“Kaia, come with me, please.”
My heart thudded, then fell into my butt. I’d been in trouble enough times to recognize the tone of his voice, and at the moment, there were any number of infractions that could have been discovered. I could only hope it wasn’t one that could get me into seriously hot water.
There was nowhere to run in Genesis, or on Earth Before, where the Historians couldn’t find me. So I followed him, trying to prepare myself to face the music.
Chapter Sixteen
Elder Truman led me down the echoing metal hallway, past a giggling group of first-years who went silent and wide-eyed at the sight of him. He didn’t do much overseeing unless he wanted to experience a particular event again or spend the day with his son, and never taught reflections, with one exception: the reflection on the actions of his ancestor, Harry Truman.
That class revolved around the American president’s decision to test nuclear weapons on defenseless civilians. Oz’s father never tired of dissecting it. We kept our honest opinions unspoken and unreflected around him, but after my certification I planned to revise my file on that event to include the words despicable, thoughtless, and possibly sociopathic narcissism for good measure.
Not everyone agreed, the Trumans included, but witnessing that horrible day had turned my stomach. All of those people. There one moment, gone the next. For nothing. Then again, military tactics had never made sense to me. That’s why there were many Historians, so that history could never be observed and reflected through a singular, distorted lens. I tended toward one side, while people like Oz and his father peered through a vastly different one. Neither was wrong.
Well, that’s what they taught us. I was pretty sure I was right.
“Sit down, Miss Vespasian,” a scratchy old-man voice commanded.
Oh my laundry, Zeke Midgley.
He sat at the head of a long, wooden table in a small chamber in one of the offices. None of the other rooms at the Academy had anything but metal or stone accoutrements, but the additions of heavy cloth drapes and the thick wooden table and chairs made this space eerie. Truly quiet. It would be intimidating even without Zeke and his nearly colorless eyes staring me down from behind his own Historian frames.
If a sighting of Elder Truman was rare, Zeke, the last surviving Original settler of Genesis, was a ghost, a tall tale. And I’d seen him twice in the past couple of weeks.
“Yes, sir,” I managed, plopping into the chair at the opposite end of the table.
No matter how many times they called me on the carpet, it never failed to redeposit all of the moisture from my mouth onto my palms. I’d given in to Analeigh’s protests and left Jonah’s cuff hidden in the mussed covers of my bed, so at least they couldn’t find it on me and take it away. The seat cupped my rear and wasn’t cold, the combination making me long to leap to my feet. I had a strange mental image of the chair sucking me in and eating me for dinner.
Focus, Kaia. You’re in some serious trouble here. Maybe you should hope the chair does eat you for dinner.
Truman slid into a chair on the right side of the table, leaving four empty ones, and Maude Gatling came in, taking a seat on the left. They all studied me until I felt naked. I couldn’t stop swallowing in a desperate attempt to turn my tongue back into a usable organ, as opposed to its current impression of a cotton ball.
“Do you know why you’re here?” Zeke asked.
I shook my head, not trusting my voice. There were any number of reasons I could be here, and opening my mouth upped the chances I’d confess to an infraction that had escaped their notice. My eyes were stretched so wide I worried they wouldn’t stay in my face much longer. Trouble and I were well acquainted, and I’d been sanctioned plenty of times for my wandering eye during observations and a couple of instances of breaking curfew, but this room meant something bigger.
“Why were you reviewing Minnie Gatling’s reflection on the development of weaponry?”
The question threw me. Thoughts jumbled in my head, scattered like a bowl of marbles dumped on the glass floor, but I kept catching the same one—I had only done that this morning, too soon for the Elders to perform a random review of any of our reflections or research paths.
Which mean certain files had to be flagged in the Archives.
They’d never told us that.
My insides bolted seven different directions, unsure what they wanted to hear. “I was finished with my assignment, and my reflections never get very good marks so I thought I would study some of the overseers’. You know, to work on improving.”
Zeke’s eyes narrowed. “Kaia, my dear, you have many talents. Improving yourself without prompting is not usually one of them, unless you have decided to turn over a new leaf.”
“If that is the case,” Elder Truman interrupted, “why did you also initiate a search cross-referencing people instrumental in the development of guns minutes prior to reading Elder Gatling’s reflection?”
Ice ran in my veins. Minnie’s file hadn’t been flagged. The search path had.
I needed to throw them off track, because if they kept digging into my recent actions, they were going to find two unauthorized trips into the travel air lock. “I didn’t realize there were off-limits files in the Archives. Perhaps you should mark them.”
“They’re not off-limits, Kaia, but we do monitor access to the Archives that deal with the major contributing factors to our exile from Earth Before.” Zeke’s empty eyes bored holes into my face.
There was that word again, the same one Younger Minnie had used. Exile.