CHAPTER 33 KAT
IT WAS morning, the bright lights of day filtering under the door as it all came back to her.
Segura.
The mainframe.
Lee—
Clutching the blankets close, Kat felt the bed beside her, searching for his warm body. But he was already up and dressed. Lee sat behind his desk, leaning with his chin in his hand as he read something on his holoblock.
She just watched him. The quiet, peacefulness of the morning so at odds with the frenzy that had consumed her head as she’d fallen asleep last night. She caught fragments of those thoughts as she lay here. But for the most part, it was just still.
A mourning, and a wake.
He looked up as she pushed herself up to sitting, letting the blankets pool down around her legs.
“Morning,” she said. Just the word felt heavy enough on her lips she almost considered lying back down again. But she made herself lift her chin, made herself remain vertical as she nodded over to his holoblock.
“Whatcha reading?”
“Oh, nothing. Tonya just got back to me.”
And when she continued to peer back at Lee, he smiled faintly, a hint of humor reaching his eyes. “You remember my ancestor and the space farming we talked about? Well I asked her to look into it...”
Carrying his holoblock over to the bed, Lee sat down next to her, expanding the hologram for her to see what Tonya had sent.
“It’s—a Raider Placement log?” Kat asked with disbelief, squinting as she read the bio displayed near the top. “‘Interests include pilotry, aviation mechanics, and botany…” She shook her head. “A raider cadet. It’s a wonder Tonya didn’t know about him, your ancient relative is basically you.”
“You forget, it’s my dad’s line. She’s probably never even seen these records, only repeats what she heard. Although I had always thought I was the first…”
“She found a photograph too, here,” Lee said quietly, drawing up a second hologram.
It was a full color image showing a teen about their age, with warm brown eyes and hair a very similar shade to Lee, standing with a couple other friends.
They all wore dark navy jumpsuits, but with their posture, and the way they carried themselves, she would never have mistaken them for anything other than raiders.
She knew that pride. The obedience and the thrill. That feeling like you truly were doing something for your galaxy.
Kat read further down the Placement log in her head, still in disbelief. ‘Declining multiple placement offers, top Gamma cadet, Leland Waters, has accepted another pursuit with Sol Verde private operations, to begin upon graduation…’
The parallels truly were uncanny.
She massaged her chest as some of that ache from the night before returned, the jagged edges still raw. They’d made such a mess of it, too. She had no idea what she’d tell people, what they’d make of her breaking down yet again.
And her cadets—
“Oh gosh, our trainings, Lee we’re going to be late.” She checked her hyperband, and had kicked off the blankets before Lee waved his hand.
“I got us a cover, bought us the morning,” he said, closing out his holoblock as he stood to set it back on his desk.
“Who’d you get on short notice?” Kat squinted. Her brain felt full of mush right now.
“Whistler and Marco,” Lee said, thoughtfully. “I told them about the bad green juice you had last night…”
“Bad green juice,” she snorted. “You know Whistler’s going to come knocking. He’ll immediately suspect something’s off,” she warned.
“Perhaps.” But Lee was still thoughtful as he rolled his lip under his teeth. “And when that time comes, maybe it’s fair we let him in and give him the choice.” The one that hadn’t been offered to them.
Pulling her knees up towards her, she wrapped her arms around them, grasping at her toes.
The memory stung nearly just as bad as it had last night.
She couldn’t shake the splinters from the image that had cracked in her head—not just of her Commander—but the entire picture she had built for herself as a raider.
Everything she stood for—shattered into a zillion tiny flecks, like the city that had rained down on them.
Shattered for the person who had made that glitter rain, leaving only a murky dust for them to pick through.
The mattress shifted again as Lee sat down next to her. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” He looked about as grim as she felt with the soft coloring under his eyelids. The hazy glimmer of pain in his eyes.
“I’m scared,” she said, searching his eyes as she tried to form words for the feeling she now carried—the beginnings of which she’d carried for weeks now. “I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be if not this.”
“I’m scared too,” he admitted, watching her with his shades of green.
“This isn’t where I wanted us to be right now.
This isn’t what I had planned for us.” And just as she’d hoped, something had sparked in his eyes, an ember of clarity, pure and brilliant.
And she wondered if this wasn’t supposed to be part of it, if they weren’t supposed to be scared.
Maybe they needed to feel something to know they were on the right path, and that it was worth it.
If they would have ever fought for it, had they not.
But staring it down in the face now, she’d never felt more exposed. The Commander’s shield had only extended so far. And facing the full gravitas of it all, she had to wonder at Nolan having let them get this involved.
“I will never make you choose something you aren’t comfortable with,” Lee said, squinting as if also chasing that clarity. “I’ll never ask you to follow me somewhere you don’t want to go. I don’t know where we go from here yet either. But I promise I won’t leave here without you.”
And she knew it was silly, and probably didn’t mean much to anyone. But she needed to feel his promise right now. She needed to feel his touch.
And so she held her pinky out for him to take. For us.
“I still can’t believe he was a raider,” Kat murmured as they filtered into the Hideaway later that morning.
They had it all to themselves, and normally Kat would have been overjoyed to have her pick of the tables under the golden mood lights.
It was the only floor of the Academy aside from their dorms that had ever truly felt homey.
But this morning she could feel the emptiness.
The loneliness. She couldn’t decide if she was still in a funk, or if she just felt abandoned.
Probably a little of both. At least she wouldn’t have to fake it in front of her cadets.
That was one perk. She wasn’t quite ready yet to shove on her game face again.
She also wasn’t ready to go anywhere near the De Zolar files. Not right now, not when she was barely keeping it together. Instead, she found herself poking around less recent histories.
She’d spun a quick search into that Sol Verde private operations company, Lee’s ancient relative had left for, on a whim. But, as expected, they’d long since gone out of business.
Which had led her to dig into Commander Blanche’s raider history, which she’d been at for a while now. It was closure, in a way.
“I wonder what changed,” Kat said as she closed out yet another impressive mission Raider Yvette Blanche had led back in her day.
She’d truly been magnificent. She’d taken a ship out to star systems Kat had never heard of before.
Rescued species of near-extinct creatures and fungi.
She’d even shepherded a pretty vocal rally, by the sounds of it, for the conservation of land in some fourth quadrant star system.
But all of that had been years ago. Before.
Where was the raider who had held such a fire and passion for her people?
Kat tried to make herself focus, tried to let herself move past it, but the longer she sat there, the more agitated she became.
They’d held a real chance of righting this.
With Commander Blanche on their side, they’d stood a real chance at convincing the council of Segura’s innocence. But without her influence?
Kat knew how slim the chances were of coming out of this unscathed. Even less so, for Segura.
When she could no longer keep her feet still… when she was very close to just chucking her holoblock at something, Kat jumped to her feet.
“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 to her head? If their Commander had really tried everything she could, she would have 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.