Tables and chairs occupy most of the room. We spot Gilad, Hammon, and Edgerton at one. I follow Hawthorne to the table and sit down next to Edgerton. Hawthorne sits beside me. I strip off the long plastic spoon from the foil pouch, tear away the top of the foil, and stir the contents—creamy chicken salad.
Hawthorne hands me a package of rolls. “It’s better with these.”
I take one. “Thank you.”
“Why’s she here, Hawthorne?” Gilad growls.
“She’s hungry,” he replies.
“All you’ll get from her is trouble,” Gilad grumbles. He’s not wrong.
“So I should run panic-stricken from her?” Hawthorne asks. “Like most of these soldiers around us? Isolate her because she’s different?”
“It’s called caution,” Gilad says, looking straight at me. “She may not last long here. No sense in getting attached. No hard feelings, Roselle. I’m just a realist.”
“Sure, Gilad,” I reply. “Let’s just get all our awkward moments out of the way now.”
“So, Roselle.” Edgerton addresses me from his seat next to Hammon. “Tell me why you shave your stems—and what else do you shave?” Hawthorne begins to choke. Hammon elbows Edgerton.
“What?” he queries Hammon. “You’re the one what wanted to know. I was just going direct to the source. Roselle and me has that kind of relationship. Don’t we, Roselle?”
I pat Hawthorne on the back as he tries to catch his breath. Red-faced, he wipes his eyes. “Where I come from,” I answer Edgerton, “females shave their legs, armpits, and . . .”
“You don’t has to do that. We’ll like you just fine with hair,” Edgerton replies, as if he’s sorry that I’ve been raised by savages. Hammon elbows him again. “What?” he asks her, dismayed. “We will. She’s our friend, even if she does strange things.”
“Thank you, Edgerton,” I reply. “That means a lot to me.”
Hammon gives me a friendly smile. “Sorry. Edge still has mountain sensibilities. Things that appear impractical are lost on him. He forgets what it was like to be newly processed.”
“I know that a lot of things from my world don’t make sense here,” I reply. “How long has it been since you were processed?”
“I was eleven,” Hammon says. She looks over at Edgerton, her adoration obvious. “We were all processed on the same Transition Day. That’s how we all met. You make most of your core friends on your first day.”
“We was just sayin’,” Edgerton chimes in, “how hard it must’ve been for you not to Transition with anyone else.”
“I didn’t say that,” Gilad interrupts, not looking up from his food. “I said you’d be puking up sunshine to be the only one.”
“Gilad and I were best friends from the start,” Hammon says. “Then Gilad brought Hawthorne in, and I brought Edge in.”
“So you’ve all been together for years?”
“We’ve been lucky,” Hawthorne replies. “None of us has been transferred. We were assigned to Tritium 101, and it’s been home ever since.”
“We all made the rank of Strato together. Well, Hawthorne made it first. He’s up for Meso now,” Hammon says proudly. “I bet he gets it by the time we’re done with active duty. We’ll have an officer in our midst soon.”
“I might not get it,” Hawthorne says.
Edgerton rolls his eyes. Gilad says, “You’ll get it. You earned it.”
There’s genuine love here, even between Gilad and Hawthorne, maybe especially between them. A cold sort of anger bubbles up in me. It’s hard to name what it is at first, but then I realize that it’s jealousy—of their relationships with one another, the camaraderie, trust, respect, and love. I’ve never had that.
I glance away from them. A familiar face catches my attention over at a different table. Jakes sits with a few other engineers. I haven’t thought much about him since I was thrown in detention. He nods and points his chin toward the door. He gets up from his table and leaves. Crumbling the foil meal package in my hand, I stand. “Please excuse me, I have something I have to do. I hope you have a lovely evening.”
I hurry for the exit, following him. Jakes is at the end of the corridor by a heartwood. I move in his direction. He takes the heartwood, and I follow him down. We pass a few decks. He steps off into a hangar that houses combat troop movers and Winger aircraft. Most everyone is still at dinner. He pauses by some metal crates, and I join him.
“I looked for you before we deployed,” he says by way of a greeting. He pushes his thick glasses up on the bridge of his nose.
“I was in detention. I was picked up for brandishing.”
“I heard. No one has ever stood up for me before.”
“It was my fault you got harassed in the first place. I’m sorry there was trouble, but I’ll always take the consequences.”
“Maybe I’m tired of being cautious,” he mutters. “Maybe it’s time for a little danger.”
“Do you have something for me?” I ask.
“I do. I was looking through schematics for some older weapon designs in the archives.” He touches the scanner on the metal crate, opening it. “What you wanted isn’t so far-fetched. Most of the old designs were scrapped when fusion came along, but I was able to use existing diagrams and parts to create this.” Inside the crate is a fusionblade housing, but it’s unlike any I’ve seen before. The silver hilt is longer than a normal fusionblade’s. Not only that, a regular sword of this caliber has only one strike port where the energy flows from the weapon. It’s the source from which a fusionblade glows with golden power. This weapon has two strike ports: one at the top of the hilt, and the other at the base of the hilt.
I lift it from its case. When I squeeze the hilt at its center, two light-infused blades ignite from it. At one end, a golden fusionblade; at the opposite end, a silver hydroblade. It’s truly a dual-bladed sword.
Jakes comes nearer to me. “If you choke up by moving your grip toward the fusionblade’s strike port, Roselle, the hydroblade will extinguish. The opposite will occur if you place your hand closer to the hydroblade. Or you can have both if you keep your grip centered on the hilt.”
Most of the time, I’ll only use one side of the sword or the other because to have them both lit at once is dangerous, unless I use it like a staff. Jakes shows me how to switch off each side so that it won’t pop on accidentally.
“This is remarkable. You’ve done it, Jakes!”
“It wasn’t that hard. The hydrogen cells are abundant,” he explains. I wave the dual-blade around, trying out complex maneuvers. “We use hydrogen cells for powering some of our burners in the lab—it’s heavy hydrogen—condensed. I can show you how.”
“I’d like to learn that.” I want to learn everything he knows about everything. I’m tired of being ignorant. I want to be able to break into consoles, like Flannigan could. I want to write the story of my life to suit me. I want to see the world without restrictions. I want to use my mind to obtain freedom, like she had.
“We get these hydrogen cells in bulk,” Jakes continues. “They last about a thousand hours before you have to change them out and recharge them.” He holds it up. It resembles a silver bullet with a clip on the back of it. “You can put them in one of your armor compartments, or maybe even in your hair. They have clips on the backs.” He slips a hydrogen cell into my hair like a decorative pin. “Just open the housing on the hilt here to reload.”
“Am I interrupting something?” Hawthorne asks from behind us.
Jakes looks startled. “It’s okay. Hawthorne is a friend,” I tell him.
“What’s this?” Hawthorne asks, indicating my new weapon.
“Something we need. Hawthorne, how many merits do you have?”
“A lot. Why?”
“Because I need some to get an ugly mole removed, and so do you.”
“I don’t have an ugly mole.”
I blush, remembering catching a glimpse of him in the locker room with just a towel on. “You have a mole, Hawthorne, and it will kill you if you don’t have it removed. This is the tool that’s going to remove it. Everyone will need to get a mole removed, and Jakes here is the one who’s going to do it.”