Page 19 of Winterveil

“One more thing,” Professor Narendra said. “And not to undermine my own concerns about your workload . . . but I wondered if I might ask you a favor.”

Klaudia straightened. “What is it?”

“I’m introducing my first years to the simulation tomorrow. I was hoping I could have you there for a demonstration.”

She didn’t need more than a second to consider it. “Yes. I’ll do it.”

“Thank you.” Professor Narendra smiled at her, and it was the kind of smile that Klaudia appreciated: subtle, even remote. She would have bristled at anything overfamiliar, anything approaching genuine fondness or gentleness. That wasn’t for her. Klaudia’s world was cold by design.

And she would do all that was in her capability to keep it that way. She said goodbye to Professor Narendra without a smile of her own and departed for the dining hall.

When she arrived, Jane was already waiting for her at their usual table. She perked up when she saw Klaudia and moved her satchel off the chair beside her so that Klaudia could sit.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “How was your morning?”

Anyone else would have immediately commented on Klaudia’s victory in the simulation—news and gossip spread around Valeran at breakneck speed—with an undisguised glare of resentment. Nothing drove students at the academy more than competition with their peers. Dr. Iver had intentionally inculcated a culture of ambition and rivalry, where each student’s loss was another’s gain. A zero-sum game indeed.

But Jane Lin was different. There was, sincerely and unequivocally, no one else at Valeran like her. She had come to the academy under almost unthinkable circumstances. Three years ago, a health care corporation, Lumina, had begun implementing AI models to accept or deny claims by their patients, resulting in an unsurprising but still grim series of negative health outcomes for patients with preventable and treatable conditions, and even a spate of deaths.

Her parents, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, had heavily invested in Lumina. Nevertheless, it all should have been beneath Jane’s concern. Even if Lumina had faced more than the faintest rumblings of public backlash, its CEO golfed with the governor. There would have been no consequences, and nothing to stop Lumina from continuing to cut costs with AI, at the expense of patient care. The world should have turned on as usual.

Jane, however, had been appalled at what she viewed as a heartless and sadistic policy. So she had hacked into Lumina’s systems, disabled the AI model, and replaced it with her own code—one that instantly approved every client’s claims. This went unnoticed for weeks, until a corporate board meeting nearly ended in a mutiny when one of the board members presented evidence of fraud.

Misleading shareholders was, of course, a more serious crime than murder by proxy. Jane’s role was quickly discovered, and though she was careful to remain as apolitical as possible in her public statements (“I don’t want anyone to have blood on their hands”), the board was irate. They demanded what they had the brazenness to call justice.

So her enrollment at Valeran had come to pass. Jane was the only student at the academy to have ended up there out of moral courage and not out of a lack of it. Even after two years, she remained unfalteringly kind, never falling prey to the embittered cynicism that Valeran ordinarily engendered. Her fellow students were friends and colleagues, not competition.

It was a worldview Klaudia could not conceive of, but she did respect it. And she never ceased to feel fortunate that the housing lottery system had assigned them as first-year roommates. If not for Jane, Klaudia would have eaten every meal alone.

“It was fine,” Klaudia replied, sliding into her chair. “How was yours?”

Jane grimaced. “I hate cryptography. Did you know LEAP128 has a proprietary design procedure? Auric holds the exclusive rights. I used it in one of my assignments and got docked a whole letter grade for it.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” said Klaudia. “The CIA and DOD collaborate enough with Auric that I highly doubt they would disallow its use in a real professional setting.”

“Probably not. But Professor Kitt is such a purist.” Jane sighed so emphatically that strands of her black hair fluttered. She always wore two minibraids to frame her face, while the rest of her hair hung down in perfectly straight, glossy sheets. “At least he gave us a list of patented ciphers so I won’t make the same mistake again.”

Jane’s kindness and openness did not detract at all from her intelligence—and neither did her obvious beauty. She was pretty in an effortless way that Klaudia found herself secretly envying. She didn’t covet beauty for its own sake, though; she wanted it to make her imperceptible. Her physical form was an impediment. She wanted to be pure mind.

A girl with a face like Jane’s garnered a baseline level of respect that allowed her to be more than her looks. A girl with a face like Klaudia’s would always be seen as unattractive first, at best unusual. Her looks would never go without remark. For as long as Klaudia could remember, she had hated the impudence of her body, the breasts and hips that even her many efforts at weight loss couldn’t seem to shrink. It would have been a privilege to believe that her appearance did not matter.

Unfortunately, Klaudia was not the only one to be taken in by Jane’s charms. In as casual a tone as she could manage, Klaudia asked, “Is Mikhail coming?”

Jane shook her head. “His new roommate arrived this morning. Mikhail is giving him a tour.”

“Right,” said Klaudia, quietly relieved. It wasn’t that she hated Mikhail—she tried to remain above such sentiments—but she felt uncomfortable being audience to his and Jane’s flirting. And, truthfully, she thought Jane could do better.

“I’ve been practicing my Russian,” said Jane, unlocking her tablet and tapping open Valeran’s proprietary language-learning app. “Soon I think I’ll be ready to show Mikhail.”

Klaudia felt even more uncomfortable bearing witness to Jane’s dewy-eyed dreams. She talked excitedly about how she and Mikhail would build their lives together after Valeran; she was learning Russian in hopes of impressing his parents. Klaudia did not try to disabuse her, even though she thought Jane was being slightly naive. If Mikhail’s parents were anything like her own, they would not be dazzled by some conversational Russian. They were more likely to be disappointed that Mikhail had not brought home a thoroughly American girl. Assimilation trumped tradition, especially now that a third Red Scare was on the horizon.

Or maybe she was entirely wrong in her assumptions. Maybe Mikhail and his family didn’t have the same neuroses. It would have horrified Klaudia to have been caught reciting the Shema during a particularly convincing duck-and-cover drill, but Mikhail had shrugged off the whispers and stares.

“I told you I would teach you,” said Klaudia. “There are bugs in the conjugation code.”

“I don’t want to put more on your plate. You’re the busiest person I’ve ever met. Third-year surgery residents probably get more sleep than you.”

“I get enough sleep,” Klaudia said.