“Goooo!” Edgar roared.

He and his partner paddled to the pier like they were being chased by the kraken. They had to, unlike every other team. If they were late, they would have to run another mile.

Raine was lying on the sand. He took his gaze off the last team on the water and let his head fall back onto the ground.

“I don’t think I can get up,” Vick said beside him.

“Me neither,” Raine said.

“Whose idea was it again to rush to the pier?”

“Yours.”

Vick sighed. “Fuck.”

“You guys are idiots,” Ava said, walking up to them. She had a bottle of water in one hand.

“We know,” Vick said. “No need to rub it in.”

“Here,” Ava said to Raine. The cold bottle of water touched his cheek.

“Thanks,” Raine said.

“Dude, waterfall it and pass it to me,” Vick said. “I’ll be eternally grateful and all that. I need some goddamn water.”

Raine tried to open the bottle. His arms lacked the strength to do it. Ava snickered and opened it for him.

“Thanks,” he said. She shrugged and walked away.

He drank from the bottle without touching it and passed it over to Vick.

“I’m forever in your debt,” Vick said with a grin. He waterfalled as well, but he chugged the water like it was beer on a Friday night.

Edgar and his partner reached the pier. They clambered out of their canoe and lay on the pier, panting.

“We...we did it,” he said.

“Congratulations,” Steele said flatly. She glanced at her watch. “In five minutes, you’ll start cycling.” She looked at a small mountain maybe six or seven miles away. “You’ll ride to Mount Rialis.”

“Oh my god, no,” Max said.

“Can I cry now?” Vick asked.

Raine started getting up. Grant helped him and passed him his crutch.

“Thanks,” Raine said. Here’s hoping I won’t have to cycle.

. . . .

He didn’t cycle. But he did have to follow this teammates in an SUV with Steele, Ava, and June. He was wrapped in a large towel to avoid getting sweat and sand on his seat. During the ride, he was expected to read and finish a short book on Ephrian.

“What if I get carsick?” he asked.

“You suck it up and keep reading,” Steele said.

“Can I ask a question about Ephrian—”

“No, so shut up and read.”

He did.

The book was drier than Introductory Ephrian, and it covered different material. Whereas Introductory Ephrian was mostly about Ephrian words and phrases used in everyday life, this book was about grammar.

Ephrian was phonetically and grammatically like a blend of Russian, German, and English, with a sprinkle of Spanish. The writing looked a bit like Korean. But Ephrian was simpler than any of those languages. Its grammatical rules had few exceptions, unlike English ones. And if Introductory Ephrian was right, anyone who spoke Russian and English could mostly sound like a native speaker with a bit of practice.

Raine sat in silence and read the book while every other new employee was suffering a thirty-minute cycle. He heard someone throw up outside, but he tried to ignore it and continued reading.

He finished the book just a few minutes before the car slowed to a stop. They were in front of the Gilman Tower.

“Here we are,” June said.

“I’ve finished the book,” Raine said.

“Get out,” Steele said in Ephrian. “And keep the book.”

“Okay,” he said, also in Ephrian.

He got out with the book in one hand. The car sped away as soon as he closed the door.

His teammates were nearby and greeted him. They all headed into the Gilman Tower.

“Dude, I threw up,” Vick said. “It sucked.”

“You were puking like you had a hangover,” Arnett said.

All of Raine’s teammates were walking like their legs were made of jelly. They stumbled occasionally as they walked, and their gaits looked unnatural.

“You lucked out, man,” Arnett said to Raine. “We got fucking destroyed.”

“You sure as fuck lucked out,” Edgar said, approaching with a scowl. He was covered in sweat like everyone else. “Why the fuck did you get to sit and relax in the car just because of some minor injury?”

“What?” Raine frowned. “How do you know whether my injury is ‘minor’ or not? I got shot. You think I can cycle with a gunshot wound in my leg?”

“Whatever the case, why the fuck didn’t you do something else? Even if your leg was broken, you could have kept paddling at the beach.”

People were gathering around them—not that many, but enough to form a small crowd.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“I could have, but my last name isn’t Steele and I don’t make the decisions.”

“You could have volunteered to get back in a canoe. Instead, you looked pretty happy to step inside and ride in that SUV like a prince while the rest of us cycled under the fucking sun,” Edgar said to Raine. “That guy even threw up.” He pointed at Vick, who raised an eyebrow.

“Calm down, man,” Edgar’s Latino teammate said. “You’re just being—”

“Will you fuck off, Marco?” Edgar snapped.

“He’s just telling you to chill out, brother,” another of Edgar’s teammates said, his hands making a pacifying gesture, “Let’s just go upstairs, shower, and rest, okay?”

Edgar stared at Raine for a long moment. Raine stared back at him with a flat expression. He was thinking about how he had enough space to swing his crutch at Edgar if he had to.

Edgar snorted and turned around. “Fucking loser.”

“Wow,” Grant said. “What a guy.”

“Sorry about that,” Marco said to Raine. “He’s been on edge since the moment he woke up. I don’t know why.”

“I see,” Raine said. “It’s alright.”

Marco and his teammates followed Edgar to the elevators.

“Dude, that was so weird,” Vick said. “That Edgar guy is cuckoo.”

“I’ve met him before,” Raine said. “He wasn’t that...explosive.” He shrugged. “Then again, I didn’t spend that much time talking to him.”

“Stress and exhaustion do strange things to people,” Reo said.

“I guess so.”

They headed for the elevators after Edgar’s group was gone.

“I was ready to sucker punch him,” Arnett said suddenly. “I’m kind of disappointed he didn’t try to throw a punch.”

“Damn, I was waiting for him to do something stupid too,” Kayden said. “I was thinking Steele would make him take another trip to the mountain.”

Reo sighed. “You people...”

Walking near the back of the group, Raine looked at them talking and smiled.

. . . .

Song Hyun-woo waved his keycard over the sensor. The automatic door opened, and he entered the room.

Kim Jun-seo and several others were sitting inside, staring at a screen.

“How is he?” Song Hyun-woo asked them.

“He’s been unresponsive, as expected,” Kim Jun-seo said.

“I’ll talk to him.”

“I tried earlier.”

“Which approach?”

“Slow-and-steady for two hours.”

Song Hyun-woo frowned. “He just didn’t respond at all?”

“Nothing useful. Just laughter and silence.”

“Did you talk about the Prince?”

“I did. He just laughed.”

Song Hyun-woo sighed and went to the door on the other end of the room. “I’ll try.”

Kim Jun-seo nodded. He hit a button on his keyboard and punched in the password. The door unlocked. Song Hyun-woo pushed it open.

On the other side was a simple room that wouldn’t look out of place in a cheap apartment. There was a bookshelf, a table, two chairs, and a mattress on the floor.

The Duke was sitting at the table, reading the first volume of Bartolomé de las Casas’ History of the Indies in Spanish. His upper right arm was bandaged.

“I can’t say I’m surprised to see you reading that,” Song Hyun-woo said.

The Duke glanced at Song Hyun-woo. Then his eyes returned to the book.

Song Hyun-woo grabbed a seat in front of the Duke. “I couldn’t get far before wanting to puke while reading the book.”

The Duke made no response. There was no change in his expression. His breathing remained steady.

Song Hyun-woo smiled. “We have all day, Duke. I’ll be here for quite a while.”

Song Hyun-woo talked. And talked. And talked. For more than an hour, he spoke about Las Casas, US history, and slavery. The Duke made no reply the entire time.

He closed the book.

“A good book by a good man,” he said.

Song Hyun-woo frowned. “You know, I have a hard time reconciling your hatred for slavery with your moral deficiency in other matters.”

“Like?”

Now we’re getting somewhere. “Like the Black Winter.”

The Duke snickered and got up. He put away his book and grabbed another one. It was The Great Gatsby.

“You’re a Fitzgerald fan?”

“No.”

Song Hyun-woo tried asking more questions. The Duke ignored them.

Song Hyun-woo didn’t think of himself as a violent person, but he felt an urge to punch the Duke. This son of a bitch is so goddamn tight-lipped.

But the Duke had information he needed. Song Hyun-woo wondered if he should come again another time and start with the presumptive: lying that he ‘knew’ a certain Follower had opened the portal for the Duke. There was some risk in that. It was a powerful tool, but it would only work once.

He spent another two hours in the room. He got nothing out of the Duke.

. . . .

They showered and threw their dirty uniforms into the washing machines. They had a little under an hour to rest before their training continued. Aside from Max, who went to the cafeteria, every one of them decided to take a nap.

“What if we don’t get up?” Arnett asked. Raine had a similar concern.

Vick raised an eyebrow. “You think seven alarms are going to fail? All we need is one person to wake up and make a racket.”

“Okay, that’s true.”

Raine put his phone on the table, flopped onto his bed, and fell asleep in seconds.

Everything hurt when he woke up. He slowly climbed out of bed. His alarm had yet to ring; his fear of oversleeping had cut his nap short by about ten minutes. He grabbed his crutch, got his phone, and left the room quietly.

Arnett was still asleep, snoring on the couch. But on the other end of the living room, in front of an open window, Max was talking on the phone. He had yet to notice Raine.

“Yeah, I’m doing well,” Max said. “And I’ll be back in no time, and things will get easier then. Don’t worry. You’re doing fine in school, right?” A few moments later, he sighed. “I got it. Send me an email with the question you’re stuck on.”

Raine opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of juice. Max glanced at him with a look of surprise but kept talking on the phone for a few more minutes, albeit a little more quietly.

Raine had a glass of juice. It tasted like strawberries and bananas.

“Family, I assume,” Raine said.

“Yeah,” Max replied with a smile. “My younger sister. Do you have any siblings?”

Raine let out a small sigh. “Yeah, an older brother.”

“Are you guys close?”

Raine washed his cup. “No.”

“Ah. I’m pretty close to my sister. She’s a damn prodigy and she’s nice. Mostly.”

Raine glanced at Arnett on the couch. He was sleeping through their conversation without a problem. Max opened the fridge and poured himself a glass of water.

“She has it pretty rough, honestly,” he sighed. “I worked a bunch of random, crappy jobs to pay the bills until this one came along.”

Raine paused. “What about your parents?”

“My father left when I was four; my mother passed away when I was eight.”

“Damn. I’m sorry.” But what a coincidence.

“It’s alright—I didn’t really like either of them,” Max said so nonchalantly that Raine believed him. “My sister doesn’t even remember them.”

Raine was about to reply when the first alarm rang. Within a second, the five others did as well.

Arnett shot to his feet. “Goddammit, it’s so fucking noisy!”

He hurriedly turned off his own alarm.

Everyone got ready to leave. Raine let Kayden and Arnett know that they had to head to the archery range.

“Yes! Archery!” Arnett said, suddenly moving with vigor.

“Cool,” Kayden said. He cringed as he put on his jacket. “God, everything hurts.”

The eight of them left the apartment and headed down. Five of them went to the running track, two to the archery range, and one, Raine, to a nearby building that was fat and short and named the Costas Hall. It wasn’t actually a hall despite the name.

Raine entered through the double doors at the front. Nine pairs of eyes landed on him.