Iron Inheritance

by G. R. Fillinger

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I crossed my arms over my chest as my whole body tensed. What did Ms. Maintain-the-Balance want now?

  Duke smiled and stuck out his hand. “You must be Ms. Brooks.”

  “Evelyn.” I nodded, reluctantly shaking his hand. His fingers were long and nimble. I traced my eyes over the rest of him—silver watch almost the same shade as my necklace, crisp white dress shirt, gray slacks.

  “I know you’ve just arrived.” He nodded to Ria and Josh as well, acknowledging them politely. “And you’ve all gone through something quite horrible.”

  “You’re talking about these pancakes, aren’t you?” said Freddy, a mushy mixture falling from his fork.

  Josh elbowed him lightly and shook his head.

  I froze, not wanting to explain what had happened to anyone else, not wanting people to know about it because then I’d have to think about it again. I’d have to see that blinding white light.

  “They’ve suffered a loss,” Duke said delicately, choosing every word as carefully as Morales seemed to. “We all have,” he added. “Solomon Brooks was one of Patron society’s most important leaders in generations.”

  Freddy looked at me and then back up at Duke. He set down his fork, and his shoulders drooped. While everyone else in the cafeteria stared, Freddy and Miranda were left out of the loop as to who I was.

  “It’s ok, Freddy.” I shook my head and put on a soft smile. “Everyone else already knows; they’d just rather point and stare than say anything,” I said a little louder so the people around us would hear. I could feel their eyes burning into my back.

  Josh smirked and looked over my shoulder approvingly.

  “If you feel up to it, Dean Morales has instructed me to give you a tour of the campus, and I have time before my next class,” said Duke, professional and delicate as ever.

  “You’re a student here?” said Ria, unable to hold herself back.

  Nate cut in. “He’s the newest instructor of spiritual control. I thought that if we had time after the tour, you might like to sit in.” He raised an eyebrow and looked at me for confirmation.

  My jaw clenched as my eyes locked on Nate fully for the first time. If he’d just told me about needing to control my essence, maybe I could have prevented all of this. Maybe Grandpa wouldn’t be a flurry of ash buried with my old clothes. “Your timing’s impeccable.”

  Ria touched my shoulder, and I saw that she had a similar glare for Nate. “It’s fine. At least it’s not like Nate’s hiding anything from us anymore.” Waves of heat radiated off her.

  Nate stopped rocking from toe to heel and looked down. Duke’s gray eyes flicked to him, then around the group.

  Ria got up and locked her arm in Duke’s. “Lead the way, Mr. Natural Blond. Seriously, is that real?”

  “Quite.” Duke smiled and turned her toward the double doors to the left.

  Miranda and Freddy followed, all too willing to join the tour.

  “This should be fun,” Josh mumbled.

  Nate waited for me to go first, still looking down. I stopped and glared at him for a moment, the only person I could afford to be angry with—besides myself. As I started forward again, I noticed many of the eyes that were on me were now stabbing into Nate like daggers. They had stared at me because they were sorry or curious, but they stared at him with pent up anger and betrayal.

  I guess Nate wasn’t lying about one thing—Guardians weren’t exactly on friendly terms with Patrons.

  Through the double doors off the cafeteria, a tunnel large enough to carry a football team from the locker room to the field of a professional stadium stretched out. My shoes squeaked on the shiny concrete floor, echoing up to a rainbow of haphazard posters plastered over nearly every inch of the rounded walls. Some even made their way up and around the arched ceiling.

  “What are all these?” I caught up with the rest of the group and read a headline of a decades-old, yellow newspaper taped over a poster of a woman’s face. I tilted my head back as every step sloped down a few degrees.

  “They’re all Patrons.” Miranda jumped up higher than I would have guessed she was able and slapped a painting of a pomegranate hanging from a lush green tree.

  “Whoa.” Ria’s mouth fell open, and Duke stopped to allow us to look around. It was a completely different feel than the rest of the school—modern, rebellious, almost like a punk rock concert might be around the corner.

  “She painted that one.” Freddy pointed to the spot Miranda had hit.

  I spun around slowly. There were some bands and people I recognized right away, but others were either faded beyond recognition or names I’d never seen before. Here and there, 5x7 photos even found their way into the mix.

  My eyes widened as I stared up at a poster of a woman I’d seen about five times on TV just last week. “Is that—?”

  “Yep.” Freddy chuckled. “She’s a miracle like Miranda. Helps out when she has to jump off buildings.”

  I shook my head, barely believing. “Every actor who says they do their own stunts is now a Graced in my mind.”

  “That one over there—” Freddy pointed at a woman with a microphone in her hand and pretended to sing again. “She’s a Praiser; it’s another one of the talents Graced can get. Singing comes easy for them, all of the arts, really, but singing makes them most of their money if they choose to go big.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” said Ria, her eyes wide as mine.

  “Cause then they can’t fit through normal doors anymore.” Freddy grinned, eyebrows dancing again. “Get it? Go big?”

  Josh chuckled.

  My eyes scrunched, confused, unaware of the joke. “Wait, so are you a Praiser and a Healer.”

  Freddy shook his head. “Graced can’t have more than one talent. It’d be too much for our bodies to handle.”

  “But his singing voice is still lovely,” Miranda said wistfully.

  Freddy pursed his lips in mock embarrassment and batted his eyelashes.

  “So, the surface levels of the headquarters are fairly self-explanatory,” Duke said, his back straight and a genuine smile shining past his lips and his eyes. “It encompasses one block, including the recycling center, which we own. One building has the dorms and the cafeteria. The other side consists of a few faculty offices, classrooms, and the infirmary. In reality, Patronage College runs deep underground and is actually one of six regional headquarters in North and Central America. Thus, most simply call it headquarters or HQ.”

  “I think he’s done this tour-guide-thing before.” Josh grinned next to me, his voice deep and a hint of his Texan accent coming through again. It was so subtle, which made me want to know even more about him.

  “This is the main tunnel that leads to the arena where Professor Denisov trains almost all Patron military personnel before they enter The Defense—our equivalent of the humans’ Marine Corps.” He waved for us to follow him; a fork in the tunnel came into view almost immediately. “The arena is down there to the left while the field for Pesahs—Patrons who aren’t graced with angelic essence,” he added as my eyes widened at yet another term my mind had to wrap itself around. “Sometimes, almost entire families are Graced with the exception of one or two individuals. Rather than send them to a human college, we allows them to come here. They take most of the same courses but prefer to train separately for combat since they have to utilize different skills.”

  Ria glanced up the hall as we passed, her brow furrowed.

  I took a calming breath as I thought of her in this place, learning how to fight the Babylonians alongside the rest of these people. She wasn’t built for that. Her knife skills alone were evidence enough.

  Duke led us through the center of the fork’s options, and the concrete tunnel narrowed into something out of the last century. The glazed concrete floor turned to thick green carpet as the curved walls gave way to dark wood panels, elegant backdrops for ornately framed paintings, and gas lamps’ flickering gold flames.


  I surveyed one of the pictures and recognized it right away, my eyes widening in disbelief that he was a Patron too. “Newton? Seriously? Isaac Newton?”

  “You’d be surprised who were Patrons in their day.” Duke stopped and turned around, his white shirt clutching his long, thin torso, the hallway stretching into eternity behind him. “As you can see, headquarters like this date back several centuries. Thus, the areas aren’t always renovated at the same time. Most of the dorms and bathrooms, for instance, were remodeled in the 1950s.”

  “Purple sinks!” Miranda shouted like it was the biggest revelation of her life.

  Duke smiled. “One of the most important things to remember is that for every room here, there are at least two points of entry. However, I do not recommend trying to find the shortcuts on your own for a while. These tunnels were designed like a maze in case Babylonians ever infiltrated the headquarters. It’s best to explore them with someone else for now.”

  “Especially if you get trapped in one that automatically locks down when someone else enters it,” said Josh with a grin.

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

  “They have the same kind of layout in Texas,” he said, looking around at the pictures.

  “So, where would you like to go first? The greenhouse?” said Duke, his hands clasped behind his back patiently.

  “It’s underground?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Of course.” Duke inclined his head cordially, like he was asking me to dance.

  “They can’t endanger their food supply to aerial attack,” said Nate, his boyish voice a jarring transition from the likes of Duke and Josh. He was shorter than them by a good foot, and his stooped shoulders didn’t help his posture. He was the same today as he was in ninth grade. How had I never noticed that before?

  Duke nodded and looked at me. “Your grandfather was the one who suggested it.”

  “Big surprise there.” Ria turned back to me and grinned.

  I pressed my lips together in a sad smile. Another thing to miss about him, even if I had thought he was crazy most of my life. Now I knew he wasn’t. Paranoid, maybe, but for good reason.

  “If not the greenhouse, then we can head to the infirmary, the laboratory, the library, the chapel, the—”

  “Ooh, let’s go to the lab.” Freddy rubbed his hands together. “They never let me in there anymore.”

  “Why not?” said Ria, glancing at Nate. Working with microscopes and dissecting kits always put him in a good mood. I couldn’t tell if Ria wanted that effect or not.

  “One time I made all the frogs come back to life.” Freddy shrugged.

  “You can bring things back from the dead?” My jaw dropped.

  Josh shook his head before Freddy said anything. “Just small things when they’re barely dead. People are a lot different than frogs.”

  Duke waited like the patient tour guide he was, not a strand of his blond hair out of place. If he hadn’t been so rigid and formal, I would have guessed that he surfed every day to get his skin so tan and his hair so light.

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “The lab it is.” He smiled, turned to the left, and pushed on one of the wooden panels in the wall. It slid to the left and revealed another similarly decorated, slightly smaller hallway. The gas lamps inside flickered as a gust of air rushed forward.

  I looked back at Nate, then Josh, bewildered. “Seriously? What is this, Hogwarts?”

  Josh snickered. “I knew there was a nerd hiding in there.”

  Miranda skipped in slow motion through the entrance. Freddy followed, his whole body jiggling.

  “It’s really just to keep the humans out,” Josh said, smirking at them.

  I scoffed. “Humans? That’s it? Don’t you have some kind of derogatory name for them or something?”

  Josh smirked, his black shirt stretching tight across his wide chest. “We figured after titles like Patrons and Babylonians and Graced and Nephilim we’d give the ungifted a break.” He winked.

  “You’re probably the first human outside of a Graced family to come down here in a century,” said Duke as Ria passed him.

  Ria stroked her hand through her hair dramatically. “It’s because they know some angel’s going to come down and give me a kiss here soon.” She locked her arm in Duke’s.

  Nate’s forehead crunched into an old man’s as he passed me.

  Was this him being jealous?

  “Guess what else you missed, Natey,” Ria called back as we jostled through the long hall.

  Nate stayed silent.

  “Amazing Grace,” Ria said without turning around.

  Nate kept marching.

  Freddy turned back, his eyes wide. “Wait, do you like that song?”

  “Affirmative.” Nate nodded

  “Don’t lie. He loves it,” Ria purred.

  Josh walked next to me and leaned down so his lips were near my ear. “What’s going on there?”

  I shrugged, a patter of butterflies taking off in my stomach as I felt his breath on my neck.

  “Either way, remind me not to get on her bad side. Doesn’t seem like she forgives very easily.”

  I nodded as thoughts of Nate squished the butterflies to pulp. He’d lied to us our whole life. What if his liking that song was the only real fact we knew about him now? If he was even telling the truth.

  We walked down the hallway for at least a minute, every section of the dark wood panels and oil paintings blending together in my mind. It was a miracle Duke even knew where we were headed. Several times I could have sworn I saw the same picture repeated just to make it seem like I hadn’t moved at all.

  “Right through here.” Duke punched in a code on a metal keypad at the base of a wall that looked exactly like the rest. If he hadn’t bent down and pointed it out, I would have thought it was just part of the base board.

  Behind the wall, several pistons hissed and clunked before the whole thing swung forward.

  It was like going from night to day, and my jaw dropped with the difference.

  A bright white, state-of-the-art lab sprawled on for hundreds of feet in front of us. Crystal clear beakers and tubes and centrifuges and more vials of colored liquid than I had ever seen lined the crisp, white walls. There were lab tables set up with sleek computers on one end of the room, burners and sinks and overhead displays of cell walls and bacteria on the other.

  “Smell that?” Freddy inhaled as he stepped inside, his orange Hawaiian shirt clashing wonderfully with every piece of professional equipment.

  “Ammonia?” I said.

  “N. O.” He grinned and waited. “Nitrogen and Oxygen.”

  Nate was the only one to chuckle. Periodic Table humor always got to him for some reason.

  “It’s not their preferred method anymore, but Babylonians used to enjoy biological warfare quite a bit.” Duke leaned on a counter, his silver watch glinting in the overhead light. From this angle, I could almost make out little silver wings ticking around the black circle. “Nearly every headquarters has a lab like this. A lot of Patrons with non-Warrior and Messenger talents actually end up going into science-related careers just in case Babylonians decide to start up again. Good is always reactionary in that way, I suppose,” he added bitterly.

  “Baking soda. That’s what I remember,” said Ria, her eyes growing wide as she surveyed an oblong beaker. “So much baking soda.”

  I pictured the volcano with green lava that had consumed the dining room table, half the kitchen, and Ria’s pet gerbil. Not a pretty sight, especially when Grandpa caught us.

  “I can’t believe you actually teach real science here. Most religious people I’ve ever met avert their ears from anything verifiable,” I said, still looking around in awe.

  “Thee of little faith,” Josh raised an eyebrow. “Patrons are the reason Smallpox, Polio, and Tetanus have vaccines.”

  I looked to our tour guide to verify. He couldn’t be more than two or three years older than me, probably the same
age as Josh.

  Duke nodded. “Nothing for cancer yet, but they’re still working on it.”

  “Impressive.”

  “If you’re interested, I can make a recommendation that you be placed on a medical track. We have connections and spots open at almost every major university in the country.”

  My eyes bulged far beyond their limits. “You’re serious? This place gets people into colleges? What about journalism for NYU? I mean I’m already in, but—”

  I couldn’t believe this. A glimpse of the life I’d planned came back into view. What about graduation? Would I still go to NYU this summer?…Or stay here?

  “Absolutely.” Duke nodded. “That shouldn’t be too tough. We haven’t had a Patron reporter in a while. It would be nice for the truth to come out in the papers for once.”

  “Wait,” said Ria, her brow furrowed. “So you’re telling me that you make all Patrons come to these community colleges after high school, train them how to use their talents, and then place them in different careers around the country right under everybody’s noses?”

  “Anywhere around the world, but yes, that’s the idea.” Duke nodded, his hands tucked into his pockets. “Patrons are supposed to understand and sympathize with humans in their youth, train as young adults, and protect as adults. Not every job involves going out and fighting demons.”

  “It might need to one day,” Josh said, leaning back on the counter with his hands behind his head, his triceps flexing.

  “So Denisov believes.” Duke inclined his head politely.

  “All I heard was I get into a fancy college with Evey if I stay here.” Ria wrapped her arms around me.

  I smiled, my body suddenly tense, my mind unwilling to admit why.

  “Come on, there’s more to see.” Duke led us out.

  The greenhouse was an engineering marvel. Mirrors reflected sun all the way down from the surface and filled the entire room with light. Next was a giant storage room with enough MREs and canned food for a city. The whole school was supposed to be able to survive for a year with the surrounding community included.

  Grandpa would’ve been proud.

  Every so often, we came to a gray stone courtyard area that seemed to act as a hub for more tunnels. We rested and drank from a medieval-looking water fountain. Duke stretched as he leaned back against a giant stone column holding up the ceiling and the hundred tons of earth above it. I still had no idea how they’d manage to dig all this out.