The Academy

by Zachary Rawlins

  Mitsuru tittered, and Steve burst into laughter.

  “I would think so,” Mitsuru said, smiling. “They’ve both completed the Program themselves, after all. Rebecca helped design the Program.” Mitsuru shook her head. “Okay, question time is over. Are you ready to do what you have to do?”

  She looked at Alex, hard, for several moments, but he refused to look up at her, transfixed by the weight, the sheer reality of the gun in his hand.

  “No,” he said, softly. “Why should I? Why should I do anything?”

  “Because you have to,” Mitsuru said, looking mildly disinterested. “Again.”

  “Right,” Steve said, from immediately behind Alex.

  Alex jabbed an elbow back, digging it into Steve’s midsection, but he just grunted, his arms wrapping around Alex, one forearm reaching across his neck. Alex tried to lower his head, to put his chin between Steve’s arm and his throat, but he was too late for that. He stomped on Steve’s foot, several times, with all the force he could muster, grinding his heel against the boy’s instep. He drove a few more elbows into his body, but he couldn’t put much power behind them. Steve’s forearm crushed steadily into his larynx, and soon all he could hear was himself making ghastly strangling noises.

  Alex woke on the floor, with his face in a shallow pool of vomit, unable to swallow and struggling to breathe. Mitsuru crouched above him, holding out the gun. He brushed her away with one arm, and then everything reset again.

  This time he didn’t bother with conversation. When Mitsuru asked him if he was ready to use the gun, he ignored her. He put the echoes of the pain and the fear out of his mind, as best he could. He focused solely on Steve, standing a few meters away, looking like he hadn’t even broken a sweat, grinning like it was his birthday. Alex was ready when he came forward this time.

  He was ready for Steve’s jab, too. He had gorilla-like arms that gave him a reach advantage, but Alex kept his hands up and his head moving, and Steve couldn’t do anything more than clip him. Alex was patient, protecting his head, absorbing the occasional shot to the side or the arms, waiting for his chance to close.

  Steve threw a combination that ended in a right hook that was a little off, and Alex saw his footwork was bad, that he was punching while he backpedaled. Alex blocked the punch with his left arm, and then stepped inside, putting everything he had into a hard right that sank into Steve’s kidney.

  Again, there was no apparent transition. Steve was simply one thing, and then he was the other. Alex didn’t even see it before he made contact. His hand crumpled against Steve’s rocky skin, folding and tearing like paper where it collided with the stone, and then he fell to the ground, while Steve kicked him with his heavy stone foot and laughed his booming laugh. Alex closed his eyes, protected his face as best as he could, and waited it out. He didn’t want to open them, because he might have seen what he had done to his hand.

  When he finally did, he saw Mitsuru crouched over him, holding out the gun.

  Alex refused three more times, and it ended horribly, three more times. Then he gave in.

  The pistol was somehow louder with that shot than it had been when he shot at the range, the trigger much more difficult to pull. And when Alex stood and stared at the intact remainder of Steve’s head, most of his brain dripping off the far wall, Mitsuru put her hand on his shoulder like a friend.

  “Combat isn’t fun, Alex,” she said, with surprising gentleness. “It hurts, and it is frightening. There are no good choices, only a series of compromises and things that you will regret later. This isn’t training, Alex, and it isn’t theory or philosophy. This is fighting and surviving, or it is fighting and dying. Nothing more. And it is the only thing that matters.”

  She gently prized the Glock from his fingers, and then activated the safety.

  “Welcome to the Program. When we are done with you,” she said, her bloodshot eyes full of sincerity, “you won’t even recognize yourself. Reset.”

  --

  Alex heard the door close behind him, and congratulated himself on not running. Mitsuru’s ‘class’ had turned out to be an eight-hour nightmare; Alex hadn’t seen Gustav again until right before Mitsuru dismissed him. Alex still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but he was fairly certain that much of it had been due to the old man’s purported telepathy.

  Whatever they had done, though, it had consequences – Alex had bruises forming along his chest and above one eye and across the bridge of his nose, and he felt a strange lingering pain everywhere he’d been injured. Steve had left looking totally untouched, and Alex was fairly sure that the mess at the end of the session had been solely for his benefit. Mitsuru had bemoaned his performance, but Alex didn’t feel like he’d done too badly.

  After all, it was his first time killing anybody. That he could actually remember.

  Steve wasn’t about to let himself get shot, of course. He’d been grimmer, after the reset, but he seemed angry more than traumatized, which gave Alex the feeling that this was not an entirely new experience for Steve. After that, Alex was faced with an enraged, moving target, and he only managed to tag Steve once in the entire rest of the day, meaning that he was forced to go hand-to-hand with someone who was bigger, stronger and more experienced.

  Given the circumstances, it could have gone worse. Mostly, things had ended with Steve bashing in his head, either with his elbows or against the floor, and Steve’s obvious wrestling background made this kind of close-quarters ground fighting particularly hopeless for Alex. But near the end of the day, Steve had gotten sloppy while setting up a choke, and Alex had managed to get a thumb up into Steve’s eye socket, and forced it in as far as he possibly could. Steve howled and reeled away from him, clutching his face, and Alex had time to pull himself to his feet, wipe the blood from his eyes, and find the Glock that Steve had knocked to the ground when he tackled him.

  He hadn’t shot him. He’d intended to, of course, but instead he’d walked up behind the blinded kid and struck him in the base of the skull with the butt of it. He didn’t stop hitting him when Steve fell down, or when he stopped moving.

  He’d only stopped when he heard Mitsuru laughing.

  Alex stepped out of the hallway, and into the chill of the evening and the setting sun, never quite so grateful to be out of a classroom.

  “Hi.”

  She sat on the low fence that bordered the walkway outside the building, striped tights and shiny black shoes dangling, her nails painted to match her hair. Her face was impassive, her eyes wet and shining. She put aside her knitting and looked at him expectantly.

  “Hi, Eerie.” Alex’s hand froze in the process of putting his headphones in his ears, and then they hung there, apparently determined to linger, useless and in-the-way. “What are you doing here?”

  “I am waiting for you,” Eerie explained, hopping down to stand beside him. “Vivik said you weren’t in homeroom today because you had Mitsuru’s class, and Margot said you’d be messed up afterwards and that someone should keep you company. I am company.”

  Alex starting walking slowly down the path, and Eerie fell in beside him.

  “Wow. I’m surprised.”

  “Surprised that we knew? Surprised that Margot said that?” Eerie was staring up at the changing leaves of the ancient trees that bordered the path, walking just out of reach. Every word had a ringing, musical quality to it. “Or surprised that it was me, and not Emily?”

  Alex thought for a moment, trying to give an honest answer.

  “No offense, but all three. I figured if anybody is going to be waiting for me outside of class like some kind of…”

  “Stalker?” Eerie offered.

  “Right,” Alex said uncertainly. “Well, that seems like Emily’s thing, you know?” He hesitated for a moment, then winced. “Hey, don’t tell her I said that, okay?”

  Eerie walked along beside him quietly, and Alex started to worry that he handled the whole conversation very clumsily. She was short enough that wh
en he looked down at her, he could see a quarter-inch of blond where she parted her hair, and he wondered absently whether she was changing colors, or was lazy about dyeing it.

  “I will tell you a secret,” Eerie said finally. “Emily is waiting for you, back at your room. She has been planning this for days. She was very,” Eerie frowned, “loud about it. So, I decided to meet you here.”

  “I see. Okay.”

  Alex realized that his hands were trembling, an after-effect of the class, and buried them in his pockets. There was something about Eerie’s silence that seemed to imply to him that she was about to speak at any moment, and the anticipation stretched on for minutes. Alex stared out at the diminishing blaze of the autumn leaves, gradually being washed away by increasingly frequent rain, and tried to calm down.

  “You went to Emily’s house, Alex. She talked about it,” Eerie said, her frown deepening. “She talks a lot, that girl.”

  Alex shrugged, too surprised to formulate a clever response.

  “She doesn’t seem like the type.”

  “Not to you,” Eerie said, shaking her head sadly. “Because Alex is stupid.”

  “What?”

  Eerie glanced at him, her pupils massively dilated even in full daylight, her expression innocent and detached. He couldn’t help but wonder why she he was here, what she saw with her strange eyes when she looked at him.

  “She wants you to feel sorry for her, I can tell. She doesn’t say it, but it’s obvious, even to me. And you have to be stupid,” Eerie said angrily, “to pity a pretty girl.”

  “Huh?” Alex said, puzzled. “Are you mad at me, Eerie?”

  She appeared to think about it for a while.

  “Not really,” she said, shaking her head. “You are just a boy, after all. But…I do want to know. Why did you go home with her, Alex?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, as truthfully as possible. “Because she asked me to, I guess.”

  “You don’t like her?” Eerie asked, clutching her knitting basket in front of her with both hands, her fingers tight around the handle. “You aren’t seeing each other? Or kind of seeing each other?”

  “What? What are you talking about? No. It’s not like that,” Alex said guiltily, his eyes on the concrete path in front of them. “I don’t even know her that well.”

  “You went just because she asked you?”

  “I guess,” Alex admitted, shrugging. “What can I say?”

  “So, you’d go somewhere with me, if I asked you to?”

  Eerie spoke casually, refusing to meet Alex’s eyes when he looked over at her, one hand picking absently at the hem of her skirt. Alex kept looking at her with a shocked expression for a little while, hoping for a reaction, then gave up.

  “Sure.”

  “For real?”

  Eerie glanced up at him shyly, like he’d promised her something she was hesitant to believe.

  “Sure,” Alex repeated, feeling surprised and a little embarrassed.

  “Will you go somewhere with me?”

  “Um, sure,” Alex said, laughing. “When did you have in mind?”

  Eerie smiled at him, and grabbed his arm, fortunately not picking the one that still ached from class.

  “Now,” she said, pulling him along behind her, away from the dorms, back toward the center of campus. “Right now.”

  --

  “I’d really like to go and change my clothes first,” Alex complained to Eerie, who dragged him along determinedly by his sleeve. “I didn’t think that I’d be going anywhere, you know?”

  Eerie glanced back at him icily.

  “Emily is in your room, remember?”

  “Oh,” Alex said, blushing. “Right. That would be. Um. Yes.”

  Alex felt, quite frankly, like an asshole. He didn’t know what either Emily or Eerie had planned, and he hadn’t had enough time to think about either to know what he would have picked, given the choice. His first day in Mitsuru’s ‘Program’ had been enough to leave his brain violated and muddled, and his body tired and battered. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing Steve’s broken head, the vile mess against the wall behind him, the gun in his shaking hands. He didn’t feel like going somewhere with Eerie, he felt like going somewhere and being sick.

  But he didn’t want to go back to his room, and not only because Emily might be there.

  Alex wanted out of the Academy, for the first time since he had arrived. He had thought that any world would be better than the one he had left behind, but after Mitsuru’s class, he wasn’t so sure. Despite what had happened to his family, and the role he had played in it, Alex had never thought of himself as a killer. After all, he had no memories of doing what the cops claimed that he had done, no hatred toward his family, no memory of the abuse that the cops claimed his father had visited upon him. If he was pressed, Alex would have had to admit that he often couldn’t even remember his parent’s faces without looking at the photograph his grandmother had kept on her bureau back in the trailer. How could he feel like a killer? He didn’t remember killing anyone. Most of the time, he didn’t even remember the people that he was supposed to have killed.

  He’d seen Steve walk away, after the class was over, sneering at Alex as he left the classroom. He knew he hadn’t killed him, the same way he knew that he had killed his family – because other people told him so. But Steve didn’t feel any more alive than his parents felt dead, and in the back of his mind, all he could see was the contents of Steve’s skull spreading slowly across the blond wood of the floor.

  Alex followed Eerie numbly through the campus, into one of the cavernous Administrative Buildings, then through a series of corridors and hallways, doing his best to think about nothing, haunted by the afternoon. He was glad that she didn’t want to talk, because he wasn’t sure if he wanted to say any of the things he was thinking out loud. He didn’t notice when they had walked out the back of the building, until they were halfway across a dark, secluded courtyard, overhung with the grey branches of ancient willow trees. Alex remained heartsick and oblivious to his surroundings, to the extent that he almost tripped over a tombstone.

  “Holy shit!” Alex exclaimed, attempting not to fall over the mossy, fractured limestone that his foot was caught on.

  “Quiet,” Eerie shushed. “We aren’t supposed to be here.”

  “I sort of guessed that.”

  Alex brushed the moss from the tombstone without thinking about what he was doing. The carving on the stone was in kanji, and unreadable to him, but it looked like someone important.

  “Shh.”

  Eerie led them on a winding path through the headstones. It was chilly and dim beneath the leaves and the high walls that surrounded the courtyard, the path overgrown and dotted with white marble benches that looked cold and uninviting. Alex shivered and hurried along behind Eerie, who continued to ignore his questions. The courtyard wound on and on, passing by glass-enclosed terrariums and rooms that, through leaded glass windows, appeared to hold endless shelves of books in varying states of decay. Above them the uniform slate-grey stone stretched up to shut out most of the sky, with only the silhouette of the occasional stovepipe to break the uniformity. Eventually, they came to a rounded platform lined with broken columns, limestone bas reliefs, and the faint remains of white marble inlays. The columns were thin, fluted, and utterly unlike anything else Alex had seen in the Academy, fragile and almost alien in their design, in their strange lack of symmetry.

  Renton leaned against one of them, a dour girl in a blue dress standing discreetly behind him.

  “Welcome, welcome,” Renton said, grinning expansively and motioning Alex and Eerie over. “Sorry for making you come all this way, but this is, well, profoundly against the rules. Now then,” he said conspiratorially, putting his hand on Eerie’s shoulder in a familiar way that Alex did not like, “who wants to go to San Francisco?”

  Twenty Four

  “You did not have to do that crap with Alex and Steve. I had intended for
them to spar with each other to work out their differences, not this fiasco. You know better,” Michael said firmly, “and I want an explanation.”

  Mitsuru looked up from her soup, annoyed.

  “How did you hear about that already?” She sighed and dropped her spoon back in the bowl. “Never mind, I already know. Rebecca and her bleeding heart, right?”

  Michael pulled out a chair and sat down across from Mitsuru at the staff cafeteria table, arms folded across his broad chest. The faculty occupying the adjoining tables universally decided that now was a good time to visit the cafeteria line, and disappeared in a rustle of whispers and the clatter of hastily gathered dishes.

  “I’m serious, Mitsuru. It wasn’t so long ago that I was your teacher. And I don’t recall doing anything like this to you.”

  “What did you think happened,” Mitsuru asked, eyes downcast, “when I went down to see Alice Gallow for ‘Applied Combat Fundamentals’? It’s the Program, Michael, and they run it on all the prospective Auditors. You know that. They’re just getting an early start with Alex.”

  “I know what happened when you were with Alice,” Michael said sadly. “I remember the Program myself. It isn’t right. And I don’t like watching you do it to someone else, Mitsuru. Alex isn’t a candidate for Audits or anything else, not yet. I haven’t even had a chance to get him into shape. I’m doing you the courtesy of asking before I go to Gaul and lodge a complaint. Why are you doing this?”

  Mitsuru flipped through the binder next to her lunch tray, and pulled out three plastic sheathed documents. She passed them across the table to Michael, who inspected them.

  “No point in going to Gaul,” Mitsuru said, shrugging and picking her spoon back up. “My orders came direct from Alistair, and his got carte blanche from the Director. It’s all above board. The plan is to make Alex an Auditor, remember? Gaul doesn’t want to wait; it creates too many opportunities for the Hegemony and the Black Sun. We don’t have the luxury of letting him make the wrong decision.”