Achilles de Flandres - Ender's Shadow

Ender's Shadow

Near the beginning of the series, Achilles is established as an enemy of one of the main characters, Julian "Bean" Delphiki, another citizen of Rotterdam. Both Achilles and Bean are considered for Battle School, the training ground for Earth's interstellar military; Bean is accepted, but Achilles is deemed too unstable and violent. Achilles is later sent to Battle School simply as a test for Bean: Colonel Graff wants to see how Bean will deal with the resurfacing of his old nemesis from Rotterdam. It is suggested that Achilles is not aware at this point that Bean thinks him an enemy, as he is not aware that Bean knows he killed Bean's friend, Poke. Bean tricks Achilles into a trap in an air shaft, forcing him to confess to all his murders onto a recorded tape, which Bean shows to the school's administrators. This results in Achilles' expulsion and placement in a mental institution. Bean hopes that with his confession to his murders made public, Achilles would be confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life, unable to hurt anyone ever again.

The teachers remark on the irony that Bean, the street urchin boy who struggled for his life on the streets of Rotterdam, ends his problems nonviolently, while Ender Wiggin, a similar child with a stable, fairly comfortable middle class upbringing from the United States, kills the boy who attacks him in the bathroom, defeating his enemies so they will never be able to attack him again. Bean eventually becomes an assistant to Ender and a hero of the Third Invasion.

At the end of the novel, it is revealed that a mental institution was compromised by the Second Warsaw Pact in an attempt to gain the mind of the ex-Battle School student. Three security guards were dead, but all of the escaped prisoners are accounted for save one: Achilles.