They were the first thing Iva emp-Umber set her sights on when she decided to take our homeworlds and their abundance of metal-rich asteroid belts for her own. Thirty coordinated strikes destroyed every knight, their staffs, their headquarters. Not even a single powersuit remained in the aftermath. Knightfall, they called it. A declaration of war, painted in the blood of every single person we were dumb enough to call our heroes.
“I like my head where it is,” I tell Seely sharply. Guilt prickles through me as his expression drops to a stony glare. Usually the choice to fall in line with Umber rests comfortably on my shoulders—and in my well-fed gut—but when a fellow war orphan is scowling at me like I’m dirt, it’s hard not to feel it. “Look, for your sake, whatever it is you think you’re going to do…Don’t.”
“Told you he wouldn’t bite,” one of Seely’s companions says with a sniff. She glances over her shoulder. “He’s a waste of time.”
“Agreed,” I tell her, plastering a false, cheery smile over my face as I back toward the marked walkways.
“See you in the black, Gold One,” Seely calls. “And for your sake, stay out of my way.”
I scoff as I dodge back into the flow of traffic out of the hangar. Seely’s all talk—anyone who thinks they can do anything for the old empire at this point is all talk. If the Umber victory wasn’t secure when they won the war and executed the Archon imperials seven years ago, it was rock-solid by the time they opened the academy’s doors. Now Archon-born children grow up with good Umber foundations that keep the drums from pounding rhythms into their hearts. Reliable supply lines run from the richness of the Umber interior to all-but-barren Archon soil, and hungry new governors—often second children with no bloodright claim in their home territories—have stepped in to bring order to the newly acquired worlds. The region’s finally stabilized after the war cracked it open, and gods of all systems help anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to disturb that peace.
I break from the hangar’s shadow and into the bright winter sun. A curl of wind from the east brings with it the dusty scent of prairie grass, and some of it settles the frayed ends of my nerves. Between getting Gal his forgotten helmet and my run-in with the other Archon brats, there’s a good chance I’m going to be the one on the receiving end of an imperial-level dressing-down from the officers.
I lengthen my strides as I hustle down the tarmac, making for the row of Vipers lined up in their staging zones like knives in a drawer. My focus locks onto the third ship in the row—and as a result, I nearly run headlong into a young officer on her way back to the hangar. It takes me an extra second to recognize Jana as I try to keep from tripping over my boots.
“Ettian, hey!” she says, her smile bright as she resettles the shoulders of her crisp black uniform. Her eyes drop to the second helmet I’m carrying. “Again, huh?”
Jana’s one of an entire cohort of upperclassmen Gal charmed into adopting him the second he arrived at the academy. Even though she graduated to the officer ranks two years ago, she still checks in from time to time, and it’s not uncommon for her to come knocking at our door for a conversation that usually devolves into mindless gossip about ten minutes in.
I return her grin, backpedaling to keep my momentum going. “Again!” I tell her. I wish I had time to stop and chat, but there’s fire under my heels. Knowing Jana, she’ll probably swing by our room later tonight anyway.
She tips an informal salute at me, and I turn around and break into a jog. As I run past, some of the other cadets call out greetings that I try my best to acknowledge with quick jerks of my head. A few of them are already perched in their cockpits, doing their preflight checks. It spurs me faster.
By the time I make it to the Gold Twenty-Eight Viper, I’m clawing for breath, both helmets dragging me down like twenty-pound weights. But when Gal Veres turns around and sees me, it’s easy to forget all that. His smile glows, the breath he lets out fogging in the chilled air. He’s unfairly handsome, his skin a warm golden brown, his hair perpetually perfectly tousled, and his frame sturdily built from a lifetime in Umber abundance. How dare you, part of me groans. I need to be in my Viper already, comfortably settled in my gel-seat so I can forget how a single look from Gal sometimes feels like it might take my legs out from underneath me.
Before he has a chance to get a word in, I pitch his helmet at him. He catches it with a slight oomph.
“You owe me one,” I tell him. It’s not true, strictly speaking—I’ve been carrying his ass in classes since day one, but he’s carried me through our time at the academy in ways I can never fully repay.
But it’s Gal, so of course he plays along. He leans casually against the ladder to his cockpit, settling the helmet over his unruly undercut. “Thanks for covering for me—knew you’d have my back. I would have commed you to make sure, but…”
And then his smile goes wicked, and he slips my earpiece out of his pocket.
Hollow exasperation hits me like a gut punch for the second time today. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groan.
Gal doesn’t toss it—he makes me come and pluck the device daintily out of his palm, his hooded eyes sparkling with delight. “Noticed you forgot to make your way to the comm station, figured you’d gotten distracted by something, you know the rest. And we’re supposed to trust you to lead us today?”
“Better me than you.”
“Rut off. I could be an amazing leader.”
“Your test scores say otherwise. And last week you couldn’t even get one other person in the cantina to try streaking the officer quarters with you.”
“No one was drunk enough. But it’s gonna happen someday. We’ll make academy history—first to make it to the head’s door and back.”
I knock my shoulder into his, laughing softly as I slip my earpiece in. Behind Gal, I catch a glimpse of Hanji, another cadet in our year, as she moseys toward her station in the control tower. She gives me a wave, then makes a suggestive gesture involving both of her hands and a wicked tilt of her eyebrow. I grapple with the urge to pull a face at her, keeping my stare pinned on Gal instead.
Hanji and Ollins, another member of her merry band of miscreants, made a bet where Gal and I are concerned. If Gal finds out the terms of that bet, I might as well float my Viper into the path of an oncoming dreadnought.
“What?” Gal asks, and I realize I’ve stared a moment too long.
“Huh? Oh, just…I saw Jana on my way over,” I blurt. Smooth, Ettian.
“Yeah, she came by to say hi.”
I glance around at the tarmac, the line of Vipers, the distance from here to the hangar. “Came by?”