Academy 7 (19 page)

She stared into the fountain’s sheeting curtain. “I don’t remember much from right after the crash. I saw my father’s body and . . . I guess I was in shock. There were people. I don’t remember them trying to talk to me. They were more concerned with the ship. It was a long time before I realized they didn’t know what it was.”

“The ship?”

“Vizhan is isolated. The people there have no concept of flight.”

His throat rejected the notion. He knew there were planets outside the Alliance that had lost scientific knowledge, but still, if the planet was inhabited by human life, the people must have come there by ship originally. “No concept at all?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I think the leaders must have rebelled against space travel at some point, though the man who owned the property where we crashed, he kept my father’s ship, even though he didn’t know what to do with it—left it like a monument in the field where it landed. He collected things: land, machines, people.”

Dane’s hands clenched into fists. “You were a slave?” he asked.

She paused. A shadow traced its way across her back. Then the words began spilling from her throat as if she could no longer contain them. “I was housed in a shed with over a hundred people. The smell . . . it was like death. There wasn’t enough food. You had to fight.”

That was how she had learned the skills she used in combat and why she talked about them as if they were a matter of survival. Understanding slid into Dane’s mind.

“We were herded to work in the fields,” she said, “flat-open areas where only a few guards with weapons could control dozens of people. The guards . . . they would stand up on platforms. If we were too slow, or made a mistake, or they just didn’t need us anymore, they would fire their lasers.”

Bile rose in Dane’s throat. His hands lifted to her upper arms, and this time she did not pull away.

“One day”—Aerin’s voice had gone sandpaper harsh—“the owner pulled me off field duty to fix an ancient computer. He had a lab filled with them, but they were almost all dead. He must have thought I might know something, considering all the machines on the ship. I fixed it, the computer. And nearly all his other ones. It kept me out of the fields a few days a week. In three years, through trial and error, I made everything in that house run by machine: the lights, the doors, the running water. Then there was only one computer left in need of repair. I stalled on it for months. Until the day he lost his temper.”

Dane’s hands tightened on her arms.

She reached up, covering his left hand with her palm, and pried his fingers away, then undid the top buttons of her uniform and eased the fabric over her shoulder. To reveal the dark lines of an X burned into her skin. “He branded me.”

Dane’s body jolted. He could not accept that X and the pain it told him she had endured. It rivaled anything his father had ever done to him. Physically.

“That night”—she took a deep breath—“instead of returning me to the shed, he locked me in the lab.” Her voice hardened. “That was his mistake. As soon as it was dark, I sabotaged his security system, shut it all down and let myself out. There was a forest running from the owner’s house to the field with the ship. The trees gave me cover. I never would have made it without them.”

Tension ran under Dane’s skin.
But the ship had been damaged before the crash. What if she hadn’t been able to fix it?

“Hardly anything wasn’t damaged,” she said as if reading his mind. “I’d learned a lot in the lab, and I managed to fix the autopilot and part of the control system, but if the ship had failed . . .”

She turned toward him, silent tears streaming down her cheeks. And then she was trembling, sobs escaping her throat. He knew now what she had done. A runaway slave committing sabotage and theft. A suicide mission really. Pinning her life on the chance, no matter how slight, of escape. No wonder she lived in fear, jumping at danger. No wonder she questioned her safety in the Alliance. No wonder she judged and doubted people without letting them close. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed her to his chest in a fierce embrace.

 

“Aerin.” She heard Dane say her name through a thick down of cloudy memory. “What do you know about your father? I mean about his past—where he grew up, his family?”

“I don’t have any family.” She spoke into his shirt.

Dane began to pull away, and she didn’t want him to go, didn’t want to lose that strange, unreal feeling. Of safety.

But the firm hands slid from her back, and the warm cocoon withdrew as he insisted on talking. “Your father must have had family though, at some point. He must have come from somewhere.”

She shivered, trying to wipe away the tears that blocked her vision. “I don’t know. I’d give anything to know more about him.”

Dane swam into view, a blurry figure blending with the darkness. “Then there’s something I need to show you.” He reached out for her hand and pulled.

She found herself following him with an odd sense of detachment. Too shaken emotionally to think about much, she focused on his steps. He plowed ahead recklessly, willing her forward through the garden and across the grass.

Not until he pulled a pair of lock picks from his pocket did she bother to wonder why he was taking her away from the dorm.

“You remember that conversation at Christmas dinner?” He paused at the foot of the Great Hall.

Hadn’t she just admitted it had haunted her for months?

He scaled the sloping steps, then looked down at her. “You said you didn’t know how my father knew you were lying.”

She eyed him with a frown. “It was almost as if—”

“He knew when your father died.”

She froze, unable to react as Dane slid a small tool into the keyhole of the main door. His fingers moved with deft ease.
Click, click, click
came the response. And then the massive door was opening. He pushed it in and gestured for her to enter. She shook her head in refusal.

He hurried back down to her, placed his hand beneath her elbow, and guided her easily with him.

The hallway was dark. Too dark to see after the bright moonlight of the outside, but Dane did not wait for her eyes to adjust. “Stay here,” he said, then sprang up the stairs.

“No.” She tried to stop him, but he disappeared in the blackness. The sound of creaking steps rose farther and farther above her, echoing in the high space.

She fell back against the wall. What was she doing? Once before she had sat in this building alone, in that empty basement room, the terror of the dark ripping apart her sanity. And that instance, too, had been Dane’s fault. At the time, she would never have believed she would risk her place at the school. Yet here she was, putting herself in the same situation she had been falsely accused of eight months ago, and Dane had not even given her a real reason. What had changed in her world that she could accept this?

Everything. Everything had changed.

And nothing.

“Aerin.” He was standing before her again. By now her eyes had adjusted, and she could see him. The light from the window played across his features: strong cheekbones, dark hair curling behind his ears, eyes shining with anticipation. He stepped closer. “You remember that day when Dr. Livinski made us clean the trophy room?”

She remembered all too well. The punishment she would receive for this night’s excursion would be far worse.

“Xioxang handed me a plaque,” Dane kept talking. “He ordered me to clean it. I wouldn’t have even looked at the thing, but it had my father’s name on it: Flight Team: Gold.”

Her patience had worn out. “Your father won a million awards.” She pushed off the wall and turned to leave.

“He did.” Dane blocked her path. In his hand was a rectangular piece of polished wood. “But every flight team has two members.”

“I don’t care if there are fifty members. The announcement ceremony is tomorrow, and if Dr. Livinski finds us here, neither one of us will be on a flight team. Ever.”

“Aerin, there’s another name on this plaque.”

She waited.

“Antony Renning.”

The name reverberated off her eardrums. It flew up along the stairway, repeating and repeating and repeating until it rebounded off the ceiling and entered her soul.

“My father?” she whispered.

Dane held out the plaque.

She took it, pulling the slick, carved surface up against the window’s light. And read her father’s name.

“How?” Her hands began to tremble. “How do we know it’s him?”

“It would explain a lot,” Dane replied, “about the General’s reaction to you. If he knew who your father was, he might have thought I brought you home as some kind of ploy. And he might have known when your father died.”

“How could—”

“Don’t forget who my father is, Aerin. He has access to data that never reaches the public, and even if he doesn’t know about the crash, he could still know when your father disappeared.”

She felt a flood of emotion: anger at Dane’s father for what he might know and had not told her, doubt that any of this could be real, and hope—ridiculous, stupid, breathtaking hope. Her words came out in a firm question. “How do we find out?”

Dane gestured toward the basement. “We look. That is, if you can break through Zaniels’s new clearance program.”

She met his gaze.

He needed no other reply.

Within moments they stood in pitch darkness outside the tech lab. There was another series of clicks as Dane worked at the lock beneath the keypad; then the door slid open. Ivory light glowed from the machines. The room’s soft hum beckoned her in.

And a louder whirr vibrated as she flicked on Zaniels’s computer. Golden light spread across the screen. Her fingers moved, interrupting the loading process and bypassing the clearance program.

“If your father was a student here, his records should be in the archives,” Dane said. “At the very least, there should be a picture you can use to identify him.”

With Dane’s advice, she began the search, entering the restricted school files, then the archives. A white box popped up, asking for a name.

Her fingers typed in the letters, A-N-T-O-N-Y-R-E-N-N-I-N-G.

Swish!
Colors flashed across the screen as the machine rifled through its memory. A pause. Then a basic directory appeared with links for grades, awards, and postgraduate data.

Beneath them emerged a simple school photo of a student, a young man with black eyes. A cowlick kicked up his dark hair just to the left of his forehead. Unmarred skin covered his cheekbones and jaw. His mouth spread in an irrepressible grin. So unlike the man she had known. And yet it was him. Her father.

Aerin stared, soaking in the view of that face. Alive. Uninjured. A picture to replace her last haunting image.

“It’s him, then?” Dane asked, shifting his stance and bringing her back to the present.

“It’s him.” For the second time that evening, saltwater stained her vision. Her father.
Here.
In the Alliance. Her heart stuttered as she took in the implications. He was a citizen then. And according to Allied law, so was she. Was it possible?

Yes.
In fact, knowing what she did now about the security at Academy 7, it was the only real explanation for why she had been accepted here with her real name, and why she had never been exposed as an imposter. Because she wasn’t one. She had just as much legal right to be here as anyone else.

Aerin blinked, gathering herself and calming her emotions. But if her father had grown up here, why had he never spoken about the Alliance? And why had he left? She slid the cursor toward the first heading on the page.

His grades sprang onto the screen.

“Doesn’t look like you inherited all your strengths from him,” Dane said, pointing at a row of C’s for tech analysis.

“No.” She gestured at another C for combat. “But he had one of your weaknesses.”

“I,” growled Dane, “have an A in combat.”

“You wouldn’t if I was teaching it.”

“Well, there’s a reason you’re not.” Dane slid his hand toward a row of A’s under introduction to flight. “Looks like he was destined to be a pilot.”

“Maybe,” came her response as she moved on to the awards page.

“Definitely.” A list of flying awards covered the top of the screen. “Best in Class, Pilot: Rank 1, Air Strategist,” Dane read some of the titles aloud. “You’d think he was the one in line for the rank of military general instead of my father.”

“I guess they had something in common,” she whispered.

“I’ll say,” Dane replied. “Wonder if they were rivals.”

“And flight team members?” she asked with doubt. She scrolled down the page, this time reading aloud herself. “Best First-Year Essay: Planet Rebellion. Best Second-Year Essay: Flaws in the Alliance. Best Third-Year Essay: Allied Failure.”

“Ouch!” Dane murmured. “Guess we know why he didn’t make military general.”

“Second Speaker: Debate Team. Universe Debate Champion.”

“Jeez, Aerin, your father knew how to argue.”

She glared at Dane but couldn’t keep a smile from spreading across her face. This was a new feeling, sharing pride in her father with someone else. She moved on to the final award on the list. “Graduation Speaker.”

“Not bad,” Dane teased.

She sat down in the chair beside the computer and clicked the heading for post-graduate data.

A sullen blank screen met her request.

She waited but nothing appeared, and her chest began to feel hollow.

Dane must have been disappointed as well. “Try a more general search,” he urged.

“I’ve done that before,” she said. “Nothing comes up. He’s not famous like your father.”

“Try it here. Maybe there’s something else in the private data bank for the academy, something that’s not under student files.”

She followed his directions, doubt warring with hope as she produced a new search box. Again she typed in her father’s name. Again color lit the screen as the computer searched and searched and searched. Aerin glanced up at the glowing clock, 1:06 A.M. She turned back to the screen.