“You sure know how to make a mess of yourself, right before class.” Kovac sighed.

“God, your head’s a rightful mess,” the voice in my head resounded. “That’s what I get for leaving your body on its own for… eleven and a half years?! Argh! Well, that answers that question. Time gets a LOT screwier the deeper you go into the Astral Ocean. Let's not do that again.”

I ignored her, focused on shaking dirt out of my shirt and pants. Hundreds of bruises and scratches all over me itched and ached.

“This is fine. I can fix this! Don’t worry. You’ll be good as new soon, Dante. I got your soul and everything. It’s only a little chewed up. It’s still good!”

“What are you talking about? Who are you?” I whispered. “How do you know my name?”

“I’m Delta,” the voice introduced herself with a ping of sadness. “The best soul-twin sister you’ve never had and will always have.”

Kovac looked at me. “Did you say something?”

“Just got some dirt in my mouth, bleh.” I spat, scattering leaves out of my hair.

My friend shook his head. He was definitely judging me.

“Turn around, you’re covered in dirt,” he said. “Instructor Wiklogg is going to explode when he sees you.”

I turned, accepting the shakedown. More leaves and bits of dirt flew off me as Kovac slapped dirt out of my clothes.

“Aight, your soul’s in, but it’s like not fully in IN,” Delta declared in my mind. “I’m sure I can get it in. My Tether is gone to shit. Really need a longer vacation to repair my skills properly. Just give me a couple of hours, okay? Okay.”

“My soul? I don’t understand.” I whispered, slowly limping behind Kovac.

“Overseer Kliss got inside the house under cover of darkness in the middle of the night. She was wearing a powerful invisibility cloak of some kind, so I didn’t notice her. The wards didn’t notice her either because she had another bloody master key. Long story short - she stabbed you in the head and then ran away.”

My hand instinctively went up to touch a silver scar across the side of my head.

“Your body died, for a bit. I caught your soul before it could float away to god knows where. I’ve been taking care of it in the Astral, hiding from hungry hunters by riding even hungrier hunters like a suckerfish.”

“A what?”

“A species of marine fishes of the family Echeneidae noted for attaching themselves to, and riding about on, sharks, other large marine animals, and oceangoing ships. I’ve got the idea from the book you’ve read in your childhood. The main character used a trained suckerfish to catch turtles…”

“I don’t remember reading such a thing. The only books in Skyisle belong to the Overseer. Wait. Did you say Overseer Kliss tried to kill me?”

“Try to keep up, Dante. You’re usually a lot smarter than me, not the other way around! She did kill you. If I had to guess Nurse Tamara resuscitated you and you’ve been living out your life as a soulless body…”

“I’ve had no soul for twelve years?!” I gasped.

Things in my head started to click.

Pieces of the missing puzzle suddenly filled themselves in. The strange dreams of another place, of another me… they were me! I was Dr. Vladislav Kerenski and commissar Sasha really followed me around like a guard dog. My extremely detailed report about contamination of the Kazakh steppes went through, straight to the highest office in the land. Someone upstairs liked my honesty. Instead of being executed amidst the irradiated dunes, I was offered a job as the new Administrator of Aralsk-7. I had no idea what happened to the old administrator. If I had to take a guess, he tried to get out or made a mistake and was shot or sent to labor camps in Siberia.

My head started to feel heavy with irrefutable, painful facts. I’ve been asleep at the wheel for eleven and a half years. I’ve… I…

“Dante! Come on, we’re going to be late!” Kovac yelled, waving at me.

I blinked. I had to get to class on time. I was already a rightful mess. I didn’t want to make Instructor Wiklogg even angrier. The old man had quite the temper. I joined the throng of kids heading into the church, passing under the gothic-style gate surrounded by pink Ambrosia trees.

“Today’s lesson about Soul-Songs will be taught by our lovely Overseer, Kliss Cessna! You dunderheads best be on your best behavior today!” Instructor Wiklogg, a portly, silver-bearded man dressed in black robes and a black, cylindrical hat paced in front of the room. “If you pay utmost attention, some of you might even get to unlock your Soul-Song, although I highly doubt it.”

The Instructor’s eyes went around the room and finally settled on me.

“Pupil Alan!” He barked. “Didn’t I say everyone must look their best today? Why are you so filthy and scratched up? Is this the face you want to present to our Overseer as a future citizen of our glorious Empire?!”

I instinctively lowered my eyes.

The Instructor walked towards me, black robes billowing behind him. A heavy, iron cane slammed into my hand, landing on a yellow-colored bruise I got from a pointy rock this morning. I hissed.

“Everyone and everything has their place in the world, pupil Alan. Next time you show up looking like this, the consequences will be most dire. However, as this is your first serious offence and the Overseer wishes to see all of Skyisle’s Song-less children of age gathered before her today… I will only assign you two weeks of cleaning duties!”

I groaned inwardly, rubbing my aching hand. Cleaning duties sucked. Once I wasn’t paying attention in class, trying to do math in my head to unlock the Soul-Song and missed whatever Instructor Wiklogg was talking about. He noticed and assigned me an entire half-day of scrubbing the floors and polishing the stained glass windows.

The instructor turned away from me, the Equality pin on his chest glittering in the morning sunlight coming through the blue stained glass windows. He went on to berate other kids for various reasons, loudly throwing reprimands left and right.

“Man that really sucks, two weeks,” Kovac whispered from the right. We were sharing a large wooden table and a long bench, so he wasn’t sitting very far from me.

A shimmering something started to flicker in the corner of my eye. I turned my head. A semi-transparent girl with silver-blue eyes and silver hair approximately my age manifested into the space between me and Kovac, sitting on the long bench between us.

I nearly jumped out of my seat when I saw her.

Something else clicked in my brain. Delta! Homomagicus. My twin-soul-sister. My Infoscope!

“This educational institution leaves much to be desired,” Delta shook her head.

I gritted my teeth, realizing that she was right.

More memories swam up to the forefront of my mind.

The one thing the Soviet Union didn’t screw up was education. We didn’t have corporal punishment in schools. Young minds were cared for, nurtured, given as much knowledge as possible all the way up to university level if they showed dedication and promise. I was a twelve year old kid in Skyisle and I knew absolutely nothing!

In Moscow, I was in the seventh grade at twelve. In comparison - at that time I was studying rational numbers, integers, graph solutions, polygon classification, percentages, fraction, probability. And that was just mathematics! There was so much more that I learned at twelve from my esteemed, Russian professors. Biology, geography, physics, chemistry, geology, languages, arts, history. The inadequacy and hollowness of Skyisle education was maddening, enraging and also… normal, something that I was already used to.

Bit by bit, everything was beginning to surface in my head. Memories of the old-me. Perception of self, the 12 year old Dante and the sixty-year old Dr. Kerenski were converging into one stronger, fuller, brighter, more self-aware identity.

My stinging right hand turned into a fist. My eyes tracked the motion of the black-robed Instructor.

My mind clicked again.

He was a local turncoat, a big supporter of Equality who got this position to elevate himself above others. He probably got better pay, better housing, maybe an artefact or two from Overseer Kliss. We’ve had plenty of people like him in the USSR, kissers of authority, willing to do anything and everything to elevate themselves in the social ladder. People like that reported brilliant scientists like rocket inventor Sergei Korolev to the commissars for entirely made up thought crimes, setting Soviet science years if not decades backwards!

Wiklogg pulled a book from the shelf. “Today, we’ll be reading from the Imperial book 'The Tower of Agatha'.” He opened the book upon the bookmarked page and started to read. His droll, stuttering voice made me feel immediately sleepy. He made constant pauses at random, stumbling on words he didn’t recognize.

“In the year 7015 Empress Agatha had run into a problem. The tower’s foundations bore an ever-widening crack. Architect Lazarius had failed to account for the weight of the stones used…”

It went on like this for about thirty minutes. By the end of it I felt like strangling him. The book was an incredibly boring account of building a very big tower.

“The tower fell across the city, killing… uhm… two hundred and ninety four citizens. Agatha Arcadia had… prosecuted? uhm… executed the architect involved in the project by drowning him in a vat filled with grease-worms.” Wiklogg rambled on. “She search an… khrm… sought another architect across Arcadia, one that would ensure that her legacy was… glued?… krhmm… enshrined for generations onwards, casting a shadow… into the furniture? F-future!”

The old Instructor looked back up at us. “The moral of this book is that towers built too high can fall down and the best intentions sometimes end with tragedy. Don’t reach for glory and keep your head low, obey the Laws of Goddess Equality and you will avoid disasters.”

It was like this everyday! Wiklogg read random Imperial books to us and then discussed the content, explaining concepts from within the books to us with the best of his understanding. It was suddenly clear to me that he had no idea what he was even talking about. He’s likely never been to the Empire!

His struggle with tenses and complex words showed me that he was just an old man from Skyisle or perhaps Agamemnon who had grade three skills in reading the Imperial language at best. Coinciding with an abysmal understanding of science and reason, his lessons did more damage than good to these kids!

“If I didn’t already want to murder Kliss, I totally would just for this,” Delta commented, her eye twitching. “This idiot can barely read! This is ridiculous! Hang on… is that grade one addition behind him?! Seventeen plus two equals nineteen?! God!” Her head slumped into the table.

I looked at the blackboard behind Wiklogg. It featured a few basic numbers we had learned, explaining addition of numbers. The Empire didn’t use the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. The numbers on the board were dots, zig-zag lines and circles. When they were put together they vaguely resembled oversimplified hexagram patterns Delta and I had studied inside the house wardstones. Hey, I knew how to do math with Skyisle numbering system!

Two systems of numeration started to compete for space inside of my head. It gave me a migraine. I rubbed the space between my eyes, trying to make it go away.

“You poor, poor child,” Delta sighed. “If I knew things were this bad, I’d try twice as hard to drag your soul out of the Astral. Not that I wasn’t trying very hard already. Such misadventures you and I had... Well, mostly me. You did nothing to contribute.”

I squinted at her.

“You do remember me, right? Please acknowledge me in some manner. Your soul went into some kind of hibernation mode as soon as it fully ran out of mana, trying to keep itself alive. I’ve been all alone in the deep dark for a very long time, Dante.” Delta whispered. “I’ve been fighting and running for so long, sacrificing bits of myself to protect you.”

I reached out towards her with my right hand. My hand went straight through hers. She was just a ghost, a mental projection, an illusion of a person. For nearly twelve years I didn’t have a system, didn’t have my soul-sister. She smiled at me and in that smile I saw pain and loneliness she had endured trying to preserve and protect me with all of her being.

“Stats,” I whispered.

Nothing. No blue screens. No beeping sounds of Besm-6 staring up. No System. Damn it. Did I have to start over? Did I lose all of my skills?

“Just give it some time, I’m certain it’ll kick in… soon,” she said. “All of the channels are intact. I kept you safe... You’re waking up, but you’re not quite there yet.”

With the sound of metal boots clinking on stone floors Overseer Kliss stepped into the room. She was wearing her full magisteel regalia. She had a new red cape. A new armacus glittered on her wrist. Or did she get the old one back from my parents by force or theft?

“Ah! Here she is! Our beautiful, wise and brave Overseer!” Instructor Wiklogg clapped. “Come on then, clap with me!”

He turned to the class, encouraging us with a glare. A few people started to clap. More joined in. Soon the clapping was thunderous from all sides.

I didn’t clap. I stared right into the eyes of Kliss Eliza Cessna. She realized that someone wasn’t clapping.

Her eyes settled on me and her entire face twitched.