Chapter 1: Morning

He'd slept terribly, but he'd slept on the floor of Hangar Nine with his head against a box that talked, so he felt he'd earned it.

Nobody had come for him. That was the strange part. The white coat Odysseus had promised had either not existed or had looked in, seen a cadet asleep on the decking with his mouth open, and decided there were worse things to be doing with the night. Hale woke at the academy's idea of dawn, which was a klaxon, and the lights in Hangar Nine stayed exactly as they were.

"Good morning," said Odysseus. "You did not faint."

"I fell asleep."

"The medical distinction is finer than you'd think."

Hale got up in stages, the way a dropped engine is lifted: one corner, then the next, then a pause to see what has fallen off. His back had an opinion. His left boot was still wet. He looked at the lid of the pod, which had closed itself overnight and now looked like nothing at all, an engine crate with a hull number half scraped off, and he had the distinct feeling of a man who has been told a secret and is not yet sure which parts of his life it has ruined.

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Today?" The voice was pleasant and far away, as if it were calling from a room it preferred. "Today you have a duel. Then you will be interviewed. I would eat first. The Office does not feed the people it interviews."

Chapter 2: The roster

The Trials yard in daylight was the colour of wet concrete and smelt of fuel. Forty cadets stood in five uneven blocks because nobody had told them to stand in blocks and Houses do it anyway: Ventry drifting, Strand planted, Lumen catching the light, Nul somewhere, and Tessel at the back, in flightsuits that had been other flightsuits first, where the mending showed least.

A Marshal's aide with a tablet read the roster. She was good at it. She had clearly read a lot of rosters and let none of them matter to her, and the names came out at the same weight, like coins.

"Kestrel, Ventry. Callsign Lift."

"Dessa, Lumen. Callsign Flare."

"Orrin, Nul." A pause. The aide looked up, looked at the gap in the Nul block where a cadet presumably was, and moved on. "Callsign Quiet."

"Hale, Tessel." The aide frowned at her tablet. Something on it was wrong, and she was the kind of person for whom a wrong thing on a tablet is a personal insult. "Callsign... Civilian?"

A noise went through the yard. Not a laugh, exactly. The noise forty people make when one of them has been given the wrong coat.

"That's a classification, not a callsign," said the aide, to the tablet.

"It's fine," said Hale, who had never in his life been asked what he'd like to be called and was not going to start having opinions now. "Civ's fine."

"It is not fine, it's a category." She tapped, and the tablet refused her, and she tapped harder, with the air of someone who would be writing to somebody about this. "Fine. Civ. Report to Arena One."

Behind him, bright and gold and far too pleased, Flare said: "Civ. That's the best one."

"It's a filing error."

"Every good name is."

Chapter 3: Arena One

The duel arenas hang in low orbit over Stralis Seven, a few minutes' climb from the yard in a trainer, and each one is a box of sky five kilometres on a side with the planet filling the floor of it. The sky in the box is the real one, the same wrong sky the whole Imperium flies under, with its colliding stars and its too-bright seam; the academy did not build a sky, it fenced one off. You can't see the walls, but you can feel them: a low hum along the teeth when you fly too close, and then a Marshal's voice, and then if you're stupid about it, a wall. The dampeners are on the inside of that box, a lattice of grey pylons that were never explained to anybody. Mages fly in here and come out ordinary. The cadets think that's the point. It is one of the points.

Hale sat in a trainer that had been flown by eleven thousand people before him and smelt like all of them. His hands knew the stick; his family had rebuilt worse. He ran the power through shields, engines, guns, like a man counting change, and the HUD came up thin and green and honest, and for a moment he was nearly happy.

"Civ, Lift. Arena is live. First to five. Fly clean."

Fly clean. They said it every time. Nobody in the Imperium had thought about what the word meant for about four hundred years.

Lift came off the far mark like she had been fired out of it. Ventry fly as if mass were something that happened to other people, and Kestrel Ventry flew like that with a grudge. She didn't have one yet. She would. For now she had the arena, and the light, and a Tessel in a trainer who'd been late to the roster and had a callsign out of a customs form.

He lost the first exchange because he was watching her instead of flying. He lost the second because he'd learnt from the first and was now flying instead of watching her, and she'd anticipated that, which is the Ventry trick: they think two turns ahead and never tell you which two.

Third pass he got her. Not well. She rolled through his line and his lasers raked her shield and the HUD chimed and the Marshal's voice said "Point, Civ" with the precise flatness of someone who had expected to say the other name. He didn't crow. He was too busy being astonished.

The fourth, fifth and sixth exchanges did not go like that.

What a hull going to zero feels like, nobody tells you properly, because the people who know are ashamed to say it was fine. There's the shield bleeding out, that's bad. There's the alarm. There's a half-second of the cockpit around you that you remember afterwards far too well, every rivet, the smear on the canopy, the thumbprint of some earlier cadet on the throttle quadrant. And then there is nothing, and the sky, and the seat going up and back as if pulled on a wire, and the cockpit falling away beneath you like something you'd dropped.

Then the quiet. Then the voice, right in the ear, dry as a drawer.

"Welcome back, Civ."

He hung in the pod and watched the trainer tumble, in no hurry, towards the floor of the arena, and he said what every pilot says the first time, which is a word that isn't a word.

"I'd call that five-one," said Odysseus. "I did not. I would never. But if I did."