Act I, The RecordChapter 2
Chapter 2: After Midnight
Selrick Academy, the night of Fanny’s first day.
Second place for the first time. Layla works in secret through the night, then races Fanny for drones.
Layla heard every word through the closing doors. She did not turn around.
Her lab was an abandoned classroom she had taken against the rules. Three black drones rose to meet her, each with an angry face she had drawn on in cyan marker.
A message from home: “Second is still wonderful, darling! You’re the hope of this family.” Her family had been scientists for generations. She left it unanswered.
Behind spare capacitors on the top shelf stood her gold FIRST PLACE trophy. She turned it to face the wall.
Then she worked on the cannon she had built. Low charge shot true. Full charge pulled left, a hand’s width at two hundred meters. She had rebuilt barrel and sight twice. The fault was somewhere in how the power came up.
ERROR, said the console in red: one more line in a log that went back months.
Last, she checked the seedling under its glass dome, the only thing there she had not built.
After midnight she slipped into the VR Battlefield and signed the night log. Her name filled the page, at lunch hours and late nights, back to her first year.
Beside every line someone had made a small stylus tick, the same slant each time. The system ticks everything, she assumed. She had never checked.
At home, talent had been enough. At the Academy the courses got hard. So she trained in secret, and told everyone the exams were easy.
She ran Fanny’s assessment five times, leaving the simulated man under his sign. Her best was 3:40. Fanny’s record read 3:39, CIVILIAN RECOVERED, +0:11.
Without him, she did it in 3:28, Layla thought. At two in the morning, she gave up.
Three mornings running, at a quarter past five, Layla lay on the dark gallery above the drill hall. Her drone filmed Fanny.
Fanny drilled alone in the hall’s one narrow doorway, blades out. Anything that came at her there had to take turns.
That’s the alley thing? It was so simple it made her angry.
On the third morning, Fanny turned toward the gallery. Layla pressed her face to the floor. The drone did not. It rose over the rail to keep Fanny in frame.
“Who’s there?! Phew, you startled me.” Fanny laughed and told the drone kindly that it must be lost.
Layla called it home with two taps.
In training, she needled Fanny at every turn. She made everything a race, too.
“Careful,” she said on the climbing wall. “Someone up there might need carrying.”
“I’ll look,” said Fanny. She reached the top first, found nobody, and reported it. She did not seem to know it had been a race.
On the fourth day they reached the drill hall door together. Layla made sure she went through first. Fanny caught up. “Layla! Let’s train together.”
Layla gave her the smile she kept for teachers. “Train together? Sorry, let’s do it another time.”
At the week’s end came a test match in the white training corridor. It was long and narrow, with lockers down both walls and a dark doorway at the far end. Out of that doorway came the practice drones: round and blue, with a glowing arrow for a face. They flew at you and burst when hit.
Over each girl’s head floated a counter of the drones she had destroyed. The swarm was shared. Every drone Fanny took was one Layla could not. Weapons were set to training power, enough to burst a drone and bruise a girl.
At the start line Layla stood half a step ahead. Fanny stepped level without noticing. Layla moved up again.
“I’m ready. The test is about to start.”
“It’s just a test match! There’s no way I’d be nervous.”
“I didn’t ask,” said Fanny.
The drones came in waves, and Fanny met them in the air. Flying was banned on school grounds, except in this hall. She wore her suit: white armor, and at her hips a rig of two long cases like folded wings. Each case held a blade. Thrusters in them lifted her.
Her blades lit cyan, and every drone they touched burst. By the last wave her counter read 0150. Then 0151. Fanny smiled over her blade.
Then she was gone. She shot down the corridor upside down. Two thin shining cables ran from her rig to the ceiling and pulled her up. She spun in the air, both blades out, and the drones around her burst.
Layla’s counter read 0148. She shot the next drone through the middle: 0149. Two behind. She narrowed her eyes at Fanny’s number and did the sum.
The drones came out of the far doorway one behind another. A narrow place, one line: the alley thing, turned around. One full charge down that line would take the whole row.
Fanny stood just left of that line, blades low. Room enough, thought Layla.
She swung the cannon up. It was as tall as she was, white with a teal strip. The cyan cells on its stock filled one by one, and lightning crawled around the muzzle.
“You can’t escape my magic gun!”
The shot pulled left. It passed Fanny’s shoulder by a hand’s width and caught only one drone at the edge of the row. 0150. The rest flew on.
Fanny laughed. “That’s the alley thing! So you did hear me!”
“Hear what?”
Fanny launched at the row herself. Her rig spread open like wings. She spun through the drones, and they burst around her in orange sparks.
She rose to the ceiling. The drones that climbed after her met her blades.
Layla aimed again, low charge this time, and took one: 0151. Then she ran along the lockers and spun as the rest flew past her.
From the ceiling Fanny swept down to the floor. She cut two drones on the way and a big one at the bottom. 0157.
Layla tossed her cannon up, caught it one-handed and planted it with a crack of light. If I can’t win the count, I’ll win the look.
She walked to the middle of the corridor, one fist tight at her chest. Then she lifted the cannon over her head and brought it down level across her body.
The swarm ran out. Fanny’s counter stopped at 0157. Layla’s stopped at 0151.
Fanny landed beside her, pink in the face and grinning. “Training is fun.”
Layla walked out first, before her hands could shake. In the empty corridor they shook anyway. She gripped the strap in both fists and waited.
It took a long time. When her hands were still, she said it to the empty corridor. “I’m going to take back first place!”
At the window by the corridor’s end she stopped. Fanny was already out on the grass behind the hall. She lay alone in the sun as if no counter had ever existed. Layla turned away.
Fanny lay on her back in the grass. The sun was warm on her face. Birds crossed high over her, and their shadows slid across the field.
She opened her eyes and reached one hand up at the sky, fingers spread.
Her number had already gone out of her head. What stayed was the shot down the line of drones. She used the alley thing, thought Fanny. She was listening after all.
“Another time,” Layla had said at the drill hall door. Fanny had taken it as a promise. Later, then. But yes.
With the Shield there had always been somebody to drill with. Here the class had been together since first year, and she had come two years late. She drilled alone at a quarter past five. Nobody came. Only a lost drone, once.
The sun went down behind the hall, and the grass went cold under her back. Overhead the dome turned to pale light against the dark. Past it, faint, came the first stars.
Her arm ached. She kept her hand up anyway, fingers spread against the light.
“Someday, the day will come when I can leave Terrinia freely.”
When the dome’s light was the only light left, she got up, brushed the grass from her back and went in to oil her blades.