4He wasn't expecting much from the launch. There wasn't much to expect. The shuttle was loaded with children, some eager, some apprehensive, and it took off. It felt a bit wobbly for a moment, and there was some slight pressure that he felt in his ears and nose, but other than that, it was fine.
At least at the beginning.
After the initial stage, the teacher walked down the aisle, calling roll. "Yuri."
"Here, sir."
"Marcos."
"Here."
"Here, sir."
"Whatever."
It didn't matter what they said. It was all a game, anyway. To test them, to remind them who was in charge.
When the teacher got to his name, Han Tzu, he mangled it somehow. One of the bigger boys found humor in this. "Hey, he said Hot Soup."
"Hot Soup," another boy chuckled. "Good one." They stared at Han Tzu, who tried to lean back in his seat, away from them. Han Tzu mentally groaned-now he was stuck with a nickname for who-knows-how-long.
Next to him sat an empty seat. Which was weird, because there were twenty kids in the launch group-he remembered counting-and twenty seats, so there should be a perfect fit. But what seemed more important to him at the time was the fact that there appeared to be a negative stigma against him from day one. No one wanted to sit next to him. Someone had even sat next to Wu, the girl.
Oh well, thought Hot Soup. He was used to being lonely before, when the teachers had separated him from the others at school and when his parents separated him from his sister. It wasn't fun, but it was bearable.
Suddenly, the shuttle began to shake violently. A few people started screaming. One vomited-one of the ones who'd sneaked a few illicit chips before launch-and it floated around in a disgusting little cloud.
A spark flew. The teacher went down the aisle again, but this time not at a leisurely stroll. He was muttering to himself. Hot Soup caught a snippet. "They've been doing this for a hundred years, why does it go wrong now…"
And then the cabin went dark.
Even Hot Soup felt like screaming, at the shock and the fear and the sense of helplessness, but he bit his lip. The shuttle was filled with reverberating yells, shouts, pleadings, not all of them mockery.
"We're fixing it!" cried the teacher from inside the control cabin. And then Hot Soup's mind went blank.
He woke up-was it a few minutes or a few hours later?-to a light, but unusually subdued, shuttle. But beneath the surface, there was tension, a strained memory of the chaos after the lights had gone out.
Hot Soup looked to the left to observe his future classmates and saw a boy sitting in the once-empty seat.
He startled for a moment, then calmed down. "Who are you?" he asked.
The other boy smiled. He was tall, with a square, charismatic face, and a shock of black hair at the top. His eyes were a pale, indeterminate color, and they almost seemed to glow.
"I'm Tom," he said. "Don't you remember?"
Hot Soup thought back to the time when all the children had been clustered around the launch site and he had performed a count. He vaguely remembered Tom being somewhere in the crowd, though it was hazy, like a half-forgotten dream.
"Oh yeah," he said. "Tom. So where were you, anyway? During the launch?"
Tom smiled mysteriously. "I had to go…fix some things. In the pilot's cabin."
Hot Soup made a face. "What kind of things?"
"Oh, navigation," Tom said airily. "I've been flying shuttles since I was two years old, and now I'm a better navigator than the navigator." He sounded so completely serious that the obvious joke was made even more funny. Hot Soup laughed and momentarily forgot the question of where Tom had actually been. Right then, he felt he had found a friend.
"The teacher must be new," Tom commented as they exited the shuttle. "He seems uncertain. Like he doesn't know his craft."
Hot Soup nodded.
"His head looks like a potato," Tom added. "No, someone trying to carve a potato out of clay, except their knife slips and cuts gashes in the clay."
Hot Soup nodded.
"Are you going to say anything?" Tom asked. "How'd you get into Battle School? Everyone seems to have an interesting story about it."
"Trust me, mine isn't interesting," Hot Soup said. "My mom had a sister first, but she was ordinary. I suppose I was kind of a surprise. I remember my preschool teacher telling my mom that she should apply for me to take the tests to get in. And I passed. And next thing I knew-I was here."
Tom nodded.
"What's your story?" Soup asked, seeing this as an opportunity to get information about his friend.
Tom went silent. "You don't want to know," he said.
"Come on," Soup said. "Is it something…bad?" He left a significant pause between something and bad.
"Not exactly…"
"This way," the teacher said, interrupting their conversation conveniently. They took a left turn, and the discussion was over.
Later, after Hot Soup got his desk, he sat on his bunk playing on it. One weird game, better graphics than he had at home but still it didn't look very exciting. He would try it later. One personal message feature. He played with that for a little while, then got bored of it and moved on.
Then he remembered at home, when he'd hacked into the principal's files and exposed a very…personal letter. Maybe he could hack into the school database to find Tom's information. Desks and computer systems were his hidden talent.
He began. He was interrupted a few times, but all in all, it took him about an hour to reach the student files. Good, but not his best. He typed the name Tom into the search box. Five results came up. But it soon became apparent that none of them were the Tom.
He looked at the most recent launch group. Nineteen students, none of them Tom.
He modified the search terms to include any students Tom who'd arrived in the most recent group.
A message flashed on his screen. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. Someone was trying to hide Tom's data from Soup. But who? And why?
Who was Tom?