The first part of the Stormrunner Exam was a written test. Shon opened the booklet right away.

  “What is the first law of thermodynamics?” the first question asked.

  “The first law of thermodynamics,” Shon wrote, “dictates that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transferred between different states.”

  Because of this iron law, Fraxian powers depended heavily on their surroundings. It would be useless to transfer energy if there were none to begin with.

  Valerians also understood the laws of thermodynamics well. Shon recalled the stories from the November Riots. The Valerians would incapacitate the Fraxians by extinguishing all heat. Some shot the Fraxians outright. The crueler ones would tie up Fraxians and light a fire under their feet. Faced with the burning pain, those Fraxians would instinctively perform thermal transfer to protect themselves. After an hour, they would reach their limits and die of exhaustion rather than burns.

  Shon shuddered. No point in dwelling on these dark days now. Although life was far from perfect in the present, at least Fraxians like him were given legal protection and a possibility for the future.

  He focused back on the present and glanced at the clock.

  Shit. Five minutes had passed already. He did not have the luxury of wasting time.

  Around him, pencil scratched against paper like winds hissing through dried leaves. The more he tried to focus, the louder the sounds became. Paper rustled every few seconds as students turned their pages. Even the faintest sound could not escape him.

  Shit. Shit. He had to focus. Snap. A pencil lead broke somewhere. He should be on page two by now. Plop. Somebody dropped their pencil. Damn it, he had not yet read the next question.

  Shon took a deep breath and dived back into the booklet. His biggest enemy was not the questions on the exam. It was his own mental state.

  Thankfully, the next few questions were straightforward, mostly information instilled in their heads since day one.

  The details of the Stabilizer project, the four Stabilizers in the nation’s four quadrants. Memories of Professor Lilah’s class were still fresh in his head. A few questions about the Terrich scale of storm lethality, where storms were ranked from level 1 to 10. This should be common knowledge for any resident.

  Then the questions steered to basic physics principles. Eldton’s three laws of motion. The ideal gas relationship between pressure, temperature, and volume. Illuobern’s equation on fluid pressure and speed.

  “What are the four types of lethal debris in a sandstorm?”

  Evidently, there was sand. Death by asphyxiation. There were boulders, like the ones he shot up in the range earlier. Death by blunt trauma. Sharp metal poles from destroyed buildings could become lethal javelins. Death by penetrating trauma.

  And of course, there was gravel.

  Shon shivered at the implication behind this word. Memories flooded back. The words on his father’s death certificate were etched into his mind. Countless punctures. Organ perforation. Complete disfigurement.

  Shon shut his eyes, but all he could see was the shrouded, headless body at the funeral, the sight that had haunted his dreams for many years to come.

  Without realizing it, his breathing quickened. Anxiety and fear began gnawing at the back of his mind.

  Instincts kicked in. The air chilled. The drop in ambient temperature struck his thermal sense, like someone shining a flashlight right into his eyes.

  Fortunately, he caught it in time. As soon as he noticed it, Shon began suppressing these reactions. Years of Academy training kicked in like muscle memory. He took a deep breath, then another. He felt his pulse slow.

  Keeping his breathing steady, he moved his pencil. “The four types of debris: aerosol, boulder, spike, and shrapnel.”

  Gradually, the temperature reverted to normal. But the sensory overload did not stop — not just the noises of scratching pencil and rustling paper, but something remained itching on the thermal level.

  Although he had already halted his involuntary thermal manipulation, the surrounding temperature was still changing. Once again, Shon stepped through his meditative sequence, pushing the memories of his father out of his mind. The fluctuations persisted, though Shon was sure he had nothing to do with it.

  After a minute, the tickle in his thermal sense got even stronger. Now it was not just a flashlight in his eyes, but a thousand glittering mirrors rotating in the sun, a thousand insects buzzing around his skin. It was nowhere near painful or debilitating, but it was annoying enough.

  At the written test, every point mattered. He could not risk any distraction.

  Shon raised his hand for the proctor.

  “Can we check the temperature controls in this room?” he whispered, feeling awkward that he was the only candidate raising this complaint. “It’s very distracting.”

  The proctor, a Valerian schoolteacher, was surprisingly kind. He did not seem to notice anything, but he went to check the thermostat anyway.

  In the meantime, Shon kept writing.

  The questions grew more difficult, more calculation-oriented. Each problem displayed a storm diagram supported by differential equation field lines. A few major winds were given in the form of vectors.

  Tasked with computing the coordinates of the storm nuclei, Shon had to apply the two phases of the Storm Equations, a combination of differential equations and linear algebra. This would have been easy to execute on paper, but the phantom forces insisted on tickling his thermal senses. He tried to hone his sense again, and then again, but to no avail.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Finally, he gave up fighting and just accepted it.

  Thankfully, he was trained to compute the Storm Equations under immense physical stress. After all, these equations were meant to be used amidst a real storm, not in a quiet exam room. Despite all the discomfort, he managed to crunch out the numbers.

  Footsteps approached him.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the thermostat,” the proctor returned. He placed a thermometer on Shon’s desk. “I will file a report for you, but you can double-check the reading here.”

  Shon nodded, silently appreciating the kindness. He looked at the thermometer. The temperature of this room was indeed stable, no change in even the hundredth of a degree.

  However, the feeling remained. He glanced out the window. Could the perturbation be coming from the outside?

  No time to dwell on this. He must put his full attention on the booklet. Any careless error would be fatal. One point lost here would require ten times more effort to recuperate later.

  The next set of questions focused on a storm case study. Meteorological patterns were presented through textual description and numerically labeled diagrams, and Shon must identify the proper storm signs.

  This was not as easy as it looked. While most academies — including Shon’s — had machineries to simulate an ongoing storm, they could not reproduce its inception. Only those who had faced real storms knew what storm signs felt like.

  As for sheltered students like Shon, they could only rely on theoretical meteorology and historical data.

  The inception of a storm followed certain trends. It always began with abnormalities in the atmosphere. Shon scanned through the grid of data in his booklet, circling the outliers that stood apart. However, there was another layer to this problem — the Fraxians on the ground.

  While most abnormal air currents hovered hundreds of feet above, some of the thermodynamic fluctuations would spill downward. Fraxians with strong thermal sense could perceive the storm signs.

  Shon scanned through the qualitative descriptions, composed of observer testimonies. Very few Fraxians had such a sharp thermal sense, so he had to use meteorological principles to filter out unreliable narratives.

  And there was one final layer. The calm before the storm.

  Mother Nature loved to play cruel jokes. Historical data had shown that often, before the worst storms, all storm signs would disappear temporarily. The sky would clear. The winds would stop. Once people had lowered their guards, everything would strike at once.

  Using that, Shon identified a few troughs in the atmospheric graph. Cross-referencing with the ground-level narratives, he identified the most probable location of the storm.

  Finally.

  Shon put his pencil down and stretched his wrists. His head felt clearer than ever, and he soon realized why.

  The buzzing in his thermal senses was gone. It had probably happened when he was busy answering the last problem; he had not even noticed it. To double check, he tuned into his senses again, but all the annoying distractions disappeared.

  He looked around. There was no reaction at all from other test takers. Of course, they never felt anything earlier. Why would they feel it now?

  Shon could not complain. At last, he could focus. He could finally give his one hundred percent.

  He checked the clock. Thirty minutes left. He flipped the booklet over. One essay question left.

  “In 500 words, describe the relationship between Fraxian biology, the laws of thermodynamics, and the city’s power infrastructure.”

  This problem was novel, unseen in any past exams or exam prep. While most problems targeted theoretical knowledge, this problem required a thorough, systemic understanding of scientific applications.

  Why was this year’s exam different? Did the criteria for selecting Stormrunners change?

  Regardless, this was his chance to recover his score.

  He picked up his pen and began writing. The entire power infrastructure of the Republic of Valeria was designed and built by XetaGen Technologies, Inc. The founder and CEO of XetaGen, Theo Xeta, combined thermodynamics with Fraxian biology to create ThermoTech, a branch of engineering applied in most modern-day tech.

  The details of ThermoTech remained proprietary information, but Shon understood the basics. Fraxian cells contained specific genomes capable of manipulating heat. While a regular Fraxian could not extinguish a candle without breaking a sweat, ThermoTech amplified the most useful traits in Fraxian cells, specializing them as power sources, sensors, or signal carriers.

  Shon looked around the room for some inspiration, and he saw the bright thermolamps hanging overhead. He began illustrating a diagram.

  In a thermolamp, cells were specialized in incandescence, or changing heat energy into visible light. Inside, a small quantity of Fraxian cells was compacted into a speck of dust. However, an amplification infrastructure could multiply the perceived energy.

  Shon drew another picture of a person yelling into a canyon. On flat land, voice could not travel far. However, in a perfectly shaped canyon, the sound could carry for miles. A ThermoTech amplification device was like that. It did not produce extraneous energy, but it rearranged existing energy in the most efficient manner.

  Shon reviewed his essay with satisfaction. Then, he noticed a line at the bottom of the paper.

  “Bonus [Fraxian Paper, 10 pts]: In an additional 200 words, discuss potential future research direction on how Fraxian biology can be further integrated into core technologies.”

  Once again, a question never seen before. This one did not even seem relevant to Stormrunning.

  Shon glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes left. He had no time to guess the examiner’s intentions. Following his gut instinct, he poured out the thoughts stashed deep in his head.

  Fraxian biology. The entire Valerian civilization was built on Fraxian biology. Everyone celebrated ThermoTech as the antidote to humanity’s problems.

  However, Shon remembered the stinky train ride earlier today. That poor Fraxian girl had to steal to survive. When she was cornered, Shon and Zora had to fight so hard, not so she could walk free, but just so she could be arrested properly without extrajudicial retribution.

  How absurd. If Fraxians made up the foundation of science, why didn’t they deserve to enjoy the benefits of their creations?

  Shon had heard stories about the land far, far away, about the Bastion Empire, the empire of Fraxians. Of course, not the official derogatory propaganda, but from his parents’ whispers of their past, and from the murmurs that circulated the streets.

  In the Bastion Empire, Shon had heard, Fraxian powers were celebrated instead of detested. By fully exploiting Fraxian biology, they created futuristic innovations — bottled lightning called electricity that could power the poorest homes, lossless superconductors used to build floating trains, even thinking machines that could compute storm patterns ten times faster than the finest scientists here.

  The more he unfolded the advancements of Bastion, the more he wondered why his parents had wanted to escape from there. Perhaps in the Bastion Empire, Shon and his family could have lived with dignity…

  Shon snapped back to the present. What was he thinking? It was dangerous to revere the Bastion Empire, especially right before the political loyalty test. In fact, he should not even reveal any prohibited information.

  Shon glanced at the clock. Seven minutes left.

  Scrambling, he erased his paragraph. Compared to losing points in the Exam, getting suspected of disloyalty would be infinitely worse.

  He began scrawling a new response, one with no depth, with no reference to Bastion technology, with no hints of discontent at his own society.

  He discussed irrigation improvements at the farms, though he knew the crops would never be distributed to the starving Fraxians. He wrote about stronger walls for storm bunkers, though he knew these fortifications would never reach the impoverished frontier provinces that needed them the most. He injected leaps of imagination, speaking of flying automobiles rather than the lack of affordable energy, discussing music radios instead of the scarcity of clean water. He painted a fantastical dream of science fiction.

  A loud buzz interrupted Shon’s train of thought. Time was up. Thankfully, he had the essay finished.

  Shon quickly stashed away his thoughts. Given that the political loyalty test was in two hours, he should not let any questionable thoughts enter his mind.

  He went to the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water.

  Right now, his only priority was the thermal transfer test.