I almost emailed Majorana later to apologize for refunding her three dollars plus one cent, but then I realized something: my refund had been exactly the sort of passive aggressive response Warner said parahumans preferred. I’d accidentally expressed my annoyance in the most mature, tactful way possible.
As if to confirm this, that night when I got home there was a parcel waiting for me. It was a 650-page book entitled Common Human Coping Mechanisms.
A note attached said, Earlier at Forbidden Planet I remembered the name of a song I’d been trying to recall for weeks. I went home immediately to listen to it in a dark closet. You may find this book helpful. It says many humans turn to drugs and alcohol in times of great stress. If you need help acquiring drugs and alcohol, I’ll see what I can do.
Making friends and doing well at the School was deeply weird. It messed with my head from time to time. On the one hand, I was experiencing the best times of my life. On the other, sometimes I felt guilty, like I had no right to have fun when my dad was being held captive by the worst beings imaginable. Sometimes I felt like a worthless, lazy bum because I wasn’t working on finding a way to help him.
I started having nightmares: about the SUV in our home, Tabbabitha sneaking up on me, or not being able to stop Hypatia before she cut herself for real. Sometimes I’d have dreams in which I figured out how to locate my dad, and I’d wake up in excitement, only to have the solution evaporate once my brain was fully awake.
As time passed, I became less and less convinced that she had been in town after all. It was known that the Old Ones couldn’t be disconnected from the hive mind for more than a month or so, and she hadn’t struck out at anyone, which wasn’t really in character for them. Besides, my dad had managed to get a message through the gap at one time—with his email—so it wasn’t as impossible as everyone was always saying. Maybe whatever he’d done had something to do with how Tabbabitha had hijacked my bracelet. I spent hours studying Happybear’s communications protocol, trying to figure out how Tabbabitha could have used it to communicate through the gap, but try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what she’d done.
I had developed a few routines that helped get me through my days. Every morning, I would get up because I was anxious to learn weird new things, and also because Hypatia was standing in my room, poking me in the back of the head with a broom handle. After showering and dressing and all that, the two of us usually took the wormhole downtown for breakfast.
I would give up wormhole travel entirely if it were up to me. It wasn’t just the first trip. I always feel a little creeped out and wrong after I’ve come through one. Plus, they’re extremely dangerous. Seems like every time I go through, I find a new way of hurting myself. The outlet is never located at the exact same height off the pavement, so that makes it very easy to trip unless you’re paying close attention. Also, imagine what happens when you go through and another person is already occupying the space you’d planned to appear in. It’s like the bike accident only disgusting. I don’t want to talk about that anymore.
I’m going to tell you something that was a new discovery for me, something most people probably know already: having friends is nice. I saw people at my old school with friends, but I didn’t like them and assumed they didn’t like each other much, either. I often wondered why they bothered and how they could keep each other’s personalities and dislikes straight and get along with everyone simultaneously, but once I actually tried it out, it wasn’t as exhausting as I thought it might be. Breakfast was typically a large gathering of our extended social circle held at the Event Horizon. I wasn’t always crazy about the company, since Ultraviolet and a couple other high-dollar genetically engineered kids who tagged along with her were there as often as not, but the place made a mean breakfast burrito, poured strong coffee, and had fast Internet.
I don’t know whether it was the fact that she thought my friend had eyes for her boyfriend, because I once laughed at her getting knocked over, or because of how “rumpled” I tended to be, but Ultraviolet always made it clear that she’d rather be associating with more appropriate types. Unfortunately, because Ultra dated Tom, and Tom was friends with Rubidia and Dirac, they tended to get stuck with us from time to time. Hypatia both hated and loved this. She got to be around Tom, but she also had to put up with Ultraviolet. Of course, she would probably pretend to have forgotten there was anyone at school named Tom if you asked her about it. Still, her admiration of Tom was a bit obvious to everyone but the two of them.
There was a kind of cold war between Ultraviolet and Hypatia and me—one fought in petty insults and strategic passive aggression. One morning we’d been up super early because our Xenopsychology teacher was into astrology and was convinced we would learn faster between 5:00 and 6:00 AM on a morning following a full moon (I don’t think this is true because all I remember is Hypatia waking me up early at home and a second time in the classroom after we had been dismissed). Because of that, she and I were first to the Event Horizon that morning, which meant the job of sequestering the big patio table for our group fell to us. This was crucial, because there was a perpetual shortage of tables at the Event Horizon.
Warner turned up just as we were getting settled in and sat down at the head of the table like he owned the place, so I sat at the opposite end, with Hypatia in the middle of the long side. We made a show of having a conversation across that distance, and it was kind of funny until Warner produced a copy of the New York Times and started reading, which meant he was bored with that joke. After that, Hypatia set to work on an assignment, and I played a game on my phone.
Everything was perfectly fine until Ultraviolet turned up and made it weird.
She looked like she was on her way to a New Year’s Eve party, not a semigreasy breakfast joint. She was wearing a long, rather tight black dress, huge chunky gold bracelets on each wrist, and a tiara. That’s right, she was wearing an actual glittering golden tiara on a Wednesday morning. Who does that?
“Thanks for getting the table, guys!” she said as she took a seat not far from Warner on the side opposite Hypatia.
“Yep,” I said, a little coolly.
Warner threw me a quizzical look over the opinion pages for that.
“I mean, great job,” Ultraviolet went on. “Warner and Nikki are covering their ends, and Hypatia has that entire side open so she can just happen to move next to wherever a certain someone might sit. Good thinking.”
I rolled my eyes, drumming my fingers irritatedly, and Warner made an oh expression before going back to his newspaper. Hypatia’s face turned red, which matched the fire Ultraviolet brought out in her eyes pretty nicely.
“Look, Ultra,” I said. “Could you come back and be vile later on in the day, please?”
She feigned innocence. “I was just wishing Tom would pay a little more attention to Hypatia. I know he and I are dating and all, and I know I can be a little jealous, but only when there’s something to be jealous about.”
She winked at Hypatia. “Feel free to chat him up anytime you like. Tom is just so sweet, and he doesn’t mind throwing a dog a bone from time to time.”
By that time, I was seeing red myself and was about ready to throw my coffee in her direction. Hypatia was wincing and squirming, and her eyes were switching from red to gray and back again. I could handle verbal abuse with the best of them, but seeing someone bully a friend like that pushed every button I had.
That was when Warner (who did not even look up from his paper) said, “Ultraviolet, you don’t need to be ugly like that.”
Her eyes grew large, and she attempted to bore holes through his head with her glare. “Excuse me?”
He turned the newspaper page, revealing that he’d given each of the classy etched portraits on the page a comical expression with his pen. “I think you say terrible things to people because you believe that deep down everyone is as terrible as you are and so they deserve
it, but you’re wrong. You probably aren’t even as terrible as you think you are.”
She stood up so suddenly her tiara was thrown from her hair and over the railing onto the sidewalk. “Maybe you’re a terrible person, you . . . rat-faced retail reject.”
Warner glanced up at her for the first time and shrugged. “Nah. I’m awesome. Ask anyone. You, on the other hand . . . You know jewelry, makeup, and all that can only make you pretty on the outside, right?”
Ultraviolet, no longer in the mood for company, stormed away from the table. On her way to leave, she ran straight into Tom, who was knocked off balance and dropped a plate full of various fried meats onto the patio.
“My bacon!” he said in dismay.
“We’re leaving!” she said.
“But . . . ,” he said, collecting himself in the wake of the tragic loss of his breakfast. “My bacon.”
“Come on!” Ultraviolet whisper-snarled, and dragged Tom through the door by his arm.
Hypatia watched them go, and then rounded on Warner. “I could have handled that, you know. I didn’t need you to spring to my defense or anything.”
“Sure, you could handle it, but she couldn’t handle it,” Warner said, nodding at me. “I just saved us all a lot of drama. You’re welcome.”
I scoffed. “Whatever. You just can’t help sticking your nose where it doesn’t—”
His face took on a wry grin. “Let me guess. When she showed up, you were wishing she’d sit somewhere else. When she started talking, you were chanting ‘shut up shut up’ in the back of your head, and when she got really insulting, you started thinking about throwing your coffee at her. Am I right?”
I tried to keep my expression level, despite the extreme weirdness of having someone quote the past five minutes of my inner dialogue back to me word for word.
“You’re totally wrong. I wasn’t thinking any of that,” I said.
Warner looked surprised. “You seriously don’t know you’re doing it?”
“Doing what?” I asked, losing my patience.
“She’s not doing anything I can see. Just sitting there, drumming her fingers and holding her coffee like she just changed her mind about throwing it,” Hypatia said.
Warner looked to Hypatia. “Close your eyes, listen carefully, and try to remember kindergarten cryptography class.”
Hypatia obliged.
I sat there watching her concentrate, forming theories about how Warner could have guessed what I was thinking. He’d been too accurate to have gotten it from body language. He was a plain human like me, so he wasn’t reading my mind. Maybe he had a gadget for reading minds and was letting Hypatia try it out. That was a thought I didn’t like at all. The contents of my mind were private and not suitable for public consumption.
As I watched, growing more and more nervous, Hypatia’s expression changed. A great, wide smile grew on her face. Then she said, “Don’t listen to my brain. God please don’t listen to my brain, I’ll die of embarrass—”
“Stop it!” I said. “What are you two doing? It’s incredibly disrespectful!”
Hypatia opened her eyes. “You’re the one doing it. It’s your fingers.”
“My fingers?” I looked at them. They didn’t look particularly expressive to me.
“You were drumming your fingers in Morse code!” Warner said.
“I was not!” I said, still looking at my fingers.
“You’re so fast I can barely keep up,” Warner said, taking a tentative bite of Ultraviolet’s forsaken breakfast. “Seriously, you could go back in time and be the world’s greatest telegraph operator. You must have learned young.”
I put my hand back on the table and drummed out Morse code for “Shut up.” Instantly, I realized Warner was right. Muscle memory told me I’d been drumming that very phrase just a minute ago. “My dad taught me when I was little so I’d stop talking with my mouth full at dinner. He said I could keep talking, as long as I did it with my hands. I guess it turned into a habit somewhere.”
Hypatia snickered and tapped out her own message on the table. Dit dit dah, dit dah dit . . .
U . . . R . . . A . . . D . . . O . . . R . . . K . . .
“Very funny, Hypatia,” I said.
Warner started tapping out some rude commentary, and before long, the three of us were having a rather hilarious argument that sounded a lot like sitting inside a car during a hailstorm.
15
ALL IS FAIR IN MONKEYS AND WAR
The one class I was nervous about kept getting postponed. Every morning I would wake up and get dressed, and my tablet would show me a list of the things it reckoned I would need that day. For instance, I might need a slice of bread, a biography of Jonas Salk from my private library, and some bacteria from our bathroom, so it would put those on the list. Every day the list was different, but there was one thing that was always the same. Every day, without fail, my tablet said I’d need my gravitational disruptor pistol for Electronic Combat class. Location: TO BE DETERMINED. And every day the class would disappear from the schedule sometime during lunch with a one-line explanation like POSTPONED TILL LATER, CANCELED, or MECHA TIGER DIED. I’d started to wonder if it was a way to trick us into keeping a weapon on us at all times, in case of an attack.
Then one Tuesday, after a particularly grueling morning when I had barely passed an Exobiology exam, and when I’d been forced to listen to Ultraviolet and Tom canoodling over lunch, I didn’t get the news, which means I got the news. What I’m trying to say is that Electronic Combat was not canceled.
My tablet said I was to proceed to the “orriso A besto Pr sing” building, located in the old industrial district. I guessed the name might mean something in Latin. I would need my weapon and a hair clip, if I had longer hair. I figured my brown tangle counted as “long” if not linear, so I used some of my agar bracelet to make a hair tie. That done, I headed to class.
I’d only gone a block or so before I was joined by Warner.
“First time in Electronic Combat class?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, making sure my gravitational disruptor was fully charged. “So what’s it about? Some kind of target shooting, or more like a phys ed kind of thing?”
He smiled in a way I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. “That’s one aspect of it. Just don’t expect any help from me. In this class, I work alone.”
“Um . . . okay, Mr. Lone Wolf.”
As we passed through the downtown area, I found myself actually getting nervous. To combat that, I tried to find something to talk about other than the mysterious class.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, how often is the town destroyed?” I said.
“Huh?” Warner said, caught a little off guard.
I pointed at a building that was not a pile of rubble. “Couple weeks ago, the entire downtown area was totally destroyed, and the next day it was pretty much back to normal. People weren’t even surprised.”
He nodded. “I’ve seen some pretty bad disasters, but that was the most damage I’ve seen since I’ve been here. From what I’ve heard, the worst was back in . . . I think it was ’83. There was an elementary chemistry project that got out of hand. You know what happens when you add Mentos to Diet Coke?”
“Yeah . . . ,” I said.
“Well, adding gummy worms to molten boron is like that times a hundred thousand. Anyway—most of the downtown area was either completely obliterated or mostly devastated. When they rebuilt, some of the students—your dad was one of them—designed the nanoreconstructor materials to rebuild with. They’re microscopic robots that can do jobs on a really tiny scale, so the buildings could heal themselves in the future instead of needing to be repaired.”
“How do you know my dad was one of them?”
He threw me a withering glare, like I was being intentionally thickheaded. “Everyone knows who your dad is.
There is—was—a plaque on the courthouse commemorating the rebuild. Your dad’s name was the only one on both the list of students who caused the disaster and the list of those who cleaned it up. The cannon atomized the plaque during the incident, though.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “I’d have liked to see it.”
“You’ll get chances. Your dad’s name is on plaques all over this town. He was the first actual human the School admitted. He showed everyone that one of us could be as smart as them, if not smarter. They still look down their noses at us a bit, though.”
“I haven’t noticed that.”
He kicked a rock and sent it skittering down the sidewalk. “It’s just their first assumption. If you’re parahuman, you belong here. If you’re human, you’re a novelty—an exception to the rule. That’s why we humans need to stick together whenever we can.”
“Like the way you stick together with Ultraviolet?” I said.
He sighed. “She’s not one of us; she’s one of her. I like Tom, but I don’t know why he bothers with her. I also think she resents that I outscore her in just about every class.”
I was starting to wonder if Warner was a normal guy with a huge competitive streak or a living competitive streak that looked a lot like a guy.
Something else had been bothering me about the cannon attack. I hadn’t mentioned it before, but I’d become a little more familiar with Warner and knew he wouldn’t take it too personally.
“When the cannon started melting things, you just kind of disappeared. Where did you go?”
He stepped in my path, halting me, his arms folded. “Do you know where the cannon’s power supply feed is located?”
A Problematic Paradox Page 21
