20. Iceni

Academy Hill, Vidako

Imperium Stellarum
September, 2847

When Arc first woke from the surgery, he didn’t yet feel pain. That came later. Instead, he felt fuzzy, disconnected, as if he was somehow two steps to the left of his body. They put him in a recovery room, where he lay with his bandaged head against a pillow, waiting for the anesthesia to get out of his system. In those first hours, he drifted in and out of consciousness, and eventually he woke from sleep to find that the second bed in the room was occupied by another cadet.

It wasn’t until he saw the spray of acne across the other boy’s face that Arc realized he’d been half-expecting they would put him and Cassie in the same room. It was stupid—the academy didn’t use co-ed dorm rooms, it wouldn’t put men and women in the same hospital room—and it certainly wasn’t the other cadet’s fault that he wasn’t Cassie. Still, they’d been sorted together so often, because of how close their last names were, that he’d come to expect it.

Jimmy Tierney was almost unrecognizable without his frizzy hair; it was only once Arc heard the other cadet speak for the first time that the sound of his voice brought back the memory of how Doctor Vogel had lectured them on why she wanted all the cadets to take their own notes. Once he did start talking, all Arc wanted was for his temporary roommate to shut up. Even with the painkillers, his head was throbbing, and any sound just made the pain worse.

The corpsmen had them taking short walks up and down the corridors of the infirmary starting on the second day. Aside from a few brief flashes of vertigo at the beginning, Arc was surprised at how good it felt to move around. Better yet, though he had to put up with a corpsman hovering at his heels like an overprotective parent, it let him get away from the room, and away from Tierney.

Arc found Cassie and Vee sitting in a small waiting room, and he threw himself down on any empty chair with enough force that he made himself wince. Both of their heads were wrapped in bandages, and the sight of it was jarring—wrong at a fundamental level. Cassie’s eyes seemed even brighter without that black hair falling down to frame her face, and Vee almost looked washed out in the absence of her vibrant, feathered head-crest.

“Pika was here until five, ten minutes ago,” Vee said, once Arc was seated. She spoke quietly, slowly, and without any of the energy she’d shown even during the worst of Hard Burn. “He won’t stop nagging them to let him take a shower. Says his skin’s too dry.”

Arc laughed, and immediately regretted it. “How are you two feeling?” he asked.

“Mostly, I’m having a hard time not touching it,” Cassie admitted. She raised her fingers to her bandage, and brushed it very gently. “I’m kind of terrified to see what it looks like, under all this.”

“Beautiful,” Arc said, before he could think better of it. Because it was true—she looked, with those bandages and in the hospital gown, more fragile than he’d ever seen her before. It made him want to protect her, and to comfort her. “You still look beautiful.”

Cassie froze, color creeping into her cheeks, and just looked at him—until Vee leaned forward too fast in her chair, and groaned at the pain.

“Do me too!” the Torean girl demanded. “Tell me I’m beautiful, not a bald, sick little ghoul. Tell me I’ll still be pretty even if my feathers never come back.”

Arc smiled. “Your feathers will come back, Vee,” he assured her. “You’re the one who told me that, remember? Anyway, Beecher Red Crest went through the exact same surgery you did, and he’s got a very nice set of feathers now.”

Vee flopped onto her side to face Cassie. “He doesn’t get it,” she said, looking as pathetic as she could manage.

“You’re still pretty,” Cassie said, and reached over to wrap her arm around Vee’s shoulders.

𝝮

If there was one good thing about being stuck in the infirmary for days, it was that Arc finally had time to record a message to send home. He’d been so busy, since the moment they walked onto the campus of the academy, and particularly over the two weeks out in the jungle, that he hadn’t had a spare moment to do it. It also turned out that a video had come for him, transmitted by some freighter or passenger liner to the local net when the ship docked at Pinnacle Station. Arc opened the file sitting in his hospital bed, tablet in his lap; the first half was from his father and mother, and it was difficult to watch.

Camden and Audrey Sandhurst did their best to put on a brave face for the camera, but neither of them looked good. Arc pinched his fingers over his mother’s face while they waved and said hello, zooming in to confirm that she’d tried to hide the circles under her eyes with makeup. All of a sudden, he felt intensely guilty for leaving them alone, in an empty house, to mourn the death of their daughter.

“We’re so proud of you for getting into the academy,” Arc’s father said. He looked like he’d aged a decade in less than a year. “And we know you’ll do well there –”

“But remember to take time to make a few friends,” his mother said. “Don’t have your nose in a history book all the time. Maybe even a girl –”

“Anyway, we’re looking forward to you coming home to visit at the end of the year,” Cam Sandhurst said. “You can tell us all about it then, but try to send us something in the meantime, even if it’s just a short video. Otherwise your mother will worry. We’re letting your friends record something for the second half of this message, so you’ll see Teo and Rashmi in just a moment.”

“We love you,” his mother said, and then the screen changed so quickly that it was jarring. Instead of recording indoors, his friends had apparently taken a tablet outside, and Arc got glimpses of a blue sky behind them, broken by the foliage of the mulberry trees which were ubiquitous around Avataran Shahar.

Teo and Rashmi were pressed close together, to fit both of their faces in the frame. Though it had only been six weeks and a few days since he’d seen them last, Arc was amazed at how soft his school friends looked.

Teo Xie had always been heavy, enough that he was routinely teased about his weight by everyone who wasn’t one of his friends. The extra weight showed in his face, in his cheeks and jaw, in a way that Arc was simply no longer used to. Anyone who’d shown up to the Academy carrying a few extra kilos had lost it over the course of Hard Burn—and there had been a couple, if none of his own roommates.

Rashmi Nayar, on the other hand, made even post-surgery Cassie and Vee look tough. She had no muscle tone to speak of, and it was visible in her arms, especially, where they were revealed by her sari of brilliant pink and gold.

“She dressed up,” Arc realized. Perhaps she’d been trying to cheer him up.

“Hey, buddy,” Teo began. “I’m sure they’re kicking your ass all across campus there. It’s hard to imagine you running around shooting rifles and hopping into cockpits, but since they haven’t sent you home yet, I guess it must be working out. When you send us something back, you better tell me how it feels to actually pilot a mech.”

“Hush up,” Rashmi broke in, and leaned toward the camera. “I hope you’re taking care of yourself, Arc. We miss you here.”

“Who’s that?” Jimmy Tierney asked, sliding off his own bed and coming over to look over Arc’s shoulder. “Girlfriend back home? She’s pretty. I bet –”

“Shut up, Jimmy, so I can hear,” Arc complained.

“ –that if you decide fleet isn’t for you and come home, none of us will think any less of you,” Rashmi was saying. “We’d rather you be safe and alive, you understand? Anyway, whatever happens, we can’t wait to see you at the end of the year. Send us a message, alright?”

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“Just friends,” Arc said, once the video had ended. “They’re just friends.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Jimmy Tierney scoffed, returning to his bed. “Girls don’t dress up like that for friends, Sandhurst.”

𝝮

On the third day after the surgery, Arc found himself in an examination room with Doctor Nara Seung, herself. Given that the last time they’d spoken in private, she’d threatened to bounce him from the academy entirely if he didn’t meet her requirements by the end of the year, it didn’t feel particularly comfortable to him.

“You don’t need to keep after me,” he said, finally, unable to bear the silence any longer as she looked over what he presumed was his medical file, flicking one finger against the surface of her tablet, occasionally. “I know what I have to do, and I’ve already said I’ll get it done.”

Seung looked up and fixed him with a withering glare—the kind that made him wish he was wearing something more than a hospital gown as he sat there on the examination table. “Did you think I made a point of seeing you, in particular, cadet?” she asked. “I hate to disappoint you, if so. Every pilot program cadet has to be approved by me before their AI kernel is activated. You’re the thirty-fifth patient I’ve examined.”

“Oh,” Arc said, feeling like an absolute idiot.

“Blood pressure and heart rate are good,” Seung murmured, as much to herself as to him. “No nausea?”

“Not since the first day,” Arc admitted. “I’ve been walking every chance I get.”

“The corticosteroids have kept swelling down nicely,” Seung continued. “No blurriness in your vision?”

Arc shook his head.

“Look here,” Seung said, spinning her tablet around to show it to him. A ghostly gray image of his own head, complete with bones, confronted him. The brain was painted in shades of color, and at a tap from the doctor, a spiderweb of bright, glowing blue threads sprang into relief against the organic material.