“This is a political concern.”
It’s personal,
she thought,
and you and I both know it.
“School records are my jurisdiction.” Her fingers dug into the edge of her desk. She was not about to let him usurp her control of Academy 7.
“And my son is
mine.
” The image from the transmitter blurred.
“Not while he’s attending my school.” She was not going to have this conversation again, after four hours of it the night before. As the image cleared, he opened his mouth, but she cut him off. “I’ll send you a scan of the trace, Gregory.” And she severed the connection.
Her hand clenched on the closed transmitter.
Overprotective parents: always doing their best to undermine their children’s education.
Already, she had wasted an hour that morning defusing the anger of Mrs. Entera, though how the woman had known about the lockdown had been a mystery until the admission that she had disregarded school rules by giving her daughter a personal transmitter.
Soon to be confiscated,
before the entire episode became a matter of public record. Fortunately, upon reflection, Mrs. Entera had been none too eager to have the news of the lockdown, and with it her own deceit, released to the press.
And then—Dr. Livinski shoved the office transmitter across her desk—there was Gregory Madousin. She knew he had a grudge against her, and she could not entirely blame him for it, but that was no reason to forfeit his son’s chance to attend the best school in the universe. Or to make the ridiculous claim that Dane had cheated on the A.E.E. Any parent that denied his or her child’s accomplishments in order to win an argument was appalling.
Though Dane had certainly done his best to prove his father’s point.
She sighed and pushed back her chair. She probably should have expelled the boy. But wouldn’t Gregory have loved that!
And then there was the girl. Somehow as soon as Zaniels had mentioned his aide, Dr. Livinski had known Aerin would be tangled in this mess. The decision to question her had proven effective, though not in the manner the principal had anticipated. She had already identified Dane as the guilty party and had fully expected the girl to turn him in, after explaining how the boy had achieved his feat. But it had been Dane who had confessed.
Expulsion was not the answer. Dr. Livinski eyed the now clear, still light on the transmitter. A thin smile creased her lips. Those two students were going to have to work off every ounce of stress they had manufactured for her this day. And maybe, just maybe, if they spent enough time together, they could terminate Gregory’s crusade against the Traitor
.
Though God help her when the general found out she was harboring Aerin Renning.
Chapter Nine
PUNISHMENT
CLEANING FUMES STUNG DANE’S EYES. DR. LIVINSKI’S view of punishment involved rags, metal pails, and ammonia water. A great deal of ammonia water. He wrapped his fingers around thin bucket handles and heaved the steaming pails up the narrow attic stairway.
“It’s on your left.” Xioxang’s voice called from below, stabbing Dane’s back. “Just before you reach the message room. No, your
left.
”
Dane squinted into the darkness, trying to spot an Entry button. If he had not been told, he would never have known there was anything up here except the message room. The weight on his hands cut into his fingers, and it was just dawning on him that he was not going to be able to push a button even if he found one, when Aerin, laden with a tower of rags, swept around him and slapped the wall. And what must have been the button. A harsh squealing filled the air.
Then dust erupted. Dane coughed, the movement causing hot water to spill over a pail rim, scalding his thigh. He swore under his breath.
Aerin stepped forward, a dim stream of light illuminating her profile.
He blinked, startled by the vision. Her hair glimmered past her shoulders. Though still straight and mousy brown, the long tresses were no longer limp. And the skinny arms and legs he had observed on the first morning of class had somehow lost their sharpness. The exacting pace of Academy 7 must have agreed with her. That or the physical demands of knocking him on his ass every day.
“Move on, Madousin,” came the harsh command from below.
Dane stumbled forward into a narrow room lined with dusty shelves. Grateful to relinquish both buckets onto the floorboards, he rubbed his aching fingers with his thumbs.
“Clean it up.” Xioxang suddenly stood in the doorway. “Livinski wants every piece of memorabilia to shine.
Memorabilia?
Dane squinted at the shelves. Sure enough, beneath the dust, cracked plaques fought for space with corroded trophies.
“What’s the matter, Madousin?” the teacher challenged. “Never learned to perform physical labor?”
Dane did not dignify that with a response. Two hours of labor every day for the foreseeable future were less a purgatory than a reprieve.
What he could not fathom was why hell had not come for him. His father would not have given up on pulling his son from the school. Nor would the General have changed his mind. The only explanation Dane could devise for why he was still here was that Dr. Livinski had blocked his father’s request for removal—that she had refused to let Dane leave because she wanted to inflict her own version of punishment. As the Council member in charge of education, she had that power. Still, Dane had never known anyone to—
Aerin interrupted his thoughts as she slid past him for a second time without speaking. She wrapped a rag around a bucket handle and snatched up the heavy pail with its steaming contents. Within seconds she had scaled the top of a ladder and begun scrubbing down trophies.
Xioxang raised an eyebrow. “At least one of you knows how to work.” He plucked a plaque off a nearby shelf and thrust it into Dane’s hands. “Get busy, Madousin. I’ll be back in two hours.”
Stomach clenched, Dane remained motionless, staring at the dingy photo on the old award. Then, discarding the plaque, he squared his shoulders and peered up at the figure balanced on the ladder. He might not mind this punishment, but the mandate that Aerin had received it as well bit into his conscience.
She did not deserve to be here. The moment when the principal had asked her who was to blame came back to him. Aerin must have known he was guilty. He had left a trail like a blazing meteor. But she had not turned him in, and, in the process, she had obliterated his whole concept of bravery.
“Listen—” His voice scraped over the word. What could he tell her? That he’d let his desire for revenge take precedence over everything else, including her reputation. Of course, he had never meant to involve her, but he might have realized the possibility if he had taken the time to think. After his father’s accusation, nothing else had entered Dane’s mind. He couldn’t tell her that. Or explain. Could manage nothing more than the wholly inadequate, “I’m sorry.”
The only response was the unforgiving sound of water dripping into a bucket.
For Aerin, the first five weeks of work crew were defined by silence. She intended to punish Dane. For dragging her into his stupid prank, for risking her future, and for failing even to attempt an explanation. His stilted apology in the trophy room that first day had displayed little more than a vague regret. He had no idea of the horror she had experienced in that empty basement room or what he had almost cost her. And she could not tell him. So she punished him, refusing to speak to him outside of class.
Back on Vizhan, silence had been her refuge, a place she could go where no one could defeat her, but something had changed. Her involvement in the
crime,
as the other students now referred to the tech lab incident, had placed her squarely at the center of the school’s gossip mill. The other students all watched her now with wary stares. Yvonne and her close-knit clique stepped off paths and curved around Aerin in giant semicircles. At meals, they convinced others to avoid her table. The barrier Aerin had built to protect herself had expanded beyond her control, and the whispers and smothered laughter hurt.
It took her a week to admit that she cared.
It took another four before she realized that punishing Dane was making matters worse. The two hours she spent every day beside him—scrubbing, dusting, painting, pruning, and doing three times the amount of work he accomplished—had become sheer torture. Her refusal to speak seemed not to disturb him at all. Or to dissuade him from talking. On and on, he yammered, complaining about everything: the floor was too hard, the paint too thin, the pruning scissors too rusted. He
never
stopped.
Still, she clung to the security of silence. Until the day Xioxang ordered Dane and Aerin to wash the outer windows of the Great Hall. Buckets in hand, they headed with caution around the front of the building toward the south side. Usually this section of the lawn cleared out after classes, but with fall exams looming, the shooting hours for upper class-men had been lengthened. Targets scattered the field, and a number of older students gathered nearby, choosing lasers.
The slight breeze turned to frost in Aerin’s chest as she spotted the gleaming compact firearms. Every nerve in her body reacted to those weapons, and the barrels that had tracked her every move in the fields on Vizhan.
In front of her, a boy raised his laser as if it were part of his hand, aimed at a target, and fired.
Pow!
The sound pierced Aerin’s flesh. She jumped.
Someone touched her elbow, and she jerked away, swinging an instinctive backhand.
Dane dodged, dropping his bucket and sending her a strange look. Then he shrugged as if giving up on understanding her and proceeded forward.
Aerin followed him, pinning her gaze between his shoulder blades. She tried to block out the sound of the shots as she made her way along the edge of the practice field.
Her focus worked, perhaps too well, for when Dane stopped and she allowed herself to look elsewhere, the massive structure overhead took her by surprise. She felt her jaw drop as she gazed up at the scaffolding of thin boards and rusted pipes stretching along the building’s stone side like an unwanted fungus.
Her shocked stare must have given away her apprehension.
Dane took another step, clutched one of the corner poles, and gave it a shake. A shower of paint and dirt chips drifted down.
Lines furrowed his brow. “Ludicrous,” he muttered, then ignoring both his own assessment and the built-in ladder, he wrapped his hands around the pole and began to scale it. He literally pulled his body thirty feet in the air, then dropped catlike onto the highest platform. “I suppose if we die,” he called down, “we won’t have to finish washing the windows.”
Aerin felt a certain amount of envy. Dane’s coolness in the face of danger put her own attempts at subterfuge to shame. Her glint of admiration quickly faded, though, when she noticed he did not have his bucket.
She turned and peered back around the corner. The old metal pail waited, abandoned, on the far side of the practice field.
Pow! Pow! Pow!
A new hail of laser shots fired.
Aerin gripped the pole at her side.
Forget the extra water. Mine is enough.
She was shaking.
“Afraid of heights?” The question came from above. Dane lay on his stomach, his chest and shoulders hanging over the platform’s edge.
Idiot.
She gathered her self-control, hefted her own bucket, and began climbing the ladder as quickly as possible. Reaching the top, she heaved her pail onto the platform with a resounding thud.
“Watch it!” Dane warned, then added, “You might want to stay on the sides. The center seems weak.”
She took the creaking of the wood as confirmation and set to work without a word. All five windows at this level were covered with thick dirt. It washed off, but not without arm and shoulder muscle.
Dipping a rag into the same bucket, Dane also began to scrub, launching into a string of complaints against the Allied government for allowing the school to fall into such neglect. “Education, the backbone of the Alliance, my ass,” he grumbled, mocking the line Aerin had first heard the captain of the
Envoy
say and since learned was a popular political quote. “If the government really valued education, do you think we’d be risking our lives to wash a few windows?”
Dane was nothing if not dramatic, she thought.
“Honestly,” he continued, “if they’d redirect half the funds wasted on Wyan-Ot, none of the academies would have to choose between good teachers and a cleaning staff.” He plunged his rag into the bucket and splashed the precious water over the platform.
Speaking of waste.
Aerin glared at Dane. How could he complain about funding while he stood before her dressed from head to toe in his free school uniform?
She tried to tune him out, but the laser fire from below kept shredding her concentration, dragging her where she did not want to go, into memories she did not want to have, had never wanted to have, and had never truly managed to banish: the child she had seen shot for dropping a sack of grain, the woman who had outworked men half her age and been killed on her seventieth birthday, the guard who had pressed the barrel of his own laser to Aerin’s head and ordered her to say when.
She was cold. The breeze up here was stronger than on the ground, and the whistling along the pipes evoked that of distant screams. Her bare hands were chilled, and though she dipped them back in the warm water, they were shaking.
And then a volley of laser fire sent her entire body into a spasm.
“Damn it!” Dane shouted, his voice jerking her into the present. Water covered the platform and streamed off through the cracks.
Dimly, Aerin noted the fallen pail. She must have knocked it over. Embarrassment surged through her body, then exploded in a defensive attack. “Well, go retrieve
your
bucket!” she snapped.