Fight the Darkness

by W. J. May

  Simon got up, too, stretching out his arms with a disgruntled scowl. “Oh, thanks. Yeah, I’ll just do it all by myself then, shall I?”

  “Sounds perfect.” Tristan pulled open the door and slipped back out into the hall, leaving his friend to it. But before he vanished completely, he stuck his head back inside.

  “Simon?”

  Simon paused in the center of the room, already holding the trash bin. “Yeah?”

  “I really will speak for you, you know.”

  There was that vulnerability again. Tearing him from the inside out.

  “Thanks, Tris.”

  “Anytime.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, SIMON made the uncharacteristic decision to actually play the part of a student and get himself to class. He hadn’t yet heard anything about his romantic outburst the day before. No giant holes had opened in the ground to swallow him up. But one way or another, he thought it would be a good idea to keep his head down and follow the rules for once. If not for his own sake, then for Beth’s.

  “Why, Mr. Kerrigan!” Professor Lanford looked up in surprise as Simon slid into his seat in the back, just before the final bell. “How good of you to grace us with your presence. I wasn’t sure you remembered where my classroom was.”

  Simon flashed a guilty smile, then opened his textbook and kept his eyes fixed on the front page. There would be no outbursts today. At least not from him. Lanford could rest easy.

  It was a fairly standard lesson. Boring. Easy. The kind that made Simon wish he was back in the Oratory, doing what he did best. The only thing that caught his attention was a solitary quote Lanford had written up on the blackboard. He had no context for it—it had been done in a previous lecture and then forgotten about until today. But something about the words caught his attention.

  ‘The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.’ Erich Fromm.

  When the bell rang to dismiss them to lunch, Simon found himself hanging back, staring at the board as he wandered up to the professor’s desk.

  “Professor Lanford,” he asked tentatively, “who wrote that quote up on the board?”

  Lanford glanced around to look, before turning back in surprise. “Fromm? He was a German psychoanalyst. Studied human and social behavioral patterns.”

  “Makes all this seem a bit pointless, doesn’t it?” Simon joked lightly. “You know, standardized testing. Homogenizing syllabuses. The entire act of going to school.”

  Lanford chuckled to himself. “Well said, well said as ever, Mr. Kerrigan. But I’m afraid that you’re missing the one, simple point.”

  “And what’s that?”

  The professor’s eyes twinkled over the top of his spectacles. “That the meaning you seek is often found within these very walls.”

  SIMON WAS STILL MULLING over Professor Lanford’s comment all the way to the cafeteria. He was still spaced out thinking about it when he sank down in his usual chair next to Tristan. It wasn’t until he got a sharp kick in the leg that he realized someone was talking.

  “Sorry—what?”

  He looked up to see Tristan and Isaac staring at him with matching grins.

  “I said, how was it attending classes this morning?” Tristan asked mischievously. “Must have been a bit of a shock to your system.”

  “No more so than yours,” Simon fired back, pouring cream into his coffee. “You hear back from Renley yet?”

  Tristan’s face grew momentarily dour. “No. I’m thinking maybe I should try to cook him something. Offer to mow his lawn.”

  Simon chuckled, tucking the saying deep into his mind for later consideration while returning to the land of the living. Not a moment too soon. After Beth’s minor meltdown in the Oratory yesterday, his group of followers had more questions than usual. And they were not to be put off a second longer.

  “So Simon, spill.” Zane leaned forward, followed quickly by Eli and Rob. “What the hell was going on with Beth and that fire? That was some serious shit!”

  Simon shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Why are you asking me?”

  Zane hesitated. “Well, you know her, right? You guys have gotten tight.”

  That was one way of putting it.

  Simon shook his head swiftly and was about to deny the whole thing, when Tristan rolled his eyes and pushed him deliberately back in his chair, leaning forward to take point. “So the flames can cover her entire body.” He tried to brush it off as best he could. “It’s no big shock, is it? We see fire-throwers try it all the time.”

  Zane and Eli exchanged an incredulous look, before Rob and Isaac broke into laughter.

  “No big shock?” Rob repeated, shaking his head. “You’re messing with me, right?”

  “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen!” Zane took over again, his tiny body literally still trembling with excitement. “The freaking mats under her shoes started to melt! It was awesome!”

  “And don’t forget the fire itself.” Arturo, the resident genius, had to put in his two cents. “In the last three hundred years, there hasn’t been fire ink with that reported color. Not even her father had it. His was the usual orangey-red.”

  This time, it was Simon who leaned forward with interest. “Really?” He had never thought to ask Beth if there was a difference between her and her father’s ink. “Are you sure?”

  Arturo cast him a sour look. Really? Of course he was freaking sure.

  Simon let it go and leaned back to digest this fresh bit of news, when Isaac dragged him right back front and center again, his shaggy black hair bobbing with enthusiasm as he talked.

  “You have to level with us, man. You hitting that?”

  Simon paused. Thrown off by the directness of the question. In the end, it was all he could do to repeat it. And try his very best not to punch Isaac right in the face.

  “Am I...hitting that?”

  He’d hoped that his tone would silence the rest of the questions, but the boys leaned forward together like a pack on the hunt. Too long they had put up with his silence and cryptically dodged questions. Too long had he dominated the time of Tristan, their liege-lord. They wanted some answers, dam nit! And they wanted them now.

  “Come on: truth.” Zane was grinning from ear to ear. “You have to be, right? The four of you spend all of your time together.” When he got no response from Simon, he turned to Tristan instead. “What about you, Tris? Tell me you two are hooking up.”

  Tristan flashed a millisecond look at Simon, before his face shifted into a mischievous grin. “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.”

  The table erupted in an explosion of whoops and cheers, while Simon returned Tristan’s original kick under the table tenfold.

  “Really?” he asked under his breath.

  Tristan simply smiled, rubbing painfully at his shin. “You have to feed the monkeys on occasion, Simon. Otherwise they rebel.”

  “So you tell them you’re sleeping with my girlfriend?”

  “Would you rather I tell them you’re sleeping with your girlfriend?”

  Simon was about to come back with a scathing remark, when Alfred Higgins, one of the school administrators, suddenly appeared at the table and tapped Tristan on the shoulder.

  “Mr. Wardell?”

  Tristan looked up in surprise, as the rest of the table sobered quickly behind him. “Yes, sir?”

  “Come with me, please.”

  It was no open-ended invitation. There was no chance to disobey.

  With a hasty nod, Tristan snatched up his book bag and pushed to his feet. He mouthed a quick Renley to Simon, rolled his eyes, then followed Higgins out of the cafeteria.

  “That’s what happens when you miss as much school as the two of you do,” Arturo said smugly, staring after Tristan’s back. “It’s a miracle they haven’t put you guys on the rack.”

  Simon rolled his eyes with a faint grin. There was nothing Arturo took more seriously than academia. No wonder
he’d made the immediate jump to medieval punishments. “I think they save the rack for upperclassmen,” Simon countered practically. “It would be ridiculous for them to try to use it on us.”

  There was a soft chorus of laughter as the regular lunchtime conversations resumed. Arturo, however, sniffed daintily as he returned to his food.

  “I think a couple thousand lashes would do the both of you some good.”

  TRISTAN STILL HADN’T gotten back to the dorms by nightfall. He’d missed all of his afternoon classes. Simon took it as a good thing. With any luck, he was getting to complete Renley’s excruciating exam after all, thus ensuring that he wouldn’t be put on academic probation. Simon shuddered at the thought. Wasting all that time in detention? There were better things out there.

  He didn’t give it much thought as he went to sleep that night. It had already completely slipped his mind as he headed to Tristan’s dorm the next morning to walk with him to class.

  It was only when he saw the two strangers packing up his friend’s belongings that he realized something was wrong.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he exclaimed, freezing in the open door.

  All of Isaac’s possessions were still scattered messily about the room, but Tristan’s were nowhere to be seen. They had been replaced with a number of heavy-looking boxes—the last of which was being clumsily sealed. As Simon watched, Tristan’s sacred picture of Mary fluttered down from the decorative mantel and landed on the floor.

  He picked it up with a trembling hand, sensing something was deeply, deeply wrong.

  “Answer me,” he demanded. “Where the hell is Tristan?!”

  The men paused only for a split second, before the last box was sealed tightly shut. The taller of the two turned to him as the other started levitating the boxes out of the room, one by one.

  “Tristan doesn’t go to this school anymore.”

  Chapter 9

  SIMON SAT NUMBLY AT his desk, staring out the open window.

  The school was quiet, even though there was still a day left until the end of term. The sun-swept lawns and towering trees rustled impatiently in the breeze, as if asking the obvious question.

  Where is everybody?

  For his part, Simon was not surprised by the quiet. Not surprised that the cheerful Guilder halls had been replaced with a ringing silence. By now he was almost used to it. It had been quiet for a long time.

  A bell rang somewhere off in the distance, and Simon glanced wearily at his clock. Was it time for morning classes already? It felt like he had just turned in for the night. With his old routine so uprooted by the absence of players, it was getting hard to keep track.

  With a muffled sigh he pushed to his feet, slung his bag over his shoulder, and trudged down the quiet third-story hallway to the busier floors beneath.

  “Hey Simon!”

  “Morning!”

  He was greeted several times as he passed the younger students, but despite their friendly persistence he made no attempt to acknowledge any one of them. To be fair, at this point they hardly expected him to.

  Simon didn’t talk much these days. He had made it a habit to sit back during the weekly HOC meetings and partake only as a silent observer—forcing Jacob to take the reins instead. When Jacob, too, vanished from school one day, the meetings stopped altogether.

  In Simon’s defense, it was getting harder and harder to find anyone to talk to these days.

  After the kiss in the Oratory, he and Beth had kept a careful distance between themselves, communicating only through Jennifer. And then, only when Jennifer felt like translating. Jason hadn’t turned him in, but had apparently decided to resolutely ignore him until they were both long dead. And back at school, the table in the cafeteria had been growing steadily emptier as the days, then weeks, marched on. Tristan was only just the first.

  After his departure came Isaac. Followed shortly after by Eli, then Zane. Rob and another boy named Caleb were soon to follow. Then Arturo, then Andrew James Carter. When Jacob disappeared just the other week, Simon found himself for the first time in a long time sitting alone.

  He couldn’t resent them for it, not the students themselves. They had been offered the opportunity to become world-class spies. Who in their right mind would turn down that offer?

  It was the Council itself that he resented.

  The ones who saw fit to shape young people’s lives at the drop of a hat. Acting as supreme and unnatural overlords. Selecting some, abandoning others.

  Yes, although Simon did indeed feel abandoned, he didn’t resent it. He merely felt confused.

  All the boys who had been recruited had been so because of one thing: their ink. Simon happened to have one thing in common with every single kid who was taken: their ink.

  Why the hell would the PC have selected someone like Eli, and not someone like Simon? An escape artist was a good commodity to have, but Simon could be that. He could be that, and also be a leopard, and also be a fox, and also be whatever the hell else they wanted if they would just tap him on the shoulder, too, and let him come along!

  He took a deep breath to steady himself, making his way down the deserted halls.

  The only one he did resent was Tristan. And he resented him hard.

  They had spent months talking about the day when they would both be recruited to join the Privy Council. Endless hours speculating as to every pointless detail. The different things they might get to do first. The different missions they’d be sent on.

  Together. The key word being together.

  And now? Not a word. Not a letter. Not even a freaking postcard.

  It was like Tristan had vanished off the face of the earth. Like when he left Guilder, he forgot about everyone left inside, leaving the past behind him as he set out to embark upon his fantastic new life.

  Alone. The key word being alone.

  Simon pushed open the door to Professor Vector’s class with another sigh. Sometimes it felt like he was just a ghost pacing the same circles in the same halls, just killing time.

  A derisive snort rose up in his throat as he took a seat in the back. Why did he even bother coming anymore? There were only five people left in the class.

  “Today,” the professor began cheerfully, “we’ll be reviewing the material we have studied thus far. Doing a basic overview before you turn in your final papers to receive your grade. I know it’s a bit earlier than usual this morning, but I will still expect—”

  “What’s the point?” Simon asked loudly. The remaining students swiveled around in their chairs and Professor Vector’s jaw dropped open in surprise. Simon was too depressed to care.

  “I’m...I’m sorry, Mr. Kerrigan?”

  Simon got slowly to his feet, feeling as though he wanted to rip the little man in half, just to change up his routine. Just for the pleasure of watching someone else hurt, too.

  “I said...what’s the freakin’ point?” He lifted his hands and sarcastically gestured around. “The school year’s over. We’ve already taken the final. We have our papers with us in our bags. Why don’t you just let us turn in the damn things and be done with it?! Why the dog and pony show?!”

  Professor Vector’s face turned an ugly shade of red. “Why, you little...sit down, Mr. Kerrigan! Sit down before I have you thrown out of this school!”

  Simon stayed standing, cocking his head tauntingly to the side. “What—a day early? I ask you again, oh wizened professor: what is the freakin’ point?!”

  If the room was tense before, it was almost unbearable now. Well aware of Simon’s reputation for trouble, the students still sitting in the room were glancing at the door like they didn’t think they wanted to be there for what might happen next. Likewise, Professor Vector was wavering like he was on unsure ground. If a direct threat didn’t work on a student, he wasn’t sure exactly what else to try. It wasn’t like he could physically force Simon to do anything.

  Simon watched as the professor weighed the options of how to treat his d
isruption. He grinned suddenly before hiding it with a stern look. He threatened to call in a reinforcement that Simon would actually respect. “Unless you want me to get Mr. Archer in here, I suggest you take a—”

  “Really?” Simon threw back his head with a loud, unnerving laugh. “That’s the best you’ve got? You’re going to rat me out to Jason? You think, for one second, I believe he would come down here and—”

  “And what, Simon?”

  It was like all the air got sucked out of the room. Simon cut off mid-sentence and turned towards the door, the taunting words suddenly sticking in his throat.

  Sure enough, there was Jason. Leaning quietly against the doorway. Watching the scene unfold with dangerous, indecipherable eyes.

  “How did...” Simon stuttered, unable to piece together how the hell Jason could have possibly found out what was going on, and how he’d gotten there so quick. “How did you...”

  “Let’s take a walk, Simon.”

  Feeling like he’d been slapped in the face, Simon reached down robotically and picked up his book bag. He slung it over his shoulder and walked to his Botcher without a second thought, head spinning so much he was completely unaware of anything else going on around him.

  He was already halfway out the door, when he realized that Jason had yet to move.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Jason’s glare shimmered with malice, and his voice sliced the air between them like a knife.

  With a heavy heart, Simon turned back to Professor Vector. He could barely meet his eyes. “My apologies, Professor.”

  “Louder, Simon,” Jason snapped.

  Simon took a deep breath, forcing himself to lift his eyes. “I apologize, Professor, truly. I promise it will never happen again.”

  Vector nodded curtly, but to be honest he just looked relieved that Jason had magically shown up to take Simon away.

  As the two of them headed down the hall the rest of the class peered after them from the doorway, like a child would look at a wild beast.