It’s not just the thought. I’m nervous. I realize it slowly as I look around the shuttle’s interior. Six other youths sit quietly. One, a slender boy with an open gaze and pretty smile, catches my eye. He’s the sort who still laughs at butterflies.
“Julian,” he declares properly, and takes my forearm. We have no data to offer each other through our datapads; they took them when we boarded the shuttle. So instead I offer him the seat across from me. “Darrow, a very interesting name.”
“Have you ever been to Agea?” I ask Julian.
“Course,” he says, smiling. He always smiles. “What, you mean you haven’t? It’s strange. I thought I knew so many Golds, but hardly any of them managed to get past the entrance exams. It’s a brave new world of faces, I fear. Anyway, I envy you the fact you haven’t been to Agea. It’s a strange place. Beautiful, no doubt, but life there is fast, and cheap, so they say.”
“But not for us.”
He chuckles. “I suppose not. Not unless you play at politics.”
“I don’t much like playing.” I notice his reaction, so I laugh my seriousness off with a wink. “Not unless there’s a wager, man. You hear?”
“I hear! What’s your game? Bloodchess? Gravcross?”
“Oh, bloodchess is all right. But fauxWar takes the prize,” I say with a Golden grin.
“Especially if you’re a Nortown fan!” he agrees.
“Oh … Nortown. I don’t know if we’ll get along,” I say, wincing. I jab myself with a thumb. “Yorkton.”
“Yorkton! I don’t know if we’ll ever get along!” he laughs.
And though I smile, he doesn’t know how cold I am inside; the conversation, the jibes, the smiles, are all a pattern of sociality. Matteo’s done me well, but to Julian’s credit, he doesn’t seem a monster.
He should be a monster.
“My brother must already have arrived at the Institute. He was already in Agea at our family’s estate, causing trouble no doubt!” Julian shakes his head proudly. “Best man I know. He’ll be the Primus, just you watch. Our father’s pride and joy, and that’s saying something with how many family members I have!” Not a flicker of jealousy in his voice, just love.
“Primus?” I ask.
“Oh, Institute talk; it means leader of his House.”
The Houses. I know these. There are twelve loosely based on underlying personality traits. Each is named for one of the gods of the Roman pantheon. The SchoolHouses are networking tools and social clubs outside of school. Do well, and they’ll find you a powerful family to serve. The families are the true powers in the Society. They have their own armies and fleets and contribute to the Sovereign’s forces. Loyalty begins with them. There is little love for the denizens of one’s own planet. If anything, they are the competition.
“You sobs done beating each other off yet?” an impish kid sneers from the corner of the shuttle. He’s so drab he is khaki instead of Gold. His lips are thin and his face like a cruel hawk just as it spies a mouse. A Bronzie.
“Are we bothering you?” My sarcasm has a polite nip.
“Does two dogs humping bother me? Likely, yes. If they are noisy.”
Julian stands. “Apologize, cur.”
“Go slag yourself,” the small kid says. In half a second, Julian has drawn a white glove from nowhere. “That to wipe my ass, you golden pricklick?”
“What? You little heathen!” Julian says in shock. “Who raised you?”
“Wolves, after your mother’s cootch spat me out.”
“You beast!”
Julian throws the glove at the small kid. I’m watching, thinking this is the height of comedy. The kid seems pulled straight from the Lykos crop, Beta maybe. He’s like an ugly, tiny, irritable Loran. Julian doesn’t know what to do, so he makes a challenge.
“A challenge, goodman.”
“A duel? You’re that offended?” The ugly kid snorts at the princeling. “Fine. I’ll stitch your family pride together after the Passage, pricklick.” He blows his nose into the glove.
“Why not now, coward?” Julian calls. His slender chest is puffed out just as his father must have taught him. No one insults his family.
“Are you stupid? Do you see razors about? Idiot. Go away. We’ll duel after the Passage.”
“Passage …?” Julian finally asks what I’m thinking.
The scrawny kid grins wickedly. Even his teeth are khaki.
“It’s the last test, idiot. And the best secret this side of the rings around Octavia au Lune’s cootch.”
“Then how do you know about it?” I ask.
“Inside track,” the kid says. “And I don’t know about it. I know of it, you giant pisshead.”
His name is Sevro, and I like his angle.
But the talk of a Passage worries me. There is so little I know, I realize, as I listen in as Julian strikes up a conversation with the last member of our shuttle. They talk about their test scores. There is a severe disparity between their low scores and mine. I notice Sevro snort as they say theirs aloud. How did applicants with such low scores get in? I’ve got an ill feeling in my gut. And what did Sevro score?
We come to the Valles Marineris in darkness. It is a great scar of light across Mars’s black surface, going as far as eyes can see. At the center of it, the capital city of my planet rises in the night like a garden of jewelswords. Nightclubs flicker on rooftops, dance floors made of condensed air. Scantily-dressed girls and foolish boys rise and fall as gravMixers play with physics. NoiseBubbles separate city blocks. We cut through them and hear worlds of different sounds.
The Institute is beyond Agea’s night districts and is built into the side of the eight-kilometer-high walls of the Valles Marineris. The walls rise like tidal waves of green stone cradling civilization with flora. The Institute itself is made of white stone—a place of columns and sculpture, Roman to its core.
I have not been here before. But I have seen the columns. Seen the destination of our voyage. Bitterness wells in me like bile rising from stomach to throat as I think of his face. Think of his words. His eyes as they scanned the crowd. I watched on the HC as the ArchGovernor gave his speech time and again to the classes before my own. Soon I’ll hear it from his lips myself. Soon I’ll suffer the rage. Feel the fire lick over my heart as I see him in person once again.
We land on a drop pad and are shepherded into an open-air marble square looking over the vast valley. The night air is crisp. Agea sprawls behind and the gates of the Institute stretch before us. I stand with over a thousand Goldbrows, all glancing about with the cocksureness of their race. Many clump together, friends from beyond the white walls of the school. I did not think their classes so large.
A tall Golden man flanked by Obsidians and a coterie of Gold advisors rises on a pair of gravBoots before the gate. My heart goes cold as I recognize his face and hear his voice and see the glimmer in his ingot eyes.
“Welcome, children of Aureate,” ArchGovernor Nero au Augustus says in a voice as smooth as Eo’s skin. It is preternaturally loud. “I assume you understand the gravity of your presence here. Of the thousand cities of Mars. Of all the Great Families, you are the chosen few. You are the peak of the human pyramid. Today, you will begin your campaign to join the best caste of our race. Your fellows stand like you in the Institutes of Venus, of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres of Earth, of Luna, of the Gas Giant Moons, of Europa, of the Astrodian Greek Cluster and the Astrodian Trojan Cluster, of Mercury, of Callisto, of the joint venture Enceledas and Ceres, and of the farpioneers of Hildas.”