As our youngest professor, Jessica Strich had a lot going for her, all of it negated by the fact that she shared more than just a last name with my former roommate. She was dark-haired where Matthew was blonde, and sleek where he was built, but the family resemblance was still plenty obvious. She was only in her mid-twenties, but would be instructing us in tactics and weaponry. Maybe she’d teach Matthew how to wield the stick lodged up his own ass.
After that, the names and faces started to blur together. Robert Mance, also in his twenties, and the recipient of just as many lustful gazes as Isabel Ferra, would be teaching Philosophy to Powers and normals alike. Emery Goldstein, who hated me even before I told him he looked like a four-limbed penis, taught both Projection and Perception. Maria Curberas, late-thirties and plain as could be except for when the sunniest smiles you’d ever see transformed her into something angelic, was our Literature teacher. Professor Cade—no first name provided, leading to widespread speculation that his given name might actually be Professor—was pushing sixty in the worst of ways, taught mathematics, and didn’t seem the tiniest bit concerned with who or what I was. Last but not least was our Mobility instructor, Macy Johnson. Black, slim, and small, she was also a world-class Jitterbug, something Caleb learned only after a particularly shameless round of his usual boasting.
The Powers class instructors would stick with us until graduation. That was less true for those who taught academic material. Curberas exclusively taught first-years. Cade taught lower and upper-level mathematics, but the latter was generally the domain of normals. Isabel Ferra, on the other hand… well, assuming I lasted until graduation, I’d be blessed with her instruction for all three years.
Apparently, ethics were considered important for would-be Capes. Who knew?
Anyway, those were the teachers we’d be studying under, arguing with, and—in a few particular cases—hating with fiery, all-consuming passion during our first year at the Academy. A lot of names, all at once, I know. Don’t worry if you can’t keep them all straight… God knows it took me time to do so, and I saw most of those fuckers on a weekly basis.
We’ll come back to the ones that matter, soon enough. Maybe you’ll learn to see them the way I did. Or maybe you’ll decide even the worst of them were justified in their methods.
Now that? That’s what we call foreshadowing. See the difference?
CHAPTER 17
After Orientation ended, I had the dubious pleasure of meeting my tutors, and they had the equally dubious pleasure of meeting me. I’m pretty sure it was mutual hatred at first sight, but I could have gotten past that if they hadn’t promptly loaded me up with chapter readings from a half-dozen different texts on five different subjects.
Day one of school… no, day zero of school, and I already had fucking homework!
I swung by the cafeteria, grabbed another sandwich, and retreated to the dorm, trying to ignore the festivities that were still in full swing out on the field. We first-years got an hour-long speech on how we were all going to die, while the normal students got a party. The Academy’s bullshit was already starting to stink.
Back in my room, I flopped onto the bed, waited to see if Mom’s ghost was going to finally speak—she didn’t, of course—and then picked up my Glass. Like my three sets of school-branded sweats, the tablet had been part of my enrollment package, and I couldn’t deny the thrill of actually owning one for the first time in my life… even if I was being forced to use it for something as shitty as schoolwork. I thumbed it to life, loaded the first of the texts my tutors had assigned me, and got to work.
It sucked… and not the good kind of suck, if you know what I’m saying. This was mind-numbing drudgery, and it sucked in the least sexual way possible. But flunking out, going crazy, and ending up in the prison known as the Hole with my asshole dad? That would suck even more. So I read and I studied and eventually, sometime before my roommate or the rest of the class got back, I fell asleep.
And that was how I spent my birthday.
Eighteen years old.
Didn’t feel much different from seventeen.
CHAPTER 18
Mondays as a first-year are always the same, a bucket of cold water in the face to shake you free of your weekend passivity (and heaven help the asshole who stayed out late Sunday night drinking). That’s a metaphorical bucket of cold water, of course. Actual water would just make the first-year Hydros happy, and the Academy wasn’t in the business of making any of us happy. Especially not on Mondays.
At six-forty-five A.M., every Glass in the dorm came to life, broadcasting a screaming noise like an air siren or a dozen children being sacrificed. I bolted upright in bed, grabbed the tablet from my dresser and hurled it across the room, where it dented the door, and kept on shrieking. Not sure what the devices were made of, but I only ever saw one get broken, and that took…well, let’s just call it superhuman effort.
Anyway, nothing gets people out of bed quite like demon speakers shrieking in stereo. We poured out of our rooms and into the group showers, and were lined up in the common room, dressed in our school sweats, by twenty past the hour. The women came out of the opposite hall to line up next to us,
