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It couldn’t have been Torq. He couldn’t have fallen again.
“Was it Torq?” I rasped, my voice cracking.
“Torq?” Zalina crinkled her nose. “The cocky first-year who gave Lieutenant Bowman such a hard time? No, it wasn’t him.”
I hitched in an uneven breath, and then caught Morgan staring at me as if she’d just fit the last piece into a puzzle.
She knew.
Chapter
Forty
Torq
Isquared my shoulders as I stood at attention in front of the wide, black desk and waited for Admiral Zoran to arrive. My eyes burned from lack of sleep, but I wasn’t tired. I was too filled with shame and rage to worry about sleep overtaking me.
How had Zenen fallen? One moment he’d been moving easily up the rope, and the next, he’d been falling backward. I closed my eyes as I replayed the moment in my mind, much as I’d been doing since I’d lowered myself to the ground at the base of the tower and learned that the cadet hadn’t survived the fall.
Others had whispered darkly that it had been the tower’s curse, but I did not believe that. I did not believe in curses, even if I couldn’t explain the Blade’s fall. Our Drexian ancestors might have held fast to curses and the supernatural, but they’d also lived in the ancient times, when creatures roamed the planet that had died out long ago. Creatures who breathed fire and unfurled broad wings, creatures who ruled the skies and stalked the mountains, creatures who had become the stuff of legend.
Now it was the modern era, and the Drexians were the most technologically advanced species in the galaxy. We had developed jump technology to travel across vast distances in the single beat of a heart, we’d created holograms that were as real as matter, and we had successfully defended Earth and other planets from violent invaders with our superior weapons. Spells and curses and myths had no place in our rational world. Not anymore.
“But neither do coincidences,” I said under my breath, as I stood alone in the Academy Master’s long office and peered out the tall window to the Restless Sea.
I couldn’t help feeling that it wasn’t chance that had sent two Blades careening off walls. I knew why I’d fallen, and I was confident that Dom had played a part in the second fall, as well. His expression as he’d looked at Zenen crumpled on the ground and then at me had told me everything I needed to know.
He’d been shocked, but not because of the fall. He’d been shocked that it hadn’t been me to fall again. But why did he want me dead so badly? Was it really all over me leaping past him one time on the climbing wall? Was he willing to kill because he’d been bested once?
The thought that it was supposed to be me in a heap at the bottom of the tower made bile tease the back of my throat. I pressed my lips together tightly and took a deep breath. A fellow Blade had died in place of me. Even if I had nothing to do with the fall, I couldn’t fight the guilt that clawed at me, the guilt that told me it should have been me, the guilt that repeated the taunts that I hadn’t been strong enough, skilled enough, fast enough to save him.
I shifted my weight from one foot to another and clenched my hands behind my back. It didn’t surprise me that the admiral wished to speak to me, but it did surprise me that he was making me wait. Every other Blade had already been debriefed. The academy knew what had happened and why we’d been on the tower. My Blade brothers had already been given punishments by the security chief, punishment that I was glad to accept for my part in the death.
But I alone had been sent to the admiral’s office to watch the morning break over the turbulent surface of the sea. Only I would be interviewed alone.
A sound from behind made me stiffen and turn my head slightly. It wasn’t the door at the other end of the room opening. It was a hidden door in one of the side walls that had slid open and allowed two Drexians to emerge from within. One was Admiral Zoran, and one was my father.
My chest constricted and my jaw dropped. My father had been summoned? As far as I knew, none of the other Blade fathers had been notified. The academy rarely involved Drexian parents in the inner workings of the school, even when danger was involved, even when there was death. Danger was part of joining the academy. It was part of what made it so rigorous.
So why was my father walking toward me with a scowl on his face?
“At ease, Cadet.” The admiral strode to his place behind his desk, but he didn’t sit.
I unclasped my hands, but I remained ramrod straight as I focused my attention on him and not my father who stood at the end of the admiral’s desk facing me instead of by my side. This told me where his loyalties lay, although I should not have been surprised. My father held the academy in higher regard than anything, even his sons.
“There is no debate about what happened last night.” Zoran leaned his hands on the desk but didn’t break eye contact with me. “A group of Blade cadets—all first-years and including you—went to the forbidden tower to scale the side and complete one of the unspoken requirements.”
I didn’t make a sound because there was no question, and no facts I would dispute.
“Only three cadets remained on the wall when one of you fell to his death.”
I flinched at this cold assessment, recalling the look of terror on my fellow Blade’s face as I tried in vain to catch him. I doubted I would ever forget the horror in his eyes when the fabric of his shirt ripped in my fist, and he realized that I had failed.
“The other cadets have told me that no one was near the Blade when he lost his grip on the rope, but that you were the closest. Is this true?”
“It is.”
Zoran held my gaze. “They also reported that you attempted to catch him. Is that accurate?”
