Hours passed.
My anger before had been as hot as magma. Now I just felt cold. Numb.
Echoes of the party drifted in from another area of the building.
I felt used, stupid, and most of all … empty. Shouldn’t I have been snapping my pencil, throwing tables about in rage? Ranting about seeking vengeance upon my foes, and their children and grandchildren? Typical Spensa behavior?
Instead I sat there and stared. Until the sounds of the party grew quieter. Eventually, an aide peeked into the room. “Um, you’re supposed to leave.”
I didn’t move.
“Are you sure you don’t want to leave?”
They’d have to drag me out of here. I imagined it—very heroic and Defiant—but the aide didn’t seem so inclined. She switched off the lights and left me there, lit only by the red-orange glow of the emergency lights.
Finally, I stood up and walked to the desk by the wall, where Ironsides had—perhaps accidentally—left the tests the children of the First Citizens had given her. I looked through the stack; each of them had only the name filled out, the other questions blank.
I took the one off the top, the first one handed in. It held the name Jorgen Weight, followed by a question.
1.Name the four major battles that secured the United Defiant Caverns’ independence as the first major state on Detritus.
That was a tricky question, as people were probably going to forget the Unicarn Skirmish—it didn’t get talked about as much. But it was where the fledgling DDF had first employed fighters of the second generation of designs, built in secret in Igneous. I trailed over to my desk and sat down, then answered the question.
I moved on to the next, then the next. They were good questions. More than simple lists of dates or parts. Some math questions about combat speeds. But most were questions about intent, opinion, and personal preference. I struggled on two of them, trying to decide if I should say what I thought the test wanted. or what I thought was actually the correct answer.
I went with the second both times. Who cared anyway, right?
By the time I was finishing up, I heard people talking outside. Janitors, from the sounds of their discussion.
Suddenly I felt silly. Would I scream and force some poor janitor to pull me out by my hair? I’d been beaten. You couldn’t win every fight, and there was no shame in losing when you were outnumbered. I turned over the test and tapped my pencil against it, still sitting mostly in the dark, working by the glow of the emergency lights.
I started sketching a W-shaped ship on the back of the test as a crazy idea began to form in my head. The DDF hadn’t begun as an official military; it had started out as a bunch of dreamers with their own crazy idea. Get the apparatus working, create ships from some schematics that had survived our crash on the planet.
They’d built their own ships.
The door opened, letting in light from the hallway. I heard a bucket get set on the ground outside, and two people complaining about spills in the party room.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” I said, finishing my sketch. Thinking. Wondering. Dreaming.
“Why are you still here, kid?” a janitor asked. “You didn’t want to go to the party?”
“I didn’t feel much like celebrating.”
He grunted. “Didn’t do well on the test?”
“Turns out it doesn’t matter,” I said. I glanced at him, but he was backlit, just a silhouette in the doorway. “Do you ever …,” I said. “Do you ever feel they forced you to be what you are?”
“No. I might have forced myself into it though.”
I sighed. Mother was probably worried sick about me. I stood up and wandered over to the wall where the aide had put my pack.
“Why do you want it so much?” the janitor asked. Was there something familiar about his voice? “It’s dangerous, being a pilot. A lot of them get killed.”
“Just under fifty percent are shot down in their first five years,” I said. “But they don’t all die. Some eject. Others get shot down, but survive the crash.”
“Yes. I know.”
I froze, then frowned and looked back at the figure. I couldn’t make out his face, but something flashed on his breast. Medals? A pilot’s pin? I squinted, and made out the shape of a DDF jacket and dress slacks.
This was no janitor. I could still hear those two out in the hallway, joking with each other.
I stood up straighter. The man walked slowly to my desk, and the emergency lights revealed he was older, maybe in his fifties, with a stark white mustache. He walked with a prominent limp.
He picked up the test I’d filled out, then flipped through it. “So why?” he finally asked. “Why care so much? They never ask the most important question on these tests. Why do you want to be a pilot?”
To prove myself, and to redeem my father’s name. It was my immediate response, though something else warred with it. Something my father had sometimes said, something buried inside me, often overshadowed by ideas of vengeance and redemption.
“Because you get to see the sky,” I whispered.
The man grunted. “We name ourselves Defiants,” he said. “It’s the central ideal of our people—the fact that we refuse to back down. And yet, Ironsides always acts so surprised when someone defies her.” He shook his head, then set the test down again. He put something on top of it.
He turned to limp away.
“Wait,” I said. “Who are you?”
He stopped at the doorway, and the light outside showed his face more clearly, with that mustache, and eyes that seemed … old. “I knew your father.”
Wait. I did know that voice. “Mongrel?” I said. “That is you. You were his wingmate!”
“In another life,” he said. “Oh-seven-hundred sharp on the day after tomorrow, building F, room C-14. Show the pin to get access.”
The pin? I walked back to the desk, and found—sitting on top of my test—a cadet’s pin.
I snatched it up. “But Ironsides said she’d never let me into a cockpit.”
“I’ll deal with Ironsides. It’s my class; I get final say over my students, and even she can’t overrule me. She’s too important for that.”
“Too important? To give orders?”
“Military protocol. When you get important enough to order an armada into battle, you’re too important to interfere with how a quartermaster runs his shop. You’ll see. There’s a lot you know, judging by that test—but still some things you don’t. You got number seventeen wrong.”
“Seventeen …” I flipped through the test quickly. “The overwhelming odds question?”
“The right answer was to fall back and await reinforcement.”
“No it wasn’t.”
He stiffened, and I quickly bit my tongue. Should I be arguing with the person who’d just given me a cadet’s pin?
“I’ll let you into the sky,” he said, “but they’re not going to be easy on you. I’m not going to be easy on you. Wouldn’t be fair.”
“Is anything fair?”
He smiled. “Death is. He treats us all the same. Oh-seven-hundred. Don’t be late.”
