They left the police station to find a vehicle waiting for them outside.
Hermes stared at it.
Cyber truck looking ahh, he thought. Not a car — a PTV. Personal Transport Vehicle. He had read about them. The terminology still felt wrong in his mouth in the specific way that all terminology felt wrong when you had grown up calling something else entirely by a different name for your entire life. Car rolled off the tongue. PTV did not. He would call it a car privately and PTV out loud and hope nobody noticed the half second delay.
They got in and left for the academy.
He watched the city move past the window and tried to think practically and found, somewhat to his annoyance, that he couldn't quite manage it yet.
How did I even end up here?
The question had been sitting at the back of his mind since the first moment he had arrived here and he still had no answer for it. Did he overdose? Heart attack? His trip sitter was going to be absolutely beside himself. He hoped the poor man hadn't gotten into trouble over it.
Two months. He had been living on his own for two months before the trial — part time earnings and a maintenance loan stretched thin across a tiny rented room, running from a family he had stopped thinking of as his somewhere around year seven of boarding school. He was not doing well by any objective measure. But he had been doing it himself and that had counted for something.
It wasn't as if anyone would miss me, he thought, with the particular flatness of someone who had made peace with a thing by refusing to look at it directly. Maybe my siblings. A little. For a while.
But he hadn't been close to them. How could he have been? He had been sent away at six — the moment he started speaking, as it turned out, which in retrospect said everything that needed to be said about his parents' priorities — and hadn't come back until he was nearly sixteen. Nine years of someone else's institution, someone else's rules, someone else's idea of what a child should be. Nine years that had taken everything soft and open in him and either hardened it or removed it entirely. His childhood. His innocence. Gone before he'd had the chance to know what either of them was worth.
Teachers who hit. Students who hit harder.
For the first five years of his life he had not spoken. Not a selective silence — just the silence of a child who had never properly been taught that words were for him too. His mother had told him later, with the breezy detachment of someone recounting a mildly interesting anecdote, that she hadn't known what to do with him. That his armpits had been rotting. That he had cried so much he bled from his belly button. She had put on some cartoons and gone about her life.
His parents had assumed he was dumb. Not the stupid kind — the non verbal one.
They were wrong. He was dumb. Just the stupid kind.
The moment he started speaking they sent him to boarding school. Perhaps they had been hoping for the non verbal kind after all.
He had never forgiven them for it.
Whatever, he thought, with practiced efficiency. Enough. What do I do now?
The PTV hummed along in silence.
At some point Master Jet broke it.
"Since we both come from the outskirts, I'll give you three pieces of advice," she said, without preamble. "Whether you listen to me or not is your business."
Hermes knew exactly what she was going to say. He listened anyway.
"First: once you're registered at the Academy they'll offer you psychological counselling again. They'll also offer a valuable reward for sharing your experiences in the Nightmare and the details of your Appraisal. Soul shards. Possibly several of them."
Hermes filed that away. If Jet couldn't get him a memory he might need those soul shards to craft one himself.
"Are you trying to convince me to see a psychiatrist again?" Sunny asked.
Jet shook her head.
"No. I'm telling you to refuse."
"Why?" A surprised tone.
A pause before she answered.
"You're too green to understand, but out there in the Dream Realm, Nightmare Creatures are not the only danger. Once you grow powerful enough, humans will become an equal threat. The less they know about your Aspect, the better." She paused. "The easiest way to defeat a powerful Awakened is to exploit their Flaw. That's why young fools at the Academy are encouraged in various ways to share the details of their Aspects. I'm not saying the government will leak your information — but once two people know a secret it's no longer a secret. And there are a lot of people working for the government."
These governments are always the same, Hermes thought, with the resigned familiarity of someone who had read enough history to find it deeply unsurprising. I wonder if the elites here eat babies. Probably not. Hopefully not.
"Thank you, Master Jet," Sunny said.
She nodded.
"Second: there will be a lot of courses to choose from. Combat training, Nightmare Creature categories and vulnerabilities, basics of various types of sorcery, artifact study and so on."
Hermes perked up considerably at sorcery.
"Disregard all of that," Jet said. "The only course you have time to attend is Wilderness Survival."
Unfortunately, Master Jet, Hermes thought pleasantly, I am inclined to decline.
"What?" Sunny asked.
Jet glanced at him.
"It's different for city kids — they learn useful things in school, from tutors. We don't have that advantage. What was the biggest threat to your life during the Nightmare?"
Sunny thought about it.
"The cold."
Cold? Hermes thought. He can summon a fireball. Cold is not a problem. Hot? He can summon water to drink and cool himself down. Though admittedly that logic fell apart somewhat at extremes — if it was cold or hot enough to kill someone instantly, a fireball and a water ball were not going to save anyone. In the middle of the sun for instance. He hoped very much that he would never have to test that particular theory.
"Smart," Jet said. "You only know how to survive in the city. But the Dream Realm is mostly wilderness. Do you know how to make a fire? Procure food? Find safe shelter? Fighting monsters is important — but it's useless if you die of hunger or exposure first. Trust me. I've learned it the hard way."
Hermes thought about this genuinely for a moment.
Who doesn't know how to start a fire? Even if somehow they didn't — he was fairly certain they had smartphones here, or communicators. It took one search. Sure Sunny was a homeless bum but he would get one at the academy. As for procuring food — what exactly was there to procure in the Dream Realm? Everything edible was probably also trying to eat you.
There were no fruit trees, no vegetables, no foraging opportunities that weren't also an ambush. Even mushrooms would be monsters in the Dream Realm and those tough bastards grew everywhere normally.
Well, he concluded. Whatever. She means well.
He did not say any of this out loud.
Master Jet brought the PTV to a stop.
They got out.
Hermes looked up.
Colossal red metal gate rose in front of them, vast and silent, the kind of structure that was designed to make you feel small and had clearly been succeeding at it for some time.
The Awakened Academy.
Well, he thought. Here we go.