Her voice had a husky, caddish growl to it. If she wasn't already inebriated, she was the type that loosened their demeanor in advance of drinking.
"...Why would you drop out?" Io asked, her stomach turning as she hunched over the kitchenette table. She didn't know why it made her feel this way, but it felt like she couldn't escape it. The buzz of the hydroponics pumps seemed to expand to a deafening wave.
"A knight must have a master," Remy said. "This much I know." She leaned back serenely and peered up at the glowing tray of bean sprouts. "You'll grow into it!" She smiled. The room smelled like soil.
Io sighed. "I messed up, Remy. Fredda lost all of her work and we'll never come back."
"Well, maybe she would have reservations, but as for myself—I am not one of those how you say," Remy glanced left and right, making sure there weren't any scholars around, "binoclardes. Nobody died and we got what we came for—where are you going, mec?"
A shrill voice floated over from the common room, past the end of the pods. Io stood and peered round the corner of the kitchenette. Could it really be her?
Between the two pipe coffee tables out front, she saw Fredda crossing her legs over a yellow suitcase smoothed flat with amulets, flicking her Athame open and shut with an practiced snap of the wrist. The blade glinted off her round glasses in white flashes.
"You know," she looked up at Ema, deadpan, "this kid literally took a bullet for me, so if she wants to kill you then I'll at least help stuff your limbs down the toilet or something."
"You... You kinda gotta ask if I deserve it, though. Wouldn't I be soooo much more fun alive?" Ema crooned, reaching a hand out towards the suitcase's owner.
"Do NOT touch me!" Mica stamped her feet and shoved the bigger girl into a short stumble. "Ground rules: we do NOT talk outside of the dorm, we sit for dinner and leave for lessons at least 5 minutes apart—hey, are you even listening?!"
"God, you're tiny..." Ema flatted her hand over the top of Mica's fringe, sizing her up. "I guess every class needs a mascot. Me, I'd have gone with a dog, but I reckon a child is fine too."
Mica turned completely red and blew into her cheeks at the insult, her golden pigtails bristling like a cat's fur. But she gasped and shielded herself when yet another touchy person rushed towards her.
"Mica, you're alive!" Io yelled, clutching the girl to her chest. She thought she'd never see Mica again—she felt so fragile. The huge patch of gauze on her ear made Io's heart break; it looked like a grievous injury on such a small figure.
"Of... Of course I am, dummy," Mica mumbled, wriggling uncomfortably in Io's arms. "I don't want people to see us together either."
Io hugged her tighter. "Why do you care so much what people think?"
"B... Because it's important. Why do care so much about me?"
"Because you keep letting people push you around and it's like watching a house burn down."
Mica clicked her tongue. "I told you, I came here to—"
"Fuuuck, chill out," Ema groaned, palming her forehead. There was a sense that she had lost her patience at being tacitly smeared and couldn't help but defend the dignity of the downtrodden. "Who do you think respects that kind of ass-kissing? Look where going with the flow got you already."
Mica's eyes widened. She ducked under both of Io's arms and speared Ema with a fury that couldn't possibly have fit in her body. "God, you're such a dick!"
Apropos of nothing, she shoved Fredda off the suitcase and onto her butt before whipping the container upright and storming off towards the dorms.
Fredda shrugged and picked her glasses back onto her face. With everyone having been pushed at least once, it felt like a whirlwind had just barreled through the class.
"You know, Ema..." Io was the first to break the silence. "You can be kind of insensitive sometimes?"
Ema sulked, shredding her fingers through her hair. "Ugh, look who's talking...!"
A distant crash made both of them jump and wince. It could only be Remy's wheelchair falling over.
The way to the Student Council took her past a snaking path of dimmed hallways, alongside more and more unfamiliar faces the closer she got.
Io steadied her breath; she'd combed her hair and put on Patricia's nice jacket and daubed her neck with a little scent she'd nicked from her father. She grasped the little paper notebook that Fredda had spare for her. The blank pages shouted at her; she hadn't used a pen long enough to have an idea of what a class representative's notebook should look like, so she'd just scrawled the questions she'd gathered all on the first page.
That was enough, wasn't it? They shouldn't expect more of her, really.
The problem was the impending sense of doom.
It wasn't quite the crowd in front of the gilded entrance, nor the ghastly portrait of the Emperor or the mountain of foam plugging in a massive hole on the way here. Rather, something about this part of the ship felt familiar in a way that made her skin crawl. But it couldn't be, could it? Was it the unpowered section again?
When she finally slipped past some of the girls and into the rotunda, the bottom fell out of her soul. Something in the back of her mind had always acknowledged the possibility—after all, the Academy and the Zebulon were something like the same class—but it came crashing down that the meeting would take place in the very same Council of the Seven.
The fire. The heat on her neck.
It's okay, Io told herself, the crowd loosening around her shoulders as more and more students found their seats. She was over it. That was a long time ago.
It was not okay.
Io's legs fell out from beneath her and she dropped to her knees. Students flowed past her like a rock in the river. She could hardly tell if they were looking at her through her tears. Please don't look.
A familiar blue cape swept though the space and blocked out the lamps around the glass cupola. Diane Levenger squatted down, her boyish mop ringed by artificial light, and held out her hand. It was impossible to make out her expression in the water.
Io swatted it away. Don't you touch me. You don't really care.
She felt a pair of skinny arms scoop around her sides and lift her. She couldn't remain on the floor if she tried, so strong was the push. A gamine girl with a small crown circled to her front and hugged her, smelling of a rounded blackberry cologne.
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Vineta's golden eyes peered just beyond Io's face, took everything in, crossed slightly over as she processed it. It was almost mechanical, the processing of a computer. I shouldn't trust anything she says. I shouldn't.
"Don't look at me," Io sniffled. "Don't see."
"I'm not looking." Vineta spoke like she was defusing a bomb. "I'm not going to look at your eyes. Look ahead. Into my shoulder. Come on. I can't see you."
"T...They're up there." Up on the benches. Five or six tiers of students. She'd told someone off for caring what they thought, but she was coming apart.
"Yeah, they're looking." Vineta whispered. "Even roaches can climb the shelves, get on top of you. Imagine what they're doing up there, where you can't see, chittering away. But they're still insects. You're scared of bugs because you can't stand to see filth."
The girl held her hand in cold, powerful fingers. "Kill them. Kill Diane again. Imagine killing me. Take my heart in your hand. See, it's all over you..."
Vineta hugged her again, applying, releasing a pressure that reminded Io of her first mother. When she'd run from botany class crying because she'd dropped a pot, a hug so strong she couldn't peel away. Nobody else knew to do this.
"You've got a Torch, you're one of us while you're in this room. Isn't that right, Diane? Francesca?"
Diane nodded begrudgingly, her arms crossed over her chest. "Y... Yeah. I suppose."
Chess hovered nearby, changed from the transparent NBC cover to the formal uniform of House Vesta, a quilted bodysuit with the golden Torch. Her tong-spiraled hair framed a worried look.
Vineta let go.
"Stay between us," she said. "Two of you, take the sides. Don't look at her. Come on. Have a tissue."
"What did your mates want you to raise to these roaches. Remember. Remember." She clapped both Io's shoulders, guided her up the steps to the benches. "That's what's important."
"T... Thank you." Io's breathing was still as she sat between the three girls.
"I'm sorry. You... reminded me of myself," Vineta said, not looking, not judging. "That's what my brother would have done for me—I could only guess it would help."
Io wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked over the benches.
There were only 26 class representatives, but in a normal year where the cohort had been loaded with sophomores and seniors, the seats nearest the stand would have had to hold 104. Instead, the seniors' benches sat empty, leaving a gap between the first-years and the rubberneckers above. With no defined seats, the classes instead arranged themselves by House allegiance. Io was deep in the Vestan quarter, flanked by the few she knew by name.
President Lin took the stand and began to work through the agenda, spreading her dog-eared textbook on the dais.
"At solar dawn today, we received a recorded ultimatum from the Federalists' leader. Among other things, it should answer any questions about why you cannot speak to your families."
Lin touched her halo and projected the video onto a set of screens at the edge of the rotunda. The air was tense as the lights in the council dimmed.
What would the person look like who'd commanded the crude but vicious attack on the Tyumen waystation? Io felt nauseous at the idea that a person had given the order to hunt down her classmates. She pictured a bearded face, or someone sort of sneering like Klaus Schwartz had been.
The screen faded onto a white void, where a young boy in a ripstop tunic waved his hands at the camera. His thin shoulders didn't place him older than 15.
"Hello all!" the boy waved. "My name is Noa Pan, leader of the New Huang Federation! Wowie!"
"You girls may have been wondering why it's been sooo hard to contact your parents!"
He stepped aside to reveal a starmap: hundreds of inhabited systems connected by a webwork of jump threads. A few particularly important threads had been marked with red 'X's.
"This is because strategic choke points in Xiaguan, Auriga and Saggitarius have already agreed to the Federation's faster-than-light communications blockade!" His fingers covered his mouth conspiratorially. "The rest of these systems are scabs, who will be dealt with appropriately ?"
"Of course you might be thinking: Surely, the Imperial Navy will save lil' ol' me, right? Well, they're a little occupied right now: With the help of our kind benefactors, we're currently laying siege to King's Seat!"
He ducked to reveal a drone video set against the black of space.
The footage zoomed out from the pitted bulk of a rotting Magnanimity-class and panned over what appeared at first to be a small escort of mismatched frigates in various colors. But it just kept going, hundreds upon hundreds of malformed capital ships edging into frame until it became impossible to count them all, arrayed into a wall that might've stretched for hundreds of li.
"Woaaahhh... Looks like the whoooole neighbourhood is here!" The boy looked over his shoulder and pursed his lips in mock-astonishment. "Guess you guys had better surrender that Spine quick, huh?"
"Bye-bye!" He waved with a grin.
Their insignia faded in: the ideograms for 'NEW HUANG FEDERATION' girded in a circle of stick figures holding hands, all clearly drawn in crayon. 'Let's learn to share!'
Io heard clapping from the bench behind her.
"I say, man. Shitting brilliant graphic design." Vineta alone clapped her little hands, sitting boyishly on the bench with her legs open. Even her House mates thought this was insensitive, so she played it off and pretended to have been adjusting her sleeves.
...so that happened.
Considering the crowd, the core of the plan went over pretty well. They would escape pursuit by traveling deeper into the Trail and gathering the rest of the Four Regalia, each providing the directions to the next.
Io flipped through her notebook. A couple of 1-H's questions had been answered off-hand:
- Mica: Where will the recovered bodies from 1-Epiphyllum be interred?
- We expect to make planetfall in a couple of days. They will be interred planetside.
- Ema: How many weeks' supplies are left?
- Not many. We expect to make planetfall in a couple days and begin ISRU.
At the end of the rainbow was in all likelihood a method to replace the current Emperor with somebody who had a functioning brain. Who that heir would be was not for the Academy to decide.
Lin took to the stand and read from her dog-eared copy of the Trail. There was one last point she wanted to raise: that of contacting the rest of the military.
"Having had a look at the survey data, we believe there is an old solar pulse array that can be used to contact the Tian Lung merchant navy—sending and receiving faster-than-light communiques in the ancient way. But we'll only have a short window of time to fire the pulse, and it's coming up in a few months."
"Objection!" A hand shot up from dangerously close, blocking out the lights; it was Chess, the tomboyish engineer with the tight curls.
"Sustained. Francesca Trianon of House Vesta, please speak your mind."
"Why should we specifically contact the merchant navy instead of all relevant fleets? I think that gives your House too much leverage over our next moves."
"There are a few different contact windows upcoming," Lin grumbled. "The merchant navy's is simply the earliest."
"Ehem," Vineta raised her hand. "If I may."
"...Go ahead." Lin sighed. "But make it quick."
The girl crept to her feet and cleared her throat before addressing the council in a practiced diction.
"In no way do I wish to suggest any impropriety," she began, "but as you are no doubt aware, House Tian Lung benefits greatly from the devolution of power in the Huang. In other words, their House has always had similar incentives to the Federalist forces.
"Much of its wealth stems from levies exacted by local governors. In contrast, my comrades in House Vesta have always supported the centralization of power. It's not unprofitable to deal in military technology, but it's clear that our personal incentives do not align with those of the Federation in the same way that Tian Lung's do."
...Well, so much for peace. Vineta wasn't messing around anymore. There was a commotion in the hall. Obviously the amulets did not take this insult kindly.
"...What do you mean to insinuate, Vineta?" Lin said, bristling. "Do you mean to put my proposal to the vote?"
The two major Houses had more-or-less equal representation in the Student Council, so a vote that effectively pitted them against each other necessarily came down to the remaining Houses—most notably Benetnasch.
"Nothing of the sort," Vineta smiled. "Personally, I trust our President Lin as one of the more upstanding members of her House. I would say she managed yesterday's battle in an... adequate manner. I only raise these doubts as a representative of my class and House.
"I think we should take Lin's plan to contact the Merchant Navy as the true test of her capabilities as a leader. To be honest, I don't doubt she shall follow through on it.
"Nevertheless, it would be wise to remain adaptable: should the window elapse without any contact being established, only then shall we reconvene—perhaps to refine the plan, as well as the Academy's chain of command. This is such a reasonable measure that I can't imagine even putting it to the vote.
"Francesca, I imagine you are satisfied?"
The engineer punched both her fists in the air insincerely. "Aye, Miss Vineta! Your wisdom knows no bounds!"
Lin's shoulders shook. So much of what Vineta said was covered in honey, but to her, it probably felt like polite mutiny.
"I would also like to recommend a leader for this expedition..."
Io shivered; she felt a pair of hands tease her hair lightly as Vineta nuzzled her cheek.
"...1-Heliotrope's Io Temperance Harmony Zebulon."
A lowborn? They whispered.
I heard she went out on her own to fight the Federalists' ace... kept Lin off the nukes just long enough for us to grab the Epitaph.
Vineta leaned down and kissed her on the temple. Her breath smelled sweet, like Tokaji. Io stuck her arms out and struggled, flabbergasted and blushing. What was going on? There was no way she could possibly—
"You're brilliant just the way you are," Vineta crooned. "Do your best ?"