I swirl a spoon through a bowl of the canteen’s leftover mystery chili, mentally replaying the events of the day. A janitor mops the floor by the kitchen. It’s just me and him tonight.
I sit at a circular table in the corner of the room. The chili’s cold. It tastes even worse than it smells. I can’t say our cooks know how to do Mexican. They should stick with what they do best-opening cans and dumping them into serving bowls.
The walls around me are the same color as the seven pitiful pieces of melted cheese that congeal into a rubbery disc in the center of the bowl. I would have been better off sneaking a couple pieces of fruit down to my room and calling it a night.
“Well,” a figure enters the canteen, “I can’t wait to join this fun little pity party.”
I look up and smile, even though she’s twenty minutes late.
Avery Wicksen: fellow orphan, snoop extraordinaire, and totally unattainable eighteen-year-old post-grad.
She skips over to the corner of the room, plopping down on the seat next to me. Her straw-colored hair’s tied up away from her face. She wears a pale-blue tank top and loose-fitting jeans, and couldn’t be more beautiful if she tried. She stares down into the bowl, shaking her head. “That is a crime against nature. They should be ashamed of themselves.”
I push the bowl away. “I was wondering if you were gonna show up.”
She grins, the faint cluster of freckles on each side of her smile dancing up and down. “Ran into some trouble with Dolores. Trouble in the sense that I couldn’t escape her. I swear that woman is in love with me.”
I lean against the wall, facing her. Dolores Anderson is the fossil-old librarian that Avery works with during the day. Given her less-than-stellar training record and knack for ditching classes, the teachers stuck Avery with mass boring library work rather than graduating her to full-blown agent status. Hanging out with her is like taking a look at my own future. If only our similarities were enough to hypnotize her into falling in love with me. “You two have tea again?”
She nods. “Ever since her husband died she’s been so clingy. Part of me wishes they’d just send her off to one of the retirement ships. Rigel, maybe.”
“Yeah, right. Once you’re up here, you’re here to stay. Unless you wanna let the Tribunal do a full mind wipe.”
Avery shrugs. “ Nature’s doing a mind wipe on Dolores. Sometimes I think she mistakes me for her daughter.” She pauses. “But enough about her.” She grabs my wrist. “How are you?”
“Been better,” I reply.
“Do you wanna talk about it?”
“Not really.”
She leans in closer, squinting and placing her fingers on my cheek. An orchestral symphony swells inside my body. For a second I’m convinced that she’s gonna kiss me. My mind frantically searches for the right thing to do. Lean forward, grab her shoulder, pucker up. Then she opens her mouth.
“Are you aware that you have an imprint of a brick on the side of your head?”
My inner symphony hits a bum note and the orchestra lights flicker off. “Yeah, I’m aware. It hurts like hell.”
She chuckles. “Did someone brand you?”
I lean back, knowing that the red mark is the least of my worries. “I told you I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” She pulls away. “Just saying. Us poor little orphans have to stick together up here.”
I sigh, resting my chin on my knees. “We lost the Pearl today. I lost my belt. Everything. If Eva hadn’t stepped in when she did, I might be dead.”
Her green eyes fill with concern. “Dead? On a training mission?”
“Yep,” I reply, pressing on the table with my thumb. “And if that doesn’t define my life up here, I don’t know what would.”
“So you think it was your fault.”
“I know it was my fault, Avery. There was this Pearlhound, not even an adult. I should have been able to take him, but I panicked.”
“This guy have a name?”
“Cassius Stevenson.” I sigh.
Her brows raise.
I meet her eyes. “What? Does that mean something to you? Is he like some super macho legend I should know about?”
“No,” she responds. “Just curious.”
“Oh, and by the way, Eva’s pissed about you hacking into our CPs. How do you do that, anyway?”
“A lot of time and a lot of reading.” She shrugs. “But look, I’ve seen Skandar in action and he ain’t so hot. And Eva may think she’s some warrior princess, but I heard she still sleeps with her old teddy bear blanket.”
I smirk. “Really?”
“No,” she replies. “I made that up to get a smile out of you. Truth is, Jesse, it doesn’t really matter. The teachers make it seem like Pearls are the be all and end all, but there are other things in life. Don’t obsess over the parts you can’t control. Jeez, if I spent time wallowing about my failures I’d have jumped off the ship ages ago.”
“I wasn’t wallowing.”
She laughs. “Oh, you’re wallowing. That is the most wallowing bowl of chili I’ve seen in my life.”
I glance over to the lonely bowl, considering her sage advice. It’s times like these that I’m convinced the two of us should just hijack a shuttle and take off for Polaris or Vega or some other fun ship-a ship where they don’t train children for illegal, dangerous work and then mock them when they’re not up to it.
“Speaking of,” she reaches over and grabs the bowl, “you got any enemies, Fisher? We can pick the lock on their door and dump this on them while they’re sleeping.”
I chuckle, despite myself. “That sounds like the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
“Oh, come on. I’ve had worse.”
“Well, there is August Bergmann… ” I wince as I say his name, imagining how he’ll spin my little Surface adventure once he hears about it. The guy’s had it in for me ever since Year Six.
Her face lights up. “Yeah! Now there’s a perfect candidate for a late-night chili dump.”
I shake my head. “But I’m already in trouble. Alkine’s concerned .” I frame the word with air quotes. “They’re all concerned.”
She rolls her eyes. “They’re always concerned. If they weren’t, they’d be concerned about that too.” She pushes the bowl away. It flies across the table, nearly toppling off the edge.
“There were Fringers,” I continue. “Not friendly either. Hence the lovely mark on my cheek.”
She rests her chin in her hand, staring at me. “It’s actually kinda cute. Think of it as a temporary tattoo. Real badass.”
“Yeah.” I smile. “Temporary tattoos are the definition of badass, right? They might as well have just scrawled ‘loser’ across my face. Bergmann’s gonna have a field day with this one.”
She shrugs. “There’s always the chili. Just sayin’.”
I nod, relishing the idea of August Bergmann with cold chili dumped all over his body.
“Seriously, though,” she leans closer, “you’ll get over it. After my parents died… when General Campbell had me transferred over here, it was the absolute loneliest time in my life. Sometimes this place is like a tomb. You just wanna get outside and breathe in fresh air for once, but people keep pulling you back. I mean, who cares about Pearls and stuff when your whole world falls apart, right?”
I nod.
“But then I started hanging out with you and things weren’t so bad. The teachers may be concerned about you, Jesse, but they’re boring, stuffy people. They don’t matter.”
“I don’t think they’d agree.”
“Trust me,” she says, “you’ll be wasting your effort trying to please them. Wilson was born disappointed. Alkine, well… if you ask me he’s not exactly the sympathetic war hero he’d like everybody to believe. You make me laugh, Jesse. And there are maybe three people onboard who can do that. Should count for something, right?”
I smile. “Thanks, Avery.”
“For what?”
I pause, holding back what I really want to say. “For coming up here. For talking.”
“Hey, no problem.”
I stare at her face for a second before glancing away, realizing that I look like a stalker. “I should get to bed early tonight. Wilson’s making us do Bunker Ball tomorrow morning and my legs are killing me.”
“I’ll walk down with you.”
We stand up from the table and take off through the empty canteen, leaving the chili in the corner to harden.
When we reach my room on the second level, I input my code and crack the door, turning around. An awkward pause comes between us.
There’s always an awkward pause. If we were really boyfriend and girlfriend I’d lean over and kiss her goodnight, or at least give her a hug. Instead, I offer a meek “goodnight” and she smiles, heading down the hallway. I watch her go for a moment before slipping into my room, kicking myself for wasting yet another perfect opportunity.
Before plopping onto my half-made bed, I walk to my desk and run my fingers over a pair of medallions hanging on the wall. They belong to my parents, which means technically they belong to me. The Tribunal had them shipped over in honor of bravery and sacrifice and mass heroic stuff like that. They’ve been a permanent fixture in my room for as long as I can remember. The Tribunal destroyed all photographs for security purposes. My parents weren’t the keepsake type, either. These medals are all I have-a constant, glistening reminder of how fearless they were. Not like me. I can’t even handle a Pearlhound trainee.
I drop the medallions and let them clank against the wall, reaching for the entertainment console at the end of the desk. Then I slump face-first onto the bed and purge the day from memory with the most mind-numbing program I can find on Skyship TV.