The Hidden Princess At All-Boys Alpha Academy

Chapter 98

Jackson works hard for a smile when he sees my reaction to my story, though he kind of fails at it. “I take it,” he murmurs, “that you have parents? And you like them?”

“Well, yeah, Jacks!” I reply, staring wide–eyed into his face. “They’re kind of great!”

Jackson laughs a little, tightening his arms around me. “Well, if you don’t know that parents are a thing, you don’t really notice them missing, do you?”

I tilt my head, considering this, as Jackson goes on with his story, telling me about being a little boy growing up in a Community and sleeping in what was essentially a bunkhouse full of little boys just like him. The youngest babies, he knew, were raised in a nursery, and every year a new batch of boys was brought to the bunk house when they were very young.

And from that young age, they were trained to fight.

“Just every morning,” Jackson murmurs, his face distant as he remembers, “we’d troop out of the bunkhouse and get to work running, learning to fight, sparring with each other.” He shrugs. “It wasn’t so bad. As we got older, the guys who weren’t as good at it they stopped. coming to practice and I’d see them out in the fields and stuff, or training for a new job. But, I mean, I was…good at it. So. I just kept going.”

–

“You could see them?” I ask, trying to picture this world. “But not…talk to them?”

“The bunk house was for men and boys in warrior training,” Jackson explains, turning his face back to me. “If you were sorted out of that, you…moved to another bunk house, I guess. I could see our little community- the main part of it, with the council house, and the mess hall. And the women’s barracks, too.”

My eyebrows raise at this but I press my lips together, wanting him to tell the story any way he wants to. He notices, though, and smiles.

“Yeah, the women lived all together too. And we could see them, from where we lived on top of the hill.”

“But weren’t you curious?” I breathe, fascinated.

“Of course we were,” he laughs, smiling at me. “Especially as we grew older and noticed them more. In a different way. But you have to understand it was forbidden. We were taught our roles very, very well, and we were never, ever supposed to talk to anyone in town, especially the women.”

I shake my

especially by the fact that these kinds of attitudes towards gendered difference and communal living exist within my own nation. It sounds, like anything, more Atalaxian than native to Moon Valley.

to judge? Just because Jackson grew up differently than me…does that honestly make

you happy there, Jackson?” I ask, my voice worried. Because while I desperately want him to have been…I just don’t see how a little boy could be, growing

whispers, shaking his shaggy head, and I raise my hands to his face, stroking his cheeks with my thumbs and murmuring soft nothings. “But you have to understand…I didn’t know anything else. I didn’t even know I was unhappy for…for a long time. I thought that was

have

–

still live there Cristof and Zachary. I spent pretty much every day of my life with them until I left. They were…well, they were the best

Jackson talk for days about

–

he hesitates now, glancing away, and I can see that he’s suddenly measuring his loyalty to the Community against his new loyalty to

wait, trying to be patient, letting him decide what to tell.

“New fighting techniques, new technologies. And then, when I’ve

O

to….desert. To go back and teach the Community what I

hands again taking fistfuls of his shirt, suddenly terrified by the idea that he’s going to leave and go back to that…that place.

Jackson just laughs and shakes his head. “Don’t worry,” he murmurs, leaning forward and pressing a kiss to first one of my cheeks, and then

I say, surprised, even as the tension lessens in my shocked muscles. “Why not?”

murmurs, “I learned….enough, in the few months that I lived in Capital, to understand that what they’re doing is…well, I mean, it’s a cult, right?

–

against him, wanting to fix it all –

I don’t know…anything about having a family,” he murmurs, raising his eyes to mine. “But I do know that if I had found you, somehow, when I lived there? They…they wouldn’t have let me keep you wouldn’t even have let me see you.

back.”

as I see that his own heart is broken with the realization. And I’m overwhelmed, suddenly, with the strength it must have