I didn't trouble to pull; he couldn't hurt me.
I said, "Begin whenever you're—"
He fired on me, as I'd known he would. More than ready for his clumsy stream of power, my Shell not only deflected it but spun it swirling around my chest to slingshot back at him. What had approached me as a ragged head-sized stream returned as a focused javelin that punched through his Shell into the pit of his stomach and doubled him over.
"You'll have to do better than that." I hadn't even moved.
He tried again, and again, with similar results, but with each attempt he closed the gap between our virtual selves by a step or two. From this perspective, in the detached calm of mindview, his intentions were transparent. He intended to step outside the rules once again: these clumsy Flow bolts were only cover, to get him close enough to rush me.
I opened my Shell and pulled.
Hari had tapped into a Flow current, diverted some of it for his use; I created Flow currents—those shining lattices of force swirled into my Shell like the funnel of a tornado reaching down from a thunderhead. From where I stood to the visible horizon, all Flow drained toward me. My skin sang with power.
When Hari leaped at me, I let him have it.
Flow doesn't interact directly with the material world until it is patterned by the mind of a spellcaster; in its basic state, it only affects the Shell, altering the matrices of energy that surround material objects, especially living ones. About the worst you can do with raw Flow is give somebody a bad charley horse. I gave Hari seven of them.
His arms and legs, his chest and belly and back all cramped convulsively in midleap. He gave out a strangled croak and collapsed at my feet.
I stepped a prudent distance away from him before I let him up.
"That was too easy," I told him. "I'm a better fighter than you are a spellcaster. First off, if you ever want to be good at this, you'll have to improve your reach. Right now, your Shell stops at your hands and feet. But your Shell can have any size and shape that you wish, if you properly visualize it. Start by reaching for Flow without using your hands."
Hari's manikin still sat in the soft virtual grass, arms wrapping knees. He looked up at me, and I wished I could read an expression on those blank features. "This's been fun, Kris. I've been a good sport, and I let you whip me Now I gotta go." He stood up and his hands went to his head, feeling for the cutoff.
"Let me?" I sneered. "Like you could have stopped me."'
He sounded tired. "Yeah, you're right. I'm not good at this. But I will be."' "I'd say so. Shit, Hari, with my help, you could be great."
He stopped. His head swiveled toward me, and he neither moved nor spoke for a long time. I began to sweat inside the VA suit, wondering what was going on inside his head.
Finally, he spoke. "You think I'm a fucking idiot, don't you?" My mouth worked, speechless. I forced out, "Hari, I—"
"You think that because you're Business, and I'm Labor, you can think rings around me, you can manipulate me and push me around and I'll never even know it?'
Suddenly I became acutely glad that Hari's real, physical body was two doors away in the VA suite. "That's not true—"
"Drop it. I've bought too much of your shit already." His manikin stepped up to mine. "I don't much mind you thinking you're smarter than me. It might even be true?'
It's unquestionably true, I thought.
"What bothers me," he went on, "is that you think you're smarter than me because you're upcaste. Like, if I had any brains at all, I would have known enough to be born into a better family."
"It's all about caste to you, isn't it?" I said, turning to the attack. You couldn't deal with Hari by going defensive; it brought out his killer instinct like a guard dog that smells fear. "That's your answer to everything?'
"I don't need answers," he said, rising and turning as if to leave. "I don't need to know why you've been all over me this past week or two; I don't care if it's some upcaste liberal befriend-the-Labor-punk project, or an anthro experiment, or you've developed a taste for my butthole. It doesn't matter. You're trying to con me, and I'm tired of it. Shit, mostly I'm tired of you thinking you're getting away with it."
"Y'know," I said slowly, "your street-butch act goes only so far." "Hah?"
"Why are you still here? No matter how good your exit line is, it only works if you actually exit."
"Yeah," he said, reaching up for the cutoff switch on his sleeve, but I was ready for him: the instant I finished speaking I drew the slow, controlled breath and summoned mindview, and I gave him a cramp in that arm that would stun a horse.
He grunted.
"I'm not ready for you to go, yet," I said.
He dropped his hand and fixed his manikin's blank stare on me, and I could imagine all too well the homicidal gleam that would be in his black eyes right now. "Don't jump in this shitpool, Hansen. You don't swim well enough?'
"Cut it out, will you? I'm not Ballinger—you don't have to intimidate me to prove you're a man."
"Don't pretend you understand."
"I'll tell you what I understand. I understand that you are going to fail. Do you understand that? You're going to fail. You will never see Overworld. You will never be an Actor. You will be some meaningless shit-shoveling Laborer for the rest of your life. You will always have to suckass the upcasters—and everybody is upcaste of you, Hari?'
He shrugged and looked away; he knew, or at least suspected, that I was telling the truth, and he couldn't face it. "Why do you care? What's it to you if I live or die?"
"Nothing. I don't give a rat's ass what happens to you," I said. "What I care about is getting there myself. You get it? Yeah, you're a project. Chandra assigned me here. I've got the word of Chandra himself that if you don't graduate, I'll never even get to take the examinations!"
"Then I guess you got a problem; he said, and flicked his cutoff switch before I could react.
His manikin vanished; I was left alone in the virtual world, staring at the vacancy where my hope had been.
9
I don't remember much of that night.
Lurking somewhere in the back of my brain are vague recollections of coming back to myself again and again out of daydreams of Overworld, sitting at my desk in my dorm room or wandering vaguely on the darkened campus lawns, through tangled native scrub the color of corpse flesh in the moonlight.
I couldn't get a handle on what had happened, not really; whenever I wasn't actively reminding myself that my life was over, I stopped believing it. I couldn't make myself understand that I'd really blown it this time, that some fundamental incapacity in my nature had thrown a wall into my path and I'd dashed out my brains against it.
It was as though I'd spent so many dreaming hours on visions of Overworld that my mind automatically turned to them, despite the cold fact that I'd never see those skies, never breathe that air, never come closer to the surge of true magick through my nerves than the pale tingle of a VA suit's tawdry replication.
And every time I did remember, each time I forced that knowledge back through the muddy strata of my rebellious mind, I had to wade through each level of muck again, one at a time: cursing Chandra, cursing Hari, cursing my father, the Conservatory, the Studio itself, until I finally slogged through to the truth.
It was my fault.
It's crushing, when you've made it through twenty years or so of your life, when you first find yourself against a wall you can't climb. Gifted in caste as well as genetics, I had wealth and status and looks and brains and athleticism, and I could always find a way to get what I wanted: grades, girls, friends, whatever. Until I found the one thing I couldn't live without.
It was a hell of a time for my first failure.
I'd made a fatal error with Hari, and the worst of it was, I still couldn't figure out what I should have done to make things work out any better. I mean, sure, thousands of plans and ideas poured into my mind that night, limitless and swirling, funneled from the stars by a quiet maelstrom
of the chill Aegean air, all equally futile—I should have done this, I could have tried that, why didn't I think of this—until finally it was morning and I hadn't slept at all. I stopped by my room just long enough to dry-swallow a couple of caffeine pills, then I stumbled off to class, to spend the next few hours, the next few days, pretending that my life wasn't over.
At least I didn't have any trouble staying awake. I couldn't have slept if you hit me with a rock.
Sometime during that hopeless blur of days, Chandra called me into his office again. I don't remember what he said or what I replied; I think, at that point, all I could do was bluff. With my father's voice whispering advice and scorn alternately in my ear, I sneered at my executioner. Show no weakness to the undercastes, I thought. Fuck him. If he had any brains at all, he'd have known enough to be born into a better family. That phrase kept ringing inside my head, again and again.
On top of everything else, I had to live with the knowledge that Hari despised me.
In some strange and inexplicable way, that hurt nearly as much as the rest put together. His harsh judgment gnawed at me like a hungry dog worrying a bone. Maybe it was because I was accustomed to the affection of my peers and the respect of those below me; maybe I was appalled that a Labor thug would presume to judge me at all.
Maybe it was because I felt like he was more real than I was.
Something about his Labor life, his street life, gave him what looked to me like a mystic connection to some level of existence at which I could only peer from the outside, through streaked and darkened glass. He was right: I'd never understand, not really. I wasn't sure I wanted to.
I was sure that I wanted his respect more than I'd ever wanted anything, short of a Transfer ticket to Overworld.
A few days passed in this fog of mingled self-pity and self loathing. I checked my messages obsessively, hoping for any word that he'd relented; all I got were nagging whines from girls who wondered why I hadn't called them back. I didn't try to call him, or catch up with him at any of his classes; that would have been too pathetic, even for me.
One morning I woke with something resembling my old resolve, and without even stopping for breakfast or a shower I jogged across campus to the gym, foggily wondering if I might find Hari there.
I had no idea what I would say to him if I found him. I suppose I was half planning to fall to my knees and hope the pathetic blankness of my postsurgical mask might soften his clockwork Labor heart.
It was a stupid thing to do; if I'd been thinking clearly, I wouldn't have come within a klick of the gym in the morning. Before noon, that's where the neanderthals gather to flex their muscles and sniff each other's assholes.
Hari wasn't there, of course. He was too wise for this, too experienced to be caught out like a young rabbit upwind of a wolf pack. I strolled into the weight room like I belonged there, and it wasn't until I met Ballinger's eyes, small and red and hungry like a bear's, that I understood how stupid I had been.
Then I made my second mistake of the morning: I turned and tried to walk out of there coolly, with a show of calm confidence. Even though my heart roared in my ears, I would not show fear before these hyperthyroid pinheads. Hari would have been smarter; he would have understood how much trouble he was in.
He would have bolted like a scalded cat, and got away.
I made it through the fluted arch, and past the door from the gym's main hall, and was congratulating myself on my narrow escape when a huge hand grabbed my hair and slammed me against the wall.
The corridor spun around me; grey patches floated raggedly through my vision. Ballinger towered over me like a giant, like a dinosaur, incomprehensibly powerful. Half his face was still swollen and purplish yellow from Hari's kick, and there was nothing human in his eyes.
I sagged against the wall, trying to catch my breath, and Ballinger's mouth split in what he probably thought looked like a smile. "Hey, aren't you Kris Hansen?" he said, his voice rough with mock awe. "Pleased to meet you, you little faggot."
Then he hit me, casually, a kind of paternal slap, just to establish our relationship. His open palm struck the side of my neck and dubbed me spinning to the floor. I skidded a little ways, and I curled up into a ball and lay there, gasping at the shower of stars inside my head.
"Have a nice trip," he said. "Bet you thought that was pretty funny, didn't you? I know I did. Shit, I'm still laughing."
He tangled his fist in the front of my tunic and hauled me up dangling above the floor. He set my back against the wall and leaned on his fist to pin me there, driving the breath from my guts. He put his other hand up under my chin and started to force my head back, and up, against the slicing pressure of my collar at the back of my neck, the numbing yoke of the tunic tearing down on my shoulders. I pulled at his arm, which felt like stone under my useless fingers, and I punched weakly at his face. with nothing but the meager strength of my scrawny arm behind it, and all I could think of was that Tallman's hand-to-hand combat classes, and Hari's training, and my wit and good humor and brains and my record as the top Battle Magick student in the history of the Conservatory, everything I am, everything I will ever be, all came down to to the tensile strength of my cervical ligaments. Nothing in the universe was as important right now as whether or not my neck was stronger than Ballinger's arms—and I knew it wasn't. I could hear the creaking and popping of my neck giving way. Stretching wires of pain sang all the way down into my toes.
And I was wrong about his eyes: they weren't hungry like a bear's. What I could see from point-blank was an impersonal hunger, an abstract and dispassionate lust.
They were hungry like Chandra's.
This wasn't about me at all; it was about him. He was going to kill me just to make a point. To prove something to Hari, and to himself.
I'd done one foolish thing—one thoughtless, fatal act. When I'd dropped to my knees behind him, I'd mixed into a situation I didn't understand. Now I was going to die for it. I couldn't even plead for my life; the pressure of his hand held my jaw shut and cut off my wind.
Then suddenly, blessedly, the pressure slacked and I could breathe again, and I found myself staggering under my own weight as he let me go. It took a few seconds for me to understand what had happened. There were people around us, and an instructor-I think it was Tallman, but I don't remember for sure—and Ballinger was laughing and joking with them and cheerfully pretending that he and I had just been horsing around. The instructor and his group of students must have come into sight in the corridor just in time to save my life.
Somebody asked me if I was all right, and I choked out some kind of lie. "Yeah, yeah, Ballinger just plays kind of rough, that's all."
I could have filed a complaint against him, sure, but the corridors don't have the same kind of security camera coverage that the rooms do; we were in a blind spot, and probably the worst trouble I could have gotten him in was a reprimand and a few days of push-ups and extra laps.
As they moved past us toward the gym, Baffinger leaned over to me and spoke softly. "I'm gonna find you, Hansen. Nobody does me like you did, you hear me? And you tell that faggot Michaelson that I'm gonna find him, too. And then I'm gonna show both you pussies how we do shit over here in Combat School."
And that's what gave me the idea, right there; it came like a sudden rent in a storm cloud, a shaft of brilliant sunlight straight into my brain, and I thought, All right why not?
"Sure, I'll tell him," I said, grinning behind my mask, the surge of adrenaline making me forget how scared I was. "I'll tell him all you really want is a chance to suck his cock."
And in the half second while what I'd said percolated through twelve layers of solid bone to reach his walnut-sized brain, I kicked him in the balls.
His eyes bulged out, and his mouth twisted open to release a strangled hiss. He reached for me as he doubled over, but I ducked under his hand and ran like hell. He might have come after me for a few steps, but I'm quick and he was hurt. He didn't have a chance.<
br />
From behind me as I ran, I clearly heard derisive laughter from the other Combat students. Even through his pain, I'm sure Ballinger heard it, too.
10
I didn't make the mistake of assuming Ballinger was stupid just because he was big. I didn't know whether or not he was popular with the other Combat students; I assumed he was. I assumed that any Combat student who spotted me anywhere on campus would take the news back to him.
Only five students in the Conservatory were undergoing elving surgeries that term; it wasn't like I could wear a disguise. For nearly a week I was extremely careful about where I went and when I went there: I cut some classes, stayed late at others, kept my movements meticulously erratic, and kept in sight of crowds whenever possible.
Another mistake I didn't make was to try dealing with Ballinger rationally, to tell him I thought he was overreacting to what was, essentially, nothing but a schoolboy prank. I understood that the next time he caught me alone, he was going to kill me. I understood that no amount of logical argument, or threat of legal reprisal, would change this fact.
Besides, I didn't think he was overreacting. Hari and I, we'd challenged his manhood. A Labor kid like Ballinger, manhood was all he had. He'd defend it to the death.
Even his own.
I didn't need to wonder from where this understanding came; I knew it clearly. I was starting to think like Hari.
I left messages for Hari every day of that week, but he was still ducking me. The few times I spotted him around campus, he'd go the other way, heading places I didn't dare to follow—lonely places, like the windswept crags above the beaches. I had to get to him, though; I needed a place I could corner him, and I needed a way to convince him to listen.
On the morning of his first Virtual Acting seminar, I was waiting outside the door of the VA suite when Hari came walking up. He walked in the midst of a steady stream of Battle Magick students, but as usual, the tangled darkness of his demeanor made him look like he was alone. He stopped when he saw me down the hall, but I knew he'd chew off his own arm before he'd skip VA. He shook his head disgustedly and came toward me.
Blade of Tyshalle Page 4
