Kill Game

by Francine Pascal

  “Most of the time, neither can I,” Gaia said. And to her surprise, Catherine laughed. An actual, bona fide laugh—not a sarcastic fake laugh.

  “I’m from Philadelphia,” Catherine went on, stifling a yawn. “Mmm. Sorry. I got in late, so I ended up crashing in my dad’s hotel room. He took me out for a late dinner … and sure enough, I was tired this morning and fell off the ropes. Not like you.” Gaia realized that Catherine was looking at her admiringly. “That was pretty awesome.”

  “Thanks,” Gaia said awkwardly. “Did your dad take off?” she asked politely.

  “I think so; by now, yeah. Hey, are you hungry?” Catherine asked. “It’s lunchtime.”

  “Sure—I could eat,” Gaia said. She had sat down on her own bed and caught another whiff of the gunpowder residue on her hands. “I think I want to take a shower first.”

  “Yeah, good call,” Catherine agreed. “I thought I’d wait since there was such a line. Let me know if it’s thinned out, okay?”

  “Sure,” Gaia said.

  See? It’s easy, she told herself. Talk. Listen. Don’t be fake. Don’t hide behind word games; don’t cop an attitude. You don’t have to.

  As Gaia moved out of the room with her towel and her toiletries bag, she realized she was smiling. She had nothing to worry about—Catherine had picked up one of her geek books and was scanning along inscrutable lines of machine code. And then, just as she hurried away from her dorm door, she ran smack into Farm Boy—soaking wet, wearing nothing but a towel.

  “Well, hi there,” Farm Boy said, grinning his patented grin. It came out as, “Hah there,” to Gaia’s city girl ears. “I’d call you clumsy, but I know better.”

  “Um—sorry.” It seemed to be Gaia’s day for awkward opening lines. She couldn’t think of anything to say—and the fact that Farm Boy’s trim, muscular body was right in front of her, barely concealed by a towel, certainly had nothing to do with it.

  “Will Taylor,” Farm Boy said, holding out his right hand (while catching his towel with the other hand before it could slip off). Gaia was momentarily at a complete loss as to where to place her eyes. “From South Carolina. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Gaia Moore,” Gaia managed, shaking his hand. “Um … what are you doing here? This is a female floor.”

  Will nodded soberly. “It is … it surely is.” He pointed. “But for some reason known exclusively to the FBI, it’s the only floor with a pop machine.”

  Gaia squinted at him like he was speaking a foreign language. “A pop … oh, a soda machine,” she said. “Well—use it and go back to wherever you came from.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Will said agreeably. “But before I do, I have to tell you how much I admire your athletic prowess, Ms. Moore.”

  Was he kidding? She couldn’t tell. Gaia was staring back at his blue eyes, mainly because she was absolutely determined that he not see her skating her eyes down his body, even inadvertently. “Well, you came up a close second,” she said.

  “I can’t understand it,” Will agreed, shaking his head sadly. “That’s one occurrence I’d relish, Ms. Moore, if I were you … since I can fairly well guarantee it will never happen again. I’m a track champion, which I only mention in the interest of warning you about things to come if we should ever meet again on the field of battle.”

  “Right,” Gaia scoffed, trying to move past him and toward the floor’s common bathroom. “The ‘field of battle.’ You’re making me think this is Gone With the Wind or something. And call me Gaia.”

  “Gaia—Goddess of the earth, right?” Will said thoughtfully, stepping back in front of her.

  “That’s—” The remark was so unexpected that Gaia was genuinely flustered. “How did you—”

  “I’ve been to college,” Farm Boy told her. “We’ve got book learning south of the Mason-Dixon line, Ms. Moore.”

  “Very funny,” Gaia muttered. Another brilliant witticism, she told herself. There seemed to be no end to her verbal cleverness today. “Will you please just let me by?”

  “Who’s stopping you?” Will backed to the wall, making an exaggerated show of waving her by.

  “Thanks,” Gaia muttered, edging past Will and moving as quickly as she could toward the bathroom door.

  Insufferable, she told herself as the door swung shut behind her and the familiar smells of soap and shampoo and perfume and damp tiles assaulted her nostrils.

  And he LOST, she reminded herself. Imagine what he’d be like if he’d beaten me. Why am I even thinking about this?

  The bathroom was clean; the white tiles were spotless, like everything else here. For a moment it almost felt like the last of Gaia’s natural confusion and anger were washing off along with that morning’s dirt and grime. She had won the competition. And nobody was giving her a hard time about it. Everyone was nice. It was like she was jumping at shadows that weren’t there, expecting, inevitably, that when people saw the things that she could do, trouble of one kind or another would result.

  But so far, it hadn’t.

  Strange.

  Catherine

  When kids say, “That’s weird,” or, “You’re weird,” it’s an insult. I never got that, my whole life. Weird is good. I’m “weird”—and I love it.

  As far as I’m concerned, the FBI is no big deal—it’s just the coolest, most elite collection of weirdos in the world. These people are crazy; they know how to do everything, and they love being good at everything. I can totally relate to that. I can already tell that Gaia is that way too—but for some reason, she seems uncomfortable about it. Like she minds being “weird.”

  But there’s no downside to being “weird.” Okay, I admit it would have been nice to have one or two more friends when I was a kid. Like, having any would have been a plus. But I didn’t even have a fighting chance.

  Back then, in Philadelphia, I wore thick glasses (still do) and read a lot of books (still do) and messed around with computers all day and all night (yep … still do). As a girl, I didn’t care if people looked at me and thought, Weird.

  In high school the “plot thickened,” as they say. I discovered boys—but not the way most girls do. I discovered them because they were the ones hanging around all the computers. My big passion, from then to this day, was code.

  Machine code, mostly—computer languages, scripting languages, all the arcane and beautiful operations that happened on tiny silicon chips in machines and devices all around me every day. Everyone’s cell phone, wristwatch, personal computer; their cars, their portable music players—to my eyes it was a supercool sea of microchips, each brimming with little bits of secret code, all interacting and communicating and humming at the speed of light, all at once. I felt like one of those “naturalist” dudes with a butterfly net and a microscope—except that the bugs I liked were made of numbers. So if you could figure out how numbers worked, you could figure out how everything works. That’s power, as I see it.

  So that was how I met boys—geeks, mostly; weirdos like me, but it got me used to the concept of having males around. Most of the time, in geek clubs or whatever, I’d be the only girl, and later, in high school, once I had a figure and all, it meant they would treat me like Zena, Warrior Princess, or someone had come into the room. But that was fine.

  When I met Brian, it was like he never realized a girl could “outgeek” him. After we met on campus and even on our first date (using up his precious Dave Matthews tickets), I would catch him giving me this look, like, How can you be a girl I like and at the same time know more than me about programming? I could tell it made him even more into me. That wasn’t too bad at all.

  Maybe Gaia’s life has been different. Maybe she hasn’t been lucky that way. Maybe she’s still worried about the big distinction between “weird” people and “everyone else.”

  If that’s true, hopefully she’ll get over it soon. And this sure is the right place for it.

  I’m curious to see what happens to her here. Just like I’m curious to see what hap
pens to me.

  saving my fake life

  NO FOOD SOURCE

  The FBI—specifically, a woman named Bisho—had recruited Catherine one bright afternoon in Boston, where she’d traveled with a college programming club (all boys except her) to the CompLife Expo. They’d spent three days in the enormous convention center gawking at the supercomputers and attending the conferences while getting ready to show off their big project in the final day’s competition. It had taken days for her club to figure out how to make a splash in Boston.

  “We can make a ‘fuzz tracker,’” Catherine had told her club one night as they devoured a mushroom pizza and three plastic bottles of Jolt cola in her boyfriend Brian’s dorm room.

  “A fuzz buster?” Cliff, who had really bad acne but was otherwise the most charming boy Catherine knew, hadn’t heard right. “So what? You mean, pick up cop radar on the highw—”

  “A fuzz tracker.” Catherine’s mouth was full of pizza and she swallowed impatiently. “Picks up police computer activity.”

  “How?” Sam said. He was over by the stereo, putting another Beck album on. “How would you get access to it, for starters?”

  Catherine had shrugged. “That’s easy. It’s already around us, on the Internet, on radio and CB channels, on phone lines. You just have to organize it.”

  “Are you crazy? Nobody could do that,” Brian protested loudly. “You’d need a supercomputer.”

  “We can do it. With an ordinary office PC,” Catherine said between chugs of Jolt. “If you listen for two minutes, I’ll tell you how.”

  In the end, Catherine had done most of the work. It was like solving a puzzle—the legality of what they were doing never even entered their minds. That Friday in Boston, while she and her bearded colleagues showed off their handiwork—effortlessly displaying police records, arrest reports, even paychecks and billing stubs on the little monitor they’d lugged from college, Catherine had no idea that Jennifer Bishop was intently watching her from the side of the convention hall.

  Catherine smiled, remembering that day. She had been so flattered by the attractive young FBI recruiter’s attentions (although she’d found Bishop’s boss, the grim-faced Agent Malloy, more than a little intimidating). She had even gotten a short haircut without necessarily admitting to herself that she was copying Bishop’s style—or that Bishop had become something of a role model. Today, relaxing on her favorite orange bedsheets in her sunny new dorm room on her first day of FBI training, Catherine allowed herself a moment of unabashed pride. I made it, she told herself. I’m here.

  Gaia had been in the shower a few minutes when there was a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” Catherine called out, closing the PC World magazine she’d been leafing through.

  The door swung open. A young Asian man was standing there, smiling pleasantly, his hand on the doorknob. He had shiny black hair and pale skin, and he was impeccably dressed in an untucked blue dress shirt, khaki pants, and well-shined black shoes.

  “Hey,” the young man said. “I’m sorry—am I bothering you?”

  “No.” Catherine tossed the magazine aside.

  “The dining hall’s closed,” the young man told her, hooking a thumb to point behind himself. “I just walked all the way over there and the door’s all boarded up. There’s, like, no food source at all.”

  “There’s a candy machine,” Catherine said. She could hear through the wall that the shower had stopped—Gaia would be returning in just a moment. “If you’re dying.”

  “No, I just wanted to see who was around and, like, spare you guys the walk,” the young man went on. Catherine had decided he was Chinese American; she had figured him for Korean at first, but the modeling of his face looked more Chinese. “I don’t know about you, but my entire body’s dying after that routine this morning. There’s no reason we should all trudge over the fields to that locked mess hall. I’m sorry—Kim Lau.” Kim stepped into the room and extended his hand.

  “Catherine Sanders.” They shook hands. “Welcome to the girls’ floor.”

  “Hi,” Gaia said, coming into the room behind Kim. She was wrapped in a towel, and her long wet hair was swept back from her face. Kim seemed utterly unaffected by the view “What’s going on?”

  “Hey, I know you—you’re Supergirl,” Kim said, smiling amiably at Gaia. Even with the loose-fitting, perfectly tailored dress clothes, Catherine could tell that Kim was in very good shape—the muscles on his forearms and the wide cast of his shoulders gave it away. “Gaia Moore, right? This morning’s decathlon winner.”

  “Kim was just saying that the dining hall’s closed,” Catherine explained. “Which sucks because I’m really hungry. Aren’t you?”

  “‘Decathlon’ would be ten,” Gaia said, pulling open a drawer. “It was only two events.”

  “Well, it felt like ten. Listen, should we go to one of those restaurants in town?” Kim asked. “Didn’t they give us a list or something in the orientation package?”

  Catherine’s stomach was growling—she realized that she was hungry enough to endure whatever passed for cuisine in tiny, rural Quantico. “Sure,” she said. “How about it, Gaia? Even a biathlon can make you hungry.”

  Gaia shot Catherine a look. “Whatever you say,” she said. “Let me get dressed and I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  PREPARED FOR COMBAT

  Gaia was thinking about luck.

  Not “fate” or anything so grandiose. Just “luck,” as in the bad or good variety. At the moment she was crammed into the backseat of her new roommate Catherine Sanders’s Nissan Altima, which wasn’t a particularly large or roomy car. Catherine was driving, and Kim Lau, the friendly trainee from the men’s floor, was in the shotgun seat. Outside, through the window that Gaia was pressed up against, the Virginia landscape was rolling past: fields and small rural outbuildings and farmland, gas stations and billboards, all catching the slanted sunlight of afternoon. Someone named Brad Thompson, another trainee, was sitting next to the other window, and between Gaia and Brad, with his blond hair brushing against the Altima’s roof, was Mr. Southern Gentleman Farm Boy, Will Taylor.

  Gaia had tried as hard as she could to avoid this seating arrangement, but there had been no way—Kim had just climbed into the front seat, and then Will had gotten in, and before she knew it, she was pressed up against him, pulling the door shut, and counting the minutes for this little excursion to be over.

  “Well, this is very nice countryside,” Will said agreeably.

  “Uh-huh,” Gaia said, her eyes fixed out the window. She could see that Catherine was following signs for Quantico. They were moving through a more economically depressed area. She had seen at least one trailer park, and they’d just passed a row of small houses, some with peeling shingles, some with laundry lines stretched across their backyards, some with barbecue grills on their porches, some with rusting cars that had “For Sale” signs, their chrome gleaming in the evening light.

  How did I get here? Gaia thought idly. It wasn’t an unpleasant question, necessarily. It just kept hitting her what a new, unfamiliar place she was in. So far from Manhattan, from California—from everywhere she’d called home before.

  “I imagine this is a big change,” Will said.

  “What?” Gaia turned to look at him. The illusion that he’d been reading her mind was startling—but then, she firmly told herself, it was luck. Just blind luck: the same kind of luck that had arranged for the five of them to arrive outside at the same time and end up all piled in the same car, with Farm Boy pressed up next to her.

  “Well, you’re a city girl, aren’t you?” Will went on pleasantly. She could smell his aftershave—too much of it, as she would have guessed. “And a Yankee, obviously. In fact, I’d guess you’re from New York City.”

  “Brilliant,” Gaia muttered, turning her attention back outside the car window. “You’re going to make a great investigator.”

  “All right, you two,” Catherine said, peering at the road s
igns as they slowed at an intersection. “Kim, what’s the name of this place?”

  “Montanos steak house,” Kim read from the page in his hand. “When we get to town, look for something called MacDougal Street.”

  “It’s one of four restaurants,” said Bradley, the trainee none of them knew. “Which sounds like we’re dealing with one swinging town.”

  Catherine laughed, but Gaia, watching the landscape roll by, brushing her drying hair back from her face, was thinking that it was fine. She could use a break from subway systems and freeways, Starbucks and crowded sidewalks, office-building lobbies, the constant sound of passing planes.

  As she watched, the car passed something beautiful- Gaia was pretty sure she was the only one who had caught it. In the middle of a large, mowed field, on the outskirts of town, was a World War II memorial. She was sure that was what it was—even though they were moving pretty fast. But she could make out a bronze statue of an infantry soldier, crouched in his bronze uniform, rifle extended, prepared for combat. His helmet was silhouetted against the sky as they drove past. The beautiful part—the element that caught Gaia’s attention—was the flowers. Somebody had put a bouquet of white roses into the barrel of the soldier’s gun.

  It was interesting. Seeing the gun dressed up with the white roses struck Gaia differently than seeing a bare gun. No nausea. No loss of control. There was something touching about it.

  “Montano’s steak house,” Catherine yelled out, pointing at a garish yellow-and-red illuminated sign. “Oh, it’s not looking good at all—”

  “Yikes,” Kim agreed. Gaia peered past his shoulder at the shingled building with its dirt parking lot and neon Steaks and Chops sign and decided it didn’t matter.

  As Catherine parked and Gaia opened her car door (as quickly as she could to get away from Will’s leg pressing against her), she was startled by the buzz of insects and the incredibly fragrant country air. It was so tranquil, so disarmingly relaxing, that she found herself nearly intoxicated by the simple, plain aroma.