What kind of bitter irony is it that they would send Trigger 17 to fetch me when he is the very source of my distraction?
When we reach the common lawn, I follow him toward the gate leading out of the training ward while the rest of my class heads for our academy. As we walk, I stare at his back, noticing for the first time how much broader his shoulders are than mine. Broader even than the boys in the hydroponic gardening union. I’m so fascinated by this that I don’t even realize we’ve turned off of the main walkway until the shadow of the Specialist Academy falls over me.
Trigger 17 has led me to the side of the building, out of sight from the common lawn, the street, and most of the nearby buildings.
I stop walking and clear my throat. “Cadet, this is not the way out of the training ward.” I’m allowed to say that to him. This isn’t fraternization, because he’s here on official business, and that business is me. Still, I feel strangely exposed, speaking to him out loud. Outside. Where anyone could hear.
In reply he smiles and pulls open the door to his left, then motions for me to go inside.
I stare through the door at the stairwell exit of the Specialist Academy. Then I shake my head. Management is expecting me. I can’t just take a detour with him!
Trigger gestures more insistently at the stairwell.
Against my better judgment, I go in. He follows me and closes the door, but before I can ask him what’s going on, he gives me a “shh” gesture with one finger over his lips. Then he stares up at the series of three landings above. “Hello?”
His voice echoes, but there is no answer. We are alone.
“What are we doing here?” I demand before the echo of his voice has fully faded from my ears. This detour can’t be part of his official business, which means I shouldn’t be talking to him. Why would he put me in this position?
“I wanted to see you,” he says, as if it’s just that simple, and I can’t believe how casually he’s willing to smash his way through the fraternization directive. “Why didn’t you meet me in the dormitory stairwell?”
“Because it was too dangerous. Trigger, this is not okay!”
“But you did get my message?” he asks, as if he doesn’t understand how risky it is for me to be here.
“Of course I got your message. It was wrapped around a carrot in my drawer. What was your plan? That we chat about things I’m not supposed to know on the eighteenth-floor landing?”
He shrugs. “We could have gone down to the twelfth-floor landing. That’s my floor.”
I’m not supposed to know what floor he lives on. We’re not just breaking the fraternization directive. We’re pounding it into tiny little bits.
“So was the carrot good? They’re different than the ones you grow, so I wasn’t sure you’d like it.”
“I didn’t eat it.” I shake my head, trying to bring the entire preposterous, perilous conversation back on track. “I’m not a cadet. You can’t just—”
“Why didn’t you eat it?” He looks terribly disappointed, and in spite of the fact that we’re about to be dragged away in handcuffs by soldiers, I want to fix that.
“Because…I wanted to keep it.” The admission feels beyond dangerous, but the lines in his forehead disappear and his bearing relaxes a little. Why does making him happy make me feel so good when we’re both risking everything just by standing here?
“Oh. Well, you should probably eat it before someone finds it. There will be other carrots.”
“No, there won’t!” I exhale, grasping for patience. “Trigger, there can’t be other carrots, and you can’t sneak into my room again! You’re going to get caught!”
His shrug is too casual. No matter how different his bureau is from mine, even a cadet would be punished for sneaking into a dorm room belonging to a member of another division. I’m missing something.
“I know how to avoid the cameras,” he insists. “And if I have to, I can make them glitch for a second. Sometimes the feed gets fuzzy.” He shrugs with a small smile. “Can’t be helped.”
“You…?” I don’t even know the word for what he’s describing. “What did you do?”
“I hacked the feed,” he says, and when he finds no comprehension in my expression he tries again. “I used my tablet to break into the security system—that’s called hacking—and cause static in the camera feed. Just for a few seconds. It goes unnoticed because it happens periodically on its own, and since the feed isn’t really down they don’t send anyone to investigate.”
I need a second to process what I’m hearing. I had no idea such a thing was possible. “They have a name for breaking that specific kind of rule? Maybe if they hadn’t named it, you cadets wouldn’t do it. How do you even know how to…hack?”
He gives me another shrug. “I’m Special Forces. My primary specialty is hand-to-hand combat, but my secondary is cyber-intelligence.”
“Your instructors taught you how to bypass Lakeview’s security feed?” The most daring thing I’ve ever done is graft a tomato vine to a potato plant and grow two kinds of vegetables from one plant.
“They taught me how to bypass other cities’ security feeds,” Trigger clarifies. “Mountainside, Oceanbay, and Valleybrook use very similar systems. From there it wasn’t hard to figure out our own. They must know that’s a possibility. They just don’t think we’ll actually do it. They have to trust us, because in a couple of years we’ll be their first line of defense.”
Defense against what? His training sounds more like offense.
Trigger’s dark eyes shine even brighter for a second. “I’m the best in my class.”
My gasp echoes around the stairwell.
“What?” Trigger stands straighter. “That’s what this cord indicates.” He tugs on the red braid looped around the stiff, square shoulder of his uniform jacket. “I’m the leader of my squad.”
“Are all cadets so arrogant?” My voice is a whisper, as if volume could possibly influence the scale of my fraternization violation.
“That’s not arrogance; it’s truth.”
“It’s pride. What if you start fighting to bolster your own arrogance rather than to glorify and protect the city?” That would surely be a slippery slope toward ruin.
Trigger 17 looks confused. Then he chuckles. “It doesn’t work like that in Defense. My ‘arrogance’ does glorify the city. And if my superior skill motivates my fellow cadets to fight harder, the city is glorified that much more.”
I can hardly even process that thought. My identicals and I have spent our entire lives learning to work as a unit. To bond with and support one another without fail. To celebrate one another’s successes as our own. Yet…“Your academy encourages competition?”