I shook my head. “What if something goes wrong?”
“Wrong?”
“Walkers? Spirits of vengeance? A total fucking undead apocalypse?”
“Damian, you’re eighteen, untrained, and a Low-Three. Apocalypses are a little beyond your reach. But I’m not suggesting you actually try to raise anything. Even with as many former Capes as we have on the faculty here, that’s not the sort of excitement anyone wants.”
“What are you suggesting then?”
“Practice your meditation. If you think it’ll help, focus on that peace and balance mantra Gabriella gets her little silk panties in a knot over. But mainly, just spend time looking inward. See if you can find your power. Not use it; just find it. Maybe once you’ve done so, you’ll have an easier time actually utilizing it under the safety of the dampeners.”
I chewed that idea over. As frustrating as it was to be completely inept in Control, there was a part of me that was relieved when each hour of class ended without any sign of success. If I couldn’t ever use my power, then maybe…
Alexa was already far too adept at reading my thoughts. “If there’s one thing that history has shown us, it’s that powers can’t be ignored. Sooner or later, yours will emerge. When it does, do you want to control it or let it control you?” Something in her unblinking eyes softened. “If you’d prefer, I can set aside some time for you to try here, under my supervision.”
I shook my head, reminding myself that I wasn’t a little boy who needed to be looked after anymore… and that I hadn’t been one for a long time. “It’s okay. I’d rather practice on my own. Maybe someplace outside and away from everyone?”
She thought for a moment, and then that almost-smile flashed again. “I know just the place.”
•—•—•
Just the place was, as I started to tell you earlier, somewhere on the west side of campus, through the thick forest of evergreens. There wasn’t any sort of path to follow and Dr. Gibbings’ directions had been unhelpfully vague. All I knew for sure was that I’d know it when I saw it and if I reached the wall that encircled the campus, I’d have gone too far.
I was willing to concede that Alexa might be a decent shrink—way easier to talk to than the fucker back in Bakersfield—but as far as navigators went, she kind of sucked. Next time, I’d request a map.
I thought about just taking a seat there in the woods. It was secluded enough, on the far side of campus from the so-called beach, and well away from the nearest buildings. The rough ground didn’t scream meditation though, and for all I knew there were tigers hanging out in the dark trees above me, just waiting for an easy target.
Or was it jaguars that jumped out of trees?
I was still mulling over that question when I found the place.
Alexa was right; I knew it the moment I saw it.
A small clearing appeared before me, as if by a Druid’s design. On three sides, it was bordered by the trees I’d been hiking through, but on the fourth was nothing but sky and darkness, the hill falling away in a deep slope down toward the campus wall. Above and beyond that wall, a thousand stars gleamed like a tapestry of light, reflected in the dark waters of an otherwise invisible ocean. The breeze from the Pacific was strong and cool, smelling of salt and age and something almost sad.
A stone bench sat maybe ten feet from the hill’s edge, and I could see why the doctor had recommended the clearing. It was easy to imagine sitting on that bench, staring out toward the ocean, and letting the peace and quiet of the place guide my meditation.
Or it would have been, if the bench hadn’t already been occupied.
Fuck my fucking life.
I was turning to leave, resigned to a hike back through the woods, when an all-too-recognizable sound stopped me. God knows I’d heard plenty of it over the years.
The person on the bench was crying.
•—•—•
Listen to enough tears in your life and you start to recognize the flavors they come in, kind of like how a connoisseur can blind-taste wine. That’s not the Crow in me talking. That’s the orphan. No place like an orphanage for tears, unless it’s a cemetery. Abandonment and regret. Fear and grief. Loneliness and pitch-black despair. All of it just another word for pain, just one more expression of that particular tightness that twists away at your core, that squeezes sound from your chest and salt from your eyes.
Whoever was crying on the bench wasn’t just homesick. She wasn’t merely frustrated or angry. Her sobs were quiet, choked gasps that wracked her body. A boy at Mama Rawlins’ had cried like that, three nights in a row, and we’d all let him be, each of us young and scared and maybe a little unwilling to risk caring about another human being. On the fourth night, he went silent, and it wasn’t until the next morning, when someone found his body on the street, twenty feet below the upstairs balcony, that we knew why.
I’d been ten, still dealing with the Jacobsens’ betrayal and the revelation of what I was going to become, but some part of me had looked down at that body, looked at the birds that kept trying to make away with the delicate pieces of what had been a boy, and wondered: what if I could’ve stopped this?
Took some of the older kids leaving. Took me gaining my height, more than a few pounds, and a shoebox of dirty tricks. Most of all, it took a lot of fights—scar tissue on my knuckles, bruises so regular they seemed like tattoos—but by the time I was thirteen, I had control. It was Mama Rawlins’ place, but I took charge of the little ones as they came in. I did what was needed to keep the fighting reasonable, to keep the bullying to a minimum. And when someone cried tears like that dead boy had, I sure as fuck made sure one of us, or two of us, or the whole god damn bedroom was there and did what we could to help.
This wasn’t Mama Rawlins’, and I had no authority at the Academy. Less than none, given the way my fellow first-years saw me. Probably should’ve gone to get a teacher. Or Alexa, even—I was pretty sure she lived in her office; maybe even slept upside down, hanging from the ceiling like some sort of oddly analytical vampire. But I didn’t know who the woman crying was, and I wasn’t sure she’d still be there when I got back.
I don’t like people. Not really. That might be the Crow in me talking. Might be the orphan too, I guess. But I like watching people suffer even less.
I stopped, turned around again, and headed for the bench.
•—•—•
Five steps away, and she was still crying like she hadn’t heard me coming.
Three steps away, I stopped. “Are you okay?”
She launched off the bench, like Her Majesty being shot off the motorcycle, and spun to face me, small hands coming up in fists. “What the hell?!?!”
Those were the first three words Kayleigh Watai ever said to me. First three words I heard her say to anyone. With the sun gone from the sky, I couldn’t see the electric blue streaks in her dark hair. Couldn’t see her tear-stained face at all, really, but judging by her tone, she had gone from grief-stricken to pissed in the blink of an eye.
“Who do you think you are, sneaking up on people like that?!?”
I held my ground. “I wasn’t sneaking. I just heard you—”
She cut me off, her voice suddenly puzzled. “You snuck up on me!”
“You said that already.” Maybe I should have gotten Alexa. “I was trying to expla—”
“How is that possible?” she interrupted again.
“I… don’t know how to answer that.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
It was time to exit Crazytown. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. Seems like you are—” Outside of being a total lunatic. “—so I’m going to—”
“Don’t move.”
Me not liking people? This sort of shit might be why.
Kayleigh came forward, closing in on me like personal space was something to be conquered. Even though her head barely came to my chest, I was the one fighting not to step back.
Badass Crow, and all it takes t
o freak him out is one crazy chick. Her Majesty would be laughing her leather-clad, inhumanly fine ass off.
“I can’t feel you,” she finally said, voice soft and full of wonder. “At all.”
“Probably because you’re not touching me,” I pointed out helpfully. “Although I can feel you breathing on my shirt.”
“I’m talking about your emotions, Necromancer.”
“Oh.” Everything clicked. “You’re an Empath?”
“Unfortunately.” Lightning-quick, she reached out and touched my hand. For a moment, she was stunned to silence. This time, her voice was outright awed. “Holy cow.”
“Holy cow?”
“When I touch you, everything goes quiet.” She started to cry again, small shoulders shaking, but I recognized these tears too, remembered them from the handful of kids who’d made it out of the system and into loving families and good homes. Not tears of joy so much as they were tears of relief.
“What does that mean?” I finally asked. “Everything goes quiet?”
“What do you know about Empaths?”
“You hear emotions.” Like Bard had said, I’d aced the History of Powers section of my entrance exams.
“Yeah. Everyone’s emotions. Except yours, apparently.” She let go of my hand, and then quickly reached out and grabbed it again. “But when I touch you, I don’t hear anything.”
“You just said that—”
“I mean anything,” she interrupted for what felt like the hundredth time. “The three guards down on the wall. The couple making out on the field. The janitors cleaning the nearest classrooms. When I’m touching you, I can’t hear any of them.”
“And that’s… good?”
“It’s kind of a miracle.” She breathed out a little sigh and the tears finally stopped.
CHAPTER 27
“…so the scientific community—or what little of it survived the Break—worked feverishly to understand everything that had changed and to develop new theories to accommodate our very different new reality.”
I haven’t talked a lot about Amos to this point. Haven’t talked at all about his class. Nothing too unusual about that; I haven’t spent any time on Philosophy or Math or even Jessica Strich’s weapons classes either. Life as a first-year was, as I may’ve mentioned, really busy, and if I was going to tell you every minor detail, we’d be here until I was as dead as you are. And what good would that do anyone? You’re just going to have to trust that I’m hitting the high notes and the low notes, and that the rest of it is inconsequential.
Or don’t. I’m not forcing you to listen, even though we know I could. Any of you can take off whenever you feel like it.
Say hi to hell for me when you go.
Anyway, Amos. He’s the closest thing to proof that Dr. Nowhere had a sense of humor. Why else would you give immortality to someone who’s already old, wrinkly, and as foul-tempered as a Beast-shifter during mating season? Any reasonable person would’ve granted that gift to someone young and hot. An eternally young Orca… just the idea makes me want to fall to my knees and give thanks.
But not Dr. Nowhere. No, he gave us old Amos. Eternally old Amos. Born before the Break, during what he calls the first World War, whatever that means. God knows the world’s been at war the entire time the rest of us were alive. On the first day of class, Amos had joked that it was more His Story than History, since he’d actually lived the whole damn thing. Some people even laughed.
If you attend the Academy in your next life, do everyone a favor: don’t laugh. It only encourages him.
“While physicists and chemists ran experiments to confirm that some of the universe’s rules had stayed the same, biologists and zoologists focused on a different problem. People like me. People like some of you.” Amos waved to the left side of the auditorium, where the first-years were seated. Twenty-four of us in total, outnumbered five-to-one by the regular students, but there wasn’t a single non-Cape on the left side of the room, even if it left the other hundred-twenty students squashed together on the right.
I didn’t have much of a handle on what Academy life was like for the regular students. They were there to major in careers that supported Capes or the industry we’d given rise to. More than a few hoped the connections they made would translate into job opportunities when they graduated, and no relationship was more valuable than a Cape who wanted you on their staff… but in the few mixed classes we had, this same pattern of division repeated over and over again. Maybe it was awe. Maybe it was fear. Maybe they just really hated the grey sweats that every first-year wore during the week. Whatever the reason, it was as much their doing as ours.
“I’m not sure how many sleepless nights it took,” continued Amos, “but they went through a godawful amount of Jolt.” He paused expectantly, but none of us had a clue what the hell Jolt was, what it had to do with zoology, or why he’d expected a laugh. He grumbled, and went on. “Eventually they emerged with what they called the Genus of Superpowers. They’d grouped powers into one of four general classes; Elementalism, Naturalism, Physicalism, and Mentalism. There’s a long-running debate as to whether Elementalism and Naturalism should be separate at all, but that’s a subject for the scientists, not us.”
He tapped something on his Glass—a model that was older than I was—then tapped again, slightly harder, when that first tap didn’t produce the desired result. On the vid screen behind him, the four classifications were listed out. “Each of these classifications contains one or more power sets, but there is no hard and fast rule about what that number should be. So Elementalism includes Hydromancers, Pyromancers, Wind Dancers, Sparks, and Earthshakers, while Mentalism includes only Empaths, Switches, Sirens, and Telekinetics.”
I’d done the reading for the class, but had ended up with more questions than answers. In general, I tried to keep as low a profile as possible, but… I don’t know. Maybe my sessions with Alexa were starting to rub off on me. I found myself raising one hand. “How do we know they got it right, Amos?”
He shaded his eyes and looked up at the seats until he located my raised hand. “Mr. Banach, is that you? And awake? I thought I might have grown so accustomed to the sound of your snoring that I just wasn’t noticing it anymore.”
One half of the auditorium laughed. Not the Cape side. Outside of Shane and maybe Kayleigh, the whole first-year class remained ice-cold and distant. Some of them hated me, some of them feared me, but none of them were comfortable laughing at me.
“When you say got it right, what are you referring to, Mr. Banach?”
“Everything, basically.” More laughter, and I paused, trying to put the question into words. “Science is a guess that hasn’t been disproven yet, right? And these classes and sets were just their best guess on how to organize things?”
“I’m sure you would have done a much better job,” sniped Tessa. Poltergeist, as she now preferred to be called, most definitely belonged to the group that hated me.
“So far, so good, Mr. Banach,” said Amos, ignoring Poltergeist’s comment. “But I’m still not sure where the question is.”
“Well, it’s because of their guesses that we can label someone a Druid or a Stalwart, and that seems clear enough… but the system doesn’t seem to account for people who bridge multiple categories or don’t fit into any class at all. Like the Singer. Or Grannypocalypse. Or even you, for that matter. Hell, nobody can decide what class Dominion fits in, considering he has powers from so many of them!”
“It’s a fair point,” admitted Amos, “and one that makes me glad you chose to participate instead of sleep. For people with multiple power sets, we generally use their dominant power when classifying them. So Ms. Von Pell is a Weather Witch, despite her Wind Dancer abilities, and Mr. Mikkazi is more Jitterbug than Flyboy. However, as you noted, there are other individuals with a multitude of powers that all rank equally.”
“So what do they get classified as?” That was a blonde guy on the regular student side.
“Extremely fortunate, Mr. Inglewood,” answered Amos with a grin. “To be quite honest, beyond initial training methodologies, I’m not sure classification matters as much as we like to think it does.”
It was easy for him to say that. As far as I could tell, everyone cared a hell of a lot about my classification.
“But what would you be considered, Professor?” the same blonde asked.
“Yeah, or the Singer? Or Tezcatlipoca, for that matter?”
Amos frowned, his wrinkles deepening. “I’ll remind you all that the Voidsinger’s existence has yet to be proven, despite the many tales circulating about him. As for myself, I would prefer not to be lumped into the same category as someone like Grannypocalypse or that murderous creature south of our border. However, it is true that the current system does not account for every power we’re aware of, let alone all the powers that might exist around the globe. Does that mean the scientists got it wrong?”
He waited a moment for a reply.
“No,” decided Winter.
“And why is that, Ms. Von Pell?”
“Because science isn’t wrong.”
“Oh, how I wish that were true! I could tell you stories about orange juice…” Amos shook his head. “But in a way, you’re also correct. Science isn’t static. The Genus was correct, given what information was available at the time, and for the most part, it remains correct even now. If a sufficient number of quasi-immortals show up one day, then maybe a new class will be added to the Genus. Until then, those few of us who don’t fit are simply left unclassified. I like to think of myself as a Full-Five Amos, really.”
“But what about Necromancers?” That was Poltergeist again, and I felt myself flush, even as Shane shifted uneasily next to me. I wasn’t sure which of the regular students knew what I was, if any. I was kind of hoping none of them did. It would make getting dates a hell of a lot easier. God knew my chances with the first-year women were slim-to-none.
See These Bones Page 13
