“No, red shirts. Cannon fodder. Star Trek? Any of this ringing a . . .” Simon sighed at the blank look on George’s face. George had grown up in an isolated rural pocket of Scotland, but it wasn’t like he’d lived without Internet and cable TV. The problem, as far as Simon could tell, was that the Lovelaces watched nothing but soccer and used their Wi-Fi almost exclusively to monitor Dundee United stats and occasionally to buy sheep feed in bulk. “Forget it. I’m fine. See you at the top.”
George shrugged and returned to his climb. Simon watched his roommate—a tan, muscled Abercrombie-model type—swing himself up the plastic rock handholds as effortlessly as Spider-Man. It was ridiculous: George wasn’t even a Shadowhunter, not by blood. He’d been adopted by a Shadowhunting family, which made him just as much a mundane as Simon. Except that, like most of the other mundanes—and very unlike Simon—he was a near-perfect specimen of humanity. Repulsively athletic, coordinated, strong and swift, and as close to a Shadowhunter as you could get without the blood of the angels running through your veins. In other words: a jock.
Life at Shadowhunter Academy was lacking in a lot of things Simon had once believed he couldn’t survive without: computers, music, comic books, indoor plumbing. Over the past couple of months, he’d gotten mostly used to doing without, but there was one glaring absence he still couldn’t wrap his head around.
Shadowhunter Academy had no nerds.
Simon’s mother had once told him that the thing she loved most about being Jewish was that you could step into a synagogue anywhere on earth and feel like you’d come home. India, Brazil, New Zealand, even Mars—if you could rely on Shalom, Spacemen!, the homemade comic book that had been the highlight of Simon’s third-grade Hebrew school experience. Jews everywhere prayed with the same language, the same melodies, the same words. Simon’s mother had told her son that as long as he could always find people who spoke the language of his soul, he would never be alone.
And she’d turned out to be right. As long as Simon could find people who spoke his language—the language of Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft, the language of Star Trek and manga and indie rockers with songs like “Han Shot First” and “What the Frak”—he felt like he was among friends.
These Shadowhunters in training, on the other hand? Most of them probably thought manga was some kind of demonic athlete’s foot. Simon was doing his best to educate them to the finer things in life, but guys like George Lovelace had about as much aptitude for twelve-sided dice as Simon did for . . . well, anything more physically complex than walking and chewing gum at the same time.
As Jon had predicted, Simon was the last one left on the climbing wall. By the time the others had ascended, rung the tiny bell at the top, and rappelled to the ground again, he’d made it only ten meters off the ground. The last time that had happened, Scarsbury, who had an impressive flair for sadism, had made the entire class sit and watch as Simon painstakingly made his way to the top. This time, their trainer cut the torture session mercifully short.
“Enough!” Scarsbury shouted, clapping his hands together. Simon wondered whether there was such a thing as a runed whistle. Maybe he could get Scarsbury one for Christmas. “Lewis, put us all out of our misery and get down from there. The rest of you, hit the weapons room, pick yourself out a sword, then pair up for scrimmage.” His iron grip closed over Simon’s shoulder. “Not so fast, hero. You stay behind.”
Simon wondered whether this was it, the moment that his heroic past was finally overpowered by his hapless present, and he was about to be kicked out of school. But then Scarsbury called out other names—among them Lovelace, Cartwright, Beauvale, Mendoza—most of them Shadowhunters, all of them the best students in the class, and Simon let himself relax, just a little. Whatever it was Scarsbury had to say, it couldn’t be that bad, not if he was also saying it to Jon Cartwright, gold medalist in sucking up.
“Sit,” Scarsbury boomed.
They sat.
“You’re here because you’re the twenty most promising students in the class,” Scarsbury said, pausing to let the compliment settle over them. Most of the students beamed. Simon willed himself to disappear. More like the nineteen most promising students and the one still coasting on the achievements of his past self. He felt like he was eight years old again, overhearing his mother bully the Little League coach into letting him take a turn at bat. “We’ve got a Downworlder that broke the Law and needs taking care of,” Scarsbury continued, “and the powers that be have decided it’s the perfect opportunity for you boys to become men.”
Marisol Rojas Garza, a scrawny thirteen-year-old mundane with a permanent I will kick your ass expression, cleared her throat loudly.
“Er . . . men and women,” Scarsbury clarified, looking none too happy about it.
Murmurs rippled across the students, excitement mixed with alarm. None of them had expected a real training mission this soon. Behind Simon, Jon faked a yawn. “Boring. I could kill a rogue Downworlder in my sleep.”
Simon, who actually did kill rogue Downworlders in his sleep, along with the terrifying tentacled demons and Endarkened Shadowhunters and other bloodthirsty monsters that crawled through his nightmares, didn’t feel much like yawning. He felt more like throwing up.
George raised his hand. “Uh, sir, some of us here are still”—he swallowed, and, not for the first time, Simon wondered whether he regretted admitting the truth about himself; the Academy was a much easier place to be when you were on the elite Shadowhunter track, and not just because the elites didn’t have to sleep in the dungeon—“mundanes.”
“I noticed that myself, Lovelace,” Scarsbury said dryly. “Imagine my surprise when I discovered some of you dregs are worth something after all.”
“No, I mean . . .” George hesitated, substantially more easily intimidated than any six-foot-five Scottish sex god (Beatriz Velez Mendoza’s description, according to her bigmouthed best friend) had a right to be. Finally, he squared his shoulders and plowed forward. “I mean we’re mundanes. We can’t be Marked, we can’t use seraph blades or witchlight or anything, we don’t have, like, superspeed and angelic reflexes. Going after a Downworlder when we’ve only had a couple months of training . . . isn’t that dangerous?”
A vein in Scarsbury’s neck began to throb alarmingly, and his good eye bulged so far out of his head Simon feared it might pop. (Which, he thought, could finally explain the mysterious eye patch.) “Dangerous? Dangerous?” he boomed. “Anyone else here afraid of a little danger?”