Return Once More by Trisha Leigh

Author:Trisha Leigh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Elder Truman led me down the echoing metal hallway, past a giggling group of first-years who went silent and wide-eyed at the sight of him. He didn’t do much overseeing unless he wanted to experience a particular event again or spend the day with his son, and never taught reflections, with one exception: the reflection on the actions of his ancestor, Harry Truman.

That class revolved around the American president’s decision to test nuclear weapons on defenseless civilians. Oz’s father never tired of dissecting it. We kept our honest opinions unspoken and unreflected around him, but after my certification I planned to revise my file on that event to include the words despicable, thoughtless, and possibly sociopathic narcissism for good measure.

Not everyone agreed, the Trumans included, but witnessing that horrible day had turned my stomach. All of those people. There one moment, gone the next. For nothing. Then again, military tactics had never made sense to me. That’s why there were many Historians, so that history could never be observed and reflected through a singular, distorted lens. I tended toward one side, while people like Oz and his father peered through a vastly different one. Neither was wrong.

Well, that’s what they taught us. I was pretty sure I was right.

“Sit down, Miss Vespasian,” a scratchy old-man voice commanded.

Oh my laundry, Zeke Midgley.

He sat at the head of a long, wooden table in a small chamber in one of the offices. None of the other rooms at the Academy had anything but metal or stone accoutrements, but the additions of heavy cloth drapes and the thick wooden table and chairs made this space eerie. Truly quiet. It would be intimidating even without Zeke and his nearly colorless eyes staring me down from behind his own Historian frames.

If a sighting of Elder Truman was rare, Zeke, the last surviving Original settler of Genesis, was a ghost, a tall tale. And I’d seen him twice in the past couple of weeks.

“Yes, sir,” I managed, plopping into the chair at the opposite end of the table.

No matter how many times they called me on the carpet, it never failed to redeposit all of the moisture from my mouth onto my palms. I’d given in to Analeigh’s protests and left Jonah’s cuff hidden in the mussed covers of my bed, so at least they couldn’t find it on me and take it away. The seat cupped my rear and wasn’t cold, the combination making me long to leap to my feet. I had a strange mental image of the chair sucking me in and eating me for dinner.

Focus, Kaia. You’re in some serious trouble here. Maybe you should hope the chair does eat you for dinner.

Truman slid into a chair on the right side of the table, leaving four empty ones, and Maude Gatling came in, taking a seat on the left. They all studied me until I felt naked. I couldn’t stop swallowing in a desperate attempt to turn my tongue back into a usable organ, as opposed to its current impression of a cotton ball.

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