“The quarry seems a bit different than the last time I saw it.”
“Different how?”
“Well, there’s a lot… more of it, for one thing. I mean, that whole area over there, since when is that nothing but gravel and sand?”
“Since this afternoon, roughly three-ish?”
“And then there’s the frost. It’s just like my poor couch.” Rebecca pinched her lower lip and looked at Michael disapprovingly. “Did you freeze the quarry? Why did you freeze the quarry, Michael?”
“I didn’t do it,” Michael protested. “Alex did. Or rather, that was a side effect of what Alex did.”
“Alex blew up that whole rock face?”
Rebecca pointed incredulously at the ruined slope, at a deep crater that exposed the bedrock, covered with a fine layer of gravel and chipped stone.
“No, that was me,” Michael admitted, shoulders slumped. “I showed him the Vacuum Bomb Protocol, to give him an idea of what was possible, given the right control…”
“You were showing off,” Rebecca said, staring grumpily at the quarry wall. “And then what happened?”
“He activated the Absolute Protocol that you implanted. And then he started dumping all the local energy directly out into the Ether. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What does that mean? What ‘local energy’?”
“Everything. First thermal, then radiant and electromagnetic as well.”
Michael picked up a pebble and threw it toward the quarry wall, but it came up short, diving down early toward the black water at the bottom of the quarry and colliding with the ice on the surface with a crunching sound.
“I tried to get him to stop there, but he seemed like he was in a trance or something. Next thing I know, the rock where he was staring starts to disappear into the Ether.”
Michael gestured at the frost around him, as if it had just arrived, to his shock.
“I think all the cold is only a side-effect, you know?”
“You mean he was creating a vacuum? You are kidding, right?”
“I think so,” Michael said. “I think all the time, without even realizing it, Alex creates a localized void in our world, and Etheric energy leaks through to fill it. I think that’s where all that catalytic power comes from. When he activated the protocol, he created a much larger void in the Ether, so energy went rushing out of the world to fill it.”
“You could use that, maybe,” Rebecca said slowly, lost in thought. “The cold might be easier to control than an actual energy or mass transfer. Less dangerous for Alex, probably more effective.”
“No,” Michael said, almost sadly, shaking his head.
“Why not?”
“He can’t control the protocol, and he can’t stop it, once it starts.”
Rebecca frowned doubtfully.
“Okay, what then?”
Michael looked moodily at the frost covered hole in the quarry wall and sighed.
“It’s like Mitsuru all over again,” he said, turning to face her, with an expression that was filled with grief and frustration. “We can’t let Alex operate that protocol. He’ll kill everyone around him.”
Alex lay on his back, on top of the comforter, still wearing his shoes and uniform, and wondered why someone enrolled in the combat program had to study any math at all, much less the exact same math that had been kicking his ass back in the real world.
He looked idly over at the stack of books on his desk, the study guides that Vivik and Emily had made for him sitting on top. Vivik’s notes were typed, bullet-pointed, and exhaustive to the point of being incomprehensible. Alex often found the text book’s explanations to be shorter. Emily’s notes were handwritten, concise, and easy to understand — but equally as useless to Alex. They only made him worry about her, and their little ‘arrangement’.
The ceiling proved more interesting that the books. He wasn’t, he realized drowsily, going to be doing any studying tonight. He fished his headphones out of his pocket and hit play on his MP3 player, finding himself mid-song, halfway through a Portishead album.
Alex turned the volume up earlier when he’d gone for a jog on the Academy’s surprisingly modern synthetic-surface track. Alex hadn’t really felt like getting lost going running on the grounds, but he’d wanted the exercise, even if it was an off-day. The music was too loud now, in the quiet of the dorms, but he didn’t bother to reach for the volume, letting the lushness of the sound obliterate his thoughts, his skull reverberating with the slow, looping beats.
He couldn’t have fallen asleep. Not like that. Alex was a light sleeper, a very desirable trait for those who planned on surviving incarceration. He had trouble falling asleep almost every night, and even small noises tended to wake him up. He couldn’t possibly have fallen asleep with his headphones on.
But, Alex could have sworn that for a moment somewhere in the album’s final tracks, his head heavy and swimming with worry, that he felt the warmth of another body besides his own in the tiny dorm bed, a small hand resting on the pillow above his head. The illusion was so complete that he was aware of the smell of her hair, the weight of her head from where it rested on the hollow of his shoulder. He felt a tremendous sense of comfort and gentleness, and he lost himself in it.
He did not wake then. He could not have woken, because he had not slept. He opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. He was alone, and the place beside him on the bed was cold. The MP3 player had moved along to Massive Attack, but he felt too agitated to listen anymore. He pulled the headphones out of his ears as he sat up, puzzled and angry for reasons he couldn’t articulate.
There was no way for him to know how long they had been knocking on the door. He hadn’t slept, he didn’t even feel that sleepy. But, he hadn’t heard them until now.
Alex got up with a sigh and opened the door, expecting Vivik. He liked the Sikh kid quite a bit; actually, he was really good-natured and upbeat. But Vivik liked studying, as in he seemed to do it for fun, and sometimes he wanted to tutor Alex a bit more than Alex wanted to be tutored.
It wasn’t Vivik. It was Renton, and a Chinese kid who Alex recognized from class, but he couldn’t remember the name of.
“Hey, Alex,” Renton asked, smiling mischievously, “why are you still in your uniform?”
Alex looked down at himself, and wondered the same thing. He had he slept, then? Had he dreamed?
“I’m not really sure,” he admitted, rubbing his head. “I guess I was asleep. What time is it, anyway?”
“A bit after eleven. I’m Li,” the Chinese kid said, extending his hand to Alex. He had a firm hand shake and a smile that seemed friendly enough. “We have homeroom together.”
“Right,” Alex said. “You’re a friend of Renton’s?”
“Don’t think badly of me for it, though,” Li said, grinning. “It sort of worked out that way.”
Alex laughed, and then stifled a yawn, wondering how anyone could tolerate Renton on a consistent enough basis to be friends with him. Frankly, he wasn’t totally sure how Anastasia put up with Renton, as an employee or whatever he was.
“Get yourself changed, Alex. Put something warm on,” Renton suggested, leaning against the wall. “We’ll wait out here while you change.”
“Where are we going?”
Alex was wary. He wondered if the Academy had hazing rituals that he was unaware of.
“The roof, Alex. Believe me, you want to come with us to the roof,” Renton said, his voice dripping with sincerity.
“I will not notice,” Rebecca said, up to her chin in rose-scented bathwater.
The room was so thick with steam that she couldn’t see the shower curtain. Pink-tinged bubbles floated across the water’s surface. Her hair was securely wrapped in a red towel, a mask stuffed with lavender pressed across her eyes.
“I will not notice.”
Rebecca thanked whatever God that there might be that the founder of the Academy had been Japanese, and had a fondness for his native country’s baths. She’d made certain that everyone in Central had forgotten the bathhouse except herself and the staff that cleaned it. The wood was carved cedar, darkened with age and moisture, and the bath itself was big enough that she could stretch her legs out. The only sound was the branches scraping across with the outside wall with the wind.
“I’m not going to notice anything. I don’t care what they do. I’m not going to feel any of it.”
The worst was the flirting, the falling in lust or in love. She could feel it from a mile away.
She’d always planned to bring a lover here, Rebecca remembered bitterly. Back when she’d had them. When she found someone special, someone worth rewarding, she intended bring them here. She’d had it all planned out.
How many years ago had that been? Three? Four?
“I will not notice. I will not.”
Rebecca let herself sink down, into the steaming water up to her eyeballs, letting the hot water massage her brain.
It helped a little bit.
There were around thirty people up on the roof. Most of them were strangers to Alex. Since Renton and Li were caught up in conversation as soon as they walked out on to the roof, Alex shyly migrated back to where a cooler sat, perched on top of one of the old chimneys the dotted the roof. A beer, he figured, might help relax him a little, make talking to people a bit easier.
Alex stared into the cooler in dismay.
“Seriously?”
Renton looked over at him from where he was hitting on some curly-haired first year student, confused.
“All this power and technology; a secret school in another world,” Alex recited numbly. “Plus, some of the people here are really rich! So, how could this be?”
Renton looked him with a puzzled expression. Alex reached into the cooler that he held open.
“Keystone,” Alex said sadly. “Still warm.”
Renton laughed like he’d heard the funniest joke ever. It was obscene, unpleasant, and probably designed to be exactly that. Alex was starting to realize that Renton had mastered that art of being friendly and despicable at the same time.
“It’s like fucking Bakersfield in a can, you realize,” Alex said to no one in particular. Then a nasty idea occurred to him, and he turned to confront Renton. “Is this some kind of joke, Renton? Should I take offense?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get beer when you’re stuck in the Ether, you ungrateful little shit?”
Renton extracted a can from the cooler for himself, smacking his lips with satisfaction.
“We can’t even bring it in the dorms, you know. They have a protocol on all the student buildings, it puts you to sleep if you try and bring this sort of thing in.”
“Same thing if you try and get it on with a girl in the dorms.”
Alex looked over at the speaker, a chubby upperclassman named Todd that he had just been introduced to. Seemed like a nice enough guy, although he had a bit too much of the white-boy hip-hop act going for Alex, but maybe that was an East Coast thing.
“You try some shit, you both wake up to find the staff member on duty standing over you.”
“Really? Even if she was only there to study or something?”
“Study, right,” Li said with a grin. “That’s a good one. In that truly unlikely scenario, nothing would happen. Not until one of you tried to take your clothes off, I guess.”
Alex laughed nervously while he considered the implications. He hadn’t really realized what an opportunity he’d blown at Emily’s place.
“It happened to a girl in my hall, last year. She was so embarrassed when the teacher came to get her in the morning.”
Alex turned to look at the new voice. Anastasia, wrapped in a surprisingly cutesy winter coat and fringed scarf, was glancing at the contents of the cooler with obvious contempt. Behind her was Emily in a tailored coat, heavy woolen skirt and felt boots, laughing cheerfully and walking with a plump, dreadlocked blond girl he didn’t recognize.
“You do realize that you’re staring, don’t you?”
Anastasia hissed at him as she walked near, stopping a discrete distance away.
“Sorry,” he mumbled into his beer. “I was surprised to see you here, that’s all.”
Anastasia made a sour face at him.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us, Ana?”
The dreadlocked girl interposed herself between Alex and Anastasia, looking indignant.
“Alex, meet Serafina Ricci,” Anastasia said, sounding as bored as she looked. “Serafina, meet Alex Warner.”
“Call me Sarah, everyone does. How do you do?”
Sarah greeted Alex with a smile. Alex nodded back, and took a sip of his wretched beer to cover his discomfort. He was never sure, meeting a new girl, whether he supposed to shake her hand or what. It seemed so inappropriately masculine, somehow.
“I have, of course, heard all about you.”
She said it as if he would find that reassuring.
“Seems like everyone has,” Alex agreed. “Saves time on introductions, I guess.”
“Serafina is a second-year student,” Anastasia explained. “And her cartel, I might add, has the bad taste to associate itself with the Hegemony. Despite that, and her awful, she is my second cousin, and therefore my responsibility.”
Sarah looked scandalized.
“And your friend, too, I would hope. And I’ve told you a million times to call me Sarah. After all I’ve done for you…”
“Please,” Anastasia said, her voice deathly bored. “I only came because you made me promise to introduce you to Alex. That done, I am afraid that I have better things to do with my time. Do enjoy yourselves…”
Anastasia breezed off, brushing by a puzzled looking Emily on her way to the door. Alex sipped from his can as sparingly as possible and felt tremendously out-of-place. How could beer be warm when it was this cold outside? It defied logic.
Alex grabbed Renton by the arm as he walked by. Renton met Alex’s look with slightly glassy eyes. Alex realized the boy was probably a touch drunk already.
“Okay, then, so why the party?”
“We are sort of the welcoming committee,” Vivik admitted, emerging from the group of people behind the tangle of pipes on the center of the roof. “We would have done it sooner, but you keep falling asleep at eight o’clock, so it’s been a little tricky.”
“Vivik!” Alex exclaimed. “I didn’t realize you were here.”
“Don’t look so surprised,” Vivik said, obviously hurt. “I’m not that big of nerd, you know.”
Renton winked at Alex.
Emily walked up and tried to say something, only to be cut off by Renton shouting a greeting and then pushing his way through the group, running over to the far wall. Alex watched in astonishment as Margot, the vampire from the day before, floated up from the side of the building and over the retaining wall, coming smoothly down in front of the cheering Renton.
“Shush.” Margot’s voice was prim and cold, but not unfriendly. “One of the staff has to be doing rounds, Renton.”
She held out a brown paper bag, which Renton promptly snatched.
“It’s Rebecca tonight, so we’re cool. And you’re great, Margot. I appreciate this.”
Renton was looking at the contents of the heavy paper bag with obvious satisfaction. Given the clinking noise it made when he moved it, Alex was pretty sure he’d just seen how the beer had made it to the roof in the first place, without tripping any of the Academy’s security measures.
As Alex approached them, he realized that he’d been wrong — Margot hadn’t actually landed. She was still floating, her bare feet dangling lazily, centimeters above the concrete and rebar, her long brown skirt around her calves, teased by the cold wind.
“Am I done?” Margot said, looking vaguely annoyed. “I have Eerie waiting down there…”
Renton chuckled to himself, and then looked at Alex evilly.
“Why don’t you bring her up, then, and hang out for a while. I’ll introduce you guys to Alex. You can have a beer with us or something.”
Margot looked at him, clearly taken aback.
“I can’t drink alcohol, because of my metabolism, and Eerie’s pathologically shy, because she’s a nutcase.” Her intonation made it obvious that she wasn’t making excuses; rather, Margot was just stating the facts as she saw them. “What kind of party are you having, exactly?”
“That was a pretty big favor that I did you, right?” Renton said softly, his smile wide and mean. “And while I do appreciate you bringing up all this stuff up to the roof for me, maybe you should consider if things between us are really squared. What do you think, Margot?”
Margot’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment, Alex wondered if she was going to attack him. She was, after all, a vampire, right? He had been planning on introducing himself, but found himself standing by nervously, not sure what to make of the conversation. The mood didn’t seem right for him to interrupt.
“Very well.” Margot bowed her head for a moment, and then continued on evenly. “I can’t speak for Eerie, though. She will probably just go home by herself.”
“I really don’t think you should let that happen, Margot,” Renton said reasonably. “Besides, you can tell Eerie that I have a bunch of candy up here for her.”
Again, Margot paused and appeared to try and compose herself. Alex looked at the serious, pigtailed vampire, and wondered why Renton was being so hard on her. He’d already known him long enough not to like him, but he didn’t think he was stupid or fond of wasting time. Alex sipped his awful beer, and wondered what Renton’s angle was, with Margot, with Eerie, with himself.
“It was a mistake to fall into your debt, Renton.” Margot turned and began to float away. “And you’d better be serious about the candy. You don’t want to disappoint Eerie.”
Alex looked at Renton and wondered. Renton had gone out of his way to be friendly, in his own weird way, since Alex had arrived, but unlike Emily and Vivik, his motives were far more obscure.
“He’s been like that since I met him,” Emily observed, looking over Alex’s shoulder. “He can be kind of a dick, and still confuses picking on girls with flirting, but he’s not really as bad as he’d like you to believe.”
Alex spun around, startled, and found himself face-to-face with her. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold, and she held her beer gingerly in sparkly blue gloves.
“Are you sure?” Alex said, only half-joking. “Sometimes I wonder if Renton’s really such an okay guy.”
“Well, he did throw you a party,” Renton pointed out from behind his beer.
“I guess. But are you seriously blackmailing that vampire just to get beer on to the roof? That seems like a bad idea.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Margot said dismissively, floating neatly over the retaining wall, Eerie held casually in her arms, as if she weighed nothing. “I don’t bite. I’m the nice kind of vampire.”
She actually came all the way down to the ground, this time, and Alex wondered if her bare feet were cold against the stone, and shivered in his jacket. She set Eerie down carefully next to her.
Eerie wore a red and white sweater with a pleated black skirt and black knee socks. Her exposed shoulders were perfectly round and bone-white, and the edges of her hair brushed against them, haphazard and uneven. Her outfit, like Margot’s, didn’t seem to really take temperature into account, but neither of them looked particularly bothered by the cold, either. She had a basket filled with yarn and carefully wrapped knitting needles tucked under one arm.
Alex made a mental note to ask someone where he could get a haircut before the party ended. It seemed like the Academy really needed an orientation or a tour, or something. Maybe it was held at the start of the year, and he’d missed it.
“That’s pretty rare,” Sarah observed. “Margot has come to these things once or twice, but I’ve never seen Eerie come to anything. You have to admit that Renton has a remarkable way with people.”
Ways which included blackmail and bribery. Something worth knowing, Alex thought. Eerie ran over to Renton, and held out her hand expectantly.
“Where is the candy?” Eerie’s voice was strange, with a musical, sing-song quality. The way she spoke gave him the impression that English was not her first, or best, language.
“Here,” Renton said, pulling a different paper sack from one of his coat’s inner pockets, and handing it to Eerie. Alex was astounded to see Eerie pull a package of Skittles from it and tear it open.
“It never even occurred to me that it would actually be bag of candy.” Alex shook his head and Emily laughed. “I figured that was slang for some kind of drug.”
“Do you want me to introduce you?” Emily offered. “I know both of them pretty well.”
“You’re an empath,” Sarah said, laughing. “You know everybody pretty well.”
Alex finished the last of his beer, and then collected Sarah and Emily’s empties as well. He made a trip to the cooler and got three new cans, depositing the empty ones in an already half-full paper sack. There were more people on the roof now, and a lot of them, maybe even most of them, were girls. Alex stood there for a moment, before realized that much of the party, subtly or not, had started watching him, and hurried back over to where Emily and Sarah were chatting.
“Alright. What the hell. Introduce me to your friends.”
Sarah laughed and patted him on the shoulder.
“Try not to look so nervous, Alex,” Emily admonished, leading him over. “This way… Hey Margot? Eerie?”
Emily walked to where the two girls stood, skirting the periphery of the party, up against the edge of the roof, and Alex tagged along behind her. He was going to feel bad about what had happened with Steve until he got Eerie to talk to him, no matter how much of weirdo she might turn out to be. He still felt kind of like an ass, for having tried so hard to look cool in front of her. He wondered if she hated him already, and was surprised that he cared.
“Emily,” Margot acknowledged with a nod, from where she leaned against the wall, arms folded across her chest, her face blank but not unfriendly. “Alex. Renton was supposed to introduce us, but he wandered off, chasing after that redhead from Herzog’s class.”
Alex was a bit taken aback, but it wasn’t an altogether bad reception, he reasoned. Eerie was staring at him, he realized, her hand frozen halfway to her mouth, a number of multicolored candies in her palm.
“Hi! I’m Alex,” he said, raising one hand stiffly in greeting and wondering what in the hell it was that he was doing. His voice sounded odd to him, forced and artificial. “Nice to finally get to talk to both of you.”
Margot said nothing. Eerie held absolutely still for a moment, and then, slowly, lifted the remaining candy to her mouth.
“He’s being nice to you guys,” Emily admonished, shaking her finger and glaring at them. “I thought Rebecca had made you two promise to try and be more social this year.”
“Don’t worry,” Sarah offered encouragingly. “No one ever knows what to say to either of them, Alex. Keep trying. You’re already doing better than most guys.”
Eerie’s eyes widened, and then she shook her head, and looked as if she was going to speak. After a brief struggle, her expression went slack again, and then she simply looked back down to the ground. Margot glanced over at her, and then shook her head.
“I think we should go somewhere else,” Margot said as she walked past, Emily feebly protesting as she was dragged along. “She has been talking about this boy since the other day in the cafeteria.”
Emily went silent, and then gave Alex a panicked look as she was pulled off towards the party by the vampire. Sarah followed them, laughing at the whole scene. Despite the cold, Alex felt himself break out in sweat. Had he really been left alone with a girl who hadn’t managed to say anything coherent to him, one who wasn’t even human? In front of Emily? Alex was having serious doubts about the soundness of the whole situation.
“I don’t get it.”
Eerie’s voice was oddly musical, but vaguely inhuman, like a reproduction of a human voice made by a beautiful, but wholly alien, device.
“Um, yeah… you don’t get what?”
Alex scratched the back of his head nervously, and shifted from one foot to the other.
“Margot says that you are an idiot. She says that you fought with Steve the other day because you are stupid…”
She trailed off shyly, one hand toying with the edge of her skirt.
Alex shook his head slowly.
“That is a very real possibility,” Alex admitted. He finally got her to meet his eyes — and was stunned to discover that they were dilated to such an extent that her irises were nothing more than millimeter-thin colored rings around a reflective black space. He wasn’t certain that he’d ever seen anyone’s eyes look that way, and wondered what kind of drugs did that to you. “But, I prefer to think of myself as impulsive.”
Eerie crumpled and discarded the Skittles wrapper, and then started digging through the bag again, seemingly oblivious to Alex’s presence.
“So, it seems like you and Margot are pretty good friends, huh?”
Eerie didn’t look up, she just continued rummaging.
“Friends? I don’t really get stuff like that,” she said quietly, pulling a handful of red liquorices twists from the paper bag, “but we live in the same place.”
Alex took a sip from his beer, and rapidly considered his options. Renton and Vivik had disappeared, as had Margot, Sarah and Emily. As a matter of fact, the entire party was conspicuously distant from them. He was obviously on his own, and he’d need a pretty good excuse to walk away. That meant he’d have to finish the beer, as rapidly as politeness allowed, since going to get another was the only reason to walk away that he could come up with. This still left him needing something, anything to say to the girl standing next to him.
“You seem to really… like candy,” Alex observed, lamely casting about for a topic, any topic.
Eerie seemed to give the question serious consideration, nibbling on a Red Vine, before nodding gravely.
“But, I have been practicing eating other food. Actually,” she added, looking thoughtful, “that’s why I was in the cafeteria the other day. I don’t usually go there.”
Alex felt mildly encouraged. He was starting to get the hang of her bizarre intonation, and her last statement had even referenced what he had wanted to talk about. This, Alex thought proudly, was communication.
All of a sudden, then, Eerie was standing very, very close to him, on her tip toes so that her eyes would be level with his. Her pupils were black and glittering and huge, and he could see a ghost image of himself reflected in them, looking far more nervous and less cool than he would have liked.
“You’ve only just been activated. But it’s already started, hasn’t it?”
Alex backed away a step, and then shook his head.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Eerie took another step forward, dropping the paper bag into her knitting basket and then clutching the basket handle in both hands.
“Don’t you remember, Alex? Hasn’t this happened already?” Eerie voice was distant, her eyes wet and unfocused. “Are you dreaming now, Alex? Isn’t it hard to tell?”
Alex shook his head, utterly dumbfounded. He had no idea what the girl was talking about, but at the same time, it made him terribly nervous. Something he had dreamed, maybe, a strange sense of deja vu… he wasn’t certain. He was, however, certain that Eerie was standing too close to him, and he half-stumbled a few steps away.
“I don’t understand.” Alex felt hot, almost feverish. There was a strange buzzing sound that seemed to emanate from the back of his neck, like static from the base of his skull. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”
“Can you feel it already?” Eerie asked softly. “The slippage. Dislocation. Oh, so very lonely. Haven’t I already told you my secret?”
Eerie’s eyes were half-closed now, and her arms were wrapped around herself tightly. She stumbled forward, dazed, almost colliding with Alex in the process. He caught her awkwardly, trying to push her away and stand her upright at the same time, without much success in either endeavor.
“The Church of Sleep, Alex.” Her melodic voice was barely a whisper, and he had to strain to hear it. “Surely you’ve noticed. Don’t you fall asleep earlier and earlier, since you came here? Can you remember going to bed when you wake up?”
“Yes,” Alex replied, his throat hoarse, “and no.”
Eerie clutched herself even tighter, the folds of sweater pulled tight across her chest in a way that he found quite distracting. Her skin was flushed, and icy cold where Alex’s fingers brushed against her shoulder. She pressed her forehead against his chest, and he was afraid that she really would fall over, she seemed so out of it.
“And when you wake up, sometimes, and you feel like someone is there with you.” Eerie’s voice had lost all of its interrogative qualities, replaced with something that sounded more like a bald statement of fact. “And sometimes, when you wake up, you know things that you didn’t know before. But you’ll never remember another dream, now that you’ve come here.”
“H-How,” Alex stammered, “how is it that you know these things?”
“The Church of Sleep, Alex.” Eerie looked at him as if she had answered his question in full. “When we sleep, we are programmed. What else could sleep be? But who does the programming, and to what end? To where do they drive us?”
Li put his hand on Alex’s shoulder, and the strange atmosphere immediately deflated, Eerie retreating back from him hurriedly, as if she’d only now realized how close they were. Alex felt confusion as well as a profound sense of relief.
“Try not to overwhelm Alex,” Li said to Eerie, patting her on the head affectionately. “You can’t try and tell him everything all at once.”
Eerie’s shoulders slumped and she looked distraught, and for some reason, Alex immediately felt guilty. What was it with this girl? He didn’t understand anything. But his head was starting to clear, and whatever strange effect the girl’s words had on him was already fading.
“I’m sorry, Alex.” Eerie looked at him, unaccountably sad. “I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”
“Everything is fine, Eerie,” Alex insisted. “Nothing bad happened.”
Eerie looked one way, then the other, and then leaned in close so that Alex could hear her whisper.
“I’ll help you out with something, then, to make up for it.” Alex felt a bit nervous with her standing this close, but this time he didn’t pull away. Whatever it was Eerie had to say, he was sure he wanted to hear it. “Walking in the snow, under a grey sky, you will wonder if it is okay. I won’t be able to say it, then, because I’m shy. Alex,” Eerie whispered, her lips so close to his ear that he could feel her breathe. “It’s okay with me.”
Eerie straightened back up, and then smiled at him. Her oval face lit up when she smiled, and he was struck by how familiar she looked, how nostalgic, in a way he couldn’t put his finger on. Alex could only stare at her and wonder what any of what she said had meant.
Alex found himself shaking his head, trying to clear it. Had this all happened before? Why was it that he kept thinking about a cloud of golden butterflies, wheeling and diving in rough unison under the brilliant afternoon sunlight near Half Moon Bay? Had he ever actually seen that? Whose memory was it?
“Something bad is coming, Alex. Right now. It’ll hurt a bit,” Eerie said sadly, kicking at the ground absently, “but you’ll have to make it through without my help. Don’t worry, though,” she said reassuringly. “I know you will.”
Where Eerie had stood, there was only a cloud of golden smoke, dissipating in the wind, smelling delicately of sandalwood. Alex turned back toward the rest of the party, wanting to ask someone what had happened.
The party had become a still-life portrait. Sarah was frozen in midsentence, caught up in conversation with Renton and a black girl he didn’t recognize. Li was right behind them, along with Vivik, Todd, and two other guys that Alex vaguely remembered from class. All of them were rigid, silent, flesh-colored statues arrayed across the jumbled surface of the roof. Alex took a step closer, and realized that even the beer in the bottle Renton was drinking from was inert, held in perfect suspension in the neck of the bottle.
He heard a strange, metallic sound from behind him and spun around. Hovering in front of him, perhaps twenty feet above the roof of the building, a thing that he could not stand to look at directly loomed over him with its many terrible eyes, and screamed.
The scream was not like anything Alex had heard before. It was barely even a sound. He felt revulsion from the very depths of his being, and was immediately sick, coughing up bile as his stomach contracted and heaved. The sound the creature made was like a terrible reverberating siren, endless and punishing, battering his mind and thoughts into fragments. His chest and abdomen were racked with spasms, and his legs twisted and collapsed underneath him. He spilled onto his contorted back, unable to move, pinned down by the sheer horror of the thing, the noise, the horrible piercing shriek.
There was a sudden wetness on his face, and then he realized that his nose was bleeding. His vision blurred, and an impression of the thing seemed to be burned into his retina, so that every time he blinked he saw an afterimage of its horrible shape. The light refracted around it bizarrely, disorienting Alex, filling him with a formless and intolerable anxiety. The scream drilled into him, it ate away at everything around him, corroding reality. The world would not tolerate an existence like the one above him and in its desperate attempt to shed the abomination, the world itself was unraveling around him.
Alex felt it in the stone crumbling beneath his hands, in the crawling of his skin, everything rejecting the monster’s existence on a molecular level, like a cancer afflicting the world. The air hissed and smoked where it met the distended grey appendages and the building beneath began to shudder and fracture. It was translucent, but even the moonlight that eked through the glutinous mass was corrupted and ruined. The monster was so fundamentally abominable that Alex could not help but understand: the world around him was dying rather than accepting the existence of this thing, and if he stayed there too much longer, he would as well.
It took hold immediately, flashing through the front part of his skull like a migraine, the strange vertigo as his mind executed the implanted instructions, out of his control. He reached back without his hands, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, hidden in a place in his head that he had never thought to look before Rebecca had shown him how. Alex reached for the Black Door. It did not matter that he couldn’t move his body, that he couldn’t even blink. Even as the unrelenting horror beat down on him, peeling his soul away layer-by-layer, like an onion, he felt the Black Door creak open, frost crunching and tinkling as it slid wide.
The cold light burned as he breathed it in like smoke. It filled him, and then worked its way up out from the core of him, rigid and strong, a luminescent sheen that extended a few millimeters beyond his skin, sheathing him in frigid incandescence. Around him, the air hissed and steamed, agitated by the heat above and the utter absence below. He managed to get one knee underneath him, still aware of the tremendous pressure from above, the tension as his whole body tried to tear itself apart. But he forced the door inside open wider, and the flood of cold light supported him, pressure flowing outwards from within.
He made it to his feet, heedless of the blood the trickled down from his nose and the corners of his eyes. All along his skin, as the air passed through his lips, he soothed and slowed the air molecules, bleeding the heat off into the Ether. He pushed further, and reached outwards, stripping the surrounding atmosphere of its kinetic energy, siphoning it directly into the Ether, where it dissipated like steam. Alex couldn’t remember anyone teaching him how to do this, but he found it was surprisingly easy.
Alex raised his arms to either side of him, surrounded by a bubble of cool, still air, the stone frozen solid beneath him; a glimmering, blue-white light radiating from his chest. Frost crawled across the roof, radiating out from where Alex stood, beneath the horror of the thing in the sky. There was a strange, tinkling sound as the water molecules in the air coalesced and froze, and then fell to the ground, shattering musically on the stained concrete.
Alex was unaware of all this, as the horrible pressure from the thing above him beat down on his unprotected mind. Even though he was bleeding the heat and motion out of the surrounding area, he could not do anything about the crushing gravity the thing exuded, and Alex could feel his bones disintegrating under the strain with a sickening surety. His breath was a dense fog now, and it was impossible to see through the layer of superheated mist roiling at the edge of the bubble.
Alex pushed even harder, then, until his mind was filled with a cold radiance.
Then there was no more, or no further, and for a moment, he faltered. It was enough. The bubble collapsed around him and for a moment, he felt the full force of the thing’s scream again. He felt his legs crumple beneath him, and Alex collapsed backwards into Rebecca’s arms, who gathered him up like a child. The moment she touched him, the terrible pressure was gone, and the scream silenced, without as much as an echo, and he wanted to kiss her. Alex could see the illuminated script of the barrier protocol that Rebecca activated clearly, a copper dome of beautiful but unreadable words that arced over the both of them.
“Shh… Alex, it’s okay…” Alex realized he was screaming, and stopped. Rebecca hugged him tightly to her chest, her arms hooked underneath his own, supporting him. “I’ve got you, now.”
Her next words were louder, and clearly not directed at him.
“I’ve collected Alex, whenever you less sociable types want to earn your pay,” Rebecca shouted. She then grinned down at Alex, who was still trying to get his legs to hold him up again. “I hope you had a nice party, anyway.”
Alex discovered that, in Rebecca’s arms, he could look at the thing. It hovered in midair, writhing and amorphous, like a gigantic amoeba, extending tentacles and formless limbs in all directions. Some of them were elongated and ended in things that looked like mouths, if flowers had mouths — brilliant red and wet and on the inside, cellulose ridged with teeth hooked like thorns. Other limbs ended in strange, flower-like blooms, and at the center of each, there were a cluster of black eyes, like an insect. Around the periphery of the monster the air burnt and smoldered, disintegrating rather than come into contact with the horror. The entire world recoiled, Alex realized, and had he not activated the protocol, his body would have done the same.
A cluster of arms drooped down from the thing’s misshapen bulk, stretching in a way that made Alex nauseous. He felt panic as the flower heads bloomed at the end of the tentacles, exposing terrible black eyes and toothy, gaping maws. Where it touched the building it left behind a viscous trail of yellow-tinted slime, and the stone crumbled and sizzled where it dripped. Alex wanted to scream, but then he felt Rebecca in his mind, her hand on his chest, and the fear began to dissipate. He watched the arms descend down toward the barrier with an odd feeling of curiosity, nothing like the fear of impending death.
The limb was disintegrated before it made contact, dissipating into a mist of disconnected tissue, less like it hit a wall and more like it was hit with a wall.
“What is this thing?”
Michael asked the old man casually, as if he didn’t notice the tendril of smoke drifting lazily from the palm of his outstretched hand. Alex blinked his eyes, trying to clear his vision, which insisted that Michael’s strange tattoos were now radiating a deep blue light from underneath the skin, his whole upper body wrapped in mass of fluctuating indigo light.
“It’s a Horror,” the old man standing next to him said conversationally, without looking up from the heavy leather bound book he carried open in front of him. To Alex’s eyes, he was orbited by several rings of words in a strange script that he could not identify, but seemed somehow familiar. The words spun around the old man, each ring moving at a different speed, their color one Alex could not recognize, though later he would remember it as similar to violet. “Or it was one, at any rate. This one is imminently near death. We are fortunate, in that sense, as the effective radius of the creature’s scream has been considerably reduced. While the other students appear to be caught in a stasis field, they have not been subjected to the brunt of its assault. I’m not sure about the nature of the stasis field, because it isn’t mentioned in the literature” Vladimir said, frowning, “but, it’s probably some sort of defense mechanism. Horrors are so rarely encountered…”
“A defense mechanism besides the screaming, you mean? Thanks for the natural history lesson, Vladimir,” Michael said, shoving his fingers in his ears and shouting. “But, since we aren’t in class, can we skip to the part where you tell me how to kill it?”
The thing’s mouths all opened simultaneously, gaping red, and Alex felt his headache began to return. Rebecca closed her eyes, and the barrier flared briefly. From Michael and Vladimir’s expressions, Alex figured the screaming had gotten louder again. Alex saw that the roof was starting to buckle, and realized that he was lying in a shallow pool of sand, as the building beneath him fractured and disintegrated into its base components.
Vladimir waved one hand lazily at the thing, and for a moment, the rings of letters around him flashed and increased the speed of their rotation. Above them, the monster shrieked and wailed, and the sky burned. Vladimir looked disappointed, and then waved his hand at the creature once more.
As far as Alex could tell, nothing happened.
“Fuck,” Rebecca said quietly, slumping down against the retaining wall behind them, Alex sprawled in her arms, almost sitting in her lap. He felt languid and weak; he could barely even move his fingers, and worse, he was hearing the scream more and more clearly, despite the barrier. “That didn’t work at all. Vlad is getting feeble.”
“Okay, asking nicely doesn’t do the trick,” Vladimir observed. “And Rebecca’s got her hands full. Guess it’s down to you, Michael.”
“I hate doing this stuff, you see,” Michael said to no one in particular. “But, since I’m already up, I might as well put this to rest.”
Michael raised his hand again, the light around him gathering and pulsating up from inside, the air around him charged with static and rippling, his skin dark in contrast to the vivid lines that ran across it.
At first nothing happened, and the Horror managed the first few dissonant notes of a new shriek. Then it’s body rippled, first expanding outward as the pressure swelled within warped the flesh, followed by a massive contraction that pulled everything back toward the center. For a moment, the amorphous body flexed and struggled, racked and twisted by the contrary momentum that pushed and pulled at it. Then it detonated, with a wet sound and a muffled but powerful explosion, one that rattled the roof of the building and resonated with Alex’s chest, the wind whipping around the barrier that surrounded him, held close to Rebecca’s chest. He could hear damp thuds as chunks of the monster battered the wall of golden light around them.
“This is really fucking gross,” Rebecca observed, watching the amorphous pieces of undifferentiated tissue splash against the barrier. “You alright, Alex?”
She smiled down at him, but the boy was fast asleep, his head curled up in her lap, his breathing slow and shallow. Rebecca looked worried for a moment, and then shook her head. She reached down to brush the hair away from his eyes, looking at Alex with a mixture of affection and pity.
“Sleepyhead,” she said softly, as if it were a warning.