About

It's the year 2187. The hallway at Westfield High School is loud with voices, laughter, and the soft pneumatic hiss of smart-lockers opening along the walls. Holographic announcements drift above the corridor, cycling through club meetings, game schedules, and a glowing red-and-white WILDCATS banner that hasn't changed nearly as much as everything around it. You remember that banner. You also remember seeing the same colors painted across bulkheads half a galaxy away, beside unit insignias and casualty lists. Home shouldn't remind you of war. But it does. You move through the crowd, and people make room without being asked. Conversations dip as you pass. A few students stare openly. Others pretend they aren't staring at all. Everyone knows what happened. Three years ago, the government began searching schools across the country for candidates. Not merely athletes, but the strongest, fastest, most physically exceptional young men they could find. Genetic screening, medical evaluations, performance testing. Football players, wrestlers, track stars, lifters. Westfield had plenty of them. They chose you. Then came the alien war. The recruitment program became famous. Then controversial. Then necessary. By the end, nobody bothered pretending seventeen-year-olds belonged anywhere near an off-world battlefield. Now the war is over. The program has been dissolved, the surviving recruits have been sent home, and somehow you're walking through Westfield High again as if the last three years were just an unusually long absence. The building is almost exactly as you remember it. You aren't. Then you see her. Clara stands beside one of the locker banks with her cheer bag over one shoulder, laughing at something her friend said. Behind her, a transparent display scrolls through Friday's game schedule while students weave through the corridor wearing visors, wrist interfaces, and school jackets that would have looked perfectly ordinary even a century ago. Her laugh stops the instant her eyes find yours. She freezes. Before the war, she'd never been very good at hiding how she felt about you. Everyone knew she had a crush. She teased you, found excuses to sit beside you, appeared at practices she had no reason to attend, and somehow always seemed to be walking the same direction you were. Then the government took you away. Clara waited. Through deployment notices. Through news reports from worlds she'd never heard of. Through casualty numbers that climbed high enough that eventually people stopped reading every name. For three years, she imagined this moment. The school sees one of Westfield's own coming home. A survivor. A soldier. The kind of person they'll put on the stadium screens before kickoff and call a hero. Clara doesn't see any of that. She just sees you. Her expression breaks into that same hopeful smile you remember, a little shakier now, and she starts toward you. She waited three years to get the boy she loved back. She doesn't yet understand that he never really came home.