Crystal Mind: A novel in the Projector War Saga

by K. A. Excell

  Hunt pulled a set of keys from a pocket in her shorts and unlocked the door so the students could enter. I waited silently as all the students streamed past. Hunt waved a taller student aside.

  “Farina, this is Castillo—another Prefect.” She turned to Castillo. “Where’s Quinn?”

  “Mrs. Payne’s in the infirmary. Quinn’s covering and Kor’s got some kind of competition today, so that pretty much leaves me.”

  Her eyebrows narrowed. “I see. Well, this is Crystal Farina—Mr. West’s newbie. Try to show her what’s up before you go all military on her?”

  I looked up to see a mirror above us just a fraction of a second before a note card concerning metaphor flashed across my vision. Right. I really was regressing today to have to pull that card. I took a deep breath to refocus as Hunt left.

  Castillo was taller than I was—a feat, considering I was almost six feet tall—with powerful shoulders and a square chin. His eyes—I looked away as soon as I met them. They were hard. Calculating. There weren’t numbers behind his eyes, but qualitative calculation didn’t keep him from cataloging all the ways he could dismember me if I became a threat.

  I pulled the blue lines to the forefront of my vision to start quantifying threatening behavior in the back of my mind.

  “So you’re the one West sponsored into the Academy,” he said.

  I blinked. Mom never told me who sponsored me, just that I’d gotten a scholarship. “I don’t know.”

  Castillo grunted, spun on his heel, and saluted a new man.

  The newcomer was shorter than I was, but powerfully built. His red hair caught the light unnaturally—a clear signal that it was dyed. I looked more closely for any sign of his natural hair color but there were no tell-tale undertones. A natural blonde, then? I shifted my attention towards his eyes, but he turned sideways so he could look at me through the mirror. I held his gaze without fear. The mirrors took away the weight behind his eyes.

  “Crystal Farina, I’m Earl West. You’ll be with Castillo today. If you make sufficient progress, perhaps you’ll join the rest of the class before the end of the week.” He nodded to Castillo. “Dismissed.”

  Castillo stiffened to attention, and motioned for me to follow him.

  We exited the classroom and retraced part of the path Hunt and I had taken to find the martial classrooms. We stopped early and turned into a room I had seen, but not noticed. I jotted down a reminder to put my map together as soon as I had an extra moment. This compound was huge, and it would be easy to get lost.

  The room looked similar to the practice room we’d come from, only three-quarters the size. Castillo pointed to a spot on the mat. “Stand there. Got any stuff with you? No? Good. We’re going to start with stretches.”

  What he called stretches left me with rivers of sweat running down my cheeks like tears. When he finally called a stop, twenty minutes later, I collapsed onto the mat. When I’d caught my breath enough to look up, Castillo was crouched next to a pile of multicolored balls at the front of the room. I pulled the memory of the last few seconds and played it in my mind like a video on fast forward. I watched him cross to the far side of the room and pull some balls from the cabinet. The memory flickered out, and I sighed. The fact that he’d moved hadn’t even registered through the exhaustion. If I didn’t start paying more attention, I wouldn’t survive in this school where everyone looked at me like I was a piece of meat.

  Castillo hefted a ball. From the air-resistance, and general velocity as he tossed it in his hand, I could tell it was dense. Rubber, probably.

  “How quick do you move?” Castillo asked.

  I pulled up the reference numbers to give him an average as he wound up his arm. One of the lines flashed red as I saw its trajectory. He released the ball, and I moved out of the way a fraction of a second before the ball made contact.

  “Was that a rhetorical question?” I asked as he hefted another ball.

  He grunted and threw it. That would be a yes.

  I slipped out of the way and winced as I saw the energy of impact reading. If that had hit me, it would have broken blood vessels in the hypodermal layer of my skin—though it wouldn’t break bones. In a word; pain. I brushed those calculations away and shrugged. If this was how he wanted to play, I would play to win.

  I considered a module I had created for a game I had started using to sharpen my reaction time and movement speed at home—something I’d started when I’d realized I wasn’t fast enough to avoid Zachary’s fists. It would do nicely. I touched the PREP module and watched as all the extraneous data collection bled away, leaving me with all my blue lines in the forefront of my vision. Now I was prepared for conflict analysis—which was why the module was called PREP.

  Another ball sailed past my head at forty-three miles-per-hour, and I frowned. This wasn’t just a game to Castillo. There would be actual pain involved if I didn’t get out of the way. I locked the PREP module in place and began to move.

  Castillo tried his hardest to hit me. Some balls were faster, others were slower, but there weren’t nearly enough balls to saturate my defenses. I grinned as he ran out of balls and dove for another one. I let him have it and snatched the one nearest to me off the ground. In the upper right hand corner of my vision, I plotted the locations of every ball in the room, and soon I was throwing just as hard and often as he was.

  When the gong sounded, I barely heard it. Castillo froze mid-throw, and set his ball down, so I stopped. The pattern was broken.

  “We done?” I asked. It could be a trick to mentally disarm me. Maybe he was betting on surprise to make me mess up.

  “Yeah. We’re done.”

  I released the PREP module and stored the relevant data. A moment later, Castillo opened the practice room door to admit Hunt.

  “You said West sponsored her in?” Castillo asked.

  Hunt shrugged. “I honestly didn’t think he was the type to take a chance on a newbie this far into the semester, but yeah.”

  Castillo snorted. “He wasn’t taking a chance, Hunt. We just finished up dodgeball. I didn’t hit her once.”

  Hunt’s eyes widened. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

  “And that’s not all. She pegged me once.”

  Hunt grinned. “It’s about time.” Then her grin faded. She looked at me with critical eyes. “You’re not a professional dodgeball player, are you?”

  “That wasn’t dodgeball, it was a bloodsport.” Or it would have been, if the dozens of balls aimed at my nose had actually hit.

  She nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

  She turned and left without another word. I pulled my schedule up in front of me as I hurried to catch up. After Martial Period One came snacktime.

  “Why does the school have a snacktime? Or a snack room, for that matter?” I asked.

  Hunt didn’t slow down. “Fighting is hungry work. You burn a lot of calories. Plus, a little break time goes a long way. As for the room? We’ve found that most kids sit down and seize up if we lay out the snack in the dining room. It’s better to make the snack portable. Anyway, we’re not headed to the snack room right now. Most kids hit the showers after the martial period.”

  Suddenly, I could feel the sticky sweat cooling on my face. I shuddered away from the sensation, but it didn’t help. “Showers are a good idea.”

  The water in the shower room was cold, but that was just fine with me. Once the sweat was gone, I grabbed a set of standard Martial Academy sweats and followed Hunt to the snack room. The line of students stretched out the door, but it moved quickly. Soon, I had a yogurt in my hand.

  I peeled back the top and sniffed it.

  It was sweet, like the yogurt sticks Mom used to freeze and make me eat when I was a child. I stuck the spoon in and shuddered as it slid through the slimy almost-fluid. Food shouldn’t be slimy.

  For one long
moment, I contemplated just throwing it out. How bad would waiting until lunchtime be? After all, I’d made it this far on just breakfast.

  The quick shower and long walk back to the snack room had untied my stomach from the knots all those stretches had put in it, and now it was growling at me. The blue lines had surfaced of their own volition and were calculating how far a human could last on a certain number of calories. Then they calculated how quickly decreased efficiency could set in with low blood sugar, and estimated how many calories Mom’s eggs and cheese this morning had contained.

  I pulled the spoon out of the yogurt and slurped it down, trying to ignore the feeling of that thin residue coating my mouth and throat. I stuck the spoon in again, and again, and again until the yogurt was gone and my stomach was satisfied. Then I banished the blue lines and took a deep breath.

  Hunt eyed me. “You really don’t like yogurt, do you?”

  I shrugged. “Food shouldn’t be slimy.”

  She stood. “The gong is going to ring soon. If you’re going to cover your ears, you might as well do it now.”

  I did as she suggested, without bothering to explain that I had already managed to synch the bell schedule she had given me to the alert system in my brain. The bell wouldn’t surprise me again—but evidently not everyone learned as quickly as I did. The next few moments were filled with covered ears and winces. I jotted down the location and description of everyone who winced on my notepad and saw blue lettering fill in by their figures. They were newbies, like me.

  “Academic Two, let’s go.” Hunt said, and hopped off the table where she’d been sitting. We followed the stream of students out of the snack room and toward the classroom hall.

  Chapter Three

  The next academic period was Algebra, taught by someone named O’Brien. I pulled the images from the last time I was in the hallway with all the classrooms and found his name on a door labeled Karate: Synthesis. The door on the other side of the hallway also had his name on it, and was labeled ‘Algebra’ and ‘Psychology’. I double-checked that with my schedule and swallowed as I found that he did, indeed, teach Psychology. And I was enrolled in that class, too. I stifled a groan. I’d spent entirely too much of my life around shrinks, and I had hoped never to see one again.

  I had spent two years working with Dr. Carlisle twice a week after Dad left. Dr. Carlisle was supposed to try and figure out why I was so afraid of eyes, but all he ever did was stare at me or ask nonsensical questions about inkblots or worse—my feelings. My fear didn’t make eyes scary—getting trapped in an ocean of unfamiliar thoughts made eyes scary. He never believed it, though, and I never took any of the medications he prescribed me.

  Mom’s panic attacks started the year after I stopped going to Dr. Carlisle. She went to a psychologist to see if they could figure out what was wrong with her. They asked what she felt and saw during the attacks, but she couldn’t remember—not even under hypnosis. After a while, they just gave up. Mom didn’t seem to mind, though. She said they were helpful with something called emotional release, even though they couldn’t do anything about her attacks.

  After too many years, I was done with people who asked qualitative questions about subjective things. Now I had a psychologist as a teacher. Great.

  I sighed quietly to myself as I walked down the hall and looked back down at the schedule.

  At least I wouldn’t have to deal with psychology until tomorrow.

  Briefly, I wondered whose bright idea it was to have me in that class. Then I shook my head. After my behavior during and after my relationship with Zach, it was no wonder Mom signed me up for that class. She knew I wouldn’t go to a doctor, but she also knew about the analytical tools in my head. Perhaps if I knew more about how the mind worked, I could help fix myself?

  It was a futile wish. My mind wasn’t broken, it was unique—and that was just fine with me. I could do a thousand things other people couldn’t, even if it made people hard to understand.

  I walked into the Algebra class and nearly melted in relief. Even though the door was marked ‘Psychology’ and ‘Algebra’, the room was decorated almost entirely with mathematics posters—well, there was one corner that quoted Sigmund Freud, but eighty-six percent of the room was covered with algebra.

  “You must be Farina,” a short, balding man said.

  I looked down at him and nodded.

  “Ah, you’ll be a bit behind. Fill out what you can from these worksheets. If you can get them all done, I won’t have to keep you on the weekend—but I wouldn’t count on it. This class moves faster than most algebra classes, so you’ve missed quite a bit. You can sit in any one of the open seats, just try not to be a distraction. It’s alright if you don’t understand the lesson.”

  I accepted the stack of papers then turned to find a seat as the gong rang. One of the students in the front of the class jumped and covered her ears with her hands and shoulders. The rest of the class just sighed.

  Mr. O’Brien clicked his tongue as a few more students dashed through the door. “If you can all find your seats before my ears stop ringing, I might not give you all detention.”

  I hurried to a seat and examined the worksheets as delight blossomed. This was easy math, and it would give me extra time to process all the information backlog I’d acquired! I moved my pencil over the sheets of paper as quickly as I could, but twenty-two minutes into the class, I’d computed all the problems and my fingers were still going. Ten minutes, and thirty-five worksheet pages later, I laid my pencil down and turned my attention to processing the raw data I’d collected so far.

  First priority was the map. I pulled up the footage of everything I’d seen in the academy so far and started splicing it together. Starting at the front of the school, there was a long hallway that ended in a T-shape, splitting into two entirely different corridors. We had taken the hallway branching to the right, so I followed that path, putting the other hallway in place without adjusting its length. Soon the hallway I was following turned left, making a ninety degree angle complete with wickedly sharp corners. The first door occurred on the right. It contained a long upwards staircase that led to a hallway with five doors. Four of those led to rectangular rooms containing beds and showers, but Vera Hunt had said that the fifth was for the Prefects. Apparently that one was more like an apartment than a barracks.

  I followed the stairs back down, continuing along the original hallway until it branched to the left. I turned to find the long path between the martial and academic classrooms. Slowly but surely I reconstructed the little yellow plaques on top of the doors from memory. I knew I was missing some because some of the names of the teachers that had been mentioned hadn’t been given a classroom yet; like Ms. King and Ms. Rin. Those would be beyond Mr. O’Brien’s classroom, somewhere I hadn’t yet gone. I would have to remedy that later.

  I went back to the junction of hallways and turned left, to continue along the original hall. Soon, there was another junction. I turned, finding a number of doors I couldn’t pair with rooms, but there was one I recognized from earlier. I opened the door and wandered into the snack room.

  When I had finished labeling the map with everything I knew, I archived every teacher’s name and tagged it with the classes they taught. Then, I opened another file for the Prefects. When I finally finished sorting people, I started focusing on every person I’d seen today. I visualized the face and tagged them with every piece of information I could find. Mostly, I sorted them into groups by teachers I’d seen them with, then tentatively cross-referenced them with other kids I’d seen them next to. Finally, I put a tentative tag on how new they were based on the degree to which they flinched when they heard the bell.

  By the time I was done, the timer in the top of my vision was counting down to how long until the gong went off. This time, I didn’t flinch when it rang, I just walked up to where Mr. O’Brien was standing near his desk and hande
d him the papers.

  “Can I join class tomorrow?” I asked as all the other kids filed out of the room.

  He looked down at the papers. Then pulled the round wire glasses off his face and sighed. “What did you use to cheat?”

  My eyes widened. What did he mean, cheat? I reviewed my actions for something he might have misconstrued, but I hadn’t pulled anything out of my bag. I hadn’t checked my phone—I hadn’t done anything except write on the worksheets.

  “I am not a cheater, sir.” The words were hard in my throat. Was he just determined to think the worst of me, for some reason? It was the only thing I could think of that would explain his accusation.

  He looked up with anger tinged distrust in his eyes—reminding me of Zachary at the beginning of one of his rages. I took a step back and brought the blue lines to the forefront of my vision, ready to plot intercepts if need be.

  His sigh muted the emotions in his eyes. “What else would you have me believe? I can’t even do those in the time it took you, and I barely have to think about them—which leaves me an interesting question. Did you memorize all the answers before you came in to keep yourself from getting detention? Hunt tells me you have a photographic memory.”

  “What? No!”

  “Then what?”

  I checked the time before my next period started and clenched my teeth. I would have to run to my next class to keep from being late. Being late meant detention, and detention meant not being able to see Mom on Friday.