The Academy

by Zachary Rawlins

  “So I slept for a month? That seems…”

  Rebecca looked downcast.

  “I know,” she agreed, grimly. “That’s why Michael didn’t want you to use this ability at all. The price for a Black Protocol is always greater than what you get from using it, if you ask me. You know you aren’t the only one here in Central who uses them, right?”

  “Well, Alice…” Alex said, nodding.

  “Right,” Rebecca nodded. “Well, Alice forgets things every time she uses her protocol, Alex. The more she uses it, the more she does with it, the more of her memory is gone forever.” The stare Rebecca fixed him with was hard. “Do you know what she does when she’s not out being an Auditor, Alex?”

  Alex shook his head. The calm that Rebecca had flooded him with earlier had started to ebb a bit, and he was having trouble following what she was saying, even with only the edges of the panic he’d felt nudging him.

  “She has a room full of diaries, Alex, hundreds of them. And she spends most of her time reading them, or recording the day’s events.” Rebecca smiled unhappily. “So it’s not like she doesn’t know anything about her life, because she’s read about some of it. But she doesn’t remember much of it at all.”

  “I don’t get it,” Alex said, closing his eyes and leaning his head back onto the pillow, still slightly damp with his sweat. “Why? Why did this happen?”

  “We don’t know,” Rebecca said darkly. “We still don’t have any idea. But every M-class on record has the same problem. Unlimited power, a Black Protocol, and an exorbitant cost for using it.”

  “Christ,” Alex said. “Who in the hell makes up all these rules?”

  Rebecca smiled and patted him on the leg.

  “Alice is an extreme example,” Rebecca said. “Not every M-class has problems on that scale, okay? She insists on using her protocol all the time, maybe more than any other Operator I’ve met, despite the consequences. Other people handle it better.”

  Alex thought for a moment.

  “Um, so, Mitsuru’s scars, then?”

  “You little shit,” Rebecca said approvingly. “How did you figure that out?”

  “Well, she cut herself when she saved me, that first night,” he said, smiling. “Before she used the barrier protocol. And then with what you just said… It doesn’t seem like you’d let someone that, uh, unstable work in the field, unless they had some truly exceptional abilities, right?”

  “Yeah, more or less,” Rebecca admitted grudgingly, “Mitsuru’s kind of unique, though. A long time ago, there was a plan to help her avoid having to use her Black Protocol. The surgery, right? The implant. The whole idea had, you know,” Rebecca paused and looked briefly angry, “mixed results. It won’t be repeated, that’s for sure.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Another time,” Rebecca said, shaking her head. “We don’t have all night, and I came here to talk to you about some important things. I can’t be the only one in Central who knows you woke up, so it will be common knowledge, soon.”

  “What’s up with Eerie? Why isn’t she waking up?”

  Rebecca smiled and stroked Eerie’s cheek gently with the back of her hand.

  “I fixed it so she won’t wake up until we are finished. She’s fast asleep, dreaming about something that makes her happy,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “This is, actually, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Making Eerie happy is one of the things you wanted to talk about?”

  Alex fought off the urge to pinch himself, just to be sure this wasn’t an extremely odd dream.

  “Sort of. You see, I’ve known Eerie since she could walk without falling over, and I’ve never seen her latch on to someone the way she has with you. I think this is probably a new experience for her, and I’m not sure what to make of it – she’s not human, after all, not really.” Rebecca frowned, pulling her feet up onto the seat, clutching her knees to her chest. “I don’t know what it means, that Eerie is acting this way. I mean, she’s not totally abnormal, I know she’s gone out with boys before. But she didn’t seem to particularly care about them, one way or the other. You didn’t,” she asked, her voice tolerant and frank, “you know, do anything with her, while you were in San Francisco, did you?”

  “N-no,” Alex stammered. “Nothing like that. I’m not even sure that she likes me, you know. She doesn’t always act like it.”

  Rebecca nodded sympathetically.

  “I bet. I’m not sure that she even knows what she likes, some of the time. But, that’s beside the point,” Rebecca said, leaning closer. “My point is this – Eerie has put a lot of effort into being the first thing you see when you wake up, right? And her reaction to this, when it happens, is likely to be, well, intense.”

  “…and?”

  “And I’m wondering if you want that.”

  “Huh?” Alex said, puzzled.

  “Alex, I can put you back to sleep for a few more hours,” Rebecca said glumly. “So that you’ll wake up when only the nurses are here. Or, if you prefer, a bit later, when Emily is around.”

  “Wait, what? What does it matter?”

  Rebecca shrugged.

  “If you don’t care, then I don’t care,” she said. “Just wanted to give you fair warning. Girls take this sort of thing seriously.”

  Alex scratched at his arm, where the tape had been torn away, leaving behind red, irritated skin.

  “Consider me warned, then. I’m not going back to sleep, anyway, not for any reason,” Alex said firmly. “Besides, I thought I was supposed to be staying away from the cartel girls.”

  “Eerie presents her own set of complications. But I’m not interested in keeping you away from anyone, Alex, and I’m sorry I gave you that impression,” Rebecca said, looking upset. “I’m trying to give you options, okay? Eerie seems to be kind of fascinated by you, and that’s already kind of a dangerous thing. If she decides that she likes you, well, then we are in unexplored territory.”

  Alex held his hands up in surrender.

  “Okay, sorry, I didn’t mean to be a jerk,” he said apologetically. “I’m still out of it and in shock, you know? Don’t take me too seriously.”

  “I never do,” Rebecca cut in, cheerfully, folding her arms across her chest and sitting back in the chair.

  “What’s so scary about Eerie?”

  “Well,” Rebecca said, looking at him doubtfully. “She isn’t fully human, for one thing.”

  “Yeah, and? I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but compared to my daily life lately, that doesn’t seem all that odd.”

  “Being part of the same species is kind of a minimum standard that most people apply in dating,” Rebecca said, resting her forehead on her hand tiredly. “Beyond that, you have noticed that she has some little biological quirks, right?”

  Alex nodded.

  “Sure, the whole ‘my body is a drug factory’ thing, right?”

  Alex paused while he recalled the room of dead Weir, and then his own somewhat fuzzy recollections of the night he’d spent with Eerie. Both seemed a touch surreal now, for different reasons.

  “Yeah, that thing,” Rebecca said, smirking. “What do you think happens, Alex, when you act as a catalyst for her abilities?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said, scratching his head. “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Rebecca admitted, spreading her hands. “And that’s the whole problem.”

  Alex yawned and sat up in his hospital bed.

  “This is all kind of a moot point, because I’m not going back to sleep.” Alex shook his head. “I still can’t believe I’ve been asleep that long.”

  Alex felt just a bit of the panic he’d felt earlier, then, like he could feel the shape of the thing out there, emotionally, but it was still somehow distant, something to be objectively observed, but not necessarily something to be concerned over. He couldn’t help but wonder how long this particular perspective would last.

  “Yeah, it has to be disconcerti
ng,” Rebecca said, putting her hand against Alex’s forehead. “You seem totally healthy, though, if a bit undernourished. Are you feeling any better?”

  “Thanks to you,” Alex said. “But, it isn’t a brand new experience for me. You lose a lot of time, being locked up. It’s weird, actually – every day seems to stretch on endlessly, but when you look at a calendar, you realize you’ve lost weeks or months, with no specific memory of the time passing.”

  Rebecca smiled at him.

  “It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? What we can get used to, if we have to. It’s always more than you think you could deal with, in the abstract.”

  Rebecca looked affectionately at the sleeping girl curled beside her, reaching over to tuck an errant faded blue lock back underneath the hood of her sweatshirt.

  “You’ve already changed a lot, Alex, since I met you. I’m interested to watch what happens from here. But you’ll be okay, you know that, right?”

  “Why in the world,” Alex asked plaintively, “is Eerie wearing a Pittsburg Penguins sweatshirt? Don’t tell me she’s a big hockey fan. Is she from Pittsburg? There are Fey in Pittsburg?”

  Rebecca laughed, standing up and brushing the wrinkles from her jeans.

  “She says she just likes penguins,” Rebecca said, shrugging. “I’m going to stay out of your way from here on out, okay, Alex?” She leaned close to him, and then, much to his surprise, kissed him on the forehead. “You keep coming to see me every week, but I’ll stop meddling in your affairs. You seem to have everything under control.”

  “Do I?”

  Alex gratitude was obvious in his shining eyes.

  “No, not really,” Rebecca laughed, patting him on the head and then heading for the door. “But I think you’re doing okay, all things considered.”

  Alex sat there for a while, after she left, wondering what she had actually come for, why it was that Rebecca kept such a close eye on him, and why she got so nervous anytime he mentioned Mitsuru. After a few minutes, he decided to put it aside, no closer to a solution than when he had started. He would have to find out what the deal was, eventually. But, he didn’t have to do it right now.

  He lay back against the pillows, his eyes half-open, and let his mind drift. It felt good, at that moment, to just lie there, nothing he had to do, nothing to worry about, no expectations to meet. Somehow, Alex felt so tired, and that bothered him, on a fundamental level. What had been the value of all that sleep, if he had not rested?

  He frowned, trying to remember, something about sleep, something Eerie had told him. Something about what sleep actually was, what happened while he was asleep…

  “The Church of Sleep,” he said softly, turning the phrase over in his mouth like sour candy.

  Had he heard someone say that before? Alex wasn’t sure. It still didn’t mean anything to him, but there was a certain… resonance, maybe. A quality of dislocation. A memory from the time before words, like something passing nearby in darkness, evident only in the displacement of air. He felt uncertain, reluctant to follow his thoughts any further in this direction.

  Alex wondered if he had slept. Had he dreamed? Had this all happened before?

  The headache was so brief, it was over before he realized that it had started, accompanied by a piercing shriek that reverberated in the back of his skull, echoes of a pain he had forgotten. It went on and on, much longer than he could stand, even though it was over before he realized it had begun. The silence that followed was beautiful.

  Alex tried to remember what he had been thinking about for the last few minutes for a while, and then he gave up.

  He looked down at his hands, blue-veins under the pale skin of his palms, and flexed his fingers. He was awake. Alex ran his fingers along the cold rounded steel of the bed frame, bunched the starched sheets in his hands. This was real.

  There was nothing, he thought, opening his eyes and smiling at Eerie, curled in her giant sweatshirt, her head peeking out from the gaping hood, breathing softly, the pink of her slightly parted lips. There was nothing here to worry him, nothing to be afraid of. He had not forgotten anything, nothing important.

  She stirred, shifting her hips, drawing her knees up close to her chest, her lips mouthing words that he could not hear, but recognized intuitively, and almost understood. He watched her chest rise and fall, let his eyes linger on the curvature of her white calves, moving against each other with furtive languor. Alex watched Eerie sleep, and felt something like peace, for a little while, wondering what it was that she dreamed of.

  In the half-light of the early morning, in a room that was not quite cold, on top of a bed that was not his own, Alex watched Eerie breathe, her face untroubled by whatever passed for a changeling’s dreams. He waited for her to wake, for her to open her eyes and speak to him, to say his name and make everything real.

  Thirty

  The two guards behind the desk didn’t seem to like Alice’s cheerful smile very much.

  The heavy duffel bag she dumped on the faux mahogany desktop with a series of metallic thuds they appeared to like even less.

  Alice didn’t look like she was working, to Chris. She looked like she was reveling in the moment, relishing every action.

  To say that her job was her life would be to trivialize it. The reality was, the only time that Alice honestly felt like Alice, was when she was she was in the midst of an Audit. Chris had seen it a dozen times, in various place, and it never got less unnerving. He didn’t blame the guards for stammering and hugging the wall. He pitied them.

  “My name is Alice Gallow, and I’m here in regards to an ongoing Audit of the Terrie Cartel, as ordered by the Director,” she gushed, grinning at the bank of cameras above the security guards’ heads. She unzipped the bag, one of the guards leaning cautiously closer to peer inside. She upended it onto the desktop, pouring dozens of heavy green German anti-personnel grenades, their pins daisy-chained and attached to one end of a carabineer with wire.

  “I don’t have an appointment. Is that going to be a problem?”

  Both of the guards moved in unison, one reaching for his gun, the other trying to meld himself with the marble paneled wall behind him, his mouth moving in some kind of desperate plea or prayer, his eyes mad with panic. Alice paused a moment to relish it, before yanking on the carabineer. The pins gave way in rapid succession, a satisfying chorus of near-simultaneous clicks. Alice fell backwards through her own shadow just ahead of the blast wave.

  The detonation itself was deafening. The wall panels buckled and rattled, and the air was suddenly dense with particles of glass and wood, and bits of the unfortunate guards, all deformed by the velocity of the force that propelled them. The desk area itself simply disintegrated, the larger chunks tossed straight up toward the white painted ceiling, leaving behind a pile of splintered, smoldering wood.

  Next to Chris, huddled behind a retaining column near the glass frontage of the office building, Alice laughed until she wept, pressing her face into her folded arms and rocking back and forth. Chris looked away, carefully removing the fragments of safety glass from his hair, the front windows and doors having shattered with the shockwave of the explosion.

  “I do hope that the rest of your plan is better thought out,” Chris said, standing up and wiping soot and dust from his hopelessly stained suit.

  Alice smiled back at him, her expression satisfied and benign, her cheeks streaked with tears that had left a trail behind them in the ash and dust that smeared her face. Chris clucked his tongue, fished a handkerchief from his inside pocket, and proceeded to wipe Alice’s face an approximation of clean. Alice simply allowed this to happen, grinning cheerfully up at him.

  “You ready?”

  Chris examined his handkerchief sadly. For a moment, he looked as if he was going to return it to his pocket, but then he thought better of it and tossed it aside.

  Alice nodded and stood up, brushing the front of her coat absently.

  “Of course, Chris,” she said quietly, patti
ng him on the shoulder and then walking past him. “This is the best part of the job. You’ll see.”

  After a moment, Chris followed her across the ruined entryway, around the charred remains of the front desk, and up to a bank of shining brushed metal elevators.

  “Probably,” Chris agreed glumly. “I never actually wanted to, though. Are we really just going to take the elevator up?”

  Alice shrugged and pressed the call button.

  “Why not? They must know I’m here, and who I am. I did announce myself and my business,” she said, gesturing at the remains of the security cameras.

  “Quite,” Chris said dryly. “This isn’t my usual stock in trade. Alice, dear, I don’t know how much good I’m going to be able to do you.”

  She looked over at him briefly, the dreamy smile fixed on her face, her blue eyes smoldering.

  “I have a pretty good idea how much harm you’ve done, Chris,” Alice said brightly. “So I’d suggest that trying to do me at least that much good is probably your best strategy right now.”

  Chris straightened his tie with thin, white fingers, and smoothed his hair in the reflection of the polished brass that framed the elevator, frowning slightly at his appearance.

  “Very well. If that is how it has to be. I warn you, though, that this is an ineffective, and in all probability, wasteful use of my services.”

  Alice nodded, tapping the toe of her boot against the brushed aluminum doors of the elevator, leaving small dents in the surface.

  “You’re probably right,” Alice agreed. “But, I don’t have any virgins I need attacked in their beds at this particular moment.”

  The elevator chime rang and then the doors slid smoothly open. Inside, the elevator looked like a narrow brass bullet, all contoured lines and burnished metal. Alice walked in and Chris followed, and a moment later the doors slid shut behind them, with a sound that was oddly like a protracted sigh.

  “Actually,” Alice said thoughtfully, as the elevator began its almost imperceptible assent, “if I did, I’d probably take care of that one myself.”

  Chris attempted to buff his cufflinks, and then gave up in despair when he realized the one had already been completely lost.