Instead I sat there and stared. Until the sounds of the party grew quieter. Eventually, an aide peeked into the room. “Um, you’re supposed to leave.”

I didn’t move.

“Are you sure you don’t want to leave?”

They’d have to drag me out of here. I imagined it—very heroic and Defiant—but the aide didn’t seem so inclined. She switched off the lights and left me there, lit only by the red-orange glow of the emergency lights.

Finally, I stood up and walked to the desk by the wall, where Ironsides had—perhaps accidentally—left the tests the children of the First Citizens had given her. I looked through the stack; each of them had only the name filled out, the other questions blank.

I took the one off the top, the first one handed in. It held the name Jorgen Weight, followed by a question.

1. Name the four major battles that secured the United Defiant Caverns’ independence as the first major state on Detritus.

That was a tricky question, as people were probably going to forget the Unicarn Skirmish—it didn’t get talked about as much. But it was where the fledgling DDF had first employed fighters of the second generation of designs, built in secret in Igneous. I trailed over to my desk and sat down, then answered the question.

I moved on to the next, then the next. They were good questions. More than simple lists of dates or parts. Some math questions about combat speeds. But most were questions about intent, opinion, and personal preference. I struggled on two of them, trying to decide if I should say what I thought the test wanted. or what I thought was actually the correct answer.

I went with the second both times. Who cared anyway, right?

By the time I was finishing up, I heard people talking outside. Janitors, from the sounds of their discussion.

Suddenly I felt silly. Would I scream and force some poor janitor to pull me out by my hair? I’d been beaten. You couldn’t win every fight, and there was no shame in losing when you were outnumbered. I turned over the test and tapped my pencil against it, still sitting mostly in the dark, working by the glow of the emergency lights.

I started sketching a W-shaped ship on the back of the test as a crazy idea began to form in my head. The DDF hadn’t begun as an official military; it had started out as a bunch of dreamers with their own crazy idea. Get the apparatus working, create ships from some schematics that had survived our crash on the planet.

They’d built their own ships.

The door opened, letting in light from the hallway. I heard a bucket get set on the ground outside, and two people complaining about spills in the party room.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I said, finishing my sketch. Thinking. Wondering. Dreaming.

“Why are you still here, kid?” a janitor asked. “You didn’t want to go to the party?”