Limitless

2|

Chapter 2 - Harmony

15 03, Millennium Academy

I'm sitting on a velvet chair inside the principal's office of Millennium Academy. On the other side of the frosted glass pane, I can see a bunch of my classmates milling around to see what's going on—seniors, each of them at least four years older than me. Everyone saw me get dragged into the office, and when that happens, everybody knows about it.

The Commonwealth's favourite prodigy gets into trouble again.

The room is silent except for the quiet hum of the principal's laptop. The room looks the same as always, and I've already memorised every inch of it (hand-cut marble tiles imported from Antartica, 256 plastic square boards on the ceiling, 15 feet of drapes hang either side of the Chancellor's picture at the back wall, a forty-four inch screen on the side wall, the sound muted and the headlines TRAITOROUS CRIMINAL GROUP 'VORTEX' BOMBED THE LOCAL POLICE STATION, KILLS 5 running at the bottom). Avery McCall, the principal herself sits on the other side of the table, typing on her glass keyboard. And I know, without doubt, that she's typing down my report.

It's the sixth report I'm going to receive this semester. I'm willing to bet that I'm the only student at Millenium that has managed to get six reports in a semester without getting expelled.

"Injured your hand yesterday, Miss Avery?" I ask after a while.

She pauses and glares to at me. "What makes you think so?"

"Your pauses at your keystrokes are off. You're favouring your right hand."

"Yes, Harmony," she says, "I injured my right wrist yesterday while playing tennis."

"Sorry to hear that. You know, you should use your whole waist and shoulder when you hit the ball, rather than using only your arms and wrist."

I meant that as a general statement, but Miss Avery took it as a correction. "You know what, Harmony? You may think that you're very smart, and you may think that that will get you out of trouble each time. But make sure you understand that this will be the last time you're being excused. You're perfect grades will not help you anymore, and let me tell you that once you graduate and become a soldier, then this kind of behaviour will not be tolerated by your superiors."

I nod, because that's what she wants me to do. But she's wrong. I don't think I'm smart. I'm the only person in the country who scored a perfect score of 1200 in the Boards. That's the reason I got into Millennium Academy—the best military university in the country—at the age of twelve, four years ahead everyone else my age. And then I skipped my sophomore. I got perfect grades for the past three years, and I'm going to graduate in six more months. I don't think I'm smart, I am smart. I am the Commonwealth's favourite prodigy.

It wasn't my fault that I found the wall climbing training at Millennium way too easy, and that's why I decided to scale a nineteen-storey building outside the academy.

Rumours say that Hope once scaled three stories in less that six seconds. How were we going to catch the country's most wanted criminal if we aren't even as fast as him?

I hear three beeps from Miss Avery's portscreen and she presses a button, answering the call. "Yes?"

"Captain Xavier Hunt is here," a voice says. "He's here for his sister."

"Send him up," Miss Avery says before cutting the call. She looks up at me. "I hope your brother does a better job of minding you after this, because if you end up at my office one more-"

"Xavier is doing a better job than my dead parents," I say rather too sharply than I wanted to.

We fall into an uncomfortable silence.