Dedication (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 1) by McCullough Crawford

light of the fluorescents. Jon can't help but notice this, however he quickly peers down the hall towards the window, hoping that she didn’t notice him looking at her. She is not the kind of beauty who would generally attract ogling stares as she walked down the street, but there is a certain vitality and precision in the way she moves that, to his surprise, grabs Jon’s attention and holds it hostage. From the few lectures he attended at the beginning of the semester, he can’t seem to remember her face or name, but now that they are in the confines of his office, he can feel her presence in a potently memorable way.
    Fortunately as his eyes search, he can just barely see the window over a row of filing cabinets. Unfortunately, however, his brief daydream of sunlight is only fantasy. The real first snow of the season is starting to fall; small flakes are beginning to drift. If he had access to a window overlooking the rest of campus, he’d be able to see a cloud front mounting the top of the school's stadium, its shadow creeping over the many buildings of the campus. Before he can get too lost in the beauty of the first snow, or before the young woman before him—he now remembers her name as Sara when he glances at the top of her assignment where it is written neatly—can ask another question on the homework, his view of the outside world is blocked by large dark shadow, backlit by the light in the hall. Jon’s reverie is broken by an exclamation.
    “Dude!”
    “Hey Ryan, what are you up to?” Jon asks, wishing his friend would calm it down a bit some of the time.
    “You gotta come see this, like half the campus has gone nuts,” Ryan explains as he wades into the room, his shoulders brushing both sides of the door frame and his hat nearly knocked off by the top. Without even seeming to notice that there are papers on the corner of Jon's desk, he takes a seat and leans down so that he’s closer to his friend’s face before continuing in a very loud whisper.
    “So, I’ve been reading some of the underground news feeds, and they’ve been talking up some crazy stuff. There has been like this whole government conspiracy thing where they are arresting and detaining kids all over the country and forcing them to work in labor camps, and then they are trying to brainwash all of us other ones through the school system so we willingly become their slaves. And the whole government is controlled by like this family, and they are in league with a bunch of other governments to keep all the people under their control, but the families that run the government also run all the corporations. Man they're like trying to control our lives, turn us into their slaves or something. And there are a whole bunch of people protesting it over in the main quad. There are like thousands, it’s going to turn into a riot real soon. You should come, it’s going to be awesome.”
    Jon sits there, digesting his friend’s long breathless rant. He tries to make sense of it all for a minute before giving up and falling back on his default answer.
    “You know I'd love go, but I've got to get this work done, and I still have office hours for the next half hour, so I can't leave yet,” he says, indicating Sara, who is now looking up from her calculations.
    Ryan swivels on the desk top, catching a few more papers and sending them drifting down to the floor, the pages looking like the snowflakes drifting down outside. Once his shoulder-length ginger curls slow their swinging, he tosses them back and tucks them behind his ears.
    “My dear, I’m sorry for the intrusion, I’d hate to have interrupted the valuable knowledge my friend here was imparting to you,” he says with what sounds like sincerity, but the twinkle in his eye betrays him. And then he winks, as if to destroy any remaining credibility of his last statement. “And pardon my tirade, generally I am quite sane and only occasionally lapse into the mentality of a deranged conspiracy