by Lu Huiyi
Then the effects kicked in, and everything was fantastic.
He couldn’t go to sleep, not as long as the sleeping medication was coursing through his veins and wracking his body with pain. But the new drug took him out of himself, left him unafraid and numb and relaxed enough to regard even the worst of suffering with a devil-may-care kind of apathy. Within an hour of its injection, the integrity of the building was no longer under threat, and they could reinsert his IV without fear of him hurting himself or them.
The next morning, he woke up clean and calm again. No longer drugged out of his mind, he still ached from the wounds left from Hell Night, but the bandages had been changed and the visible bruises and cuts were purpling and darkening. Things felt a little more manageable, and he, at least, could ask questions again.
“I don’t think it is,” said Elder Francis, laughing, which Beng found a little flippant but didn’t care enough to call out. “It’s sleep. When your brain shuts down for rest, that’s when your extraordinary power tries to come out to play. That’s why it’s always surged up and taken control when your body was at its limits, when you were about to collapse or lose consciousness. That’s also why you reacted so badly to the sleeping medication—your body and your power are not in sync when you are forced into artificial sleep.”
“Did I cause a lot of damage?”
“No, nothing we can’t deal with. But this is good, this is very good. Usually we don’t find out so soon, Beng. Now we’ve something to work with.”
“What’s next?”
“We need you to get better first,” said Elder Francis, and Beng was relieved and grateful. It felt like the world had expected him to bounce back from everything that had been thrown at him for the longest time. He wasn’t used to the idea that someone would actively protect his rest, to actively ensure that he could heal in full before getting back into the swing of things.
“Get better first,” Elder Francis repeated, taking a glass of hot liquid from a passing nurse and giving it to him. It was tea, hot, rich and overpoweringly sweet. Beng drank greedily, not caring that he was scalding his tongue in the process. “In time, we will teach you to work in tandem with your abilities, so that you get to harness it, instead of letting it just overtake your mind to do wild damage. You’ll be very strong, Beng. You’ll change the world.”
“That sounds like a lot of work,” Beng said.
“But you feel ready for it?” asked Elder Francis, and his question sounded like the answer itself.
“I think it might just be worth it,” Beng murmured. He thought of the blood tracks he had left at the donation clinic, and glanced at the crack in the wall, plastered over by now but still visible. He thought he was quite ready to take control of whatever force it was that was germinating in his body, and to wield it as a force for good instead of mindless destruction. It made him feel purposeful, even excited, to get better. It was the closest he had felt to being happy in a long while.
“Why’re we doing this?”
Beng was standing in the middle of a room. At least, he thought he was in the middle of a room. He was blindfolded, and had been so for increasing pockets of time every day, till it no longer frightened him to not see. They had begun training the minute he was well enough to get out of bed. A lot of it was tedious and at times he didn’t fully understand what he was being trained for. But he was still soft and malleable from his convalescence, and the structure of it all was comforting enough for him to go along with for now.
“Focus,” said his trainer.
There was a clang, even and all-encompassing in breadth, reverberating in his ears. Beng breathed in; every breath was a sensation to be marked and noted; he breathed out and tried to understand.
“Brass,” he said.
“Correct. Weight?”
“Uh. Um, five kilograms?”
“You’re guessing.”
“Yeah, I am,” said Beng, unrepentant. “It’s heavier than the previous one, though. At least I got the metal right.”
The trainer sighed, shifting his weight from foot to foot slightly. Beng kept his ears open. Nothing was ever accidental in training.
“Where am I standing?” the trainer asked.
“To my left,” Beng ventured. “Near.”
His left arm shot out, quick and forceful—he felt his fingers graze the trainer’s cheek before the man sidestepped out of reach with startling alacrity.
“Arm’s length,” he finished.
“You can take the blindfold off,” said the trainer. Beng did at once, blinking furiously at the onslaught of light and vision.
“Two out of three,” he said. “That’s not half bad.”
“It isn’t,” conceded the trainer. “Your senses are getting sharper. But you still have a long way to go.”
“I know,” said Beng, who was unable to keep himself from smiling. He knew he was being smug, but after weeks of wrong answers and panic attacks, this was kind of nice. “Feels like it might just be worth it.”
“Why do you think this happened to me?”
“Sometimes great things come from terrible experiences,” said Mother Helen. “Fear, or pain. Things that exist outside the spectrum of what humanity thinks is acceptable—they give birth to things that humanity does not think possible.”
“Why?” Beng pressed on. “Why me, of all people? A lot of people have suffered since the Deprivation.”
“Do you not want to be powerful?” Mother Helen asked. “Would you rather have ended up as a traumatised shell, too broken to keep on fighting?”
“No, no, of course not. It’s just, I never thought life would be like this.”
“I believe in a higher power,” said Mother Helen. “I don’t know if that comforts you. But it makes me believe that there is a reason for everything—for why you should become stronger when others have grown weaker. I don’t know if you believe that.”
“I—religion isn’t really my thing. Should it be?”
She shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter,” she told him. “Then maybe you need to stop yourself asking why to the questions where there are no answers for you to find. Maybe the question you should explore is that of what next? Maybe you were given power, so you could protect those not as strong as yourself? The code of the Gentlemen is one of chivalry, of standing up to a government that is exploiting and destroying its people. You’ve stumbled upon us, but in the short time you’ve been with us, you’ve become such a valuable member, Beng. You can be the power that changes the world.”
“I don’t know if I feel like that,” said Beng, struggling to form words beyond the lump in his throat. He felt like he loved her, loved her with the sort of quiet, unspoken reverence with which a son might love his mother. Everyone in the Gentlemen did. “But I can try to be.”
She smiled at him, fond and proud. It didn’t feel practised, this time. “That’s the stuff that heroes are made of,” she said, and he held the words close to his heart. He was ready for any test, he thought. He was ready for anything.
The point was to be aware of when he was in the clutches of a dream.
After a while, vision had become unnecessary, even overwhelming. He carried out most of his training blindfolded. It was easy to tell when he was alone or when someone had joined him, as long as he kept his other senses sharp. And in the vacant spaces of his regimented life, it was easy to stay sharp, to latch on to any stimuli that made itself apparent. And even—especially—when he slept, the trainers had him keep the blindfold on. Altogether, he was rarely permitted vision for any more than an hour a day.
“You need to be sure about whether you’re awake or not,” Elder Francis had told him. “Some people use tests like trying to read or tell time, because they won’t be able to do these things in the same way when they’re in a dream. But those are secondary tests. What if your dreaming mind tricks you into thinking you can read? The surest way to prove it, is if you can do something that you definitely could not in the wak
ing world. When you can see, you will know for sure that you’re in a dream.”
It made sense. But it still felt a bit stupid at first, until the first dream he had since he put that into practice.
He was in the Institute. He always was, after all. One of the training rooms. He was cross-legged on the floor, so he must be starting his meditation session. Deep breaths. Clear the mind. Await instruction. His mind was pliant and his senses were keen, keen enough to focus on the smallest details. He could even see the smallest crack in the wall before him—
He could see.
There was no blindfold, not anywhere, and the sudden consciousness of sight was disorienting. Beng forced himself to return to his breathing routine. A breath in, and then out.
He was dreaming. He could see. He knew he was dreaming.
Nothing could have been as certain as the presence of a sense that wasn’t supposed to be there. The ability to see was the strongest and surest test as to whether he was awake or sleeping; that was why he had had to learn to function even without it. This was exactly what they had trained for. They had waited very long for this opportunity.
He moved on to his secondary reality checks, just as he had been taught. He pressed his hand against the floor and noted that his fingertips seemed to push through it just a little, as though he was sinking his fingers into foam rather than unyielding concrete. Then, systematically, hands shaking only the slightest, he fished in his pocket for the Gentlemen’s tract that they were expected to carry with them at all times, and flipped it open. He couldn’t read it. The smudged words floated and changed places before his eyes.
He was dreaming all right. But he was in control.
Carefully, he rose to his feet, willing himself to stay calm and focused. The last thing he wanted was to wake up now, when he’d finally gotten to such a state of being. He was allowed the luxury of sight in such limited and fixed settings now that it seemed almost surreal for him to have no choice but to see. Usually he could count on the security of a blindfold of some kind in his pocket or near his person.
He had to find the lever.
There was a switch, somewhere. That much he had been taught. He wasn’t quite sure how it would look, but he knew that he had to activate it. That would unlock the power within him, and unlock it without suppressing himself, the way it had previously. In lucid dreams he could actually be present at the same time as his unpredictable source of strength, able to coexist alongside the power within him, instead of it taking over his body in absolute dominance. If only he could just find it.
The door was closed. He padded over to it and turned the knob. It swung open with a ghastly creak that normally would not have sounded in real life.
“Where are you?” he muttered without thinking, as he stepped out into the hallway.
He went down the corridor. The doors of every room were shut, which was rare. Unless serious meditation or dangerous training was being held, the training centre generally operated on a strict open-doors policy. Beng couldn’t hear anything at all. It seemed like he was the only occupant in the entire building.
He picked his way to the very end, where the sleeping quarters were. The door was open.
He went in. All his fellow trainees were asleep on their assigned mats, silent as the grave. He went to his own, which was occupied. There was a figure there, very pasty and pale, as if he had been kept away from sunlight for the longest time. As Beng approached, the figure uncurled himself from the foetal position he had been in, and sat up slowly, movements jerky and stilted.
Now that he was facing Beng, Beng could see that the figure was blindfolded, eyes shielded with the same thick secure strip that he used in waking life. Skeletal white fingers twitched faintly in his direction, seeking and uncertain.
“What are you?” Beng asked.
“I am the Power—I am you—I am the Power you could be,” the voice rasped.
“There must be a trigger. Where’s the trigger?”
“Let me see,” said the Power. “Let me see so I can show you.”
Beng reached out. The groping hands grazed him and clutched at his wrists instantly with a sort of wild desperation. With the sort of absurd serenity that only came in dreams, Beng gently pushed the hands off him and tugged the blindfold from the Power’s face.
The Power looked at him. He had stones for eyes.
“This is good,” he said, still in that choking gasp of a voice. He was smiling, though. “Now we can meet each other.”
Beng woke with a start.
“How’re you feeling?”
It was Elder Francis, who was seated cross-legged next to him.
The room was a mess.
Something had busted a hole through the ceiling, such that he could see the defunct pipes through it. There were flakes of plaster and dust everywhere, and some of the chairs and mattresses had been ripped apart. It was as though a whirlwind of destruction had torn through the sleeping quarters. Beng jerked up into a sitting position, startled.
“What happened?” he gasped.
“You found the trigger,” said Elder Francis, who was inexplicably smiling. Why was he smiling? The ceiling was broken! “Well done.”
“Well done?!”
“I believe that was what I said.”
“The ceiling!”
“Necessary damage,” said Elder Francis. He made as if to put a fatherly hand on Beng’s shoulder. Skittish and disoriented, Beng flinched back at once, and Elder Francis stopped himself immediately. “You are made to be strong, Beng. That’s why we had to train so hard for you to activate the trigger. It’s all right now.”
“Did I hurt anyone?”
“One of the trainers was hit—but just minor wounds. Nobody was really hurt. But what matters is that we’ve got it unlocked. You’ve done well.”
“Wait a minute—”
“What?”
Beng felt around, frantically. The blindfold was nowhere to be found.
“I can see,” he said, breathing quickly.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can see. Did I take the blindfold off? But I was sleeping—am I awake? How do I know? How do I know?”
“Beng, slow down—”
Never had a command more impossible been given to him.
“I—I can’t breathe,” he managed to get out, the world blinking and fading out at the edges. Something was clutching at his throat, constricting and cruel. For a moment his vision cleared up and he could see, with immense accuracy, a hand wrapped around his neck: the white hand of the Power, pinning him down and choking the life out of him. Then he thought of the destroyed room and the fact that Elder Francis was still sitting vulnerable there. Somehow, he found in himself the will to not yield control to the Power, and somehow, gasping and struggling, managed to claw back into some semblance of control.
“Breathe,” Elder Francis was saying, when Beng came back into himself. “Slowly. Breathe. It’s all right.”
Beng could feel the presence of the Power now. He could, if he tried hard enough, even see it out of the corner of his eye, lurking and waiting in his peripheral vision. It didn’t feel like a weapon or a source of strength, more like a rival and a threat.
“I need to stay in control,” he said, the words bursting out of him with the urgency and desperation of an unstoppable flood.
“Absolute control,” agreed Elder Francis. He watched Beng fumble around for a while, and then pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, placing it in Beng’s hands for him to shield his eyes again. Only when Beng was completely calm, did Elder Francis go on speaking.
“You could be a sniper rifle, strategic and precise, or a landmine, unpredictable and possibly killing innocent people that were fighting on your side,” he intoned solemnly. “Your strength needs to be kept in the right hands. You are the only person who can and should be wielding it.”
Beng could hear, could feel, every breath rattling through his own lungs, with the kind of acute awareness that only acco
mpanied a great shock or upset.
“How do I do that?” he asked.
Elder Francis rose to his feet, and extended a hand to Beng. Beng took it and slowly got up on shaky legs. They began to pick their way through the rubble.
“This is only the beginning,” he told Beng. “We have so much more to go.”
He continued with his training for the better part of a year.
It was a cloistered existence, isolated from his home and his family and anybody else he might have known or usually interacted with. It was funny to think now that when he had first begun, he had pleaded to go home. Now he wore discipline like an armour over the soft vulnerability of desire, of discomfort and of doubt. His life was governed by nothing but the rigid perimeters of strict control. He was expected to rise at punishing hours, usually crawling out of bed in the wee hours. Much of the day was spent training his physical skill, his senses and his control over the Power. There were no holidays or reprieves, but he learnt to prefer this—it would be hard to return to this life once he had had a break.
He knew he was doing well, possibly one of the best amongst the trainees. His trainers could not help but give it away from the way they spoke to him, and from the kind of schedule and plans they made out for him. At the start of his training, he had been expected to spend some of the day on chores around the Institute, just like any other trainee. However, as he grew increasingly powerful, and as the extent of his power grew more and more impressive, it was decided that he was better off spending all his time on intensive training and practice. Regular Hell Nights continued at the Institute, but he was no longer the one being tested—he was often enlisted as a trainer or facilitator, to push another trainee to his or her limit. Those sessions were the only times he would really interact with other trainees—he was usually kept apart and worked only with the Elders, and when fellow trainees passed him by on a rare occasion, they kept their eyes averted. He didn’t know if it was out of respect or fear.