7. Alexander
ALEXANDER
At some point in the middle of the night, Alexander wakes up to a light scuffling sound outside his door—like someone walking down the hallway. He shrugs it off and rolls over to fall back asleep.
Alexander is a prince. He’s probably said it enough times, but he needs to make that abundantly clear.
He is a prince. And princes don’t wake up before ten unless they’re sneaking out of someone’s bedroom. Princes are awarded infinite respect for simply taking a breath. Princes have very few responsibilities besides sitting around and looking pretty.
So when Zeno picks him up out of bed and drops him to the ground at seven ten, it is an understatement to say he is not pleased.
“What in the ever-loving fu—” he sputters, flailing his limbs around with no direction.
Zeno gets slapped by one of his arms and laughs uncontrollably.
“I told you,” he shouts over Alexander’s continued ranting. “Seven o’clock. And I’ve been trying to get you up for the past ten minutes, but you sleep like a rock. They stop serving breakfast at half past.”
Alexander stops his blubbering when he realizes that, yes, he is truly expected to get up and leave the room within the next twenty minutes.
He never gets ready in under an hour.
His hair is not something that happens by itself.
“Come on,” Zeno encourages, pulling him to his feet.
“Zeno, it’s so early.”
“I know, buddy. But you better get used to it. Patrol days we get up at five.”
Alexander launches himself back onto his bed and screams into his pillow. He really, really needs to get out of here.
Zeno just lifts Alexander up again and places him, standing, in front of his closet.
He rifles through his drawers and sees Zeno is doing the same. Which means Zeno didn’t even get ready before spending half his morning waking Alexander. And he doesn’t seem annoyed by it, just amused and slightly rushed. He’s so… nice.
Alexander decides to stop being a brat for Zeno’s sake and quickly gets dressed.
He slides the ring that he doesn’t know how to use onto his finger, and packs his messenger bag up with books, a tablet, and his tank top. Zeno mentioned training at some point during their tour yesterday, and he doesn’t want the linen shirts that he looks so good in to get sweaty.
He’ll just have to fix his hair during breakfast, he supposes.
Once clothes are on and teeth are brushed, they sprint up the stairs and make it right before the clock strikes seven thirty. They load up their plates and join Eudoxos in the same seats as last night.
“You guys cut it close, huh?” Eudoxos asks, far too lively for this early in the morning.
“Don’t ‘you guys’ me. Alexander sleeps like a princess,” Zeno laments, a playful smile on his face.
“That makes sense. Pretty boys like him never have much discipline. I don’t know if Kallias has been on time a day in his life,” Eudoxos says.
Alexander starts to interject, but Zeno beats him to it. “You think he’s pretty?” he asks, face tight with anxiety.
Well, isn’t that interesting. Alexander’s not opposed to some drama to keep him going in these wee hours of the morn. And it looks like Zeno’s nursing a little crush—on his best friend, no less.
“Well, objectively, he is. Not for me, though.”
“Hey!” Alexander exclaims. Why not stir the pot, right? “I could be pretty for you if you want me to.”
“Oh, well if that’s the case, then—”
“No!” Zeno shouts, then immediately laughs sheepishly. “Then I’d be the third wheel and that would be so weird, so, no, you can’t. Alex, don’t look at Xos like that.”
Alexander keeps making kissy faces at Eudoxos until Zeno looks ready to combust, then turns to wink at him, running a hand through his hair, which reminds him…
“Zeno, look at me.”
“Huh?”
“I need to use your eyes as a mirror. Didn’t get the chance to do my hair.”
Zeno’s brows fly up. “You want to use my eyes as mirrors? What about your ring?”
His ring?
“Of course,” he stumbles. “And how would I—”
Apparently Zeno is used to Alexander’s lack of basic life skills because he just slides the ring off of his finger and onto the table. “Here, watch.” Zeno taps the hole in the center and a screen projects up.
“These boxes are all of your applications. That one is the camera. Just click it, and voila. A mirror.”
“Zeno, you beautiful bastard, that’s brilliant. I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.”
“He’s like a parakeet,” Eudoxos scoffs. “Who knows if we’ll get his eyes off that thing now.”
He lets their chatter fall into the background to focus on his mess of a hair-helmet, but then he feels a tingle at the nape of his neck like someone’s looking. He knows who it is right away. There’s nothing more intense, he’s coming to learn, than a stare from Kallias.
When they make eye contact, Kallias smirks at his disheveled morning state.
Alexander sticks his tongue out like a five-year-old—he might want Kallias to think he’s cool, but that doesn’t mean he has to act mature—and Kallias rolls his eyes and looks down, back to his book.
It’s a different book from the one he had last night. A quick reader, then. Smart and pretty?
Kallias doesn’t engage again, so Alexander turns back to his reflection. His hair looks fine. The ‘purposefully untamed’ bits are a little less purposeful than intended, but whatever.
Once breakfast—eggs that were somehow both too runny and too stiff—is finally over, they leave the dining hall to head to class.
“History first,” Eudoxos says. “Get ready to be bored out of your mind.”
“Odds on him falling asleep?” Zeno asks Eudoxos.
Alexander laughs and answers for him. “Oh, very high. I’m not one for… learning.”
Eudoxos sizes him up. “Makes sense.”
They cross the lawn to a little amphitheater. It’s surrounded by columns that hold up a circular roof.
“Why’s the class size so small?” he whispers to Zeno.
“You take classes with your cohort, which are capped at twenty members.”
“And the cohort is…”
“Everyone who lives on our floor. Our age group, basically.”
Eudoxos leads them to the second row of the four-row amphitheater. Alexander doesn’t get the chance to see who else is in the class before the teacher pulls a rod and the curtains shut between the columns. Even in the dark, though, the flash of golden hair in the back shines bright.
Images of the Republic still under construction light up on a white screen—probably courtesy of one of those pre-Fall projectors Alexander’s read about—and he tries to focus. Knowing the history of this place will certainly give him some insight into how to leave it.
He opens his notebook, cracks his knuckles, and starts scribbling.
When the curtains reopen and mid-morning light soaks into the amphitheater, Alexander is truly in a horrible mood.
Their history teacher, an ancient, tired man, rasped out facts and figures for the entire two hours of class, almost reciting the textbook verbatim.
Alexander didn’t fall asleep, but it was a close thing.
He face plants into his desk once the teacher exits the classroom. “That was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” he groans. None of his peers move to leave, so he figures all of their classes will take place here.
“Told you,” he hears Eudoxos say above him.
Then someone (definitely Zeno) shakes him violently by the shoulder. “Wake up, wake up!”
Alexander lets his tongue loll like he’s dead, and Zeno gasps. “Oh, Forms. He’s lost to the world.”
Zeno and Eudoxos make up some stupid chants to the Forms about his hair and how they hope there are mirrors for him in the afterlife, and Alexander stays limp on the table even after he starts laughing.
He only opens his eyes when he hears someone scoff nearby.
An unremarkable boy with chestnut hair, a horse-ish face, and beady eyes observes them with scorn.
“Can I help you?” Alexander asks.
“You just got here and you’re already making a fool of yourself. Not sure if I want your help.”
Alexander smiles, a scathing, mean thing. “Oh, buddy. If you have an inferiority complex, you could just say so.”
No one seems to like Horse-face very much because snickers erupt around the room. The only people who don’t laugh are the two lackeys sitting on either side of him and another boy in the back who looks too stern to be entertained by shenanigans like this.
Kallias doesn’t laugh either, too busy pretending to be apathetic toward the world, but Alexander can see in the way the corners of his mouth tilt that he’s amused.
Then an older woman struts into the room and silences the chatter with a powerful clap. She rises to her podium, scratching numbers on the board without a glance at her class.
“Today we’re looking at vector calculus and convergence,” she explains at top speed. Then, not looking away from the board, she says, “Before we begin, I know we have a new recruit here today. Stand up for us, will you?”
He stands.
“Name?”
“Alexander.”
“Welcome, Alexander. Sit. If you need help, ask a classmate after the lesson.”
“Sounds go—”
“Let’s dive right in.”
When they open their textbooks, Alexander bites back a smile. Maybe this is obnoxious, but surely he’s already proven himself to be arrogant, so who cares. Alexander is great at math. He doesn’t even really have to try; something about him is wired to just get it.
His brother hated him for it. He thought it made his successes less impressive—he studied for hours while Alexander didn’t even open the book.
Part of him thinks that he was meant to be the treasurer and not the King of the Holy American Empire. But instead, he’s neither, and his entire country thinks he’s dead. Which is just great.
He needs to stop thinking about home; it does him no good.
The teacher lectures, assigns practice problems, and reviews the answers in a predictable, near-meditative cycle. Until she breaks the pattern.
“Kallias,” she says, after ten minutes of work time for a particularly sticky problem.
“Here we go,” Eudoxos groans quietly next to him.
“Ma’am,” Kallias drawls, not disrespectful, but definitely not overly kind. His voice is low and intense and—
Well, it fits his body.