Cara flipped open the AP physics textbook she’d found in the bottom of her closet. If she wanted to apply to Dartmouth, she’d first have to make up the work she’d missed, and what better opportunity to catch up than during spring break? As she pulled her Einstein packet from her backpack, it occurred to her that she’d probably lost her valedictorian rank when she’d fled Earth.
She supposed that douche canoe, Marcus Johnson, would graduate at the top of the class. The old Cara would have devised a plot to reclaim her title, but the new Cara couldn’t bring herself to care.
“Valedictorian,” she muttered to herself. “Whoop-de-friggin-do. I’m the Chief Human Consultant to the most powerful woman in the universe.”
Or rather, she was.
She turned to the chapter on Einstein’s theory of relativity and began skimming the text, but then she realized that the advanced physics she’d learned on L’eihr transcended her AP science class. Cara closed her textbook. It had nothing to teach her.
Her internal clock was still on Aegis time, and it seemed too early for bed. She stepped into the hall, finding no signs of life other than the subdued glow of the oven exhaust hood, which Mom had always used as a night-light. Cara recognized the sound of a kitchen chair scraping the linoleum floor and decided to see who was awake.
“Hey,” she said to Troy, who sat at the table with a box of Cheerios and a bottle of Sam Adams lager to keep him company. He tossed back a handful of O’s and used his bare foot to push out a chair for her. Accepting his invitation, she took a seat and grabbed the cereal box.
After munching his snack and washing it down with a swig of beer, Troy asked, “Change your mind about the party?”
“Nah.” Cara shook out a pile of Cheerios even though she wasn’t hungry. “Just bored. What about you? I figured you’d be hanging with your friends.” She nodded toward the backyard, where soldiers stood guard around the house.
He shrugged and leaned an elbow on the table, propping his chin in one hand. “They invited me to a poker game later. I dunno. I used to like that stuff, but now it seems so…” He appeared to struggle with the right word, eventually settling on, “Pointless.”
Cara’s eyes flew wide. “I know exactly what you mean! I thought it was just me.”
“Trust me, it’s not.” Troy smirked, more at himself than at her, then glanced through the kitchen entry and into the living room as if to make sure they were alone. “Can you keep a secret?”
Cara hesitated a beat before nodding, not because she couldn’t keep her lips zipped, but because Troy had never confided in her.
“I haven’t been the same since I got back from L’eihr,” he said. “My CO sent me to the head shrinker, and she said I’ve got an adjustment disorder.”
Cara tipped her head. “What’s that?”
“Failure to adapt.” Clearly uncomfortable, Troy dropped eye contact and began stacking his Cheerios atop one another in a crooked pyramid. “You usually see it with special forces guys—the ones who go out on big missions. They get hooked on the adrenaline and can’t cope when they come home.” Troy raised his gaze to hers. “How’re they supposed to go from live combat and jumping out of helicopters to grocery shopping and driving their kids to school, you know?”
“Real life is dull by comparison,” Cara said.
“Exactly.”
“I get that.” As much as she wanted to feel like a “normal teenager” again, her time on L’eihr had ruined her for dances and shopping and all the things she used to love. “But for me, it’s more than that. I’m starting to see our way of life differently.”
“Like…” Troy prompted, seeming to perk up a little.
“Remember the gas station where we stopped on the way home from the mall?” When he nodded, she said, “They had TVs built right into the pumps.” The old Cara would have thought that was cool, but the new-and-ruined Cara didn’t see it that way. “Are we so overstimulated that we can’t spend five minutes pumping gas without a TV or a cell phone to distract us?”
“Guess so.”
“And when I went inside to buy a magazine,” Cara went on, “that’s when it really hit me. I stood there looking at the racks, and all the headlines seemed so trivial. I’ve always wanted to be a journalist, but what am I going to do? Write articles about which movie star had the fat sucked from her ass and injected into her face? Which professional athlete just confessed to shooting steroids? The latest celebrity baby names?” Cara lowered both brows in frustration. “Who cares? It’s like our whole culture is built on frivolity, and I never noticed before.”
Troy flicked an O into the pyramid he’d built, toppling it over. “It’s the noise that gets to me. Everything sounds amplified now.”
“Yeah, me too,” Cara agreed before continuing her rant. “And we squander our money on the most ridiculous things. You know how much Americans spent on Halloween candy last year?” Without giving him a chance to guess, she cried, “Two billion dollars. That’s billion, with a B.” She fell silent, struck by the absurdity of it all. “We’re dropping piles of cash on candy while disease research and scientific advancement go unfunded. It makes my head explode.”
Troy snickered and held both palms forward. “Chill, Pepper. I believe you.”
“The worst of it is I don’t know where I belong.” She wasn’t wholly human anymore, but she didn’t feel like a L’eihr. She swept aside her Cheerios, too upset to taste anything. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Probably,” her brother said.
She told him about her decision to remain on Earth after the alliance ceremony, including her residual breakup with Aelyx, whom Troy had never liked. But by the time she finished explaining her reasoning, Troy seemed more conflicted than relieved.
“What?” she asked. “I thought you’d be happy.”
He picked at the label on his beer bottle, avoiding her eyes. “I am, if it’s what you really want…” Then he trailed off, warning her a but was coming.
“But?” she asked.
“If you were going to the colony,” he said, peeking up at her, then back to his bottle, “I was thinking of coming, too, when my enlistment’s over.”
Cara drew a breath. “Are you serious?”
“Uh-huh,” he said with a slow I know it sounds crazy, but I really mean it nod. “I’ve been thinking about it since I got back.”
“But you hated L’eihr,” Cara reminded him. “You kept saying we didn’t belong there.”
“Yeah, and that’s still kind of true,” Troy said, locking his blue eyes with hers. “But we also don’t belong here.”
He was right—Cara knew it all the way down to the marrow in her bones. But that didn’t change the fact that she couldn’t be happy on the colony, not without the kinds of concessions The Way would never make. It was an impossible situation. She felt like a square peg that had been shaved into an octagon, so now she didn’t fit into any hole, round or otherwise. But somehow in the next forty-eight hours, Cara would have to decide once and for all where her future lay.
No pressure or anything.