"Lily! Oh, and Sky, hi. What are you still doing here? The next class is about to start," he asked, wearing a charming smile on his lips as usual. He casually combed back his dark red hair with his fingers. It matched the red accent color on our black Keres uniforms.

Could he have heard how she had threatened me and come over to stop it? If he did, his facial expression did not betray it. He seemed perfectly oblivious and cheerful, I knew that he sometimes hung out with Lily and the other popular kids. The odds of him being on my side in an argument were slim, so perhaps it was just convenient timing.

"Blaze! What are you still doing here?" Lily asked, stepping away from me.

Suddenly she was all about sweet smiles and fluttering lashes again.

"Forgot something in the class room, must have fallen from my pocket during the sim," he explained. He walked up to the door, but it wouldn't budge.

"Aww, damn. Steel must have already left."

"Uhm... I... I have a passcode," I blurted out, immediately regretting my words.

"A passcode, really? Fantastic!" He turned to face me, and basked me in the radiant force of a supernova smile. "Could you just let me in for a sec?"

"Of course Steel's little lapdog has a passcode," Lily muttered so that only I could hear it, rolling her eyes, and I could feel my cheeks turn even hotter than before. This was really not helping me prove my point to her.

Fortunately, she didn't seem to be willing to continue our argument in Blaze's presence.

"Whatever. I see you later. Bye Blaze!" she waved at him.

She had spoken in a sugary sweet voice that didn't seem to match the sour expression she wore on her face a split second later, when she gave me one last look before turning away.

I heaved a deep sigh as she made off, then I went over to the door and typed the six-digit code into the panel beside it. It slid open, revealing the room behind it empty and illuminated only by the dim, bluish glow of the large screen on one of the walls.

"How come you have a code?" Blaze asked as he went inside. I hesitated to follow him. I didn't want to seem to be prying. So I opted for staying in the hallway next to the door, where I leaned against the wall and waited.

"Ray and I both got one. We come here to train sometimes. Because I missed so many classes," I explained.

I had gotten the code when my time-consuming training for the Agalma project had started. Of course, the gym had rigs as well, but they were hybrid set ups usable by Talos defender pilots as well. Only the rigs in class were specifically tailored to our training as Keres cadets: piloting robot suits, not space ships. Ray had agreed to train with me outside of class so I wouldn't fall behind. As I thought about it, I wondered if Lily was right, and if anybody else would really have received the same privilege as me.

"Really?" Blaze's voice sounded surprised. "So you can come in here anytime you like? Sounds convenient. No wonder you're on top of the class."

"I missed a lot of our regular training sessions and classes," I reasoned, "And the code only works during school hours and on weekends till ten. And I've only had it since a few weeks. And we don't get to run Steel's sims, only the regular training ones, and-"

"Calm down, Sky. I didn't mean to accuse you of anything," he interrupted my breathless babbling, and I heard him laugh inside the room. "I guess what I meant to say was, it's quite impressive that you kept up your performance with all those extra duties for the Agalma project."

"And we also promised not to let anyone else in, so could you hurry please?" I pleaded.

Blaze reappeared in the doorframe holding up a memory module, grinning. He flipped it up with his thumb and caught it in mid-air again before he put it in the pocket of his uniform. "Don't worry, all done."

As the door closed behind him, he kept his gaze fixed on me. His eyes were of an almost unnaturally bright, golden color, reminding me of a cat. It made me wonder whether he had had his eyes augmented to look like that, or if it was genetic engineering. I had never thought about that before. I had never even realized what his eye color was, and now I found myself wondering how on earth I could have not noticed that.

Most likely because we haven't really spoken outside of classes or missions ever before.

We stood in the hallway, nothing but increasingly awkward silence between us. Was I supposed to say something?

"Okay. Well then..."

I finally chose awkward words over awkward silence, and turned to leave. But to my surprise, he moved to fall into step beside me. As we walked out of the building like that, a strange sense of anxiety gripped hold of me. I became acutely aware of every aspect of his presence next to me, while turning more and more self-conscious about myself. The way he walked with his shoulders square and head held high, while I kept my gaze glued to the ground. The way he drew calm and steady breaths, while I felt like I was about to hyperventilate. The way he threw me these strange and unreadable sideward glances and smirked, while every glance I stole at him in turn only made me feel uneasy and confused.

Was his gaze lingering on me, or was I imagining it?

"You really are some kind of genius, aren't you?" he finally broke the silence, and blessed me with a radiant smile. "Whatever extra training you do is one thing. But you... there's more to you than that. You have guts, and intuition. You're very... creative, but you also know a lot. Like that trick with the suits – how did you even know which wires to pull?"

Flustered by that unexpected flood of compliments, I stared at him on disbelief for a moment, before I opted to stare at the path in front of my feet instead. I hoped that my hair would fall over my face and hide the blush that was most definitely creeping up on my cheeks.

"Electrical Engineering and Unit Maintenance classes and... my dad's an engineer." I mumbled, "Fixes up tanks for a living."

"Huh, I see. Honestly, I thought you were ex vivo. No offense."

"Oh. None taken," I replied with a smile.

After all, my best friend was ex vivo born. Between the two of us, it was usually not her – the outgoing, adorable, bubbly girl with the colorful hair and that undeniable spark of excitement in her eyes – whom people expected to be an ex vivo. Many people thought that children born from artificial wombs were strange, reclusive and sullen. Something about gestating without constant connection to a human being. But of course, it was all bullshit. Just a stereotype, a relic of an old fear that had dominated the public opinion during the very early days of Genesis research. These days, most ex vivo kids were genetically engineered in a hope that they would fulfill certain tasks in our society once they would grow up – essentially, they became experts by design. Although not all of them always took the path that Genesis planned for them, most of them were highly intelligent and talented. To me, being compared to an ex vivo was a compliment.

"You know..." he started again, "I guess people tell you that all the time, but... you're really amazing."

He threw me a grin that I met with wide-eyed confusion. Nobody actually told me that, ever.

"And I like you...a lot," he added.

His words hit me with the impact of an ADM tank's hydraulic fist, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

I must have misheard that last part.

He was not the kind of person to like people like me. I was not the kind of person who was particularly well-liked by anybody. Especially not by the kind of guy who was notorious for breaking hearts left and right without so much as batting an eyelash. He probably had half of the campus swooning over him, and I couldn't believe that he would take even a second out of his day to spend just so much as a thought on me, let alone talk to me, let alone compliment me, and tell me that he liked me. It was ridiculous.

Then again, I told myself, as I tried to calm my pulse, maybe I'm reading too much into his words. Maybe I shouldn't overreact. It was just an empty phrase. He probably tells half the campus the same thing on a daily basis.

Without looking at him, I knew that he was wearing a smug smile on his face as he saw my reaction. I swallowed hard, straightened my uniform, and finally found the courage to face those golden eyes again that he had kept on me the whole time.

"At any rate," he went on, "All that stuff you did was really impressive. Not just that idea with the EMP. The way you fight, too. So... Do you think... would you consider bringing me along to one of your training sessions, perhaps? Only if Steel permits it, of course. And if Ray doesn't mind."

His smile turned impish, implying some vague indication of a joke that I was too flustered to comprehend.

"Of course. I mean, yes. I mean.... I guess?" I stuttered distractedly.

He continued to watch me intently through his unsettling, honey-colored eyes. His pupils had narrowed into needle pricks in the light of the afternoon sun. But almost less than their appearance, it was the look in his eyes that made me feel like a mouse, in front of a cat on the prowl. I didn't like it. And yet I couldn't avert my gaze.

I fell silent. A moment seemed to drag out, and on into eternity, until suddenly a force even more compelling than his hypnotic stare began to draw my eyes away. It coerced me to turn them towards a strange darkness that had not been there before. A velvet black night sky, spangled with hundreds of stars like twinkling diamonds. It reminded me of something that I couldn't quite place, and I felt the urge to plunge into the black and find out what would wait for me there, beyond the stars.

"Sky?"

Blaze's voice tore through the darkness, and brought me back to my senses. It took me a second to realize what I had seen. My vision had gone black for a few seconds and I had almost collapsed. Blaze was holding onto my arm to keep me from falling.

"Are you okay?" He sounded worried.

I could feel my cheeks burning hot as my vision came back. There was no night sky, no stars. The afternoon sun was still shining down on us, draped against cloudless blue, casting reflections on his hair that made it look like real fire.

"I'm okay, I think," I said in a flat voice.

He gave me a doubtful look for a moment, but let go of my arm when I tentatively stood on my own feet and straightened up.

"Just... tired. Sorry."

"Come on then, how about I treat you to a snack and coffee in the cafeteria?" he said and gave me an encouraging smile. "As thanks for letting me into the class room."

I realized that a part of me would have actually liked to accept his invitation, not just because I probably really could use a coffee or two to make it through the rest of the day. But a much, much larger part of me was terrified of the thought of forcing down food in his presence. Eating was about the last thing on my mind that moment. The mere thought made me feel nauseous. And there was also a part of me that wasn't quite willing to skip my next class.

"Thanks, but...we're already late, so..." I shook my head. "But I appreciate it. Really."

"Right, wouldn't want you to skip classes," he said. For a moment I thought he was being sarcastic, but he sounded genuinely disappointed.

"Another time, then?"

"Sure..."

I looked up again and met his gaze, and for a moment he just looked back at me in silence. It seemed that my blood had found its way back to my head after my near-fainting spell, but somehow found it necessary to localize to my cheeks, to my great annoyance.

"Well then... I'm looking forward to training with you! See you later in class!" Blaze stepped away with a smile on his lips and a lazy salute, before he turned around and made towards the cafeteria.

The moment he turned around, I felt something tickle my nose. I rubbed it absentmindedly it, my fingers came away red with blood. I looked at the traces of red on my skin, unable to process how they had gotten there. I had never in my entire life gotten a nosebleed before. Not even when an Enforcer cadet had accidentally elbowed me straight in the face during training once. It made no sense that I would get one now. But as I stared after Blaze as he walked away, a thought popped up in my mind that was so ridiculous that I almost laughed out loud.

So... Has this guy just literally made me faint and given me a fucking nose bleed over the course of a five minute conversation?

Somehow, I felt like a very stupid mouse.