The weeks bled together fast. Wake up, salute, pledge, choke down rations, repeat. If you squinted, Academy life almost felt normal. Almost.
I slipped into a role without meaning to. Not the star cadet, not the rebel, something in between. The guy who cracked jokes during drills, who "got lucky" in sparring, who somehow had the right answers on every written test but never made a big deal out of it.
Greg helped. He always laughed at my lines a second too loud, like he was on cue. Made the other cadets think I was harmless. Friendlier. Safer. People came to me when they needed help on essays or wanted to cheat off math problems. I let them. It was easier to be useful than suspicious.
Even Elara got… tolerable.
Don't get me wrong, she was still a rulebook with legs. She timed her drills, saluted with spine-cracking precision, and corrected anyone who didn't. But after the flag exercise, she stopped treating me like background noise. Instead, she studied me. Not with admiration, no, she was cataloguing. Calculating. Sometimes I'd crack a joke in class, and I'd swear I saw the tiniest twitch at the corner of her mouth before she buried it.
Greg insisted that meant she liked me. I insisted it meant she needed a sense of humor transplant. We both agreed she was dangerous.
Still, for a while, the Academy became routine. Predictable. Almost easy.
Which should've been my first warning.
---
The Wrong Kind of Attention
It started small. An instructor's eyes lingering a little too long on me during sparring. A proctor frowning at my test scores, then double-checking them like I couldn't possibly be that fast.
One night, I caught two officers whispering as I passed the halls. I didn't hear the words, but I saw the glance, sharp, pointed, landing squarely on me before flicking away.
The kind of look I'd learned to fear.
Then came the simulation drills.
We were dropped into a mock battlefield—a holographic wasteland crawling with drones programmed to mimic "United Earth insurgents." The assignment: secure a point, defend it, survive. Easy in theory. Deadly in practice.
Cadets scrambled, shouted, fired stun rifles. Greg was glued to my side, as always, shaking but determined. Elara was barking orders like a sergeant, snapping at anyone who moved out of formation.
A drone lunged from the shadows. I moved before I could think, sliding behind it, twisting its barrel, firing straight through another. Sparks rained down. The whole maneuver took seconds. Too fast. Too smooth.
The instructors watching from the platform leaned forward. I saw it in their eyes, even through the glass: Not luck. Not training. Something else.
Greg whispered, panicked, "Kaelen… tone it down."
But it was too late.
The buzzer ended the sim. The proctors called us off the field. Every cadet was sweaty, panting, some still shaking. I wasn't. And that made me stand out more than anything.
After dismissal, an officer stopped me in the hall. His uniform was pristine, his eyes colder than steel.
"Cadet 53721," he said, voice calm and sharp enough to cut. "You're showing remarkable… instincts. Better than expected."
My smile came easy. Too easy. "Just lucky, sir."
His gaze didn't waver. "Luck can only take you so far."
He walked away without another word, but the weight of his stare lingered like a shadow I couldn't shake.
Greg caught up, pale as chalk. "They're watching you."
"Let them," I said, forcing a grin. "I'm harmless."
But inside, I knew the truth.
Harmless was the one thing I'd never be.