the helmet over his unruly undercut. “Thanks for covering for me—knew you’d have my back. I would have commed you to make sure, but…”
And then his smile goes wicked, and he slips my earpiece out of his pocket.
Hollow exasperation hits me like a gut punch for the second time today. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groan.
Gal doesn’t toss it—he makes me come and pluck the device daintily out of his palm, his hooded eyes sparkling with delight. “Noticed you forgot to make your way to the comm station, figured you’d gotten distracted by something, you know the rest. And we’re supposed to trust you to lead us today?”
“Better me than you.”
“Rut off. I could be an amazing leader.”
“Your test scores say otherwise. And last week you couldn’t even get one other person in the cantina to try streaking the officer quarters with you.”
“No one was drunk enough. But it’s gonna happen someday. We’ll make academy history—first to make it to the head’s door and back.”
I knock my shoulder into his, laughing softly as I slip my earpiece in. Behind Gal, I catch a glimpse of Hanji, another cadet in our year, as she moseys toward her station in the control tower. She gives me a wave, then makes a suggestive gesture involving both of her hands and a wicked tilt of her eyebrow. I grapple with the urge to pull a face at her, keeping my stare pinned on Gal instead.
Hanji and Ollins, another member of her merry band of miscreants, made a bet where Gal and I are concerned. If Gal finds out the terms of that bet, I might as well float my Viper into the path of an oncoming dreadnought.
“What?” Gal asks, and I realize I’ve stared a moment too long.
“Huh? Oh, just…I saw Jana on my way over,” I blurt. Smooth, Ettian.
“Yeah, she came by to say hi.”
I glance around at the tarmac, the line of Vipers, the distance from here to the hangar. “Came by?”
“Jealous? I can ask if she’s got friends who are into, y’know, all of this,” he says, gesturing from my head to my toes.
“Who isn’t?” I shoot back, setting my helmet over my head.
Gal snorts. “Got me there,” he says, and something skitters sideways in my stomach. Before the comment has a chance to settle, he claps me on the shoulder. “C’mon, Ettian. Big day. Let’s get these ruttin’ birds in the sky.”
I cuff him back, grinning, then lift a finger to my earpiece and flick my comms on. “This is Gold One. All units report in.”
As I jog to my own Viper at the opposite end of the staging zone, my ears fill with the noise of thirty rowdy cadets sounding off. At my back, Viper engines whine through their preflight checks, rattling my bones. I clamber into my own cockpit, dropping into my gel-seat as I will myself to focus. It’s just noise. No rhythm beneath it. No thoughts of the past. Only the wide-open future, the black above, and the sureness of the ship beneath my hands as I taxi onto the runway.
When the tower signals, I throw everything I have into the Viper’s thrusters. I rocket for the fringes of Rana’s atmosphere with the formation at my rear, begging for my heart to calm down.
But the frantic thump-thump-thump in my chest is a little too close to drums for my liking.
CHAPTER 2
THE HUMAN MIND isn’t built to process hurtling through a vacuum at skin-peeling speeds in a cockpit just big enough for a single pilot and all of his fear. The Viper around me is sleek and athletic, and the engines at my back roar as I urge a little extra speed out of them. The vast dark of space envelops me, the stars washed out by the daytime glow of Rana five hundred miles beneath us. I should be pissing myself.
And yet.
My mind goes a little inhuman in the cockpit of a Viper. My awareness pushes its limits, my body forgotten in favor of the ship around me. My eyes unfocus.