“Oh my god, we’re really going to get fucking 120,000 dollars a year!” Arnett screamed.

“Wow,” Reo said, watching as the competitors passed the finished line. “Just...wow.”

Grant was first, Max was second, and Kayden was sixth.

Then came Cecily and her teammate, followed by Livia and Julia. Then an exhausted Edgar.

In about ten minutes, after all 30 cyclists passed the finish line and the race was over, their teammates approached.

“Give me a high-five, dude,” Vick said, raising a hand to Max, who was still on his bike.

“I would, but I can’t move,” Max said. “Can someone help me get off my bike?”

Lukas and Grant helped him.

“I don’t know how you still have the energy to stand, let alone help Max,” Reo said to Grant.

“Well, I’m tired, not dead tired,” Grant said.

“Your stamina is unbelievable.”

Grant grinned.

“But damn, I feel bad for Stanbury and his guys,” Kayden said, glancing at them. “Two are going to have to run again.”

“The hidden cost to those two-person rooms, I guess,” Raine said. “Grant, aren’t you glad you didn’t beat them on the first day?”

“Oh, yeah. They were kind of nuts,” Grant said. “I just wanted to get my legs moving after the flights, but they were cycling like it was a race for their lives.”

Steele announced the top three teams soon. Raine’s was first, Stanbury’s was second, and Cecily’s was third.

While Raine and his teammates spoke with each other, Stanbury approached. He greeted them and extended a hand to Grant.

“Congratulations on your team’s win,” Stanbury said.

Grant shook his hand. “Your team was damn tough competition,” he said.

Stanbury laughed. “Thanks. Hopefully we get another chance to race again sometime. I’d honestly love to have a rematch with you and him.” He gestured to Max.

“Sure, maybe sometime after training is over. By the way, how are you guys feeling about the run?” Grant asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“It’s going to be brutal.” Stanbury smiled. “But we’ll do alright. Our fourth man, Gael, is a great runner. I expect us to take second place after you guys.”

He spoke with Grant and Max for a short while before Steele told them all to head for the running track.

. . . .

“Well, it’s pretty much decided,” Ava said, leaning back in the couch and staring at the screen in front of them. “Pow. Williams’ team wins.”

Song Hyun-woo nodded. “Grant Johnson belongs in the top tier anyway. His stamina is out of this world.”

“He knows a good amount of physiology too. I’m sure Yasha would love to train him if he does decently in the individual competition.”

“Three. Two. One,” Steele said on the screen. The running competition was starting. It was a one-mile race. “Go.”

Song Hyun-woo watched closely. Come on, Yang. Smash Caraway.

Two men shot ahead of the other 28 runners: Grant Johnson and Kayden Caldwell.

“Fuck, they just don’t get tired,” Ava said. “Freaks. They’re like Kristina.”

Then they were followed by Gael Murphy from Stanbury’s team. After him were Erwin, Julia, and Cecily. Good. Just like this. Keep her team out of the top three.

Then after a minute, Erwin grew tired and slowed down. Cecily sped up and passed him. Damn.

Julia kept up her pace, but Cecily obviously had more energy. After another two minutes, Cecily passed her. Song Hyun-woo sighed. She conserved her energy in the cycle.

Soon, Grant passed the finish line, followed by Stanbury’s teammate, then Kayden. Then Cecily.

“We can’t randomize her team in the individual competition,” Song Hyun-woo said. He went to his laptop. “We should put Caraway with Johnson, Yang, and Wade.”

It wouldn’t be hard to convince the other recruiters to agree, since Cecily was already in the top tier and, more importantly, he hadn’t been the one to recruit her.

“Huh, not Caldwell?” Ava asked.

“There’s a small chance Caldwell will start hitting on them and be a distraction, since he won’t have someone like Williams to keep him in check.”

“Oh. Bleh.”

Song Hyun-woo wrote a short email with his suggestion for Caraway’s team, sent it, and closed his laptop. His gaze returned to the screen. The throwing competition was going to start in about ten minutes. Then there would be Ephrian.

. . . .

Lukas was a man with scary strength. That much was obvious with just one look at him. He was a big guy. But even scarier was his control of that strength.

The baseball flew 40 feet and hit the human-shaped target on the head.

“Hmm,” Lukas said. He walked about five feet to his left. He was going to aim for the 50-foot target. He asked June for another ball.

Then he threw it. It hit the target on the head.

Wow, Raine thought. And I thought I had good hand-eye coordination.

Lukas had three more baseballs to throw. Every one of them hit the target on the head or the neck.

It was his performance alone that took Raine’s team to second place. Kayden and Arnett did well, but they couldn’t compare to him. Stanbury’s team took first place. Even though each competitor did worse than Lukas individually, they performed well enough for their average score to be higher. Cecily’s took third.

It was the strangest contest among the ten. Everyone had to face the target the whole time and wasn’t allowed to lift their leg like a pitcher for momentum. At most, they could take a step forward.

This was the one contest that they had no practice for at all. Raine had no idea what the purpose of it was, and neither did any of his teammates. But they were second, and they were now sure to get the top spot, so they didn’t dwell on it.

They high-fived each other and cheered.

“We did it,” Lukas said with a grin.

“Damn right. The 3,000 is ours,” Arnett said.

“Yeah,” Max said. He was in a daze. “Yeah it is.”

“It makes me feels just as good as I did when I got my signing bonus,” Grant said. “Hopkins is a beautiful company.”

“Money, money, money,” Vick said. “I don’t even know what I’ll do with 120 grand.”

“I think I’ll save up and buy a house,” Reo said.

“I'll save too. I’ve been dreaming about a Bentley for years,” Arnett said.

“Woah, now you’re aiming high,” Vick said. “But why does anyone need more than a Ford?”

“A Bentley is moving art,” Raine said. “It’s beautiful.”

“Raine, your inner Wall Streeter is showing,” Kayden joked.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

“Shit, did I just say that? I meant to say that all I need is a ten-year-old Honda.”

. . . .

There were five minutes before the Ephrian test.

Cecily leaned on the sink, staring at herself in the mirror. Her jaw was clenched, and her eyes were filled with frustration. Fuck. This one. This one for sure. I can’t lose. I won’t.

She turned on the tap and splashed cold water onto her face. Then she dried her face with a paper towel and left the bathroom.

Raine is decent, but I learn fast. The fucking top spot is mine. She strode to where her team stood.

Even a stranger could tell that most of her teammates didn’t like each other. The only conversation was between two or three of them at a time, and it was brief. Cecily didn’t care. She just needed them to be competent enough to help her win.

“Okay, Team 4-1, please head into that room,” June said, gesturing toward a door. “4-2, head over there. And 4-3, that door.”

Cecily and her team headed for a nearby door. She shot a glance at Raine’s team as she went in. They were chatting with smiles on their faces. Raine looked relaxed and even said something that made his teammates laugh as they walked through a door.

So fucking easygoing. That attitude is why you’ll lose.

She and her teammates entered their room. Hugh was inside with a small pile of paper in his hands.

“You have about a minute before we start,” Hugh said, looking at his watch. “The first 40 minutes of the test will be written. The last 20 will be verbal.”

Cecily and her teammates took their seats at one long table with pencils and erasers on it. Hugh put the sheets of paper on the table. Cecily turned off her phone and put it on the table behind her, as did her teammates.

Then Hugh counted down to the start of the test. “Three. Two. One.”

Cecily gritted her teeth. I’m number one. Number one. Let’s fucking do this.

“Start.”

Cecily pushed aside the answer sheet at the top. She looked at the next page for half a second and pushed it away as well. She did the same for the page after that. And the one after that. And again. Then she stopped. Her teammates whispered to each other and, after a brief argument, they decided who got which paper.

Cecily ignored them and focused wholly on her own questions. She answered the first ten questions in five minutes and moved on to the next page’s questions. They were harder. One of them made her dig through her memories and search for a word she knew she’d learned but couldn’t recall immediately. Shit. Come on. What is this?

She remembered it in a minute and then blitzed through the next twenty questions. Four pages down, six to go.

She was forced to slow down and think through several questions afterward. But she had plenty of time to work through them. The number of questions per page was falling, since the questions themselves were longer.

“Shit,” one of her teammates cursed quietly. “What the fuck is this word?”

Cecily ignored her and kept working. She quickly went through three more pages.

“You have 20 minutes left,” Hugh said.

Loads of time. Cecily took a deep breath and went on to the next page.

The first question asked her to translate two basic sentences. She did that easily. But the next question was harder. She had to translate a simple sentence from English to Ephrian.

Shit. She got halfway through the sentence before getting stuck. She couldn’t remember the difference between two letters that both seemed to fit. Her finger tapped the back of her pencil impatiently. She spent five minutes thinking about it before skipping the question in frustration.

“Ten minutes.”

Cecily’s heart leapt. Shit, shit, shit.

She answered three questions in quick succession. She wasn’t certain about every answer, but she had to get through it all. She moved on to the last sheet of paper.

The only thing on it was a free response prompt: ‘Write three grammatically correct sentences in Ephrian stating three activities you have done today.’

Son of a bitch. She started writing about running, swimming, and archery.

. . . .

“Hey, it’s free response, guys,” Raine said. He read the prompt aloud.

“Dude, it said activities,” Vick said. “That’s basically anything. So write that you ate a tiny breakfast, celebrated your future 120,000 annual pay, and made a joke about Wall Street bankers being greedy.”

“That’s asking for a little too much,” Reo said.

“Nah, I can do it,” Raine said. He started writing.

June smiled wryly. What is this? she wondered. This test was supposed to be stressful. It was supposed to show the ability to think clearly and collaborate even with a challenge that required them rack their brains for solutions. But this team is just...They’re joking around.

And they were done answering everything else, and they still had fifteen minutes left.

“Done,” Raine said.

“That was fast,” Reo said. “Can I take a look?”

“Sure.”

“Interesting. What does this word mean?”

“Oh, that means ‘tiny.’”

Then others in his team asked to see it. They started casually passing around the paper.

My god. Until now, June had never felt ashamed of her own performance when she’d been a recruit. And her team had been second in Ephrian.

Then when they were done, Raine had nothing to do, so he started checking his previous answers.

June’s phone started buzzing. Her eyes widened in surprise. Oh, it’s already over.

“Okay, pencils down, please,” she said. They didn’t even have any in their hands. “The verbal part of the test starts now.”

She started with some basic conversational questions like “How are you doing?” and slowly progressed to harder ones like “How do you feel about your progress so far?”

Raine answered with such ease that she almost felt like she was speaking to someone in the New World—not a native, but maybe an Earthling who’d been there for a year.

The twenty minutes were up before she knew it. Perfect verbal score. What the hell?

. . . .

It would take a while for them to get their results. It was 5:00 PM, and they were supposed to return to the Costas Hall by 5:45.

While every other team anxiously awaited their results, Raine’s was celebrating with potato chips, ice cream, and soda at their apartment. Arnett had suggested that they get beer, but Reo and Raine had shot down that suggestion immediately.

“I thought I’d used up all my luck when I got my signing bonus,” Grant said. He sat on a beanbag with a cup of soda in one hand. He was finally exhausted, proving that he was in fact a human being like the rest of them. “I lucked out getting assigned to this team. We’re uniquely awesome, as we just showed today.”

“The Ivy team doesn’t have shit on us,” Arnett said.

“I’m still in amazement that we’ve done so well,” Lukas said. “And I’m eager to get that 120,000.”

“People, I don’t know what to put my 3,000 in,” Vick said. “Should we throw a huge party or something?”

“A good party doesn’t need more than a few hundred bucks, if you do it right,” Raine said.

“Throw it in your bank account and forget about it,” Reo said. “Or better yet, invest it.”

“Agreed,” Grant said. “I would be putting everything in bonds if I weren’t in debt.”

“What’s a bond?” Max asked.

He doesn’t know? Raine blinked. Then he explained to Max what a bond was.

“Oh. So it’s an IOU.”

“Yeah, basically. Bonds issued by different organizations or governments have different levels of safety, of course.”

“And credit rating companies give those organizations and government meaningless ratings,” Arnett said. “Everybody, triple-A!”

“Everybody, CDOs! Housing is gonna go up and up forever, baby!” Raine said. “Wait, what do you mean I have to make 3,000 in monthly mortgage payments? And that’s just interest?”

“Breaking news,” Vick said, lowering his voice and pretending his potato chip was a microphone, “We’ve time traveled back to 2008, and we’re fucked.”

“Rest in peace, net worth,” Reo said.

“A good man, Net Worth,” Max eulogized. “He will be remembered for his fleeting peaks and persistent troughs.”

“But really, the crash sucked,” Vick said. “My family said goodbye to the middle class.”

“Same,” Grant sighed. “My dad lost over half his life savings.”

“Yup. And the only benefit I got out of being poor was great financial aid in college,” Lukas said. “And that really didn’t make up for the rest.”

The eight of them shared depressing stories about the crash and its demolition of their families’ wealth. They learned that Kayden was the only one among them in the middle class. The rest were poor.

“Does Hopkins do this intentionally, or is it self-selection?” Raine wondered aloud.

“The vast majority of the people I’ve met here are working class,” Kayden said. “The rest are middle class. I haven’t met a single rich person. I don’t think it’s just self-selection. Even if the work is going to be dangerous, there should be a lot more people from the lower-middle class at least.”

“Yeah, and you would think there are at least a few rich kids bored enough to take a strange job like this,” Vick said. Then he shrugged. “But whatever. We’re going to be rich soon too.”

“Guys, I have some advice for when you have money: don’t go full-on nouveau riche and buy five luxury watches and ten pairs of designer sneakers you’ll never use,” Arnett said.

“Says the guy who wants a Bentley,” Vick said with a grin.

“That’s different.”

They kept talking for another 20 minutes. Then they headed back to the Costas Hall to hear their results.

Most of Raine’s teammates weren’t too interested in hearing them. Some brought stuff to eat. While they waited for Steele to announce their results, Vick drank soda, while Kayden ate a pack of potato chips as quietly as he could.

Meanwhile, Cecily stood with her fists clenched. She bit her lip as she stared at Steele, who was speaking with June.

Julia and Livia looked stressed but not nearly as much as Cecily.

Stanbury’s team seemed to care even less about the results than Raine’s, probably because they were confident they’d done poorly. They were one of the last teams to reach the Costas Hall, and they were looking at their phones with bored expressions.

Edgar’s team was nervous, but not Edgar himself. He yawned.

Then June clapped to get everyone’s attention. “Hello, hello,” she said. “We’ll now announce the top scorers of the Ephrian test, as well as the winners of the team competition overall.”

Kayden threw a chip into his mouth and chewed slowly. A quiet but certainly audible crunch, crunch filled the space between June’s words.

“The first place winner is Team 5-1,” Steele said.

“Fuck!” Cecily shouted. She threw her phone down, and it hit the ground with such a loud clack that made Raine pretty sure she broke it. “God-fucking-dammit! How the fuck!”

Kayden threw another potato chip into his mouth and watched her rage. He chewed normally this time. His crunch, crunch was hidden under the sound of her shouting.

“Are you done?” Steele asked Cecily. “Second place is your team. Third place is Team 5-5. The order of the top three is the same for the overall competition.”

“Yaay,” June said, smiling awkwardly as she glanced at Cecily. “Congratulations.”

Meanwhile, Julia’s team cheered. They high-fived each other with grins on their faces.

“The individual competition begins at 6:00 PM,” Steele said. “In 20 minutes, we’ll take the bus to Mount Rialis from the Gilman Tower. You should each receive an email listing your temporary teammates anytime now. It also includes information about the course.”

When Steele was done talking, Cecily stormed out of the Costas Hall immediately.

Raine and his teammates trailed out. They talked about the results, but none of them were that excited about being first, since they knew it was coming.

“Guys, why didn’t Stanbury’s team get in the top three overall?” Max asked.

“They were last in math and physics,” Reo said. He glanced at Arnett. “I remember because Arnett made a joke about them being muscleheads. They did decently on the physiology test.”

“Hey, it was just a joke,” Arnett said.

Raine’s phone buzzed then. He pulled it out of his pocket and saw an email from June. Here’s hoping I don’t get paired with Caraway. Stanbury or Livia would be nice if I don’t get anyone from my team.

He opened the email.

He got his wish. Both, actually.

But the list of names he saw made him sigh.