The Academy

by Zachary Rawlins

  The jungle around the camp smoldered angrily, and then burst into a conflagration, the lush vegetation withering and charring in the sudden blaze. In an instant, they were surrounded on three sides by a towering wall of flame, bathing the camp in a flickering orange light, the barbwire fence protesting and warping in the heat, sparks carrying the flames gradually across the whole of the camp.

  “You’re up, Mitzi,” Alice said softly, watching the flames with a rapt expression. “They have to come this way to get away from the fire. Put on a show for me.”

  Mitsuru nodded, shifting her grip on the wrapped handle of her sheathed knife, and then disappeared into the shadows, moving in the direction of the nearest patrol.

  Alice smiled to herself as she watched Mitsuru’s Etheric signature flit from building to building, her movements accelerated to a blur by a downloaded alacrity protocol, almost invisible in the flickering firelight.

  The closer patrol had stopped to have a panicked conversation – one was talking rapidly in Tagalong into a walkie-talkie, while the other stared at the inferno, open-mouthed. Mitsuru rounded an outhouse, then crossed the open space between them in a half-dozen bounding steps, the only sound her cheap Thai sandals slapping against the soles of her feet. She was behind them before either of the guards had time to react, the knife reflecting the ghastly orange glow of the flame.

  She slid the point of the knife into side of one of the guards, aiming for a breach between the Kevlar pads on his vest, the tip sliding smoothly past the ribs. With a flick of her wrist she turned the knife in the shape of a ‘C’, the blade emerging red and glistening from his side, slightly above his hip. The guard fell to his knees and made awful, wet sounds, too stunned to scream, his arms wrapped protectively around his ravaged and leaking torso.

  The other guard yelled and spun around, leveling his rifle at Mitsuru and pulling the trigger. The rifle was firing at full auto, but the acceleration of Mitsuru’s protocol was such that she heard each individual shot, and saw the flare of hot gas that punctuated each shell’s ignition. She fell forward, under the arc of the bullets that plodded toward her, and then rolled, her perception so agonizingly acute she could see the wake of distorted air the bullets left behind. She let the momentum of the roll carry her close to the gunman, and before he could lower his rifle and aim, her knife darted out and in, cutting his ankles out from beneath him. He cried out as he fell backward, but that was the last noise that he made, as Mitsuru wrenched his arm aside and drove the point of her blade into his throat. The gunman’s scream cut off, his hands clasping Mitsuru’s blade, his eyes bugging out of his head. Blood trickled from his throat, splashing weakly into the dirt beside him. Then the light went out in his eyes, all at once, and his face went slack.

  Mitsuru pulled the knife from his throat and wiped the blade against the dead man’s shirt before sheathing it. Her vision was permeated with information from a combat protocol; translucent text and data boxes informed her of the positions of the six remaining guards. Four of them had abandoned their gear and were moving in inhumanly low crouches, their spines contorted and bent, their skulls elongated and feral. The two in the rear moved to supporting positions, taking cover behind the nearby buildings and scrambling to maintain a clear field of fire.

  Weir hated humans, so Mitsuru felt safe in assuming that the two rear guards were Weir maintaining a human appearance. That was unusual, as they preferred to fight in their swifter lupine form, or the monstrous hybrid shape the other four guards had already assumed.

  They had Egyptian-manufactured AK-47s, the same as the other guards and common to insurgencies the world over, but even through the smoke and the flimsy Quonset hut walls, Mitsuru could see the yellow glow of the bullets, radiating from the working that a Witch had laid on each of them. There was no alternative source – only Witches were capable of creating such artifacts – though to lavish such power on bullets was unprecedented. The workings Witches created took time. Mitsuru had no idea how long it would take to place one on each bullet in a clip, but it hardly seemed worth the effort.

  Mitsuru walked calmly into the open, right in the middle of the burning camp, exposing herself to the six guards that remained. The four in the front came roaring around the corner of the main building, their paws kicking up mud and pebbles, hundreds of pounds of rage and sinew and yellow teeth. They charged immediately, fluid as shadows, smelling of the jungle and death, their fur matted with clumps of dried blood. One howled as it ran, a loathsome, high whining that set her teeth on edge.

  The two in human form were more cautious, but only somewhat. They rounded the far corner of the building they were using as cover, rifles at the ready, staying low to avoid fire.

  Mitsuru smiled at all of them, and held out her hands.

  “I’d hoped that the silver one would be here, but still, I’m grateful to you,” she said, in the face of the charging beasts, calm and unhurried. “I can’t normally do this, you understand.”

  There was a slight glow at her fingertips, a silvery aura, and the wind picked up from behind her.

  “Compliments of Alistair,” Mitsuru said, her eyes rolling back in her head with effort, the borrowed protocol flooded through her mind in a wave of information and pain, the silvery protocol writ large against the field of black that consumed her vision. “A souvenir, from San Francisco.”

  Mitsuru dropped her hands like a conductor, and her whole body was encompassed by the strange silvery light radiating from her chest. The wind tore at her clothing, and a fine spray of water from the river behind drenched her.

  “Shining Cloud,” she whispered, but her words were carried away by the sudden gale that whipped past her.

  A dense silver fog swirled around, and then burst forth in all directions, the main part of it making a rapid, twisting path toward the charging Weir. It passed through the two in front before they had time to react, and they disappeared into the metallic fog, little more than a few brief howls, and then a rapidly dissipating red mist. The two Weir behind them had time to try and stop, talons scrambling for purchase in the mud, before the fog encompassed them as well.

  They had more than enough time to howl and cough wetly, trying in vain to expel the millions of tiny sharp particles they had inhaled. One even tried to transform as he was cut to pieces, spitting his insides onto the mud as he died, not quite human, not wholly wolf.

  One of the remaining guards abandoned his position, dropping his rifle and running, struggling to free himself from his bulky bulletproof vest so he could transform. The other was either braver or more foolish, and opened fire at Mitsuru with his rifle, or at least in the last place he’d seen her before she’d been obscured by the mist of nanometer blades.

  It didn’t make any difference.

  The bullets were shredded by the rapidly advancing silver cloud, and a moment later the gunman himself was reduced to a pile of horribly uniform small pieces of meat. The runner made it the furthest, all the way to the edge of the camp before he came up short, faced with the wall of flames. He stood frozen there, torn between the fire in front of him and the glimmering silver cloud that pursued him.

  The first tendrils of the fog licked his back, and where they touched him, they left deep voids in the flesh, gouging through bone and muscle. The Weir screamed and leapt into the fire, caught somewhere between his human and lupine forms. Mitsuru dispelled the protocol with a sigh of relief, and listened to the screams of the Weir as Xia’s inferno finished it.

  Alice walked up next to Mitsuru, dripping river water and smeared with someone else’s blood, and smiled at her approvingly. After a brief hesitation, Mitsuru gave her a small smile back.

  “You’re a nightmare, Mitzi,” Alice enthused, her kohl-lined eyes shining. “I got all excited just watching.”

  Mitsuru blushed.

  “The Shining Cloud belonged to Alistair,” she admitted. “He implanted it directly before we left. I can’t manage something like that yet.”

  Alice patted
Mitsuru affectionately on the shoulder.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mitzi.” Alice’s grin was wolfish. “We have time. We’ll make an Auditor out of you yet.”

  Mitsuru winced, opened her mouth to correct her.

  Tung dropped the camouflage protocol that he had activated the moment the Auditors had arrived. One moment, there was a 50-gallon black metal drum standing next to Alice, and then next, Tung stood there, wheezing and gasping, a 12-guage double-barrel shotgun leveled at her head.

  “You bitches are all out of time,” Tung snarled, still struggling to catch his breath. He’d had to hold it ever since they’d stopped next to him. The camouflage protocol was powerful enough that they probably won’t have been able to hear him – but he couldn’t risk it. “And truly fucking weird, I might add.”

  “Don’t act like such a big shot,” Alice said casually, her body language totally non-plussed. “You aren’t capable of concealing yourself from me. Who set that up for you?”

  “Miss Gallow, you aren’t in any position to be asking questions. So how ‘bout you get that freak in the mask to turn the fire off, and then me and your little Japanese friend, we’re going to take a little walk in the woods, alright? I know that you’re an Auditor and all, but there’s no way you’re going to be able to do anything before I pull the trigger on this thing, and at this range, no barrier is gonna save you.”

  Tung fished something out of his right pocket and held it, clenched in his fist.

  “It was nice of you to leave me one, Mitzi,” Alice said gratefully. “I like to feel useful, after all.”

  “I am a kind-hearted woman,” Mitsuru agreed. “Now, please stop calling me that.”

  “What the fuck is it with you people?” Tung pushed the muzzle of the shotgun up against the side of Alice’s head. “One last chance here, Miss Gallow. Call off your dogs, and we can both walk away from this.”

  “Did you actually think,” Alice said coldly, closing her eyes, “that you could get the drop on me, with power that you borrowed? Do you know my reputation, Tung? Do you know how I got it?”

  Tung tried to pull the trigger, but it was already too late. Tung looked down at the weapon and saw something, something a bit like a crude hand that had reached up from the weapon’s shadow and wrapped around the firing mechanism. Other hands were forming, from somewhere deep inside his own shadow, and reaching for him.

  Alice turned around to face the gun with her ghastly smile. She folded her hands in front of her like an obedient school girl.

  “Oh, my dear Mr. Do,” she said sweetly, patting him on the forehead. The many dark hands clutched him tightly, now, and he could not move away. Everywhere the little hands had attached, do felt a strange aching sensation, and then nothing at all. He struggled against them, but his efforts came to nothing more than straining and grunting. “Thank you so much for showing us your little camp, your doggy-friends and your Witch’s toys. You’ve answered all sorts of questions for us.”

  Alice giggled, and then swayed coquettishly up to the frozen, horrified man.

  “It was kind of you to cooperate with our Audit, Mr. Do.” Alice smirked. “In regards to your own personal circumstances, I’m happy to report that our investigation is at an end. You didn’t know much of anything, so I’m happy to say we’ve got no reason to hold on to you.”

  Tung tried to desperately to crush the egg-shell thin ceramic idol in his other hand, to activate the dormant working inside that the Witches had left with him, the one he’d been warned to only use in desperation, but his hand would not close. When he looked down, most of his hand was gone, neatly disassembled. The little hands had been working him over, tearing away small pieces from his hands, his feet and his chest, and then withdrawing into the shadow. It caused almost no pain, and left behind nothing at all – the skin at the edge of the void was smooth, featureless. There was no bleeding. It was as if what had been taken from him had never been there at all.

  Tung screamed, but it was hard to tell, because so much of his mouth was gone.

  Alice leaned over what remained of the man’s face, her black-rimmed eyes staring directly into his, her expression rapt and hungry.

  “My name is Alice Gallow, Mr. Do,” she whispered. “And I’d like to show you something special. To be entirely honest,” she added, batting her eyelashes, “I’ve developed quite a thing for you. Would you like to see?”

  Tung wanted to scream, he really did, but there wasn’t enough of him left to manage it.

  Eighteen

  “Imagine the universe as something extreme large, with definite boundaries, okay? Something really big, but finite. You understand the distinction?”

  “Imagine a big universe, but not an endless one, I got it,” Alex muttered. “Just answer the question, Vivik.”

  “I am answering it,” Vivik countered happily. “So, our universe is actually in a stack of universes, layer upon layer. The farther down you go, the older they get, and therefore colder and less energetic. Further up, it’s the opposite, newer and faster, okay? With me so far?”

  “Big pile of universes,” Alex said, nodding tiredly.

  “The best part is listening to Alex summarize Vivik’s lessons,” Anastasia said quietly, nudging and startling Emily. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m actually losing my ability to comprehend things I already know.”

  Vivik glared at Anastasia, but Alex refused to acknowledge it. Anything else he did only encouraged her.

  “These universes are discrete, right? There can’t be any overlap, because every particle, the very nature of matter, is fundamentally different in each of these universes, and any kind of contact would be mutually destructive, so there has to be a mechanism to hold them apart, right?” Vivik continued on without waiting for any input from Alex, his face flushed with excitement at the subject. “Well, the ideal boundary mechanism would be some kind of superfluid. Something dynamic, something that could expand and contract to deal with vast volumes and massive thermodynamic variations. But whatever serves as a barrier, it would have to be energetic in nature, because matter, any kind of matter, couldn’t possibly survive the conditions involved.”

  Alex put his head down on his desk in despair.

  “Not only did you lose me,” he said, his voice muffled by the book his face was planted in, “you actually made me hate the idea of knowing the answer. Thanks to you, I now despise this subject, which I still know nothing about.”

  “The Ether, Alex,” Vivik said, gripping Alex’s desk, “that’s what the Ether is. It’s what holds the universes apart. It’s the barrier that keeps the colder subverse below and the more energetic superverse above separate from our own.”

  “Or so he says,” Anastasia offered primly from where she sat, one seat over from Emily. “Vivik is very persuasive, but he can’t prove any of this. Besides, subverse is a made-up word.”

  “True,” Vivik allowed reluctantly. “But, the majority of the theoreticians at the Academy subscribe to this notion.”

  “And before that, they were always talking about entropic energy and waste heat accumulation and alternating frequency vibration,” Anastasia said, rolling her eyes. “Go ahead and tell Alex the truth. Nobody knows what the Ether is. We live right next to it, but we understand it about as well as you understand, say, geometry. That is to say, we know it exists, and that is about it.”

  Alex nodded slowly, and when he spoke again, he sounded almost hopeful.

  “Then it’s like everything else with science. Lots of rules, but nobody understands it. Right?”

  “Exactly,” Anastasia said, grinning.

  “Not at all,” Vivik protested, flustered.

  “I don’t think either of you is helping Alex catch up very much,” Emily said disapprovingly. “I’m not even sure if you’re trying, or if you just like arguing with each other.”

  “Our universe is like a drop of water suspended in oil,” Eerie said quietly, surprising Alex, who had not noticed that the girl was still ther
e in the classroom. She wilted when everyone turned toward her, looking down at her desk and clearly regretting saying anything. When she spoke again, Alex could barely hear her. “You know what I mean, don’t you? The universes are the drops of water, and the Ether is like, well, the oil? Does that make sense?”

  Eerie looked over at him hopefully, while Anastasia appeared to laugh quietly behind the hand that discretely covered her mouth.

  “Is this going to be on a test of some kind?” Alex asked despairingly, clutching his head in his hands.

  Emily laughed and patted him on the back comfortingly.

  “Don’t worry,” she said reassuringly. “It’s not like you can fail homeroom, no matter how bad you do.”

  “What’s the point, then?”

  “Evaluation,” Anastasia said, working her nails over with an emery board. “To gauge our interests, our aptitude, and most importantly, our sanity and durability. They throw everything at us, not because we need to know it, but because knowing it might help us not turn into lunatics. Where do you think Eerie learned about knitting, anyway? They do it for the same reason that everyone has to go see Rebecca once a month – because as badly as Central needs us, they are even more frightened of us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of people like you,” Anastasia said, shrugging. “Unpredictable students with combat-grade protocols that exceed their own ability to control or understand them. At best, you are a wild card. At worse, you’re a threat to everybody around you.”