“He isn’t a kid,” Alistair said gloomily, “he’s a bomb.”
“No,” Michael said quietly, “he’s a child and a bomb.”
“Um, hello? I’m getting a bit tired, here. Do you want me to activate this kid, or what?”
Gaul considered for a moment, ignoring Michael and Alistair’s stares.
“We’ve come this far,” he said, his bloodshot eyes glinting red under the lights, his smile sad and reluctant. “Let’s find out what has been left to us. Even if young Alex is as you say, well, it isn’t only about where the bomb is. It’s about when it goes off, and who’s standing next to it.”
He shrugged dismissively, the ghost of a smile playing about his thin lips.
“Do it, Rebecca. Activate him.”
Alex woke up slowly, his awareness returning to him piece by piece, a little like waking up after a night of serious drinking, but without as much immediate pain. First, he felt the soft cotton sheets bunched in his hands, and realized he was in a bed. And not his own, unless someone had replaced his institutional bedding with high-thread count sheets and added a bunch of unnecessary pillows. It was warm, he realized, but not uncomfortable. He was lying on his back, his head propped up and his arms folded neatly over his stomach. Then he became aware of smells: some kind of incense, his own sweat, and then a hint of the soft, unmistakable scent of a girl’s hair coming from the pillow beneath his head.
So, he was in a girl’s bed. Alex thought briefly about opening his eyes, but he felt too tired to manage it. It seemed pleasant, anyway, lying there, in the softness and the cozy warmth of the bed, only languidly aware of his aching body. He felt strangely calm, almost blissful, immobile and safe.
Perhaps he fell back asleep then. He couldn’t be certain whether the sound of a lighter and then a protracted coughing fit merely jarred him from his reverie, or whether it actually woke him up again. The effect was the same, regardless — Alex was jolted from his placid contemplation into awareness of his situation, his body’s litany of aches and pains, and his presence in the strange bed. A strange girl’s bed. With a certain amount of trepidation, Alex opened his eyes.
The room was dim, as the shades had been drawn across the room’s single window, and only a sliver of the late afternoon sun made its way across the giant four-post bed that occupied much of the room’s available space. A pair of old-looking bureaus made of dark wood and a dresser topped with a muted television displaying commercials rounded out the furnishings. On the other side of the bed, wrapped in a red Anaheim Angels-branded blanket, Rebecca hacked and coughed sheepishly, red-faced, motioning for Alex to look away.
“Are you smoking pot?” Alex asked skeptically, sitting up against the headboard and attempting to extract his lower body from the tangle of sheets and blankets he was wrapped in. He seemed to have picked up a headache to accompany his body’s various pains at some point. “You are a seriously terrible role model.”
“Give me a break,” Rebecca croaked. “I have a headache. Anyway, it’s your fault.”
“What? How is that possibly my fault?”
Rebecca shrugged and reached over to the sideboard, retrieving a heavy blown-glass pipe and a cheap plastic lighter.
“Never mind. Do you smoke this stuff?”
Alex shook his head.
“Fine,” Rebecca said, putting the lighter to the bowl and taking a long hit. She held her breath for a moment, and then exhaled a stream of dense, skunky smoke at the ceiling. “Be a drag. Whatever.”
“Why do I feel so,” Alex paused, searching for words, “um, bad?”
“That’s your fault, too,” Rebecca said, making a face at Alex. “You started freaking out, when we activated you. First, Michael tried to hold you down, and when that didn’t work, I had to bliss you out.”
“Yeah. So, uh, bliss?”
“State of semi-conscious ecstasy. Nicest way I know to put somebody down. I’m an empath, remember,” Rebecca said, rolling her eyes. “You sure you don’t want any of this?”
Alex looked warily at the bubbled blue glass pipe. He started to refuse again, and then it occurred to him that the random drug tests he’d been subjected to for so many years that they had become routine were unlikely to ever happen again. The Academy probably didn’t have any such policy, he figured, if Rebecca, who he thought was some kind of school councilor, was trying to get him stoned. And his head really was starting to hurt.
“Fuck it. Sure. Why not?”
Rebecca chuckled and handed him the pipe and lighter.
“Famous last words, right?”
Alex barely managed to get the bowl lit before he started coughing, his throat raw and his mouth filled with spit. Rebecca prized the pipe from his limp hands while he coughed, then grinned and pounded him on the back approvingly.
“You are such a baby,” Rebecca said cheerfully.
Alex managed to stop coughing, caught his breath, and then gave her his best sheepish, glassy-eyed smile. She laughed and tousled his hair. He didn’t feel stoned at all, and he thought for a moment about asking for another hit, but then decided to let it go. He figured he’d already embarrassed himself enough as it was.
“So, uh, why I am in your room, Rebecca?”
Rebecca turned to glare at him, the pipe still at her lips, the bowl burning cherry red.
“You owe me a new couch, you little shit,” she said, blowing smoke at him. “I’d had that thing for years, too. It was like a friend of mine. So many memories.”
“And you made me lie down on it? That’s gross.”
Rebecca smacked at his head playfully.
“It was clean, asshole. And leather couches last forever… oh, shit,” she said, panicked, patting down the bedding around her. “Where is that fucking remote?”
“What?”
“Aha!”
Rebecca pulled the remote from underneath the pillow next to her. She hit a button and the TV’s speakers squawked to life.
“Rebecca?”
“Shh.”
Alex squinted at the television, and then looked over at Rebecca in surprise.
“Are you serious — ” he began, only to be cut off by Rebecca waving at him to shut up.
“Hush,” she commanded, glazed eyes glued to the television. “’Survivor’ is on,” she said, helpfully pointing at the TV with the remote. “You ever watch this show, Alex? They make them do some pretty messed up stuff, eat bugs and shit, you know?”
“I can’t believe that you watch this crap,” Alex grumbled, settling back against the pillows behind him.
“Well, I do, and we are in my room, so, you’ll just have to deal. Give it a chance. You should like it — half these girls spend the show making a concerted effort to show America their tits, anyway.”
Alex considered pressing her for answers, and then gave up on the idea almost immediately. After all, he figured, why take on a fight he was guaranteed to lose? Anyway, he had to admit that she was right about the boobs on display, even if they did appear to be mostly on the fake side. He waited patiently for the commercial break, wondering if the dialogue on this show had always been so vapid, or if he was just stoned and tired.
“Okay,” Rebecca said breezily, hitting the mute button and silencing a detergent ad, “you have until the commercials end. Knock yourself out.”
Alex felt a bit groggy, if not exactly wasted, but his headache had receded a bit. In balance, then, he figured he was no worse off than when he had woken, but it was still hard for him to formulate the questions he wanted to ask. Or perhaps it was simply that he had too many.
“So, what happened when you activated me? I mean, except for being tired and a little sore, I don’t feel any different.”
“Besides destroying my couch? Well, we didn’t have much trouble activating you, but I guess we did a little bit too good of a job. Normally, it’s a pretty simple procedure, even for one of you rare types. Technically, a telepath would work almost as well as an empath, but Gaul likes to have an empat
h on hand, in case things go wrong. As it turns out, that was a very good idea.”
Rebecca cleared her throat, and then reached for the glass of water on the bedside table beside her and drank deeply, making Alex acutely aware of how thirsty he was. He didn’t want to interrupt Rebecca’s explanation, though, so he decided to deal with it for now.
“That catalyst effect of yours is a pretty unpredictable thing, Alex. The moment I put you under, it started to affect me.” Rebecca looked a bit uncomfortable to Alex as she spoke, and he wondered what about the situation bothered her. “I thought I had it under control, but it’s… intoxicating, you know? It’s all this power, right? And the further down I pushed, the closer I came to activating you, the more intense the effect became.”
Rebecca shrugged and gave him a goofy grin, her eyes bloodshot and glazed.
“By the time I’d completed all the preparations, Gaul said I was glowing.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“Just that. We’d formed a closed loop, Alex. I was using my power to improve your access to your own. You were providing me with power to do so. Every step I took accelerated this process.” Rebecca turned to face him, putting one hand on his shoulder, her expression serious, maybe even concerned. “Alex, can you feel the Black Door?”
Alex intended to tell her no, that he didn’t know what she was talking about. He had even opened his mouth to do so. But then, it was like his perspective changed somehow, as if he was observing himself as a third-party, from a discrete distance but with greater clarity than he had ever imagined possible. He could see the boy propped up against the pillows on the bed, still half underneath the blankets, his long hair hanging down in his eyes. He could see his vague, almost dull-witted expression. On the face of the woman sitting beside him in the bed, he could see concern mixed with resignation, and knew that she was afraid that something bad might happen. Inside of her, pulsating out from underneath her t-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms, from inside of her lithe body, he saw a multifaceted light, burning like sunlight refracted in the heart of a gemstone. But when he looked inside of himself, all he could see was darkness; a darkness he knew was absolutely frigid. And within it, encompassed by it, he could see a great Black Door, heavy lacquered wood and tarnished silver hinges and door handle, the whole thing coated with a generous layer of white frost.
When Alex became aware of himself again, he was lying on his back. His eyes were open, and he wondered how long he’d been staring at the ceiling. Rebecca’s hand rested on his forehead, cool and soft. He sat up gingerly, wanting to ask what happened, and then noticed that the show was back on TV. Wisely, he decided to wait for commercial.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” Rebecca said, punching mute and turning to face him again, “but you kinda lost your shit there for a minute. I don’t need you destroying my bed and my couch in the same day. You disintegrated that thing on a molecular level, you little bastard.”
“Sorry,” Alex muttered, obscurely embarrassed. “Guess I’ve been kind of a headache today, huh?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s my job.” Rebecca smirked at him. “Though I guess I should warn you that if you make a habit of destroying girl’s beds, then you’re going to have trouble scoring invites in the future.”
Alex rolled his eyes.
“So, what’s that,” Alex paused, shuddering slightly at the memory, “that thing inside me, Rebecca? The Black Door, or whatever you called it?”
“Not whatever. That’s what it is, Alex. It’s a big fucking Black Door in your head. I suggest that you try not to think about it too much. Sometime when I’m feeling better, I can do a better job of explaining your situation.”
She looked at Alex with something that looked suspiciously like pity, and for some reason, it bothered him.
“Okay, so, what does that — ?”
Rebecca put one finger up to his lips without even looking, her eyes already glued to the television, her other hand hunting for the mute button on the remote.
“Shh. Survivor.”
Alex tried to watch in resentful silence, but he was too comfortable, Rebecca was too easy to be around, or maybe he was a little stoned, after all. He found himself raptly watching a bunch of strangers plot, scheme and preen for the cameras, and wondered how long it had been since he’d last watched television.
“Alex,” Rebecca said quietly, still staring at the TV, “it’s probably going to be hard on you, you know? Up until now people have treated you like you didn’t exist, or like they wished you didn’t. Now everyone will know who you are before they meet you, and they’ll probably be extra nice to you, but you’ll always have to wonder about their intentions. How does that make you feel?”
“As long as I can get a date out of it,” Alex said with a sheepish smile, “I’m cool.”
Rebecca gave him an amused looked, and then rolled her eyes.
“Boys. Hush,” she said. “TV show.”
Ten
“Director, I must object. An Inquiry? Is all of this truly necessary? As I recall, my only crime was rescuing a boy who is now a student here, along with one of your Operators.”
“The Inquiry was deemed necessary because your answers, on the face of it, appear evasive, Mr. North. You must understand that though your motivations may be pure, the explanation you’ve provided for your proximity to the incident strains credulity.”
Mr. North crossed his legs and looked thoughtfully at Gaul.
“And yet here we are. Director, you should know by my reputation that if I wanted to deceive you, I would have at least concocted a believable story,” North offered reasonably. Gaul had only met him a few times before, at various Hegemony events where his attendance was expected; he’d thought him to be reserved and observant, but Rebecca told him that if you actually got him to talk that he was a bore. After an hour talking in circles with the somberly dressed man, he was inclined to agree. “That I simply happened to be in the area on personal business may be a wildly unlikely coincidence, but it is a coincidence that saved one of your people’s lives. What more can I offer you?”
“And the nature of the business?” Gaul asked doggedly.
“Personal, and private, and, as judged by the Committee-at-Large, nothing that I must disclose to you, having already done so to a panel of my peers.”
“You are putting me in a position, Mr. North,” Gaul said carefully, “where my only option to compel your cooperation would be to expand the scope of a potential Audit of the matter to include your private business.”
“If you feel that you must do so, then by all means Director, by all means. That I refuse to disclose private matters does not mean that I have something to hide. If you instigate an Audit into this matter, then I will be forced to lodge a complaint, and you will be called before the Committee to explain your rationale. Tell me, sir,” North said pointedly, “which part of my actions in this affair do you feel jeopardized the safety of Central, or violated a tenant of the Agreement?”
Gaul tried a cold, long silence, but Mr. North seemed unperturbed. Eventually, Gaul sighed, shuffled his papers, and moved on. Even the mention of the Committee-at-Large, Central’s own representative body and the theoretical counterweight to his own authority as Director, irked him to no end. Gaul approved of democracy, at least in theory, but only when it cooperated with him, something the Committee had never been willing to do.
“Tell me about the Weir, then.”
“Had no idea they would be there,” Mr. North said, brushing his dark brown hair back from his forehead and looking huffy. “Never would have suspected such a thing, and in such a pitiful backwater, no less.”
“And the silver Weir, Mr. North?”
“Terrifying creature,” North said sincerely, leaning forward as he spoke, “absolutely terrifying. I had thought it dead, of course, after your Operator, Aoki wasn’t it? After she shot the thing in the head, I assumed that it had been killed. I had dealt with most of the rest of the pack when the thing
pulled itself up out of the mud, howled and then ran off to who-knows-where, before I could stop it.” North paused and looked contemplative. “Pity,” he said, after a brief hesitation, “the beast had a magnificent pelt. It would have made quite the trophy.”
Gaul fixed the man with his best unsettling stare. He’d actually practiced it, after reading a book on human psychology that discussed conversational gambits, and had found it quite effective on the Academy staff. It failed, however, to invoke a reaction of any kind in Mr. North’s regular, placid face.
“Have you ever encountered one previously?” Gaul asked, hoping that he didn’t sound as tired as he felt. “A silver Weir, I mean?”
Mr. North scratched his head and then offered Gaul the faintest ghost of a smile.
“Odd that you should mention it, Director,” he said, looking vaguely interested for the first time since Gaul had met him, “but you are the second person to ask me that question recently. The first, since you are certain to ask, was Mr. Cruces, head of the Terrie Cartel’s operations in Asia. He asked me at the last Hegemony Executive Committee meeting,” North said, squinting with the effort of remembering. “I believe it was as an aside to anecdotes being shared regarding the Weir hill tribes. He felt strongly, as I recall, that the silver breed were not as rare as was generally thought, and that in some regions, particularly Cambodia and Vietnam, that they could still be found if you looked hard enough. I thought it odd, at the time, when he asked me if I had seen one. I got the distinct impression that he had seen one, and recently, from the way he talked about it.”
Gaul tried to digest the information, and then decided that he couldn’t stomach it. He felt like he was being fed something, and he’d never liked handouts. Still, he didn’t think that he would get any more out of North, even if he decided to push him again, so he elected against trying. He changed subjects.
“Mr. North, investigating these incidents would proceed more smoothly and, I might add, impede on your time and liberty less, were the Committee-at-Large to approve the candidates the Board submitted for the vacant Auditor positions over the last two years,” Gaul said carefully, shuffling the papers on his desk into completed and incomplete piles. “I would hope that this experience would color your thinking on the subject.”
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