-long terms no more than twice in their lifetimes. There was no shame attached to performing Munis service in Lorien culture, but it was far from my idea of a good time. And entering the Munis as an apprentice was basically signing up to haul trash for the rest of my life. To me, that was a fate worse than death.

I felt myself beginning to panic. “There’s got to be something else in the city. Can’t I get some kind of job at Kora, or the Chimæra?” I knew it was a reach to ask for a work assignment in one of the very places I’d just gotten in trouble for sneaking into, but I was open to taking any job in them, no matter how menial. I’d scrub floors if that’s what it came to.

“Yes, surely there are some better options?” my mother spoke up. I was surprised to hear her coming to my defense.

Osaria shook her head with regret. “Unfortunately, all urban job assignments other than apprenticeships are reserved for adults. It’s either Munis, or a Kabarak relocation.”

I thought my heart had already reached the bottom of my chest, but I felt it plunge deeper, right into the pit of my stomach. A Kabarak? Doing time outside of the city on one of Lorien’s communal Kabaraks was an important part of Lorien’s culture, not to mention essential for keeping the planet running smoothly, but it was definitely not a glamorous experience: loralite mining, Chimæra husbandry, farming. And all of it way out in the country, miles from any excitement. Unless pulling up weeds and digging through dirt all day is your idea of a good time.

I had a bad feeling about this. On the screen, my father was nodding, looking almost satisfied, and I knew that my fate was as good as decided. Having done time on a Kabarak was considered a noble credential, and was a prerequisite for working in government or the Lorien Defense Council, helping to protect Lorien from an attack by one of our nonexistent enemies.

Among a bunch of equally terrible options, the Kabarak looked like it had managed to win my parents’ approval.

“Osaria, I think a few years on a Kabarak is just what my son needs.” My dad was smiling as he said it, actually pleased with the outcome of the conversation. I looked up at the screen, but he avoided my gaze—he had to know exactly how awful it sounded to my ears.

Even my mother wasn’t going to bail me out this time. “I agree,” she said, giving me a furtive, apologetic glance. “It really is the best option.”

“Well then it’s settled,” said Osaria.

Right then, I wished again that I’d been born a Garde—one with the Legacy to go back in time and undo all my mistakes of the previous night.

Of course, if I undid the night, it would mean I would have never met Devektra. Which might have almost been worth it. Well, almost.

I left the academy, beginning the long walk back home to my parents’ empty apartment. The school’s shuttles to the city center didn’t start running for hours, so I had to walk by myself, on desolate streets. My parents weren’t due back from Deloon for weeks, and they’d made no mention of coming back to the capital to see me off. I’d likely spend my last days in the city alone in the apartment, waiting for my Kabarak assignment and transportation details. The transpo details would probably come first, and would offer some clue about my fate: if the state arranged for a terrestrial craft, it meant I’d been assigned a nearby Kabarak colony, like Malka. If they ponied up for air transport, it meant I was being shipped far, far away, to a Kabarak in the Outer Territories, the other side of the planet.

Not that it made any difference. Exile was exile. And even after I did, my future would be forever changed. While I’d always imagined myself going on to a job that was easy and low-key, like Teev and Paxton’s, or even working at a place like the Chimæra, most people on Kabaraks ended up going on to a position in Lorien government.

I shuddered at the thought of finding myself spending the rest of my days pushing paper as a bureaucrat at a dull-as-dirt office like the Lorien Defense Council, wasting my life trying to stave off an invasion from an extraplanetary attack that everyone knew was never coming while I tried to cheer myself up by pretending I was actually doing something important.

It was hopeless. For now, all I could do was try not to think about it. And keep walking.

My school disappeared behind me as the Spires of Elkin loomed ahead, beckoning me towards the city center.

I’d considered hanging around, waiting for the shuttle. It would’ve given me a chance to say good-bye to my friends when they got out of class. But the thought depressed me too much to bother. I couldn’t stand the thought of them finding out how badly I’d messed up.

Anyhow, I liked Adar and Rax and a few of the other kids at the academy well enough, but I didn’t consider them my real people. I’d always been different, even from them. Everyone else on Lorien seemed to be content with exactly what they had. They were happy to live on the most perfect little planet in the whole damn universe. Why couldn’t I be more like that?

I was still wallowing in my un-Loric pool of self-pity when I heard my name.

“Sandor?” I stopped in my tracks and turned around to see that an unfamiliar man, a few years older than me, was standing next to a parked Muni hovercraft a few paces behind me. “Are you Sandor?”

He wore the distinctive blue tunic of a Mentor Cêpan, the special class of Cêpans who work for the LDC and are charged with training the Garde and monitoring their Legacies as they develop. I had no idea how he knew my name, and I didn’t really want to find out. I’d had enough trouble today, and for all I knew, this guy was about to tell me I’d committed some new infraction without even realizing it.

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s my name all right.” Without waiting for a response, I turned again and resumed my walk.

Without asking permission, he kept pace beside me.

“My apologies. I’d meant to catch you at your meeting with Osaria but I got there too late.”

I was silent.

“I’m Brandon. I’m a Mentor Cêpan at the Lorien Defense Academy—”

“Sorry, dude,” I said. “I’m not a Garde. Just your typical, boring Cêpan—no need for a mentor. And I flunked the LDA aptitude test years ago.”

“Yeah,” said Brandon. “I’ve seen your scores.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively, like he knew I had tanked the exam on purpose to avoid being sent off to the prestigious academy.

Of course compared to a Kabarak, mentorship training sounded pretty good at this point. If I’d known what was in store for me, maybe I would have thought twice about bombing that test all those years ago.

“We got word of your little hijinks over at the academy,” Brandon said. I looked at him in surprise. How in the world would they have heard about one underage Cêpan’s misadventures at the Chimæra?

But Brandon was talking like that was the most normal thing in the world. “We were impressed,” he said. “That kind of technological work is quite unusual for someone your age—especially someone without academy training. If you put your talents to work in a more serious way, you could really make a difference in the Lorien security efforts.”

I was reminded why I didn’t care for LDA types. They took themselves way too seriously. Lorien had never had a war. We had never been attacked. And yet these people acted like we were living under constant threat. It was like they just told themselves that so they could feel important.

I waved Brandon off. “Yeah, well,” I said. “I’m off to a Kabarak. Hopefully they’ll appreciate my skills there.”

“They won’t,” he replied with a shrug. “Listen. The LDA could use some fresh blood and some new hands. We have some decent engineers and techs, but no one with your gift for problem solving.”

I rolled my eyes. An engineer at the LDA? That was almost as bad as joining Munis.

“Sorry, man. Not interested.” I kept walking.

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