The room grew quiet.

“All right…,” Jerkface said. “Well, that was… descriptive.”

“Bless your stars,” Kimmalyn added. Hudiya gave me a thumbs-up and a grin, though the others in the room plainly had no idea what to make of me.

And… maybe my reaction had been over the top. I was used to making a scene; life had taught me that aggressive threats would cause people to back off. But did I need to do that here?

I realized something odd in that moment. None of these people seemed to know who I was. They hadn’t grown up near my neighborhood; they hadn’t gone to class with me. They might have heard of my father, but they didn’t know me from any other cadet.

Here, I wasn’t the rat girl or the daughter of a coward.

Here I was free.

The door chose that moment to open, and our instructor—Mongrel—stopped in the doorway, holding a steaming mug of coffee in one hand, a clipboard in the other. In the light, I recognized him from the pictures of the First Citizens, though his hair was greyer, and that mustache made him appear much older.

We must have looked like quite the menagerie. I was still standing on the seat of my mockpit, looming over Jerkface. Several of the others had been snickering at our exchange, while Kimmalyn was again trying to execute a salute.

Mongrel glanced at the clock, which had just hit seven hundred hours. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything intimate.”

“Uh…,” I said. I jumped off my seat and tried a little laugh.

“That wasn’t a joke!” Mongrel barked. “I don’t joke! Line up by the far wall, all of you!”

We scrambled to obey. As we lined up, Jerkface pulled off a precise salute, and he held it, at perfect attention.

Mongrel glanced at him and said, “Don’t be a suck-up, son. This isn’t basic training, and you aren’t grunts from the ground corps.”

Jerkface’s expression fell and he lowered his arm, then snapped to attention anyway. “Um, sorry, sir!”

Mongrel rolled his eyes. “My name is Captain Cobb. My call-sign is Mongrel, but you will call me Cobb—or sir, if you must.” He trailed along the line, his limp prominent, taking a sip of his coffee. “The rules of this classroom are simple. I teach. You learn. Anything that interferes with that is likely to get one of you killed.” He paused near where I stood by Jerkface. “That includes flirting.”

I felt my face go cold. “Sir! I wasn’t—”

“It also includes talking back to me! You’re in flight school now, stars help you. Four months of training. If you make it to the end without being kicked out or shot down, then you pass. That’s it. There are no tests. There are no grades. Just you in a cockpit, convincing me you deserve to remain there. I am the only authority that matters to you now.”

He waited, watching to see how we responded. And wisely, none of us said anything.