“Yes, of course. It has always been that way. Not for you?”
“Of course not. We sent Minerva Cusk to settle Titan, right? My class was mostly women. It was a bit controversial that I was chosen for this mission, actually.”
Kodiak looks me up and down. Then he shrugs. “You are a Cusk. Of course you got the position. And if Dimokratía is going to send a male, Fédération has to send one too, so there are no little space babies.”
My face burns. I really don’t want to fight right now, but he’s making it hard. “So your scar...,” I prompt, setting Kodiak’s tea down before him. He goes to sip it. “It’s not properly steeped yet,” I tell him. “I’ll let you know when it’s time.”
He places his hands in his lap obediently, like a chastised kid. This might be the first tea he’s ever had. It makes me want to ruffle his hair. “The story of my scar,” he says. “It was after a pool bash, and we were down to two, so youknow, that’s what happened.”
“I understood precisely nothing that you just said,” I tell him, cupping my tea and curling my legs up under me. “Start with the ‘pool bash.’ What’s that?”
“You do not know what a pool bash is? Clearly we are much better at collecting information on Fédération training than you are at learning about Dimokratía.”
“You’re avoiding my question.”
He drums his fingers. “Yes, I noticed that I was doing that, too. I will work on being more direct so we can be friends.”
That sets my shoulders tensing up, but then I see he’s serious, and my body softens. I wave him on.
“The pool bash. As you know, we start training at age four, leaving the orphanages to live in the cosmology academies.” He chuckles, I’m not sure what for. “For the next eight years, we are all built into the best little spacefarer soldiers we can be, learning gymnastics, science, engineering, combat. We practice in zero g, orbiting often so that movements in space will be second nature.”
“Like riding a bike,” I say.
“Functioning in zero gravity is not at all like riding a bike.”
“No, that’s an expression. Never mind. Please continue.”
“Thank you. Once we are twelve, the culling begins. The class must go from one hundred fifty down to twentyor so. There are many ways to fail out and be placed in military or civil service instead, but the most frequent is the ‘pool bash.’ We are strapped into a mock spacecraft that is suspended a hundred feet over a pool with wave generators. The lights go out, and the craft is dropped into the pool. We have to get out of the underwater wreckage in the dark and make it to the edge, all with twenty-foot swells.”
“Some cadets drown?” I ask, putting my forkful of pea slurry down.
“We are well-trained survivalists by this point. It is rare that someone drowns. No, before the exercise begins, the instructors throw iron keys into the black water, and you must have one to be permitted to leave the pool. There is always one fewer key than there are cadets.”
“So someone gets eliminated each time.”
“Yes, and sometimes a student gets so tired that they give themselves up so they don’t drown. Then they must leave the program, too, and the game ends for the rest of us. Do we watchThe Mummynow?”
“Not yet. You haven’t gotten to the part about your scar.”
“Right. Okay, I will tell you now. I was usually one of the first out with my key.” I don’t find that hard to imagine. “But one day I was unlucky. My biggest rival kept pushing me away, and I fought with him over a key, but he got outwith it, and when I turned around there were two of us in the pool, and only one key left. We fought for it, in the underwater wreckage. I don’t remember the fight very well. By the end my arm was broken, but the hand at the end of that broken arm still held the key.”
“You fought hard enough tobreak your arm?”
He supports his upper arm in his other hand so he can get a better look at the scar. “I think it was technically the wreckage that broke it, but I fell into that wreckage because Celius Li Qiang had me in a headlock and was drowning me, so yes, you can say it got broken in the fight.”
I cough. “I want you to know that even though my exams in my training were mostly essays, some of them wereveryhard.”
Kodiak chuckles. “You are joking, but I am sure that I would have found them hard. I might not have survived so long if our exams had been essays instead of fights for survival.”
Kodiak is insecure about his intellect.I’ve already suspected as much, but it feels strangely good to have confirmation. I’ll have to step carefully around this insecurity—or manipulate it full throttle if we come to open conflict. He’s looking at me, a slight smile on his lips. I realize he could be deploying this “insecurity” to his advantage.
I want to share with him that maybe we’re not that different, he and I. That we both have our strength, and our fear.I want to tell him that I grew up in my own sea of Cusk, that I had to fight thirty siblings in a dark pool for my mother’s attention and affection. But I don’t feel safe enough to say that. So I take a different tack. “You said ‘Celius Li Qiang.’ That means he was from your same orphanage?”
“Yes. We grew up together.”
“So he was close to you.”
“Yes. Friend, sometimes my erotiyet, sometimes like a brother. But that ended when he became my competition instead.”
