The roof was dead quiet, but as soon as Alex had that thought, he regretted the description. He could still see the shattered facade of the nearby dormitory building in the back of his mind, though they had taken away the bodies and cleaned up the broken glass hours ago. When Katya had walked with him back home from Eerie’s, there was still blood on the concrete and frightened students crying, though that also seemed to have died down as the night descended.
“I can’t believe they got Rebecca,” Alex said, taking a sip of his beer and making a face at the bitterness. Renton liked IPAs, and since he was the only one who seemed to be able to get beer, Alex had to drink them, but he hadn’t learned to enjoy it. “How could that even happen? Margot said she’s an Auditor, right?”
“Yeah,” Renton said grimly, from where he slumped next to an HVAC unit, in one of the old classroom chairs they had dragged up here. He had bandages all the way down one arm, an ankle wrap, and a crutch that he seemed to barely use. “She is. One of the best. Alistair said they rigged the assassins with some sort of psychic trap, a parasitic protocol that disguised itself as a memory and then attacked her mind from inside, once it was past her defenses. I still have trouble believing it myself.”
“Will she… be okay?”
“Of course,” Vivik said immediately. Renton just shrugged, while Li looked away.
“Who were they after, do you think?”
Alex only felt okay asking the question because, for once, it didn’t seem to be him. One group had attacked Anastasia’s home, while a second had gone for one of the Administration buildings, meeting Alice Gallow and Rebecca Levy by chance. It hadn’t taken long to deal with either attack, but a third undetected group had made it as far as the dormitories in the meantime. A few kids he didn’t know were killed in the attack, and a couple more were in the hospital, including Li’s friend and Alex’s occasional training partner, Cy So. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he felt a profound relief, not being responsible for this. After all, they hadn’t even attacked his dorm.
“Hard to say,” Renton said thoughtfully. “Maybe it was Rebecca from the start. Who knows? They sure couldn’t have taken away anyone we need more right now. Half the primary school kids saw that happen. They’re probably all traumatized.”
“It’s worse than that, and you know it. Rebecca’s a lot more important than you are giving her credit for,” Vivik said moodily. The boy had been drinking more than the other three over the past hour, to no visible effect, but causing some worry on Alex’s part. He understood, of course. Alistair had to intervene personally in order to prevent Alex from visiting Rebecca’s bedside a few hours before, dragging him down the hall while quietly explaining the need for her to recuperate in peace. “The Committee, the cartels, the Academy, it all holds together because Rebecca can always rally support, or smooth things over. Without her, Gaul might be brilliant, but I don’t think he can do much to keep control.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” Li asked. “I’ve been here three years longer than you and I don’t know any of this…”
For some reason, Vivik looked embarrassed to Alex, but maybe it only seemed that way. Maybe he was just drunk.
“I’ve been studying political theory and history lately,” Vivik said dreamily. “I’ve been having these ideas…”
“What I want to know,” Li cut-in, turning to Renton with a smirk, “is what you were doing over here, old man. Why weren’t you right by Anastasia’s side?”
“I was watching out for Alex…” Renton began uncomfortably.
“Bullshit! We all know where Alex was,” he said, turning and giving Alex a big grin that made him supremely uncomfortable, “so Anastasia knew, too, right? So what’s up with that?”
Renton finished his beer before he said anything.
“I think that maybe I got ditched. She’s been tight with Timor ever since they were both kids. I think she wanted to hang out with him without me around. It’s not a big deal.”
“Look out, Renton,” Li said, cackling. “A rival appears!”
“He’s gay,” Renton said flatly, giving Li an evil look.
“Or you wish he was.”
“He is, jackass,” Renton snapped. “I am a damn telepath, remember.”
“Huh,” Li said, briefly stopped in his tracks. It didn’t last. “Well, whatever. I still say you are jealous. He goes to class with her everyday and all, while you are stuck with me and Mr. Kohl…”
“He is her cousin,” Renton said, almost shouted. “And he is gay, you fucking idiot! Why would I be jealous?”
“I don’t know, but you’re the one yelling, dude,” Li said, smiling affably.
Renton’s shoulders slumped.
“How is Margot?” Alex interrupted, hoping to avoid a fight. “You were with her, weren’t you, Renton? You fought with those guys who attacked the Academy, right?”
Renton looked pained.
“It wasn’t much of a fight. They were much more experienced than we were. One on one, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but there were five of them. One of them manipulated light, I think, because that bitch set my whole arm on fire, swear to God, and I couldn’t see a thing the entire time. While they had me distracted, their telepath got all up in my head, locked me up in a replay of some fucking childhood trauma on endless loop. It took me hours to get it to stop. Margot said they ported her about forty feet up and dropped her on concrete, then one of them shot her in the chest with an assault rifle for good measure. She didn’t even have to go to the hospital. By the time the cavalry showed up, she said she was already walking around.”
Li whistled appreciatively.
“That girl is a force of nature,” he said approvingly. “But you shouldn’t feel bad. Even the Auditors would have had trouble with odds like that.”
Renton shook his head.
“No, you don’t get it,” Renton said quietly, but the kind of quiet that made Alex think that he might actually be really angry. “Timor killed two of them. So did Katya.”
“So? They got the jump on them. And you got jumped,” Li said encouragingly. “It’s not the same thing.”
Renton stood up abruptly, knocking his chair aside with an angry gesture. His crutch clattered to the ground beside it, forgotten.
“I’m supposed to be the one protecting her, Li,” Renton said, the full force of his anger turning his voice into a snarl and contorting his face. “Do you think she takes mitigating factors into account when she’s evaluating the success of her bodyguards? No, you idiot, she doesn’t. That fucking piece of shit Timor is after my job.”
“I don’t know,” Vivik said uncertainly. “Who besides you would want it?”
“Maybe some other pedophile?”
Renton gave Li the finger and stomped off, slamming the door behind him as he left the roof.
“That was pretty messed up, Li,” Vivik said, mildly rebuking him. “You didn’t have to be so hard on him.”
“Well, it is Renton,” Li said cheerfully, unmoved as always. “You don’t know him the way I do. Don’t waste too much time feeling sorry for him, ‘cause he sure wouldn’t do the same for you. Besides, if you think that was fucked up, wait and see what Renton does next. I guarantee it won’t be pretty.”
“I will be the first to admit that this is hardly my strength or area of expertise,” Mr. Windsor said solemnly, sitting on the edge of the table in front of the lecture hall, his normally ubiquitous projector inactive and silent. “Unfortunately, the events of this weekend appear to have deprived us temporarily of the services of the person most qualified to deal with their aftermath. This, I’m afraid, leaves me as the next-best option. Therefore, I wanted to give you all the opportunity to discuss anything that might be on your minds, to ask any questions you might have, which I will answer to the best of my ability. While we were fortunate enough not to lose any members of our class, I’m sure that some of you knew some of those affected by the fighting. Moreover, the sheer violence itself, once so routine in the days of the cartels running rampant, must have come as quite a shock, given the decades of peace we have enjoyed here at the Academy. Now, would anyone like to start?”
The class was silent, which was pretty much what Alex expected. Judging from the patient expression on Mr. Windsor’s face that was probably what he had been expecting, too. Alex glanced over at Vivik to see if he was planning to say anything, and decided that he was not. He had managed to maneuver Vivik between himself and Emily, as a precaution, one Vivik had been had to oblige. She looked hurt as class started, but he ignored it. Better, he thought, to be safe — but he couldn’t be too obvious about it, either. If he went over and sat down by Eerie all of a sudden, he would make her the target of every plot and scheme at the Academy. The silence stretched out uncomfortably, and Mr. Windsor opened his mouth to break it. Then, something that no one was expecting happened.
Eerie slowly raised her hand.
To his credit, Mr. Windsor managed to keep the amazement out of his voice.
“Yes, Eerie?”
“When will Rebecca wake up?”
The class stirred and muttered, and not with the usual amused contempt that followed Eerie’s attempts to contribute in class. For most of the people here, Alex figured, it might have been the most coherent thing they had ever heard her say. Thinking about what he knew about her relationship with Rebecca just made him sad.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Windsor said apologetically. “We are all hoping it’s soon.”
“Then… why won’t they let me see her?” Eerie demanded. “Because I don’t like it. Alistair keeps saying no. But I could help!”
There were some giggles, but Eerie seemed oblivious, like she always did.
“I am not certain why that would be the case,” Mr. Windsor said, with obvious concern. “I will look into it for you, I promise. Do you have any other questions, Eerie?”
She shook her head solemnly, apparently satisfied.
“Anyone else?”
It seemed like the whole class relaxed when Vivik raised his hand, restoring the normal order of things. Alex did, anyway.
“I have one, Mr. Windsor,” Vivik said, his voice abnormally strident and cold. “How long does the Administration plan on allowing this madness to continue?”
“What do you mean, Vivik?” Mr. Windsor asked, sounding genuinely curious. It was, in Alex’s mind, a personality flaw.
“They were Black Sun, right? Nobody is saying so, but I saw the markings. The Taos Cartel, right, Anastasia?” Vivik demanded, his hands shaking visibly. Alex tried to catch his eye and failed. Next to him, Emily looked mortified.
“That’s no secret,” Anastasia said airily, not looking up from the notebook she was writing in. “Though they have been expelled from the Black Sun, obviously. What is it that you want to say?”
“Relax, Anastasia, I don’t think you ordered the attack on the school,” Vivik said hurriedly. “But, is this what it’s come to? They were here for you, weren’t they?”
“This is getting a little personal…” Windsor interrupted half-heartedly.
“It is fine,” Anastasia said curtly. “Yes, some of them were here to kill me. Some of them were not. I took care of the ones who were. Whatever members of the cartel remain after the attack are dead, or they will be soon. There will not be a reoccurrence of such behavior.”
“But you can’t guarantee that, can you? Or there wouldn’t have been one in the first place, right?” Vivik said emphatically, half standing. “And if you can’t maintain discipline, then how will anyone? How will the Hegemony?”
“Watch yourself, boy,” Grigori said darkly from the other side of the class. “We would never do something like this.”
“No? The Terrie Cartel turned already, everybody knows it,” Vivik shouted back. “You don’t have control. None of you do. The system was always insane; it was always going to get some of us killed. Now you’ve all lost control of it, and unless someone does something, it’s going to kill all of us. While you, Mr. Windsor, you and the rest of the Academy, you train us and then you stand by disapprovingly while we kill each other. Are we just going to pretend that this didn’t happen?”
The class was silent. Emily had turned bright red, and was staring over at Vivik, while Katya looked delighted and impressed with him. Grigori and Hope were looking at Vivik too, but without the approval. Even Eerie looked surprised. Only Anastasia continued as if nothing was happening.
“Maybe not the most civil delivery, but Vivik has some excellent questions, class. Would anyone care to try and answer them, or shall I take a shot at it?”
Mr. Windsor smiled pleasantly, as if they were having a normal class discussion.
“I will answer,” Anastasia said icily. Mr. Windsor nodded at her benignly, but she didn’t look up to see it. “I maintain order, Vivik, because it must be maintained, because I can, and because I like it that way. I have no other reasons. I’m not devoted to the system, but it works better than anything else we’ve tried so far. Tell me, Vivik, because I do know how very intelligent you are, do you have anything better?”
“Not yet,” Vivik said defiantly, folding his arms across his chest. “But, I have some ideas I’m working on.”
Anastasia looked up at him, her face composed and haughty.
“Then when you’ve worked them out, come and talk to me. You know I’ll listen,” she said through what sounded a clenched jaw. “And, Vivik, since you seem to have forgotten, my enemies,” she said, pointing back at the Hegemony side of the class, “are right there. The next time you want to talk politics, you come see me in private. Do not,” she snarled, slamming her notebook closed, startling everyone, “put me in this position again.”
Anastasia gathered her notebook and stomped out of the class, letting the door slam behind her. Timor nodded politely at Mr. Windsor, grabbed her books and his things, and hurried after her. The entire class watched, helpless in shock at the outburst.
“Alright,” Mr. Windsor said, cleaning his glasses. “Maybe we should take a moment to compose ourselves? Five-minute break, people. Back in your seats in five minutes.”
Katya leaned over the row of seats to tap Vivik on the shoulder.
“Well, well,” Katya exclaimed, beaming. “Who’d have thought it? I totally misread you, Vivik. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone call Ana out like that. You’re awesome, man.”
“I think I might actually be stupid,” Vivik said, burying his face in his hands. “Why did I do that? What possessed me?”
“Well, there go all my questions,” Alex said softly.
“You poor thing,” Emily said, patting Vivik on the back, looking appalled. “What got in to you?”
“I don’t know,” Vivik said miserably. “I feel weird.”
“I bet I know,” Katya said smugly. “You go see Rebecca a lot?”
“Once a month, same as everybody else,” Vivik said without lifting his head.
“Yeah? Well, you know, whatever protocols she was operating, keeping everything running smooth and everybody happy around here?” Katya smiled and leaned back, her hands behind her head, her feet up on top of the row of seats in front of her. “Well, they stopped working a day or so ago. And it can’t only be you. Anastasia seemed a bit emotional herself. Betcha almost everybody at the Academy has been subjected to a little tweaking courtesy of Rebecca at one time or another. I think things around here are about to get a lot more interesting. Tell me,” she said, kicking the back of Alex’s chair, “how you feeling lately, son?”
Alex couldn’t sleep.
Calling that rare didn’t do it justice, particularly since he’d come to the Academy. Alex had been falling asleep before ten most nights, and woke up only when his alarm clock got insistent about things. Since the attack two days before, he hadn’t been sleeping well, and last night, he’d only gotten a few restless hours before giving up around four in the morning and heading to the gym, hoping to dispel some of the nervous tension that had been plaguing him. While he forced his stiff body through a very abbreviated Yoga routine on the deserted mats, Alex couldn’t help but wonder if Katya had been right, if Rebecca had really been manipulating everyone in the school, and if his current worries were the result of her injury.
He tried not to think any more about that.
Remembering things at random made it even more difficult to rest. Alex would drift part way to sleep, feel his body start to relax, his mind begin to wander… and then he would snap back to attention while a memory emerged from nowhere, blurry and indistinct, the details jumbled and impossible, and he would spend hours worrying over it.
He recalled the ocean, placid as a bathtub, warm as it lapped against his calves. His legs aching from the effort of climbing the foothills behind him, up to his shoulders in bare red Manzanita, the air around him smelling of the sage plants he crushed underfoot. He remembered turning the pages in a very old book, too young to read, sitting on a thick Persian carpet in a library that seemed almost as ancient as the book in front of him, smelling wood polish, coffee, and tobacco. For some reason, in the middle of the night, he remembered that Monarch butterflies return to the same trees along the California coast every year.
For some reason, he realized with a fair amount of surprise and confusion, at one point he had been very concerned with this particular butterfly migration, though he couldn’t imagine why.
None of the memories seemed to hold any special significance. Alex wasn’t sure why a memory of attending a formal dinner party and being confused over the forks had kept him awake a significant portion of last night. Of course, he must have fallen asleep at some point without realizing it, because in a muddled version of the memory, it was a childish but unmistakable Anastasia Martynova who helped him figure out which fork to use, scolding him as she explained. Dream logic caused him to accept this until he woke up in confusion.
The sun was barely up by the time he got to the track. He didn’t even have to run today, but after several weeks of being forced along by Michael, the strangest thing happened — he started to like running, just a little bit. He wasn’t fast, not at all, but over long distances, that tended to average out, and it wasn’t like anyone was racing anyway. Moving at a steady jog, he could comfortably cover several miles, and he found himself wanting to, some days, when his head was too weighed down, when he started to feel smothered by all the people and the attention. The track was cold and still damp from the night mist, but not deserted, despite his expectations.
“Good morning, Ms. Aoki,” he called out, descending the row of concrete steps that led down to the track and the playing fields. She looked up from where she sat by the side of the track, damp with sweat, messing with one of her running shoes.
“Alex,” Mitsuru said flatly, not expressing any surprise. “You are up early.”
“I know,” Alex said, stepping on to the track and smiling with forced cheerfulness. “Out of character, right? But I couldn’t seem to stay asleep last night, so, I thought maybe if I went for a run…”
Mitsuru nodded, and started fooling around with the other shoe. She was wearing the same grey t-shirt and red running shorts that the Academy handed out to all of its students, but it looked somehow risque on her. Alex couldn’t help but notice that it was the first time that he had seen her legs bare, but Mitsuru’s vivid red eyes were too nerve-wracking to risk appreciating, so he actually went out of his way not to look in her direction. This probably meant he was over-thinking it, since she didn’t seem concerned with him at all. He hurried through his warm-ups, eager to get moving, to get away from his former instructor and repeated savior. He’d just about finished when he realized she was just sitting by the side of the track, watching him.
“Do you miss her?” she asked abruptly, her expression offering Alex no clues as to her motivation. He didn’t bother to ask who she meant. No one had talked about much of anything else since the attack, even though no one wanted to talk about it.
“Yeah,” Alex admitted, surprising himself a little. “I guess I do. I didn’t really think that much about it while she was here, but I think I sort of started to rely on our little chats to put things in perspective, you know? She was, like, the most levelheaded person here, and I, I don’t know… I guess I felt like I could trust her.”
“I thought you might,” Mitsuru said enigmatically. “You were her special project, after all. I remember what that felt like.”
Alex was immediately curious, but he let it pass. Not that Mitsuru had ever been reluctant to answer his questions, but her demeanor didn’t normally encourage it, and he wasn’t about to bank that her current mood gave him a free pass.
“She worried, you know,” Mitsuru said, standing up next to him. “About you finding out that she was an Auditor.”
“I see,” Alex said uncomfortably. “I was surprised about that, but I never had a chance to talk to her about it… I mean, I haven’t had one yet.”
“Right,” Mitsuru said, flipping her hair back and adjusting her ponytail. “You were going to do some running, right? I’ll join you. Unless it would be weird, having your former teacher run with you…”
“Not at all,” Alex said, a false, reassuring smile plastered across his face. Internally, a voice cried out that it would, in fact, be very weird, but what could he do?
He shook out his arms, bounced a few times on the balls of his feet, and then fell into the slow-but-steady jog that he preferred anytime Michael wasn’t there to force him to go faster. He was a bit worried that Mitsuru would want to push him the same way, but either she wasn’t as much of a conditioning fanatic or she was distracted by whatever was going on in her elegant and inscrutable head, because she just fell in beside him and let him set the pace, more-or-less. They finished the first few laps in silence. It was the first time in a while that Alex had run without his headphones, and it was weird, how loud his breathing seemed, how loud the sound of his feet on the synthetic track was in the still of the morning.
“Do you like having Miss Gallow as a teacher?” Mitsuru asked, not sounding the least bit out of breath.
“She’s good,” Alex said carefully. Michael liked to talk with him while he ran, too, even claimed that it was an important skill to have, though Alex suspected that he was just chatty. Nonetheless, he could manage a conversation while running, at least for the first few miles, as long as the listener was patient enough to put up with the gaps his breathing created. “But I hate the Program.”
“As much as you hated it when I was in charge?”
He snuck a look over at Mitsuru, looking for signs that this was some sort of trap or setup. He didn’t see anything other than polite disinterest, so he took the risk.
“More,” he admitted. “It’s bad enough having to do those things, but Miss Gallow thinks it’s funny, and that makes it worse…”
To his surprise, Mitsuru gave him a thin but genuine smile.
“That sounds about right,” she said, moving ahead a little, and forcing him to pick up his flagging pace. “That’s the way it was for me, too. And I also hated it.”
“So,” Alex panted, “Miss Gallow was your teacher as well?”
“No,” Mitsuru said, shaking her head, “it was Alistair.”
Alex mulled it over the next quarter-mile.
“Miss Aoki,” he managed, between breaths, “I’ve always — meant to ask — what’s up — with the eyes? Same as — the Director?”
He had braced himself for a bad reaction, but she just laughed, a first, in Alex’s experience.
“I have an implant,” she said, tapping the side of her head, just above her temple. “Two grams of nanomachinery introduced into my brain that spontaneously evolved surgical components and attached itself to my nervous system. The Director has an identical implant.”
“Huh?”
“I have a computer in my brain,” Mitsuru said, rolling her eyes. “The Director does as well. It’s an uplink to the Etheric Network, and from it, we can download data and temporary protocols, and upload information as well.”
“Protocols?” Alex asked, both amazed and out of breath.
“Yes. That was the reasoning behind my implant. You must be aware of the… drawbacks to using Black Protocols. In my case, those consequences were judged too severe to merit using the protocol, so an alternative was devised. Along with seven others, I volunteered for the process. Only the Director and I survived it, and the procedure was banned. We are the only two of our kind, which is unfortunate, because it is very useful device. Such a pity.”
“Director,” Alex wheezed. “His protocol is black?”
“No. And the Board fought him tooth and nail when he announced his intention to undergo the upgrade. Nevertheless, he designed the procedure, and he wouldn’t let the testing go forward unless he was the first subject. Black Protocols have always worried him excessively. He thought that maybe this would eliminate the need to use them. There was some precedent, actually. There are other ways to perform implants, or any secondary introduction of nanites, which have better survival rates. But the experiment that created us was deemed a failure.”
Alex managed a gasp as a response, but that was all he could do. Miss Aoki seemed to take pity on him, because she didn’t ask anything else while they ran. Alex tried to get into a groove, that place he’d become aware of lately where he stopped noticing anything other than the action of running itself, the obsessive mechanics of movement, but that was proving impossible when running with Miss Aoki. She’d started to stay a little bit ahead of him no matter how fast he went, probably with the intention of pushing him. In a way she was, because the last thing Alex wanted was to be caught staring.
Maybe that was why, somewhere around mile three, his leg cramped up. He limped off the track and tumbled down on to the grass next to it, his right calf in painful knots. Miss Aoki trotted back a moment later, with what might charitably be termed as concern on her face.
“Did you get a cramp?”
“Ow. Yes,” Alex said, kneading it with his knuckles. “Sorry about that. Not sure what happened.”
“Here,” Mitsuru commanded, “give me your leg.”
She snatched his leg and pulled it taut; ignoring his pained expression, and then leaned on it gradually. Alex tensed for tremendous pain, but there was none, just a gentle, facilitated stretching. After a minute or so, she slowly changed directions, so that she was pulling, rather than leaning on it, but that didn’t feel bad either. The pain subsided a few minutes later, and with some coaxing from Miss Aoki, the muscle finally ceased its spasms. Alex stood up carefully, testing his leg to see if it would take his weight. He had a bit of a limp, but he was otherwise fine.
“Thanks, Miss Aoki,” he said hurriedly. She seemed to be ignoring him, staring off into space with a peculiar intensity. “I think that’s it for me this morning. I’m going to head for the showers, okay?”
She gave him a bit of a nod, so he shrugged and headed for the locker room, perhaps a bit too eagerly, but Miss Aoki didn’t pay him any attention.
If Alex had stayed a bit longer, he might have seen Mitsuru staring at the inside of her arm intensely for several moments, as if lost in thought, and then, slowly, raise her hand and drag the jagged edge of one fingernail sideways, across the soft skin below the elbow, until she pierced it. He would have needed to be very close to see the blood seep out, first one small drop, then a moment later, another.
He probably wouldn’t have noticed that while the first drop hit the grass, the second did not. Instead, it formed a perfect sphere midway to the ground, and then it reversed itself, floating back up until Mitsuru caught it in her hand, something indefinable, between happiness and fear on her face, as she examined the bloody smear across her palm.
“It was right there the whole time, from the first night I met him. Rebecca,” Mitsuru asked sadly, looking over at Alex as he slowly limped up the steps from the track, “what did you make me forget?”