On the way to the thermal transfer test, Shon noticed a large crowd gathered in the corridor. He tried to sneak a peek from the edge, but someone pulled him off balance. It was Zora.

  “Come here. It’s Squad Ospery!”

  Squad Osprey! Did she mean the Squad Ospery, the most elite Stormrunning Squad in the Republic?

  Shon hurried forward. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. Tasked with battling the toughest storms, Squad Osprey was constantly deployed from one front to another. Even the current serving Stormrunners had little chance of meeting them.

  Shon followed Zora into the crowd. He tiptoed and stretched his neck, finally getting a clear look.

  Near the front, a tall, lean man was encircled by a group of students. The man stood firm and upright, his posture carrying an unusual stillness. When he moved, his motion declared brevity, as if he refused to waste even a millisecond on a useless act.

  However, what caught Shon’s attention the most was his orange eyes. Although a Fraxian, the man faced nothing but utmost deference from all Valerians around him.

  That was Captain Lynx, the leader of Squad Osprey.

  “Captain, can I get your autograph?” one Valerian student said. “You saved my mom from Storm Aries. She would be so happy to see you.”

  “You probably don’t remember me,” said another Valerian student. “But your squad saved my town in the northern basin.”

  Seeing all these Valerian faces, Shon hesitated to squeeze in further. However, Captain Lynx spotted him and Zora, and he invited them in.

  “Tell me, what are your names?” asked Captain Lynx, his voice kind and gentle, nothing like the commanding baritone in his documentaries.

  Shon’s head went blank. He began to stutter. Thankfully, Zora responded for him.

  “I’m Zora, a student of the Deercreek Academy. This is Shon.”

  Shon closed his eyes, bracing himself for a wave of sneer from all these Valerians from elite institutions. However, in Captain Lynx’s presence, they maintained a nonchalant look. Some even squeezed out a smile.

  “Ah, Deercreek Academy, how I missed it there,” Captain Lynx laughed. “Is Professor Lilah still teaching social meteorology?”

  “Indeed, she is. I’m gonna miss her so much.” Zora joined Captain Lynx in laughter. “Though I have to admit, her lectures have put me to sleep a time or two.”

  “Wait,” Shon interrupted. “You’re from Deercreek?”

  “An elk for life.” Captain Lynx raised two of his fingers to form an antler, a reference to Deercreek Academy’s mascot. “You know, some of the best Stormrunners are from Deercreek. You are lucky to study there.”

  “Wow. I… I just never thought you’d have gone to the same school as me,” Shon stuttered. Captain Lynx, the epitome of the Fraxian dream, so exalted in his achievements, so out of reach. Yet here they were, sharing the same alma mater! A surge of confidence washed over Shon. Maybe, just maybe, his own dream was not so impossible.

  “I know what you mean,” Captain Lynx smiled. “Everyone sees Squad Osprey as some unattainable goal. But we are just like everyone else. In fact, Shon, you and I probably have quite a lot in common.”

  Shon was surprised. Captain Lynx, the face of Fraxian legacy, the second most popular Fraxian next to XetaGen Technologies’s Theo Xeta, had just acknowledged his potential. Shon stared introspectively. Could he also become someone as great as Captain Lynx?

  As Shon and Zora left the crowd, they were met with stares of envy. As for Shon, whatever frustration he had felt earlier on the train was completely gone.

  On closer thought, however, it was not typical for Stormrunner celebrities to come to the Exam. Why wasn’t Squad Osprey fighting storms on the frontline?

  “Zora, did you feel like this year’s Exam was a little odd?” Shon asked.

  “Now that you speak of it, the written test was certainly… different,” said Zora. “Not that it was hard. But it seemed more practical.”

  Shon thought about it. A different test meant a new set of standards for selecting Stormrunners. This could only mean one thing.

  “The situation with the storms must have changed,” Shon muttered. “That’s why they are changing the tests.”

  Zora nodded. Shon remembered the earlier radio broadcast about Thiab. Perhaps the recent storms in the Northern Provinces had prompted a reassessment. Or perhaps there were bigger threats not yet announced.

  Before Shon could finish his thoughts, he arrived at the room for the thermal transfer test. Just as he had predicted, this test had also become different.

  Typically, the thermal transfer test involved extinguishing and re-igniting a single flame. It was a test of concentration and brute force. However, this time, instead of a lamp in the middle, there was a matrix of eighteen by eighteen candles, each spaced a foot apart. A few dozen candles were alight, while others remained untouched.

  “Candidate, please take your position.”

  Shon walked into the center of the candle matrix, now resembling a blend of spellcasting circle and chess board. From his position, the candles extended in every direction, their juxtaposed flames weaving together a glowing geometric pattern.

  Upon closer observation, however, Shon noticed that each candle flame danced at their own pace, their geometry mutating rapidly from one shape to another, never repeating the same pattern twice.

  This revealed thermal instability in the atmosphere. In the past, the test only used stable air currents. More predictable molecular trajectories meant easier thermal manipulation. This time, however, dozens of warm and cool currents jumbled together in the atmosphere. Some collided with each other and parted ways, while others swallowed their neighbors. Every few seconds, one stream would die out, and another two would form. The entire atmosphere was a shapeshifting mesh, enveloping Shon and the surrounding candles, folding and molding the flame patterns into arbitrary structures.

  “Candidate, as you may have noticed, our machines are pumping out air streams of random directions and temperatures. In this environment, you will need to extinguish or reignite candles according to our instruction.”

  Shon noticed a large thermo screen hanging off the ceiling. There were three lines, supposedly where the mathematical equations would go. For every round, Shon had fifteen seconds to solve the system of equations, locate the corresponding candles, and ignite them while extinguishing all others.

  Shon reflected on these new exam components. The complex air currents and the candle matrix were likely emulating a sandstorm. This, combined with the weird essay question earlier, all seemed to scream that the Republic was now looking for Stormrunners with practical skills.

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  But why the sudden shift? Shon’s worry grew beyond his personal future. Could it mean something bad would happen to the nation? To his family?

  The clock buzzed, signifying the start of the exam.

  Numbers and equations flashed on the screen. At one glimpse, Shon could tell they were components of the Storm Equations, the mathematical model Stormrunners used to identify weak points in storms. Without a second thought, Shon dived into his headspace, pulling apart each equation and realigning the variables. As a striker candidate, he specialized in pinpointing the exact location and size of a storm nucleus within a wide probabilistic distribution. This part of the Storm Equations that carried involved straightforward computation, but it demanded extreme precision within incredibly tight time constraints.

  Shon was right. This candle matrix was an abstraction of the storms. Lighting the target candles represented dealing the fatal blow to the storm nucleus.

  He worked through the equations steadily in his mind. With his eyes closed, he let the graphs of each function float around him. He picked one up and layered it on top of another. Then again. And again. And there it was, the magical point of intersection, the array of coordinates representing the target candles.

  However, the real challenge was extinguishing and reigniting the flames.

  With only a few seconds left on the clock, Shon swept through the candles in a few broad strokes, extinguishing rows of candles at a time. However, he made a mistake, and a couple of candles in the target coordinates were put out.

  Shit, Shon cussed quietly. Extinguishing a candle was easy, reigniting one required way more energy. Shon scraped together the residue heat from the recently extinguished candles, but like a paper bag caught in traffic, the heat had long dissipated into the web of unpredictable air currents.

  As one last desperate attempt, Shon grabbed onto the heat from a hot stream. He tried to bring it down to the candles, but a stream of cold air suddenly flew past and knocked the energy away, causing it to dissipate into the ambiance.

  The buzzer sounded.

  “Stage one failed.”

  Shon froze. How could he possibly complete all the tasks in fifteen seconds? There must be some mistake.

  However, Shon had no time to feel sorry for himself. The second stage began immediately.

  Shon jumped into action, but this time it was even harder. He had extinguished too many candles last round, and now he had to reignite some of them again. This required even more energy.

  Shon tried to optimize the problem. He transferred the existing flames to target locations before lighting up new candles. However, while this saved energy, the extra calculation took up more time in itself. Even after optimizing, Shon still had five candles to light up.

  Just like last time, the unpredictable current patterns knocked most of the thermal energy out of Shon’s grasp. He simply did not have the mental capacity to both transfer heat and dodge the rogue currents.

  The buzzer sounded. Shon failed again.

  He grew anxious. He did not know the exact number of rounds he could afford to fail, but he must be close to disqualification.

  Stage three. Stage four. Stage five. Shon failed every one of those. Either he had his heat killed by unseen currents, or he was too careful and ran out of time.

  This task was impossible. With each failure, thoughts gushed into his mind like water breaking through a dam. He thought about the life that awaited him should he fail the exam: moving to the rural frontier, working a minimum wage job, or maybe two. How could he face his mother — or the memories of his father — after returning to the same starting point they tried to escape from? He imagined facing his sister’s disappointment, telling her that despite her sacrifice of her own education to support him, he had still failed.

  As the thoughts raced in his head, he began involuntarily sending ripples of temperature fluctuation through the room, until it reached a point he could not ignore.

  Shon raised his hand.

  “I’d like to use my allotted break.”

  “Do you understand that this is the only break left for the remaining twenty rounds?” asked the examiner.

  “Yes.”

  “Granted, you have five minutes.”

  Shon took a deep breath. He spent the first thirty seconds readjusting his emotions. Like what they taught in the Academy, extreme emotion was the biggest killer of Stormrunners.

  Then Shon began reviewing his actions. Evidently, the old strategy caused him to run out of time every round. He backtracked every step. Performing the mental arithmetics was an inevitable step, and Shon knew that his mathematical capabilities already stood in the top percentiles. That meant he must develop a new strategy to reignite the flames.

  What could be more efficient than his current strategy? He had always transferred heat from one candle to another, lighting up the new candle while extinguishing the old one. Of course, some energy would always be lost in the process, as proven by the second law of thermodynamics.

  The second law of thermodynamics. Shon gasped. This was the key to this challenge!

  The second law of thermodynamics stated that the entropy of a closed system would naturally increase, meaning that elements inevitably tended toward disorder. It would be easy to scramble an egg, but it was virtually impossible to unscramble it back into yolk and whites.

  A sudden realization dawned on Shon. The entire environment, with its interweaving webs of hot and cold air currents, represented a disorderly system of high entropy. Shon’s attempts to separate certain streams of air were akin to isolating egg yolks out of a beaten egg. It was arduous if not impossible.

  If only he could follow the natural direction of entropy instead…

  The buzzer rang, signifying the end of his break. He didn’t calculate the details yet, but he had a rough sketch of a new strategy.

  Shon closed his eyes. As he was computing the target location, he also turned up his thermal sense. From a bird’s eye view, he observed the interweaving web of hot and cold air, like automobiles in a busy city.

  He latched onto one stream of air, letting it carry him through the traffic of air. He imagined that he was riding the same train he took earlier this morning, except he was not on one single train, but on all of them simultaneously. He felt the train accelerate, taking multiple loops around the city each second.

  As the air streams carried his senses around the room, he felt the flames on each candle flickering on and off, dousing the room in changing hues of yellow and red. In the center, the flames merged into a motion picture of illuminated geometry, like fiery constellations blinking in the dark of night. Shadows raced along the walls, combining, dividing, waning, and growing every moment.

  From every position at once, Shon targeted one single stream of air. He found himself on the train this morning again, soaring past the junctions of traffic. He thought about the damp, musty air. He thought about Zora. He thought about the Valerian construction workers and the little Fraxian girl.

  Right when the train soared past his stop, he took a leap of faith, literally. He aimed his focus at the target and let everything implode at once. A surge of heatwave engulfed the entire room. Then everything calmed as quickly as they began.

  He opened his eyes. He ignited every target candle except for one.

  Shon smiled. It was imperfect, but much better than before.

  Suddenly, the examiners called for a technical pause. A few examiners came in and replaced a few candles. As they disposed of the old candles, Shon noticed that their glass holders were marred by dark scorch marks. A few of them were completely burnt to a crisp

  “Damn son,” One of them patted Shon on the shoulder. “I don’t know, but you completely torched those candles.”

  Shon felt confidence rising again in him. While this new way of thermal transfer was unlike anything taught at the Academy, he was confident he could learn to control it.

  He closed his eyes. The buzzer sounded. He dived in again. At the second buzzer, he opened his eyes.

  This time, it worked perfectly.

  And it worked again. And again. In fact, he passed every single round after with perfect precision.

  As Shon was about to depart the room, he heard a man laugh. The man clapped slowly as he approached Shon.

  The man was tall with shoulder-length hair. His glowing orange eyes sat behind what seemed like an ordinary pair of glasses, but Shon could see small gadgets retrofitted on top. In fact, every piece of accessory he wore, from his watch to his chains, resembled some instrument from the future.

  Shon had seen that face too many times, on billboards, magazine covers, and even propaganda posters. It was Theo Xeta — inventor, philanthropist, the first Fraxian billionaire, and the CEO of XetaGen Technologies, Inc.

  “Good job. Few managed to pass my test, especially not the way you did,” said Theo Xeta, extending a hand. “I’m Theo, by the way.”

  “I’m Shon,” said Shon, trying hard not to stammer like he did earlier. “Wow, Mr. Xeta… I didn’t know you’d be here!”

  “Just Theo, please,” Theo Xeta smiled. “Now I know I’m not allowed to interact with candidates, but I must tell you, I’m very impressed.”

  “Thank you, sir. I mean, Theo,” said Shon, trying hard to search for words but failing to find any.

  “I will not interrupt you any further, Shon,” said Theo. “Best of luck to you.”

  Shon walked away from the testing room with a dreamy smile. He couldn’t believe it. It was Theo Xeta, the pride of the Fraxians! Like what his mom had told him over and over again, Theo Xeta was the embodiment of the Fraxian dream.

  However, Xeta’s presence, combined with that of Squad Osprey earlier, further confirmed Shon’s suspicion. Something was different this year. He was dying to figure out what it was. However, with the time constraints, he could neither investigate this mystery nor indulge himself in triumph.

  Still undergoing heavy and mental fatigue, Shon stepped into the next testing room, bracing himself for what was rumored to be the most psychologically daunting challenge — the test of political loyalty.