Together, all three hundred of us dissolved in luminous, sparking energy that flickered in a quantum state in between a dancing white laser and a bolt of furious lightning. Our transformed beings united into one collection of shining power that lanced out of the enormous teleportation chamber and up through wires made of cloned nerve cells. The wire of human nervous tissue directed our rapidly accelerating bolt of fused and compacted pseudovoltaic lightning up through one of the skyscrapers that stood over the Administrative District and the Governor’s Palace.

Mere instants later, we had ascended breathtakingly high into the sky, reaching almost to the very apex of the towering building our teleportation wire led through. Our potent surging substance of combined glaring photons and seething thunderbolts split into three hundred jagged threads that coalesced back into bodies of flesh and organic matter in bursts and flashes of light. I stood this time, but I still felt terribly queasy at the unpleasant transition.

We exited the receiving teleportation chamber, stepping off its black and golden electronically designed floors with unsteady legs and uncertain footsteps. Evidently, even for those who likely had been on these contraptions many times over the course of their lives like the candidates from High Houses, it still was an annoying and irritating method to travel, though it was obviously incredibly convenient from a time perspective and from the restrictions of space like an elevator being too small to carry all of us at once.

The group of us accepted students climbed the last three flights of stairs of the behemoth of a construction we were inside and emerged outside on top of the roof of the skyscraper. Aircraft were landing before, nestling down on the roof to shuffle us into their innards and then fly off to the North Sea of Iulius to keep up the illusion that the Scholarium was situated on the sea floor, away from prying eyes and dangerous elements that might scheme to interfere with or outright attack some of the most privileged and important young Imperators in the Apollo system. Once we reached the decoy site at the North Sea, I had been told we would be brought all the way back to the Administrative District via undersea train where we would find the real Scholarium right underneath the Governor’s Palace. Safe and secure, hidden from interlopers.

“It is a bit much to have us to all this bait and switch runaround with going all the way out to the ocean and then back to the same place we started, isn’t it? I mean, even if we don’t talk, our servants we bring with us could.” I said to Clodias and Antonias.

“It’s not under the palace.” Clodias said absentmindedly, his eyes on the airships.

“What?” Thorania said, narrowing her violet and Bronze eyes, having overheard his words and my question. “Aezion, yes, it is. It’s literally right below the Governor’s Palace. This is common knowledge.”

Clodias merely gave a faint smile in reply, like he was in on a joke that the rest of us had not heard yet.

The pack of accepted students split up into smaller sections, each of the aircraft only fitting twenty of us as passengers at a time. More ships flew in a circle above us, waiting for the airships that had already landed on the roof to depart so they could land as well and pick up the next crop of the three hundred.

I got onto the very first one, with others following behind me. Walking up the open ramp in the back of the ship, I climbed inside to find that there were no seats within it. Instead, there were only seatbelts and straps lining the sides of the aircraft, we were clearly expected to fasten ourselves in standing with our backs to the walls. Less luxurious and more spartan than I would have imagined for us esteemed invitees to the officers’ school. I would have expected more champagne flutes, plushy chairs, and holographic entertainment screens to show us movies and music rather than the cold gunmetal walls and windowless sidings that lay in front of me.

I picked a spot on the wall and locked myself in, buckling and tightening the synthetic fiber straps around myself. I surveyed those who had followed behind me and was interested to see that this ship would be containing and delivering the very top and very bottom of the class to the decoy station out in the ocean. Amongst the totality of the twenty Bronze Imperators counting myself were Antonias, Kato, Caesia, Aurelia, Clodias, Thorania, and the four Fulvion clones. Quite the spread of scores and rankings between all of us together.

I heard the other two airships that had landed with ours lift off with rumbling roars of engines, departing before us despite our ship having landed at the same time and our group having been the first of the several hundred Bronzes to get moving and jump into one of the flying craft. We were being held up by Andarias Fulvion, who was towering over a Servus flight attendant.

“I don’t need to buckle myself in like a child.” Andarias growled, which I privately found amusing given he was chronologically three years of age.

“I am Bronze. I can handle a little bit of turbulence even if the rest of these pansies can’t without their safety ropes around their waists.” Andarias snarled.

“It’s not about you and your physical safety, your grace, it’s about the airship’s.” The flight attendant said, driving her point in. “This ship will reach high speeds in its acceleration to the Scholarium’s docking area in the North Sea, you might not get a single scratch or the slightest bruise from the force of it, but the ship is not so sturdy that it can withstand someone of your size, weight, and durability flinging around in the flight cabin without your punching through its walls like a bullet through cardboard. Respectfully, sir, buckle yourself in. The captain will not be leaving until you do, even we’re stuck on this roof for the next three days and nights.”

Andarias Fulvion complied, squeezing in his bulk in between two of the others, but he did not look happy about being told off by the flight attendant, even if her logic was rock solid and sound.

“Filthy fucking Ancilla.” The clone muttered under his breath. “Telling me what to do…”

The Servus flight attendant’s back stiffened, the other five Servi flight attendants’ expressions went blank, and even the rest of us Imperators hushed to an uncomfortable silence at that word.

Ancilla. I had known the word and its acquired cultural meaning even as a Servus boy before my transformation at the touch of my grandfather’s ring, but I had never heard it regularly back then. It was slur for the Servi subspecies that had gained a distasteful and ugly heft to it. It was an insult that had such a bite and violent historical legacy to it that while calling my former Path literally the Path of the Slave was perfectly fine in inter-Path relations, Ancilla was considered crass and unfit to be spoken at best and an invitation to a race riot at worst.

I wondered if the woman was going to slap or strike Andarias. I would have rooted her on in doing so if it was not for the simple reality that the giant of a Bronze Imperator would crush her little skull like a grape. In the end, she merely walked away and rejoined her fellow Servi at the front of the airship, just outside of the Navita’s cockpit, and fastened herself to the wall as everyone else had.

The aircraft we rode in lifted up, rocketing off towards the Scholarium’s oceanic decoy site. The twenty of us gradually got over the silence caused Andarias’s slur, though the flight attendants never said anything to us after the clone’s words. I closed my eyes while the others jabbered on idly.

Perhaps thirty minutes into our roaring, vigorous flight through the skyline of the planet, I heard the beeps of communicators, six of them in perfect and simultaneous unison. I opened my eyes curiously to see that the noise had come from the six Servi flight attendant’s wrist communicators.

“Is it time to pass out refreshments?” Clodias asked wryly. “Did you all set a timer?”

The flight attendants did not respond to Clodias’s question. I began to tense, something was wrong.

I tried to relax, there were six Gold Servi who weren’t even in a combat or athletic profession versus twenty of us Bronze Imperators, and the flight attendants could not even have any weapons hidden on their persons to even out our substantial advantage on them if it came to some kind of violence or aggression.

The head flight attendant took a steel case that had been mounted on the wall off and opened it calmly. He pulled out six syringes loaded with a deep, dark black liquid in their tubes and handed five to the other Servi and kept one for himself.

“My good man, are those drugs? Feel free to share them around with everyone else, I’ve been sober for an ungodly amount of hours.” Antonias said eagerly, eyeing the syringes happily.

“Gross.” Aurelia Nerion said, with a sneer on her lips, marring her heavenly visage. “Of course, the diversity picks are druggies and addicts.”

As one, the flight attendants stabbed their thighs with the needles of the syringes and they injected the midnight black fluid into themselves, the substance shooting inside their bodies.

“Is… is this another part of the tests?” Kastor Gallion asked hesitantly.

The flight attendants unbuckled and unlocked their restraints and fell to their hands and knees, trembling and shaking, gasping and choking on air. One of them threw up black fluid and curled up into a ball, another was spasming on the verge of a full-blown seizure.

I released my constraints and walked over to the woman that the clone had called an Ancilla.

“…ma’am...? Are you alright?” I said worriedly, taking a knee and leaning down to look at her. “If you can tell me what was in those syringes maybe we can help you in time.”

She looked up at me, her eyes still closed, tears dripping from between those sealed eyelids. She sucked in breath and struggled to get words out.

“Yes?” I said, encouragingly.

The flight attendant opened her eyes and I gasped. They were completely and entirely pitch black. No Gold or Servus Brown irises or even Preawakening white sclera. Just darkness in her eyes.

I remembered a saying my mother had been fond of: The eyes are the windows to the soul, Aydee. They reveal your true nature.

“What are you?” I said, horrified.

She sucked in another breath, still trembling, her freakish black eyes never leaving mine.

“Die and be damned, slaver.” She growled out, her voice shockingly and monstrously inhuman, and grabbed my throat in her hand and started to strangle me.

Her hand was far stronger than it should have been. And far colder too.

“What are you?” I asked her again.

“Justice.” She said in a voice that sounded more like scraping metal than a woman’s tones. “Justice coming for you. Justice coming for all of you.”