Alex looked at the pig, and the pig looked back at him. He wished it had fur. Its pink, knobby skin was altogether too close to human for him, and its bright little eyes even more so. Then it made a noise that his mind insisted was simultaneously questioning and pleading, and Alex couldn’t swallow past the knot in his throat.
“I’m not sure I can do this…”
“Yeah, I noticed that in Mitsuru’s notes,” Alice Gallow said, flipping through pages on his clipboard until she found the one she was looking for. “You’re kind of a wimp, aren’t you, Alex? Well, I don’t plan on coddling you the way Mitsuru did.”
“Hey…” Alex protested weakly. “I just don’t want to shoot the stupid pig, okay?”
“You eat meat, right, Alex?” Alice said, grinning at him. He’d never met a person, he decided, who smiled more often or looked less friendly when they did so. “If that little piggy was already conveniently turned into delicious bacon or pork chops, you would eat it, right?”
“Well, yes, but…”
Alice advanced on him slowly, menacingly, her grin displaying her white, sparkling teeth.
“If you won’t kill it, you don’t deserve to eat it,” Alice said, reaching out to poke one black-painted nail into his chest. “If you won’t defend yourself, then you don’t deserve to live. According to the notes Mitsuru left, you do, in fact, want to live. Is that right?”
“Uh, yeah…”
“Then don’t give me that crap about being more comfortable with someone else doing the killing when you’re planning on doing the eating,” Alice said, turning away from him and back to the class. “This is the Program, kids. What you don’t take, you won’t have. You all want to have dinner tonight, right?”
There were cautious nods and affirmative noises, though Alex noticed that none of the other students wanted to make themselves too noticeable either. He didn’t really blame them, looking again at the gun in his hand, and then again at the pig, who was cheerfully wandering around the radius of what the cord around his neck would allow him to explore. Alex related to the animal, on a number of levels.
“Well,” Alice said, turning back to Alice and licking her lips, “tonight we are having pork. Except for the Jews and the Muslims, of course. Wouldn’t want to upset poor Rebecca’s sensitivities. Then again, dinner could be very late,” she said, taking a chair in the corner of the classroom, “considering we have to wait for Alex to provide it.”
“You’re saying that if I converted…” Alex said slowly.
“Nope,” Alice snapped. “I’ve seen them raise and slaughter pigs on a kibbutz in Israel; they just didn’t eat ‘em.”
“Oh,” Alex said, his voice sounding funny and somewhat hollow to him, as if he was hearing it at a remove. The pistol was the same S amp;W 9mm that he used for target shooting two hours ago, but it had taken on an evil import, a menace that pervaded its cold weight. “That’s good, then.”
He did it in a rush, raising the gun and firing quickly. To his utter shame, he closed his eyes at the last moment, something that Mitsuru had cured him of weeks ago, by slapping him in the back of the head every time he did it until he stopped. His shot went wide, hitting the ground a few feet away from the pig, causing it to squeal and run in blind panic. Alex felt hot shame, and heard the beginning of Steve’s laughter before he started firing wildly.
Alex was a terrible shot, and the pig was moving. He got it eventually, but it took several tries, and it wasn’t pretty — he hit it in the foreleg, causing more blood and noise, and it took another shot to put it down. Alice inspected the carnage grimly while Alex shook and wiped tears from his eyes that he hadn’t realized he cried, all the while trying not to notice Steve and Renton smirking and exchanging superior looks.
“Well,” Alice said doubtfully, “I’m not sure how much of this one will be edible, but we all have to start somewhere, right?”
She slapped Alex on the back.
“Don’t worry,” Alice confided. “I already talked to the kitchen. It takes them a while to use up a whole pig. You won’t have to do it again for two, maybe three days.”
“Great,” Alex said numbly, the gun hanging, useless and forgotten, from one hand. Somehow, this hurt worse than shooting Steve, although that didn’t really make any sense to him. “That’s great.”
“Of course, man doesn’t live by pork alone,” Alice said cheerfully. “Tomorrow you get to practice decapitating chickens.”
“Oh God,” Alex said, swallowing back bile, his eyes smarting and watering.
“And we’re supposed to have hamburgers for lunch Friday…”
Alex calmly returned the gun to its locker. He didn’t have to run to the bathroom. He found his own way back to his seat without stumbling. He watched Timor, the new kid, take care of his pig with a ruthless dispatch that was almost boredom. Alex didn’t get sick.
And it wasn’t that he didn’t care. Rather, he was trying to tell himself that this represented progress on his part; that he was closer to becoming something definable, to an identity. Maybe not something he could be proud of, he would have been the first to admit, but something that, at the very least, he could put a name to.
Maybe he shouldn’t have been, but he was still surprised, watching Timor’s pig bleed into the gutter inset in the floor for that exact purpose, how badly he wanted that.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am sure!” Eerie insisted, stomping her foot in frustration. “I see it! Every day!”
“Okay, that’s weird, but you know how boys are,” Rebecca said. “One minute they’re all over you, the next minute they’re off with someone else. Maybe he and Emily just, well,” Rebecca hesitated, trying to find a way to finish her sentence that wouldn’t set the poor, frantic changeling into another fit of anxiety, “maybe they’ve gotten… closer.”
“I am not as petty as you think I am, Rebecca,” Eerie said sternly. “I would not be coming to you if I thought they were sleeping together. I am coming to you because she is making him feel things, you know, with her protocol.”
“Well, you pretty much had to come to me, because you’re stuck working in my office until field study comes up next week,” Rebecca added. “Can you spot empathic manipulation in the first place? It can be pretty subtle.”
“You don’t know what I can see with these eyes. I’m not broken, Rebecca,” Eerie said defiantly. “Besides, I noticed you doing it to me, didn’t I?”
Rebecca had to give the girl that one, even if she didn’t openly acknowledge it. She looked for a place to stub out her cigarette, but found the ashtray so overwhelmingly full that it wasn’t possible. She dumped out the contents into her trashcan, wrinkling her nose at the ash it kicked up, and then finished the job on the blackened bottom of the ceramic tray she’d been given so many years before, when she’d been a student here.
Eerie was in one of her rare lucid moods today. The shimmer in her eyes was diminished, and when she spoke, it was careful, pained, with an air of profound reluctance. It was unkind, but Rebecca had more affection for the girl’s other, more pitiable persona.
“But Emily doesn’t have that kind of empathic ability,” Rebecca insisted. “She’s quite weak, actually. I doubt she could do any kind of significant manipulation, let alone a lasting one.”
Eerie tossed her head and threw her hands up in the air, gestures so dramatic by the girl’s standards that Rebecca startled back in surprise.
“She was touching him,” Eerie said insistently. “At the time. All the times.”
“That’s why I think — ”
Eerie stomped her foot again.
“You are not listening,” Eerie said, tears of frustration in the corners of her strange eyes. “I don’t mean it like that. She was touching Alex, Rebecca. When she did it. You know what I mean, right?”
Actually, Rebecca did know. The catalyst effect. Michael might have been scared of Alex’s Black Protocol, and with reason, but the part about the kid that kept her up at night, that gave her the heebie-jeebies, was his potential as a catalyst. Gaul worried about what would happen if Alex came into contact with Mitsuru, who was obviously still obsessed with operating her own restricted Black Protocol, and she saw the validity in that. Rebecca herself had worried about the effect it might have on Eerie’s unique body chemistry, and in turn, the effect that same body chemistry might have on Alex, and she stood by that worry. Maybe, she thought, they had gotten too cute, too clever this time; maybe they had overlooked the most obvious person, perhaps the most desperate person.
Emily was a Class B, so she had just a shred of empathic ability, limited largely to perceiving the emotional state of those around her, rather than manipulating it. She was clever, and persistent, so given time, she could make very small tweaks in other people — Rebecca was well aware that she’d done so in the past a couple of times, mostly to stop bullying or avoid unpleasant social scenes, so she’d let it slide. Nevertheless, a manipulation of the order Eerie was talking about, that wouldn’t be possible, would it? It was a Class F operation, a severe and lasting transformation, which would require ability, time and a huge reserve of strength to accomplish. There was a nine-year old boy in the Academy’s grade school, who Rebecca believed to be the most powerful empath currently at the Academy besides herself; potentially, she thought, he could even surpass her, and turn out to be a Class M. However, he would be sadly incapable of doing what Eerie alleged had been done to Alex until he was fully trained.
The problem was inexperience. Employing a protocol like that, repeatedly, so subtly that neither the subject nor the people around him were aware of it, was an amazing feat, and doing it required practice and instruction. Rebecca had been lucky enough to find a teacher, and callous enough when she was young to experiment on those around her. She was confident in her abilities, having tested and honed them. But there was simply no way for most empaths to attempt something like that, much less to do it regularly enough to get good at it. Even if Alex was somehow elevating Emily from a Class B to a Class F…
Was Alex really elevating Emily to Class F without even realizing it?
…even if he was, she still shouldn’t be capable of a complex and nuanced operation like this. She just didn’t have the technical knowledge to pull it off. Raw power alone, even a great deal of it, wouldn’t do it.
“I don’t see it, Eerie,” she said reluctantly.
“Just trust me…”
For a moment, her temper flared. Eerie had, more-or-less, gone out of her way to embarrass Rebecca, being something of a project of hers, and in front of her boss, no less. She had made her look stupid and shortsighted, and she had done it for the exact same reasons that had gotten Rebecca a reprimand back in her Academy days. The same incident, oddly enough, that had led to the badly misshapen clay ashtray. Even though Rebecca knew that the similarities were the source of her frustration, that didn’t make her any less frustrated.
“No, Eerie, I warned you about this — you don’t get to play the trust card with me, not right now. You abused that,” Rebecca snapped. “Don’t ask me to take this on faith. You’re lucky I’m even bothering to listen to you.”
Eerie looked briefly furious, then her expression turned stricken, her hands dropping to her sides as she cried in frustration. Rebecca was more than a little surprised. Eerie had cried easily, until a few years ago, when she’d stopped completely, for reasons that she’d never explained. Eerie had shut Rebecca out of what little contact she’d made between their minds at the same time, too, for equally nebulous reasons. Rebecca didn’t think she’d cried since.
“Then talk to him,” Eerie demanded, sniffling. “Bring him in here and see for yourself. Then you tell me whether I am lying.”
“Maybe,” Rebecca said, turning her attention reluctantly to the stack of paperwork that Gaul kept circulating the offices perpetually, like that Greek guy in Hell endlessly rolling a rock up a hill, whose name she couldn’t remember. “If I get the time, I’ll try and talk to him early this month, even though I just saw him two weeks ago. But don’t hold your breath, kiddo.”
“Why are you being like this?” Eerie asked, sounding genuinely puzzled. “You should just let me!”
“Let you what?” Rebecca asked quietly.
“Let me out of trouble!” Eerie pleaded. “Just let me talk to him. Please?”
Rebecca made a show of meticulously filling out the first page in front of her, appearing to study it thoroughly without reading a word while she considered her options. The truth was that, in her own opinion, Rebecca wasn’t nearly as nice as people thought she was. She was just very sensitive, as an empath, and hated the people around her being unhappy. It always made her feel bad, too. With the exception of Gaul’s unhappiness, which she had come to treasure.
Moreover, she loved Eerie, she couldn’t help it, and it would be stupid not to admit it privately. But Eerie had embarrassed her, and it didn’t really seem to bother her at all. That upset Rebecca a great deal.
Rebecca thought about it for a while. Her glance strayed back to the stupid ashtray.
“You don’t deserve a chance when you haven’t even finished your punishment,” Rebecca said tiredly. “But if you are very, very good, then I might try and arrange a little time for you to do whatever it is you have in mind, provided it’s not what I’m thinking it is. I’m serious about that.”
“It’s not that,” Eerie said reassuringly. “Not for sure.”
“Make certain that it isn’t,” Rebecca warned her. “I have to work in this office. Anyway, finish the files in the other room, and then we’ll talk about it. Tomorrow. Okay?”
But Eerie had already gone skipping off, confident of her eventual victory. Rebecca sat, smoked, and contemplated the ugly ceramic ashtray, thinking about how stupid it was to assume that being older made you less susceptible to a broken heart.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” Alex offered.
It was impossible to tell what the look Margot gave him meant. Her expression was always the same, unless she was really angry — so all he could tell from her face was that she wasn’t really angry. She paused briefly in the process of wrapping his hands in white tape, gave him a look, and then shrugged and went back to it.
“Field study.”
“Oh. So, uh, how’s it going? You’re doing stuff with Audits, right?”
Margot gave him the barest of nods.
“Yeah,” she said reluctantly, as if she had admitted to something he might use against her later. “It seems like it’s going okay. How do you like Miss Gallow’s Program?”
Just the mention of the name brought the bleeding pig back to Alex’s mind, and he dispelled it with an effort. He wasn’t about to share anything about the pig incident, even if he was certain that Steve had already told everyone he could think of to tell about it. Steve never passed up the opportunity to take a shot at Alex — time didn’t seem to have diminished their dislike for each other at all.
“Well, I don’t think it’s any worse than Miss Aoki’s version. But it isn’t any better, either. Sometimes — well, most of the time, actually — I don’t think I’m cut out for this. You know, killing people and stuff. I didn’t think it would be like this. It’s weird, but sometimes I even feel bad about Mr. Blue-Tie.”
“Who?”
“A Weir,” Alex said, embarrassed. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I guess I don’t know if I have it in me. This whole thing, the Program or whatever, it’s a fucking nightmare as far as I’m concerned.”
“We all think that way at first, Alex,” Margot said softly, tapping the wrap on his right hand to see if it met her standards. “And then we adjust. It won’t bother you forever.”
“I’m not sure that makes me feel better,” Alex complained. “Is that an improvement? Or are they just wearing us down?”
Margot turned the hand over, gave it a final inspection and a quiet grunt of approval, and then she moved on to his other hand.
“You tell me,” she said, pulling a fresh length from the roll of tape, “you’re the one with all the problems.”
Alex almost got mad. That would not have been a good idea, even if Margot was working in Michael’s class as an aide today, and therefore obligated to be more tolerant than normal. He’d had the bad luck to spar with her, just once, in Mitsuru’s class. He’d broken his arm blocking her first kick. Her second kick had been aimed at his head — at least he thought so, because of the concussion he’d received as a result. On the upside, he couldn’t actually remember anything else about the fight. He was about to say something obnoxious, then he noticed the tension in her movements, the slight indications of a frown of her face, and he remembered where she lived and got a little worried.
“Have you, uh — have you been back long enough to see Eerie?” he asked, looking away, trying hard to sound casual.
“I have.”
He waited a moment, but Margot appeared to be absorbed in wrapping his hand.
“Yeah?” Alex prompted. “How is she? We keep… not running into each other, I guess.”
Margot turned his hand and pushed his thumb up, so that she could put extra tape along the edges of his knuckles, where the impact would be the greatest.
“My understanding is that you suck,” Margot said blithely. “That’s what I hear.”
“Oh. Um.”
“Right,” Margot agreed, though he didn’t think he’d said anything that she could agree with. “That’s about the impression I get, too, so I can’t say I’m unhappy that Eerie is coming around.”
“She’s angry with me,” Alex said slowly.
Margot paused, the roll of tape hanging from one of his hands, and glared at him, but he didn’t think she was actually that mad.
“She said you guys made out once, week before last, and then you haven’t spoken to her since, even though both of you are in homeroom together.” Even as oblivious as he was, Alex couldn’t help but notice the envy in the last part of the sentence. He was a bit surprised. He never would have thought that Margot would have been the type to miss school. “She says every time she sees you, you’re with Emily, being all cutesy. What exactly did you think I was going to say, Alex?”
Alex sighed, and tried not to hear the other kids behind him snickering and gossiping about what they had overhead. Margot finished the wrap on his right hand, testing the tape to see if it was thick enough, smooth enough to satisfy her. Apparently it was satisfactory, because she reached for the gloves sitting on top of his gym bag. They were light, mutant things, bulbous on the outside but almost nonexistent on the inside, leaving the fingers and thumb free for grappling, but offering a couple inches worth of padding over the knuckles and the back of the hand.
“Pretty much exactly what you said, but maybe angrier,” Alex admitted, holding out his hand so she could work the left glove over the tape.
Margot appeared to think about it while she did the same to his right hand.
“I’m not that angry, because I don’t think that much of you,” Margot said casually, a thin, polite smile on her face. “I don’t like seeing Eerie with you. Emily is vapid and weak, so I don’t really care what you do with her. But the idea of you and Eerie, well, I don’t approve. Getting close to Emily might be the first thing you’ve done since you showed up that I can support. Keep it up. Eerie will get over you eventually, I’m sure.”
“Hey!” Alex objected. “Maybe I deserve some of that. But it was a little harsh, don’t you think? I mean, I do like her…”
Margot shrugged. She’d let Eerie cut off her hair, right before she started field study, and he was still trying to get used to it. It was a little ragged around the nape of her neck, but it didn't look bad. Still, Alex had to give it up to anyone brave enough to let Eerie get near their face with scissors.
“Not harsh enough, I guess,” Margot said, looking away, her expression terse and strained. “You know I live with her, right?”
“Well, yeah…”
Margot sighed deeply.
“You want to see her?”
“Wait, what?” Alex asked, scratching his head with one gloved hand. “I thought you said I sucked?”
“You do, but that girl is raving mad,” Margot said, looking at him briefly, and then hesitating. “Look, I can get you in, tonight, after dinner. Do you want to or not?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Okay. Then meet me outside the library after dinner. Wait on the back steps. When I’m sure everything is cool, I’ll come for you.”
The plan puzzled him, and he opened his mouth to tell Margot as much, to say that her time with Audits had made her paranoid, but she turned and walked away before he had the chance, striding off toward Katya who was patiently waiting her turn to be taped up. Alex looked automatically for the bouncing pigtails that were no longer there as Margot walked past him, and for a second, he felt a kind of giddy happiness at the thought of seeing Eerie. Then he remembered all the weird things that he had done, that he would have to answer for, and his apprehension returned. He wasn’t exactly sure how long Michael stood there, just off to his side, waiting for him to notice.
“Hi,” Alex said sheepishly. “Sorry. I was thinking.”
“Wouldn’t want to interrupt that,” Michael said, wearing his usual implacable grin. “But anytime you’re feeling up for it, I know this Muy Thai instructor who’s just dying to meet you.”
“Right,” Alex said, grabbing his headgear and mouthpiece from the gym bag. “I thought it had been a long time since someone kicked my ass.”
Michael clapped him on the back as he led him along, toward one of the gym’s three elevated boxing rings, and laughed. He wore a white t-shirt and board shorts, and as always, Alex was profoundly envious of his physique — Michael looked, more or less, as if someone had carved one of those ancient Greek statues of the gods out of some kind of lustrous, dark wood, then added dreadlocks and black tattoo work for good measure. He was easily the most popular teacher on staff, the best physical trainer and protocol instructor, and the most patient man Alex had ever met. Michael was also the object of more than a few crushes from students in the combat program, some of whom stared jealously as he walked Alex across the room.
“Thanks for not letting Margot do it,” Alex said tensely, biting down experimentally on his mouthpiece, a nervous habit he seemed to have picked up lately. “I think she might have tried to kill me.”
“I’m not a sadist, son,” Michael said, looking surprised. “This isn’t the Program. I wouldn’t do that shit to you. I’m trying to make you better, that’s all. I don’t like seeing people get hurt, much less my students.”
“I think you’re the only one here who feels that way,” Alex said gratefully. “I can’t decide whether it was better when Miss Aoki was in charge or Miss Gallow, but they’re both pretty awful, aren’t they?
For a second, as they approached the side of the ring, Michael looked so unhappy that Alex couldn’t believe it. Then it was over, so fast and out of character that he found himself doubting that he’d seen it all. Nothing, after all, bothered Michael, not like that.
“Yes,” he said, grinning. “But let’s get back to the job at hand, alright? The last time we did this, every time you clenched, you let him get you in a Thai plum,” Michael said, putting his hands on the back of Alex’s neck, fingers interlocked, to illustrate. “Then he can hit you with knees all day, son. You have to keep him outside, work your jab and throw some low kicks, keep him cautious. You have reach, I keep telling you, but it’s no good to you if you don’t use it.”
Alex nodded, put in his mouthpiece, strapped on his headgear, and clambered through the ropes, thinking all the while that Michael could have been talking about a lot more than just his reach.