Chapter Two

It had been a week since Samuel had seen Melanie last. There were two things uncomfortably wrong with this: one, she always made a point to see him in his school room during the day between classes. Two, it was exceedingly difficult in this small village to not see everyone at least once a day. He would have been alarmed and worried about the girl, but he already knew why they hadn’t seen each other in the days following her unexpected proclamation. He had tried to call her, but she refused to answer. The last time he attempted to contact her, Melanie’s mother answered the Graph in place of her daughter. Her face on Sam’s screen was grim, her eyes pitying.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” she said tenderly. “Melanie’s a very… spirited girl. It will be a while before she will talk to you. Until then, just try to act naturally. I think she’s more humiliated than angry with you.”

He had nothing to remark on that, though he did feel a wave of his own humiliation that Mrs. Skivert knew about the situation. He muttered a quiet “thank you” and then shut off the Graph. That was the last time he had tried to talk to Melanie. That was three days ago.

Sam sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose underneath his bifocals, wishing for the millionth time he had done something different that night in the snow with Melanie. He wished even more that he knew what to do about this. He didn’t have much experience with girls, much less romance. His life had been spent in studying, working with mechanics, learning about the technology that surrounded him from day to day. He hadn’t paid much attention to the finer sex. He now wished that he had.

“Still hasn’t talked to you, has she?” The voice of Miller Hawthorn broke Sam out of his dark cloud of thought. He looked up from his desk to see the younger man smiling piteously back at him.

Sam took off his bifocals and rubbed a hand across his face with a weary sigh. “No,” he said, muffled by his hand. He replaced his glasses and folded his arms on his desk. “Tell me something, Miller. How much experience do you have with females?”

Miller took a nearby chair away from its desk and straddled it, draping his arms across the backrest. “For one thing, I know enough about them to know that you don’t call them ‘females.’” He tilted a crooked smile towards his friend. “But I have courted a few girls here and there, so I suppose you could say that I have a decent amount of experience.”

“Then why, do you think, Melanie seems to act like this is all my fault,” Sam asked, frustrated. “I’m not the one who blurted out some string of nonsensical feelings.”

“And that,” Miller said, patting the back of his chair, “is precisely why it is your fault.” When Sam simply blinked back at his friend blankly, Miller stressed, “She wanted you to be the one to make some great confession.”

“But there’s nothing to confess!” Sam exclaimed, standing up in frustration.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Miller said with a light click of his tongue. “We both know that you have feelings for the girl.”

“Do I?” Sam asked, turning swiftly to look down at Miller. “That’s news to me. If you had known, why hadn’t you enlightened me of this fact? Please, do educate me on my feelings, for you obviously know more about them than I do.”

“For all your sarcasm,” Miller said, undaunted by his friend’s outburst, “it’s highly ironic that what you just said is truer than you realize.”

“And just what in the hell does that mean?” Sam asked, exasperated.

Before Miller could come up with a response, a soft chiming came from the corner of the room, signaling the arrival of students. He smiled back at Sam and said, “We’ll continue this conversation later. In the meantime, don’t stress too much.” He headed towards the classroom door, turning briefly to wave at Sam. “And don’t think too much, either. Thinking and feeling often don’t coincide, and trying to use both of them might get you into trouble.”

And with that, Miller was gone. Within minutes, the room started to fill with students, each sitting at their assigned desk and calling up their screens in front of them. Sam sighed again and absent-mindedly keyed in the codes for today’s lecture, the board behind him reflecting the commands he gave to the computer. In the right-hand corner of the board, he saw 23 small dots light up, showing that the attendance had been taken. There were two absences.

The same chime that had sounded five minutes ago sounded again, this time signaling the beginning of class. Sam wasted no time. “Morning, class,” he greeted.

The collective group responded: “Morning, Mr. Willaker.”

“Can someone please refresh the class on what we were talking about on Friday?” he asked, turning his back to the class as he stroked his finger along the board in patterns that brought notes and highlights from the previous lecture onto the side of the screen. He saw one dot light up on the side of the screen.

“Yes, Desmond,” he allowed, not turning to look at him.

“We discussed the key points in technological advances prior to the Post-Terra years,” Desmond answered immediately.

Sam turned to face the group of 23 teenagers that filled his classroom. “Enlighten us on some of them, please.”

“Sir,” Desmond affirmed with a nod. He pushed up his thick glasses on the bridge of his nose, glancing at his screen. “We brought up simple innovations such as the light bulb and telephone first, working our way up to later leaps such as the home computer, the Internet, hover cars, and the discovery of the first Bonshi energy source.”

“Good,” Sam said, turning his attention to the other students. “Anyone care to fill in the blanks? What was the Bonshi source and why is it important?” One computer screen lit up before three others in the far right corner of the class. “Yes, Elise.”

“It was discovered in the year 3241 Terra, sir,” she recited. “Nigel Bonshi, one of the first soul space-explorers discovered it while venturing through the Bima galaxy. At first he thought it was the remnants of a dead star that had hit the planet he was scouting out, but when he looked into the crater, he found out that it was not a star at all, but another celestial body that had hit the surface of the planet; it was still alive, just dormant. He took a piece of it with him, went back to his aircraft, and tinkered with it to find out if it would be useful at all. Pretty soon he discovered that, with just that one piece of crashed star, he could power his entire ship. After a few years, the energy source replaced others such as electricity and petroleum.”

“And what, Remmy,” Sam asked, pacing the classroom and looking at the faces of his students, “did that trigger?”

Remmy, the youngest boy in the class at the age of 13, straightened up and said in his high voice, “It triggered the first wide-spread expansion into space exploration. As Earth began to run out of areas for humans to live, colony ships were fired out into space, running on the Bonshi energy source, to find other planets that could sustain life. That was the time we switched from the Terra years, or at the time known as AD years, to Post-Terra years, or PT.”

“Excellent,” Sam remarked, pleased with the report from the students. He recalled in his first year of teaching, he could hardly get any pupil to talk at all. Now, into his third year, he was beginning to feel as though he had a grasp on this. For years, he had relied on being a scientist and inventor for income. Lately, since his inventions and patents were becoming few and far between, he had to take up more teaching positions. While he was uncomfortable with talking to groups of people in this kind of atmosphere, he felt less unsure in front of a classroom than he had before.

“Now, class,” he began, expertly moving his fingers across the board to bring up pictures, diagrams, and notes, “if you would move to today’s lesson on your screens, you’ll see that today we’ll be discussing the multiple uses of the Bonshi energy source. Now, as you all know, Nigel Bonshi originally lived on Earth, but when he became the head of the Bonshi Energy Corporation, he moved to—”

An ear-splitting crash coming from outside the school building interrupted Sam’s lecture, and the violent quake shook the classroom. The walls of the classroom cracked against the sudden stress against them, and the students screamed and panicked, ducking under their desks and covering their heads. Sam’s long, clumsy body toppled as the shaking knocked him off balance.

An alarm sounded throughout the school building, alerting the inhabitants of an emergency. As though the unexpected shaking of the building wasn’t an indication, Sam thought dryly as he tried to get back onto his feet.

“Remain calm, students!” he shouted above the loud noises of quake. “You know the evacuation procedures! Everyone file to the emergency door, please!” Sam managed to reach the screen, pushing the EMERGENCY NOTIFIED button on the side. In reaction, a section of the wall facing the outside opened up, blasting cold air into the room, and extended a slide to the ground level below them. The students hurried to the evacuation shoot, grabbing their coats and hastily putting them on as they went. Sam was the last to exit the room, looking over his shoulder to glance around the room and make sure everyone was out. He sat on the cold metal of the emergency evacuation slide and pushed off, feeling his stomach fly to his throat as he went down the two stories. The steep decline as well as the shaking from the aftermath of the quake made his adrenaline pump through his veins faster than ever.

Once on the ground, he exhaled sharply and stood up next to his students, straightening his suit and tie and adjusting his glasses. He looked at them to make sure they had all made it out of the building safely, finding that their gazes were all fixed in the same direction, a look of pure horror on their faces.

Sam looked in the same direction. He felt his stomach, which had been close to his throat, now plummet in dread. “Oh god…”

One of the students raised a hand slowly, pointing at the gargantuan ship that had just landed right next to their peaceful village. Its engines were still whirring, causing the ground to rumble beneath their feet. It seemed like everyone in the village was standing out in the courtyard, staring at this monstrous vehicle that towered over all the buildings, casting a deadly shadow across everything in this peaceful, sleepy town.

There was a black and red insignia on the side of the ship, large and glaring at everyone who dared to cast their eyes upon it. It looked like the old letter Z from before the Post Terra years, only backwards with two dashes across its middle. It was as famous as the people it represented, and it struck horror into the hearts of all the villagers unfortunate to be there that day.

“Mr. Willaker…” one of the students said in a shaky voice. “Is that the…?”

“Yes,” he whispered as his wide eyes refused to tear away from the terrible sight. “It’s the Raiders.”