The French rebels were nicknamed Jacques, usually spelled Jax.
“I—I don’t know,” stammered Chevie. “The fever comes and goes. Antibiotics are what I need, that’s all.”
Suddenly Clover Vallicose was in her face. “Antibiotics? There are soldiers dying for the Blessed Colonel right now. Lying on foreign slag heaps, watching their life’s blood splash onto unhallowed rocks, and you think their medicine should be diverted into your worthless veins? Is that what you think, Savano?”
Chevie ground her teeth to keep herself from collapsing. “No, Sister. Of course not. Heroes of the Empire should always take priority. Any one of us cadets would be proud to lay down our lives for them.”
Witmeyer laughed, then finger-ticked an imaginary box. “Straight out of the manual, but well remembered under pressure.” She nodded at the cadet. “Now get ready, Cadet; the director is waiting.”
Chevie shuddered. She could not help it.
Director Waldo Gunn.
A hero of Box’s War, awarded the Empire Cross. For thirty years the director had endured working undercover in Provence. Director Gunn was a true believer and a master assassin—who resembled nothing more than a diminutive, kindly grandfather.
Look at the hands, the other cadets whispered as he passed in the corridor. They are darker than the rest of his skin, stained red by Jax blood.
Chevie had only seen Director Gunn in person as he strode the academy corridors on Box’s business, surrounded by committee members and his personal guard, a phalanx of pistoning legs and swinging arms.
I have never seen his hands.
Forget Director Gunn’s hands. Get dressed, Cadet, Chevie told herself. Your life is at stake.
Chevie hurriedly zipped up her regulation navy jumpsuit and high boots, tugging on a peaked cap emblazoned with a golden Boxite Youth Academy symbol. She stepped smartly past Vallicose and into the dorm.
The Thundercats marched Chevie Savano down the academy’s long corridor, their boots drawing creaks and groans from floorboards that had long since sprung their pegs. The dormitory’s other cadets were concealed behind drawn curtains, and the only significant sounds besides boots and boards were the occasional whimper of someone with night terrors and the background drone of Colonel Clayton Box’s collected speeches, which were piped through the sound system twenty-four hours a day.
The corridor was a hundred feet long, the length of what had once been four joined but separate terraced houses on Farley Square in Bloomsbury. Through the sash windows Chevie saw the steel edges of the Blessed Colonel’s pyramidal mausoleum, and the crimson laser glint from the all-seeing-eye mounted on its peak.
Like Sauron, thought the second Chevie, who was hiding inside the mind of the first one. Traitor Chevie, as she had named the mind disease that was determined to get her killed.
Sauron?
What is a Sauron?
The door to Director Gunn’s office was conspicuously plain, in stark contrast to the wall in which it sat. The wall was decorated with a heroic mural depicting the second round of Boxstrike, when the United States, the British Isles, and mainland Europe were brought forcibly under angels’ wings. The style was typical of the Empire, with muscled figures in profile, and fans of crepuscular sun rays. The door was a simple wooden panel, adorned with nothing more than faded blue paint.
This door had been Director Gunn’s only modification to the building when he took office. A door transported from the guesthouse in France where Waldo Gunn had poached Jax information and personnel for all those years.
How many now dead men have touched that doorknob? wondered Chevie as she paused before knocking.
Witmeyer poked her with a gloved finger. “Are you nervous, sweetie? Is that it?”
Chevie bit her lip and nodded. It was true, she was more nervous than she could remember being. In fact, she was bordering on frantic.
I am at war with myself, she realized. How could a person win that fight?
She flexed her fingers to stop their shaking, then once more reached toward the door.
“Enter, Cadet,” came the commanding voice from within.
The director knows I’m here, thought Chevie. It’s true what they say: Waldo Gunn has the sight.
Sure, the sight, sneered Traitor Chevie. Or a camera over the door.
Chevie curled her fingers into a fist, then stuffed it in her mouth to stifle the sob. They would execute her in the yard if she could not control herself. They would ask for volunteers from the ranks of her own class to shoot her.
Remember DeeDee.
Deirdre Woollen, her dearest friend since first grade, had been hauled out of class, interrogated for two days, and then executed. And all because Deirdre had been discovered unsupervised in the director’s study while the war maps were on display.
She was a Jax spy, they’d whispered in the dorms. Gathering intelligence.
DeeDee a spy?
Chevie had been shocked.
Shocked because DeeDee was dumber than plankton, Traitor Chevie whispered in her ear. DeeDee was your friend, but she couldn’t gather enough intelligence to spell c-a-t. Deirdre Woollen probably got herself turned around while searching for the bathroom, and Gunn shot her for it.
It was true, Chevie knew, but she couldn’t allow herself to think it, in case she talked in her sleep.
Sister Witmeyer knuckled Chevie’s skull. “You have been summoned.”
Chevie found the courage to grasp the doorknob and turn it, and as she walked into the office, she heard Traitor Chevie in her mind.
You better let me out of here, Cadet, because if you don’t, neither of us is leaving this room alive.
Please, thought Chevie. Please be quiet.
The director’s office was long and narrow with a red carpet stretching down the center like the tongue of some gigantic animal. Director Waldo Gunn was a fan of the art of homodermy—a special type of taxidermy—and the stuffed and preserved corpses of notable academy martyrs lined the walls. Chevie knew that the waxy, rouged cadavers were a testament to the dedication of these graduates, but secretly she thought that she would rather be burned to ashes and forgotten forever than end up as a lifeless sentry in this room. Chevie kept her eyes front and tried not to feel the frosty gaze of the Empire’s heroes on her shoulder blades.
The director was seated at his desk, and from ten feet away Chevie could smell the aroma of must and garlic that traveled with him like a personal cloud.
Being a committee member had its privileges, among them smelling however the hell you felt like.
He stinks, said Traitor Chevie. Somebody power-hose that guy.
Director Gunn had been tapping a stylus on a Boxnet tablet, and he suddenly stopped, almost as though Chevie had spoken aloud.
Oh no, thought Chevie. Oh no.
Director Gunn seemed elfin behind the large desk, with his too large head and pinhole blue eyes peering out above a faceful of gray beard.
“Did you speak, Cadet Savano?”
The voice was curiously low. For some reason, Chevie had always expected it to be higher.
“No, sir, Director. I don’t think so. Not that I know of.”
Gunn sighed. “‘I don’t think so’? ‘Not that I know of’? These blurtings of yours are why you stand before me today.”
“Exactly, Director,” confirmed Witmeyer, who, along with her partner, had followed Chevie inside.
“Umfh, Director,” muttered Clover Vallicose.
Chevie started, surprised to find the Thundercats at her shoulders.
Silent assassins.
Gunn leaned back in his antique chair with its turned-down armrests.
“Come closer, Chevron. Stand before me.”
Chevie walked forward in a daze, her progress halted by the bang of her thighs on the desk’s rim. She noticed her own
photograph displayed on the tablet’s screen. The director had been reviewing her file.
Gunn sighed again. “You showed such promise, Savano. Such aptitude….But now…”
The director set down the pad and intertwined his tiny, hairy fingers in his lap.
Hobbit! shouted Traitor Chevie in her head. Hobbit. HOBBIT. HOBBIT.
It was silent, but somehow deafening. Chevie felt a line of sweat trace her brow.
“I am aware, Director, that the past few months have been disappointing…”
“Disappointing?” huffed Clover Vallicose. “Catastrophic.”
“All of these bewildering outbursts,” continued Waldo Gunn. “These strange terms. FBI, what is the FBI?”
“I…I don’t know, Director.”
“And yet you used these letters to describe our academy.”
Chevie couldn’t even remember this specific outburst, though the letters did seem familiar.
“And in history class you shouted, ‘Tell it to Oprah!’ What is OPRA? The Oriental People’s Republican Army, perhaps?”
Chevie shook her head helplessly. “It’s not me, Director. I don’t say these things.”
“Oh, you say them. The question is why.”