Page 98 of Gemini Kings
“Nice job, Romeo,” Racetrack drawls. “You always this fly? Looks to me like you’re 0 for 2 in the romance game.”
This is some obscure American sporting reference, but I grasp the gist. She is Mogadon like Vasili, she is not even a telepath, but she has eyes, and she has lived with these warlocks and their heats.
Still, I feel compelled to defend myself and my masculinity from this implied slur.
“I have done nothing to him,” I mutter, resentful.
“Yeah, riiiiight.” She snorts. “Yet.You’re hot for him. Just like almost everyone else around here’s hot for him. And he just smelled it on you.”
“I amnot—”
“Oh, for shit’s sake.” She pops her gum and rolls her eyes. “Don’t bother with the whole denial thing. Believe me, I knowallthe signs. Too bad he’s not into you, huh? Heat or no heat.”
Suddenly I find I cannot meet her knowing gaze.
Around me, my fellow students hiss and snigger. They are still pale-faced and hollow-eyed from their sleepless night, but I feel no guilt. I myself have not slept, but I am no stranger to exhaustion.
This entire Academy situation is not comfortable, but I am no stranger to discomfort.
Once my new classmates decide they hate me more than they fear me, this situation will become dangerous.
But I am no stranger to that either.
Doggedly I keep my gaze pinned to the old-fashioned blackboard. There are no computers on this island, not even a functioning cell phone, due to the magical wards that guard this Academy and conceal its existence from the mortal world. Blackboards and journals and dusty spell books are the norm here. But I do not mind.
If not for these hostile students, I might be able to find this place… pleasant. In time, I might even find it delightful.
But I am not likely to be tolerated here long enough for that.
If I am not expelled for my own misconduct, my Lady Mother will surely find some way to ruin me.
Carefully I pretend that I understand this frail witch with the steely voice and the cloud of white curls spiraling down her straight back who now returns to teaching this class. She is demonstrating the genetics behind the Theory of Genetic Exhaustion, which tries to explain why the population of the witching world is slowly dwindling.
But I am struggling to follow the science.
I understood Lucius better in our History of Witchcraft class. He spoke of other theories behind the arcane races’ near-extinction, and I was able to follow much of this, despite never having set foot in a formal classroom in my life. I paid particular attention to the Theory of Royal Culpability, which blames our endangered species status on the weakness of our ruling queens. They are weakened despite centuries, if not millennia, of inbreeding.
This situation is just as Zara says. All the great witching families are inbred now, in our desperate effort to preserve the last frail threads of witchcraft that linger in our arcane DNA.
At least this theory is less far-fetched than the competing theory that we spring from alien races who visited Earth in the time of the Roman Empire. The Theory of Royal Culpability is the theory I have always believed.
When Zara ascends her throne, we will halt the witching world’s decline. Somehow. And my dwindling clan of dragon shifters will be reborn.
Now, however, with this Genetic Exhaustion business, we are on difficult terrain. This professor is scribing endless rows of letters across the board with her chalk stylus, she is droning on about transcribing DNA into RNA and translating RNA into protein and how these phenomena apply to the witching world. I know this class is important, because witchcraft is an inherited trait. We have always bred for it.
But with all this talk of dominants and recessives and mutations, I am at an utter loss.
“In accordance with the central dogma,” Mistress Agrippina lectures at a louder pitch that somehow seems meant for me and the inattentive Racetrack in the back, “adenine transcribes to thymine, and guanine transcribes to cytosine…”
She might as well be speaking ancient Greek.
Dragons are gifted with languages, but this is not a language I know. I am fighting to conceal my confusion and frustration and incipient panic, because if I cannot master this material, I know I will not be permitted to remain here on this island with my sovereign. I will be sent home to my Lady Mother where, of all possible places, I do not wish to go.
I know nothing of science, nothing of genetics. Yet I am reluctant to reveal my ignorance.
In my world, ignorance is never tolerated.
It is punished.
