“Do you want to talk about what happened this afternoon?”
Rebecca was perched on the front of Michael’s desk, a cigarette dangling from her left hand. She was wearing a pale yellow sweater and a loose cotton skirt, her hair tied casually back, and she didn’t seem mad at Alex at all.
“Not really. I mean, you already know what happened, right?”
Alex shifted uncomfortably on the crushed-down cushions of the aging couch in Michael’s office. It was so eerily similar to the one he had destroyed in Rebecca’s office that he half-wondered if it had been moved here instead.
“Sure.”
Rebecca smiled at him benevolently, drawing on her cigarette.
“I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I didn’t. But I’m interested in what you think about what happened. Don’t get me wrong, Steve’s a piece of work — if the kid didn’t have such combat potential, we probably would have bounced him out a while ago — but your reaction seems a little…”
“Disproportionate?” Alex smiled ruefully. “You’re probably right. I’m not totally sure what got into me. But when I hit people, I try to make it so they don’t get right back up again, you know?”
“You learn that in Juvenile Hall?”
He wasn’t surprised she knew. Honestly, he was surprised how many people couldn’t tell.
“Sure,” Alex responded earnestly. “Look, I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of psycho who goes around beating people up for no reason. I’d prefer not to fight with anybody. This was, you know,” Alex paused, searching for the words, “preemptive. I would’ve had trouble with Steve, eventually. That’s really all there is to it.”
“And Eerie?” Rebecca’s eyebrows arched. “What about her?”
“It’s true that I don’t like watching that kind of thing,” Alex admitted. “But, this was all about taking care of myself.”
Rebecca looked at him for a long time, and then laughed.
“You’re the kind of kid who keeps psychologists in business, you know?” She ground out her cigarette in the ash tray, and then hopped off the desk. “I can’t fault you completely, either. Steve did provoke you, and he was tormenting that poor Changeling girl. Not the first time he’s done that, either.”
“Changeling? Is she like those werewolves? What does she change into?”
Alex looked confused.
“No, that’s just an old name for the children that the Fey leave behind,” Rebecca said, as if that explained anything, sitting down next to him on the couch. “Eerie’s had a tough time. There isn’t much of a place for her, here or with the Fey.”
“I don’t get it,” Alex said miserably. “I’m really trying, Rebecca, but I don’t understand what is going on here.”
“I do want to help you, Alex…”
Rebecca looked at the clock and sighed. She was clearly not making her afternoon appointments today.
“You say that, and I think it’s probably true,” Alex responded, running one hand through his uncombed hair. “But I’m not stupid, Rebecca. You’re helping me because you want something from me. Everyone here wants something from me.”
“Does that bother you, Alex? That we want something from you?”
“Actually,” Alex said, smiling shyly, “I’m fine with it. It’s nice to be wanted — that’s all there is to it.”
Rebecca put a hand on his shoulder, and sighed again.
“I’m sorry, Alex, but I don’t have a lot of time today. Do you mind if we move on?”
“Sure,” Alex said agreeably. “I was wondering why you were here, and where Michael was. I thought I was going to get lectured.”
Rebecca frowned.
“I think you’ll find the consequences for today to be bit more severe than a lecture.” She leaned back against the cracked leather couch, clearly very tired. “But I’ll leave that for Michael. We have something we need to do.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s nothing bad,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Do you remember last time? When I built those shields in your head?”
“Yeah. I can still feel them,” Alex gestured vaguely around his head. “It’s a little weird.”
“You get used to it after a while,” Rebecca said, nodding. “Has anyone explained protocols to you, Alex?”
He shook his head.
“Have you ever heard of a hypnotic trigger?”
“Sure, I think so,” Alex said uncertainly. “It’s like, once a person has been hypnotized, if they here a certain word or something, it makes them do stuff, right?”
“Sort of. Close enough,” Rebecca shrugged. “That’s basically what protocols are, Alex. Implanted behaviors and routines, just like on TV where they make people think they’re a chicken or dance around or whatever. Except we teach our students to trigger the behaviors themselves, consciously. You follow?”
Alex nodded.
“I think so.”
“Good. Well, Michael plans on showing you how to use the Absolute Protocol. We already know from your activation that you have the affinity for it. So, he asked me to set up the routine to help you operate it. We call the process implanting,” Rebecca explained patiently.
Alex thought about it for a while, and then nodded.
“Okay, Rebecca. I trust you. Let’s do it.”
Alex smiled at her, and was rewarded by an even bigger smile in return. Rebecca leaned next to him on the couch, resting her head on his shoulder.
“That’s good, Alex. And I know that it’s the truth, too, I can tell,” she softly, her shoulder pressing against his own, her hair in his face. Alex felt almost as if he were melting. “It feels good. There’s nothing an empath values more than genuine trust and affection. May I use your power, Alex?”
Alex nodded, his eyes fluttering and his breathing growing deep, regular. Rebecca put the palm of her hand on his chest and pressed lightly.
“Oh my…” she said, after a moment, sounding surprised. “Alright. I’m going to implant the protocol now. It’ll sting a little bit, and you might get dizzy for a minute, but that will pass quickly, and I’ll be right here with you. Is that okay?”
Alex nodded slightly, his eyes fully closed.
“Okay, Alex. This is the Absolute Protocol. In three, two…”
Perhaps there was a ‘one’, but Alex never heard it. He was only aware of where Rebecca’s palm met his chest, and the copper-toned light that emanated from there. It shown so brightly that he could see it through his eyelids, through Rebecca’s hand. The radiance grew slowly, gradually encompassing his whole body, then both of their bodies, illuminating the room with a dazzling array of sparks and metallic light. Alex shook and writhed and moaned like a child in the throes of a nightmare. Rebecca increased the pressure on his chest, and for a moment the light flared and became entirely white, with only a hint of crimson in the blinding, all-encompassing luminescence. Alex could see nothing else, could feel nothing else but the searing radiance.
And then it was over. Alex’s head hurt a bit, and he felt a little dizzy, but not bad. He took several deep breaths, and then opened his eyes.
Rebecca smiled at him, patted him on the leg, and then walked back to the desk. When she tapped a cigarette from the pack, Alex noticed her hands shook slightly.
“Damn, kiddo…” she said after a moment, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “Okay, the protocol is implanted. I also reinforced those shields we built the other day — you should be good ‘til next week. Come back and see me on Sunday, and I’ll fix them back up for you.”
Alex rubbed the back of his head and sat up.
“How long till I can build them myself?” he asked, blinking his eyes and trying to regain his equilibrium.
“Not long. We’ll teach you that soon. A couple of weeks, on the outside,” Rebecca said dismissively. “Don’t worry about it right now. You need to start with the fundamentals, and then learn the applications, you know? That’s what Michael is waiting out on the practice ground to show you.”
Alex looked down at himself oddly, then back up at Rebecca.
“So this is it, huh? I’m actually going to do this. Be an Operator, I mean.” Alex’s voice was filled with wonder and doubt. “I’m a little bit scared.”
“Don’t be.” Rebecca beamed at him, her brown eyes warm. “Trust me, Alex. You’re going to be more than fine. You’re going to be amazing. You are going to be better at this than you’ve ever been at anything.”
Alex stood up. Despite himself, he found that he was smiling.
“Thanks, Rebecca. I guess I’m ready. Where do I go?”
Alex was again awed by how huge the Academy was — he followed the map Rebecca had drawn through a number of green practice fields, a handful of low stone buildings, and one long stretch of what appeared to be rolling, forested hills. It took him a quarter hour to find Michael.
The gap cut crudely into the side of a hill had obviously been a quarry at some point in the past, though it looked to have been abandoned years before. Alex walked along the ridge on one side and then down a hand-carved path into a deep depression that narrowed by long, circular steps, with one narrow, uncut ridge rising in the center of the quarry, about half the height of the depression. Michael stood on the edge of that ridge.
The path so narrow that Alex didn’t feel comfortable walking up it. He didn’t think he’d actually fall off of it, but he felt as if he might, and it was a long way down to the still water at the bottom of the quarry. The rough-hewn walls of rock all around blocked out the sun, and it was quite cool. The pebbles that rolled away from Alex’s feet rang musically against the limestone ridge, falling eventually into the dark water below.
Michael stood at the edge of the ridge, his arms crossed, smiling companionably. Alex was grateful to find that the path widened out in front of him, and sat down with obvious relief on a large rock next to Michael.
“How’s it going, Alex?” Michael’s voice was hushed, but the sound still echoed within the old quarry. “How was your first day?”
“It isn’t over yet, so it’s too early to say,” Alex shrugged. “I’ve had worse.”
“Fair enough,” Michael agreed. “Let’s talk a bit about that altercation at the cafeteria. Did that work out the way you wanted?”
“What do you think? I mean, I knew something like that would happen eventually, with all the stories everyone has apparently heard about me. But, I didn’t want it to happen before I had a chance to talk with most of my classmates.”
“Uh huh.” Michael nodded and waited for him to continue.
“And yes, alright.” Alex waved his hands agitatedly. “I didn’t expect him to turn to stone. And that’s obviously going to be a problem, since he’s probably thinking about ways to kill me, right now. Unless,” he said hopefully, looking up at Michael, “you were planning on teach me how to fight a living statue today?”
Michael looked at Alex oddly for a moment, and then laughed.
“Not exactly what I had planned today, no. You have anything else you’d like to say about it?”
“Well, actually, I do,” Alex said softly. “Why did you pick Vivik to introduce me to everyone?”
“You don’t like Vivik?” Michael looked surprised.
“He’s a nice enough guy,” Alex allowed. “But that isn’t the point. He’s clearly the least popular kid in the class, not counting the two who apparently aren’t even human. So why pick someone that everybody already hates to introduce me to everyone? Are you trying to set me up for this shit? Or is this some kind of test?”
Michael looked at Alex for a long moment, and then had another laughing fit.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Michael wiped his eyes and composed himself. “It’s good that you’re thinking that way, Alex. A little paranoia will take you a long way at the Academy. But that’s a bit petty, for me. I like to think my plots are a bit more elegant.”
“So why Vivik, then?” Alex demanded.
“I thought you’d like Vivik.” Michael spread his hands innocently. “He’s a smart kid. He has some ideas you might find interesting. Plus, it had to be an orphan, right? Otherwise I really would have been setting you up.”
“Emily seems nice enough…” Alex said resentfully.
“I warned you about this, Alex.” Michael’s voice turned grim. “Emily is nice enough. I’ve been her teacher since she came to the Academy, and she’s a wonderful student and delightful person. She’s also an empath, Alex, and she was born into the Raleigh Cartel. They are one of the Hegemony’s oldest and most important cartels, as I’m sure you are aware. Did Rebecca tell you much about empaths?”
“She said that they tend to be in charge of things.” Alex kicked at the ground nervously. “Because people can’t help but like them.”
“That’s right. Even a moderately powerful empath is pretty much guaranteed to end up in leadership role in their cartel — empaths are rare, so there are more openings than empaths to fill them. Moreover, they’re inspirational and charming by nature, and like you said, pretty much impossible not to like. Born leaders, most of them.”
Michael reached absently for a pebble, and then tossed it out into the quarry, bouncing it off the rock face and down, into the water.
“Yes, empaths tend to rise to the top. Except for when they’re class-B empaths, that is. Like, say,” Michael rolled his eyes, “your new friend, Emily.”
“So? Doesn’t that make her even less of a threat?” Alex brushed his bangs nervously back from his eyes. He’d needed a haircut before he’d come to the Academy, and he hadn’t had time to ask about getting one, yet. “If she’s so weak, then I don’t see what the problem is.”
“Emily’s future, as a class-B empath in the Hegemony, is to be a housekeeper and plaything for some middling-important cartel functionary. Most empaths don’t have much in the way of combat potential, and she’s no good with the sciences — though she is an accomplished humanities student,” Michael added positively, “and she has excellent taste in literature. But good qualities aside, Emily has a long, mundane lifetime to look forward to. Keep in mind, too, that her father is an important man in the Raleigh cartel, and she’s been raised as part of the upper crust — a position, as an adult, that she cannot maintain without consenting to an arranged marriage.”
“That is,” Michael added slyly, tapping his forehead, “unless she figures out a way to become a much more powerful empath. The kind of empath who can’t help but rise to the top. What do you figure the best way to do that might be, Alex?”
Alex felt ill in the pit of his stomach. His interactions with Emily flashed before him in rapid sequence, as he reinterpreted them all, with newly suspicious eyes. She had seemed, in a vaguely haughty way, quite friendly. Could he really have misread her so badly?
“Keep in mind that doesn’t make her bad person, Alex,” Michael said gently, “or that she doesn’t have your interests in mind, too. Actually,” Michael added speculatively, “an empath might make a very good partner for you, down the road. Their abilities would be complementary…”
“I don’t want to talk about this stuff,” Alex said, troubled. He didn’t accept Michael’s interpretation — not wholeheartedly. But he didn’t like it, or the implications.
“Fair enough. Can I remind you to be careful, then, Alex? You’ve got to exercise restraint if you want to make it here. You have tremendous potential, son, but right now you can’t even defend yourself,” Michael said, straightening up and yawning. “Try and only pick the fights you can win, if you must pick fights.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole lecture?”
Michael grinned at him evilly.
“I already arranged for the consequences,” he said, shaking out his dreadlocks and then tying them back again. “You’ll know them when you see them. I guarantee you won’t be so cavalier about knocking people’s teeth out in the future. Particularly not when the Academy’s kindergarten class could probably take you in a fight.”
“Maybe we should do something about that,” Alex suggested. “Why are we in a quarry, anyway?”
“To limit damage to the surroundings. I think,” Michael said, his face lighting up, “that you’re going to like this part, Alex.”
Edward knocked politely before entering her office. Anastasia looked very small behind her mammoth desk, a laptop sitting open in front of her.
“The in the quarry is online,” he said quietly.
“Just in time,” she said, with obvious satisfaction. “This should be interesting. Edward, please tell the cook that I am ready for lunch.”
He closed the door so quietly on his way out that she didn’t even look up.
Alex stared at the crater in the quarry wall blankly. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then glanced over at Michael’s outstretched hand, blue smoke trailing from the palm, his fingers blackened from volatized carbon, and then looked back at the smoldering indent in the rock.
“Holy fucking shit,” Alex said breathlessly, turning back to face Michael with the biggest grin he’d ever seen on the kids face. “I mean, like, fuck! Man, just… wait. Wait, wait,” Alex said, rubbing his forehead, “so if you can do that, then…”
Michael let him trail off helplessly before he took pity on the obviously overwhelmed boy.
“Why am I not in the field?”
His expression was gentle, rather than was sad.
“Right,” Alex said, nodding. “I mean, can’t you just go blow those fucking werewolf things up or something?”
Michael laughed, but he tried to make sure that it didn’t sound unkind. He didn’t want Alex thinking that he was laughing at him — the kid had already proved to be sensitive, and Michael didn’t want to deal with him moping around for the next week because he’d taken an offhand comment personally.
“Good question, actually. Until you got to the ‘werewolf thing’ part, anyway. I can only do that once every so often, Alex,” Michael said, smiling and attempting to shrug off the ghost of past embarrassment at the fact. “Whether I knock over a matchstick or level a mountain, it takes me a long while to build it back up.”
“What,” Alex asked suspiciously, reaching down to finger one of the quartz fragments that had been scattered all around them by the force of explosion, “you mean like once a day or something?”
“I wish. It’ll be two or three days before I’ll be doing anything like that again,” Michael said, rubbing his hands against his pants to remove the soot. “So now do you understand what makes being M-Class so significant? You might not necessarily be able to wield as much raw power as me in a single instance, but you can do it over and over again.”
Alex tossed the sparkling piece of gravel in the air a couple of times, catching it midway down and then tossing it up again. He looked like he was thinking about things as he did so, so Michael let it be.
“That was telekinesis, huh?” Alex asked.
“I prefer psychokinesis,” Michael said, “but sure. Same thing. Moving things by force of will alone.”
“I still don’t understand how that’s related to, well,” Alex tossed the rock away and frowned, searching for words, “whatever it is that I can do.”
Michael had to think about it for a minute before he started, trying to couch it all in a way that Alex would be able to follow.
“I’m not going to ask you to understand it all. I don’t actually understand some of it all that well myself. But you don’t have to understand it all to make it work for you. There’s this guy, an Auditor here, his name’s Xia. He’s a pyrokine — basically, he can start fires by thinking about it, right? Well, for a long time, they thought that a telekine and pyrokine were two completely different things, so when we were going through the Academy, Xia and I barely even saw each other. These days, we’d be in all the same classes. Turns out what I do in my head, pushing against things, basically, isn’t so different from what Xia is doing when he starts fires. He’s just exciting the molecules within a flammable object until he gets them so energetic that they burst into flames. Same root concept applies to the protocol I just showed you.”
Alex frowned, and Michael could see he wasn’t buying it, at least, not yet. But he was thinking about it, so that was a start.
“Okay, but every time we talk about my protocol, you start talking about the Ether…”
“Right,” Michael said, nodding, “but it isn’t actually the Ether that you manipulate. You punch holes in reality, Alex, in whatever separates our universe from the Ether itself. Depending on how you do it, that creates a vacuum on one side or the other. When the vacuum is on our side, Etheric energy comes rushing over into our world to fill it, thus, the catalytic effect. When you create the vacuum on the Etheric side, matter and energy from our universe is pulled into the Ether, like water down a drain, or a hole in the side of spaceship. If the hole you punch is small, only energy can escape, and that creates extreme cold, and eventually kinetic stasis, on our side. A bigger hole and matter will be pulled through it. A big enough hole…”
“And the whole universe goes down the drain?” Alex asked, trying to sound contemptuous, but looking a little worried at the possibility.
“I don’t think so, but let’s not tempt fate, okay?” Michael said mildly. He had to give Alex time to wrap his head around it, he reminded himself, even if it meant going slower than he would’ve normally liked to. This wasn’t like teaching the kid to square his shoulders when he threw a punch, after all. “Besides, I think that a small hole, a little pinprick, might actually be more useful than a big one. I think even a tiny breach will be enough to pull most of the radiant energy, all of the heat and motion, out of the surrounding area. Do you know what happens when absolute zero is reached, Alex?”
“It’s impossible,” Alex said, with surprising firmness. “Anastasia told me so. You can only get so close, and then you’re always a fraction short. You can reduce the fraction, but you can’t make it go away.”
Michael covered his alarm with an indulgent smile. Why, he wondered, was Anastasia talking to Alex about absolute zero?
“True. But, if it was possible, do you know what would happen?”
While Alex considered it, Michael’s mind was elsewhere. Could Anastasia somehow already be aware of Alex’s affinity for the Absolute Protocol? Was that even possible? Rebecca’s notes, circulated only through the upper levels of the Academy’s staff, should have been the only source for such information. But, how could Anastasia have gotten access to those kind of documents?
From a staff member. That was the only way.
“Um. Everything would freeze…?”
Alex guessed more than he stated, not willing to fully commit to his answer, frowning and wrinkling his brow.
“Well, yes,” Michael said hastily, putting aside his suspicions. “More importantly, however, everything would stop. Alex, absolute zero is a completely non-energetic state — no motion, even on a molecular level. So, potentially, you could freeze things in more ways than one.”
Alex nodded slowly, but looked doubtful at best. That was alright with Michael, though. Everyone had to start somewhere.
“Okay, so, what do I do?”
Michael smiled encouragingly, doing his best to put aside his concerns about Anastasia.
“Rebecca already implanted the Absolute Protocol in your mind. Do you remember how to activate it? The routine?”
Alex nodded slowly, clearly going over something in his head.
“Okay, then let’s try it. Go ahead and focus on that end of the quarry,” Michael instructed patiently, pointing at the opposite side of the depression, close enough to see, far enough to be safe. “You don’t need to do anything fancy. Let’s see how far you can reduce the ambient temperature.”
Michael wasn’t sure what the activation routine Rebecca implanted was — they varied, after all, depending on the protocol and the Operator involved. His own routine was loosely based on some Tai Chi movements that he found helpful when he was trying to focus. Whatever it was that Alex did, it was subtle. All that happened outwardly was that Alex sighed, shook out his hands, and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them again, took a couple deep breaths, and squinted at the rock face on the far side of the quarry as if it were very far away.
He was prepared to wait. Protocols were tricky to use, and even with the hypnotic routine implanted to make them easier, students often struggled for weeks before they got the hang of doing it on command. Alex apparently did not have that problem. Michael was considering saying something encouraging, maybe suggesting a second try, when he noticed the frost sparkling in the sun; a light, uniform coating, glistening across the dull face of the rock.
“Excellent, Alex!”
Michael almost shouted, he was so excited, but Alex didn’t even appear to notice. He just continued trying to bore a hole in the rock with his eyes, and all around where he stared, the rock creaked and moaned while the air filled with a sound like tiny bells ringing. It took Michael a moment to realize that he was hearing the water in the air spontaneously freezing and then falling to the ground in crystals that shattered on impact.
“Okay, Alex, that’s good. Shut it down.”
Michael waited for a moment, but the kid seemed to be unaware of him, locked into his bizarre staring contest with the wall of the quarry. Amazingly, Alex seemed to be gaining ground, as the scree slope made ominous settling noises, and then parts of it started to give way, small rivulets of gravel and sand running down channels in the stone as the wall itself shifted to accommodate ice crystals forming where water had been trapped inside the stone.
“Alex, stop. Stop now.” Michael hoped that his voice sounded firm, not worried. But whatever it sounded like, he was fairly certain that Alex didn’t hear it. Michael reached for the boy’s shoulder, meaning to shake him, but his hand stopped of its own accord halfway. He looked closely at the wall, trying to confirm what he thought he’d seen.
The rivulets of sand and pebbles, the streams of earth that had threatened only moments before to become a small avalanche had halted in mid-air, halfway to the ground, hovering uncertainly, each fragment slowly rotating in midair as it was caught in the impasse between two opposing forces. Even though he knew immediately what was happening, it took a moment for Michael to process it.
Something inside the rock face, something Alex was doing, had created a force powerful enough to counteract gravity, and the forces were balanced perfectly enough that the dirt dislodged from the rock face was held in suspension between them, waiting for the situation to resolve itself, equally pushed and pulled. And then, almost as soon as he put a name to what he was seeing, the equation unbalanced, in favor of the force Alex was generating, and the dust began to drift upward, back toward where it had fallen from. The complaints of the rock face itself grew louder and more urgent.
“Alex, stop this right now!”
Hoping to break the visual contact and disrupt his protocol, Michael turned Alex around forcefully, grabbing him by the shoulder. But the boy almost fell over when he put pressure on him, and the eyes that he turned on Michael were blank and unseeing, rolled so far back in his head that only the whites were visible. Michael lowered Alex carefully to the ground, then turned back to the slope, in time to see it draw in on itself, the rock fracturing like glass and then disintegrating into sand. It was drawn to an invisible core somewhere within the rock, draining down into itself, and then disappearing. All around the collapsing quarry wall, frost had taken hold, expanding out to cover half of the quarry with a furry white blanket. Michael realized with a certain inevitable horror that he could see his breath, despite the warmth of the day.
Michael grabbed the boy by his shoulders, shaking him violently, and shouting at him. Alex’s head rolled back and forth like a rag doll, but he didn’t seem to notice. Michael wasn’t even sure what it was he was shouting. Michael thought desperately, weighing his limited options. He was seriously considering knocking the boy unconscious, but he was afraid that might not stop the reaction, but rather make it even more out of control than it already was. The protocol had gone Black when Alex operated it, Michael was certain, though he didn’t understand how that had happened. Rebecca would never have deliberately implanted a Black Protocol, but some protocols, including Michael’s own, could turn black in the right (or wrong) Operator’s hands.
The dilemma was interrupted by the rock face. It didn’t explode, though he felt the ground shake beneath him and there was tremendous noise. Rather, the whole slope imploded with a whooshing sound, all of a sudden, folding impossibly in on itself and then disappearing, trails of dust falling towards nothing. All around the expanding cavity, the frozen rock bent and crackled, clearly planning on following suit. The air was so cold that it was painful to breathe, and Michael’s hands were red and numb.
Michael said a small, silent prayer, and hit Alex above his jaw on the right side, below his ear. For a moment, Michael was afraid that nothing had happened, and that he would die feeling weirdly guilty for having struck a student who was already lying on the ground. Then, distantly, through the partially-frozen clothing on his back, he felt the heat of the sun, and he collapsed gratefully by Alex’s side. He lay there in the afternoon sun, his head buzzing with frightening thoughts, while his body slowly warmed.