Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) Read Online Free PDF Page A

and closer to Felicity , approaching from space. There was something disturbingly familiar about the readings.
    “Hayden, you there?”
    “… tsshht …Go ahead…”
    “You remember our first day at The Owl, on the bus-ship? What they told us about how we nearly crashed?”
    “…tsshhhhh…”
    “They said it was caused by a meteorite breaking atmosphere close to our ship and jamming the controls with an electromagnetic wave.”
    “What?”
    “I think it’s happening again! I’m losing my controls, and I’m picking up—”
    Felicity jerked, shivered, and then went silent. Her controls darkened, and both com links whispered static into Reece’s ears. For a horrible second, she didn’t move at all. Then she started to fall.
     
     
     
     

     
    III
     
    Gideon Makes Guns, Reece Makes Trouble
     
     
    The Owl’s medical facilities were some of Honora’s finest. To Reece, that just meant they were twice as uncomfortable as a normal hospital’s would have been. Everything was white and sterile, his crisp bed sheets were about as comfortable as newspapers, and then there was the horrible robe he must have been slid into when he’d been brought in from the crash…because if he had been any kind of conscious, he would have fought hard against that.
    His bed was alone in a wide chamber with wooden floors that bounced light in every direction. A grandfather clock in the corner tick, tick, ticked, its gears in constant rotation, like the sun arching beyond the windows behind Reece’s headboard. Reece started counting ticks. To keep himself sane.
    Finally, after nearly fifteen hundred ticks, one of the double doors opened soundlessly. Hayden peeked his head in, and seeing Reece, heaved a sigh of relief.
    Reece sat up—his head swam for a minute, making him all the more irritable—grabbed a pillow, and hurled it at him. “Where the bleeding bogrosh have you been?”
    Hayden pulled the door shut behind him and skipped to dodge the pillow. He was out of uniform, wearing trousers with their suspenders caught up on the shoulders of his white shirt. That’s right. For everyone else at The Owl, school holiday had started this morning, when Reece woke to find himself with a plasma bag hanging at his bedside, his only friend.
    “Trying to find out what happened,” Hayden said, resting his hip on the windowsill. “I knew you would want answers when you woke up.”
    “And?”
    “What do you remember?”
    “Before or after I received a very nice log telling me I’d failed my test?”
    Hayden almost slipped off the windowsill in his surprise. Reece felt a pang of guilt. So Hayden hadn’t known. He had almost worked himself up to believing that everyone knew and hadn’t come to visit him because they didn’t know how to deal with the subject of his humiliating failure.
    “They failed you? On what grounds?”
    Reece slouched against his headboard. “I didn’t communicate with the tower when I experienced the power flux. I crashed my Nyad into the lake. And then I didn’t have my breathing apparatus handy, so I nearly drowned. Pretty good grounds, I’d say.”
    “But they’d announced the test over before the power flux!” Hayden looking so horrified made Reece feel a hair better. Hayden didn’t question judges, tests, and rules, not without good reason. “And what happened—Reece, that wasn’t your fault. You’re right. I looked at the datagraph they were able to salvage from Felicity’s console. The readings were identical to the ones Bus-ship Ten took eight years ago.”
    “A meteorite.” Reece pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers, sighing. “I failed because of a bleeding…Hayden?” Hayden was staring out the window thoughtfully, his forehead scrunched into a mass of wrinkles. “What’s wrong?”
    “It wasn’t a meteorite, Reece. It couldn’t have been. Everyone saw it. For a second, we thought it was your ship crashing. But it wasn’t. It was too small, almost like an escape