The Perfect Soldier

by B D Grant

  Lena backs against the closest wall, resting the back of her head on it. I watch as she closes her eyes. She presses her palms against the cold tile that lines the lower half of the wall. She’s whispering slowly to herself. I have to step closer to hear. “It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real—”

  “What happened to Boston?” I ask her.

  Lena looks over at me sleepily. “They told him…what he did.” She reaches a hand across herself and pinches the opposite arm. She holds it, the color of her skin turning a blanched white between her fingers. After a moment, she moves down to the soft flesh on the inside of her forearm and gives it fast, tight pinches over and over again.

  Not concerned that he might be overheard, Glensy says, “She’s lost her marbles, man.”

  Her pinching intensifies.

  I duck my head a little to get closer to her height. “You’re trying to fight it, aren’t you?” The ghost of a smile plays on her face. When she opens her eyes, they appear less glazed-over. She finally winces and releases the soft tissue. I catch the sight of tiny crescent-shaped scars sprinkled across the inside of her arm.

  The relaxing feelings subside as a Rogue wearing a hairnet opens the cafeteria doors. Glensy perks up at the screech of the doors, never one to miss a meal. People start to emerge from the barracks within the minute. Another Tempero joins the one stationed by the cafeteria doors as more people enter the corridors.

  As Glensy and I stand nearer to the wall by Lena, she moves closer, nudging me out of my daze. Her eyes are much sharper. “You hid that picture.”

  Lena looks at me intently, ignoring the growing crowd flowing around us. Maybe Glensy’s right about her state of mind.

  “You’re not making sense,” I tell her.

  “I saw you,” she says. “Boston got me what I asked for, and then you put it in that tree for him.”

  I realize what she means. And she’s right, to some extent. Weeks before the raid—in fact, it was the day before Lena was awarded early placement at our old school—I did put a package in a tree for Boston. Boston had needed my help, so I helped him. I didn’t know a thing about the package when I hid it in the woods, and I never asked who it was for or what was in it.

  “What was it?” I ask. Glensy rolls his eyes at me, presumably for encouraging her babble.

  Lena, though, is happy to indulge. “A picture of my parents,” she says. She looks at me expectantly, but when I say nothing, she continues. “Aunt Lia got custody of me after my parents died. I wanted Boston to tell me what was going on at the school. I thought something wasn’t right. I don’t think I trusted things around that place for a while, but I finally worked up the courage to ask Boston for help around the time I started tutoring you. I had asked my aunt about some of the sketchy stuff going on—you know, like the pitting Dynas against the smaller Seraphim, that kind of stuff—but she just told me I was paranoid.”

  “So you already knew something was going on?” I ask, not sure I believe her.

  “There had been other signs that things weren’t right too,” she admits. “Like, the police officer who picked me up from my house after my parents died. He was the one who brought me to my aunt’s house. I ran into him after that.”

  Glensy is forced to press his back up against the wall next to me as more girls flock past him. “That doesn’t sound weird to me,” he says in my ear.

  She juts her head out around me to look at Glensy. “I ran into him at the Welcome Center,” she says, a little spit flying in anger. “He was with my aunt. He was working for the school.” She leans back, looking a bit smug. “He wasn’t really a cop. The picture Boston got for me when I asked him for proof that there was more going on at the school than just education, it was of my parents standing in front of the house they had started building before they died.” She crosses her arms again. “The house was completely built in the picture. White roses were planted in front of the window that they’d said was supposed to be mine.”

  “Roses?” I ask.

  “They’re my favorite flower,” Lena says as if challenging me. It makes sense, in a way, when I think about who she was before, but the idea of this Lena even thinking of flowers just doesn’t click in my head.

  “The house didn’t even have its walls up yet when the cop came and took me to my aunt. But in the picture, it’s finished, and there they are.”

  “Well, glad they’re okay,” I say. “But that doesn’t really explain why Boston’s so upset.”

  Lena tilts her head at me as if saying, Seriously, Kelly? Come on. It’s a look of hers that I am very familiar with. She did that during almost every tutoring session we had together. If I didn’t understand how she’d solved an equation, this was the nonverbal response I got, head cocked to the side, her eyes on the verge of rolling.

  “When they took me underground, I was shoved into a cell,” she tells me. “I did really good for what I think was about two whole days. They wouldn’t let me sleep, but I still did good, not speaking to them. That’s what they wanted, was for me to talk,” Lena sniffles. She brings a hand up to give her nose a hard wipe. “They’d remind me of how nice they were being when I was given snacks or the toilet or something.” Immediately, I feel uncomfortable, suddenly self-conscious as she tells us what happened. But her voice is hard, even as she speaks softly. It’s the first time since the raid that she hasn’t looked utterly broken. “Aunt Lia came in. I begged her to tell them I hadn’t done anything wrong.” Lena stares off into the distance as her sniffling stops.

  “She wouldn’t listen. I ended up apologizing to her for doing whatever it was that I did to get brought down there. She kept asking what I did to end up there, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. Before she left, she handed me an envelope telling me there was no mistake.” She looks at me out the corner of her eye. “Get this—she said her people don’t make mistakes.” She lets out a sharp laugh, and for a second it almost sounds as though she’s lost control of her emotions again.

  I glance down at the Tempero, worried that Lena’s drawn attention to us. Luckily, no one is looking our way. Just as quickly as she laughed, Lena turns solemn. Looking over at me once again, she says, “The picture Boston had gotten me was in the envelope in the tree.”

  “So? They found your picture. It’s not Boston’s fault.”

  “I did exactly what he said: I shredded it, and then I burned the shredded pieces.”

  That sounds like Boston, I think to myself.

  “And I flushed the ashes down the toilet. That part was my idea.” She looks around me to Glensy, who’s watching people walk by. “But I haven’t told you the kicker yet,” she says, as if trying to get his attention. “The picture my aunt gave me, it was the same picture I got from Boston, but bigger. It still had my parents standing in front of the house, but in this one, she’s standing in the background, off to the side. The one I got from Boston had her cut out of it. She knew my parents weren’t really dead. And, she had visited them since telling me of their deaths.”

  So Lia Heincliff lied to her niece about her parent’s deaths. For what? To bring Lena to the school? It fits perfectly with the complete psychopath I knew Lia to be. She had played a similar mind game with me. I had wanted to know how my grandmother was doing after her stroke once Lia had relocated me to The Academy. I was ready to leave the school and tell Lia to shove it when I was pulled from class. She’s the one who had told me that my grandmother had died. I wonder how many other kids at The Academy were told similar stories.

  Glensy, putting together what Lena has told us, says, “Boston was working with your aunt.”

  I shake my head at the thought of it. “No way. He was too paranoid about his own safety. If he was helping her, why would he have been worried?” He wouldn’t have had me hide the package or tell Lena to shred the contents, because there wouldn’t have been anyone trying to catch him.

  “It was a joke,” Lena sneers. “I heard them talking about it when I was down there. Bos
ton thought it was his father who was sneaking stuff inside the school for him.”

  “He told me his dad passed away years ago,” I tell her.

  Besides, how could anyone have lied to a talented Veritatis like Boston without him knowing it? Boston would have caught on as soon as the words came out of their mouths.

  Lena answers my unspoken question. “I’m sure they didn’t exactly say it. From the way they were talking, Boston’s father was murdered. I presume it was by the people running the school. Boston could have thought his father faked his own death. Think about it; don’t you think he’d have wanted to believe that?”

  I don’t answer. “My aunt even drove me to see their smashed-up car. She brought me to the coroner’s office. But I wasn’t allowed to see the bodies because I was just a kid.”

  Everything Lena is telling us makes me nervous. All it would take is the wrong set of ears to overhear her, and we could all be dragged off to one of those solitary confinement rooms.

  Thankfully, the crowd has thinned—most people are already inside the cafeteria. The Tempero outside of the cafeteria is chatting with one of the more attractive women working today. She gives him a big, toothy grin as he talks away. Glensy steps out in front of Lena again, and the three of us form a small, huddled circle.

  Glensy cocks his head to the side, looking at Lena. “Why would they talk about Boston and his dad in front of you?” he asks.

  “Because,” she says, glancing down at her hip. She runs a hand lightly over her shirt, patting her waistband. “I wasn’t supposed to survive. Why not?”

  “Boston’s dad worked at the school. Why would they kill him?” He sounds cautious, although thankfully not hostile.

  “Do you not remember his dad?” Lena asks earnestly.

  “Yeah?” Glensy says slowly.

  “He was the teacher that would get students books, magazines, you know, the stuff we couldn’t get from the school. The men that were talking about him also mentioned a stage three senior that Boston’s dad had gotten into some big trouble. I knew who they were talking about because he was the first student to be awarded early placement.”

  Glensy shakes his head. “Yeah, I remember him too. He was my idol back when I was a stage two.”

  Lena nods. “Boston’s dad had to have been giving students the same kind of proof that Boston had gotten for me. His dad’s death, early placement becoming a thing—it all happened close to the same time. They must have figured out that Boston’s father was giving information to students at the school that they didn’t want getting out.” Lena is still watching Glensy. “The first guy that got early placement was one of our best Dyna at the time, and everyone liked him; he ruled the school,” she says, looking at me. She must know that this is the first time I’ve heard any of this. “The school couldn’t have their best soon-to-be graduate spreading doubt to other seniors, so they got rid of Boston’s dad and implemented early placement for good students.” Lena and Glensy share a look. They both seem to be somewhere else for a second, probably reliving their own glory days as the popular students everyone wanted to be before everything went to hell. Lena pulls at her shirt hem.

  “It does kind of make sense,” Glensy says slowly, looking at me. “There were older guys I was sure would make early placement, I mean beasts of dudes, and it never happened. But, then a Veritatis and then a Tempero would get it, back to back, with no explanation.”

  I’ve had a lot of time to get to know Glensy since the raid. He isn’t dumb, but his parents trusted the school enough to keep him there just about year-round, and he trusted his parents. It didn’t take me long to notice things were off at the school, but I hadn’t been there long. Besides, Glensy had been going to The Academy for years, so he didn’t have much to compare it to.

  Once we were relocated from the hospital attack, McBride had allowed everyone to call home the day after the raid. Glensy hadn’t been able to reach his parents the day after the raid. Mitch had told me later that there were quite a few other kids with the same issue, which is why McBride’s school, The Southern Academy ended up with so many new students after the raid. From the sounds of it, there had been no other place to take them. Glensy at least had enough contact with his parents before the raid to know that they were out of the country working as personal bodyguards for a United States diplomat. Not usually out of the country for any more than a couple months at a time, Glensy is expecting them to return to the States soon. Glensy is one of the lucky ones who was able to keep in contact with his family while he was at The Academy. I’ve never worked up the courage to ask him if that meant his parents were once Rogues, but that’s what I assume. Knowing what I know now, it seems like the people like Lia who ran our old school had a tendency of cleaning up loose ends; Loose ends being any of their students non-rogue relatives. Lena’s lucky that Lia didn’t actually kill her parents, family or not. In hindsight, I can see now that my old school was only focused on its strongest students, which, with only the exception of a few like Boston who were at the top of their class ability-wise, meant that Dynamar got all of the attention at the expense of the other students.

  Glensy is smiling now. It’s the Tempero down the hall. I hadn’t realized it, but I’m smiling too. I hate being worked over. Lena is digging her nails into her arm again. She’s grinning, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

  “The really bad days down there,” she says, still smiling as Glensy and I look at her, “were the ones when I saw other students being taken to and from the cells. The second time I saw Howard was the worst. The first time I saw him, they had him question me. He was skinny, but he didn’t look bad. He did a good job. With the questions.” Her grin turns into a smile showing us her still white teeth. “He caught me in a lie when he asked if I had been questioning the school’s authenticity, and he covered for me. The next time I saw him, it looked like he hadn’t eaten in weeks.” Her smile fades as she tilts her head down to examine her arm. She’s dug the small nails of her index and middle finger deep enough to leave deep red marks. “He was being brought to his cell. Right after him, I saw two younger boys, twins, being taken out of their cells. They both looked almost as rough as Howard.” Lena glances up. “That’s what was going to happen to me.”

  “We got one of the twins out,” Glensy says solemnly. “He was still in intensive care when we left the hospital. I asked about him when Mr. McBride had me brought back to the hospital for treatment of my migraines.”

  Lena nods. “There were at least ten students down there, thanks to Boston. He was weeding out the bad seeds for them the entire time.”

  I know the twins they’re talking about. The day I met Boston, he was serving in-school-suspension with the two of them. They had the cute twin thing down pat. All three of them were pulling janitor duty together at the welcome center where Anne and I first arrived before we were transitioned onto the main campus. I’d heard that Boston had been caught giving the boys nudie magazines. Before, Boston had enjoyed doing favors for people. He had even got some jewelry for Anne once, saying that it was from me, after I’d told him how she wouldn’t stop talking about the necklace that he’d gotten for his girlfriend, Zoey. He wasn’t as close to Anne as I was, being that she was a stage two and therefore not in any of our classes, but I think he felt the same brotherly responsibility towards her as I did. I’m happy that I got to see her open it. I had never seen her as genuinely happy. Coming from foster care, I think it may have been one of the first decent presents she had ever received. I wish she’d been around long enough for me to have gotten something for her birthday or Christmas. I wish I knew when her birthday was. Even now that she’s gone, I’d like to celebrate it.

  “They mentioned your family too,” Lena says. My eyes snap back to her, but she isn’t looking at me.

  Glensy moves closer, his eyes narrowing. “What did they say, exactly?”

  Shrill squeals from the boys’ barracks cause Lena to jump. The Dyna that shares a bunk bed with Glensy runs ou
t, screaming, “Glensy! Kelly! Hurry!”

  Lena quickly steps away from us, Glensy’s eyes darting between her and the kid. She turns her back, striding quickly back to the other barracks. In my peripheral vision, I see that the Tempero is finally off his stool, walking towards us.

  I take off for the barracks as the kid turns around, pulling Glensy after me.

  “Hurry!” the kid repeats again, jogging down the hall. “It’s Boston!”

  We run after him, the remainder of the pulsing Tempero-induced positivity fading behind us.

  Chapter 10

  When Glensy and I skid into the barracks, Boston is hanging by his neck from the top railing of our bunk bed.

  “Find something to cut him down!” Glensy shouts at the two young boys standing there and staring. The small part of my brain that’s not panicking assumes they must have been using the bathroom or else they too would be in the cafeteria by now.

  The kid who had gotten us is running down the hall screaming for more assistance. Boston’s eyes are half open, but there’s no life to them. I grab his legs and lift. Glensy jumps on the frame of the bottom bunk, struggling to reach Boston’s neck. He pulls at the sheet tied around Boston’s neck, swearing between grunts. “Hurry up!” he yells at the boys .

  Four people run in the room. Dr. Baudin is at the forefront with the Tempero from the cafeteria, and the woman he was talking with behind him. Behind all of them is a Rogue Dynamar who can see over all of their heads. He pauses as soon as he sees Boston. Dr. Baudin is quick to action running up to face me, grabbing one of Boston’s legs and helping me hoist him higher. With the Tempero’s help, our panic subsides. Glensy’s shaky hands steady, but the knots won’t give.

  Dr. Baudin shoots a look at the Rogue Dyna who has stopped behind him looking over Boston’s body in our arms as if he can’t figure out what he should do. “Give me your knife,” Baudin demands. The man rips at his front pocket and pulls out a small pocket knife, its serrated blade coming to a piercing spear point tip.