Chapter One
Wilderness
The Green line to Bedlam was the oldest train route through Westport, a clogged, aging artery through the city’s industrial zone. Inside one of its trembling cars, Amira Valdez pressed her face against the cool window, exhaling with forced steadiness. She had not felt this anxious on a train since her escape from the Children of the New Covenant Compound ten years ago. The train shuddered as it passed over a battered section of the tracks. Amira clenched her fists, digging her nails into her whip-scarred palms, another remnant of the compound.
Amira’s morning commute to the Academy was normally a pleasant one, but today was Placement Day, and far from ordinary.
She pulled away from the window, where the tracks ascended above ground and the dense, grimy brick buildings of the Riverfront district came into view. Academy students filled the train car, all prepared in their own way for the most important day of the year. A gangly young man with a green mohawk leaned against one of the central poles, muttering a string of equations. Another student grimly performed lunges near the door, inciting glares every time new passengers boarded. No one made eye contact. Talented students abounded at the Academy and assignments were limited. Assignments in space would be even rarer.
Space. Her mentor, Dr. Mercer, called it the world above the world. For Amira, the research stations orbiting overhead represented everything the compound was not – unburdened by the past, a place that welcomed the unknown and challenged the idea of the unknowable. She belonged there. But if she failed to place well in the Aldwych district, the epicenter of the city of Westport’s Lower Earth Orbit industry, today’s exams would mercilessly destroy her dreams of working spaceside. Those countless hours she’d spent as a lonely child, hiding on the roof and searching the night sky for space-bound shuttles, would mean nothing. She had to succeed. Amira chewed her lower lip, forcing down her doubts.
The outlines of Aldwych’s imposing skyscrapers rose in the distance as the Green line turned east. A faint trail of smoke from the Galileo building signaled a recent shuttle launch. Amira ran her finger along the condensed window glass, tracing the shuttle’s skyward path toward the stations. Waves of adrenaline pulsed through her small frame, growing stronger as she neared the Academy’s stop.
You’ve waited a long time for this day, her inner voice encouraged. You know you’re ready. This is what you were meant to do. This is who you’re meant to be.
The train announced its arrival at the Academy with a dull, screeching wail. The student reciting equations switched to a torrent of expletives. As she stepped outside, Amira’s heart quickened at the sight of the Academy’s elegant, angular walls, the sleek architecture of its buildings amplified by the comparatively grim, industrial neighborhood that surrounded it. Despite Oregon’s mild climate, the Academy adopted a distinctly tropical aesthetic. The school’s founder conducted her research in the Brazilian rainforest and brought the jungle back with her. Synthetic palm trees lined the walkways and vines crawled over the self-consciously modernist buildings, their concrete walls made to look like timber. Amira touched the founder’s statue every time she passed it, as though she could absorb the late scientist’s essence through the marble.
The Academy’s main building hosted the Placement Day trials. Its corridors were remarkably silent save for Amira’s echoing footsteps and the occasional somber-faced student shuffling by. A dull-eyed teaching assistant ordered Amira to Room Four. So her fate would be decided there. Amira took a steadying breath and followed the instruction, striding with as much confidence as she could muster beyond the lecture hall.
A small, pale figure emerged from the lecture hall’s towering doors. Amira’s best friend, D’Arcy Pham, grinned excitedly, raising her fist in triumph. Though the knot in her stomach tightened further, Amira returned the smile and they clasped hands briefly. D’Arcy mouthed the word ‘Pandora’ before turning around the corridor.
Amira blinked with surprise. The Pandora project, spearheaded by a team of elite Aldwych scientists, was really a collection of projects with one common theme – a desire to push the boundaries of science as far as law, budget and human understanding would allow. It was no surprise that D’Arcy, a top quantum programmer at the Academy who custom-made her own Third Eye, had placed well – but Pandora? The project was both unusually prestigious and clandestine, even by the standards of insular Aldwych.
And there it was – Room Four. Amira found no external indicators of what awaited her beyond the door, but she had a reasonable guess. She managed to evade one test in her ten years of study, but she would not face the panel without completing it. Just as police officers had to be shocked before they could inflict the pain of a nano-pulse Taser, Amira would have to lay her own mind bare before she could become an Academy-approved therapist and holomentic reader.
She exhaled, memories of glimmering space stations and night skies dancing in her mind’s eye, and walked through the door.
* * *
Amira sat still, arms folded in her lap with sensory pads attached to her forehead and temples. She breathed deeply and closed her eyes when the first needle entered her wrist. The standard dose of Nirvatrene, cooling as it found her vein.
“Are you ready?” A lanky young man with horn-rimmed glasses pulled up a seat next to her, monitor hovering over his knees. “Nervous? I can change our background to a beach or park, or whatever you prefer.”
“I’m fine.” The walls were white, windowless and sterile.
“All right then. We’ll submerge in a few minutes.”
In the seconds before her thoughts would no longer be hers alone, Amira allowed herself a final moment of calculation. Her skills as a holomentic reader, the latest breakthrough in thought-visualizing neuroscience, did not interest the Placement Panel. This exercise was ultimately a psychological evaluation, intended to deliver a verdict on her emotional stability for a position that gave her access to patients’ innermost thoughts. A verdict on the soundness of her mind, not what she could do with it.
The sensory pads warmed against Amira’s face, joined by an odd, pulling sensation in the back of her head, as though an invisible hand tried to reel her in like a fish on a hook. She struggled to concentrate on the door, but it grew harder and harder to focus. The hologram table to her right projected images from her brain as she experienced them, in flashes of shapes and color that formed three-dimensional scenes. Initially dim and blurry, they took form while the man, her assigned reader, adjusted dials and dragged his fingers across a large monitor.
Amira clenched her fists. She fought to keep her expression neutral, but the glimpses of memory continued to appear, gaining clarity and strength under the reader’s skilled navigation.
This was only the first step. The reader probed the first level of her consciousness and would move in deeper as he navigated the complex neural map in front of him. Any Academy student could learn to read the map of the human mind – the real skill, one Amira possessed in abundance, was knowing where to look.