“Um. I can understand they might be peeved with you—it’s headlined in the news—but it’s not bad enough to make you resign.”

“They think it is.”

“They’ll wish they hadn’t,” Gaspard said. “Though it may take them a while. So… you’re in disgrace, is that it?”

All the misery broke through, and she felt tears burning in her eyes. She couldn’t speak.

“Thing is, Ky, disgrace doesn’t last forever.” She caught the quick movement of his head as he turned to look at her and looked away, out the window, where a blanket of cloud lay between them and the East Shallows.

“It can,” Ky said.

“Usually doesn’t,” Gaspard said. “Whatever stupid things you do, you can do smart ones later.”

“Somehow I don’t think so,” Ky said. “When I try my hardest, that’s when I do stupid things.”

He looked at her. “It’s not my place…” he began.

“Oh, go on, everyone else will lecture me, too.”

“I’m not going to lecture you.” He looked out the side window, sighed, and engaged the autopilot. “Logged: all boards clear, no traffic reported or scanned. Estimated flight time three hours fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll be home in time for supper,” Ky said. Her throat closed again. It had all happened too fast. She’d awakened as a senior cadet, in the honor squad; she’d eaten breakfast at the head of a table of cadets, in charge of that table, reminding the lowly cads to sit straight on the edge of their chairs and take no sugar in their drinks. She’d eaten that scrap of lunch in the Commandant’s library as a disgraced ex-cadet, and tonight she would eat supper in the family dining room, the family disgrace come home to roost.

“You want to talk about it?” Gaspard asked. He was only ten years or so older than she was, she thought. Younger than the Commandant or her father, older than all but one of her brothers.

“You know.” Her hands moved as if of themselves. “I tried to help, and it blew up in my face.”

“You know this kid well?”

“Mandy? He’s—he was—in my diviso. Last year the cad intake officer asked me to take him under my wing. Third-years get handed a cad to baby-sit. Mandy was mine. He had a rough time, being Miznarii, but he did fairly well.” The Miznarii considered even implants immoral modifications of the basic human, so those of their children seeking higher education were always at a disadvantage. They attended only those institutions where students had to study without implant assistance, but, as with the Academy, the other students had used them before.

“As well as you did?”

“No, but—” Her voice trailed away. Who would expect a Miznarii from Cobalt Hole to do as well as she had? “Better than expected,” she finished.

“So… you give the kid a model he can’t reach, and he asks you to do him a favor, and then he backstabs you. Think he did this just to cross you?”

She hadn’t considered one way or the other. What did Mandy’s intention matter? It was betrayal even if not intended.

“I think… I think he meant to get the Academy in trouble.”

“More than you?”

“Yes.” As she thought about it, more than that, even. “I think he wanted to get the whole system in trouble. The War Department, the Academy, the military, maybe even Slotter Key.”

“Yeah. And you were collateral damage, maybe.”

“Probably.” It hurt, even so. She had thought Mandy appreciated what she’d done for him, all the hours spent tutoring and rehearsing.

“He want to sleep with you?”

Ky felt the wave of heat up her neck. “If he did, it would have been unpro—wrong of me—to have noticed.”

“If? You honestly don’t know?”

She knew, all right. She knew perfectly well why Cad Mandy Rocher had pulled off his overrobe slowly, stretching, before the underclass wrestling matches. She knew he’d wanted her. No word had been spoken. No word need be.

Gaspard nodded as if she’d answered aloud. “So he lusted after you and you repulsed him.”

“I didn’t repulse him!” Ky said. “I just didn’t encourage him.” He could stretch all he wanted and it did nothing for her; she had Hal in her mind’s eye and there was no comparison.

“Dirty little scum,” Gaspard said. Ky glanced at his face; he looked like someone about to be very angry.

“I’m sorry,” Ky said.

“Not your fault,” Gaspard said. “You’re a good girl, Ky; you always have been. Taken advantage of, and thank all the gods you don’t believe in it went no farther. You’re well out of that.”

“I thought you thought I would be a good officer…”

“I did. You would have been. But a waste, in a way.” He grinned at her. “Never mind. Just think of them all, in their stiff scratchy uniforms, while we’re flying down to the sunny isles of delight. Out of that nasty cold—”

“I like the cold,” Ky said. She did not want to think of Hal, who might be storming up the stairs to the Commandant’s office to find out where she was at this very moment…

“That’s not what you’ve said other leaves.”

“No, but—all right. Yo ho for the tropics.” Her laugh sounded hollow, and he shook his head at her.

“I know it seems like the end of the world to you—that’s because you are a good’un and you care. But life goes on, Ky, and you’ll get over this. You don’t want to hear it but it’s true, just like you didn’t want to hear that there were things you couldn’t do with an airplane… but that was also true.”

“All right, all right.” She stared out at the blanket of cloud. Ahead, it frayed into puffs more and more isolated… and as they flew nearer that edge, the blue sea showed below. There to starboard, the distinctive hook shape of Main Gumbo, from this altitude a flat outline of white surf filled in with dark vegetation. She looked sunward… the wakes of ships showed clearly as darker ripples against the even pattern. In the passage betweenMainand Little Gumbo, a tanker surrounded by its attendants. Crawdad, beyond Little Gumbo, was a many-legged dark blot.

An hour later, the dark blue lightened as they neared the Necklace Reefs. From cobalt through every shade of turquoise, as the water grew more shallow, until at last the ragged brown tops of the reefs broke through white surf.

Corleigh showed at last: a dark line that thickened, surrounded by shallower water that looked, from this height, like bands of blue and turquoise, each shade defining a depth. They flew over the main harbor, with its guardian headlands rising sharply from the water; surf broke white on the rocks. Ky counted two cargo ships, the interisland ferry, and a thick cluster of small craft before they were past the harbor and over the warehouses of the harbor district. Beyond those, the neat little town, with its central park, a green square with the spire of the War Memorial glinting in the sun. Corleigh’s small commercial airfield had a scatter of small craft parked in a row; Ky knew that the daily Island Air service would be two hours behind them.

Inland,HarborValleysloped gently toward the central ridge; Gaspard banked left and Kylara looked down on the vast tik plantations between the coastal cliffs and the higher ridge with its mixed scrub. Not a monoculture: these were old plantations, interplanted with secondary and tertiary crops in a careful balance to maximize both production and resilience.

On the far side of the ridge, she knew, were the newer plantings. She had imagined bringing Hal to meet her family, on graduation leave; he was a mainlander and had never seen the far islands. She would have been explaining it to him, the order of the plantings, the yields of the different ages… She pushed that thought back.

Ahead, the island narrowed and the central ridge sloped abruptly down to end in a rumple of lower hills; she could see the outer reef’s ruffle of surf beyond them. Taller trees, the sheltering groves of the Vatta household, cloaked the landward side of the hills. Gaspard called the Vatta home field as he eased their plane down, neatly countering the predictable gusts that swept between the twin hills. Ky felt her throat close. She had been able to let her mind drift, while in the air, but soon she would have to face her family.