Aidan was a terrible partner for training exercises—he wept often, and always gave vent to his furious temper—but otherwise he was popular among the other cadets. Like many people whose nature is in essence craven, he was charming, and of course his looks brought him many admirers. During his first year he played the boy to Keenan Pyle, who was a notorious pederast and whose classes were always filled with the youngest and best-looking of the first-level cadets. But after that Aidan grew more aloof. As I have told you, he shared a bed with his twin sister. Even the most world-weary of us saw that as a weakness, a febrile affectation, like the incestuous pairings of the ruling families of the Ascendancy.
“Who do they think they are?” Amaris di Gangi sneered one morning. We watched as Aidan and Emma crossed the lawn together, the sun glinting from their auburn heads, the lines of their uniforms flowing from their lanky bodies like oil from a hot pan. “Naki and Benshan Orsina?”
I shrugged but said nothing. It was spring, the short, intense northern spring that flares as blue as the heart of a flame and is as quickly gone. Lupines grew along the spine of land overlooking the water where we sat. Below us waves pounded the rocky shore, and a quartet of cormorants swam and dived past the breakers. There were seals basking on the rocks. Aidan and Emma headed toward them, turning from the grassy lawn to a narrow footpath worn into the hillside by generations of cadets and, before them, novitiates marking the Stations of the Cross along the shore.
“What do you think they do together?” Amaris began, but before she could continue, I stood. Brushing grass from my leather trousers, and slinging my hands in my pockets, I hurried down the path after the twins.
“Margalis.” Emma looked up, frowning slightly. The cerulean leather of her cadet’s uniform made her look sallow, her wide mouth a gash in her pale face. “You’re not at exercises?”
“Canceled. Congden got called in for an emergency meeting. There was a strike at the Greenland station last night.”
“I heard.” Aidan made an apologetic face when Emma looked at him accusingly. “Well, you didn’t ask, so why should I tell you? It was supposed to be kept secret, anyway.”
I nodded in agreement. Emma sighed, tucking a wisp of hair behind one ear. “Well. I’m going back— I’ve still got exercises, unless they’ve canceled them for everyone.”
“I doubt it.” But I smiled, trying to will Emma to look at me. She ducked her head, stumbling as she walked up the edge of the stony path, anything to avoid my eyes. “’Bye, Emma—”
She raised a hand but didn’t look back, her trouser legs flapping around her knees.
“Why does she do that?” I followed Aidan, who was striding along the path to where a large boulder stuck out above the seals dozing in the sun. “Every time I see her, she runs away.”
Aidan shrugged, turned to show me a white vulpine grin in his sunburned face. “I don’t know, Sky Pilot. She says she’s afraid of you.”
I felt my face twitch in annoyance, at the nickname and at the thought of Emma being frightened of me. “Afraid! Why the—”
“Don’t ask me, Sky Pilot. Here, be quiet or you’ll scare them.”
I shut up, biting back harsh words. Sky Pilot was what Aidan called me, that and Rocket Man, derogatory nicknames he’d hoped would catch on among our friends. They never did, but he stubbornly refused to call me Margalis, or anything else for that matter, hoping, I suppose, that one day the monikers would stick. Sky Pilot was from a folk song, something he’d dug up in the audio archives at the Academy and made his friends listen to one night when we should have been going over the recordings of Dmitri Rilkov’s 2332 lectures at the NASNA War College.
“Listen! A song about Margalis!” he crowed, popping out his earpiece and motioning us to join him. A dull buzzing came from the earpiece, as though a frantic bluebottle were trapped inside. “Come listen—”
So we’d listened. Even after having been remastered a century earlier, the original recording was so ancient, one could scarcely make it out. It was as though the centuries themselves had nibbled away at words and music, leaving only vague tones, an out-of-tune voice, the faint skirling of bagpipes, and distant echoes of firearms.
Sky Pilot!
How high can you fly?
You’ll never, ever, ever reach the sky …
“That’s terrible,” Emma said stonily when it was finished. “You can’t even hear it.”
“Listen again!” Aidan twirled in his seat, punching buttons on the player, but by then everyone had returned to their studies. He was still the only person who ever called me that.
Now Aidan crept out onto the boulder on his hands and knees, tossing back his burnished hair and pursing his lips. Behind us the green tips of the tall pines scratched lazily at the sky. On the gravel beach some fifteen feet below, the seals wheezed and snored. When he reached the edge of the rock, Aidan bellied down with his chin on his hands. I joined him, careful to keep my leather jacket from catching on the boulder’s sharp edges. We lay there for a long time without speaking, just watching the seals and the play of the birds in the water—cormorants, skuas, black and white gulls. The air smelled of pine and sweet rugosa roses and the sea, and very faintly of the woodfires burning in the Academy kitchens. The day had that intense blue clarity that often proceeds a storm: a weather-breeder, they called it in the maritimes. This far north the summer’s heat was not intense, but, paradoxically, the sunlight was. I could feel my fair skin burning, and swore silently at the chronic shortages that kept us from having access to any kind of protection from the killing rays—lotions, veils, even just a visor for our uniform hats. But the meager warmth was pleasant for all that.
After a while I must have dozed. When I looked up again, Aidan had rolled onto his back, propping himself against a wedge of driftwood. He was reading a talking book. I could hear its voice, serious as that of any rector, and occasional trills of background music.
“What’s that?” I leaned over, trying to see what was on the little screen.
He moved a few inches away, trying to make it look as though he were just getting more comfortable. But I could see his eyes: genuinely startled that I’d awakened, and genuinely worried.
“Nothing.” He turned the thing so low, I could barely make it out—a man’s voice, refined in that twenty-third-century manner, but I couldn’t understand the words. Before Aidan could stop me, I flicked my finger against the side of the book so that its title flickered across the screen.
PAGAN SURVIVALS
Spiritual Origins of the Energumens And Revelations of Their Triumphant Future,
With Predictions of the apocalypse to Come
by dude Hwong
Colorfully archaic script and a baroque fanfare of Third Ascension ælopipes accompanied the copyright and warnings. Then the man’s voice came again, faint as an insect’s.