“I’m grabbing a green juice,” she called over her shoulder as she stomped across the Hideaway.
With a peachy-keen soother in her hands, that subtle acidic taste mixing with the lemongrass, Kat wandered back over. She took up a spot at the railing this time instead of trying to make herself sit quietly.
A clanking and slicing lifted up from the Canteen below. They were coming up on lunchtime. Their morning of solitude was nearly up. But she was no more clear-headed than she’d been this morning.
She was swirling the peach concoction around her cup as Lee joined her, his hair decently ruffled from hours at their table. She offered him a sip from her drink, almost surprised when he actually tried it.
“It’s not strawberry,” she told him. But Lee didn’t seem to care as he stared down at his hands, and the metal of the railing, and the din.
“Do you think she even tried?” Kat asked, letting the empty tables in the room below them listen in on their secrets.
“I think she had her reasons,” Lee said, carefully picking through his words. “I think she was probably put in a very difficult situation with the way everything played out. We only had our four accounts to go on, it was our word against his. But,” he said, his eyes flicking up to hers, “having seen her notes on the mainframe—having seen how much Nolan cares about this—I like to think she tried everything she could.” And there was that burning on his face, and behind his words, like he desperately wanted her to believe them, so he could believe them too.
But the words that kept coming toherhead? If their Commander had really tried everything she could, she wouldhave asked them for help. She wouldn’t have had to bury them under faults and claims.
But again, who was she to say? As it turned out, Kat didn’t know their Commander any more than she knew their future. She had no idea how she’d make it through the afternoon, let alone another week of this.
But she did know she wasn’t ready for the message that appeared on her hyperband a few seconds later.
“It’s from the Commander’s office,” Lee warned.
And it was on very heavy breaths that Kat scanned the details for the raid briefing the following morning. She yanked with her free hand at the band holding her too-tight ponytail, until the blonde waves came free, washing down over her shoulders.
She ran her hand through the loose hair, before letting her hand fall. “And we’re really just going to walk back in there like we don’t know anything? Like everything is fine, totally affadelic?”
But she didn’t need to see Lee’s face to know that was exactly what they’d be doing. With what they’d learned from her arrangement with the General, Commander Blanche’s ignorance was the only edge they had left.
CHAPTER 34: LEE
HANDS TUCKED neatly behind his back, Lee stared blankly into the eggshell-colored panels lining the walls inside Mission Assignment and Briefing.
To protect and preserve life. That was the raider mission. A foundation built upon the belief that there was still something worth saving with their galaxy.
He traced the gleaming facets of the raider symbol mounted there beneath the holoblock with his eyes. It was polished like everything onboard the Academy. And yet he wondered how many still bothered to notice it, or if it had just become part of the landscape.
The broken triangle was a representation of a diffracting prism, symbolizing how they might fulfill that raider’s mission. Cadets came to the Academy to learn and train so they might go out and spread that light. They were the beacons who would help the AMG re-align all the broken paths and loose ends of their galaxy. It all went back to that basic foundation.
But what if the paths weren’t broken, and the endings not loose? What if their galaxy had never needed re-aligning, but had simply been overlooked and neglected. What if the thing it had needed most hadn’t been protection, but rather trust, and understanding? The open minds that might take the time to ask what was really going on.
General Narron had painted Segura out to be the villain, and him the white knight, carefully dispelling “dangerous threats” under his Preservation Initiative and the prerogative of a better energy tomorrow. The evidence of past and present breakthroughs only supported his claims when it came to the dark rays. Had Lee never met Gaia—had he never set foot onboard Segura, he would never have questioned that there might be another way.
But again, Lee had.
Commander Blanche had been merely doing her due diligence as Commander when she’d relinquished the fate of Segura with their mainframe. She was looking out for her cadets, doing as Commanders did best. And when the option presented itself, she had set aside her own beliefs and behaved exactly as she ought.
Lee didn’t need to adjust his posture when the Commander’s precise and measured steps crossed over the threshold. He held his shoulders and back rigid, like the broken triangle on the wall, perfectly polished and conformed to the AMG’s raider military standards.
“Good afternoon cadets,” Commander Blanche began.
And Lee watched her, emotionless, as their Commander led them through their next assignment with the fluidity and skill from too many before and the confidence of many more to come. And she would continue to do so, in her pressed, cream-colored pantsuits, with not a red hair out of place.
There had been a few months in there where he’d believed her to be more. When he’d believed her to be above duty and organization. A gladiator for what was good and right. But then, like the General, like probably many before her, she’d fallen back in line. She had never forgotten her place. It was Lee who had confused the game, forgetting for a second who he was and what he stood for.
His fault wasn’t to the AMG and the Commander in helping the people of Segura escape. He’d failed himself, by taking this long to realize as much.
Lee studied the glittering coordinates Commander Blanche had drawn up on the holoblock. She was sending them back out near the De Myra Solida grouping, a star system bordering the coordinates of their last raid. More dark rays. It wasn’t surprising their sensors would have been triggered along the same timeline.
But today it was an awakening. The dark radiation was spreading. And while they waged their political battles and asserted their dominance, it cost them yet another star system. There would be more, too. They would keep losing, until eventually they lost something critical. It was planets and experiments now. But with each one, they gave away the chance of a tomorrow.
