I had to keep my mouth from twitching into a smile of pride.
“The ones in Bunk Two straightened up fast after he vanished,” Sujin went on. “I mean, they got questioned more than anyone else about what happened.”
I made a note of that information. While I didn’t get much chance to talk to people outside of class, it would be easy to look up which cadets had bunked with Jun. Figuring out a good excuse to approach them would be harder, even with the aid of Charm.
I finally plunked down a black stone on the game board. It was a weak move, and I knew it. Fortunately, Haneul’s mind wasn’t on the match anymore. The air crackled again, and a small wind swirled around us. I hadn’t realized this topic would bother her so much.
Haneul caught me staring at her and blushed. “Sorry about that,” she said. She closed her eyes and recited a chant under her breath until the energy in the air dissipated.
“Do you think we’ll ever catch up to the deserters?” I asked after Haneul had calmed down.
“I hope so,” she said. “They need to face the captain’s justice.”
“They probably just heard a rumor about the Dragon Pearl’s location, got greedy, and struck out on their own,” Sujin said. “But if that’s the case, it’s odd that the captain didn’t try harder to locate them. . . .”
The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense. If Jun had known something about the Dragon Pearl, he should have told the captain. Unless he couldn’t trust Hwan for some reason. . . . I winced involuntarily.
Luckily, Haneul misinterpreted my expression. “We shouldn’t keep talking about mercs in front of Jang,” she said to Sujin.
“It’s all right,” I said hastily. “I’ll double-check any personal shield I use in the future!” I meant it, too.
In the back of my mind, I heard Jang’s dry chuckle. So he was somewhere nearby. I wondered what he thought of this conversation.
Sujin wasn’t done talking about the deserters. “The other strange thing,” they said, “is that we should have been able to track the shuttle pretty easily. Shuttles can’t outrun a big battle cruiser like the Pale Lightning, and they shouldn’t be able to hide from one, either.”
I hadn’t thought of that before, but the anomaly bothered me, too. Had someone covered for their escape? If so, they must be lying low. No wonder Captain Hwan was touchy about the subject.
For the rest of the baduk match, those questions distracted me. Haneul defeated me handily, which meant that I had to pick up some of her chores. I didn’t care—I was too busy dreaming of ways to dig up more information.
Afterward, I made my excuses and went back to the barracks to think. For a change, no one else was there.
No one, that is, except Jang.
“Hello,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve been making progress. Did you hear what Lieutenant Hyosu said about increased merc activity—?”
“You made me a promise,” he said. Cold air whirled around him, making me shiver, and his long, ragged hair fell about his face. “You keep getting distracted by the deserters. I don’t care about them.”
I suppressed a growl. Jun wasn’t a distraction. He was the whole reason I was there! But I had to appease Jang. “Yes, I understand,” I said in my most soothing voice. “I won’t let you down.”
“You’d better not,” he said, “or you’ll regret it.” He laid his hand on mine, then vanished, leaving behind a chill that went all the way to the bone.
At mess the next morning, I accidentally dropped my chop-sticks on the floor, and while I was retrieving them, I knocked my head on the table and spilled my gruel.
Sujin asked, “What’s wrong with you today?”
Jang’s threat weighed heavily on me. I needed answers for him and had no more time to waste. “The mercs who almost fried me,” I asked, “how much do we know about them?”
“None of them survived, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Haneul said. Her eyes softened as she regarded me. “This has been bothering you for a while, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, which was close enough to the truth. At the least, it was bothering Jang—the real Jang. “These pirates looking for the Dragon Pearl . . . are they all working together?”
“Oh, there’s no chance of that,” Sujin said. “If the pirates joined forces, they’d be a real threat. But it’s impossible for individual merc captains to trust each other. They’d rather sell each other out for a quick profit. That’s what our officers always say, anyway.”
“Why were they foolish enough to attack that freighter,” I asked, “when they knew we were in the area?”
Haneul stirred her gruel, thinking. “They might have thought its captain was another pirate with new information about the Pearl.”
Byung-Ho, a pirate? Just in time, I stopped myself from saying that out loud. I didn’t think he had it in him.
But then I remembered something: All those crates that had been stacked in the hold. Were those smuggled items? Could one of them have contained the Pearl? He hadn’t wanted me to see them. . . .
Sujin and Haneul were staring at me, because I’d been quiet for too long. “Yeah. They must be desperate for leads,” I offered.
“I’ll say.” Haneul glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Hey, we’d better clean up if we’re going to make it to class on time.”
That day’s lessons were on engineering. Afterward, Hyosu took me aside. My friends shot me worried glances as they left me behind.
The lieutenant peered down at me over her glasses. I tensed, thinking I was about to get lectured, but instead she said, “You’ve been studying hard, haven’t you?”
“Y-yes, ma’am,” I stammered. What was I going to say, no?
Hyosu beamed at me. “Well, keep it up. You’re doing much better than the last time we discussed the subject.”
So engineering hadn’t been Jang’s strong suit. I wondered what he had been good at. It really didn’t matter anymore, though. I had to get by with my own strengths and weaknesses now.
I thanked her and made my way toward the mess hall, where I had KP duty. I took one of the less frequented corridors. “Jang,” I called softly. “You around?”
He appeared, his hair even longer and more disheveled than the last time I’d seen it. Maybe it was my imagination, but the unnatural breeze that usually accompanied him didn’t feel as cold as usual.
“I overheard your conversation with Haneul and Sujin,” he said.
I blinked. “You were there? I didn’t notice.”
“It’s easy for me to hide my presence around Haneul, especially when she’s upset,” Jang said, sounding wistful. “No one notices a ghost-wind when she’s accidentally summoning a miniature storm in the same room.”
“So you heard that the people who killed you are dead,” I said, hoping that would satisfy him.
“Yes, that was a very interesting detail.”
Wasn’t that enough? I wondered. His eyes still looked . . . well, haunted.
I had an idea. “Would you prefer to speak to Sujin and Haneul yourself?” I asked gently. “We could explain the situation—that I’m pretending to be you. Hopefully they’d understand.” Truthfully, I didn’t want to do it. I felt I had to make the offer, though, because of his pitiful expression.
Jang was already shaking his head. “No,” he said, “it’s better not to complicate things.” He looked away for a moment. “If they found out I’m dead, they’d be obliged to report you. And they might try to exorcise me so I don’t bring bad luck to the ship. Then I’d really be gone. I’m not ready for that quite yet.”
“I’ll keep your secret if you keep mine,” I said.
Jang smiled thinly. “Fair enough.”
“Sorry I’m not living up to your reputation as a slacker,” I teased gently, thinking back to Lieutenant Hyosu’s compliment.
“That’s the one nice thing about this arrangement,” Jang said. “Not having to study anymore.”
I stuck out my tongue—his tongue, which must have been weird for him to see.
Jang started to fade away. “You have KP duty next, don’t you? You should get going.”
I wondered when I would see him again. It was unnerving to know he could eavesdrop on me without my knowledge.
After the first week, I was starting to take to life as a cadet. It felt almost like I wasn’t pretending anymore. I was getting better at following the complicated military regulations. Saluting whenever an officer showed up had become second nature. My posture was the best it had been in my entire life, which would have made Mom proud. It even impressed me. Considering how much of my life I’d spent scrubbing things, I’d thought I would always be hunched over.
It took me by surprise the first time I was excused from toilet-cleaning duty. One night Lieutenant Ju-Won regarded me sourly and said, “Your comportment is adequate, Cadet. See that it stays that way.”
I didn’t expect my good luck to last, though. As much as I was enjoying my taste of life in the Space Forces, training to be a soldier wasn’t my true purpose. I was there to find my brother.