The Last Days of Lorien - Page 5/15

The rest of us were gathered on the lawn, waiting for it all to get sorted out and, for a few minutes at least, as black smoke curled from the building into the sky, it looked like maybe my stay at the Lorien Defense Academy would be a short one.

“So if this place burns to the ground they’ll send me home, right?” I asked Rapp.

“Don’t sound too disappointed, or anything,” he said disdainfully. When I didn’t reply, he just snorted. “Dude. You think this doesn’t happen all the time? The walls here are fireproof. Not to mention everything-else-proof. This school’s built to withstand just about anything. It’s what’s inside that room that you should be worried about. Like the poor kid who just found out being able to generate giant fireballs might not be as cool as it sounds.”

I felt instantly guilty that I hadn’t even considered that. Every year on Lorien there were stories about young Garde perishing in grisly accidents, killed by powers that they didn’t know how to control or, in some cases, didn’t yet know they even had. There had been the girl with the ability to manipulate temperature who’d accidentally frozen herself to death in the bathtub, and a boy with sonic flight who’d overshot Lorien’s gravitational pull and found himself caught in the unbreathable atmosphere many miles above the ground. It was the purpose of Mentor Cêpans to prevent such incidents. But accidents still happened.

“Sorry,” I mumbled to Rapp. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

He shrugged, and his expression softened. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”

I glanced over at Vatan, the Cêpan of the kid who’d started the fire. His face was pale and anguished, and I knew that if anything had happened to his charge, he’d never be able to forgive himself. But a few minutes later, a tiny figure crept from the smoke and flame. It was Samil, completely unscathed. He had an expression on his face that was equal parts shame, terror and exhilarated pride.

Everyone whooped with joy and relief, and, in the first show of real emotion that I’d seen since I’d gotten to the academy, Vatan ran across the field and wrapped Samil in a huge hug. The boy’s skin—just as fireproof as the walls of the school, it turned out—was still burning with heat. Vatan didn’t let go even as it charred the fabric of his blue tunic.

I was relieved too. I mean, of course I was relieved. I didn’t want anyone to die, much less an eleven-year-old kid. But at least the fire had been something. Once it was over, everything was just back to normal. And by now, I’d had enough normal to last me the rest of my life.

The nights at LDA weren’t much different from the days. At least I had Rapp to keep me company. Yeah, he took himself way too seriously, but at least he was someone to talk to. And he wasn’t quite as lame as I’d thought he was at first. He had no idea who Devektra was, but ever since I’d told him my story about meeting her, he’d wanted to hear all about it. Not just about Devektra, but about the Chimæra, and about how I’d managed to sneak in, and had I really been a regular there?

Plus, he let me copy his homework, which was nice because even though it was mostly easy, there was a lot of it.

Maybe if I’d thought there was a point to doing it myself, I would have been more interested. Back at home, I’d taught myself to tinker with machinery and electronics as a means to an end. It was a way to get out of class, to get into places like the Chimæra. To be whoever I wanted to be. It was a way to trick the system.

Here, it was the system. And it was a system I didn’t have faith in.

According to legend—or history, depending on who you listened to—the original Nine Elders had brought forth the Great Loric Age aeons ago when they’d discovered the Phoenix Stones. It was this ancient event that had supposedly awakened the Legacies of the Garde and called the shape-changing Chimæra out of hiding, making Lorien a place of prosperity and peace that was unprecedented throughout the known universe.

From that time on, Lorien’s ecosystem flourished. Where food and resources had once been scarce, there was now more than enough for everyone. What the planet itself didn’t offer up in excess could easily be provided by the strange, amazing, and endlessly varied powers of the Garde. On other planets, this was the stuff people fought tooth and nail over. Not here. Here on Lorien, we could just live.

But the Elders had also set forth a prophecy: that one day, when we were least prepared for it, a threat would come to test us—and destroy us. We wouldn’t know when that threat was coming, but it would come, and when it did, we would have to be ready for it.

That was why the LDA existed. That’s why I was learning to create and maintain ever more elaborate systems of defense against an enemy that I was pretty sure was mostly fantasy. Just in case tomorrow was the day we all woke up and found ourselves under attack.

Back home, everyone knew the deal, but no one seemed to pay much attention to it. The discovery of the Phoenix Stones was just a story, something that had happened so long ago it barely seemed real. And the ancient Elders’ prophecy—well, even if it did come true someday, it sure didn’t seem like it was going to happen anytime soon. While most good Loric paid lip service to the good work that people were doing at places like the LDA, ensuring that Lorien “stayed safe for generations to come,” even the most Loric among them didn’t seem to take any of it too seriously.

Things were perfect, after all. Why worry about what might happen someday?

Here at the academy, it was a totally different story. Everyone walked around acting like the prophecy was about five minutes away from coming to pass—like we were going to be under attack at any minute. When I’d told Rapp I didn’t really think it much mattered whether the grid, the vast defense system that scanned Capital City’s airways for potential intruders, was perfectly maintained at all times, it was like I’d insulted him personally.

“Some of us actually care about what we do here,” he said. He spoke slowly and carefully as he said it, but his voice was shaking. I could tell I’d really gotten to him. “While everyone else on Lorien is living in their little utopia, congratulating themselves for how perfect the place is, it’s people like me who are busting our asses to keep it that way. Without the grid, we’d be sitting ducks. And people just laugh at us.”

“Calm down,” I said, taken aback by how angry he’d gotten. “You’re acting like I just said Pittacus Lore’s a big loser or something.”

He scowled. “Yeah, well,” he said. “You probably think that too, don’t you?”

I paused. “No,” I said. “I mean, not exactly.”

Actually, I had no idea what the famous Pittacus Lore was like at all. I’d never seen him—even the statue of Pittacus outside the school wasn’t of the current Pittacus, but of one of the old ones, probably from like a thousand years ago or something.

The current Elders had the same names as the original nine who had supposedly discovered the Phoenix Stones all those years ago, but they were otherwise many times removed from the Elders of legend. The names were passed along like titles, along with the Elders’ special abilities, to specially picked successors who took on their forebearers’ role of watching over Lorien, of safeguarding our environment, and of protecting our traditions and way of life. I knew that they made occasional trips to the LDA to consult with the Mentor Cêpan and the instructors, but I had never seen them.

Aside from these brief interactions with the world, the Elders had long ago removed themselves from the day-to-day activities of life on Lorien. Even their exact whereabouts were unknown: some Loric said they lived deep in the mountains of Feldsmore, while others claimed they lived in a giant glass fortress deep at the bottom of the Terrax Ocean. Those were just some of the more plausible theories.

The only thing I knew was that it didn’t seem like the Elders did very much at all, and that most people at the LDA, along with the rest of the Lorien defense operation, were telling themselves stories about prophecies that would never come true.

CHAPTER 6

On my eleventh day at the LDA, I was woken by Rapp tugging on My arm.

“Come on, Sandor,” he said. “We’re going to be late.”

“Your mom’s a chimæra’s butt,” I mumbled irritably, shoving him away and pulling my thin, scratchy sheet over my head.

This had become a morning ritual between us. He’d try to wake me up, reminding me that it was my Solemn Loric Duty to rise and shine, and I’d come up with more and more colorful ways to tell him to leave me the hell alone. We were both getting sick of the routine.

“Fine,” said Rapp, turning to go. “I’ll just go to City Center by myself.”

I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. “City Center?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I saw Orkun at the commissary, she said class was cancelled and that we’re supposed to report to transport immediately. She wants us to use the time to do grid maintenance.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?” I was already out of bed, hurriedly throwing on my tunic, excited by the chance to go into the city.

He just snorted as I checked myself out in the dull, tiny mirror over my dresser, trying in vain to flatten the irregular ridges of my cowlicked hair with spit.

“Dude,” he said. “You think a little primping’s gonna make any difference? All the girls in the city just stare right through us. Our tunics may as well be invisibility cloaks.”

I knew he was right, but I groaned anyway, turned from my reflection and headed out the door as he followed behind me. It was hard to be too upset. No, grid maintenance wasn’t all that exciting or anything, but still. We were going to the city.

We arrived at the transport hangar and got into the academy’s only available two-seater, a teardrop-shaped vehicle some of the other students referred to as the Egg. I watched from the passenger seat as Rapp spoke into a receiver on the dashboard, programming our journey into City Center according to the assignment that Orkun had given him. “Sector Three twenty-nine, Security nodule H, Patch Three.” He flipped through a binder, pulling up additional coordinates. “Sector Two ninety-seven, nodule J, Patch Seven.” He had a cocky little smile as he said it, like this stuff made him feel really important or something.

I didn’t get Rapp at all. How could anyone get excited about grid maintenance? It was like getting excited about brushing your teeth, except that brushing your teeth only takes two minutes, and that’s if you do a really good job.

At the same time, I felt sort of bad that I was always giving him a hard time. Rapp was like me, in his own weird way. I was in the LDA’s engineering program because I’d been forced to be here, but he actually wanted to be here. Considering there were only two of us in the whole class, that sort of made him an even bigger freak than me. And he didn’t care. Most of the time, he hardly even seemed to notice when I made fun of him. I almost had to admire the guy.

Obviously I would never tell him that, but at least, I figured, I could tell him I didn’t really think his mom looked like a chimæra’s butt, and that she was probably actually pretty hot.