You keep to yourself. Endcircle looks familiar to you, but these people are Federation citizens and even here, it shows. Municipal services pick up litter and take out the garbage and employ juvenile delinquents to scrub graffiti off the walls and hang signs up on the community corkboard of Endcircle Regional Library. The times you do branch out are stilted, awkward and out-of-place. You're too damn serious, Toreel.
It doesn't take long before you're occupying a better space. You've know-how. Your mind's sharp as a razor-whip and yeah, maybe your Standard sucks but you can ballpark a grain average in your head to within 100 VPPs so Martin's got you right-wing, and things move forward. Maybe you're too serious for friends, but money is indiscriminate. People start to look up to you. You're just-enough intimidating to keep them in line and for some reason, they expect you care whether they live or die. It's a sign of things to come.
Maybe this will always be your role. The shepherd. The hand on their shoulder. You're all right with that.
He's an idiot. First of all, like every other idiot on this idiotic planet, he feeds them bread. You roll your eyes and patiently explain why that is stupid, and you both spend a lot of time seated on the benches of Tirah park, throwing nuts and seeds and fruit to the waddling ducks along the lakefront.
Dear Jacran,
On behalf of the Admissions Committee, it is my pleasure to offer you admission to the MIT Class of 2368. Your commitment to personal excellence makes you stand out as someone who will thrive within our academic environment as well as contribute to our diverse community. At MIT, you join kindred spirits: scholars, builders, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists. We believe that you and MIT are very well matched for each other.
The deadline to accept our offer is May 1, and there's a reply form enclosed in this packet. Between now and then, though, we look forward to building our relationship with you so that you can get to know us better. Over the next several months, we'll be in touch by email, over the phone and via your MyMIT portal account (
.edu).
Many of our students believe that the campus visit experience was the deciding factor in their choice to enroll at MIT. Therefore, we'd love to have you be our guest for Campus Preview Weekend (CPW), held on the MIT campus from April 7 through 10. CPW is an excellent way to experience MIT student life first-hand. You will go to classes, eat the food, listen to hallway conversations, and meet your future classmates. We encourage your parents to attend as well. Please see the enclosed CPW invitation for all the details.
If you can't come to CPW, please try to visit campus before May 1. To make arrangements to stay overnight with an undergraduate host, complete the online request form on the MyMIT website or just comm the Office of Admissions at [1-5674-39596-NA-C]. If you are unable to visit the campus at all but are eager to get to know MIT, you'll have the chance to speak with a current undergraduate soon; an MIT student will be calling you in April.
Finally, I hope you'll agree with us that MIT is the perfect place to prepare you for your future role in a world that badly needs you. Congratulations and welcome to the MIT Class of 2368.
Sincerely,
Khavass ch'Ranah
Admissions & Recruiting Office
[1-9594-39994-NA-C]
It's your birthday today. Four years later and most people still don't know. Birthday parties are an anomaly, merely an excuse to guzzle alcohol and scream and blare thumpy, obnoxious bass music into the night. You don't need a birthday to do that, for heaven's sake. It's juvenile. This will be the first time in your life that anyone actually notices you on your birthday. You, and everyone else in your graduating class. You walk up onto the stage and accept your diploma, certain this is some kind of colossal joke. Any second Ranah's gonna yank it back like April Fools! The Andorian just shakes your hand, though, and offers you a proud, winning smile. And then you go get black-out drunk.
You look down at the gun in your hands and for a split second it's g-dforsaken Khese until you snap back to Earth, literally. "Don't look so shellshocked, Toreel. It's a paintball gun, not a grenade!" Jenkins claps you on the shoulder, good-natured, and you resist the urge to scowl. Paintball. Just end it now.
Rush is an accurate term. It's a blur. There's something for everybody, except, apparently you. Fortunately for you, having ever at one time been in the vicinity of an FSILG is enough to offer you a bid, sooooo. Paintball.
You turn out to be excellent at it, but for the grace of G-d. Your team obliterates the other one, and against all odds, these guys aren't too bad. And that's how you end up in a fraternity. The turns you never expect your life to take. At least the party afterwards is phenomenal.
You've been here before. The world is sparkly-glitter and you're coughing. Thick, coagulated blood dribbles out of your mouth and stains your chin. Splatters onto your clothes. They'll be ruined, you find yourself thinking as if that's the most reasonable thing to be concerned with right now. Alley's dingy. Urine and rotten food in the air. Smoke wafts out of a grate; you're behind some kind of restaurant. Bricks scrape up your back when you try to prop yourself up. Your skin's sliced open, marble-muscle fibers and cartoon-yellow fat globules spilling out as you cramp your hands against it, trying to apply pressure. People talking around the corner. They meet your eyes and keep walking, decidedly not deigning to involve themselves in your affairs.
You've been here before. No one's going to help you.
Academic adviser's told you this class will be good for you. Too brusque, too abrupt. Curt, rude, mean, cranky, gruff, combative. And other adjectives that begin with A. You get the drill. Jack the Jerk. Jack's not a team player. Jack's argumentative. You don't bother correcting them. What's the point? They'll think what they think. You've changed what you can change and if they don't like what's left, tough. You won't ever tell them you're shy.
Standing in front of 200 people and giving a lecture is not-only repulsive, it's downright nervewracking. Images of Tīmay leak through sometimes; yourself in an oversized suit watching a crowd of people judge your work on its merits. Mhasy's convinced you've got this. It'll be good for you. You're in the 90th percentile of your year academically, you know this stuff, you just need to fluff it up a little because your ECs are deplorable. No student council president for Jack Toreel, ladies and gentleman. Shocker of the century. This'll be good for you.
And it is. Surprisingly. Yeah, yeah, you're no Mr. Sunshine, but you'll never admit you enjoyed it once your hands stopped shaking and you could breathe a little. They hang off your every word and that's new. People have always listened to you when you spoke, and maybe that didn't mean enough until it bashes you over the head with a hammer because, hey, talking's overrated. They learn something. You teach them something new, and you like it. Even if you'll never admit it.
It's the same old story. You practice your order in your head a hundred times in a row before blurting out, "Can I get some-uh-um, one of those? Oh, uh, sorry-" Yeah, pointing at the menu outside the vendor cart that the server can't see, real bright, Jack. "Uh. One of those. Um, damn, sorry. OK, can I get two zhashi and erran?" "
"One or two erran?"
"-one-"
"-alright, alright. That'll be 6.75."
Every second you spend counting out the change is utter hell.
You've been here before. The rifle's in your hands and you watch him move closer. Whole g-dforsaken planet's a horror-show and you're here with some TDD-leftovers, one of the few sane civilian groups unaffected by the shur. Pinned-down and trapped and far too young for this. First time, you raged, insistent there had to be another way. Until one of those kids took out half a generator block and twelve people. There's no hope in their eerie blue eyes. No light. Cold, machine-steel determination replaces their souls. They're already dead, overtaken by hishuri. Footsoldiers of Tanhama gangs vying for control of M-32. You've been here before. Now, you just fire.
You've never been here. They consider you a leader. A protector. You want to tell them no. Find someone else, look to someone else but they worm their way in. You won't let anything happen to your flock. You've never been here. You won't let anything happen to him.
You never remember your dreams. Sometimes you wake in tears, gasping and sweating. But you never remember it. Life's smallest, gentlest ease.
He tells you that you can be more than a product of your environment. That's the dictionary definition of evolution. There is no enlightenment here. He shows your art ("art", right) to his agent, a sharp woman in sharper clothes wielding a scalpel-smile. Moving forward requires moving up and you're not cut out for it, you know that, but he's counting on you. You've got a burner phone and an address no one has bothered to figure out leads to the local library, so you attend a single exhibition wearing a too-big suit and a too-old grimace, and don't get a call back. He's disappointed in you. He tells you it's easy to get sucked down into the dirt. And it is. So you stay down.
He calls you when he receives his acceptance to Holland. For a split second you consider answering the comm. Your hand hovers over the receiver. The ringing stops.
You've got a good head for numbers. You're fast and you know the area and they know you're scared to death despite all the grandstanding. They know you'll do what it takes to keep your people alive. It's enough.
This place will kill you if you don't get out. Being a deckhand on the SS Allaille isn't glamorous but it'll get you out. There's no hesitation. You pack up what little belongings you have, give your weapons to your friends and board the freighter as soon as it docks.
Three other guys and you make up Khallav. More contracts than you can keep up with, and then you hit it. The one. "It's yours, Toreel. If you want it." No one believes you at first, but they want you to design it. They want you to oversee the project. By the time you leave, there's a new structure carving up Vica's city skyline. A spire of twisting, elegant metal. Bold, stark colors and intricate detail. Eye-catching. People call it beautiful. You try to be humble, but inside, your heart sings proud.
It's up to you to get them out of there. You're the engineer, you come up with a brilliant freaking plan, then. Armed with a busted disruptor and a few electrical coils, you're down to the nitty-gritty, certain you can rig something up. If you can just get some power to these energy cells you can give them a weapon. A way. Thing overheats with a loud BOOM! and, yeah, you're not going anywhere any time soon.
You enjoy your job. It's simple and clean and people leave you alone. They respect you, even if they don't like you. You get to use your mind and think on your feet. A lot of it's what you'd expect out of an architectural firm. Schematics, drawing, planning, structures, builds, simulations. A lot of it's not. Security penetration, financial analysis, slave integration, Estate operations. It's a place.
Maybe it's not a home, but it's a place.
Tallah's nice, and he's going to protect you. You're a sheep. With him there is home and the promise of safety. He tends to his flock.
He doesn't call it that, but you're always at his side. You learn to shoot a gun by his hands. You learn to test vials with his eyes. You learn to find comfort. Holding one another in place.
He tells you it's not mutual. It can't be mutual. You're bitter. "Don't you dare make me a victim, Tal!" Mindlessly furious, you throw a paint can at him and watch red run into his eyes. The Allaille's leaving soon and you're sure going to be on it. He smiles when you tell him. You're bitter.
Tal's the only person on Tīmay you can think to call. But you can't face him. So you don't call.
"That guy."
"He's got a baby with him. No."
"Pick someone, Jack, unless you want to starve tonight."
"Fine! Dammit. OK, that guy."
"Like taking change from an old cripple, eh?"
"Let me do it."
"Let you do it? He'll ask you in for tea and crumpets and next thing-"
"Shut your mouth up, Ghav! Let me do it because you'll get us arrested!"
"Whatever, then. You do it, but I'm not eating roasted vole for the third time this week."
It doesn't take longer than a second. You flash your disruptor. He sees the terror in your eyes and calmly, slowly counts out a hundred credits. "That's your friend over there, hm?" the old man wheezes, an amused chuckle.
"Ah, uh, yeah. Shut up and give it already."
He drops the chip into your hand. "You keep an eye on him. He's a wild one. All sheep need a flock. A shepherd."
"Yeah, whatever, old man."
You're not eating roasted vole tonight.
It's the first gift you've ever been given. You and Tal spray-paint the deck and fit new trucks and screw new wheels into it (he's apologetic; the generic version is of far lesser quality than anything you could pick up in Narine) but you couldn't care less. It's beautiful and you sail down the sidewalk, balancing perfectly without practice, weaving in and out of traffic and offended pedestrians.
Your first time down the bowl is terrifying but something breaks in you and you take a running start at it, bending your knees how you've been shown and suddenly you're flying (flailing) over the other side, exhilarated. Not much time passes before you're hitting half-pipes and falling off of grind bars. (Listen, it's fun, but you're terrible.)
"You're goofy-footed, y'know that?" Tal laughs at you.
"You're goofy, you flat-footed prick."
Deckhand is code for a lot of things, but you'll be damned if they drop you off at another backwater planet. First names are personal. Last names are protocol. When they ask yours, you give them Tal's. These people have formed a crew, a peer group and you're outside it. Lighten up, Toreel. You're too serious.
There are no law enforcement officers on Tīmay. It's more than likely that if you report a crime, especially if you're a woman, the cops are just gonna see an excuse for a good time and roll with it. They are not, as the saying goes, here to protect and serve.
You know what's good for you so you stay out of their way. They're a gang amongst themselves, armed with a shiny badge and a big AK-47 they can shove up your ass any time they want. Power-trips work best when you've fingers in every operation this side of Krion and there's an army to back you up. When it's your turn on the block, you duck your head and let them kick the oxygen out of your molecules. At the end of the day, you're alive, and you go crash at Tal's for a V-fix.
Krion is a port city. You can remember being too short to wrap your hands around the rails, watching the ships come in. Smell the fish and chips, board-walk waterfront paths and tourist-attraction gift-shops. Things change. There's no context behind it. You're too small to understand why, but not too young to grasp that life isn't always fair. Deleziaiz are big and loud and tattooed and they have scary weapons, so you do what they say. That container is your life for two years.
There is no one moment. From time time you can sense the world, the world is what it is. Everyone knows to look forward, don't make eye contact, keep walking, carry a weapon and keep six. It's not a matter of learning. It's simple evolution. You either adapt, or you die.
Yeah, you just grabbed the diploma and forgot to shake Ranah's hand on stage, but no one ever said you were friendly. You catch him after and apologize with that grimace everyone's figured is a smile, looking awkward in your gown and cap. It turns into an actual smile at the last second. This is yours. You've earned it. You've crawled out of the pit. Ranah tells you not to mess it up. You resolve not to.
"Where'd you get this?" Tal's eyes catch the gnarled scar peaking out of your shirt, and he tugs it down, concerned, only to reveal a large, unsightly keloid. It's white and porous, splashed across collarbones and upper chest in vicious, curling strokes. At least a couple years old, but it's still stiff to stretch your neck and sensitive when touched. "Crate," you grind out, jaw clenched together, and refuse to elaborate. You don't need to. It's an unspoken safe-word, a turn-back-now and Tal's learned not to push it. Seconds pass suspended in fraught tension before he's shrugging a jacket over your shoulders. "OK. Let's go."
They've rigged up a little motor from an old-fashioned walk-man and some hypodermics from the sick room and a broken pen-in-half dripping black ball-point ink everywhere and Valek looks at you and asks, "What do you want? Where do you want it?" So you tap your finger across your collarbone where that gnarled burn-scar still stretches and press your lips together and murmur,
OUTWITTED.
You've been calling it Stupid Mother- for the last two weeks and it keeps showing up anyway. So you've shortened it to Stu and now you have a cat, apparently. It's filthy and mangy and mean, but it finds you on the sidewalk when you're sitting outside Tris's place too nervous and you know that logically, it's not helping anything, but maybe it helps you. Just a little bit.
You wake up each morning and pour exactly 120ml of coffee into your oversized blue mug, sipping fastidiously as you look over neatly stacked homework assignments from the rims of your glasses. The reports are frivolous and riddled with errors, but you find reasons to ignore them. Your kids are barely-present and rarely attentive, so the fact that you even have something to grade is a miracle in and of itself. The least you can do is give them a blow-off class (not that PDR isn't already synonymous with that, but in your defense, shut up) and a place to vent.
Javik's hard. It makes people harder, and for all your years and wisdom, you strive to be more than a product of your environment. A speck of light flickering within the grainy, dark maw of existence. You keep order in your home and in your classroom to ward away the chaos outside, and maybe it works. You're precise and meticulous and punctual and predictable. Maybe it doesn't. Last year your mother killed herself, so sometimes you hug strangers and give money you don't have to people who have less, because you think that maybe some small cosmic interlinking chain of events can coalesce into a single point, a moment where you've set the ripples in motion down the lake and they lap at the shores of change.
You don't want to be a cog in the wheel but you are, because all of us are, so maybe you can't make a difference but you've settled for making meaning. Maybe it counts for something. Maybe it doesn't.
It's snowing and silent and warm. You don't know where it is. That's the thing about memories. They don't work in sequence. And your brain has always been very efficient at filtering out the nonsense. Everything before the crate is a foggy haze, a coiling loam of serpents ready to strike. Venomous. When you're at your most weary, you remember the sound of his voice. The way his jacket smelled. Leather and rain and cigarettes.
Crunching snow beneath winter boots and cold, cold air and blowing into your own hands. Snapshots of moments held pristine in the steel-trap of your mind. One of the few you've held onto. He rarely smiled. Yeah, some opportunistic pseudo-Freudian analysis probably has a lot to say about that, but hey, everyone on Tīmay has daddy issues, so just go off about it. And anyway, he didn't need to. You still knew you were loved.
Your world is very small. Krion feels immense. Disordered, chaotic, but your sphere is infinitesimal, narrow. Tallah's people are ancient, and even if he isn't, he carries their wisdom in his stride. When he says something, you listen. When he gives an order, you follow it. You're blinded by adoration. You'll follow him into hell if he asks. He never does. Maybe that's why. In this place, care is an unfamiliar currency. He buys you clothes and puts food on the table and teaches you to read and write and eventually you move onto math, and that sparks something which never truly dies. He gives you medicine when you're sick and hangs your art on the wall. Your life is not conventional, but you are happy.
When he casts you away, you wish you hadn't been.
It doesn't take a genius to notice the fact that you have zero social life. You go to work, you go to the Khafi cart for your caffeine fix, you go to the store when you need something and at the end of the day, you go home to your empty apartment. You like being alone. You work better alone. You live better alone. At Yvrrih, no one gives a damn, so maybe that makes Nallia a freakin' rocket scientist. You've noticed her noticing, and that's unsettling. It's not concern, exactly. Nallia's like every other Orion in this place, always looking for the way up. You know that in time, you'll be able to hone that ambition. Sharpen it on a prism like light exploding particles. And then she'll move on, like all the others. Still, most people don't bother to play that particular game with you. It's something new. You try not to be curious.
Jenkins is an idiot. He's here on the same cracked-up-full-ride scholarship URM program you are-freaking colony kids (guy's human and last time you checked, this was Earth, so)-only you can't fathom how the hell he managed to score it. At least you're hot and smart. Political posturing is an unsettlingly vague mystery to you, even if the rigors of academia are riddled with the same bureaucratic schmoozing boot-licking nightmare fuel.
That girl you're tutoring, O'Hara, is the frequent victim of his so-called pranks. You've never fancied yourself a white knight in shining armor, but he just plain pisses you off. His stupid music and his stupid decorations in the Elevator Lounge and his stupid paintball and his stupid drugs and his stupid entire personality. ("Come to the bar, Jack." "It'll be fun, Jack." "When's the last time you got laid? Hahahaaaaaaaa, Jack.")
You experience a great deal of pleasure when he finally gives you an excuse to ram your fist into his pretty face.
Jenkins is an idiot and a moron. If you could depart a single piece of advice to this talentless hack at the top of the bell curve, it would be I know a guy up at Endcircle who'd happily accept your resume. Alas, that's considered harassment for some weird reason. So weird. Exacting revenge is almost too easy. You swipe his phone and deposit it at campus security with an anonymous note and try not to smile as he packs his things.
You're at the nursing home because your extracurriculars suck and you're still putting in app packets where they have no business being. Earth is jarring. San Francisco made sense. Endcircle made sense. Calling out the winning bingo numbers at rec night in a nursing home? Not so much. It feels disingenuous. Your peers are all much younger than you (nevermind that you're, like, 23 and whining about it here is just ironic), freshly out of high school and looking to make a difference, patting themselves on the back in a good-person hivemind-buzz.
Welcome to Earth, heart of the bleeding-hearts, grand prize of the vaunted Federation. You don't fit. Your posture's too formal, you never smile, and while you're ceaselessly patient, you're brusque in a way that makes Mary Carpenter the favorite (which you're not bitter about at all, but seriously, screw her) and you the bingo night reject guy. This, this slice-of-life human experience, does not make sense.
You're almost ready to quit when he sits down across from you and says, "Affable."
"I'll assume that's not an observation," you mutter dryly.
The tip of his pencil touches your crossword (you've got like red and dog so you're not doing so hot). 5 down, 3 across. "Gary."
"Toreel. You need help with something? I can get you a water, or-" you make a little face, an unconscious grimace.
"What's your first name?"
"Jack."
"You don't look like a Jack."
A flicker of a smile. "I'm pretty sure that's specist."
"I haven't seen you do that once since you started coming here."
"Old people aren't very funny."
"Quartz." 7 down, 8 across. "So why are you here?"
"Why not."
"You don't seem happy."
"Neither do you."
You're not sure why, but you come back the next week, and the week after that. Gary's the only one who specifically asks for you. It's enough.
Ghav's the closest thing you have to a brother. You two grew up together on the Krion scene, or cry on as Ghav calls it. Technically you both don't live anywhere, but more often than not you crash on Tallah's couch. It feels like family. Like how you imagine family must feel. Midnight dinners and board games and homework.
Ghav's three years older than you and smooth in a way you aren't. Tris is in love with him, and you're in love with Tris, but you're the shy nerd with a Retinax allergy so guess who she likes? Yeah. You want to resent Ghav but he just bites off some hilarious commentary on their frequent flyers and you know you've forgiven him, so what's the point in pretending?
You know without knowing that Ghav protects you and that burns. You're not a child, you don't want to be treated like a child. Ghav doesn't get angry. He just laughs and shrugs things off, until one day you bring it up and he socks you in the jaw, and then you never bring it up again. He starts using the product, something you never did, and Tallah kicks him out.
He's dead within the year. And you learn exactly what protecting you took out of him.
Azero's fresh off the boat, so to speak, and a summer on Earth is just the adventure he's looking for, so he hops a freighter like no big deal and that's how he ends up at Vira's, a down-tempo bar right off the main campus of MIT. After being pranked by a bunch of frat guys with paintball guns, he's just finished deciding that MIT isn't the right fit when you take up next to him.
"It's more fun when you're shooting," you assure him dryly and order the next round. You like Betazoids. There's no mind-games, no dancing around, no damn angst. And they tend to like you. Your mind's all wide-spaces and inner-cities and shadow-penumbra mathematics and spiraling, elegant skyscrapers and grids and lines and you have no problem with opening up, so to speak.
Jenkins would've cringed at your answer, for the record, because it's been a long time since you've done this. Flesh beneath your hands, controlled breakdown. Hitched breaths and you want it sharper. He's impatient. His mind uncurls in sweeping alien geometry and swallows you up, so you dive in. This is a pattern. You can go years and it builds and builds until the flames spiral up into a tornado that razes everything down. You both spend a summer enjoying a little mutually assured destruction.
Nike teaches differential geometry and everybody hates him. Which naturally makes you curious, which naturally makes you like him. MIT is a grumpy smart angst factory so you can't even call it original with the whole A Beautiful Mind chalkboard routine, which intrigues you, because there's no point to hating the continual. Eventually you determine it's because Nike has no problem humiliating students and is actively antagonistic and abrasive. And other adjectives that start with A. You can't pick your friends, but you can pick your nose, or something.
Maybe it's the subject matter; differential geometry is perfect and structured and linear and your work is equally so. And if this were a movie, maybe there'd be a Crowning Moment of Heart-warming. Yeah, no. Nike's the first professor to actually rip your work apart and it unbalances you. Unsettles you. Your work is perfect. You know it's perfect. That's why you're here. Nike calls it perfectly boring. Unoriginal. He's taking marks off when you color inside the lines on a schematics outline, for heaven's sake.
You spend the entire semester with him trying to prove him wrong. It makes you a better student. It makes you a better engineer. So no heart-warming. But you can't argue with results.
Every prospective RA has to take an intro to psych course, and unfortunately, you're nothing special, so you're lumped in with the three other unspecials who unspecially lucked out to attend this monumentally special class amid a torrent of first-years riding out a useless degree.
You're out of your comfort zone. You do all right with the stats and the charts and the score tables. You do less all right with the personal essays and in-depth psychological analysis and you get on Sanders' bad side early by dropping a joke or two about doing it Freud-style. Which is right around the time when Sanders outright tells you to stop deflecting in front of a hundred people because you're afraid you might accidentally discover some real in this classroom.
You've got a target on your back now and she's pushing at it. She takes any opportunity she can to make an example out of you. You could not be happier when the course is over. It's the first D you've ever gotten, and contrary to the popular opinion that Ds make degrees, you don't qualify for the RA program. Your GPA is tanked because of it and even though your work-well, wasn't solid-was at least passable, you don't make the cut. You track Sanders down later and ask her why. Because you're arrogant, Toreel. You think you're too good to be here. I've got news for you, you might just be the one student who most needs to be here.
She sees you, and she's right. It scares the hell out of you. Next year, you push your way through it and manage a B, which goes down like acid and tastes even worse, but at least you're still competitive.
"You seriously haven't tapped that?"
"That is a felony, so no."
"Oh, come on. She's obviously smart enough to play with the big boys."
"You're sounding a little Norman Bates, Jenkins. Better watch your mouth before mommy washes it with soap."
"Seriously. Have you not seen-"
"Stop talking to me."
"Oh my G-d. You like her!"
"I like her more than you."
"Dude. You. Have. Got. To. Ask her out or something, man."
"I actually think you're mentally deficient."
"I'll vacate the premises tonight, bro. Invite her over for a movie or something. I mean, have you even been laid lately?'
"You have a really unusual preoccupation with my sex life, Jenkins. If you want, I can give you a first hand demonstration. You like men, right?"
"Man, I'm just saying-"
"Come over here and give me a big kiss, Jenkins." You pucker your lips up.
"Get lost, Toreel."
"You wouldn't believe how often I've thought you."
"Let go of me!"
"Girls are hot but I'm too much of a scaredy-cat to take it isn't a flattering double-standard. Do you cry when someone gets too close to your no-no place?"
"I'm out of here, man."
"Stay away from O'Hara."
"I'm not gay."
"Forget you're not gay. You've been giving Nike elevator eyes for an hour."
"Not everything is linear, Farrell."
"Typical. You'd rather talk about math than talk about sex. That's not normal."
"I like math."
"And I like sex."
"Go have some."
"You should come out to dinner with me."
"Stop asking me out, Farrell."
"You're just afraid you might have a little fun."
"Caught me."
"Uguhhhhhh did you even call Wagner?"
"No."
"Are you dead?"
"Wagner's hot. Ask him out."
"It's like you're some kind of alien from another planet."
"Real original."
"OK, OK, fine, Professor Buzzkill, quiz me."
Kat never finds out about Jenkins. Soon enough, she settles into herself and you do as you've always done: recede. You're about done here, anyway. But apparently you can't leave without a bang! Lilith is everything that Kat is not. Vivacious, outgoing, fun. You occupy an odd space in Kat's life at this point; having once been roommates, having quietly and remotely steered her out of harm's way, having the patience and tolerance to endure literal hours of monotonous study where none of her peers could muster the stamina.
Maybe you are friends, or at least the closest thing to friends that you make. It's how you meet Lilith. And that's how you find out you've got a bit of a competitive streak. She works for what she's got where you and Kat typically don't. Where you spend all your time up in the clouds, Lilith is a touch of earth beneath your feet. She holds contests. She hosts parties. She has to be number one. Always-right. She stands up to you, she argues back with you.
You're loathe to admit it, but when you leave, you'll miss them.
They're cannon fodder. Non-people. A sea of eerie blue, slow-moving hordes getting ever closer. Jhial sticks a disruptor rifle in your hands and murmurs, "Look at their eyes." You hate him with a bitter, burning fury you didn't know was possible before M-32. If you abandon the Allaille, you will die here. You look.
Martin Weiss is a petty, opportunistic, greedy little man and you would love to put him in the ground. But that would mean taking on more responsibility than you want, so you step back and do what you do best. Quietly engineer. Move pieces around. Shift the puzzle. At the end of the day, Endcircle is the better for it. His replacement's tougher, harsher, but he's fair. You can live with that.
You're not friends. You're not even acquaintances. You don't even like him. He condones death. Mindless, senseless slaughter like it's a Grand Theft Auto mission. He doesn't care. Maybe that's what really gets you in the end. Some day, you won't care. Jhial's a good decade older than you, but he's the first Tandaran you've ever met other than yourself and it fills you with something. Your parents were from Tandar Prime. They settled on Tīmay, and you've never seen home. Despite yourself, despite your vaunted, precious morals, you're Jhial's little shadow. Hoping to absorb home by osmosis. Hoping for something.
Someday comes sooner than you realize. Someday you'll find yourself saddled with a problem. You have to take care of it. You can't force a stray sheep to return or they'll reject your hands. So you'll do what you have to do. It's what you've always done, in the end. It's what Jhial always did.
It's hicarreine. You dealt salander for long enough to be familiar. People expect the shakes and the sweats and the puking, they never expect the migraines. They're preventing him from doing his school work. Going to be a doctor and he can't figure out hicarreine. You're almost tempted to leave him to his own devices, but you can tell he's hiding more pain than usual. He's different and yet not. You can see him there, beneath all of the layers and the light-play. A wince finally breaks through your barriers. "Drink coffee," you mutter finally taking a step inside the shop. "It'll help."
Your memories of them are vague.
You only have one clear memory.
Echoing, screaming rage. And falling.
You stay by their sides for so long.
And then you have to get up because you're hungry and sore and you smell, and-
You can't remember anything after that except your feet against the pavement and you're running.
You're next.