"Sorry for being a bit harsh back there," the man smiled at me. "I was just trying to get my point across to those people. They don't know it, but they really can cause trouble for us if they start to think they have power over us."

  I was speechless. This guy had gone from perfectly rigid to kind and friendly in a couple of seconds. At this point, I didn't even know how to react. Everything was surprising me, and I was getting used to that real fast.

  "I'm Austin, by the way," he said, extending his hand as we climbed into the self-driving van. "I'll be the one escorting ya'll from this squadraint to the moon, Titan. I got the other already. You'll meet her on the hyper-train."

  THAT'S INTERESTING. I thought. A HYPER-TRAIN MEANT WE WERE GOING TO THE SURFACE TO TAKE OFF INTO SPACE.

  It was also news to me that I had a squadraint, whatever that meant. My books taught me a lot about Dark Matter and how to use it, but nothing about how training at Titan Academy worked.

  "How do squadrons work?" I asked the man next to me in the van.

  "It's pretty simple to understand. On the flight over to Titan, I trust you know what that is?" he asked me, and I nodded my head. "Well, on the flight over, we see who you flirt with, make friends with, your enemies, all that stuff, and right before you get to Titan, we give you guys a chance to see who you would want on your team. Who would you feel comfortable fighting with in battle? Then once we draft you into teams, and you start your training, you become a squadraint."

  I took a second to digest it. The whole idea made sense so far, so I asked another question.

  "Flirt?" It made no sense to me that you would have two lovebirds on the same team.

  "Yes," he said. "Flirt, you heard me right. If you know how hard it is to pair up several hundred people so that each group of three work well together, then you know, you have to work with what you've got, even if they seem moderately compatible, they go together, and even then we have some oddballs left over that have to be crammed into a team regardless of the compatibility. Of course, once you go through Control Training and three people aren't compatible to merge their control anyway, they get split apart regardless."

  What he said made sense up to the point that he started to talk about control. That had made no sense to me. What the heck was control?

  "You'll understand soon," he said, seeing the look on my face. "But we are here now, so let's move on."

  With that, we exited the van onto the train that would take us to the surface. It was a small little thing, more of a pod than a train. It was shaped like an egg with five-ish seats that you could strap yourself in.

  The thing that shocked me, though, was who was strapped into one of the seats. Harper was still in her clothes from school, sitting in the hyper-train, nonchalantly. I almost slapped myself in the face. Now that I saw her, I remembered she had said something about Titan at the principal's office.

  "Hey," she said, waving at me. I waved back, nervous. Even though we had talked before, I still wasn't quite sure what her real personality was. People tended to put up fake facades, as I liked to call them, at school.

  "Are you excited about this?" she said. "I don't know about you, but I've always wanted to go to Titan."

  Boom. A common interest. Who knew that the popular girl at my school was a Titan nerd too. As it was, it seemed like I had a great person to be stuck on this flight with. Nice, talkative, and hopefully reliable.

  "What do you know?" I asked her.

  "I love everything to do with Dark Matter," she said. "But I've never really done any research since it would ruin my popularity, but now that I am leaving Earth, Dark Matter is probably the cool thing, not nerdy..."

  "Back at school, I've always wondered if your preppy girl thing you had going was the real you. Whenever we talked, you seemed chill, but when you were with your friends..." I said aloud and then blushed, wanting to take that back the moment it left my mouth. Harper only looked moderately offended.

  "I just figured that since we sorta know each other, and we'll be stuck together for two weeks, we might as well get to know each other. Just cause I'm popular and pretty doesn't mean I don't have a life outside of school."

  I agreed with her. I had been a bit too hasty in judging her, and that was my fault.

  "Enough of the chit-chat," Austin told us sternly. "I just got the call that the surface is ready for us."

  I quickly got into my seat, strapping myself in. From what I had heard, when you went to the surface, you went fast, and if you weren't strapped in hard enough, you would hit the ceiling of the train and be smashed like a pancake. Not the way I wanted to go out.

  In reality, though, the flight to the surface was fast but not impossible to endure. The whole sensation felt queer because I could feel I was moving up as I was pressed back into my seat, but I couldn't actually see where I was going since there were no windows in the 'train'. Kind of like going on one of those roller coasters in the dark, if you know what I mean.

  We probably went on like that for about ten or so minutes when the vehicle finally stopped.

  "Here we are," Austin told us as he got out of his seat and unstrapped us.

  We exited the pod into an empty room that looked like the reception at a fancy spa or something. Me and Harper looked at each other. This whole thing was oddly normal. For all we knew we could still be deep underground. Where were all the windows looking out onto the surface?

  "Surprised, huh?" Austin acknowledged so I figured I might as well get straight to the point.

  "Where are all the windows so we can see onto the surface?" I asked him. At this point, I wanted proof. He could be a child trafficker that had gotten a hold of Dark Matter for all I knew.

  "I'm getting to that," he smiled at me. "We only have one window in the whole joint. This is only a smaller base and safe windows aren't cheap to make. You could only imagine how many layers of glass you would need between you and the harsh atmosphere on earth. If one drop came through we would all be dead."

  That made sense to me but I was still taken off guard by the lack of people running around getting ready to lift off. I was about to ask but Harper beat me to it.

  "Where is everybody?" she asked.

  "In space," Austin said. "You guys were recent additions because we needed a replacement after it came to our attention that two new recruits had been messing around with Dark Matter in its raw form."

  "What's wrong with that?" Harper asked. I already knew the answer to this one.

  "If you use raw Dark Matter without combining it with any other elements it is two or even three times more powerful but you will be consumed by it, forced to do its evil bidding."

  Nobody said anything for a couple of seconds as we took it all in. To me this reminded me how there is good magic and bad magic like in the fairy tales, but this was in real life.

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  "So how exactly do we even stand a chance against people who use Dark Matter without other elements?" I asked. It surprised me how anyone would be able to stand a chance against people who just used Dark Matter and it honestly scared me. I would never want to fight one on one with a Dark Matter Manipulator. It would be my death sentence.

  "Numbers," Austin told me. "But we really don't have time to go into all of the logistics right now. We need to get you guys ready for space and Wyatt needs a flesh-watch."

  Let's go! I was finally going to get the thing I had been wanting for a long time: supposedly the flesh-watch was the ultimate communicator that humanmankind had made so far.

  The first thing that could communicate throughout the milky way was something called a phone, but now we were on to flesh-watches.

  "Harper, you can go to the ladies room where a friend of mine will get you ready for space travel while I will install Wyatt's flesh-watch. Right this way."

  Austin gestured towards the men's restroom. Usually, I would have second guesses walking into a restroom with some random guy I didn't know, but at this point, I felt like I had been through a lot with Austin.

  "What is space worthy, exactly?" I asked Austin.

  "It means you have to be 100% clean. You can't have any dry skin on, no hair..."

  "No hair?" I interjected, cutting Austin off.

  "Yeh," he said. "For the two weeks you are stuck in space you will be wearing the same thing. You don't want hair to fall out and become horribly itchy in your spacesuit."

  "What about showers?" I asked. I didn't want to smell like BO the whole flight.

  "Good question. Showers won't be on this specific space shuttle for budgeting reasons. Sadly, you guys aren't exactly our priority group so you don't get the best space travel conditions. You might as well be traveling on the same spacecraft that humans first went to space in, honestly." Austin said, walking over to a counter in the bathroom.

  "I take it, the richer kids who aren't getting pulled away from their families, get nice accommodations?" I said, watching Austin as he got out a robot from under a counter.

  "Exactly right." he said. "The rich kids get a space ship that only takes a week to get to Titan, and you don't even need proper space gear. I've even heard that the lift off is so smooth, you can't even tell anything happened until you look out the window and realize that you're in space."

  FIGURES. I thought to myself in my head. NOTHING HAS CHANGED IN THE PAST TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS. WHOEVER HAS MONEY GETS IT ALL.

  At last the robot in front of me on the table started to whir, its spindly little arms pulling out needles and all sorts of other things that looked painful.

  "Take this," Austin passed me a pill, which I swallowed as quickly as I could.

  "It will put you under for the..." Austin didn't even get a chance to finish his sentence before I passed out.

  "Is it over already?" I moaned, as I lifted my head off of the table to look around. A large sign that said,

  WELCOME TO YOUR FLESH-WATCH hovered in the air, never leaving me no matter where I looked. Then the sign changed,

  PLEASE ENTER YOU NAME. I did so by speaking my full name. That sign went away, replaced by a couple of apps floating around in the air.

  TO CLOSE APPS, TAP YOUR FLESH-WATCH ONCE. TO OPEN APPS, TRIPLE TAP YOUR FLESH-WATCH.

  That sign popped up in the air and then went away. I triple tapped my new flesh-watch. I would make sure I checked that out later. Maybe I would try texting Harper to see if it worked.

  "Does it work okay?" Austin asked me. I nodded my head at him. "Sweet," he continued. "Then it's time to get your space ready. The process is pretty easy."

  "Shaving my arms doesn't sound easy," I told him, disgruntled. My arm hair was something I wouldn't be able to get back for a long time.

  "It's pretty easy to shave your arm hairs," Austin joked. "But why would I do it? That's just too much work isn't it?"

  I looked at him confused. Who else would do it?

  "If you go through that door right there," he said pointing at a door that I hadn't taken much notice of before. "She'll take care of you and once you're done, get out of there because I'll have to come through."

  "She?" I said. I did not want some lady washing me down. Absolutely not.

  "Just go in there," Austin said. At this point I was horribly curious so I walked in the door. Inside was a machine with all sorts of tools dangling from its side. I saw some type of shower in a corner and a trash can too.

  Signs were also flashing everywhere telling me not to move.

  "Welcome to the Space Travel Preparation Facility. STPF for short. We will begin the process soon." I jumped as a charming female voice started to talk from seemingly out of nowhere.

  "Take off your clothes," the voice said. I started. That was absolutely not happening with a girl in the room somewhere.

  "I'm not doing anything until you come out of wherever you're hiding." I said.

  "I am merely an AI," the voice said.

  "Why the heck do you sound like..." I started to say.

  "Because this tone and voice tends to calm most male space travelers."

  I almost laughed at that.

  The rest of the process was quite miserable and I won't go into much of the details as not to scar you guys but let's just say that I was thoroughly scrubbed from top to bottom, every hair was plucked from my body, and then a space suit was literally molded directly onto every grove of my body. Keep in mind that all of this was done with robotic arms and you'll get the general idea of how it all felt.

  Finally, once it was all over, the robot declared me 'sterile' and I moved on to the next room where clothes were lying on the floor. It was then I got my first text on my flesh-watch.

  I TAKE IT YOUR DONE WITH THE CLEANING BOT :) I WOULD RECOMMEND YOU PUT ON SOME OF THE CLOTHES ON THE FLOOR. THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY STERILE SO IT WON'T MATTER.

  I took his word for it. I was about to toss on clothes when I got another text.

  THE PURPOSE OF YOU SUIT IS TO BE A SECOND MORE DURABLE SKIN. KEEP IN MIND IF YOU'RE JUST WEARING THAT YOU MIGHT AS WELL BE NAKED.

  I blanched for a second but it made sense so I hurriedly threw on some clothes and got out of there, dressing as I normally would.

  AND GO TO THE NEXT ROOM. I'LL BE COMING THROUGH THERE.

  That got me out of there real fast. I exited through the only other door in the room besides the one I had come in from and immediately ran into Harper.

  "Like your fit," Harper said smiling. "How much effort did you put into planning that one?"

  I blushed for a second. I hadn't put in any thought at all. Just grabbed whatever was on the floor.

  "You didn't think about what you put on whatever, did you?" she said laughing. "And yet you have something on with some sense of fashion."

  She shook her head.

  "I guess," I said. I didn't really care what I wore as long as it covered me.

  I looked at what she was wearing. It was her signature short jean shorts, paired with a T-shirt and a zipper-hoodie.

  "Your outfit hardly changed," I joked with her. "Same jean shorts and hoodie."

  She looked at me weird for a second and then smiled.

  "This is my fashion. It's a whole lot better than no fashion."

  I had to agree. Her outfit looked better than my normal getup.

  "So..." Harper said. "Are you excited..?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I really am. My family life on Earth wasn't good at all so this is a great change for me. I get a chance to start over."

  "Sorry your family life sucked," Harper told me. "I have always had a good family life. I'm going to miss my parents."

  "My parents were killed by the Dark Lord when I was a baby. I was born on Titan." I said quietly. Harper seemed at a loss for words.

  "I... I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know..."

  "It's okay," I told her. "It's not your fault."

  We stood there for a moment in silence, each of us to our own thoughts. At this point, the reaction when someone heard that my parents had been killed, had grown numb to me. It was just a fact to me at this point: my parents had died and that was that.

  That didn't mean that I was just going to let the Dark Lord get away with everything. He had taken my parents and forced me to live with hateful care givers my whole life. If he hadn't done what he did, I would be living a normal life right now. He was going to pay.

  "Come on guys," Austin walked in. "It's time to go. The people up top are getting impatient."

  "Geez," Harper said. "You always come in at the worst times." I couldn't help but agree with that. He always came in when I was brooding about something.

  "Sorry," Austin said. "What'd I miss?"

  "Nothing," Harper spat out. "Wyatt was just telling me his feelings about his dead parents."

  Austin blanched. You could tell people didn't talk to him that way very often.

  "Anyway," Austin said. "We will be strapping in our seats here, so if you would like to start making our way..."

  I immediately forgave him for everything. I couldn't wait to see that space-ship more than anything. It was my ticket to freedom, a chance to restart my life.