Eight
Rural Virginia
“Come on, get up. You’ll miss breakfast.”
Julian had already been awake for hours, but he pulled the covers over his head anyway, turning to face the wall. While Valeran’s
other students stretched, yawned, and prepared for the day, he lay motionless in bed, trying to pretend he was somewhere else,
anywhere else.
If this were Exeter, he would have been the one rousing his roommate: standing over Landon’s bed and shaking his shoulder
while his friend tried to sleep off last night’s high. Drugs were of course forbidden at Exeter, but unlike at Valeran, there
were no armed guards to pat them down and search their bags. Landon wasn’t even the only student on their floor who popped
uppers between classes, though he was the most glib about it.
And if he were home, it would be the housekeeper waking him up, standing in the doorway of his bedroom and urging him downstairs
for breakfast. His father had recently replaced their head housekeeper with an older woman, stocky and short and utterly unamused
by his antics. That was after his mother had caught Julian with their old housekeeper, a thirtysomething aspiring influencer
who used her days off to audition for reality shows and touch up her lip injections. They had actually been running around
since Julian was fourteen, when she had taken his virginity, but his mother didn’t need to know that.
Here, at Valeran, it was Mikhail who stood over his bed, an irritatingly sunny expression on his face. “Come on,” he repeated.
“You don’t want to be late on your first day.”
“Right.” Julian cast off his sheets at last. “That would be a tragedy.”
He put on his uniform and checked the schedule on his tablet.
His day started with S011: Strategic Leader Foundational Course.
In the afternoon he had Global History I, Economics for Strategists, and something called, bizarrely, Basic Weapons Management for Non-Majors.
The idea that they might expect him to use a gun made Julian’s skin crawl. He was not that kind of criminal.
Julian walked with Mikhail to the dining hall, feeling increasingly ashamed for all his petulant brooding and even a bit grateful
for his roommate’s company. Mikhail had been more patient with him than he deserved.
The dining hall wasn’t even close to fully occupied, but with the domed ceiling, even fewer than fifty voices were carried
to a near-deafening roar. His head throbbed. Already exhaustion was catching up with him. He would have to find a way to sleep
more. For the past month, since his arrest, he had been using his mother’s prescriptions, topped off with a gulp of scotch,
to knock himself into oblivion.
That wasn’t going to work now, obviously. He would have to wait until he reached number one, until he won the weekend furlough.
Then maybe he could figure out a way to smuggle the pills back into Valeran.
Mikhail led him to one of the center tables with brisk, assiduous strides. There was a very pretty girl sitting there, head
bent over her tablet. When she looked up and saw Mikhail, her face broke into a grin.
“Hi,” she said—to Mikhail first, and then to Julian, with such uninhibited friendliness that Julian was almost taken aback.
He had expected more pretentions from Valeran’s students.
“Hey,” Mikhail replied. His tone was sheepish and the tips of his ears were bright pink.
“Is this your new roommate?”
“Yes,” Mikhail replied. “Jane, this is Julian.”
The girl he’d been messaging on his tablet yesterday, with that same furtive, giddy smile. Julian stuck out his hand. “Julian Joyce-Young the Third.”
“Jane Lin.” She offered her hand back. “Welcome to Valeran.”
Her voice was almost impossibly chipper for 7:45 a.m. Together she and Mikhail made quite the welcoming committee. Maybe they had managed to smuggle uppers past the guards.
“Thanks,” said Julian, unable to match her enthusiasm. “Are you a hacker, too?”
It was blunt, but he didn’t care. If everyone at Valeran already knew his face and his name and his crimes, if Mikhail—and
probably Jane, by extension—had watched scathing parody videos about him, he at least deserved some basic facts in return.
But Jane didn’t seem to register it as rudeness. “Yes, though I’m not nearly as good a hacker as him.” She batted her lashes at Mikhail.
“You mean not as brazen,” said Mikhail, dropping into the chair beside her. “You could have easily hacked B of A’s servers
if you wanted. You’re just too good of a person.”
“Oh, stop it,” Jane said, blushing.
His head starting to throb again, Julian took the seat on Jane’s other side. Yet there was something oddly soothing about
their artless flirtation, which he listened to with half attention. He could have been overhearing an almost identical conversation
in Exeter’s dining hall. They sounded like ordinary teenagers. At least for the moment, Valeran felt startlingly, reassuringly
mundane.
He didn’t hear the patter of footsteps behind him. He only looked up when Jane suddenly cocked her head and said cheerfully,
“Oh, hi, Klaudia.”
No.
Not her.
Very slowly, Julian turned.
“You’re in my seat,” Klaudia said.
“I must have missed the seating chart,” Julian said, “given that this is a military academy, not an elementary school.”
He was treading dangerous ground. At any moment Klaudia could reveal him, bring up the incident he was trying so desperately
to keep out of his mind. Why, out of all people, did it have to be her who had caught him crying? And why did it have to be her standing before him now, clearly friends with Jane and Mikhail, who were looking on with bewildered expressions? All she
had to do was recount what she had seen and he would be a laughingstock at Valeran, before he even made it to his first class.
Julian could almost feel his father’s gaze, searing hot with disappointment. A Joyce-Young shouldn’t cry.
But Klaudia said nothing. She folded her arms across her chest.
Mikhail and Jane continued to watch their silent showdown anxiously. Julian glanced over at them, and then met Klaudia’s stare.
Her gray eyes were pure ice. He wasn’t sure if he’d even seen her blink. His mind returned to some of the headlines he’d read—viperess, Medusa, cold-hearted she-devil. They all seemed at least half true. She was not someone to lose a war of attrition.
Finally, Julian got to his feet, pushing back the chair with more force than necessary. Klaudia took his abandoned seat without
a word, and he collapsed into a chair on the other side of the table, face blazing.
Almost immediately Klaudia lapsed into conversation with Jane and Mikhail—bringing up shared memories and inside jokes, with
the clear intent of cutting him out. But Julian noticed that Klaudia said little after the conversation began in earnest,
and that her eyes kept darting back to her bag, where the corner of her tablet was peeking out. As if this were all a show
to humiliate him and she would much rather be reading about NATO doctrines and proxy wars in the Pacific.
The hour wound down. Julian picked at his food.
Klaudia was the first to stand when the bell rang, bidding brisk goodbyes before walking away.
For a moment Julian stared determinedly down at the table, eyes tracing the pattern of the wood grain, considering his options.
And then, with a surge of adrenaline, Julian bolted to his feet.
He caught up to Klaudia and managed to grab her by the wrist before she could exit through the dining hall’s double doors.
“Why didn’t you tell them?” he demanded.
Gingerly, she extricated herself from his grasp. “You didn’t force my hand. And I don’t have to play dirty to win.”
Julian snorted. “That’s rich coming from a girl who scammed her own father out of millions.”
“If I recall correctly, there wasn’t an angry mob outside city hall demanding my arrest,” she said coolly. “Just investment
firms offering me salaries.”
It was true. BlackRock and Morgan Stanley had both publicly proclaimed that they would hire her on the spot—if she was acquitted.
Julian hated how much the reminder of his scandal stung. The reminder that he was better off dead to the people of Boston,
and maybe to his own father as well.
“You’re just going to hold this over my head as long as it’s useful, aren’t you?”
Klaudia lifted one shoulder in a shrug.
Julian’s fists clenched. “I should’ve known you’d be a callous bitch.”
She just shrugged again.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. If they had been somewhere else—anywhere else—he
might have gotten away with it. But here, at Valeran, the order of the world was turned upside down. The name Joyce-Young meant nothing. For once, he would have to survive on skill alone. Until now he had rarely questioned his own competence,
but the thought of having neither prestige nor wealth to fall back on if he failed was nauseating.
He didn’t know how he could compete with someone like Klaudia.
It wasn’t just her obvious intelligence; it was her legendary coldness.
She was inhuman, unfeeling. Julian searched her gaze for any trace of sentiment and found none.
No chinks in the armor. It was humiliating to have been so nakedly emotional in comparison.
“If we’re done here . . .”
Her voice, too, was as flat and frigid as a field in winter.
Klaudia turned to go, and this time Julian let her. When the sound of her footsteps faded, he leaned forward against the wall
and squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t open them again until he was sure he wouldn’t cry.
His first class, Strategic Leader Foundational Course, was nearly full by the time he arrived, leaving Julian to take a seat
in the middle of the first row. He felt the eyes of the other students on him as he entered, fixed and scorching. Still smarting
from his confrontation with Klaudia, Julian slid silently into his chair.
The teacher—Professor Narendra, according to his syllabus—did not greet the students or introduce himself. He didn’t say a