Edgar used a tissue as a bookmark and closed his book. He grabbed his phone and saw the time. He breathed a small sigh of relief. Not today, I guess.

He got off the couch and went to the kitchen to get a drink.

“What’s our schedule like tomorrow, Marco?” Erwin asked. He and Marco were reading on the beanbags.

“A lot less exercise,” Marco said, yawning. “We’ll only do some strength-training tomorrow. Then we’ll learn more first aid and ride horses again.”

“Hey, let’s hope I don’t fall off my horse again,” Erwin laughed. Marco grinned.

Uninterested in their conversation, Edgar headed to a room. He put his jacket on a hanger and was ready to crash on his bed when he suddenly froze. His phone was ringing. He immediately strode out of the room. Now? This late?

“Where are you going, Edgar?” Erwin asked.

“I just need some fresh air.” Edgar left the apartment and hit the elevator button. He went down to the lobby and called back. “Hello?”

He heard a cough. A hoarse voice came through the phone. “How did the vote go?”

“I’m—” Edgar paused to take a deep breath, “—I’m deputy leader.”

There was silence for a moment. Edgar felt his heart sink.

“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” his father growled.

“I was one vote from becoming the leader, but one guy voted for some—”

“When did I ever teach you to make excuses for yourself? Did I not fucking tell you—” His father’s words were interrupted with two hard coughs. “Did I not fucking tell you to become the leader no matter what? Did I not?”

Edgar stared at the ground. “You did.”

“What is Hopkins looking for?”

“Leadership.”

“Yeah, so what the fuck did you just fail to show?”

Edgar pursed his lips. “Leadership.”

“They want someone who can earn people’s respect quickly, dumbass.” His father coughed again. “You’ll get another fucking shot in a week. There’s always a competition of some kind then. Do not fuck it up.”

“I won’t.”

His father hung up before he was even done talking. Edgar’s arm fell to his side. His phone almost slipped from his fingers.

For a long while, he just stood there, staring at the ceiling.

. . . .

Tuesday was nowhere near as painful as Monday. The only exercise they got was from flipping tires and lifting weights for thirty minutes. Then they went to the Costas Hall and learned how to treat cut and burn wounds.

“I’m warning you now that some of the images I’ll show you are graphic,” Hugh said. He turned on the projection screen. They saw dozens of images of knife wounds at different stages of healing.

“Are we med school students now?” Arnett asked. It was probably a question on more than one other person’s mind.

Following that, in the span of three hours, they rode horses again, learned how to shoot a pistol, studied Ephrian, and went fishing.

Vick and Raine were sitting on a small wooden boat with fishing rods in their hands.

“Dude, I swear this is the wackiest job I’ve ever had,” Vick said. “By far. And that’s saying something, because I’ve done some crazy shit before.”

“Like what?” Raine asked.

“I got paid 20 bucks to go hunting for magic mushrooms.”

“That’s not that crazy.”

“Wait, there’s more. So I was doing this for a high school teacher who wrote a college recommendation letter for me.”

“Okay, we’re getting there.”

“And while I went mushroom hunting, I had to dodge another teacher who happened to be writing my other recommendation letter. I knew if she caught me, she would force me to sell them to her for just ten bucks, otherwise she would call the cops on me.”

“Jesus, now that’s crazy.”

“Yeah, and this job feels wackier than that.”

They spent two hours fishing. After that, since Raine had been the top scorer on the Ephrian test the previous day, he had the option of joining the rest of his teammates in a driving lesson or doing something else. To his great regret, thinking the driving lesson would be boring, he chose to take an extra Ephrian lesson.

He entered the Costas Hall.

“Oh,” Raine said. He stopped there, but what he really wanted to say was ‘Oh shit.’

“Fuck,” Cecily said.

He smiled wryly. “When do you think we’ll learn to curse in Ephrian?”

She ignored him and pulled her phone out of her pocket. She read something.

This person is just… He let out a light sigh and stood there waiting for Ava or someone to show up and lead them to a room.

But they were early. Over ten minutes early. Raine was bored.

“What are you reading?” he asked her in Ephrian.

“None of your business,” she said in English.

“Did you brush up on your Ephrian after yesterday?”

She ignored him.

He looked at her for a moment. “Do you drink black coffee?”

“What?” She frowned. Her eyes were still on her phone.

“You seem like the kind of person who would drink black coffee,” he said with a straight face. “No sugar because you hate fun. No milk because you don’t like company.”

Her gaze rose from her phone. She stared at him blankly for a moment. Then, to his surprise, she laughed. “What?”

Damn, what a weird sense of humor. But I’m the one who made the joke, so maybe mine is just as weird.

“I don’t drink coffee,” she said. Then her eyes went back to her phone.

They waited for about five minutes, with Raine standing around boredly and Cecily reading something on her phone, before Hugh came in through the front doors and told them to follow him. They went into a small room with about five seats and a whiteboard.

“We’ll go over the Ephrian writing system this time,” Hugh said in English. He passed them blank sheets of lined paper. “There are about thirty letters used in Ephrian. They’re arranged in syllabic blocks like in the Korean writing system.”

Hugh spoke for about twenty minutes before they started writing. Raine hadn’t practiced writing Ephrian at all, so his characters looked strange and a bit childish. But he wasn’t concerned; it wasn’t his first time learning a new language and feeling like an idiot while doing so.

“Is it more important to speak Ephrian well or read and write well?” Cecily asked. “What do I prioritize?”

“Speaking, of course. But both are important.”

“What can the average Hopkins employee do?”

Hugh thought for a moment. “They’re good at speaking and decent at reading. Not so good at writing.”

“So reading and writing well give me a leg up?”

“Assuming you can speak it well, yes.”

With that, Cecily started asking far more questions. Hugh’s answers to them each revealed something about the writing system that Raine found enlightening or at least interesting.

“The writing system was created to be simple enough that even a farmer with an hour or two to study it every day could learn it in a month,” Hugh said.

A farmer? Interesting.

“How old is this writing system?” Raine asked.

“No comment,” Hugh replied.

Their lesson went on for two hours, during which they covered all 32 letters and learned to write basic sentences.

Raine yawned as he headed for the front door. Cecily stretched and strode out first.

“Goodbye,” he said.

She nodded slightly as she passed him.

Raine made his way to the Gilman Tower, went up to the fifth floor, and entered his unit. It smelled like fish.

“Raine, you missed out,” Kayden said. He was in the kitchen, frying mackerel on a pan. “We learned how to drift.”

Raine blinked. “What?”

“Yeah,” Max said, throwing a potato chip into his mouth. “We did donuts and got to drive around a race track.”

“Goddammit,” Raine said.

“Hey!” Kayden said to Max. “Those chips are mine, man.”

“Oh, my bad.” Max put the packet down on the counter.

“No food thieves,” Arnett said from the couch. He was reading a book. “No one likes a food thief.”

“Okay, okay, jeez.”

Most of his roommates were in the living room. Only Reo and Grant were missing. They were apparently out to buy bikes, since they were sick of walking around everywhere.

Raine went to the shelf and grabbed the book he’d read the previous day.

“Raine, how’s that book?” Arnett asked. He waved around the novel in his hand. “This one sucks.”

“Huh? I thought it wasn’t too bad,” Max said. “The ending is pretty good.”

“You finished it?”

“Yeah. I got up early today and I had nothing to do.”

“The character development just stops a third of the way through, man. And it’s not even good. Suddenly, Collin is a silent badass, and Yang is a saintly business genius.”

Max shrugged. “The plot isn’t bad, at least.”

“I guess.”

Raine sat on a beanbag and raised the book in his hand. “This has the same problem. The characters start as average people and turn into saints halfway into it for no good reason. The saving grace is its worldbuilding.”

“Oh, yeah. It’s pretty good in the one I read too,” Max said.

“Worldbuilding is boring,” Arnett said. “Stories are about the characters, guys.”

“Yeah, yeah, we got our own literary critic here,” Vick said. He was on the other beanbag with his phone in his hands.

“I’m serious! It’s the basics of storytelling.”

“That worldbuilding is boring?” Max asked.

“No, that the characters are the most important part of a story,” Arnett said.

“Whatever the case, the mackerel is done,” Kayden said. “I’m having one piece, and Vick is having another. Who wants the third piece?”

“I’ll take it if no one else wants it,” Vick said.

“I’m pretty hungry,” Lukas said. “I’ll take the third piece.”

They killed time with conversation and books. Then they went to bed, and the next day came.

. . . .

Wednesday destroyed them not physically, but mentally. They had a one-hour diagnostic math exam. Then they spent an hour and a half learning everything they did wrong and how to do it right. Vick cruised through it all, but the other seven were drained by the difficulty of the questions. Many had solutions that didn’t require knowledge of advanced mathematics, but they were presented in tricky ways.

One question about an arrow’s trajectory, given certain points it passed through, tripped up Raine. Another about the angle of a sword thrust utterly confused Max. Yet another about exponential population growth stumped Lukas.

“I didn’t know I was still in high school,” Arnett said afterward. “I guess I dreamed up my graduation four years ago.”

“It was basic math, dude,” Vick said.

“Bullshit.”

“You’re a math or physics major, right?” Grant asked Vick.

“Yeah, math,” Vick said. “But there were just two or three real math questions on that test, ones about proving stuff. The rest was standardized test-esque bullshit.”

After the math test and lesson, they had lunch and went on to a two-hour-long Ephrian lesson on pronunciation and grammar. Max almost fell asleep in the last thirty minutes.

They had a ten minute break. Then they went onto a lesson on how to put a dislocated shoulder back into its socket. More than a handful of people had looks of horror on their faces as they watched a recording of a person calmly fixing their own dislocated shoulder.

Everyone was tired and sleepy by the end of the lesson. But they could finally move on to something that wasn’t mentally draining afterward.

The new employees made their way to the shooting range to practice using guns. Unlike the last time, there wasn’t an instructor for each team, just a supervisor, and they could walk around and see each other’s performance. They were given fake pistols that were similar to the real thing in almost every way. The main differences were in the significantly lower noise level and the fact that they didn’t fire bullets. They fired lasers that the targets detected.

The new employees were expected to treat the guns like they were real, with proper trigger discipline and use of the safety mechanism.

There was a small commotion nearby.

“Holy shit, look at her go,” someone said.

Curious, Raine and a few of his teammates went to take a look.

The small crowd was watching one person: Livia. She wore a calm expression as she aimed at her target. It was moving from side to side, unlike almost everyone else’s. Her fingers squeezed the trigger once, twice. The target showed two red dots in the center.

“Nice,” Kayden said. His reaction far calmer than those of the rest.

“Woah,” Max said, staring at the target with wide eyes.

“Jesus,” Arnett said. “That’s scary.”

Amazing. Raine couldn’t hit the bullseye even with a stationary target.

“Quit gawking and keep practicing,” Steele said.

The crowd dispersed.

“Hey, you guys thought that was impressive?” Kayden asked. “Watch this.”

He went to an empty booth nearby and asked their supervisor to make the target move. Then Kayden told him to move it farther away as well.

Kayden switched off his gun’s safety mechanism, aimed at the target, and fired three times in the space of three seconds. Every shot hit the bullseye.

“Our own team has a killer,” Arnett said.

“Dude, teach me how to do that,” Vick said.

“Practice, practice, practice,” Kayden said with a grin. He switched on the safety.

Raine went to a booth himself and practiced on a stationary target. He remembered the pirates June had told him about. He didn’t want to someday get attacked by them and be useless in a gunfight.

Their shooting practice was the last element of their training that day.

Over dinner, they laughed about how tiring the day had been even without any serious exercise. Then Thursday came along, and they suffered.