Alex tried to discreetly wipe the palms of his hands on the sides of his jeans. He was more than nervous — he felt like an animal on display at the zoo. He was sitting on an overstuffed leather couch on one side of the crowded office, and arrayed in a rough semi-circle facing him were Michael, an attractive woman wearing an Angel’s t-shirt named Rebecca, and two men he hadn’t met before, a pleasant-looking blond man named Alistair, and an older guy named Gaul, who had Mitsuru’s strange red eyes and an even icier demeanor. It was cold in the room, since Alistair and Gaul had insisted that Rebecca open a window if she was going to smoke. All of them seemed to have nothing better to do than stare at him while Rebecca ‘prepared’.
Whatever Rebecca’s preparations were, from where Alex sat, it looked quite a bit as if she’d gone to sleep, half-smiling, her head cocked to one side, as if she were about to say something.
“Alex, right?” Alistair said his name oddly, as if it were in doubt. “He doesn’t look like much.”
“Hey!” Alex objected, confused. “I’m right here, you know.”
“Alistair,” Rebecca said warningly, eyes still closed.
“Well, he doesn’t, anyone can see that,” Alistair said sullenly, folding his arms across his chest and ignoring Alex’s defiant glare.
“Don’t be a brat,” Rebecca scolded, then opened her eyes and smiled at Alex. “Just ignore him, hon, okay?”
Alex managed a nod. He was now feeling pretty resentful, on top of everything else. Who in the hell was this Alistair guy anyway? And why did he look so disappointed in him? He hadn’t even had the chance to do anything yet!
“We should start soon,” Gaul said. “I don’t want this to become public knowledge, and the longer all of us spend in the same room, the greater the likelihood that someone will notice.”
“Alex, stick with us for a minute longer,” Michael said, nodding at him. “Gaul, you know that these things can’t be rushed.”
“It’s cool,” Rebecca said, kicking her sandals off. “I’m ready anyway. Alex, I bet you don’t mind if we skip the introductions, right? We already know each other.”
“Yeah, but, why is that? Why do I feel like I know you?”
“Empathy, Alex,” Rebecca said, walking across the office to sit down next to him on the couch. “I’m an empath. My name is Rebecca.”
Alex flinched and shifted away from her a bit. The crushed leather cushions seemed equally uncomfortable no matter what part of the couch he sat on.
“Are you making me trust you right now, or something?”
Rebecca chuckled good-naturedly.
“I don’t think you would have flinched away from me if I was making you trust me, Alex,” she said, amused. “It’s actually the other way around. As an empath, I inadvertently make my own emotional state public knowledge. So you feel like you know me,” she said, shrugging, “because on an unconscious level, you already do. Your reptile brain already knows everything it needs to know about me. You trust me because I am trustworthy, Alex. You like me because I am extremely likable.”
Alistair snorted.
“Keep ignoring him,” Rebecca told Alex, patting him on the knee. “I’ve already told you what you need to know about me, Alex, down where it matters. You know that, right?”
Alex nodded slowly.
“I do, actually,” he said, with a touch of uncertainty.
Rebecca smiled at him approvingly, pulling her hair back into a quick ponytail and wrapping it in a rubber band. Alex couldn’t quite figure her out — her accent was definitely Southern Californian, and she looked a bit Latino, but there was something about the way she spoke, something a bit exotic about her appearance that he couldn’t place. She was right, though — he found her immediately likable, and utterly without guile in her frankness. Also, she was pretty, but she didn’t make him nervous at all, even when she sat close to him on the couch, like she was right now, even in front of the strangely intense audience that sat directly across the room, staring at them as if they expected to be entertained.
Actually, Alex thought, that part might be the whole empath thing.
“Okay, that’s good. I’m sure you have a whole bunch of questions, and I promise I’ll do my best to answer them later. But, if you are okay with it, I’d like to move on to our main business.” Rebecca folded her legs underneath her, Indian-style, so that she faced him on the couch, her bare toes pressing against the leg of his jeans. “Michael has told you that you are special, right?”
Alistair made another coughing, choking noise, but neither Alex nor Rebecca acknowledged it.
“I guess so,” Alex said reluctantly. “I’ve got some kind of power, right?”
“More like potential, right now,” Rebecca said, nodding. “And today, I’d like to activate those abilities, Alex. I’d like to wake up that power of yours, and find out what you can do. And I’d like to help make it possible for you to use it. What do you think about that?”
Gaul glanced irritably at his watch, but didn’t dare interrupt. To the best of his knowledge, Rebecca had never lost her temper with anyone at the Academy. But that didn’t keep Gaul, along with the rest of the campus, from treading very lightly when it came to potentially upsetting Rebecca. That was probably a side effect of her empathic abilities, he thought, and not something to actually be worried about. But he didn’t plan to find out by hurrying her.
Not that it seemed as if it mattered, anyway. Rebecca was talking to Alex in a calm, reasonable voice, her face open and reassuring, and her hand resting casually over his own. Neither of them seemed to be aware of the staring onlookers, crowded into the small office.
“I’m a bit scared,” Alex said, surprised and a bit embarrassed by his honesty. “But, I want to know whatever there is to know.”
Rebecca lifted his hand up, and clutched it between her own, smiling beatifically at him.
“I have your permission, then, right?” She asked the boy, his eyes already drooping. “I promise to take good care of you.”
“Okay,” Alex said, his speech a bit slurred, his eyes half-closed, “okay.”
Rebecca smiled and squeezed his hand, then set it neatly down on his thigh. She reached forward and ran one hand across his face, gently closing his eyes.
“Would you like to lie down, Alex?” Rebecca asked, speaking so softly that Gaul had to lean forward to hear it. She patted her crossed legs cheerfully. “You can use my lap.”
Alex obediently lay his head down in her lap, facing up toward the ceiling, his legs bent over the arm of the couch and dangling a few inches off the ground. His eyes were closed, and his face had an almost disturbing calm to it, as if he had been washed unnaturally clean of all concerns, an involuntary Buddha. Rebecca bent over him, her eyes shut, one arm draped across his chest, her other hand pressed against his forehead.
“Okay,” she said, her voice sounding very animated. “Okay, he’s down and I’m in. And, oh my, this is very strange…”
“Rebecca? Is something wrong? Are you alright?”
Rebecca nodded shortly, her face flushed and red, her brow wet with sweat.
“Yeah, I’m okay, but touching this kid, you understand,” she said, breathing heavily. “It’s incandescent, the effect he has. This is a tremendous power. We’re going to need to be very careful about who he comes in contact with, here at the Academy. I can barely manage it.”
Gaul and Michael both shifted in their seats and leaned forward, while Alistair rolled his eyes.
“What’s his story? What makes Alexander tick?”
“Guilt.” Rebecca’s reply was prompt, definite. “Barely contained anger. A tremendous sense of unfairness, resentment of the most general kind. Tremendous guilt.”
“Did he actually kill his family?”
“She’s an empath, Michael,” Alistair said scornfully. “All she knows is how he feels about it. You want to find out something about that kid, ask me.”
Gaul pushed his glasses back up on his brow, glancing over at Alistair disapprovingly.
“That’s enough, Alistair,” Gaul said mildly.
Alistair gave Gaul a challenging glare, but settled back in his chair.
“Did he kill them?”
Michael continued his questions with an almost placid patience.
“Hard to say,” Rebecca admitted, biting her lower lip. “He certainly thinks so, but I can’t find any specific memory of it. Maybe Alistair’s right. Maybe you need a better telepath.”
“Personally, I’m not so much concerned as to what he did or didn’t do,” Gaul said mildly, “but rather how he feels about it now. How likely it is that we are going to have a reoccurrence of that sort of behavior?”
“Well, he only had one family, right?”
“This is weird, guys. I think I’m going to need Alistair’s help after all,” Rebecca said, her brow furrowed with concern. “Because unless I’m reading this wrong, this kid has been tampered with. Extensively.”
Alistair stopped pouting and gave Gaul an inquiring look, getting a small nod in response. Alistair closed his eyes, his hands hanging loosely between his legs, as his entire body went slack. There was a long silence, while Michael and Gaul looked from Rebecca to Alistair and then back.
“She’s right,” Alistair affirmed muddily, his face creased with effort. “This kid’s been manipulated. Tampering doesn’t even begin to describe the extent of it. Every prominent memory has been altered — maybe even manufactured. The manipulation is so widespread, I don’t even know how to make a determination between what’s genuine and what’s been messed with.”
Alistair shook his head and opened his eyes. Gaul looked worried, but Michael had a look of grim satisfaction on his face.
“I thought so,” he said softly, nodding, his dreadlocks shaking with the movement, “From the first time I talked to him, I suspected as much. How could someone have such minimal feeling about such a traumatic event?”
“There is guilt, pathos, rage, all of what you’d expect,” Rebecca allowed, “but not with the depth of feeling that I’d have anticipated. Nor do I see any kind of introspection — he doesn’t return to these memories, not even in dreams. And they are so hazy…”
“They must’ve been damaged by the manipulation,” Alistair agreed, holding one hand to his forehead and wincing. “They are too faded for a kid his age. You’d think these memories were fifty years old. His head is a terrible mess — I already have a headache.”
Gaul leaned forward in his chair to peer at Alex. He appeared to be asleep, his face calm and composed, his brown hair smoothed back from his forehead where Rebecca rested her hand. He didn’t appear to be dangerous, or damaged, but Gaul had worked with children long enough to know that you couldn’t tell the dangerous ones by looking at them.
“Gaul,” Alistair said, his eyes still hidden by his hand, “that night Mitsuru found him — it wasn’t only the circumstances that were manipulated. This kid himself, he was part of the set up, too.”
Gaul nodded, looking at Alex a bit sadly as he did so.
“There is no doubt of it. Whatever trap has been laid for us, and whoever was responsible for it, Alex Warner is a part of that trap.” Gaul shook his head. “This makes his presence in the Academy all the more problematic.”
“He isn’t a kid,” Alistair said gloomily, “he’s a bomb.”
“No,” Michael said quietly, “he’s a child and a bomb.”
“Um, hello? I’m getting a bit tired, here. Do you want me to activate this kid, or what?”
Gaul considered for a moment, ignoring Michael and Alistair’s stares.
“We’ve come this far,” he said, his bloodshot eyes glinting red under the lights, his smile sad and reluctant. “Let’s find out what has been left to us. Even if young Alex is as you say, well, it isn’t only about where the bomb is. It’s about when it goes off, and who’s standing next to it.”
He shrugged dismissively, the ghost of a smile playing about his thin lips.
“Do it, Rebecca. Activate him.”
Alex woke up slowly, his awareness returning to him piece by piece, a little like waking up after a night of serious drinking, but without as much immediate pain. First, he felt the soft cotton sheets bunched in his hands, and realized he was in a bed. And not his own, unless someone had replaced his institutional bedding with high-thread count sheets and added a bunch of unnecessary pillows. It was warm, he realized, but not uncomfortable. He was lying on his back, his head propped up and his arms folded neatly over his stomach. Then he became aware of smells: some kind of incense, his own sweat, and then a hint of the soft, unmistakable scent of a girl’s hair coming from the pillow beneath his head.
So, he was in a girl’s bed. Alex thought briefly about opening his eyes, but he felt too tired to manage it. It seemed pleasant, anyway, lying there, in the softness and the cozy warmth of the bed, only languidly aware of his aching body. He felt strangely calm, almost blissful, immobile and safe.
Perhaps he fell back asleep then. He couldn’t be certain whether the sound of a lighter and then a protracted coughing fit merely jarred him from his reverie, or whether it actually woke him up again. The effect was the same, regardless — Alex was jolted from his placid contemplation into awareness of his situation, his body’s litany of aches and pains, and his presence in the strange bed. A strange girl’s bed. With a certain amount of trepidation, Alex opened his eyes.
The room was dim, as the shades had been drawn across the room’s single window, and only a sliver of the late afternoon sun made its way across the giant four-post bed that occupied much of the room’s available space. A pair of old-looking bureaus made of dark wood and a dresser topped with a muted television displaying commercials rounded out the furnishings. On the other side of the bed, wrapped in a red Anaheim Angels-branded blanket, Rebecca hacked and coughed sheepishly, red-faced, motioning for Alex to look away.
“Are you smoking pot?” Alex asked skeptically, sitting up against the headboard and attempting to extract his lower body from the tangle of sheets and blankets he was wrapped in. He seemed to have picked up a headache to accompany his body’s various pains at some point. “You are a seriously terrible role model.”
“Give me a break,” Rebecca croaked. “I have a headache. Anyway, it’s your fault.”
“What? How is that possibly my fault?”
Rebecca shrugged and reached over to the sideboard, retrieving a heavy blown-glass pipe and a cheap plastic lighter.
“Never mind. Do you smoke this stuff?”
Alex shook his head.
“Fine,” Rebecca said, putting the lighter to the bowl and taking a long hit. She held her breath for a moment, and then exhaled a stream of dense, skunky smoke at the ceiling. “Be a drag. Whatever.”
“Why do I feel so,” Alex paused, searching for words, “um, bad?”
“That’s your fault, too,” Rebecca said, making a face at Alex. “You started freaking out, when we activated you. First, Michael tried to hold you down, and when that didn’t work, I had to bliss you out.”
“Yeah. So, uh, bliss?”
“State of semi-conscious ecstasy. Nicest way I know to put somebody down. I’m an empath, remember,” Rebecca said, rolling her eyes. “You sure you don’t want any of this?”
Alex looked warily at the bubbled blue glass pipe. He started to refuse again, and then it occurred to him that the random drug tests he’d been subjected to for so many years that they had become routine were unlikely to ever happen again. The Academy probably didn’t have any such policy, he figured, if Rebecca, who he thought was some kind of school councilor, was trying to get him stoned. And his head really was starting to hurt.
“Fuck it. Sure. Why not?”
Rebecca chuckled and handed him the pipe and lighter.
“Famous last words, right?”
Alex barely managed to get the bowl lit before he started coughing, his throat raw and his mouth filled with spit. Rebecca prized the pipe from his limp hands while he coughed, then grinned and pounded him on the back approvingly.
“You are such a baby,” Rebecca said cheerfully.
Alex managed to stop coughing, caught his breath, and then gave her his best sheepish, glassy-eyed smile. She laughed and tousled his hair. He didn’t feel stoned at all, and he thought for a moment about asking for another hit, but then decided to let it go. He figured he’d already embarrassed himself enough as it was.
“So, uh, why I am in your room, Rebecca?”
Rebecca turned to glare at him, the pipe still at her lips, the bowl burning cherry red.
“You owe me a new couch, you little shit,” she said, blowing smoke at him. “I’d had that thing for years, too. It was like a friend of mine. So many memories.”
“And you made me lie down on it? That’s gross.”
Rebecca smacked at his head playfully.
“It was clean, asshole. And leather couches last forever… oh, shit,” she said, panicked, patting down the bedding around her. “Where is that fucking remote?”
“What?”
“Aha!”
Rebecca pulled the remote from underneath the pillow next to her. She hit a button and the TV’s speakers squawked to life.
“Rebecca?”
“Shh.”
Alex squinted at the television, and then looked over at Rebecca in surprise.
“Are you serious — ” he began, only to be cut off by Rebecca waving at him to shut up.
“Hush,” she commanded, glazed eyes glued to the television. “’Survivor’ is on,” she said, helpfully pointing at the TV with the remote. “You ever watch this show, Alex? They make them do some pretty messed up stuff, eat bugs and shit, you know?”
“I can’t believe that you watch this crap,” Alex grumbled, settling back against the pillows behind him.
“Well, I do, and we are in my room, so, you’ll just have to deal. Give it a chance. You should like it — half these girls spend the show making a concerted effort to show America their tits, anyway.”
Alex considered pressing her for answers, and then gave up on the idea almost immediately. After all, he figured, why take on a fight he was guaranteed to lose? Anyway, he had to admit that she was right about the boobs on display, even if they did appear to be mostly on the fake side. He waited patiently for the commercial break, wondering if the dialogue on this show had always been so vapid, or if he was just stoned and tired.
“Okay,” Rebecca said breezily, hitting the mute button and silencing a detergent ad, “you have until the commercials end. Knock yourself out.”
Alex felt a bit groggy, if not exactly wasted, but his headache had receded a bit. In balance, then, he figured he was no worse off than when he had woken, but it was still hard for him to formulate the questions he wanted to ask. Or perhaps it was simply that he had too many.
“So, what happened when you activated me? I mean, except for being tired and a little sore, I don’t feel any different.”
“Besides destroying my couch? Well, we didn’t have much trouble activating you, but I guess we did a little bit too good of a job. Normally, it’s a pretty simple procedure, even for one of you rare types. Technically, a telepath would work almost as well as an empath, but Gaul likes to have an empath on hand, in case things go wrong. As it turns out, that was a very good idea.”
Rebecca cleared her throat, and then reached for the glass of water on the bedside table beside her and drank deeply, making Alex acutely aware of how thirsty he was. He didn’t want to interrupt Rebecca’s explanation, though, so he decided to deal with it for now.
“That catalyst effect of yours is a pretty unpredictable thing, Alex. The moment I put you under, it started to affect me.” Rebecca looked a bit uncomfortable to Alex as she spoke, and he wondered what about the situation bothered her. “I thought I had it under control, but it’s… intoxicating, you know? It’s all this power, right? And the further down I pushed, the closer I came to activating you, the more intense the effect became.”
Rebecca shrugged and gave him a goofy grin, her eyes bloodshot and glazed.
“By the time I’d completed all the preparations, Gaul said I was glowing.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“Just that. We’d formed a closed loop, Alex. I was using my power to improve your access to your own. You were providing me with power to do so. Every step I took accelerated this process.” Rebecca turned to face him, putting one hand on his shoulder, her expression serious, maybe even concerned. “Alex, can you feel the Black Door?”
Alex intended to tell her no, that he didn’t know what she was talking about. He had even opened his mouth to do so. But then, it was like his perspective changed somehow, as if he was observing himself as a third-party, from a discrete distance but with greater clarity than he had ever imagined possible. He could see the boy propped up against the pillows on the bed, still half underneath the blankets, his long hair hanging down in his eyes. He could see his vague, almost dull-witted expression. On the face of the woman sitting beside him in the bed, he could see concern mixed with resignation, and knew that she was afraid that something bad might happen. Inside of her, pulsating out from underneath her t-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms, from inside of her lithe body, he saw a multifaceted light, burning like sunlight refracted in the heart of a gemstone. But when he looked inside of himself, all he could see was darkness; a darkness he knew was absolutely frigid. And within it, encompassed by it, he could see a great Black Door, heavy lacquered wood and tarnished silver hinges and door handle, the whole thing coated with a generous layer of white frost.
When Alex became aware of himself again, he was lying on his back. His eyes were open, and he wondered how long he’d been staring at the ceiling. Rebecca’s hand rested on his forehead, cool and soft. He sat up gingerly, wanting to ask what happened, and then noticed that the show was back on TV. Wisely, he decided to wait for commercial.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” Rebecca said, punching mute and turning to face him again, “but you kinda lost your shit there for a minute. I don’t need you destroying my bed and my couch in the same day. You disintegrated that thing on a molecular level, you little bastard.”
“Sorry,” Alex muttered, obscurely embarrassed. “Guess I’ve been kind of a headache today, huh?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s my job.” Rebecca smirked at him. “Though I guess I should warn you that if you make a habit of destroying girl’s beds, then you’re going to have trouble scoring invites in the future.”
Alex rolled his eyes.
“So, what’s that,” Alex paused, shuddering slightly at the memory, “that thing inside me, Rebecca? The Black Door, or whatever you called it?”
“Not whatever. That’s what it is, Alex. It’s a big fucking Black Door in your head. I suggest that you try not to think about it too much. Sometime when I’m feeling better, I can do a better job of explaining your situation.”
She looked at Alex with something that looked suspiciously like pity, and for some reason, it bothered him.
“Okay, so, what does that — ?”
Rebecca put one finger up to his lips without even looking, her eyes already glued to the television, her other hand hunting for the mute button on the remote.
“Shh. Survivor.”
Alex tried to watch in resentful silence, but he was too comfortable, Rebecca was too easy to be around, or maybe he was a little stoned, after all. He found himself raptly watching a bunch of strangers plot, scheme and preen for the cameras, and wondered how long it had been since he’d last watched television.
“Alex,” Rebecca said quietly, still staring at the TV, “it’s probably going to be hard on you, you know? Up until now people have treated you like you didn’t exist, or like they wished you didn’t. Now everyone will know who you are before they meet you, and they’ll probably be extra nice to you, but you’ll always have to wonder about their intentions. How does that make you feel?”
“As long as I can get a date out of it,” Alex said with a sheepish smile, “I’m cool.”
Rebecca gave him an amused looked, and then rolled her eyes.
“Boys. Hush,” she said. “TV show.”