Survival

The damp chill of the morning air usually burned off by the time Leo crossed the quad, but today the fog clung stubborn and low to the gravel pathways of the north campus.

"Haah…"

He took the stairs two at a time, ducking beneath the heavy stone archway of the old aeronautics wing. 

The brass nameplate bolted beside Room 402 had been scrubbed clean so many times over the last forty years that the lettering had gone shallow. 

[Advanced Applied Astrodynamics & Orbital Logistics — Specialized Practical Track.]

It sounded like a government grant project because, at its core, it was.

There were six students, one faculty lead, and an experimental syllabus drafted to test manual navigation vectors and dynamic orbital load management without relying entirely on automated stabilization suites. 

In plain English… How to keep an iron bucket flying when the computer chips melted and the horizon spun into a blender.

Leo had gotten his slot because his manual simulation scores were absurd. 

In one of his friend's words, he didn't calculate drift… He felt it in the small of his back and corrected thruster burns on pure animal instinct.

Every step toward Room 402 grated on his nerves for one single infuriating reason, Elena Sterling.

If contempt were a physical weight, the hallway would've collapsed under it weeks ago. 

He despised everything about her, from her suffocating blue-blooded arrogance to that icy upturned chin that looked at everyone else like dirt beneath her designer boots. 

She'd made it her personal mission from day one to tear him down, treating his background like a disease and dismissing his raw flight talent as sheer vulgar luck. 

Forget typical classroom friction, the two of them were pure mutual poison. 

Having to breathe the same recycled air as her for two hours every morning felt like chewing on dry glass, and just the thought of her smug manicured face waiting on the other side of that door made Leo's jaw ache from how hard his teeth were clamped together.

The worst part? She was hot…

Annoyingly hot with long legs, honey-blonde hair, and a face that would've been gorgeous if it ever stopped sneering for five seconds straight. 

More than once Leo had caught himself staring at the back of her neck during lectures, right up until she opened her mouth and called him a stray.

'Cobras are pretty too,' he reminded himself. 'Doesn't mean you pet one.'

Leo stopped with his hand on the brass door lever, rolled his shoulders, and blew out a long breath. 

"Just ninety minutes," he muttered to himself. "Don't rise to the bait… Let her talk…"

He pressed down and shoved the heavy oak door open.

The classroom was quiet, insulated from the distant roar of city traffic by two feet of solid masonry. 

Sunlight cut through the tall lancet windows, illuminating floating specks of chalk dust above the stepped simulation consoles.

Standing behind the center lectern, sorting through a sheaf of telemetry printouts, was Ms. Aoi Tachibana.

She was thirty years old, unmarried, and carried herself with an easy understated elegance that made the university's tenured professors look like rumpled librarians. 

Born in Kyoto, she'd spent six years running orbital trajectory modeling for civilian satellites before taking this visiting fellowship overseas. 

Today she wore a high-collared cream blouse with the cuffs turned up twice, tucked into a charcoal skirt, with her long raven hair gathered loosely at the nape of her neck by a tortoiseshell hairpin. 

A pair of wire-rimmed glasses rested on the bridge of her nose and Leo's heart did that familiar treacherous hitch against his ribs.

'Ah… I'm a fool.'

He'd spent the better part of two terms fighting the crush. 

It was juvenile, he knew that since she was his instructor but late at night, when the simulators were cooling down and the smell of roasted green tea drifted from her desk while rain drummed against the glass, his brain had wandered down dangerous paths. 

He'd imagined what it would be like to walk with her beneath the dripping eaves of an old townhouse in Gion, carrying the groceries, splitting a warm carton of steamed buns, laughing about academic politics while the world outside minded its own business.

Knock it off, he chided himself silently, wiping the stray thought out of his skull before he reached the desks. 

'You're twenty-one, she's thirty, and she can fail you with three strokes of a fountain pen.'

Still... a guy could dream.

"Morning, Sensei," Leo said, setting his battered canvas backpack down on the bench in the front row.

Aoi looked up, her dark eyes softening into a faint tired smile. 

She took off her glasses, letting them dangle by a thin chain against her collarbone. 

"Good morning, Leo. You're early… Again…"

"Gotta make sure the simulator rigs don't start smoking before we even spin up the turbines," he said, pulling out a dented aluminum thermos and taking a sip of black coffee. "Besides, quiet mornings are rare around here."

"A sentiment I share," she sighed softly, leaning her hips against the heavy desk. 

Her gaze drifted toward the five empty swivel chairs behind him. "If the rest of your cohort shared your punctuality, we might actually finish the docking sequence without having to run into the lunch hour…"

"Don't hold your breath," Leo snorted. "Elena probably spent twenty minutes perfecting her hair toss in the hall mirror just so she could enter looking like a movie star."

Aoi's lips twitched with suppressed amusement, though she maintained her professional posture. 

"Elena's theoretical scores are among the highest in the department, Leo. Her attitude may be... prickly, but her calculations are impeccable."

"Her attitude isn't prickly, Sensei. It's venomous," Leo corrected dryly. "Prickly is a cactus but Elena is a live electrical wire sitting in a puddle."

"And yet you continue to sit directly across from her."

"Only because it gives me a front-row seat when her descent thrusters overheat in the virtual wind tunnel…"

"You're really childish," Aoi said, though the warm cadence of her voice took the sting out of the words. 

She began straightening her notes, tapping the edges neatly against the dark mahogany. "Still, I appreciate the consistency… An instructor relies on the steady hand in the room."

'The steady hand, huh?'

Leo hid his grin behind the thermos… He was going to be replaying that line all week, and he knew it.

BANG!

Before he could answer, the door swung open with a theatrical clatter, and the room was suddenly flooded with perfume, cold air, and the clack of polished boots.

Leading the charge was Elena Sterling.

She was tall, fair-skinned, and had that cold sharp English boarding-school beauty that looked down on everyone from behind aristocratic cheekbones as well as that flawless honey-blonde hair. 

She tossed a leather designer satchel onto her desk with an audible thump with her nose tipped up as if she'd smelled something unpleasant in the room.

The window light caught her hair as she turned, and for one traitorous second Leo's brain went completely quiet then she sniffed at the room like it stank, and the moment died.

'Cobra,' he reminded himself. '...Cobra.'

Right behind her came Harper Bell.

Harper was Leo's oldest friend, a tomboy who looked like she'd grown up running through mud because she had. 

She had dirty-blonde hair shoved into a lopsided baseball cap, frayed denim jacket over an athletic tank top, and a broad easy grin that instantly split her freckled face when she spotted him. 

She took three long strides, bypassed her desk entirely, and slapped Leo on the back hard enough to rattle his ribs.

SMACK!

"Sup, Captain," Harper barked, slinging one leg over the bench beside him. "You look like you've been sitting here doing math for three days…"

"I was drinking coffee in peace until the barn doors opened," Leo grunted, though he couldn't help smiling.

Following them into the room was Camila Morales, swinging a warm paper bag of pan dulce from the campus bakery with her dark curly hair pinned up in a vibrant yellow bandana. 

Her almond-shaped hazel eyes flicked from Elena to Leo with her bronze skin glowing with natural energy as she offered Harper half a pastry without breaking stride.

Behind Camila walked Jin-Ah Park, clutching a sleek digital tablet against her ribcage. 

She was half-Korean, sharply focused, wearing a neat tailored blazer over a graphic sweater with her dark hair cut into an immaculate geometric bob. 

…Jin-Ah was the only person whose simulation logs came close to Leo's, though her approach was purely algorithmic where his was instinctive.

And trailing at the very rear, keeping her boots light and soundless against the floor, was Chloe Ivanson.

Unlike the others, Chloe looked like she wanted to melt into the wainscoting. 

Petite and pale, with unruly dark-brown bangs falling over wide anxious green eyes, she held an oversized knit cardigan wrapped tightly around her frame, scurrying toward the corner desk like a rabbit trying to avoid a hawk's shadow.

Leo gave her a small nod as she passed. Chloe on the other hand ducked her head with her ears going pink and almost smiled back.

'That's quite some progress…' 

It took two terms but she'd finally stopped flinching at him.

"Ladies," Ms. Tachibana said, her voice dropping a bit into pure authority. 

The casual warmth she'd shown Leo vanished instantly. 

"Seven minutes late... Sit… If another word about the line at the bakery leaves anyone's lips, we will begin the baseline de-orbit drill without automated gyros."

"It wasn't the bakery, Sensei," Elena drawled, sliding into the leather chair right across from Leo, crossing her long legs and resting her chin in one manicured hand. 

Her icy blue eyes locked onto him with immediate deliberate disdain. "Some of us actually take time to dress like human beings instead of rolling out of a mechanic's scrap bin."

Leo didn't even look up from his thermos. 

"Some of us actually know how to align a secondary RCS thruster without stalling the fuel manifold, Elena…"

Elena's eyes narrowed into slits. "That was a software glitch, you insufferable stray."

"Software doesn't make you hit the orbital dock at four hundred kilometers an hour," Leo said smoothly. "That was your right foot."

"Why you—"

"Enough," Aoi commanded, cutting through the room like a cold knife. "Terminals on… Now… Today's exercise will evaluate manual atmospheric skipping, Leo, you hold primary reaction wheels, Harper, you're on the telemetry and Elena, stabilize the retro-burn."

Of course she'd paired them. 

Leo caught Elena's glare across the desk and shot back his smuggest smile as her nostrils flared.

…It was worth it.

Aoi laid her palm flat against the central control lectern.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

The soft chime of synchronized boot sequences rolled across the desks then the world ripped in half.

WHOOSH!

There was no sound, only a horrifying blinding glare that swallowed the windows, the chalkboards, the walls, and the floor. 

This wasn't light… It was an absence of color that seemed to erase reality itself. 

The sensation of weight vanished, and Leo felt his stomach shoot into his throat as if an elevator cable had snapped beneath him, followed by a violent concussive vacuum that tore the breath straight from his chest.

'Sensei! Harper!'

The thought barely formed before the dark swallowed it whole.

…

'... It's freezing.'

The cold wasn't just in the air, it was radiating from the iron beneath his ribs too.

Leo's eyelids fluttered open, stinging against the acrid smell of ozone, burnt wiring, and something that smelled like sulfur. 

A dull crimson siren was stroking rhythmically across corrugated bulkheads, washing everything in pulses of arterial red.

Weeeooo! Weeeooo!

"Ugh... what... the hell..."

He groaned, pressing his hands against the floor to push himself up, expecting the smooth parquet of Room 402.

His bare skin slapped against freezing diamond-plate steel as a sudden draft of recirculated dry-as-dust air hit his back then his thighs and then his groin.

Leo froze as he looked down.

"Holy shit!"

The curse ripped out of his throat… He was buck naked!

He wasn't stripped down to shorts and he wasn't wearing an undershirt either. 

He was as naked as the day he was born, sitting with his legs splayed across cold industrial plating, without so much as a thread of cotton to cover his lap.

"Where are my clothes?!" He scrambled onto his knees, his hands darting down in an instinctive clamp over his front. "Did someone drag me into a meat locker?!"

'Okay… Okay… You were in class… There was a light and now you're naked on a metal floor that smells like a burnt toaster.'

It was totally a normal morning. 

'...Well that's cope, but someone's going to explain this... Someone has to!'

Before his racing pulse could even find a rhythm, a flat mechanical voice rang out, vibrating directly inside the bone of his inner ear.

[Ding!]

[Diagnostic complete: All surviving members of Compartment Null-7 have recovered consciousness.]

[Welcome, designated remnants, to the Interstellar Survival Theater!]

Survival theater?!