IF THE PREPARATORY track for the Imperial academies had been hard, the course load at the Royal Academy of Coruscant was brutal.

The first day’s easygoing friendliness had lasted exactly that long—one day, no more. Science, mathematics, piloting, physical training: every possible test challenged the students’ limits, every single time. Classes shrunk to about half their original size each year of the three-year program. Few would graduate, and the competition to be among those few remained fierce. Forget sleeping in, cutting class, or even whispering to other students during a lecture; if you wanted to stay in the academy, to become an officer someday, you could never, ever slack off. You had to push yourself to the limit every single day.

Two months into his first year, Thane decided he’d never had so much fun in his life.

“You must—be—kidding me,” Nash panted as the two of them ran their ninth lap around the Sky Loop, a track on the academy’s roof, high above most of the bustle of Coruscant. A cool cloud had settled around the building, enveloping them in pale fog. “Getting up at dawn—doing homework until midnight—exercising until you vomit? Fun?”

Thane grinned as he wiped sweat from his forehead. “Hell, yeah.”

“If this is how they have fun on Jelucan—I think I’ll vacation somewhere else.” They crossed the finish line and slowed down, loping to a stop. After Nash had leaned over with his hands on his knees and taken a few deep breaths, he continued, “Someday you’ve got to come with me to Alderaan. Trust me, we can show you a better time than this.”

Nash didn’t get it. He couldn’t. As the two of them walked toward the locker room, Thane tried to find the words. “Most of my life, my parents fought me on everything I wanted to do—even getting ready for this place. I had to sneak around to practice flying with Ciena. Can you believe that?”

“Seriously?” Nash shook his head in disbelief. His gray T-shirt had gone dark with sweat. “But Ciena Ree’s one of the best pilots here. You could’ve gone to twenty different worlds and never found anyone better to fly with.”

Was it worth explaining the divide between the Jelucani valley kindred and second-wave settlers? Thane decided to skip it. That was the kind of homeworld thinking the academy instructors frowned upon. “The point is this is the first time in my life when I’ve been able to go after something I want without anybody getting in my way.”

Nash sighed. “Sounds rough. On Alderaan, people are encouraged to learn and grow. All education is free, and people volunteer to teach various skills or crafts just for fun. Of course, someday the entire Empire will be like that.” Thane laughed, which made Nash frown. “What’s so funny?”

“You, thinking the whole galaxy can turn into starshine and flowers, all because of the Empire.”

“That’s what the Empire is for, isn’t it?” Nash tried to wipe sweat from his face with his shirt but, finding it even sweatier, grimaced and let it fall. “To take the best of every world, every culture, and spread it throughout every system?”

Thane shrugged. “That was what the Galactic Republic was about, too. At least, they probably thought so at the beginning. But things fall apart.”

“Don’t let too many people hear you say that, all right?” Nash glanced around them, but nobody was walking especially close. “They might think you’re disloyal. Whereas I, your friend, know that you’re merely a cynic.”

“Guilty as charged.” He’d learned his lesson the first time his parents sucked up in public to the same people they’d mocked in private: appearances were deceiving.

“Well, someday you’ll come to Alderaan with me and see for yourself how wonderful it is. Not even you could be cynical about my world.”

Thane could tell Nash was homesick, so he decided to take his roommate’s boasting about Alderaan at face value…for now. “It sounds like a good place. I’d like to go sometime.”

“Just wait, my friend. You’re going to love it.”

So Thane had a voyage to Alderaan to look forward to. By then every world he learned about had become a possible destination; what began as hunger simply to leave Jelucan had ripened into genuine wanderlust. A career in the Imperial Starfleet would allow him to stand in the deep snows of ice planets, to dive into the depthless oceans of a waterworld, to bask in the searing heat of a beach beneath a binary star system.

And he got to fly every day, sometimes all day. Sure, at that point the cadets mostly used simulators—but the academy’s simulators operated at a level of sophistication Thane had never seen before. (Plus, anything beat a crappy old V-171.) From the outside, the simulators were stark globes of dull metal; on the inside cadets found completely accurate cockpits, glowing control boards, and viewscreens that showed three-dimensional images of whatever starscape or planetary atmosphere they’d be training in that day.

The flying felt absolutely genuine, and the challenges presented were more immediate, terrifying, and plentiful than they were likely to encounter in real life—at least so far. One day Thane would try to bring a TIE fighter from deep space into atmosphere on a planet with gravity strong enough to crush a human. The next, he might maneuver a snowspeeder through a blizzard with winds that threatened to tear the metal plating from the hull. Some students tensed, panicking about their training scores or what it would be like when they had to do it in real life.

Thane actually felt more relaxed when he was piloting. He couldn’t wait to do it for real. Being at the controls of a vessel remained the purest kind of joy he knew.

His combination of enthusiasm and steadiness showed in his scores, too. The class rankings always had Thane in one of the very top slots for piloting—

—and one of the few names that ever came in above his was Ciena Ree’s.

They laughed about it together, congratulated each other for winning, and proudly declared they’d take back their title on the very next flight. Ciena had become his rival, but a friendly one. They saw each other more days than not, either in class or the main academy mess. Although the balance between maintaining their friendship and becoming “citizens of the Empire” was a delicate one, he felt they’d found it. While their meetings were often brief, they still got to hang out a couple of times a week—hours when they let the competition drop. Thane knew they’d always made each other better by striving to match the other’s skills; even at the academy, he and Ciena kept each other at the very top of their game.

“It’s ludicrous,” Ved Foslo said sniffily one night after Ciena had reclaimed the top spot. “She took your rank away from you. Why are you so thrilled the competition is making her a better pilot? You should be trying to knock her down, not pick her up.”

“There’s room for more than one of us in the graduating class,” Thane shot back as he sat at the edge of his bunk, polishing his uniform boots. “Besides, isn’t the goal to create the best Imperial officers possible? This way the Empire gets two great pilots, not just one.”

Ved shook his head. “Someday you’ll understand.”

From his place beneath the thin gray blanket of his bunk, Nash laughed. “Admit it, Ved. You’re only angry because Thane and Ciena always score higher than you! Despite your father being—what’s his rank again?”

“You know perfectly well,” Ved said. Written on his face was his displeasure at being regularly bested by not one but two kids from a hunk of rock in the Outer Rim. Without another word, he buttoned his pajamas to the neck, like he did every night. The guy never relaxed.

Otherwise, though, Ved wasn’t a terrible roommate. He was clean, he didn’t snore, and he didn’t mind explaining the finer points of military culture on Coruscant. Meanwhile, between room inspections, Nash threw his stuff everywhere in a truly spectacular display of messiness, but aside from a few arguments about why it was gross for Nash’s dirty socks to wind up on someone’s toothbrush, he and Thane were unshakable friends.

But the single best thing about Thane’s first months at the academy was seeing Dalven again.

For most of Thane’s life, he had been of an average height among his peers. Sometimes he’d looked at his statuesque mother, towering father, and lanky older brother in despair. There, too, he thought he’d be shortchanged. A few months before he entered the academy, however, his body started making up for lost time. His leg bones ached at night, and he didn’t seem able to eat enough to stop feeling hungry—and he needed new uniforms within three months of arriving.

As he stood in the sector dispensary, waiting for his turn to get larger boots, he heard a droid’s toneless voice: “Ensign Kyrell, H-J-two-nine-zero, packet ready.”

Thane frowned. He was still only a cadet, and his call number was AV547. Yet he was sure he’d heard the name Kyrell—

Then Dalven stepped out of the milling crowd of waiting officers, hastily retrieving a uniform packet. He seemed to be in a hurry to go, but when he turned and saw his younger brother standing there, he froze in place as if aghast.

“Dalven?” Thane didn’t know what to say. “Good to see you” would be a lie, for either of them.

“Well. So. You haven’t washed out yet. How astonishing.” With that, Dalven raised his chin, clearly ready to walk out—but Thane stood between him and the door, and he didn’t move.

“Ensign? You told us you’d made lieutenant.”

Dalven’s cheeks darkened. “I—well—the promotion is due to come through at any moment.”

Thane nodded. “Right. Sure. Which is why you’re picking up a new uniform, I guess….”

His voice trailed off as he saw the printed label on the bundle in Dalven’s arms: CLERICAL STAFF/THIRD CLASS.

“Good-bye.” Dalven hurried out, obviously determined to pretend Thane hadn’t seen anything.

Maybe it was cheap—even petty—but learning his overbearing older brother had been deemed better suited for desk chairs than Star Destroyers? It made Thane’s day.

That afternoon, as he headed up to the Sky Loop for an extra run, he imagined telling Ciena about the encounter. She loathed Dalven almost as much as he did; it almost seemed to Thane that he could already hear her laughter, see her dark eyes shining with satisfaction on his behalf.

Then he walked out onto the track to see several other cadets also working in additional exercise, Ciena among them.

She wore the same stuff as every other cadet: gray shirt, black shorts, and regulation shoes. Ciena was only one of a few dozen people out there, at the farthest edge of the track. Yet he knew her instantly—even across the length of the Sky Loop, even with the sun blazing down so brilliantly. Thane recognized the way she ran, the shape of her black curls braided at the nape of her neck….

She’s beautiful, he thought, a realization that startled him, then made him feel stupid. How could he not have noticed that about a girl he’d seen more days than not for the past eight years? But that was precisely it. Thane knew Ciena too well to see her with any objectivity. Her face was as familiar to him as his own in the mirror—or it had been, until now.

The evidence of his blindness disturbed him. It was as if Ciena had transformed somehow and ought to have told him first. Possibilities he’d refused to consider in the past now pushed their way into his mind, possibilities that were both exhilarating and frightening. He felt a shiver along his skin that he had always associated with flight, that exact moment when he left the earth and grabbed the sky—

Thane decided not to think about it any longer. Instead he would run, fast as he could, until he was worn-out and half-dazed. When he saw Ciena again, he would be able to talk to her just like he always had. Nothing had to change.