Light felt her fingers itch with the urge to strangle someone. Ten cadets were dead, four were wounded, and all her superiors were doing was taking tea. With a hand over her heart in the typical military salute, Light waited in the center of the room; seated at the desk, Colonel Oblam and Lieutenant Alpes sipped from their cups and made appreciative comments.

Light was much harsher with her cadets for less. Instead, her superiors were acting like housewives, gossiping about the latest news and waiting for their husbands to return from the war.

"What kind of tea leaves did you use, Colonel? It tastes really exotic." Alpes' face wrinkled up a bit on the sides of his mouth when he smiled.

Oblam ran a hand through his long dark mustache. "These are special leaves. They were imported from the Alyandra Islands. The tea tastes almost crunchy because they mix the leaves with puffed rice."

"Oh, that's why it's so special. They always have the best finds in Alyandra. Have you ever been there, Colonel?"

"I've only been once, on my honeymoon with my wife. It's a wonderful place, especially the spa, it'is like a panacea. It regenerated me. I was a new man."

"I suppose you needed it, given what… a piece of work your wife is."

As Alpes and Oblam laughed behind the Colonel's wife's back, Light dropped her arm to her side. She cleared her throat in irritation. They stopped their frivolous and stupid chatter to glance at her.

She almost missed Phoenix. He was an irresponsible imbecile, but at least he didn't have desperate housewife tendencies.

"Oh, Ferun, how rude of me." Oblam lifted the teapot, his moustache quivering on his lips as he spoke. "Would you like some tea?"

Light appealed to the patience she did not possess not to blurt out. "With all due respect, Colonel, I believe there are more important matters to discuss at the moment."

Oblam blinked as if she had just slapped him. He put the teapot back on the desk, then opened a drawer and pulled out some filled out papers. He scattered them in disarray over a drop of tea that had fallen from his cup.

Light's hands clasped together in a tight squeeze. If only she could have flown the Colonel, his damn tea, and those now-stained papers out the window, she would have done so without hesitation.

In the momentary silence, Oblam's canaries chirped and fluttered their wings in the cage. They looked out the window, trying to break free, to fly into the sky. Into a world that would crush them in seconds.

Alpes patted Oblam on the shoulder. "Come on, you know how Lightara is. Don't take it personally, she's a workaholic, you know."

She didn’t flinch, stood still, but gave Alpes an icy look. He took it with a laugh. "Cadets died. We sent them on a suicide mission. So no, I'm not really in the mood for tea."

"No offense, Sergeant," Oblam said, rising to his feet. The bodice of his uniform was tight on him, but it was hard to tell if it was muscles or an overstretched belly yearning for freedom. "You are a very good soldier, one of the best. But you are so young. How old are you?"

Old enough to kick your ass, she thought. "Just turned twenty-one, sir."

Oblam nodded, with the air of someone who had already figured out the problem. He walked to the window and tapped on the canary cage. They settled down, but never took their little eyes off the sun behind the bars. The colonel drew the curtains, and the light became dim, a dull green. "You see, you’re very young. And I understand that you’re very attached to your ideals, it's a credit to you, I mean it."

The wall clock to her left began to chime. She tensed the muscles in her back.

"But with time, you learn to understand that things happen. Is the loss of all those cadets a tragedy? Of course it is. But accidents happen, and we can't always know for sure if it's a simple mission or not. I'm sure the cadets know their lives are always hanging by a thread."

A mistake. Was he going to dismiss the problem like that? Really?

Light pinched the bridge of her nose with an exasperated sigh. "It's not just a mistake, Colonel. We were given false information about the mission."

Oblam returned to his seat. "I understand your anger. You feel guilty for not protecting your subordinates, and now you're looking for someone else to blame."

"What?" Light took a step forward, fists clenched and teeth gritted.

"Stop mourning so much, you did everything you could, and thanks to you, our best recruit survived. You have nothing to blame yourself for."

Alpes clucked his tongue, his hands crossed in his lap. He dared not look up. An ass-kisser, ready to agree with Oblam at any cost.

When she spoke again, Light raised her voice. "Your best recruit is safe, so the other ten dead can go fuck themselves?"

Oblam sighed, tired. He treated her like a little girl. "That's not what I said, don't twist my words. I was just trying to ease your guilt. It's a relief that Mark Terris is okay and that other cadets survived. The mission ended well. I don't think there's anything else to talk about."

Mark Terris, Phoenix's and therefore everybody's darling. But it was no thanks to him that the mission had not ended with the death of all cadets. All the little guy could do was pick on others when he failed at something. Mature behavior like his superiors'.

Light huffed, a hand on her hip. "Are you blaming me for the dead cadets?"

"No. I just said their safety was your responsibility." Oblam brought his cup of tea to his lips. He dampened his moustache. "You should stop putting things in my mouth, Sergeant."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

If there was one thing Light hated, it was phrases used to hide a simple concept. Most of the time, they were meant to disguise attacks. This short conversation would have been enough for her to put Oblam at the top of the list of suspects, but she knew that nothing was that simple. Just because Oblam was an old man corrupted by a shitty system did not necessarily mean he was a traitor. Alpes, with his suck-up tendencies, did not seem entirely innocent either.

"You should really try some tea. To relax yourself." Alpes lifted his cup like a mug.

Light made an irritated sound and left. If her idiot superiors didn’t want to help her, she had to investigate herself.

✦⋆𓆩✧𓆪⋆✦

The halls of the Academy reeked of sweat and disinfectant. A disgusting mixture. Despite being surrounded by it every day for years, Light found it hard to get used to. And maybe part of her didn't want to get used to it.

Cadets came running. They stopped as soon as they saw her in their path, almost colliding. They brought their hands to their hearts, backs straight, heads up.

"Good morning, Sergeant!" they said in unison.

Light dismissed them with a wave of the hand. "No running in the halls."

"Sorry, ma'am," the taller one said, a wisp of hair falling back over his eyes. She had told him a billion times to cut his hair, but he was a hothead.

"Go now."

They walked away, and Light didn’t stop to watch them. She walked out of the hallway and grabbed the railing of the stairs. The blue lights from the terminals below cast tall, thin shadows on the walls. The stairs shook beneath her feet, the low hum of the electromagnetic field a constant soundtrack as she climbed.

The library doors opened as soon as they sensed movement. Light wrinkled her nose at the stench of candles - Mr. Miles needed to stop his strange fixations, Light made a mental note to reprimand him for the umpteenth time. There were few people among the shelves at this hour: a few boys with their noses buried in books, a small group of first-year cadets studying the 3-D maps projected on the tables, and a few girls chatting.

Light put a hand on her hip and sighed. Strange, she had bet Ember was there.

She was about to leave when she noticed the blond head in the middle of the girls’ group. She was holding her head, as if every word they said made it heavier and heavier. With her other hand, she was clutching a piece of paper to her chest. Light almost smiled to herself: Ember's aversion to socializing was a quirk she understood.

The girls were oblivious to her presence. They kept talking to each other - something about the hottest superior award. Light tapped Ember's shoulder with a finger. She saw the other flinch before turning. But when they recognized her, those big brown eyes widened and her lips curled into a smile.

"Sarge?" she whispered, as if she did not want the others to hear.

Light motioned for her to follow. Ember stood up without alerting the others and walked away from the table like a ghost, unseen by anyone. A bizarre phenomenon that Light wouldn’t have believed had she not witnessed it herself. She had never liked being around people, especially noisy ones, but she struggled to remain unnoticed. Ember, on the other hand, juggled others' gazes naturally, as if she always chose to walk in the blind spot of the people around her.

Ember followed her out of the library, limping but not whimpering. She kept clutching the paper to her chest. They stopped in the hallway, where the hum of the electromagnetic field was loudest, hoping it could mask their words from prying ears.

"Has something happened?" Ember asked. She wasn’t wearing her uniform, just a white blouse. She had left the first few buttons undone, and her snow-white skin shone amid the dark colors of the Academy.

Light folded her arms across her chest. "I've been trying to talk to my superiors about the mission."

The reading of Ember's thoughts and emotions wasn’t an easy task. That angelic face rarely showed exaggerated expressions. "Oh. Okay. And?"

"They didn't listen to me and dismissed the matter as a 'mistake that can happen'. We can add Colonel Oblam and Lieutenant Alpes to the list of suspects."

Ember hesitated for a moment. "Alpes? Really?"

"Yes. Why?" Light frowned, wondering if trusting a cadet was the best idea. If Ember had been one of those young girls crushing on one of her superiors, she might have become biased and interfered with the investigation.

She clucked her tongue. No, now that she thought about it, she had been an idiot. She had to handle this herself...

"No, nothing. Just that I thought you were friends, you and him," Ember finally replied.

Light was speechless for a few seconds. "What? Me and that snoop?"

She could have sworn Ember was trying to hold back a smile. "It's just that he calls you by name, and I heard you tell him about the mission, so I thought..."

"He's a distant relative." Light leaned her back against the wall. "On my father's side. That's why he's… like that."

And Light could hardly stand him, any more than she could stand her father. That damned kinship was also one of the reasons why many superiors treated her with condescension, assuming that Light held her position as Sergeant at such a young age out of favoritism.

"And you still suspect him?"

"Like I said, I don't trust anyone right now."

Ember ran a hand through her hair. "To tell you the truth, he gave me a strange feeling earlier too. Although I don't rule out the possibility that I was just pissed off because he forced me to spend the afternoon socializing." She shuddered, as if the mere memory was enough to repel her.

Light raised her eyebrow in amusement. "I noticed you were talking about very interesting subjects," she teased.

"Very interesting for an anthropological study, perhaps. I just felt like jumping off a cliff. Some of them miraculously survived the mission, and now they talk about men as if nothing had happened."

Light shook her head, not at all surprised. But Ember's disgusted tone reminded her of her own, from when she was a teenager, avoiding girl groups with all her might so she didn't have to answer uncomfortable questions. "If it's any consolation, I didn't get much better. Instead of discussing the mission, Oblam and Alpes spent a good twenty minutes talking about tea."

Ember hid a laugh behind her fist. "I don't know which is worse."

It had been a long time since Light had held a conversation longer than a handful of sentences with anyone. She suspected that Ember was a mature girl, but she had not expected it to be so... easy to talk to her. Light wasn’t there to chat, though. She had an important job to do. And maybe Ember really could have turned out to be a great ally.

"I've noticed you're good at going unnoticed."

There was a moment of hesitation. Ember shrugged, unconvinced, or maybe just confused. "I guess," she muttered. She was hiding something more; her tone was low and tentative again. It reminded Light that at the end of the day, she was just a young girl, struggling every day with a world that, for some reason, had always mocked her. Maybe Light was making a mistake, relying on a cadet like her would have been unprofessional. But even her plan wasn’t exactly professional either.

It was a bad idea, she knew it. And yet...

"I need you to infiltrate Colonel Oblam's office."