Mitsuru sat in the middle of a long, wood paneled room, cross-legged on the floor. Behind her, there were inactive shooting lanes, their battered targets hanging forlornly. In the distance, time was punctuated by the distant pops of rifle training occurring on the range outside. In front of her, on a green cloth, was a matte-black.45 caliber Glock 36 semiautomatic pistol, and Alex bent over it, wiping sweat from his brow and wishing that he had ditched class, or, failing that, could find the damn firing pin that he had set aside only a moment ago.
He didn’t bother to look up when the door opened behind him. He only hoped that it would be something that would interrupt firearms drills.
“Gustav, thank you for coming,” Mitsuru said. “You’re early, but we can go ahead and start. This one’s fairly hopeless when it comes to guns.”
Even Alex wasn’t totally sure what it was that he muttered. So, when he found himself suddenly sprawled on his back, Mitsuru crouching over him with a handful of his hair knotted around her fist, demanding to know what he’d said, it was rather awkward. She’d hit him, he realized belatedly, from the way his jaw ached, but he’d never even seen it. It had been almost like he’d fallen over by himself.
Alex attempted a variety of sullen apologies, and then, after her grip tightened on his hair and brought tears to his eyes, a much more sincere one that seemed to satisfy Mitsuru. She released her hold and stepped off of him, resuming her former position, sitting on the floor.
“I am not Michael. This is not Michael’s class. Michael coddles you and cares for you. I will not. Whatever it is that he has taught you, it isn’t enough,” Mitsuru said flatly, her red eyes cold and disinterested. “You will ask questions whenever you need too, here, and when you do so, you will do so respectfully. Otherwise, I do not wish to hear you speak unless you are spoken to. Do you understand all this?”
“Yeah,” Alex said, rubbing his head resentfully. “I guess I do.”
“Very well. Then let me introduce Gustav Esteban, who will assist in your instruction,” Mitsuru said, pointing at the wizened old man who was currently setting up a folding chair beside them. Alex nodded at him, but the white-haired man didn’t give any indication that he’d noticed. “He’s a telepath, a very special kind of telepath, and the Academy values him far more than we value you. So, you will kindly ignore the fact that he is a horrible bastard.”
“I see,” Alex said, staring at the smiling man in his pressed suit, grinning from ear to ear with a face so wrinkled that it was difficult to tell if his eyes were open or not. “A telepath, huh?”
“It’s fun, isn’t it? Michael’s class? Yes, I know its hard work, but it’s a rewarding kind of work, don’t you agree?”
“I guess,” Alex allowed, figuring that resenting all classes on principal was still more or less a responsibility of his as a student.
“That’s because Michael’s class isn’t about fighting, Alex, its only training. And training is important, Alex, don’t get me wrong. But, it isn’t combat. Combat is scary, scary and painful and bad. Most people like some aspect of training, whether it’s the yoga or the swimming or the judo, part of it appeals to most Operators. But nobody likes combat, Alex, not really, except for Alice Gallow. And she doesn’t count,” Mitsuru added thoughtfully, “because she is a total psychopath.”
“Right,” Alex said uncertain. “That is the most I’ve heard you say so far.”
“Ask a question or shut up and listen,” Mitsuru said, eyeing him.
Alex elected to shut up and not get hit again.
“Now, onto the business at hand. Do you know what the problem with beating you to death is, Alex?”
“Well, I can think of several, actually,” Alex said, smiling tightly and shifting uncomfortably against the floor. He wished that someone had told him about the folding chairs in the corner when he came in, like the one Gustavo had. He’d been waiting for a good opportunity to get one for himself, but it hadn’t happened yet — he really didn’t want to interrupt Mitsuru while she was talking. Particularly not if she was serious about the beating thing.
“You wouldn’t learn anything from it,” Mitsuru said ruefully, “unfortunately. Because trying to explain is so much more difficult. As far as learning incentives go, there’s nothing like having your life on the line.”
Alex finished reassembling the pistol, snapping the slide into place, working the action, and then slotting the clip and checking the safety. He set it down in the center of the green cloth, and looked up at Mitsuru for a reaction. He didn’t get one — she was looking at someone behind him disapprovingly.
“You’re late,” she said icily. “Do I need to remind you how much I disapprove of tardiness?”
“Sorry, Miss Aoki,” Steve grumbled, making a face at Alex as he walked by him. “It won’t happen again.”
“It had better not,” Mitsuru agreed grimly.
Alex glared furiously at Steve, who offered him the finger in return, then glared more sullenly at Mitsuru. He was about to speak when he realized that Gustav had somehow disappeared from the room, complete with his chair.
“What the hell is going on?” Alex demanded, looking around him. “Why the hell is he here?”
Mitsuru stood up, and then picked up the Glock from where it lay on the oil cloth. She inspected the action, and then sighted down the barrel. After a moment, she grunted her approval.
“It is a bit abnormal,” she admitted, nodding. “Usually we start with a stranger, someone neutral and anonymous. It’s easier on the students, or so the theory goes. But, if they’d wanted you to have an easy time, then they wouldn’t have made me your teacher.” Mitsuru reached down, and set the pistol down delicately on the floor, right in front of Alex’s hands. He took it without meaning to. “I needed someone you wouldn’t mind shooting, Alex, and before I even had a chance to look, Miss Gallow showed up with a volunteer.”
Mitsuru motioned at Steve, and he sauntered roughly ten meters away, and then turned to face Alex. Even at a distance, Alex could see his mocking face, screwed up and contemptuous.
“I been thinking about this, fag,” Steve sneered. “Ever since the first day I met you.”
“And you’re calling me a fag? Because that’s pretty much the gayest shit anyone has ever said to me,” Alex said, looking nervously at the pistol in his hand. “Just saying.”
Steve started forward, and then halted when Mitsuru cleared her throat. Alex wasn’t sure, but he thought that he might have seen her smile, for an instant.
“Enough, boys.” Mitsuru looked at Alex, her bloodshot eyes serious and disconcerting. “This isn’t too complicated, Alex, but for some reason, many people find it to be very difficult. All I need you to do is to take the gun, chamber a round, release the safety, and then shoot Steve in the head.”
Alex blinked and stared blankly for a moment.
“You want me to shoot Steve?”
He was incredulous, gesturing wildly in panic and outrage.
“Could you stop waving that thing around?” Mitsuru said, looking warily at the Glock in his hand that Alex had almost forgotten. “It doesn’t count unless you shoot him on purpose, and if I get shot today, I will be very, very cross.”
Alex looked down at the gun in his hand, not comprehending, and then blushed and set it carefully back down on the patch of green cloth.
“No way,” he said defiantly, folding his arms. “He may be an asshole, but I’m not shooting anybody because you told me to. Wait, fuck that — I’m not shooting anybody who isn’t one of those monsters, okay? This is bullshit.”
Mitsuru didn’t even look at him. Instead, she shrugged indifferently, and sat back down on the floor.
“Steve, he doesn’t seem to want to shoot you,” Mitsuru said, sounding confused and disappointed. “I can’t imagine why.”
“I was counting on it,” Steve said, cracking his knuckles and grinning.
“Persuade him otherwise, would you?”
Steve’s grin widened as he walked toward Alex.
“I say this one’s fag the whole way through, Miss Aoki,” Steve snarled, advancing on Alex. “But, I’ll do my best.”
Alex turned to stare at Mitsuru pleadingly, too shocked to even formulate an objection.
That turned out to be a mistake.
If Steve hadn’t been such a big guy, Alex probably wouldn’t have even seen him lunge, he moved so fast. As it was, Alex barely had time to duck under Steve’s outstretched hand. He still managed to catch onto a clump of Alex’ hair, tearing it out with an awful ripping noise, like a Velcro strap detaching from his head. Alex gasped and reeled backwards, grabbing at his head, only to eat a straight jab that hit him square in the nose, bringing tears to his eyes and blurring his vision. He couldn’t see well enough to tell what the next few punches were, but the one that knocked him down had to have been a right hook; it came from the side and caught him below the ear, with an impact that rattled the teeth in his jaw and made his knees fold underneath him. He fell to the ground and moaned, having just enough presence of mind to cover his face with his arms, to ward off any further blows.
Steve laughed and kicked playfully at his chest and stomach a few times, then dropped down and grabbed a hold of one of Alex’s flailing arms. Alex realized that he was putting him in a wrist lock a moment before it happened and he struggled against him, but in his panic he forgot everything that Michael had taught him about escaping holds, and only managed to wriggle fruitlessly. Steven bent his wrist backwards far enough for it to hurt, leered at Alex, and then bent it further.
Alex howled, and somewhere during the howl, he heard something snap. Steve maintained pressure on the hold, and Alex was certain that nothing had ever hurt quite so bad. It sapped any strength he might have had to fight him off; frankly, he couldn’t even bear to look at it. His legs kicked and jerked as he struggled blindly. He was aware of the noise he was making, a kind of whimper, and he was ashamed of it, but he could not seem to stop.
“Enough,” Mitsuru said, from somewhere above them. The pressure on his wrist ceased, and Alex immediately clutched it to his chest. He couldn’t breathe out of his nose very well, and his breath came in ragged gasps. “Open your eyes, Alex.”
After a moment, Alex did so. Steve stood a few meters away, pacing and shadowboxing, looking happy with himself. Mitsuru crouched over him, her face blank, her eyes bloodshot and serene, the gun stretched out to him, still on its bed of green cloth.
“How do you feel, Alex?”
“Fucking bad!” Alex shouted, voice quivering. “What the fuck is going on here?”
Mitsuru’s calm was impenetrable.
“Do you feel like shooting someone?”
“No,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Fuck that. And fuck you, Miss Aoki. No way.”
Mitsuru shrugged and walked away, setting the gun down and the sitting down beside it.
“Let’s try it again,” she said, to no one in particular. “Reset.”
The transition was so abrupt that it made him nauseous. To Alex, it seemed as if he was lying in a heap on the floor one moment, bleeding from the face and clutching his broken wrist, and then the next, he was standing where he’d started, facing Steve with the gun in his hand. He looked down at the Glock, black, compact and menacing, and at the hand that held it. His wrist seemed miraculously whole, though it was an angry red hue, and quite sore. Alex touched it with one finger, marveling at the bruised but intact flesh, contrasted with the mess a moment ago. He put his hand to his face, and his hand came away bloody, but not as bloody.
“This isn’t real,” he said uncertainly.
“This is very real,” Mitsuru corrected sternly. “If you get killed, you will be very dead, make no mistake about it. The pain and the consequences here are all real. The only difference is that I have more discretion about when I let you die. That’s all.”
“This is Gustav doing this, right? Some kind of telepathic illusion or something?”
Mitsuru sighed.
“This isn’t some kind of show or trick, Alex. Don’t seek comfort in deluding yourself. It isn’t a good thing. This means is that I can have Steve hurt you forever,” Mitsuru said, nodding at the goon. “You won’t die until I let you. If I let you. Which I probably won’t. Now pick up the gun.”
“So, if I shoot Steve, that won’t be real, either?” Alex asked, staring at the pistol in his hand. It felt very real.
“Steve, Alex thinks this is an illusion. Disabuse him of the notion.”
Mitsuru sounded disgusted, like Alex had failed her on a personal level.
“Sure, Miss Aoki,” Steve said with his monkey grin, walking lazily toward Alex.
“Wait!” Alex cried. “Why are you doing this?”
“Are you ready to shoot him?” Mitsuru asked evenly, holding up a hand to stop Steve, who suddenly looked nervous.
“Will he die?”
Alex was unable to look away from the gun in his hand.
“That’s generally what happens when you shoot someone,” Mitsuru replied gravely.
“No,” Alex said shakily, letting the gun clatter to the floor. “No way. That’s not me.”
“Christ,” Mitsuru started, wincing. “You need to be more careful with loaded guns, kid. I’m teaching you an important lesson about being a soldier. You and me, Alex, we are both the same in this — we don’t ask why when we’re told to pull the trigger. You’ll get yourself killed, worrying about that. Let the bosses be concerned with who and why. It will take everything you’ve got just to do what needs to be done, and survive the process. Understand?”
“No,” Alex said miserably.
Mitsuru sighed and rubbed her head.
“The lesson is simple — there’s no point in teaching you to shoot, Alex, if you aren’t going to pull the trigger when you are told to,” Mitsuru explained, clearly frustrated. “No point in sharpening a blade you aren’t going to use. We aren’t going to wait until you’re in the field, until your life and the lives of other Operators are on the line, to see you pussy out. Suck it up, pull the trigger, and then we both can go home.”
Alex looked down at the ground. His nose still ached a great deal, and it was bleeding consistently enough to make him sniffle.
“I guess I’m not cut out for this,” Alex said a moment later, sounding reluctant. “If that’s what this all means, then I don’t want any part of it. I quit, alright? I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m done.”
“Alex, Alex,” Mitsuru chided. “We already know that you are cut out for this. That’s what precognitives are for. What you want is irrelevant. We’re concerned with what you can do, not what you want do,” she said, shaking her head. “There would never be enough soldiers if we asked for volunteers. I told you, none of this will be fun, or easy. Most Operators would rather not do what they do. But they can, and the need is there, so they do what they have to. We do what we have to, Alex. We are weapons, both of us. The purpose of a weapon is to kill. Don’t you want to have a purpose, Alex?”
“This is fucked up, right here,” Alex said slowly, staring at the pistol in his hand as if it would speak to him. “Do Rebecca and Michael know that you are doing this shit to me?”
Mitsuru tittered, and Steve burst into laughter.
“I would think so,” Mitsuru said, smiling. “They’ve both completed the Program themselves, after all. Rebecca helped design the Program.” Mitsuru shook her head. “Okay, question time is over. Are you ready to do what you have to do?”
She looked at Alex, hard, for several moments, but he refused to look up at her, transfixed by the weight, the sheer reality of the gun in his hand.
“No,” he said, softly. “Why should I? Why should I do anything?”
“Because you have to,” Mitsuru said, looking mildly disinterested. “Again.”
“Right,” Steve said, from immediately behind Alex.
Alex jabbed an elbow back, digging it into Steve’s midsection, but he just grunted, his arms wrapping around Alex, one forearm reaching across his neck. Alex tried to lower his head, to put his chin between Steve’s arm and his throat, but he was too late for that. He stomped on Steve’s foot, several times, with all the force he could muster, grinding his heel against the boy’s instep. He drove a few more elbows into his body, but he couldn’t put much power behind them. Steve’s forearm crushed steadily into his larynx, and soon all he could hear was himself making ghastly strangling noises.
Alex woke on the floor, with his face in a shallow pool of vomit, unable to swallow and struggling to breathe. Mitsuru crouched above him, holding out the gun. He brushed her away with one arm, and then everything reset again.
This time he didn’t bother with conversation. When Mitsuru asked him if he was ready to use the gun, he ignored her. He put the echoes of the pain and the fear out of his mind, as best he could. He focused solely on Steve, standing a few meters away, looking like he hadn’t even broken a sweat, grinning like it was his birthday. Alex was ready when he came forward this time.
He was ready for Steve’s jab, too. He had gorilla-like arms that gave him a reach advantage, but Alex kept his hands up and his head moving, and Steve couldn’t do anything more than clip him. Alex was patient, protecting his head, absorbing the occasional shot to the side or the arms, waiting for his chance to close.
Steve threw a combination that ended in a right hook that was a little off, and Alex saw his footwork was bad, that he was punching while he backpedaled. Alex blocked the punch with his left arm, and then stepped inside, putting everything he had into a hard right that sank into Steve’s kidney.
Again, there was no apparent transition. Steve was simply one thing, and then he was the other. Alex didn’t even see it before he made contact. His hand crumpled against Steve’s rocky skin, folding and tearing like paper where it collided with the stone, and then he fell to the ground, while Steve kicked him with his heavy stone foot and laughed his booming laugh. Alex closed his eyes, protected his face as best as he could, and waited it out. He didn’t want to open them, because he might have seen what he had done to his hand.
When he finally did, he saw Mitsuru crouched over him, holding out the gun.
Alex refused three more times, and it ended horribly, three more times. Then he gave in.
The pistol was somehow louder with that shot than it had been when he shot at the range, the trigger much more difficult to pull. And when Alex stood and stared at the intact remainder of Steve’s head, most of his brain dripping off the far wall, Mitsuru put her hand on his shoulder like a friend.
“Combat isn’t fun, Alex,” she said, with surprising gentleness. “It hurts, and it is frightening. There are no good choices, only a series of compromises and things that you will regret later. This isn’t training, Alex, and it isn’t theory or philosophy. This is fighting and surviving, or it is fighting and dying. Nothing more. And it is the only thing that matters.”
She gently prized the Glock from his fingers, and then activated the safety.
“Welcome to the Program. When we are done with you,” she said, her bloodshot eyes full of sincerity, “you won’t even recognize yourself. Reset.”
Alex heard the door close behind him, and congratulated himself on not running. Mitsuru’s ‘class’ had turned out to be an eight-hour nightmare; Alex hadn’t seen Gustav again until right before Mitsuru dismissed him. Alex still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but he was fairly certain that much of it had been due to the old man’s purported telepathy.
Whatever they had done, though, it had consequences — Alex had bruises forming along his chest and above one eye and across the bridge of his nose, and he felt a strange lingering pain everywhere he’d been injured. Steve had left looking totally untouched, and Alex was fairly sure that the mess at the end of the session had been solely for his benefit. Mitsuru had bemoaned his performance, but Alex didn’t feel like he’d done too badly.
After all, it was his first time killing anybody. That he could actually remember.
Steve wasn’t about to let himself get shot, of course. He’d been grimmer, after the reset, but he seemed angry more than traumatized, which gave Alex the feeling that this was not an entirely new experience for Steve. After that, Alex was faced with an enraged, moving target, and he only managed to tag Steve once in the entire rest of the day, meaning that he was forced to go hand-to-hand with someone who was bigger, stronger and more experienced.
Given the circumstances, it could have gone worse. Mostly, things had ended with Steve bashing in his head, either with his elbows or against the floor, and Steve’s obvious wrestling background made this kind of close-quarters ground fighting particularly hopeless for Alex. But near the end of the day, Steve had gotten sloppy while setting up a choke, and Alex had managed to get a thumb up into Steve’s eye socket, and forced it in as far as he possibly could. Steve howled and reeled away from him, clutching his face, and Alex had time to pull himself to his feet, wipe the blood from his eyes, and find the Glock that Steve had knocked to the ground when he tackled him.
He hadn’t shot him. He’d intended to, of course, but instead he’d walked up behind the blinded kid and struck him in the base of the skull with the butt of it. He didn’t stop hitting him when Steve fell down, or when he stopped moving.
He’d only stopped when he heard Mitsuru laughing.
Alex stepped out of the hallway, and into the chill of the evening and the setting sun, never quite so grateful to be out of a classroom.
“Hi.”
She sat on the low fence that bordered the walkway outside the building, striped tights and shiny black shoes dangling, her nails painted to match her hair. Her face was impassive, her eyes wet and shining. She put aside her knitting and looked at him expectantly.
“Hi, Eerie.” Alex’s hand froze in the process of putting his headphones in his ears, and then they hung there, apparently determined to linger, useless and in-the-way. “What are you doing here?”
“I am waiting for you,” Eerie explained, hopping down to stand beside him. “Vivik said you weren’t in homeroom today because you had Mitsuru’s class, and Margot said you’d be messed up afterwards and that someone should keep you company. I am company.”
Alex starting walking slowly down the path, and Eerie fell in beside him.
“Wow. I’m surprised.”
“Surprised that we knew? Surprised that Margot said that?” Eerie was staring up at the changing leaves of the ancient trees that bordered the path, walking just out of reach. Every word had a ringing, musical quality to it. “Or surprised that it was me, and not Emily?”
Alex thought for a moment, trying to give an honest answer.
“No offense, but all three. I figured if anybody is going to be waiting for me outside of class like some kind of…”
“Stalker?” Eerie offered.
“Right,” Alex said uncertainly. “Well, that seems like Emily’s thing, you know?” He hesitated for a moment, then winced. “Hey, don’t tell her I said that, okay?”
Eerie walked along beside him quietly, and Alex started to worry that he handled the whole conversation very clumsily. She was short enough that when he looked down at her, he could see a quarter-inch of blond where she parted her hair, and he wondered absently whether she was changing colors, or was lazy about dyeing it.
“I will tell you a secret,” Eerie said finally. “Emily is waiting for you, back at your room. She has been planning this for days. She was very,” Eerie frowned, “loud about it. So, I decided to meet you here.”
“I see. Okay.”
Alex realized that his hands were trembling, an after-effect of the class, and buried them in his pockets. There was something about Eerie’s silence that seemed to imply to him that she was about to speak at any moment, and the anticipation stretched on for minutes. Alex stared out at the diminishing blaze of the autumn leaves, gradually being washed away by increasingly frequent rain, and tried to calm down.
“You went to Emily’s house, Alex. She talked about it,” Eerie said, her frown deepening. “She talks a lot, that girl.”
Alex shrugged, too surprised to formulate a clever response.
“She doesn’t seem like the type.”
“Not to you,” Eerie said, shaking her head sadly. “Because Alex is stupid.”
“What?”
Eerie glanced at him, her pupils massively dilated even in full daylight, her expression innocent and detached. He couldn’t help but wonder why she he was here, what she saw with her strange eyes when she looked at him.
“She wants you to feel sorry for her, I can tell. She doesn’t say it, but it’s obvious, even to me. And you have to be stupid,” Eerie said angrily, “to pity a pretty girl.”
“Huh?” Alex said, puzzled. “Are you mad at me, Eerie?”
She appeared to think about it for a while.
“Not really,” she said, shaking her head. “You are just a boy, after all. But…I do want to know. Why did you go home with her, Alex?”
“I don’t know,” he said, as truthfully as possible. “Because she asked me to, I guess.”
“You don’t like her?” Eerie asked, clutching her knitting basket in front of her with both hands, her fingers tight around the handle. “You aren’t seeing each other? Or kind of seeing each other?”
“What? What are you talking about? No. It’s not like that,” Alex said guiltily, his eyes on the concrete path in front of them. “I don’t even know her that well.”
“You went just because she asked you?”
“I guess,” Alex admitted, shrugging. “What can I say?”
“So, you’d go somewhere with me, if I asked you to?”
Eerie spoke casually, refusing to meet Alex’s eyes when he looked over at her, one hand picking absently at the hem of her skirt. Alex kept looking at her with a shocked expression for a little while, hoping for a reaction, then gave up.
“Sure.”
“For real?”
Eerie glanced up at him shyly, like he’d promised her something she was hesitant to believe.
“Sure,” Alex repeated, feeling surprised and a little embarrassed.
“Will you go somewhere with me?”
“Um, sure,” Alex said, laughing. “When did you have in mind?”
Eerie smiled at him, and grabbed his arm, fortunately not picking the one that still ached from class.
“Now,” she said, pulling him along behind her, away from the dorms, back toward the center of campus. “Right now.”
“I’d really like to go and change my clothes first,” Alex complained to Eerie, who dragged him along determinedly by his sleeve. “I didn’t think that I’d be going anywhere, you know?”
Eerie glanced back at him icily.
“Emily is in your room, remember?”
“Oh,” Alex said, blushing. “Right. That would be. Um. Yes.”
Alex felt, quite frankly, like an asshole. He didn’t know what either Emily or Eerie had planned, and he hadn’t had enough time to think about either to know what he would have picked, given the choice. His first day in Mitsuru’s ‘Program’ had been enough to leave his brain violated and muddled, and his body tired and battered. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing Steve’s broken head, the vile mess against the wall behind him, the gun in his shaking hands. He didn’t feel like going somewhere with Eerie, he felt like going somewhere and being sick.
But he didn’t want to go back to his room, and not only because Emily might be there.
Alex wanted out of the Academy, for the first time since he had arrived. He had thought that any world would be better than the one he had left behind, but after Mitsuru’s class, he wasn’t so sure. Despite what had happened to his family, and the role he had played in it, Alex had never thought of himself as a killer. After all, he had no memories of doing what the cops claimed that he had done, no hatred toward his family, no memory of the abuse that the cops claimed his father had visited upon him. If he was pressed, Alex would have had to admit that he often couldn’t even remember his parent’s faces without looking at the photograph his grandmother had kept on her bureau back in the trailer. How could he feel like a killer? He didn’t remember killing anyone. Most of the time, he didn’t even remember the people that he was supposed to have killed.
He’d seen Steve walk away, after the class was over, sneering at Alex as he left the classroom. He knew he hadn’t killed him, the same way he knew that he had killed his family — because other people told him so. But Steve didn’t feel any more alive than his parents felt dead, and in the back of his mind, all he could see was the contents of Steve’s skull spreading slowly across the blond wood of the floor.
Alex followed Eerie numbly through the campus, into one of the cavernous Administrative Buildings, then through a series of corridors and hallways, doing his best to think about nothing, haunted by the afternoon. He was glad that she didn’t want to talk, because he wasn’t sure if he wanted to say any of the things he was thinking out loud. He didn’t notice when they had walked out the back of the building, until they were halfway across a dark, secluded courtyard, overhung with the grey branches of ancient willow trees. Alex remained heartsick and oblivious to his surroundings, to the extent that he almost tripped over a tombstone.
“Holy shit!” Alex exclaimed, attempting not to fall over the mossy, fractured limestone that his foot was caught on.
“Quiet,” Eerie shushed. “We aren’t supposed to be here.”
“I sort of guessed that.”
Alex brushed the moss from the tombstone without thinking about what he was doing. The carving on the stone was in kanji, and unreadable to him, but it looked like someone important.
“Shh.”
Eerie led them on a winding path through the headstones. It was chilly and dim beneath the leaves and the high walls that surrounded the courtyard, the path overgrown and dotted with white marble benches that looked cold and uninviting. Alex shivered and hurried along behind Eerie, who continued to ignore his questions. The courtyard wound on and on, passing by glass-enclosed terrariums and rooms that, through leaded glass windows, appeared to hold endless shelves of books in varying states of decay. Above them the uniform slate-grey stone stretched up to shut out most of the sky, with only the silhouette of the occasional stovepipe to break the uniformity. Eventually, they came to a rounded platform lined with broken columns, limestone bas reliefs, and the faint remains of white marble inlays. The columns were thin, fluted, and utterly unlike anything else Alex had seen in the Academy, fragile and almost alien in their design, in their strange lack of symmetry.
Renton leaned against one of them, a dour girl in a blue dress standing discreetly behind him.
“Welcome, welcome,” Renton said, grinning expansively and motioning Alex and Eerie over. “Sorry for making you come all this way, but this is, well, profoundly against the rules. Now then,” he said conspiratorially, putting his hand on Eerie’s shoulder in a familiar way that Alex did not like, “who wants to go to San Francisco?”