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horror as I appraised the spartan bunk beds, the bare stone floors, the curtainless window staring out onto a sparse and underlit courtyard.
    “How minimalist,” I said.
    “Yeah,” Rapp said. “The LDA keeps it pretty simple. We’re here to defend Lorien, not to sleep comfortably, I guess.” At least he didn’t sound any happier about it than I was.
    I flopped on the bottom bunk. The mattress was thin and hard.
    “So we’re roommates, huh?” I asked. “Are you training for the tech department too?”
    “Yep. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other, I guess. Between the two of us, you’re looking at the whole program.”
    “What?”
    “We’re it. There’s a corps of about twenty active engineers and fifteen active techs on the whole planet, but only two trainees at a time.”
    Oh, man. This guy seemed nice enough, I guess, but if it was just us, he could be the coolest guy on all of Lorien and we’d still get sick of each other.
    “It’s not so bad, though,” he went on, not registering my disappointment. “Even though we’re just trainees, the corps is so short staffed lately that they send us out on grid surveys, repair work on the electronic perimeters, stuff like that.”
    “Exciting.” I didn’t mean to sound so sarcastic, but I couldn’t help it. This would be my new life for at least the next two years, and it was already a total bore.
    Fortunately, Rapp was immune to irony. “It is. To know that I’m playing a small but significant role in keeping Lorien safe . . . I feel really blessed.”
    I couldn’t take it. I lurched up from the bed.
    “Safe from what?” I asked.
    Rapp stared at me, dumbly. “What do you mean?”
    “Keeping Lorien safe from what ? There hasn’t been an attack on this planet for aeons. For all our explorations and recon missions, we haven’t even had direct communication of any kind with another planet for hundreds of years. What are we afraid of? A civil war? Loriens are all pacifists, even in the sketchiest part of City Center or the most backward parts of the Outer Territories, nothing bad ever happens. I mean, I’m considered a hardened criminal around here. And all I did was get caught at a Devektra show!”
    Rapp looked taken aback, but I didn’t care. “Do you really think you’re making a difference?” I spat. “Please. All this stuff about ancient prophecies and attacks that will probably never come—it’s superstition.”
    Rapp didn’t take my bait. Instead of answering, he solemnly walked to the door.
    “I’ll come back in a little while to give you a tour of the grounds. But I gotta say if this is your attitude on day one, you’re going to have a pretty miserable time here.”
    Yeah , I thought. No shit .

CHAPTER 5
    It would’ve been nice if I could say my first week at the LDA passed by in a blur. Actually, it dragged on even more endlessly than I’d anticipated.
    Rapp, it turned out, was still learning things in class that I had taught myself ages ago, so I couldn’t even count on my schoolwork to keep me interested. Sure, I could have told Professor Orkun that I already knew all this stuff, but I kept it to myself. Instead, I just kept my head down in three-person seminars, nodding along with the lesson and trying to pretend like it was all new to me.
    I knew I was being stupid. If I had to be here, I might as well have tried to learn something. But, in a weird way, it felt like that would be letting them win. If I wasted my time, I was still getting away with something, right?
    Things weren’t much more interesting in the commissary than they were in class. I kept pretty much to myself and so did all the other students at the academy. As for the Mentor Cêpans who’d been assigned their own Garde to train, they were pretty scarce around campus, and the ones who did eat in the commissary usually had their hands too full with their young Garde charges to mix with engineering trainees like me and Rapp.
    The only people at the