“You got everything?” Sebastian asked Fletcher as they stood at the airport. It was almost exactly as things had been the day he left for Bren’it’p.

  “Everything being myself and my new Mixed ID? Yeah. I’m not supposed to bring anything,” Fletcher reminded his father. It’d been two days since his swearing in, two blissful days of reading before this dreaded moment came.

  “You have both IDs, right?”

  “Yes, Dad. I have the ‘proper’ one and my temp one.” Fletcher held up both cards. They were identical in everything except the last name. His true one was only for emergencies, while the one which labeled him ‘Fletcher Dixon’ would allow him to have a normal training experience without being associated as the esteemed General Anders’ son. He liked that he got to use his dad’s real last name for a few months, especially since his mother seemed a little miffed he went with Dixon instead of hers, Vincent.

  Fletcher was about to experience air travel for the first time in his life—in his waking life at least—and truthfully, he was a tad nervous.

  “Flying is simple. You literally just have to sit there,” his father assured him, sensing his concerns.

  “I know. You already told me that.” Fletcher glanced at the wheeled stairway which sat up against the plane he was supposed to be boarding at the moment.

  Even knowing this moment was going to come and doing what he could to prepare for it, Fletcher didn’t want to leave. It was a mixture of not wanting to say goodbye to his dad again and wanting to avoid becoming a soldier. He knew that he technically chose this, but it was going to happen sooner or later. There was no avoiding it.

  Sebastian smiled and pulled him into one last hug. “You’ve always been too much of a worrier. It’ll be fine, Fletcher. It’s only for ten weeks, and then you’ll be right back here with us again. And believe me, you’re not going to have time to worry about anything once you get there. The drill sergeant will make sure of it. Write as often as you can.”

  Cell phones were another luxury the Mixed couldn’t afford to furnish, especially given the security risk of such things, so the main form of communication over distance was letters, even outside of training.

  Fletcher sighed and released the hold. Ten weeks, just over two months. He could survive anything for two months. He glanced at Nora who stood only a few feet behind them with Addy and Jeric, the latter of which looked like he would rather be anywhere but here.

  Addy probably made him come. She can’t seem to accept that we aren’t friends anymore, Fletcher thought to himself as he walked to the trio. Nora gave him a half hug with a stinging slap on the back.

  “Enjoy training, Fletch. I’m excited to hear about how miserable it makes you,” his sister said with a glowing grin.

  “Thanks. That really comforts me,” he replied dryly. He hugged Addy and shook Jeric’s hand. “I’ll see you guys in a couple of months.”

  “Bye, Fletcher. Good luck,” Addy said as he walked back towards the stairs.

  He forced himself to take the steps slowly instead of sprinting up, careful not to look back at his family—minus his mother who’d said goodbye that morning in a brief visit. Not that he minded that. Things were always better when she wasn’t around.

  One of the flight attendants—some lowly soldier who looked fully Human—held out a scanner and looked at him expectantly. Fletcher grabbed his IDs out and hesitated for a moment before handing him the temporary one. The attendant scanned it and motioned him to enter all the way into the plane.

  It was divided into two columns of three seats all facing the front. The aisle was plenty wide enough for him, but would have been a tight fit for anyone mixed with something like a [Golem]. Nearly every seat was taken, the majority of the passengers being military personnel with some families with kids mixed in. There were a few dressed similarly to him in the recruit uniforms of white t-shirts and tan pants, and Fletcher slid into the empty aisle seat next to one of them.

  “Nice. Another lowly recruit,” the woman said. She had dark brown hair pulled into a ponytail and light brown skin, but a certain shine to her skin made Fletcher guess that there was some amount of Unhuman in there, even if he didn’t know what kind. She was small, probably no more than 5 feet tall with a rather thin frame. “I’m Tara Knox.”

  “Fletcher… Dixon,” he said, shaking her hand.

  “Which unit are you training in?” she asked.

  “Unit 152.” Fletcher dug around in his seat to find the two halves of his seatbelt and buckled it.

  “Another Hotshot? Even better.” Tara leaned back with a smile. “Who do you know?”

  “Hm?”

  “Like who was your in?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Fletcher attempted to seem casual. The last thing he wanted to do was expose the truth about his heritage before he even got to training.

  “Come on. No one gets into the Hotshots program without someone vouching for them. In my case, my gram used an old connection with one of her former trainees who became a Hotshot.”

  “Ah. I see.” He paused for a moment. “Uh, my dad knows someone who knows someone in the program.”

  “You’re from Finnack then?”

  “Yeah,” he lied. “What about you?”

  “Cool. I grew up in Fort Houston on the Gulf. It was a long flight out here, let me tell you. It’s stupid that all Hotshot trainees have to pass through Finnack for assessment, but whatever. We’re through medical and swearing in, so now onto the fun part.”

  He nodded and silently tightened his grip on the armrests as the plane engines started up. Luckily he wasn’t able to sit around worrying about flying because Tara was eager to chat. About everything.

  The plane took off, but Tara didn’t miss a beat in telling a story about riding horses on the beach back at Houston. The flight to Fort Wooddell was eleven hours long since the base was southwest of them, right near the border of where Telra met Africa.

  Tara managed to talk for almost all of it, telling story after story and giving long dissertations about political topics within the Mixed world that Fletcher had no grasp on. She caught on that Fletcher wasn’t in the mood for sharing much about his personal life, so she stopped asking questions early on.

  While he was always happy to make a new friend, by the end of the trip, Fletcher felt that he knew more about this woman than he did anyone else on the planet. It was like he listened to her entire autobiography and then some.

  As the plane landed, the jolt of the landing startled Fletcher, though his companion took no notice. She continued to talk, the conversation now turning to her ranking every one of the Mixed bases and colonies she’d ever been to, including in depth reviews of their food, housing, and entertainment scene.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Fletcher decided to view the past eleven hours of blabbering as a good thing, pretending that it was the infodump of Mixed culture that he would need to survive the next ten weeks of training surrounded by people who would all believe he was like them, an actual Mixed citizen.

  Okay, technically he was now a Mixed citizen, but given that it’d been about two months since that happened, he didn’t feel like he counted as a real one yet.

  Everyone stood up, and those that had luggage opened the overhead bins to retrieve their belongings while everyone shuffled through the aisle, making their way outside.

  His body told him it should be evening, but the sky outside was still plenty light, marking the time to be early afternoon instead. Traveling through time zones was a pain, but he figured that the training would account for the jet lag everyone would have.

  After descending the steep stairs, he stepped to the side and glanced around, trying to discern where to go. There weren’t any clear signs, and all the real soldiers and their families walked away with surety. Tara stood next to him, the same confusion on her face.

  Other recruits came to join them, and they soon had a huddle of about fifteen soon-to-be soldiers standing next to the empty airplane with no clue where to go or what to do.

  The answer to those questions came suddenly in the form of a strong shout.

  “Atten-tion!” a man said, walking into view of the recruits.

  Fletcher did his best to emulate the pose he’d seen other soldiers doing while at Finnack, and a quick glance told him everyone else was doing the same.

  The man—a Mixhuman, though Fletcher couldn’t tell what kind for sure since all he had were pointed ears, something that [Goblins], [Elves], [Ogres] and [Fairies] all had—wore the official gray uniform of the Mixed, but his hat was one Fletcher had never seen in person before, making him to conjecture that this man was a drill sergeant.

  “Single file line!” he commanded with his hands motioning that they should make it horizontal.

  Fletcher didn’t even have to move since he was already at the front of the group, and everyone else moved around him to create the line. Once they were in position so the drill sergeant could see them all, he began pacing the line.

  “I am Drill Sergeant Tomkins. Most of you will never work under me as I train the Hotshots, but my duty for today is to get all of you to processing in one piece. Do you think you can manage that?” He stopped, his steely gaze scanning the whole row.

  A mix of “yes, sir,” “yes, sergeant,” and a couple other forms of the same type sounded, and Tomkins rolled his eyes, clearly unimpressed with the trainees.

  “It will be ‘yes, drill sergeant’, and nothing else. Now move your scrawny, worthless behinds!” Sergeant Tomkins motioned towards one of the buildings which looked like all the others, a dirt brown warehouse.

  All the recruits turned towards where he pointed, and the line walked towards it before turning into a jog at their drill sergeant’s commands. As Fletcher ran alongside the others, the realization settled deep inside that this was going to be far worse than he could have imagined.

  ***

  Two days later, Fletcher stood in formation with the others in the Hotshot training platoon.

  “Dixon!” Drill Sergeant Tomkins called out, half shoving the recruit he’d just taken into his office with him. They were in the underground portion of the facility since it turned out almost every Mixed base or settlement was some type of bunker setup to avoid detection from the Unhumans and Humans.

  Fletcher walked from the cement pad where he and others waited for their chance with a personal interview with their instructor. The guy who just walked out was red in the face, though Fletcher couldn’t tell if it was from embarrassment or anger.

  He entered the office, and Tomkins closed the door behind before going to sit at the desk. Fletcher remained standing and at attention. The past two days had been their processing from additional medical tests to a physical assessment and learning the ropes of what to expect for this training. To his dismay, he’d even been given the required buzzcut.

  “First things first, recruit. I know exactly who you are, and as far as I’m concerned, you have no business being here,” Tomkins began. “Some soft, colony-raised, math teacher is unqualified to even think of being a Hotshot, much less be in training. It is your sole job to prove me wrong, understand?”

  “Yes, drill sergeant,” Fletcher said without much conviction.

  Tomkins stared at him for a moment and then looked down at the file before him. “A [Vampire] huh? What [Skills] do you currently have?”

  “[Dark Vision]—” Fletcher stopped himself before he could say [Read Thoughts] and [Intuition,] barely catching the slip up. All that training from Addy ran through his mind, reminding him which [Skills] he could claim and which ones he absolutely could not.

  “And?”

  “Nothing else, drill sergeant. I haven’t had many chances to train in [Skills].” Fletcher kept his gaze straight ahead instead of looking down at the Mixhuman.

  “I’m not surprised,” Tomkins said. “Do not expect any special treatment just because your parents were war heroes. Every man and woman here is responsible for making a name for themselves, got it?”

  “Yes, drill sergeant.”

  “Dismissed.”

  Fletcher walked right back out of the room and returned to his spot in the formation as Sergeant Tomkins called in the next recruit off the list. It was agonizingly slow waiting for the private interviews to finish when all he was allowed to do was stand there, but Fletcher did his best to not drop dead from boredom. Most of the interviews were as short as his, taking no more than a minute, but a few went on longer, and getting through all forty ended up taking about an hour.

  Once the last recruit returned to the formation, Tomkins addressed the platoon as a whole.

  “As you all know, Hotshots do not allow for failure. Unlike regular basic training, there is no going home crying to your momma if you can’t hack it. Your only option is to try harder. Do you understand?” he said.

  “Yes, drill sergeant,” the platoon cried out in unison.

  “Good. Now let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about a few issues.” Tomkins scanned the group. “What are we fighting for?”

  “Freedom for all, drill sergeant!” the platoon answered, Fletcher included. He supported the cause in the most general sense, even if he didn’t necessarily agree with all the Mixed ways of doing things.

  “Who is our enemy?”

  “Unhumans, drill sergeant!” everyone but Fletcher replied.

  He knew the expected answer, but he’d decided against hatred of an entire people when he was a child, and that wasn’t about to change now. He knew far too many good people among the Unhumans to claim the entirety of their kind as his enemies.

  Tomkins noticed his silence and walked up to stand right next to him.

  “Who. Is. Our. Enemy!”

  “Those who would enslave or kill us, drill sergeant,” Fletcher answered.

  Tomkins got closer to his face. “Do you think you're funny, soldier?”

  “No, drill sergeant. I only answered your question, drill sergeant.”

  The sergeant stepped away and turned to the person next to him, a full Human woman.

  “Ramos, who is our enemy?” Tomkins asked him.

  “Unhumans, drill sergeant!”

  The drill sergeant repeated the question to another five people who all gave the same answer before returning to Fletcher.

  “Dixon, who is our enemy?”

  “Those who would enslave or kill us, drill sergeant.”

  Tomkins smiled. “Well, boys and girls, I was going to let you all take the rest of the day for personal time, but since Private Dixon is so deadset on being wrong, I think a five mile run might be more beneficial, wouldn’t you agree?”

  A chorus of unhappy “yes, drill sergeant” filled the air, and Fletcher could feel the glares from everyone else in the room. Obviously the five-mile run was going to happen regardless of his actions, but now Tomkins got the excuse to lay all the blame on Fletcher and alienate him from his peers.

  The platoon moved out, jogging after the drill sergeant out of the bunker and into the warm afternoon. Tomkins led them away from the barracks and to the desert plains, heading straight towards the small mountain Fort Wooddell was nestled against.

  Anyone who was close enough made sure to shove Fletcher if they got the chance, and with every step, Fletcher cursed his mother and every decision that led to him ending up here. Just as Nora predicated, the next two months were going to be miserable.

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