"Attention all cadets," buzzed the PA system. "Roll call will begin on the training grounds in two minutes. Those who are tardy without an excuse will be punished!"

At roll call, the young men and women lined up dressed in uniform: tailored suits emblazoned with a crest on the breast pocket. The Golden Day Academy was designed to attract certain kinds of young people: the starry-eyed and privileged idealist, and the high school dropouts who had either this or factory work and chose the former. Michael was somewhere in between: an optimistic dropout having never even touched a real gun before despite growing up in the poorest part of Marygrove. What possessed him to think he could be a cop was anyone's guess.

A long plastic table was positioned at the edge of the training ground, and at roll call, the students were lined up to submit yesterday's homework to be graded on the spot by a large metal box. The long procession of students, each with a navy blue folder clutched in their trembling fingers, all awaiting the moment they reached the front of the line, where an administrator sat with clipboard in hand.

With a lit cigarette casting a hellish glow upon her carnivorous jawline and cheekbones, she let out a billowing stack of human vapor. At least, that's what it looked like. There was an inhuman lack of variance in her movements, the way she would pace herself between drags, or the way her pupils would hardly budge as she peered through a person's skin. Her immaculate navy blue peacoat's sharp lapels licked the tip of her chin. One could only imagine what she was hiding under there: gears, circuits, another head. And she kept her fiery red-orange hair wrapped in a tight bun on the top of her head, with bangs like curtains plummeting down her brow like the kind seen in a theater, to hide the horns of course. They descended upon her oblong-shaped gloomy orbitals like those of a grim bringer of death. She had tiny brown freckles that glared into you, the many eyes of an arachnid; a pale bottom lip in which she kept her fangs holstered, and a long, sleek neck that could probably unhinge and stretch, and maybe even expand depending on how large the prey was.

The next cadet stepped forward. The administrator took the folder out of her hands and examined its contents, cautiously scanning the pages and double-checking the assignment listed before feeding it into the machine and recording the grade that was outputted on the monitor. All the while, the girl's eyes remained focused on the machine. Finally, the administrator scribbled something on her clipboard and set her pen down.

"86. Thank you. I hope you have a golden day. Next, please."

Another cadet stepped forward, trembling as the council secretary hesitated to record anything on her clipboard. Instead, with cold, discerning eyes she scanned the cadet's face, and then the monitor, and then back to the cadet's face. Each time, she beamed a subtle ray of heat that compelled another sweat gland to burst and pour down the cadet's neck. She whispered something to her larger companion who stood behind her.

"Step out of line, please," he bellowed to the cadet.

Like a startled rodent, the cadet began to squeak. "I'm sorry, I couldn't finish my assignment, I—"

"Step out of line," roared the behemoth. The cadet did as he was told finally, though his knees nearly collapsed before reaching the gate to hoist himself up.

"Damn, looks like somebody's busted," someone from behind Michael snickered.

"That's gonna be you next, Walters, I'm telling you you're wrong on the homework. How did you get 49 on number 10?"

"I did it like twice. It's 49. How did you get 343?"

"Because I'm not slow like you. Everyone knows you were supposed to cube it there, not square it."

"Uzoma, what did you get?"

"343."

"Yes!" The cadet behind him double-pumped his fist while the other slumped.

"Bro. I dropped out of school to avoid calculus. When am I ever gonna use any of this when I'm out in the field?"

"It's not just because it's calculus. It's ballistics and logic reasoning," explained Michael. "The facts in number ten were full of red herrings. In order to get the correct answer, you would've had to have successfully identified the shooter. The problem is, in this case, the observer is unreliable because he was distracted. He can't stop looking at the man twenty-six feet away. He's already profiled him, he doesn't like the way he looks. He's counting the minutes since his accomplice disappeared to the bathroom. Seventeen and a half minutes. He eyes the pistol holstered on the right hip. He's eating primarily with his right hand because he assumes he's right-handed, and therefore it would've actually been quite a clumsy thing to reach across the body to unholster the weapon. The safety isn't even off. How does the criminal win the draw? I'm guessing most people got the wrong shooter, because the angle of the entry wound makes it clearly impossible. The victim in the prompt didn't even consider there could be two doors to the bathroom, one accessible to the customer and another accessed from the kitchen. The victim was shot by the accomplice, but his narrow-minded assessment of the situation made him target the wrong guy."

Michael handed his folder to the administrator. As the monitor displayed a number, the administrator flatly declared, "97. Excellent work, Mr. Uzoma. You must really be striving for valedictorian."

"Eh," he said, scratching his head and blushing. "I think I just understood last night's material pretty well."

"Well, keep it up, Mr. Uzoma. Next, please."

He put his head down as he paced up the steep steps of the academy building. He let out a beleaguered sigh as he lazily fiddled with his combination lock on his locker. At the bottom sat his gym bag.

"If only I was as good at every subject as I was at logic reasoning."

His first class of the day was combat training. The instructor blew the whistle, prompting the cadets that he had paired to line up in front of each other.

"Alright, boys, I'm grading you on technique and efficiency, neutralize, don't pulverize," said the instructor.

Michael raised his feeble hand.

"Yeah?"

"Can I take the zero, sir?" He could hear the outburst of snickering just behind him.

"No, you can't take a goddamn zero, Uzoma. Why even ask that? Ask me that again, and I'll beat your ass myself."

His opponent, Reese, sneered as he eagerly cracked his dense, freckled knuckles. "This is gonna be the easiest 'A' I ever got at this academy. Thanks, Uzoma."

The instructor blew his whistle again. Before Michael could blink, Reese was on top of him, crashing into him like a football player. He raised his hands in front of his face, but they offered little protection as a wrecking ball of a fist tore past his fingers like paper towel before blasting him in the nose.

Michael spun over, halfway wincing in pain, halfway trying to steady his vision and climb back to his feet. Reese came down on him, pummeling him as he kicked and flailed like a helpless child.

"Enough," groaned the instructor.

"Neutralized," mumbled Reese, as he dug his knee into Michael's stomach one more time just to see him react in agony. Then he slid off of him and returned to the line of cadets behind them.

Finally, Michael gathered the strength to sit up and wipe the blood from his mouth and clutch his sore stomach. He held his pink palm out in front of his face, blackened by ash and dust mixed with sticky blood, but as he looked into the face of his instructor with one eye half-closed, his instructor would not help him up. Instead, he turned away from him, shaking his head.

"What a fucking joke," he growled. "Next."