What, no comment?
You already know how we feel.
I suffered through another fifteen agonizing minutes of the last mile of my run before coming up to Fibre, the only Senior Cape at the academy who will let you sneak an extra piece of dessert. He’s also the most eccentric Senior Cape we have as an instructor. He has an extremely rare Bodymod Ch05En gene and can duplicate himself. It has to be powerful, too, because his clones can be either men or women. He doesn’t handle much of our physical training, which makes sense because it isn’t in his background. He spent all of his years as a Cape doing almost no actual fighting, and eventually became known for his ability to infiltrate enemy compounds. When you can create your own diversions, though, sneaking into a building must be easy. I clapped my hand on his as I ran by, ready to collapse as I came to a stop just beyond where he was standing, and Fibre walked over to offer me a towel. The voices get angry when I don’t towel off after a run, so I grabbed the cloth from Fibre before I sat on a bench nearby. The park we ran in was a mile all the way around, which made the bench I was sitting on the best and worst part of each run. I usually spend four laps wishing I could sit down already, sure that if the bench could talk it would be taunting me. Then, at the end of the sixth mile, I take a seat and forgive the bench for all of the awful things I imagined it said.
That bench can be very rude.
“So, tell me something, Ivy. How is it you’re still so bad at this? Are you secretly morbidly obese and hiding it from us all?” Fibre asked me with his usual rapid-fire style of questioning. “If we find out today that’s what your gene does, I’d prefer to not be the only one who saw it coming.”
“Fibre, are you calling me fat?” I asked back, barely enough breath back in me to talk.
“What? No! I’m just asking if you think your gene is hiding your fat. Or, oh! What have you weighed in at while running? Maybe when you’re active, your muscles get dense. How about we throw a live round in the chamber and point the gun at you when a run starts?”
Lacking the ability to properly articulate the reasons Fibre shouldn’t try having me shot during a run, I made a face to let him know he was being an idiot. In his typical fashion, he giggled to himself before helping me up. After I caught my breath, I went to say something else, and Fibre’s entire body rapidly evaporated. That was about one of the only times I was glad I was still catching my breath, as I was certain I had breathed in almost none of the dust that Fibre’s copies break away into. He says it’s harmless, but it was just a few weeks before being sent to the academy that I had read about Popcorn Lung. Fibre wasn’t even fifty years old, leaving me to wonder whether the dust really was safe, or if it just took a long time for it to latch onto your lungs to and damage. I already couldn’t run. I didn’t want to have to worry about not being able to go up a flight of stairs when I was older.
Thankfully, I had already stood fully up when Fibre’s copy disintegrated, and so I wasn’t at risk of falling right back down. I looked back at the bench for a moment and considered taking an extended break, but decided I was too hungry to stay in the park, in spite of having had some food just before. The run was the last thing recruits were required to do each day before dinner, and that night the academy was serving fajitas.
You like the crunchy peppers and the little tortillas. We like the tomatoes in the salsa. They’re brought in from a local farm.
I hardly ever eat the salsa, though. I don’t really like it.
That’s probably for the best.
I walked as quickly as I could, my breathing growing much less labored the farther I went, and was back to the academy in short order. I went in the entrance closest to the dorms, weaving around a few of the other recruits who were using the little time left before dinner to wrestle in the hallway, and got the shower running as quickly as I could. Hilly almost never spent any time in the room we shared, except right before dinner. I had gotten into the habit of making myself scarce around that time, and planned to simply shower and get out.
Our rooms at the academy weren’t as nice the ones in the GHS group homes. I didn’t have a laundry chute, a reading nook, or many of the other comforts I had gotten used to as a ward. I’d thought it would be awkward not to have my own fridge, but we were so busy with our daily regimen that I didn’t have time to eat outside of when they fed us. After the shower and dinner each night, I was often ready to immediately collapse into bed.
I have this weird thing with showers–I’ve been like this forever, even before I was a ward. We had strict cleaning guidelines to follow as wards of the state, and I had found a lot of them agreeable, even when I was young. But there is something about cleaning the shower that, even as a little girl, I just hated doing it. Not cleaning the shower was the only thing I really got into trouble for when I was little, the voices in my head absolutely no help when it came to that sort of thing.
We don’t like to clean at all.
The counselors and other adults who watched over all of us at each house had really drilled it into me that I needed to wipe down every part of the shower when I was finished. I absolutely couldn’t leave any standing water because, as they put it, it wasn’t safe. I’ve heeded the warning so many times that I can wipe down an entire shower in a little under a minute, even if I’ve gotten water everywhere. While I didn’t see a problem with leaving water laying around, my skills when it came to removing it were definitely up to par. That was often good enough for the people who took care of me.
When I finished showering, I put on the following day’s sweat suit—it was the only outfit not completely drenched in sweat—and made my way down the gray hallway in my gray outfit to the cafeteria. The boys who had been wrestling when I’d gone to clean up had left, and I could hear the chatter from the other recruits as I got closer to the cafeteria, signaling to me that not everyone had gotten their food just yet. When I got there, though, it was almost completely quiet. There are only a few hours in between our midday feeding and the official dinner hour, and most of that time is filled with running or otherwise expending energy. When people get their food at dinner, they stop caring much about having a conversation.
Just like the rooms, the food at the academy wasn’t quite what I was used to. There were some things that were the same, like the chicken needing salt and the constant stream of kimchi, but the food they served in the cafeteria was all parts of dishes, nothing was ever served cohesively. We’d have chicken and vegetables that would have gone great with a bit of brown gravy and some bread, but there’d be no gravy and no bread. Or we’d get cottage cheese for breakfast, but no fruit or honey to mix in. Some of the recruits seemed to enjoy it, but I had quickly grown bored.
When my time began at the academy, I sat with Hilly at dinner, but in light of our continued struggles I had elected to sit alone most nights. While I sometimes sat with the other friends I had made, I was too excited to talk with anyone that night.
In the morning, I was going to have my meeting with Sink, an old Senior Cape and instructor at the academy. She was one of the only Capes to have spent her entire career teaching others rather than being deployed onto any missions. She never went into field because she had the unique ability to determine how other peoples’ Ch05En genes worked. Sink worked with the World Government to develop all of the classifications they currently use. Prior to her becoming a Cape, the labeling system, from what I understand, was chaos. Thanks to her, we have terms like Fast One, Specian, Bodymod, Strongman, Elementalist, and the others. I had read a quote from Sink once in a text I found in a World Government home where she said that everyone’s gene worked like someone else’s, which made me feel better for a long time. For a couple of weeks leading up to that point, I clung to that phrase like a lifeline. All I had to do was wait a little longer and someone, finally, would be able to tell me how my powers worked.
My gene had activated when I was a little girl, the day my father was killed. I had an active gene, and active powers for over a decade
at that point, yet I had no idea how to really use them. A lot of people don’t have to wonder, even people with telepathy or telekinesis; they seem to just know how to use their powers, even if they can’t explain it. But I had no idea back then. I didn’t know if the voices I heard were a result of trauma or my Ch05En gene. I didn’t know if making my kidnappers’ brains melt was really the voices, as they said, or if it had been a survival instinct, a capability of the power I didn’t know how to use. I used to ask the voices all the time. They insist it was them.
It was. You are like us, so we protected you.
See? What does that even mean?
It had been intensely frustrating for years, and nearly graduating from the academy without having even the slightest indication what kind of gene I had and what kind of Cape I was meant to be when I finished was taking its toll on my psyche. Hunter, the Senior Cape in charge of running the academy alongside Fibre and the other Senior Capes, called in a Telepath early on during my stay. He and I had spent an afternoon inside of my mind, meditating the day away as we walked around what appeared as rooms inside my head. Each time we were about to enter a new room, the Telepath would tell me the same thing.
“We probably shouldn’t go this deep inside,” he’d say. “But we can keep going if you want.” I told him yes, every time, and according to him, we went deeper than he’d ever gone in someone else’s mind before. I ended up learning nothing, but he seemed happy with the experience, so that was nice. I had asked him if it was weird that we didn’t find any of the voices I heard, but he said it was common not to. Apparently, even if I were schizophrenic and experiencing auditory hallucinations, we wouldn’t have heard them inside of what he referred to as Brain Rooms.
The night after I met with the Telepath, I smashed the glass table in my room with my foot. I wore my boots, so I didn’t hurt myself, but I was up way too late cleaning up the mess, Hilly sleeping soundly even with the lights on. When questioned about the table, I told Fibre that I hadn’t had my light on and wasn’t aware of where I was going. They gave me a wooden table and left it at that. I wanted desperately to convince myself that Hunter had sent someone too inexperienced to work with me, but the Telepath already had an impressive résumé at that point. As if to prove he was the right person for the job, the next week the Telepath I’d worked with took out two different Freelancers who were working together to extort a small island nation rich with oil and credits, and he did it without ever reaching the mainland. It takes serious power to stretch your mind farther than a few feet. To go across an ocean puts his gene at the Supreme level. If any Telepath was going to be able to walk into my mind to see how it worked, it would have been him.
Sink was the only person left, at least that I had access to, who could give me some kind of indication as to what happened when my gene activated, and what my role as a Cape should be. The worry wasn’t that I was completely useless. Even if I couldn’t run very well, melting brains comes in handy no matter what your angle is. But if nobody knew how my power worked, there was no way for headquarters to ensure I was properly deployed or matched up with the right teammates. It’s a long-standing rule that Capes trust the matching software. If you don’t, that little bit of doubt can get you killed. If you’re matched up with someone else on a team, it’s best to figure out why, get a handle on how you can work together to do your job, and go with it. But I can’t trust the software if I know it’s working with a faulty variable—me. Figuring out how my powers worked was an absolute priority if I wanted to become a real Cape.
My nerves had my shoulders tense and my breathing at a fraction of what it could have been, my shoulders rising up and down on each breath rather than my stomach. I kept forcing my neck to relax, emotionally drained from how badly I wanted it to be the morning already but physically famished from training.
Fibre came to sit with me, in spite of my self-imposed exile from a nearby debate that sounded intriguing, with an extra glass of electrolyte water.
“You’re going to want to drink this,” he said. “Trust me. I’ve sat with Sink before, and it’s not like your experience with the other Telepath. There won’t be any rooms to walk through. Sink prefers to have people perform the tasks they need in order to figure things out on their own.”
“Like what? Also, you’ve been to see her? I thought your gene was active since birth. Couldn’t you always multiply?”
“When I was coming up, everybody went and saw Sink. Part of the labeling process and all of that. World Government didn’t trust people to label themselves accurately, even if the whole room could see the ice shooting from their fingers or, in my case, all of the copies of myself I could make.”
“What was your task?”
“She made me carry bags of sand from one end of the academy to the other.”
“She’s going to make me carry sand?”
“Possibly. It’s different for everyone. But she was right, it only took a couple of days before I had more mastery over duplicating myself than ever before. But I’ll tell you what, if she makes you run, you’re going to need these electrolytes—and this food in your system. You’d better eat up.”
“Alright, Fibre. Thanks.”
“No problem, kid. I know you’re probably nervous, but just try to relax. It’ll be over before you know it.”
Fibre looked like he had more to say, but he was called away by another Senior Cape into the kitchen. I took a long drink of the electrolyte water he’d brought over and looked over at the closest table, where a few of the recruits had gone back to debating something I thought was interesting, though I don’t remember what it was.
It was regarding what color scheme would look best for one of them. You thought that girl Kie’s complexion would make her look better in a brighter-colored suit.
Right, thank you.
I looked over at their table, obviously with an opinion I thought I might share, but ultimately decided to take the rest of Fibre’s advice to heart and finish my meal, even if my nerves made it difficult. To my surprise, the rice was much better that night than any other time I’d had it. I remember thinking that they must have finally replaced whatever broken machine they had been using that made the rice so soggy.
When I’d finished eating, I dropped my tray by the bin and went to refill on another glass of electrolyte water, then I chugged it like I had the last. I didn’t want to have to worry about returning my cup later on, thinking I’d go back to my room and right to bed. The hour or so after dinner was when I got most of my reading done when I wasn’t too tired–that was the time I’d used to learn about Sink and was then using to read through the public backgrounds of the Senior Capes teaching at the academy. I had originally planned on reading over some old mission reports from Hunter’s third year as a Cape, as some of his missions from his second year Freelancers in them who resurfaced the following year, but if I went to sleep right away, I could catch a full six hours. One thing we weren’t allowed to have at the academy was coffee. It was a difficult rule to adjust to after having a habit set at two cups a day, but at least the headaches eventually stopped. I needed the sleep, though, if I didn’t want to be completely useless the entire morning.
I had originally thought that, since my work with the Telepath before had been a lot like sleeping, I could stay up until I was too tired to keep reading, let myself pass out, and be groggy for my meeting with Sink. But if it was going to be anything like what Fibre had done when he’d met with her, it seemed better to take his advice. When I turned down the final hallway leading back to my room, my first thought was that I’d gone the wrong way without realizing, and that Hunter was standing outside of someone else’s door. A cold dread started to creep in when I realized that I’d gone the right away, and that Hunter appeared to be waiting for me.
Hunter’s primary responsibilities had him spending almost no time actually instructing new recruits, and instead doing… I don’t really know what. If the academy were more like a traditional school, I
guess Hunter’s role would have been closer to principal than teacher—not that I’d ever been to a traditional school outside of the fictional books I’d read where they existed. Whatever he actually did, we hardly ever saw him, and even though I was steadily making my way through the reports he’d written after his old missions, I’d had no idea what he was going to be like in person. Up to that point, I’d only ever seen him walk by as the recruits sparred to correct someone’s form before he disappeared a moment later. When he noticed me, Hunter unfolded his bulky arms and took himself off of the piece of wall he’d been leaning on, the same look on his face one of my old caregivers at the first GHS house used to make when she’d catch me taking cookies before it was time for dessert.
At that point in my training, Hunter had solidified himself as less of a person to me and more of a mystical figure. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but my heart was racing so hard it felt like what I imagined being pulled over for the first time would be like. I did my best to appear calm, but could feel the sweat starting to escape from the middle of my back.
Ivy Page 6
