But there, her careful avoidance fell apart.
“Can you believe they let him stay?” a snotty female voice carried down the almost empty table.
“Of course they did,” came a second voice. “He’s Maya’s favorite.”
Aerin shot a quick glance toward the two speakers, recognizing them both as fellow first-years: a short dark girl with a penchant for copying off others’ papers and an athletic blonde whose work was not worth copying.
“Ha!” the dark girl scoffed, twining her spoon between her slender fingers. “Do you think if one of us was roughed up in a brawl over vacation, we’d still be here?”
A brawl? Was that what they were calling it? Well, the gossip mill would have had to come up with some explanation for the bruise on Dane’s cheek, and knowing him, he would not have discouraged the rumor. He may have started it.
“Hardly,” replied the blonde. “He’s lucky to get away with just three cracked ribs.”
Aerin winced. Three cracked ribs! How could he consider going to class that way?
“It’s because of his father,” the blonde continued. “Anyone else, and they’d have been thrown out with a thud. That’s probably the only reason he got accepted in the first place.”
Aerin felt the blood run down her tongue before she realized she had bitten it. She knew Dane would not want her to defend him. Watching him today had been like seeing him self-destruct.
Still, these girls had no right to speculate.
“That’s not true,” Aerin found herself interrupting. “Dane is one of the best students in the school. He doesn’t need any special favors.”
Two sour looks turned her way. “Oh really?” said the blonde. “He’s getting a two-month reprieve from physical training, and that doesn’t sound like a special favor to you?”
“What are you?” the dark girl added. “His girlfriend?”
“I doubt it,” smirked her friend. “Did you see the look he gave her when she humiliated him in class today?”
“Deadly.”
“Besides”—the blonde pointed across the room—“could he be sitting any farther away from her?”
Aerin’s head flew up. Sure enough, Dane was at the far corner of the room. For an instant his head came up and his gaze met hers, then turned away without acknowledgment.
She began sawing at a potato skin with her knife. If he wanted to punish her for refusing to let him kill himself in physical combat, that was fine. She could live with that. He could ignore her all he wanted. She had always expected him to lose interest in her. Slowly, however, the force behind her knife lessened.
If she were honest with herself, truly honest, then she should admit . . .
That she had begun to think of her friendship with Dane as more than temporary.
That she understood why he had walked into that deluge this afternoon.
And that the wall of separation that had grown between them this week was her fault. He had built it to replace the one Aerin had torn down. She had seen what she was not supposed to see, and he could not forgive her, because the balance of secrecy had tipped, the scale sliding too far in her direction.
She knew that. She understood.
And she knew how to end it.
The only way to repair the damage was to rebalance the scale by spilling her own darkness into the hole she had made in their friendship.
But she could not do it. It was out of the question.
Some secrets were too painful to share.
Chapter Seventeen
THE NIGHT
EVERY NIGHT THE NIGHTMARE CAME. FOR FIVE months. Dane tried to ignore it. He tried to eliminate it by applying himself to his studies and filling his brain with all manner of knowledge. He pushed his body to the edge, first in rehabilitation, then in training, hoping to exhaust himself, to make it impossible to dream.
It did not work.
When you have the same dream over and over again, your brain is trying to solve a problem,
Pete always said.
It knows there’s an answer.
If there were answers in Dane’s nightmare, they had yet to reveal themselves. He awoke the final evening of the school year as always, sweat pouring down his skin, his mind determined once again to live and relive his last argument with his father.
Lucky,
the school nurse had said.
If the fellow had punched you any harder, you would be dead.
Luck had nothing to do with it. If the General had wanted to puncture a lung, he would have, and he would not have cracked the ribs if he had not wanted to.
But Dane had been the one to inflict the deepest damage. He had chosen to sever his relationship with Aerin. Because he had not been able to face her, could not accept the fact that she had seen him at his weakest and most vulnerable.
Again Dane struggled with the memory of her standing outside the sliding-glass door. Watching.
He thrust the image away and rolled over, picturing her instead in the red dress. Was that what had sent the General over the edge? The dress? That had been Paul, enacting his revenge for Dane’s entrance into the school.
Paul had never been able to stand being beaten by his younger brother. And it had happened before. Often enough that Dane had learned to recognize the pattern, and repercussions, at an early age. The General would blow up, blasting out accusations, and somehow Dane was always at the center of the blast. But his brother was the fuse.
This time, though, there had been more to the fight than Paul.
I caught her in that lie tonight at dinner,
the General had said,
and you rushed to cover her tracks
.
What lie? Dane had rescued Aerin from his father’s prying when the General had asked about her past. But what was the lie he thought he had discovered? And why would Aerin’s secrets about her personal life matter to Dane’s father? It was almost midnight when a thought took Dane in a new direction. His father had been probing Aerin at dinner. Looking for personal details, but his questions had not turned demanding until she had told him her own father’s name.
Tony. No, Antony. Antony Renning.
Dane had seen that name before.
He sat up, shoving off the sheets. After tugging on a pair of pants, slippers, and a shirt, he hurried into the hallway. He had to talk to Aerin. Now.
She was not in her room. He became convinced of that fact only after banging on her door and waking up half the girl’s wing. By the time he realized that she must have sneaked out her window, the wing monitor on night duty had arrived on the scene: Yvonne, still fully dressed in her uniform, an expensive watch, and a green necklace.
Reminiscent of the one his father had secured around Aerin’s neck at Christmas, strangling Dane as he fastened the brass catch. He’d wanted to rip the false jewels off her neck, to accuse his father and brother of using her to get to him. Flaunting their power through her naivety. But he hadn’t known how to warn her of their insincerity without frightening her.
It was yourself you were protecting. Admit it,
his conscience taunted him.
Hell yes, he’d been protecting his own secret. And it had almost cost him everything.
“Problem?” Yvonne asked, arching a tweezed eyebrow.
“No.” He hedged away from Aerin’s door, his brain clicking rapidly, hunting for a way to explain himself and keep Aerin off Yvonne’s radar. “I must have been sleepwalking.” He gave a sheepish grin. “Sorry.”
The exotic girl bestowed him with her version of a placating look, an expression that reminded him of a feigning predator. She slipped an arm around his shoulders and ushered him back up the hall. “You’re sleepwalking in the wrong wing,” she teased, then, instead of escorting him back to his room, she stopped at the staircase. “Would you like to go down for some hot cider?”
No.
But the drink machine was on the first floor, and that would put him almost where he did want to be: outside looking for Aerin. He nodded.
Yvonne let him open the door for her.
They started down the steps. She kept glancing at him as though expecting him to say something. “Nervous about tomorrow?” she finally asked.
He wrinkled his forehead, then realized she must be talking about the morning’s ceremony when the names of the returning students would be announced to the universe. He wished nerves were all that was keeping him awake. They were a good enough excuse. “I guess,” he replied.
She traced a violet fingernail over his wrist. “I would have thought you of all people wouldn’t be worried. Your marks are even better than mine.” A hint of bitterness rifled her voice. “Yours and that . . . Heron-girl’s.”
Dane squelched a desire to correct Aerin’s name. He had reached the bottom of the steps. The lobby stood before him, with the front door a mere ten feet away. “You know, Yvonne.” He tried to detach her fingers. “I think some fresh air might be better for me than cider.”
She giggled, linking her arms around his waist and facing him. “You know I’m on duty, and it’s after curfew.”
“I just think it might help get my mind off things a little.” He reined in the urge to pull away and lowered his voice in the name of a greater cause. “Maybe by the time I come back, you won’t be . . . on duty.”
“Be back by two,” she whispered in his ear, then let go.
That was one appointment he would not mind missing. Three smooth strides and he was out the door, closing it firmly behind him.
Night had turned the garden into a forest like something from a dark fantasy. Dane garnered scratches and bruises as he picked his way through the shadows. A sickly sweetness clung heavy in the air, the chaotic blend of rampant, untended flowers. His eardrums were invaded by the high-pitched cry of tuneless crickets, eventually replaced by the
shhh
of running water.
He found Aerin in a pool of moonlight by the fountain. Tree branches reached out their fingers toward her slender body; but the light seemed to emanate from her, pushing them away. Her back faced him; her long brown hair split down the middle and swept forward across her left shoulder; her thin arms bent at the elbows.
She is beautiful.
The thought slipped into his conscious as it had once before, when he had first seen her in the red dress. Suddenly the discovery that had brought him here felt less urgent. He needed to repair the damage he had done first, to explain himself and apologize. She deserved that much.
“I never meant to place you in danger,” he said, stepping forward from the shadows.
Her shoulders straightened, but she failed to turn.
“I didn’t know my father would be there,” he added. “I would never—I should never . . .”
“Your father didn’t touch
me.
” Her words wavered.
He swallowed. This was hard, harder than anything he had ever done. “The General started hitting me when I was nine. He said . . .” Dane swallowed and struggled to keep his voice. “He said it was because I was a coward.”
A strained sound between a laugh and a sob came from her. “So now you aren’t afraid of anything?”
Unease crept over Dane’s shoulders. That was the idea, but it wasn’t reality. He had been trained never to show fear, never to admit it. “I was afraid of you,” he told her, “of what it meant to have you
know.
”
There was a long, long silence. And just when he thought they might never surpass it, she spoke. “I’m the reason your father was angry. That night, he was upset because of me.”
“Don’t.” Anger stifled Dane’s voice. Had his rejection made her think he blamed her? “He’s like a time bomb, Aerin. The same thing would have happened with or without you there. I just . . . I couldn’t talk about it . . . what happened that night. It had nothing to do with you,” he rushed to say.
She was shaking her head. “Yes, it did, Dane. Maybe you’re right about your father. If I hadn’t been there, something else might have set him off, but that night it was me. It was what I said at dinner. Your father, he wanted to know when my father died, but I couldn’t tell him. I was afraid if your father knew, he would want to know where I was after my father’s death, before . . . before I came here. I don’t . . . I don’t know how he knew—”
“That you were lying.” The misshapen piece began to slip into place, and Dane felt a sudden rush of betrayal.
“I didn’t intend to lie.”
It was still a lie. She had been lying to him all this time. And she knew the deepest, most unforgivable secret Dane had. “Where were you then?” he asked, no longer willing to respect her privacy. “If you weren’t on a trade ship?”
She caught her breath. He could see the muscles tighten in her neck. There was another long silence, and then she said, “My father died in that ship seven years ago.”
Dane stared, not certain what to think.
“In a crash,” she finished the thought. “I was with him.”
Instinctively he reached out a hand to touch her shoulder.
She yanked away. “The computer . . . it malfunctioned. My father was trying to take us to the next space station, but it was days off; and I couldn’t fly without the autopilot. I was trying to fix the processor.”
“Seven years ago? But you would only have been—
“Nearly eleven years old.” Her hand ran through her hair. “I’ve always had a gift with technology, but not enough of one. The ship went down and crashed.”
“I thought you said you were days away—”
“From the nearest space station, but not the nearest planet. We landed on Vizhan.” The name tilted off her tongue, jostling through his memory.
His brain leafed through the stacks of material he had studied over the past months. “Vizhan?” he repeated.
And then he remembered what little he knew.
A minor X-level planet in the Dyan sector of the universe, ruled by a small group of people who subject the majority of the planet’s inhabitants to slavery and sporadic culling.
Culling?
The word bit into his gut. What was that? A polite word for murder?