Our neat lines sluggishly collapse into confused clusters, and I notice that even though there’s no rule against it, our cliques do not cross the gender line. As if the girls and guys have no interest in talking to one another.
“Why are there so many soldiers at the academy?” Violet asks as she twists open the valve on her bottle. “Some kind of training exercise?”
Poppy wipes a drip of water from her chin. “Do graduates still do training exercises?”
I don’t know. In fact, I have no idea what cadets do after they become full-fledged soldiers, beyond their general mission to protect and defend. I make a mental note to ask Trigger—
No. I can’t ask Trigger anything, because we can never be alone again.
Why is that so hard for me to remember?
“Class!” Belay 35 calls, and we turn as one, all conversation fading into attentive silence. “Stay here and rest for a minute. I’ll be right back.” Without waiting to make sure his directions will be heeded—there’s little doubt of that—our instructor jogs toward the Defense Academy.
“That’s weird,” Sorrel says as we watch him go, and I hear the same sentiment echoed from the other students around us. I’ve never seen an instructor so obviously curious about what’s going on in another division, which is definitely none of his business. Yet Belay 35 is clearly headed toward the Defense Academy for some answers.
“There are more coming,” Poppy says, staring over my shoulder, and I turn to see a large group of soldiers jogging in formation across the common lawn, their uniforms crisply pressed, their footsteps muffled by the grass beneath their feet. Each soldier carries a black duffel bag over one shoulder and a rifle held at an angle in front of his chest.
Violet shields the sun from her eyes with one hand. “They look kind of young.”
I glance at the soldiers, and the rest of the world seems to go dark around me. All the boys have Trigger’s face.
But year seventeen hasn’t graduated yet. They can’t wear soldiers’ uniforms. They’re still cadets.
Terrified, I spin again to squint at those already in formation in front of the Defense Academy, and my worst fear is confirmed. Those soldiers—both male and female—are also from year seventeen.
“They’re graduating…,” I mumble. Trigger will be moving to the residential ward, and even once I graduate our paths will likely never cross. He’ll be sent farther into the wild than ever before, and for longer than ever before. Should Lakeview go to war, he will fight. He might die.
I will never see Trigger 17 again.
“They can’t be graduating. Defense doesn’t graduate until December,” one of the boys says from a clique near ours. “This is nearly three months early.”
“Well, yesterday they were cadets and today they’re clearly soldiers,” Sorrel says. “What’s your explanation?”
He frowns. “I don’t know.”
“We’re not supposed to know,” the boy next to him adds, and I see with a glance at his jacket that this is Indigo, who’s been jogging next to me for ten minutes.
“Obviously.” Poppy rolls her eyes. “But if this weren’t out of the ordinary, Belay 35 wouldn’t…”
The discussion dies as our focus is pulled back to our instructor, who’s now speaking to the instructor of another class, which has also stopped to watch. Poppy’s right. Belay 35 wouldn’t make such a production of his curiosity if what we’re seeing wasn’t frighteningly abnormal.
Why would Lakeview graduate a class of Defense cadets three months early?
Belay 35 returns and orders us back into two lines. He doesn’t offer us any information, and I can’t tell whether any was offered to him.
The only person I know who will have the answer and be willing to share it with me is somewhere in that formation of graduating cadets, about to be marched out of my life forever.
I will never know why.
‘For days, I scan the face of every soldier I see, hoping against all odds that somehow Trigger 17’s squad was assigned to patrol the training ward after graduation. The chances of that are slim for a Special Forces unit, yet I can’t stop hoping.
But none of the soldiers I see around the common lawn are wearing Trigger’s face, and none of the remaining cadets are older than year sixteen. A week after the unexpected graduation, I force myself to face the reality that Trigger is gone.
Which is why, a few weeks after I’ve mentally said goodbye to him, I am stunned to step out of the Workforce Academy for our monthly field day and find Trigger 17 looking right at me. Wearing a cadet’s recreation uniform.
I can tell it’s him even without the red braid, and even though I’m not close enough to see the scar on his forearm. I can see it in the way he watches me, even though I look just like all the other girls pouring out of the academy onto the lawn.
He’s in the company of five of his identicals, forming a squad of six charged with overseeing a competition where several dozen year-fifteen cadets spar one-on-one in the center of a circle formed by their peers. The year seventeens are acting as both judges and mentors, and their instructor appears to be evaluating their performance in both regards as he taps on his tablet.
Time seems to hang suspended between us while Trigger and I stare at each other, but I know that mere seconds have passed when Poppy passes me on her way down the steps toward our first event without even noticing my hesitation.
“Hey.” I jog to catch up with her. “Aren’t those year-seventeen cadets from the division that graduated last month?” Can she see what I’m seeing, or am I imagining the whole thing?
Poppy follows my gaze, and her groan is proof enough. “Yeah. I guess they didn’t all graduate.”
I’m so relieved that I let out a breath I didn’t even realize I was holding.
“But, Dahlia, you have to forget about him and your weird fascination,” she whispers as she tugs me onto the cool fall grass. “He’s probably long gone.”
I don’t argue with her for the same reason I didn’t tell her about talking to Trigger in the stairwell. Poppy is my best friend. She’s the last person in the world I’d want to burden with such dangerous knowledge.
She deserves nothing less than absolute ignorance of whatever genetic flaw we carry.
“Why would the city graduate only part of a division?” I ask instead.
Poppy shrugs. “Why would they graduate that part of a division three months early? Who knows why Management does what it does? All I know is that it’s none of our business. Come on.” She takes off toward the common lawn, where our identicals are already setting up sporting equipment and dividing into teams under the supervision of Belay 35 and a few other athletic instructors. All the male year-thirty-five instructors look just like Belay, but there are several other genomes from other years represented as well.