by Mark Lingane
His fellow captives resembled upturned mops: thin boys with long, unwashed hair. One boy about halfway along looked relatively normal compared to the others. His frame was a bit more solid, and his skin didn’t look like the surface of the moon. His hair was dark and short in comparison to the other boys’ various shades of near-blond mops.
Sebastian wandered over to the empty bed beside the boy and sat down.
“Hey,” said the boy. “I’m Isaac.” He waved what appeared to be an overly large hand at Sebastian.
“I’m Sebby.”
Isaac extended his hand and they shook hands. Sebastian sensed a slight tingle in his fingers. He made no comment, as the other boy hadn’t seemed to notice.
“Where’s your stuff?” the boy said.
“I didn’t have time to get anything before the cyborgs came and destroyed my village.”
“What? Cyborgs? Destroyed?”
Sebastian looked from side to side. “Yes. Isn’t that what they do? How did you get here?”
“The Searchers came and tested all the kids in the city, and we got a nice comfy train ride here.”
“Your home and family didn’t get wiped out?”
“N … o.”
“Laser guns blasting? Death? Everything on fire?”
“Wow. We had none of that. It sounds really cool. I wouldn’t mind my sister being laser-gun blasted. She’s always shouting and throwing stuff at me, except when she’s listening to No Bearing.”
“It’s not cool. It’s pretty scary. And then the great scary flapping things came and destroyed the train.”
“What? GSFBs? Not the express?”
Sebastian nodded.
Isaac sighed and looked dejected. “I really liked that train. Oh well, I guess they’ll be able to fix it. They fix everything.”
Sebastian kept his thoughts to himself. He wasn’t sure if the train or the tracks could ever be fixed. He felt a little bad and almost partly responsible, vaguely. But he hadn’t asked the dragons to attack.
“What was your tesla score?” Isaac asked.
“I didn’t get one.”
“You didn’t do the test? How did you end up here?”
Sebastian shrugged and clasped his backpack tightly. “Nikola said I was to stay here.”
“You’ve actually met him? Wow. What’s he like?”
“Okay for an adult. He didn’t treat me like an idiot. A bit official, but he looks like a dandelion.”
Isaac gave him a funny look.
“He’s got white hair that sticks out,” Sebastian said. “Like the dandelions you see in the fields.”
“I’ve only ever lived in the city. But you didn’t do the quiz? Or the blood samples?”
Sebastian shook his head. “He waved a strange stick at me, which clicked, then he said I had to come here.”
“Oh man, you didn’t get the big needle? That’s not fair.”
“Well, I did lose my village.”
“Oh yeah. That’s not good.” Isaac cast his eyes down and flicked the fingernails on his large fingers.
Sebastian lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He felt a refreshing chill seep into his body. “Why’s it so cool in here?”
“It’s less conducive to electricity. With all the teslas in one room it can get a bit prickly. It makes people go a bit strange.”
“Do you get headaches, too?”
Isaac looked at him, and shook his head. “We get a funny feeling in our ears, like we’re falling over.”
“And that’s how you sense magnetism?”
Isaac nodded. “So you really don’t have a score?”
“No. Tell me about it.” Sebastian sat up.
“After the testing, after they’ve taken your blood and drunk it or something, they give you a number. Mine was one-point-five teslas. This is your natural number, the one you’re at all the time. Then, after some more tests, and after they drain the rest of your blood, they give you the second number.” Isaac paused.
Sebastian was listening intently. He had the feeling that this second number was the important one.
“The second number is your potential maximum-burst peak, like half a second,” Isaac said. “The higher the maximum the shorter the burst. It can be increased through the training they conduct here. They reckon I could get to a whole ten teslas if I work hard.”
“Oh,” replied Sebastian. “That sounds impressive,” he added, unsure whether it was impressive or not.
A hush fell over the room as the other boys went quiet. They all turned and watched as an older boy entered the room. He was in his late teens and walked with an air of superiority. He wore a form of armor that appeared to be comprised of bits of hard leather strung together with poor stitching. He had a dark red cape.
Sebastian decided that he wouldn’t dislike him straightaway, but would give him some time to prove how annoying he could be first. The boy was very thin. His face was drawn and gaunt, and his ears seemed slightly too big and pointy, and stuck out through his hair. Which was whooshy. Melanie would disapprove, Sebastian knew. In fact, he was certain all the females he had known would disapprove for one reason or another. Except for his aunt Ratty. She hadn’t seemed to disapprove of anything male and unmarried. Except him, of course.
“Who’s that?” he whispered to Isaac.
“That’s Gavin. They say he may be a k-tesla, a kilotesla.”
Isaac noted the blank expression on Sebastian’s face and continued. “That’s someone who’s a whole other level above us, someone who can control magnetics, rather than just sense it. He could be the first one. It’s really cool. He’s currently a twenty-tesla guy. Well, that’s what he tells everyone. But they reckon—he reckons—he could do super-quick bursts of up to two thousand teslas. No one’s ever done that before. They’re not even sure if the human body can survive it. It’s all really cool stuff, especially if he gets blown to pieces.”
“Don’t you like him?”
Isaac laughed. “You’ll see.”
Gavin wafted through the crowd of younger boys surrounding him. He gave Sebastian a casual glance, recognition that he was a new face but unimportant. As Gavin approached, Sebastian sensed a light tingling in his hands. A slight wave swept over him as the older boy passed by. He glanced at Isaac. He wondered if Gavin also sensed it. If he did, he didn’t show it.
Gavin wandered on, lifting his nose in the air, and disappeared into a special enclosure at the end of the dormitory. The roughly constructed box gave the illusion of a separate room, certainly a division between Gavin and the rest of the boys. He drew a threadbare curtain across the entrance and disappeared from view.
“I’ve got a feeling I won’t like him,” Sebastian said. “But it’s early days.”
“See? And you haven’t even spoken to him yet. That’s when he’s really annoying.”
Sebastian stared at the end curtain. Nothing seemed to be happening. He sighed and let his eyes wander over the vista of the boys in various states of lying around and doing nothing. The whole place seemed to be idle, in that awkward state between having no expectations and nothing planned.
Sebastian yawned and his stomach growled. The afternoon sun had waned and been replaced by the cooling evening light filtering in through the dirty windows. A breeze drifted in from the alleyway, wafting the curtains and providing more much-needed chill to Sebastian’s tired and aching body.
“What does a tesla do all day?” Sebastian asked Isaac, hoping it would involve food.
He lay back and closed his eyes. He didn’t hear the response as he fell straight into a deep sleep.
17
THERE WAS A loud clanging sound. Most of the other boys groaned and put their pillows over their heads. Sebastian had been so exhausted when he collapsed into bed that now he was unable to recollect his location. He panicked and jumped up. The early morning light shone in through a dirty window at street level.
Isaac laughed. “Keep your southern necessities on. That’s
the breakfast warning.”
“What do you mean ‘warning’?”
“You wait until you taste it.”
The boys shuffled out of the room and went up a level. An oversized lady served up a thick gray sludge, which made the other boys grumble and mutter. But Sebastian hadn’t eaten for two days, so for him it was as good as his mother’s best dessert. He finished the bowl then went back and asked for more.
A tubby, red-faced man in tight clothing gave him a ferocious glare. Sebastian stood in front of him, holding up the bowl in both hands.
“What did you ask, boy?” the man said.
“Please, sir, can I have some more. Please.”
The man looked like he was going to turn crimson and explode. “More!” he shrieked. “More!” He turned to the large woman. “Mrs. Bumblebee, this boy has asked for more. Can you believe it?”
The woman bustled over, looking flustered. “Why didn’t you say, love? You didn’t need to get up. Just wave and I’ll rush it over to you.”
Sebastian returned to his seat next to Isaac and tucked hungrily into the food.
“No one’s ever asked for more before. You must be amazingly hungry.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Sebastian asked through a mouthful of food. He continued to shovel it in.
“It’s school food. There’s a principle at stake. You’ll see it differently tomorrow.”
Sebastian munched on until there was another violent clanging from upstairs.
“Come on, it’s time for school.” Isaac grabbed him by the arm.
Sebastian quickly shoveled in a couple more spoonsful before he was lifted up from the table. “School?” he mumbled. “I like school.”
Isaac gave him a look of disbelief. “I can see you’re going to need a lot of educating when it comes to school.”
They followed the ensemble collection of boys up a level and into a long room smelling of heavy, damp dust. One side of the room, a depressing dull-brown brick wall, was covered in shelves containing scientific equipment. The other side of the room was made up of large windows, gray and grimy. A tired, sickly yellow light filtered in through the dirt-encrusted glass.
Down the far end of the room, the wall was taken up with a large blackboard. Various half-erased equations and formulas covered the broad expanse of gray slate. Beside it, fiddling with a collection of beakers and pipes, was Mr. Stephenson.
Sebastian’s spirits lifted. Mr. Stephenson. A school class. A class full of other people who didn’t want to be there. It was almost like home. Maybe with a couple of Mr. Stephenson’s bright words to start the day, like he always did back in Talinga, and he could put some of the horrors of the last days behind him.
“All right, you miserable lot, stop wasting time.”
Or maybe not, Sebastian thought.
The other boys had already shuffled to their seats, most trying to get as far away from the front as possible. Sebastian’s delay in eating extra food meant that the only seats available were at the front.
Isaac gave him a look of despair. “That’s one of the reasons you don’t ask for more. If you’re late getting up here you end up sitting at the front.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You’ve got a lot to learn about school.”
As they walked to the front seats, Sebastian noticed the absence of one particular boy. As they sat down, he turned to Isaac and asked, “Where’s Gavin?”
“He arrives when it pleases him.”
“What makes him so special?”
“You’ll see,” Isaac said cryptically.
Mr. Stephenson began by explaining the fundamentals of the study of Earth’s magnetic field. He talked about isogonic lines, referring to a line of constant magnetic declination, and the variation of magnetic north from geographic north. Exciting stuff, demonstrated by several boys at the back of the class falling asleep. He then spoke about wells of isodynamic lines, which connected points with the same intensity of magnetic force.
This intrigued Sebastian. He thought it would be interesting to see if someone could drown in a magnetic well. Mr. Stephenson had talked about these lines before in his class back in Talinga. In fact, the whole lesson seemed very familiar, although it was a slightly better presented version. Maybe Mr. Stephenson had used the Talinga school as practice for these tesla classes. Either way, Sebastian had heard it all before.
He opened a book and started to draw.
“Interestingly,” Mr. Stephenson droned on, “you can get various wells of isodynamic lines, one within another within another, and so on. Points where there are wells of magnetic buildup. These can get incredibly strong, so even the most inexperienced tesla could detect them. Isn’t that right, Sebby?”
“Huh, what?” Sebastian sat up straight, aware that something had been asked of him, but not what.
“Ah, Gavin. It’s great to see you. Where would you like to sit today?”
Sebastian sagged with relief as the attention was taken off him.
In a movement that demonstrated that everything to do with communicating with ordinary people was dull and tiresome, Gavin let out a dramatic sigh and let his eyes drift across the assembled group. “I think I want to sit here today.” He indicated the seat where Sebastian was sitting.
“Sebastian, you need to move,” said Mr. Stephenson.
“No, I was here first,” Sebastian tersely and defiantly replied. He closed his book, clasped his hands together, resting them on his book, and looked straight ahead at the blackboard.
“You must move for him.”
“What’s so special about him that he thinks he can just come in here and push me aside?”
“Really, Sebastian, Gavin is a one-in-a-million person.”
“Why couldn’t I be a one-in-a-million person?”
“Come on, Sebastian, you can’t compare yourself to Gavin. Please, just move and we can get on with the lesson.”
Sebastian played his trump card. “What would my mother say to you about this, after she invited you into our home and fed you when she was so sick?”
Mr. Stephenson’s eye twitched. “Sebastian, you will see me afterwards. Gavin, I’m sorry to do this …”
“There’s nothing to worry about.” Gavin waved his hand vaguely in Sebastian’s direction. “I wasn’t really interested in the seat anyway. Today I’ll sit over here.” He wandered to the back of the class and gave one of the younger boys a fierce glare. The boy moved over and Gavin took his place.
Mr. Stephenson waited until Gavin had settled. He gave him a barely detectable nod and continued. “In today’s experiment we shall examine the detection level of a small battery.” He took out a battery no bigger than his thumbnail and three small metal containers. “Gavin, please come to the front and try your expertise with this experiment.”
It sounded to Sebastian more like a groveling request than the usual command a teacher would give a student.
“I’ll place this battery in one of these three boxes. I want you to sense which one it’s in.”
Sebastian doodled away, drawing dragons, while Mr. Stephenson shuffled the small containers around.
“Pick one,” Mr. Stephenson said.
Sebastian looked up briefly at the three aligned containers then focused back on his drawing. “It’s the one on the right,” he whispered.
Gavin pointed to the middle container.
Mr. Stephenson picked it up and opened it. It was empty. He then opened the left container. It too was empty. The container on the right revealed the battery.
“Well done, Gavin, you were very close. The field is so small it’s amazing you can detect it at all.”
“I reckon you got lucky with that one,” hissed Isaac at Sebastian. “Gavin wasn’t too far off.”
Sebastian gave him a sideways glance. “Statistically he’ll always be close if he picks the middle one. It’s either going to be the center one, or one on either side. He’s got a one in three chance of getting it right, and a tw
o in three chance of getting close. You, everybody, we all have exactly the same chance. Do you like my dragon?”
Mr. Stephenson had set up another round of the experiment.
“It’s on the left,” hissed Sebastian.
Gavin chose the middle one.
“So close, Gavin, so close,” Mr. Stephenson said. “You’re showing an adept skill at sensing.”
Sebastian rolled his eyes. “What’s the point of this?” he hissed to Isaac.
“Did you want to say something, Sebastian?” said Mr. Stephenson.
“Er, I was saying to Isaac here … how amazing Gavin’s talents are.” He paused and thought back over his statement. “Yeah.”
“That’s more like the attitude you should have. Far more grown up.”
Sebastian went back to his drawing. Gavin returned to his seat, exhausted from the effort of prolonged awesomeness, and Mr. Stephenson droned on with the rest of the lesson. And it went on for hours.
A tired fly buzzed across the room and landed on the edge of Sebastian’s desk. He watched it crawl all the way across then slowly buzz off into the air and crash repeatedly into the window. Sebastian knew how it felt.
Finally, after what seemed like a month, there was a loud clanging from the floor above. With lightning speed, the boys who appeared to be asleep just moments before had collected their belongings and dashed out the door.
“Lunch,” said Isaac.
The two gathered up their own materials and made their way out as Mr. Stephenson began to pack up his own things.
“Sebastian, I told you to see me after the class.”
“That is what you said. But I don’t like the way this place is being run. I’m going to complain to Nikola.”
There was a sudden gasp from Isaac, who grabbed his arm and hurried him out the door, closing it quickly behind him. They could hear the ranting of Mr. Stephenson from the other side.
Isaac turned on Sebastian. “What’s the matter with you? You can’t say that to the teacher.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not respectful. You need to be respectful to adults.”
