A Starfish Side Story: Rise of the Serenes

Early in Starfish, in the “Dinner Guests” chapter, GW Canyon and Ben Taggart share a laugh about a book they read as teens. A young male fantasy that becomes prophecy.

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*Excerpt from THE RISE OF THE SERENES by N.V. Holland

Chapter Eleven: The Choosing

Klosvan saw it happen from the quad steps, and afterward he would tell it a hundred different ways, none of them true to the few seconds it actually took.

The Tribunes came through the academy gates on the first warm day of the term, four of them, robes the color of poured bronze, and the cadets stopped what they were doing the way men stop when the air pressure changes before a storm they can’t yet hear. Rejex stood beside him with a drill manual still open in his hand. He had a week-old haircut and the kind of jaw the recruiting posters used.

The lead Tribune did not hurry. She crossed the quad the way water finds the lowest point, inevitable and unbothered, and stopped in front of Rejex close enough that he had to tip his chin to keep her eyes. Klosvan never did learn her name. It didn’t matter. None of the cadets asked a Tribune her name. You waited to see if she’d give you one.

“This one,” she said, to no one, the way a buyer confirms a price already agreed.

Rejex did not move for a full three seconds. Then his manual hit the flagstones and he didn’t pick it up.

***

Klosvan didn’t see him again for eight days.

When Rejex came back through the dormitory door his skin had the scrubbed, lit-from-inside look of a boy home from a fever, and he stood differently — spine long, shoulders dropped, the posture of someone who had stopped flinching at something he used to flinch at. Klosvan was halfway through a sentence of greeting before he saw the bracelet.

It sat low on Rejex’s left wrist, a band the gray of gun metal, no clasp Klosvan could find, no seam. He reached out before he thought better of it and Rejex let him touch it, amused, patient, the way a man lets a child touch something he’s already stopped being afraid of.

“It doesn’t come off,” Rejex said. “I asked.”

“You *asked*?”

“I wanted to know.” A small laugh, private, like he was remembering a joke nobody else had heard yet. “She said why would you want it to.”

Klosvan’s mouth had gone dry. “What’s it like. Being claimed.”

Rejex looked past him, toward the window, toward nothing Klosvan could see, and for a second his eyes went wet and unfocused in a way that should have looked like grief and somehow didn’t. “There isn’t a word for it,” he said. “I’ve never felt this complete in my life.”

He held up a coin between two fingers, gold-edged, heavier than its size. Klosvan had seen these traded between upper-form cadets and never understood the denomination.

“That’s a thousand credits,” Klosvan breathed.

“Queen Varella knows what I’m worth to the Directorate.” Rejex turned the coin once, caught the light on it, put it away. He said it the way other men said their father’s name. Not pride, exactly. Closer to relief.

Klosvan sat down on the end of his own bunk because his legs had asked him to. “Gosh, Rejex,” he said, and he meant every word of it, “I wish I had your life.”

Rejex only smiled, the smile of a man who has already stopped needing to be envied and finds, to his quiet surprise, that he still is.

***

It was months later that Klosvan stood on the palace steps himself, his own wrist heavy in a way he’d stopped noticing weeks ago, and watched four Tributes come down through the columns to collect their men.

Rejex was beside him, the way he was always beside him now, on these evenings the academy had stopped pretending not to schedule. Their Tributes found each other first, the way they always did, exchanged some low unhurried word, touched hands, and parted toward their separate evenings. Rejex’s gaze went to his the whole time she crossed the steps, the particular gone-soft look of a dog hearing its leash come down off the hook, grateful before it’s even called.

Klosvan caught his own reflection in the bronze of the palace doors as his Tribune reached him — the way he straightened, the way his chin came up to find her eyes already finding his. He didn’t have a word for what he felt either, watching her come.

He decided, the way Rejex had decided eight days into his own claiming, that he didn’t need one.