“I didn’t do it,” Michael protested. “Alex did. Or rather, that was a side effect of what Alex did.”
“Alex blew up that whole rock face?”
Rebecca pointed incredulously at the ruined slope, at a deep crater that exposed the bedrock, covered with a fine layer of gravel and chipped stone.
“No, that was me,” Michael admitted, shoulders slumped. “I showed him the Vacuum Bomb Protocol, to give him an idea of what was possible, given the right control…”
“You were showing off,” Rebecca said, staring grumpily at the quarry wall. “And then what happened?”
“He activated the Absolute Protocol that you implanted. And then he started dumping all the local energy directly out into the Ether. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What does that mean? What ‘local energy’?”
“Everything. First thermal, then radiant and electromagnetic as well.”
Michael picked up a pebble and threw it toward the quarry wall, but it came up short, diving down early toward the black water at the bottom of the quarry and colliding with the ice on the surface with a crunching sound.
“I tried to get him to stop there, but he seemed like he was in a trance or something. Next thing I know, the rock where he was staring starts to disappear into the Ether.”
Michael gestured at the frost around him, as if it had just arrived, to his shock.
“I think all the cold is only a side-effect, you know?”
“You mean he was creating a vacuum? You are kidding, right?”
“I think so,” Michael said. “I think all the time, without even realizing it, Alex creates a localized void in our world, and Etheric energy leaks through to fill it. I think that’s where all that catalytic power comes from. When he activated the protocol, he created a much larger void in the Ether, so energy went rushing out of the world to fill it.”
“You could use that, maybe,” Rebecca said slowly, lost in thought. “The cold might be easier to control than an actual energy or mass transfer. Less dangerous for Alex, probably more effective.”
“No,” Michael said, almost sadly, shaking his head.
“Why not?”
“He can’t control the protocol, and he can’t stop it, once it starts.”
Rebecca frowned doubtfully.
“Okay, what then?”
Michael looked moodily at the frost covered hole in the quarry wall and sighed.
“It’s like Mitsuru all over again,” he said, turning to face her, with an expression that was filled with grief and frustration. “We can’t let Alex operate that protocol. He’ll kill everyone around him.”
Alex lay on his back, on top of the comforter, still wearing his shoes and uniform, and wondered why someone enrolled in the combat program had to study any math at all, much less the exact same math that had been kicking his ass back in the real world.
He looked idly over at the stack of books on his desk, the study guides that Vivik and Emily had made for him sitting on top. Vivik’s notes were typed, bullet-pointed, and exhaustive to the point of being incomprehensible. Alex often found the text book’s explanations to be shorter. Emily’s notes were handwritten, concise, and easy to understand — but equally as useless to Alex. They only made him worry about her, and their little ‘arrangement’.
The ceiling proved more interesting that the books. He wasn’t, he realized drowsily, going to be doing any studying tonight. He fished his headphones out of his pocket and hit play on his MP3 player, finding himself mid-song, halfway through a Portishead album.
Alex turned the volume up earlier when he’d gone for a jog on the Academy’s surprisingly modern synthetic-surface track. Alex hadn’t really felt like getting lost going running on the grounds, but he’d wanted the exercise, even if it was an off-day. The music was too loud now, in the quiet of the dorms, but he didn’t bother to reach for the volume, letting the lushness of the sound obliterate his thoughts, his skull reverberating with the slow, looping beats.
He couldn’t have fallen asleep. Not like that. Alex was a light sleeper, a very desirable trait for those who planned on surviving incarceration. He had trouble falling asleep almost every night, and even small noises tended to wake him up. He couldn’t possibly have fallen asleep with his headphones on.
But, Alex could have sworn that for a moment somewhere in the album’s final tracks, his head heavy and swimming with worry, that he felt the warmth of another body besides his own in the tiny dorm bed, a small hand resting on the pillow above his head. The illusion was so complete that he was aware of the smell of her hair, the weight of her head from where it rested on the hollow of his shoulder. He felt a tremendous sense of comfort and gentleness, and he lost himself in it.
He did not wake then. He could not have woken, because he had not slept. He opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. He was alone, and the place beside him on the bed was cold. The MP3 player had moved along to Massive Attack, but he felt too agitated to listen anymore. He pulled the headphones out of his ears as he sat up, puzzled and angry for reasons he couldn’t articulate.
There was no way for him to know how long they had been knocking on the door. He hadn’t slept, he didn’t even feel that sleepy. But, he hadn’t heard them until now.
Alex got up with a sigh and opened the door, expecting Vivik. He liked the Sikh kid quite a bit; actually, he was really good-natured and upbeat. But Vivik liked studying, as in he seemed to do it for fun, and sometimes he wanted to tutor Alex a bit more than Alex wanted to be tutored.
It wasn’t Vivik. It was Renton, and a Chinese kid who Alex recognized from class, but he couldn’t remember the name of.
“Hey, Alex,” Renton asked, smiling mischievously, “why are you still in your uniform?”
Alex looked down at himself, and wondered the same thing. He had he slept, then? Had he dreamed?
“I’m not really sure,” he admitted, rubbing his head. “I guess I was asleep. What time is it, anyway?”
“A bit after eleven. I’m Li,” the Chinese kid said, extending his hand to Alex. He had a firm hand shake and a smile that seemed friendly enough. “We have homeroom together.”
“Right,” Alex said. “You’re a friend of Renton’s?”
“Don’t think badly of me for it, though,” Li said, grinning. “It sort of worked out that way.”
Alex laughed, and then stifled a yawn, wondering how anyone could tolerate Renton on a consistent enough basis to be friends with him. Frankly, he wasn’t totally sure how Anastasia put up with Renton, as an employee or whatever he was.
“Get yourself changed, Alex. Put something warm on,” Renton suggested, leaning against the wall. “We’ll wait out here while you change.”
“Where are we going?”
Alex was wary. He wondered if the Academy had hazing rituals that he was unaware of.
“The roof, Alex. Believe me, you want to come with us to the roof,” Renton said, his voice dripping with sincerity.
“I will not notice,” Rebecca said, up to her chin in rose-scented bathwater.
The room was so thick with steam that she couldn’t see the shower curtain. Pink-tinged bubbles floated across the water’s surface. Her hair was securely wrapped in a red towel, a mask stuffed with lavender pressed across her eyes.
“I will not notice.”
Rebecca thanked whatever God that there might be that the founder of the Academy had been Japanese, and had a fondness for his native country’s baths. She’d made certain that everyone in Central had forgotten the bathhouse except herself and the staff that cleaned it. The wood was carved cedar, darkened with age and moisture, and the bath itself was big enough that she could stretch her legs out. The only sound was the branches scraping across with the outside wall with the wind.
“I’m not going to notice anything. I don’t care what they do. I’m not going to feel any of it.”
The worst was the flirting, the falling in lust or in love. She could feel it from a mile aw
ay.
She’d always planned to bring a lover here, Rebecca remembered bitterly. Back when she’d had them. When she found someone special, someone worth rewarding, she intended bring them here. She’d had it all planned out.
How many years ago had that been? Three? Four?
“I will not notice. I will not.”
Rebecca let herself sink down, into the steaming water up to her eyeballs, letting the hot water massage her brain.
It helped a little bit.
There were around thirty people up on the roof. Most of them were strangers to Alex. Since Renton and Li were caught up in conversation as soon as they walked out on to the roof, Alex shyly migrated back to where a cooler sat, perched on top of one of the old chimneys the dotted the roof. A beer, he figured, might help relax him a little, make talking to people a bit easier.
Alex stared into the cooler in dismay.
“Seriously?”
Renton looked over at him from where he was hitting on some curly-haired first year student, confused.
“All this power and technology; a secret school in another world,” Alex recited numbly. “Plus, some of the people here are really rich! So, how could this be?”
Renton looked him with a puzzled expression. Alex reached into the cooler that he held open.
“Keystone,” Alex said sadly. “Still warm.”
Renton laughed like he’d heard the funniest joke ever. It was obscene, unpleasant, and probably designed to be exactly that. Alex was starting to realize that Renton had mastered that art of being friendly and despicable at the same time.
“It’s like fucking Bakersfield in a can, you realize,” Alex said to no one in particular. Then a nasty idea occurred to him, and he turned to confront Renton. “Is this some kind of joke, Renton? Should I take offense?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get beer when you’re stuck in the Ether, you ungrateful little shit?”
Renton extracted a can from the cooler for himself, smacking his lips with satisfaction.
“We can’t even bring it in the dorms, you know. They have a protocol on all the student buildings, it puts you to sleep if you try and bring this sort of thing in.”
“Same thing if you try and get it on with a girl in the dorms.”
Alex looked over at the speaker, a chubby upperclassman named Todd that he had just been introduced to. Seemed like a nice enough guy, although he had a bit too much of the white-boy hip-hop act going for Alex, but maybe that was an East Coast thing.
“You try some shit, you both wake up to find the staff member on duty standing over you.”
“Really? Even if she was only there to study or something?”
“Study, right,” Li said with a grin. “That’s a good one. In that truly unlikely scenario, nothing would happen. Not until one of you tried to take your clothes off, I guess.”
Alex laughed nervously while he considered the implications. He hadn’t really realized what an opportunity he’d blown at Emily’s place.
“It happened to a girl in my hall, last year. She was so embarrassed when the teacher came to get her in the morning.”
Alex turned to look at the new voice. Anastasia, wrapped in a surprisingly cutesy winter coat and fringed scarf, was glancing at the contents of the cooler with obvious contempt. Behind her was Emily in a tailored coat, heavy woolen skirt and felt boots, laughing cheerfully and walking with a plump, dreadlocked blond girl he didn’t recognize.
“You do realize that you’re staring, don’t you?”
Anastasia hissed at him as she walked near, stopping a discrete distance away.
“Sorry,” he mumbled into his beer. “I was surprised to see you here, that’s all.”
Anastasia made a sour face at him.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us, Ana?”
The dreadlocked girl interposed herself between Alex and Anastasia, looking indignant.
“Alex, meet Serafina Ricci,” Anastasia said, sounding as bored as she looked. “Serafina, meet Alex Warner.”
“Call me Sarah, everyone does. How do you do?”
Sarah greeted Alex with a smile. Alex nodded back, and took a sip of his wretched beer to cover his discomfort. He was never sure, meeting a new girl, whether he supposed to shake her hand or what. It seemed so inappropriately masculine, somehow.
“I have, of course, heard all about you.”
She said it as if he would find that reassuring.
“Seems like everyone has,” Alex agreed. “Saves time on introductions, I guess.”
“Serafina is a second-year student,” Anastasia explained. “And her cartel, I might add, has the bad taste to associate itself with the Hegemony. Despite that, and her awful, she is my second cousin, and therefore my responsibility.”
Sarah looked scandalized.
“And your friend, too, I would hope. And I’ve told you a million times to call me Sarah. After all I’ve done for you…”
“Please,” Anastasia said, her voice deathly bored. “I only came because you made me promise to introduce you to Alex. That done, I am afraid that I have better things to do with my time. Do enjoy yourselves…”
Anastasia breezed off, brushing by a puzzled looking Emily on her way to the door. Alex sipped from his can as sparingly as possible and felt tremendously out-of-place. How could beer be warm when it was this cold outside? It defied logic.
Alex grabbed Renton by the arm as he walked by. Renton met Alex’s look with slightly glassy eyes. Alex realized the boy was probably a touch drunk already.
“Okay, then, so why the party?”
“We are sort of the welcoming committee,” Vivik admitted, emerging from the group of people behind the tangle of pipes on the center of the roof. “We would have done it sooner, but you keep falling asleep at eight o’clock, so it’s been a little tricky.”
“Vivik!” Alex exclaimed. “I didn’t realize you were here.”
“Don’t look so surprised,” Vivik said, obviously hurt. “I’m not that big of nerd, you know.”
Renton winked at Alex.
Emily walked up and tried to say something, only to be cut off by Renton shouting a greeting and then pushing his way through the group, running over to the far wall. Alex watched in astonishment as Margot, the vampire from the day before, floated up from the side of the building and over the retaining wall, coming smoothly down in front of the cheering Renton.
“Shush.” Margot’s voice was prim and cold, but not unfriendly. “One of the staff has to be doing rounds, Renton.”
She held out a brown paper bag, which Renton promptly snatched.
“It’s Rebecca tonight, so we’re cool. And you’re great, Margot. I appreciate this.”
Renton was looking at the contents of the heavy paper bag with obvious satisfaction. Given the clinking noise it made when he moved it, Alex was pretty sure he’d just seen how the beer had made it to the roof in the first place, without tripping any of the Academy’s security measures.
As Alex approached them, he realized that he’d been wrong — Margot hadn’t actually landed. She was still floating, her bare feet dangling lazily, centimeters above the concrete and rebar, her long brown skirt around her calves, teased by the cold wind.
“Am I done?” Margot said, looking vaguely annoyed. “I have Eerie waiting down there…”
Renton chuckled to himself, and then looked at Alex evilly.
“Why don’t you bring her up, then, and hang out for a while. I’ll introduce you guys to Alex. You can have a beer with us or something.”
Margot looked at him, clearly taken aback.
“I can’t drink alcohol, because of my metabolism, and Eerie’s pathologically shy, because she’s a nutcase.” Her intonation made it obvious that she wasn’t making excuses; rather, Margot was just stating the facts as she saw them. “What kind of party are you having, exactly?”
“That was a pretty big favor that I did you, right?” Renton said softly, his smile wide and mean. �
�And while I do appreciate you bringing up all this stuff up to the roof for me, maybe you should consider if things between us are really squared. What do you think, Margot?”
Margot’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment, Alex wondered if she was going to attack him. She was, after all, a vampire, right? He had been planning on introducing himself, but found himself standing by nervously, not sure what to make of the conversation. The mood didn’t seem right for him to interrupt.
“Very well.” Margot bowed her head for a moment, and then continued on evenly. “I can’t speak for Eerie, though. She will probably just go home by herself.”
“I really don’t think you should let that happen, Margot,” Renton said reasonably. “Besides, you can tell Eerie that I have a bunch of candy up here for her.”
Again, Margot paused and appeared to try and compose herself. Alex looked at the serious, pigtailed vampire, and wondered why Renton was being so hard on her. He’d already known him long enough not to like him, but he didn’t think he was stupid or fond of wasting time. Alex sipped his awful beer, and wondered what Renton’s angle was, with Margot, with Eerie, with himself.
“It was a mistake to fall into your debt, Renton.” Margot turned and began to float away. “And you’d better be serious about the candy. You don’t want to disappoint Eerie.”
Alex looked at Renton and wondered. Renton had gone out of his way to be friendly, in his own weird way, since Alex had arrived, but unlike Emily and Vivik, his motives were far more obscure.
“He’s been like that since I met him,” Emily observed, looking over Alex’s shoulder. “He can be kind of a dick, and still confuses picking on girls with flirting, but he’s not really as bad as he’d like you to believe.”
Alex spun around, startled, and found himself face-to-face with her. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold, and she held her beer gingerly in sparkly blue gloves.
“Are you sure?” Alex said, only half-joking. “Sometimes I wonder if Renton’s really such an okay guy.”
“Well, he did throw you a party,” Renton pointed out from behind his beer.
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