8

Two weeks into training, Hwa Young fought to stay awake in a class that a less diligent student might have classified as stultifying and she chose to categorize as thorough. She would have preferred Commander Ye Jun as an instructor, but if she’d learned one thing during her time shipboard, it was that warrant officers and noncoms like Eun did the less prestigious work of drilling the candidates, while actual officers busied themselves with loftier affairs.

Eun was lecturing them about the effects of aether poisoning, something she’d already lived through. Hwa Young knew it wasn’t the aether itself that killed you but the delusional thinking that it induced, which caused you to do something stupid and fatal.

If the Imperials hadn’t rescued me before the aether fried my brain—

But that had been six years ago, and she was no longer a frightened child hiding in the reeds.

As she scribbled telegraphic notes into her slate, she peered at the other students. Bae, right ahead of her, showed every appearance of being engrossed by the material. Geum, who had taken the seat to Hwa Young’s right, was doodling what looked like—she craned her head to verify that her friend was drawing dragons and swords. Well, if zie didn’t want to take the opportunity seriously, that was on zir. She’d much rather have Geum for a fellow pilot than Bae, though. As for Seong Su, his lips moved as he took notes, as though he were repeating everything to himself to commit it to memory.

Hwa Young had spent the classes studying the candidates as much as she did the material that Eun or the other instructors presented. Ho Sook, a thin, studious girl who never met anyone’s eyes. Chin Hae, who sneered at everyone who dared to talk to zir. Hwa Young didn’t consider either of them serious threats to her own candidacy.

Of the others, Hwa Young was most worried about Dong Yul, whose brashness Eun favored, and Hak Kun, a narrow-faced person who answered questions almost as quickly as Bae or Hwa Young herself. Dong Yul had been homeschooled, some kind of special dispensation from the planetary governor; Hwa Young hadn’t even realized that was possible. Hak Kun had attended a school in a city to the south of Forsythia. Both of them were eighteen, two years older than everyone from her class. An icicle spike of resentment stabbed Hwa Young’s heart every time one of them outperformed her.

It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to let anything stand between me and a lancer.

“All right,” Eun announced after a gruesome anecdote about someone who had injured herself with a welding tool under the influence of aether sickness. “I’m tired of hearing myself talking about this stuff. I’m sure you are too.” He grinned toothily, daring them to share in the joke. No one responded except Seong Su, who did so with his usual sunny smile. “Closing prayer, and then hand-to-hand.”

Seong Su had a question for once. “Sir, isn’t it unlikely we’re gonna end up pummeling clanners with our fists? If we’re in lancers?”

Eun heaved a sigh. “For the last time, Candidate, I’m not ‘sir.’ That’s for officers.” Notably, he failed to answer the question.

“Yes, sir.” Seong Su’s expression was bland but friendly and didn’t reveal whether he was being obtuse on purpose.

Hwa Young sometimes wondered how much in the way of brains lurked behind that easygoing exterior. Of all the candidates, he was the only one everyone got along with. Surely that couldn’t be the deciding criterion—except she reminded herself that all the pilots would ultimately have to work together. Maybe she would do better to emulate Seong Su after all.

Eun turned his attention to the closing prayer. It was the same as the one they’d observed at the boarding school: several lines of archaic Hangeul that Hwa Young didn’t understand, followed by the Imperial credo—Trust the Empress. Move at her will. Act as her hands. Then a bow to the head of the room, which stood in for the direction of the crownworld from which the Empress reigned.

She remembered her second day in the orphanage where the Imperials had dumped her, and where she had worked so hard to escape via scholarship. Hwa Young had made the mistake of asking why they recited meaningless words, instead of translating the prayer into modern Hangeul. Words that people could understand without studying linguistics. The orphanage director had told her to have more respect for history—apparently the ancient words were an oath of fealty from Old Hangeul—and locked her in isolation for a full week for her insolence. Hwa Young hadn’t made that mistake again, and she wasn’t about to repeat it now.

As much as she chafed at the customs, Hwa Young’s shoulders sagged in relief as an aura of rightness—if not exactly peace—spread through the classroom. She luxuriated in the definite downward pull of gravity.

Geum lingered after Eun dismissed them. The class had a ten-minute break before hand-to-hand, which Hwa Young now recognized as a luxury. “Hey,” Geum whispered. “I got something to show you.”

Hwa Young didn’t want to be late to class, but she owed Geum. Every time she spotted the livid scar that disfigured the shaved portion of zir head, guilt stabbed her. “Coming.”

To her surprise, Geum only took her around the corner, not far from where they were supposed to go for training. Zie called up a screen on zir slate with a few expert gestures. “It required some skullduggery, but I found out where they took all the adults.”

Hwa Young’s eyebrows rose. “Your fathers.” A knot in her stomach loosened.

Geum’s voice became even more hushed. Hwa Young had to lean close to discern zir words. “This stuff is all encrypted, high-end stuff. They really want to keep it secret. The authorities evacuated about four thousand refugees from Serpentine. Everyone over twenty got hustled aboard the Sonamu.” Pine tree. “It’s a Chollima-class colony ship accompanying the Eleventh Fleet.”

Hwa Young frowned. “Lack of space in the rest of the fleet?” That didn’t make sense. She didn’t know what the Maehwa’s carrying capacity was, but families could have fit into the empty conference rooms and unused cabins.

“I tried asking what they did with all the adults. No one’s talking. I said I wanted to send a message to my fathers and they shooed me away like I was a fly. I assume if they have a colony ship, it has to do with repopulation or something. So why all the secrecy?”

“I don’t know,” Hwa Young admitted. “Younger people make better pilot candidates, but surely there are other jobs that adults would do better. Engineering and that kind of thing.”

“I’ll keep digging, but I think I’ve already raised some red flags. I don’t want them to cut off my access to the ship’s computers.” Geum straightened. “Come on, let’s get to class.”

---

Hwa Young’s days dissolved into a blur of lectures and exercises. She became so intimately familiar with her assigned spacesuit and its quirks that she could have put it on in her sleep. That was probably the point.

I will be fighting clanners, she thought blankly in the stark cold moments before reveille, while Seong Su snored like a hibernating bear and Eun tossed and turned, calling out incoherent names. She told herself it didn’t matter. That life belonged to a girl who had died amid Carnelian’s broken reeds. She cocooned herself in meditations in which a lancer’s cockpit welcomed her, the soothing white and blue and silver lights of her cherished fantasy.

Besides, her family had died. It wasn’t as though she’d be facing off against someone she knew.

Died at the hands of the lancers came the whisper again and again, until she learned to harden herself against it. Hwa Young prayed more diligently for the Empress’s favor. It was the first thing she did upon waking, and the last thing she did at night. She fixed in her memory the image of Captain Ga Ram’s face, the kindness zie had shown an orphan six years ago.

The Empress keeps all her children safe. You are one of her children now.

Even Bae remarked on her piety. Granted, the remarks weren’t kind—“Who does she think she’s fooling?” were Bae’s exact words, spoken in passing to Ha Yoon—but Hwa Young was cynically amused to have made an impression.

The one place Hwa Young felt at home, amid the tumult of training and the cold discomfort of the Maehwa, was the firing range. Here she excelled, beating the others to emerge as the most accurate shot among the candidates. If it had been up to her, she would have spent all her rec time here, perfecting her aim. Surely, she reasoned, it was preferable to be the undisputed best at one specialty rather than middling-good at a number of them.

The only thing that prevented Hwa Young from focusing obsessively on marksmanship, whether with flare pistols or laser rifles, was Geum. Time and again she bit back her guilty resentment when zie invited her to play video games with zir, or watch the fantasy holo shows zie enjoyed so much. She felt even guiltier when Geum hung out with some of the technicians instead, or made contact with the shadowy black market in pursuit of zir favorite snacks, freeing her to do what she wanted—to be alone.

When they did hang out, Geum was always showing off zir latest hack, like tunneling past the Maehwa’s cybersecurity defenses. Zie even offered to show her the file that Eun kept on her, but Hwa Young was alarmed at the risk of getting caught and demurred. The only computer systems Geum couldn’t penetrate, ironically, were the lancers’.

They’d snatched a few moments together in a corner of the rec room, where Seong Su was patiently wrestling everyone who challenged him and looking sheepish every time he won. (Hwa Young had known better than to challenge him.) Geum looked up from zir slate with its animated prancing dragons, lips pursed. “Hey, you look stressed,” zie said. “Anything you want to talk about?”

I don’t know what I’ll do if I fail, Hwa Young almost said. She couldn’t bear the thought of being dismissed as useless. Unworthy the way Bae implied, just because she didn’t come from a prestigious family. If she didn’t secure a position as a pilot, she had nothing to look forward to but a dreary life as a refugee, toiling at whatever menial chores the authorities needed warm bodies for.

Hwa Young couldn’t bring herself to voice any of this, but Geum, always sensitive to others’ moods, patted her shoulder. “The stress is getting to all of us.”

Except you, she thought, envious. Still, wasn’t it good that someone she cared about had avoided becoming a nervous wreck? “You seem like you’re doing all right?”

“There’s so much to learn aboard this ship,” Geum said, eyes rapturously bright. “I would never have gotten close to military security systems before. Not in Forsythia City. Every time I dive into the computers, I find something new. Like the fact that one of the commodores keeps a file of dirty jokes, or that Admiral Chin is on the leaderboard for Starfighter Shoutout Extravaganza 2 under a pseudonym. One of these days I’m going to knock her off.”

The corners of Hwa Young’s mouth twitched. “I have no idea how you have time for video games.” Or how the admiral did, for that matter. She lowered her voice. “Aren’t you afraid of what will happen if you…”

“If a lancer doesn’t choose me?” Geum shrugged. “They might pick me as a technician or engineer. The techs are a friendly bunch. They say the best ones are former lancer candidates, you know.”

Huh. “But you’d rather be a pilot, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure.” Geum patted her shoulder again. “We’ll both make it. Bae will be sorry when she’s stuck crawling through ventilation ducts to do maintenance or greasing the gun mounts.” Strangely, Geum sounded wistful about the prospect.

Hwa Young checked the time. “We’d better get moving. Come on.”

It would be nice if she could be top of the class at everything, Hwa Young thought when Bae scored highest yet again on the next drill, a painstaking memory game. Everyone was given the same view of a starscape to study for one minute. Then Eun blasted terrible music videos at them for five minutes—at least, Hwa Young was convinced that he picked the ones with caterwauling and flashing lights specifically to torture them—before projecting a nearly identical starscape and challenging them to spot the differences.

Hwa Young came in fourth on this exercise, behind Bae, Hak Kun, and Geum. Resentment bit her heart anew, and she scolded herself for it. Didn’t she want Geum to become a pilot, too? Besides, while she had spent her childhood on Carnelian, learning to read the spoor of moon-rabbits in the grasses, to hear her prey’s wanderings in the wind’s cryptic utterances, Geum had excellent visual memory and focus honed by years of playing zir beloved games. She should be happy for her friend.

Three more classes followed, including a grueling session of hand-to-hand for which they wore padded armor. Hwa Young was paired with Bae again, since they had the same approximate height and build—though Bae was a half head taller, because of course she was.

As the two of them squared off on the training mat, Bae eyed Hwa Young as though she posed a threat, which was absurd. What did Bae, of all people, have to fear? “It’s touching to see you try so hard,” Bae said, her voice quiet enough that Eun, on the other side of the room correcting Ha Yoon’s awkward stance, couldn’t overhear her.

Hwa Young had learned the hard way that shooting back retorts never paid off. Bae had a knack for snappy comebacks. Moreover, all the other candidates deferred to her, whether out of habit or because they’d quickly determined that she was the dominant contender. Hwa Young kept her face as blank as winter ice.

This only infuriated Bae. “Have it your way,” she sniffed.

The moment Eun signaled that they should begin, Bae struck. She moved like wind and thunder, unpredictable yet precise. Hwa Young was hard pressed to keep up with her. Blows landed again and again on the pressure points that Eun had drilled into them. Only the armor saved Hwa Young from being disabled.

I have faced worse, Hwa Young thought as she spun and dodged, returning blow for blow. I have survived worse. Bae might have a fighter’s reflexes and instincts, but the inner core of her was soft. Cosseted. Hwa Young wasn’t going to lose to some rich kid who’d had every advantage handed to her.

Hwa Young glimpsed an opening. Committed to it. No room for hesitation, no time for doubt.

Geum, who’d already finished zir sparring match, called out encouragement. A rich kid like Geum, murmured a discontented voice in the hollows of Hwa Young’s mind. Except she didn’t want to think of Geum like that. Not when zie was such a loyal friend.

It was a fatal distraction.

Bae kicked Hwa Young on the chin. Hwa Young’s head snapped back and she staggered. Normally she’d have seen a high kick like that coming. She’d let herself lose her concentration. Not just because of Geum, but because Bae had allowed her to see that opening. A feint that had turned into a real attack.

Within a second it was over. Bae flipped Hwa Young over. Hwa Young landed hard, air whooshing out of her. Bae knelt over her, pinning her arms. She leaned in close and whispered into Hwa Young’s ear, her breath hot and vicious: “You’ll never be good enough.”

Hwa Young’s eyes stung as she stared up at the other girl, a single thought echoing over and over in her head: What if she’s right?