Chapter 2091 Tobin’s Apology

Instructor Varga looked at the score on the display for a long moment. Then she looked down at Ning as he crossed the chamber floor toward the stairs.

"Cadet," she called down. "What was your name again?"

Ning looked up at her and smiled. "Ning, Instructor."

Varga nodded slowly. Then she took a small tablet from her pocket and, for the first time that afternoon, wrote a cadet’s name down.

The four cadets left the True Simulation facility as the afternoon light began to fade over the city, and the walk from the chamber to the waiting transport felt very different from the walk in.

Hale and the other cadets from the two academies left at almost the same time, gathering in their separate clusters near the exit as their own transports arrived.

Only a few hours earlier, they had made no effort to hide what they thought of Ning’s academy, laughing and calling out remarks across the waiting hall.

Now they said nothing at all.

They kept to their own groups and avoided looking toward Ning and the others, and when the two groups passed one another near the facility’s main entrance, the cadets from the other academies shifted aside to give them room without anyone needing to ask.

Hale was the last of them to leave.

He stood beside his academy’s transport as his classmates climbed aboard, and for a long moment, he looked directly at Ning across the wide entrance yard. There was no mockery in his face anymore, and no pleasant smile.

His expression was difficult to read, a mixture of wounded pride, grudging respect, and something sharper beneath both, as though he were committing Ning’s face to memory.

Ning met his gaze and smiled.

Hale held the look a moment longer, then turned away without a word and climbed into his transport.

The ride back to the academy was quiet.

The four of them sat together in the back of the transport as it carried them through the darkening streets, and for a long while, none of them spoke.

Naysha leaned her head against the window and watched the city pass, her body still a little stiff from the impacts of her run. Ning sat back in his seat, looking perfectly at ease.

Tobin and Elena kept glancing at the two of them.

The skepticism they had worn so openly in Greeves’s office that morning was gone.

Ning could see it in the way they looked at him now, as though they were trying to work out how they had misjudged him so completely, and in the way they looked at Naysha, with a new kind of respect that had nothing to do with her score.

Eventually, Tobin cleared his throat.

"I owe you both an apology," he said awkwardly, his eyes fixed on the floor of the transport rather than on either of them. "When Instructor Stellis brought you into the Sergeant General’s office this morning, I thought she’d made a mistake. I thought the academy was wasting the slot on two first-years who weren’t ready, and that we’d be the ones embarrassed for it."

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"I was wrong. About both of you."

Naysha turned her head from the window and looked at him with mild surprise. "I scored a hundred and eighty-five."

"On a desert map, on your first attempt, in a machine you’d never seen before," Elena said quietly. "I scored a hundred and ninety-eight on an orbital station, and I’ve been preparing for this session for over a year. You did better than I did, Naysha. Honestly."

Naysha did not seem to know how to respond to that. She looked from Elena to Tobin and back again, and then she gave a small nod and turned back toward the window, though Ning noticed a faint flush of color in her cheeks.

Tobin looked at Ning.

"And you," he said, with something close to a laugh in his voice. "I don’t even know what to say to you. Three hundred and ninety-six. In a blizzard. I didn’t think anyone could do that, let alone a first-year."

"I got lucky with the storm," Ning said.

Tobin stared at him. "Lucky?"

"The wind told me a lot."

Tobin looked at Elena, who simply shook her head, and the two of them lapsed into a stunned silence that lasted for most of the remaining ride.

By the time they returned to the academy, the results had already arrived.

Sergeant General Greeves called all four of them to his office that evening. When they entered, they found him seated behind his desk with the scores from the session displayed in front of him, and Lorna standing beside the desk with her hands clasped behind her back.

Greeves looked at the results for a long moment before looking up at them.

He did not say anything dramatic. He did not praise them, nor did he criticize them. He simply looked at each of them in turn, his gaze lingering on Ning slightly longer than on the others.

"It seems," he said at last, "that I won’t have to explain anything to the other academies after all."

Then he dismissed them.

Lorna caught Ning and Naysha in the hallway as they left. She did not say much either, but she did not need to.

She was smiling openly, more broadly than Ning had ever seen her smile, and when she congratulated them both, there was a warmth in her voice that she rarely allowed anyone to hear.

"Good work," she said. "Both of you."

After that, the next few months passed without much happening at all.

The academy settled back into its routine, and Ning settled back into it with them. The lessons continued, and so did the training, the Daywatch shifts, and the simulations.

The seasons on Truimal changed slowly, the gray-orange sky growing darker and colder as the year moved on, and the cadets of Batch 122 grew steadily more confident in everything they did.

Naysha used the Emulator every night.