A Chimæra.

Before I knew what was happening, the Chimæra leapt off the ground and right into me, knocking me off my feet and onto my back.

The Chimæra had taken the form of some kind of grinning, oversized canine. Out came its huge dog tongue, scratchily enveloping my entire face. Within seconds, I was drenched.

Chimæra are pretty common on most of Lorien, but they mostly keep away from the city. I hadn’t been licked by one of the creatures since I was little, and I hadn’t enjoyed it even then.

“Byscoe! Byscoe! Down!” The animal immediately responded to the sound of its owner’s voice and obediently jumped off of me, then scooted down the road toward where the voice was coming from.

Daxin gave me a wry look as I stood and dusted myself off. A moment later, Byscoe had returned to us with his master, a grinning little boy dressed in a Garde’s distinctively fitted suit.

The boy’s skin and hair were messy, caked in red dust, the whites of his eyes and teeth blazing through the dirty mask of his face. He grabbed a tuft of Byscoe’s shag and swung himself up on top of the Chimæra with no fear at all. Lots of people out in the country were like this with the animals; they’d been raised with them. I still thought it was weird. Even when they took on cute, cuddly forms, it was hard to forget exactly how powerful they really were.

“Hi,” the kid said.

“Hi,” Daxin said awkwardly. I could tell he was unsure of what he was supposed to do next.

Just then, a burly man emerged from the hut down the road and walked towards us, in no hurry. Not quite as dirt-caked as the boy, he was roughly dressed in only loose canvas pants and a few strands of ceremonial necklaces. His skin was weathered, whipped dry and cracked by the outer winds.

“Hello,” he called out to us from a few paces away. “Is there something I can do for you?”

Daxin spoke. “Yes. We are from the Lorien Defense Council. I’ve been selected as your grandson’s Mentor.”

The man cocked his head. “A bit early. Boy’s got a few years left before LDA stewardship.”

“Grandpa?” asked the boy, still astride his Chimæra. His grandfather kept his eyes on Daxin, ignoring the boy.

Daxin seemed nervous, fumbling for something within the folds of his tunic.

“We need nothing from you at the present moment except your consent to give this to your boy.” He pulled out bracelet from within his tunic, pretty much the same as the government ID band I’d hacked a few weeks ago, but bigger. “A new security protocol, nothing more.”

I had no idea what he was talking about—the protocols for Garde and their Mentors weren’t something I’d studied at all—but I figured the LDC was doing some kind of tracking of young Garde.

The boy’s grandfather seemed reluctant, but the kid charged forward on Byscoe and snatched the band right from Daxin’s hand. He whooped triumphantly from the top of his Chimæra and slid the band up his wrist all the way to his elbow, then raced off down the road, kicking up a cloud of red dust in his wake.

“He’s a spirited child,” the boy’s grandfather said. There was something a little sad about the way he said it, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“He needs to keep the band on at all times.” Daxin seemed anxious about this point. I could read his worry. It was one thing for the boy to wear the band for fun, as part of a game, another thing altogether to ensure that he continue to wear it. Daxin needed the grandfather behind this. “It’s imperative.”

“I understand,” the man said. But it sort of sounded like he didn’t.

A few minutes later, we were back in the Egg, back in our seats. I waited for Daxin to give me our next set of coordinates. This whole day had been way too long already, not to mention way too weird. I found myself actually wanting to go back to the academy.

But for the moment, Daxin was quiet.

“Well?” I asked, finally. “Are we going home or what?”

Before he could answer, Daxin’s module beeped, and he looked down to read what it said. He grimaced and turned to me.

“Do me a favor,” he said, holding his wrist out. “Last step. I need to sync my band to the one we just gave the kid.”

I took Daxin’s wrist in his hand and looked down at the brass band encircling it. Most ID bands were just that—plain bands with all the circuitry inside, so they looked almost like regular jewelry. Daxin’s was different. It had a small digital interface and a couple of buttons on it. “Just hold the black button down while I start the sync.” As I held the button down, he started entering commands on his communication module, which were presumably being relayed to the ID band.

“Pretty unwieldy,” I said.

“Seriously,” said Daxin, still typing into his tab. “Since I got this upgraded ID band and locator I’ve had to take it off every night. It’s too big and heavy to sleep in.”

I stared down at the band on Daxin’s wrist, looking at it in a new light. It was no longer just an ID, or a locator.

It was a key.

That night I lay on my bunk before dinner, processing the events of the day. There was no denying that the place was starting to get under my skin. A month ago I wouldn’t have cared that the grid was in sorry shape. A month ago, I barely knew what the grid was, for that matter.

But this morning, when Devektra had come along and had called me one of “those people,” I hadn’t corrected her. I’d actually felt almost insulted. I guess this place was rubbing off on me.

I can’t say I liked it. I was supposed to be the kind of guy who did my own thing and had my own opinions. I wasn’t a joiner. Things weren’t supposed to just rub off on me.

“Good work today,” Rapp said, popping by the room to grab a couple of books from his desk just before dinner.

“I was slow,” I said. “Next time I’ll do better.”

Rapp shook his head like he couldn’t believe me. “Oh, whatever,” he said. “You act like you don’t care, and then you go and get all competitive. How’d things go with Daxin?”

“Fine,” I said. A part of me wanted to unload on Rapp, to talk about how weird the afternoon had been, but something made me hold back. “How was the rest of your grid maintenance?”

“One out of every three patches I serviced was broken. I’ve never seen it so bad before.”

I perked up at this. He had noticed the conspicuous failure rate too.

“You going to do anything about it?” I asked, trying to sound more neutral than I felt.

“Like what? I put it in my work report. The academy knows, the council knows. It’s the rest of the planet that’s determined to do nothing. The Kabarakians don’t see the value in a defense system that only covers the city and leaves them exposed. And half the city thinks we’re all just doing this to amuse ourselves. I seem to remember that you’re one of those people. Right?”

I brushed him off. “If we’re going to do it, we might as well do it right. Right? Otherwise the whole thing really is a waste.”

Rapp left the room for dinner but I stayed behind, thinking about the Quartermoon concert at the Chimæra, and about Daxin’s ID band on his bedside, poised and ripe for the taking.

I thought about Devektra. And I knew what I needed to get my head straight. A party.

CHAPTER 8

As Quartermoon drew closer, I was almost starting to enjoy myself at the academy. It still wouldn’t have been my first choice of a home, but at least I was settling in. Once I’d stopped playing stupid in my engineering classes, they were actually sort of fun. And although I wasn’t quite sure when it had happened, I was realizing that Rapp and I were something like friends.

I still hated the tunics, and I still hated how seriously everyone took themselves around here. But I understood it now. You’ve got to believe in something.

I still felt sort of trapped, but it didn’t feel quite as much like forever. That’s because I finally had something to look forward to: Devektra’s concert at the Chimæra. I was going to ditch my butt-ugly tunic, sneak off campus and sneak into the club.

Yes, I knew that if I got caught, none of my technical skills and no amount of groveling would save me from a fate worse than the Kabarak. I also knew that Devektra hadn’t really even invited me in the first place.

Neither of those things mattered. First off, I wasn’t going to get caught. Second, it didn’t matter whether Devektra had been totally sincere. She had invited me knowing there would be no way for me to actually go. I figured if I pulled off the impossible, she’d have to be impressed.

It was a big task, but I was up to it. Planning it had been my main source of entertainment ever since I’d come back from the trip with Daxin. It had even gotten my mind off the nagging worry that I was missing something around here—that something wasn’t quite right.

The first thing I’d done was to to scope out the nighttime security situation at the academy. That wasn’t so hard, because it turned out there basically wasn’t any. Students weren’t allowed to leave the grounds after dark, but all the other students here were so boring and committed that no one bothered actually enforcing it.

There were no security guards, no cameras, no sensors, no nothing. They didn’t exactly advertise it, but it was honor system all the way.

The more complicated part of my plan would be Daxin. I’d done a little spying on him, and had discovered that he had a single-occupancy bedroom down the hall from me, and a habit of going to bed early. I’d briefly worried that Daxin, as an active Mentor Cêpan, might have the privilege of a lock on his dorm room. But on the last night before Quartermoon, I snuck out of my room at midnight, crept down the hall, and quietly tried turning the knob. It opened without any resistance at all.

After listening carefully for the sound of his snoring, I crept into the room and approached Daxin’s bed. There it was: his ID band was lying right there next to his pillow, and he was curled up next to it, sawing logs, oblivious to my presence. This was going to be too easy. The following night, I would sneak in, snatch the ID band, commandeer the Egg from the transport hangar—I had already covertly preset the time and coordinates for my departure—and make my way to the Chimæra for Devektra’s performance. Then I’d sneak back, return the Egg to transport, return Daxin’s ID band to his pillow, and no one would be any the wiser for my absence. Sneaking around, conniving, scheming: it would be just like the good old days.

The Saturday of Quartermoon was my best day yet, a half day of classes followed by a quick workout in the gym and an early dinner in the commissary. A professor had authorized a screening during mealtime of an intercepted satellite transmission of a visual entertainment from the planet Earth.

It might have been an overall pretty crappy place to live, but they sure knew how to do their visual entertainment right. Although the transmission was video only, I had seen my share of Earth intercepts and had no problem following the story.

It wasn’t really that complicated. At all. A well-dressed man traveled the world, hung out with beautiful women, snuck around to retrieve valuable objects, chased and got chased by bad guys.