We regrouped and recuperated from the travel, and I urged us on. Kato seemed to have taken the transportation the best surprisingly and was the first one up on his feet and moving about. Caesia was the worst off, followed by Antonias, and I was the second quickest to move on. Walking out of the chamber, we followed signs designating paths to various places. Apparently, one could walk through the entirety of Iulius just through the connecting enclosed walkways that bridged the narrow gaps between each of the buildings. Now, finding each and every walkway might be a problem. Some were at the very pinnacle of the towering constructions, some randomly inserted in the middle of the above ground portion, some at ground level, and some deep beneath the earth.

Coming from my simple life on Lavinius, and even with my experiences with a more technologically advanced and urbanized civilization on Sunburst Station, I found it more than a bit disturbing that half the population had probably never seen the sun or the sky. Given how I suspected wealth and class privilege worked here amongst lesser Paths, I doubted that those people would ever be allowed to ascend to higher levels. The Imperators’ job of maintaining order and keeping a stranglehold on the population had a simple but cunning tactic: convince one Servus that he was better than other Servi and he would do the oppressing for you, free of charge. Hell, that man would probably pay you for the right to stomp his metaphorical and literal boot on the faces of the dispossessed and impoverished. Wealth had a way of breeding cruelty and disdain.

“You know what’s interesting to me?” I said aloud to the others as we navigated halls and stairways and elevator shafts.

“What?” Antonias said.

“It’s surprising that Administrative District with the Governor’s palace is so low, so buried under the surface. They could easily have put it elsewhere, the poles, the oceans, on top of some skyscrapers, or even follow the Iulian Great Houses and raze a plot of exceedingly egregious size. Heck, they could even put it permanently levitating in the sky, looking down at all the lowly peasants and riff raff. Why down here of all places?” I said.

Antonias squinted, making a face as he thought. He shook his head. “No idea.”

“I have a theory,” Caesia said softly, as though she was afraid we were going to reject her thoughts out of hand.

“Yeah? Go ahead.” I said.

“I think maybe it’s a defensive measure. To the people that live in the skyscrapers of Iulius, their towering buildings are homes and workplaces, to someone like the Governor who will never know them as more than statistical data on a datapad or a holo monitor, if you look at it from his perspective, those buildings look a lot more like a cloak or armor for the Administrative District. Spying sensorcraft from orbit sent by his rivals in other solar systems have to dig through a literal mountain of metal and concrete that’s teeming with countless lives. And that’s before you get into whatever cloaking technologies the Governor’s Palace is utilizing anyways.”

I smiled. “That’s a really good perspective, Caesia. I wouldn’t have thought of that, I’m glad you’re here to point out what the rest of us are missing.”

She reddened slightly. “Thanks, Adri.

“Adri?” I said, raising an eyebrow at her shortening of my name.

“It’s your new nickname.” Caesia said.

“You dropped two letters. What’s the point of doing that when you could just say my name?” I asked.

“I thought the four of us should have special nicknames for each other. Teambonding.” Caesia said.

“You have one for everyone?” I said.

“We already have Toni for Antonias, Adri for you, we can call Kato Kay, and you can call me Cee.” Caesia said.

I shrugged. “I guess we can do that if you feel it’s important.”

“Let’s keep the nicknames, even mine, private.” Antonias cut in. “We don’t want the others to think we’re soft.”

“Agreed.” I said, nodding my head.

“There’s another way to look at it too.” Kato said, lost in thought.

“Look at what?” Caesia said.

Kato refocused on us. “At the District and the Palace being so low. It’s like a cloak or armor, sure, but it’s also like a dungeon. If you’ve been summoned by the Governor or are being judged in the Hall of Justice, you can’t just make a break for it and fly off into the sky on a ship or ride away in a hovercar. This place is mazelike, and I bet they can remotely lock sections of it down. You’re not getting out of here or away from the Governor’s will. Everyone who enters the District is like a rat in a cage at the mercy of the cat.”

We all went silent. Personally, I was more impressed with Kato’s deduction than horrified at the thought of the District having a more brutal and dark nature. I was pretty comfortable with the idea that Iulian Imperators would be backstabbing, scheming, murdering bastards that made every other Imperator stuck on little rinky-dink worlds and space stations look downright cute and cuddly.

“Well, that’s a fun thought.” Antonias said sarcastically.

“It’s well-reasoned and that’s all that matters. We’re not here to have a picnic or hold hands and sing together, we’re here to be thrown in with a bunch of obscenely rich psychopathic brats and hopefully come out the other side of it being members of the Strategoi of the Guard. Everybody here knew that walking in. We’re the outsiders here and we’re going to kick ass, regardless of how diabolical the Imperators running this show end up being. Understood?” I said.

The others nodded.

We reached amber stairs, ornately carved with patterns.

“Well, this looks pretentious and excessive.” Antonias commented. He turned his head back to the rest of us. “We’re definitely going the right way.”

I laughed at that.

We walked down the honey shaded staircase and found adjacent amber stairs originating from other entrances aligning with ours to fuse into one great stairway that ran on and on, deeper and deeper.

As we continued, we found ourselves besides other Bronze Imperators, surely here to witness the welcoming ceremony by the Governor and to tested as candidates for the Scholarium. Our counterparts observed us, taking note of our appearance, but went back to their own conversations when it became clear that they did not already know us.

I noticed a Servus woman by the side of the grand, majestic stairs. She was playing a flute and had a box in front of her for tips.

“How did she get down here?” Caesia asked me.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

Clearly, she had had the entrepreneurial instinct to try and squeeze some coin out of all the candidates and other administrative officials coming through here today.

She was decent enough for someone who was almost certainly self-taught, but eventually she made a mistake and to our Path’s ears, even with our enhanced hearing suppressed, the sound was glaring enough to annoy me and everyone else who heard it.

“Not even an Artisan and this rat dares to assault our heavenly ears with her ineptitude?” A girl said, sneering at the street performer.

“Relax, Orbia.” The male Imperator beside her said.

He walked over to the performer, smiling. The Servus woman flinched as he neared.

“Keep working at it.” He said kindly, to my shock. He reached into a pocket in his jacket and flipped a coin into the woman’s tip box. I caught sight of it as it fell and my breath hitched.

Antonias saw it too. “Holy-“

It was a Jovium coin studded with emeralds and accented with gold, depicting a Kretan man jumping over a bull on one side and the Regent’s side profile on the other. I had never seen one in person before, but I had learned on Sunburst Station the categories and classes of coinage that the Dominium used. That coin the boy had just given her was equal to a wealthy executive of an interplanetary corporation’s annual salary. Perhaps a bit more.

The street performer stared at it with shaking hands and wide eyes, not daring to touch the coin resting in her box.

She looked up at the Bronze. “Th-thank you…”

“Like I said, keep at it.” He said warmly. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you you can’t play that flute. Music belongs to all the subspecies of humanity, not just the Artisans. I myself play a mean banjo.”

“He’s awful at it.” Orbia, the girl that had spoken first said. “Come on, Clodias. We should go now before the peasant uses your obnoxious charity on drugs or something else that will make you disappointed in the human condition.”

Clodias waved to the street performer and ambled along next to Orbia.

Quite frankly, I was stunned. I decided he must have gotten some kind of ego trip from doing things like that, because the thought of a genuinely generous Iulian Imperator was threatening to break my brain in two.

We entered the hollow that contained a small city, the Administrative District, and headed towards the Governor’s Palace. As we approached, my stomach tightened.

“There must be a thousand Bronze Imperators here to be candidates.” Caesia said in wonder.

“Yeah,” I said faintly. A thousand prospective candidates and only three hundred would be chosen for the Scholarium’s next class of first year officers.