I climb down the ladder to the matron, who throws a blanket over me rather than wrapping it around me. Little gestures show her disdain, and there are so many opportunities for little gestures in a day.
“Put something on!” she harries me as I push the blanket off my head, scowling as if she is deeply offended by my nudity.
“You’ve got some nerve breaking curfew to come stand up here,” she says. “You knew the guard would report you. Why can you not follow the rules? You’ve lived with them a lot longer than most! And you know it’s uncouth to display that animal.”
She talks like my wolf isn’t me. It’s because she’s just human. She doesn’t understand what it’s like to be wild on the inside, and sometimes on the outside too. My behavior is an annoyanceto her. My existence is an inconvenience. She’d much rather be tucked up in her little apartment watching her stories on the television and sending dirty messages to the archery instructor. Everybody knows she likes hisshaft.
I came to the academy when I was three years old. The youngest students they have taken nowadays are sixteen. But I’m rare. I’m a female wolf shifter. They don’t make many of them. Most wolf shifters are men. Something to do with the Y chromosome and the missing leg not repressing a certain wildness. For a female to be a wolf shifter, she’s got to have the gene on both chromosomes.
Usually, that leads to a creature that is more wolf than person. Not really a shifter so much as a werewolf. The fact that I can take a human form makes me important. Not important in the way that people treat me very well. But important in the way that I should never go anywhere or do anything. That kind of important.
There are two places a female shifter is allowed to be, according to official academy guidelines. One is inside the academy; the other is inside the royal palace, where the wolf king takes them into his harem. I don’t want to be taken into a harem, and so far nobody has been stupid enough to try to put me in one, but every day that passes, and I get closer to graduation, I know there’s a time limit to how long I can be here. Not because they’ll kick me out, but because my sanity is starting to wane.
Shifters belong to the king. Male shifters are trained here, as are loyal human males. I’m the only female, because females are supposed to be sent to the palace. I don’t know who made the decision to keep me from the royal household when I was very young, but I think it was the right call. I can barely follow the rules of this place. I can’t imagine what it must be like in thepalace. I’ve been told over the years that it’s a place with endless protocols, and you have to do exactly what you’re told all the time. The academy is theoretically like that, but the rules are looser. Well, sometimes.
“Do I need to remind you of the very simple rules?” Matron scolds me as if I am ten years old.
I don’t say anything as I follow her down the stairs and into the interior of the academy. This place is beautiful. It was actually the old king’s palace at one time, but several kings back they built a new one and left this to the guard. It is old, and it has always been inhabited by shifters. You can feel that when you walk through the halls, or sit in the rooms. There’s a kind of hominess that makes me feel as though I belong here—and yet there’s a part of me that needs to roam, break rules, and push past the boundaries of the narrow expectations that have been imposed on me.
“Nobody takes their wolf form inside the academy…” She leaves the sentence dangling for me to finish.
“Unless authorized,” I sigh.
“Yes. That’s a simple enough rule, isn’t it? You don’t have full control of yours as yet, and doing it outside of the academy will inevitably lead to what?”
“Disaster,” I groan dutifully.
“You can report to detention this evening at seven p.m.,” she says.
The joke is on her. I was already reporting to detention at seven.
Three different instructors sentenced me to it yesterday. I don’t bother to tell her that, of course. Instead, I try to look chastened,like I know I could do better. I’m lucky that I have the kind of face that screams innocence: round shape, low cheekbones, big brown eyes. When I smile, I lose some of my sweetness. My canines are kind of elongated. People who don’t know better think I am a vampire. Sometimes I let them think that, even though it is stupid because vampires aren’t real.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
She checks her watch. “It’s almost time for the rising bell. You may as well get ready for class.”
I don’t get ready for class. I go back to the little single room that’s been assigned to me in the attic. The male dorms are below. They’re split into shifter and non-shifter. I’m kept clear of most of the shifter boys. I don’t know what they’re afraid of, but I know I’m managed within these walls.
I belong here, and yet I don’t.
That’s why sneaking out of the academy is my one joy.
Eclipse is full of people who are free to make whatever decisions they want. It’s chaos out there. It is a high-tech city, with a whole lot of mechanical automatons and electric tools and artificial intelligence and a whole lot of money going around in a whole lot of ways. We don’t get a lot of education about things like the economy, but I know Eclipse City is one of the richest cities on the planet. It’s got a lot of poor areas too, where the tech breaks down, or never reached in the first place, but they’re exciting too.
I’m told that Eclipse has changed a lot in the last hundred years or so. I’ve only been here for seventeen years, I’m assuming.Add three for when I got here, and that makes me twenty, almost twenty-one. I have no idea who decided to leave a toddler outside a military academy, but I’m guessing it was my parents.
There’s never been any information about them. I used to ask, when I was old enough to be curious. Nobody knew anything. The nicer teachers told me that I’d been left for safekeeping, that I was special. I thought that my parents would come back for me, but they never did.
So now I just do what I want. I’ve been at the academy long enough to do the entire syllabus three times. I’ve read the books so many times I could recite some of them backwards.
If a tutor gets mad at me for not attending class, I generally pick their main text out of my brain and perform a passage for them. That really pisses them off. They think I’m too arrogant, that I know it all. I don’t know it all. I just know everything they usually teach a king’s guard, which isn’t that much.
There’s a stack of books on the bedside table. My favoriteElements of Deception and Disguiseby Sir E. Bitten sits on top, open, many of the pages dog-eared. It’s the best book, because it was written by a king’s guard who was around when king’s guards actually did something. Sir Bitten’s book is full of stories of sneaking into enemy encampments and detecting spies in the royal household. I’ve used a lot of techniques from that book in my own life already.
There are not too many other books, maybe three or four. The academy isn’t really a book-heavy place. There is a library, but hardly anybody goes there.
Truth is nobody wantssmartguards, beyond what they need to know to keep bad guys out. This place doesn’t train people to doalgebra, or any of the other subjects I’ve heard my city friends talking about over the years. I’m not technically supposed to have city friends, but my whole life could basically be summed up by the phrase ‘not technically supposed to.’
