Crystal Mind: A novel in the Projector War Saga

by K. A. Excell

  It was better than being expelled for cheating, though. I’d seen the academic honesty policy in the papers I’d signed earlier, and it was as clear on the consequences of being labeled a cheater as the other schools had been on the consequences of being labeled a fighter.

  So how did I explain my mind to someone like Mr. O’Brien?

  “I think in math.”

  Mr. O’Brien blinked. “Right.”

  I met his eyes again to check the sincerity of the word—sarcasm was based on verbal cues, so I tended to miss it. Sure enough, his eyes still showed disbelief.

  The best way to defeat disbelief was through demonstration. I pointed to a paper on his desk with three square holes in it where Mr. O’Brien had been cutting out flashcards.

  “That paper was an eight-by-eleven sheet. You cut out three three-by-five cards. The area is forty-three inches.”

  He put his hands on his hips. “That’s elementary school math.”

  My eyes snagged on a fist-sized rock he was using as a paperweight on his desk. That would work. “Yes, but it’s a useful type for what I’m about to tell you. Toss me that rock.”

  Mr. O’Brien grabbed the rock and then looked at me, eyebrows narrowed. “This isn’t one of those foam rocks teachers throw at their students for fun,” he warned.

  “I know that. Assuming that, like most people, you unconsciously try to average the energy per second you use to move an object, I can use the constant I got from handing you the worksheets to determine the mass of the rock—a little over a kilogram. I can average the volume and divide to get density—which is inconsistent with the density of Styrofoam.”

  Mr. O’Brien pursed his lips, but didn’t say anything.

  I plowed forward. “Throw the rock.”

  He put his weight behind the throw and delivered it at thirty-eight-point-six miles per hour. I danced backward two steps as the intercept flashed red in my vision, and winced at the energy reading. I still reached up to snag the rock out of the air and read the intercept off, complete with angles and trigonometric equations. When I was done, I put the rock back down on the desk and massaged my stinging hand. Then I filed the information away so I could construct a full musculature model of the teacher the next time I had a lull in the analysis queue. Preparation was the key to not ending up bloodied on the ground.

  Mr. O’Brien only frowned. “If you can do all that math in your head, then why are you in my class?”

  As if that answer wasn’t obvious! I bit down on my frustration and tried to keep my words level. “When one ends up at four schools in as many weeks, one’s math scores aren’t always transferred.”

  Mr. Obrien looked down at the rock on the desk. “Impertinent, but understandable.”

  I stared at him in silence for four-point-seven seconds, and then jumped as someone behind me called my name. Mr. O’Brien looked up. “Ah, Hunt. Here I was thinking you’d forgotten Farina.”

  I didn’t quite catch her response, but Mr. O’Brien laughed. “Quite.” He turned to me. “I’ll see what I can do about finding a class that will be a challenge for you. Now, whose class do you have next?”

  “Regional History with Mr. Salazar.”

  Mr. O’Brien reached for a pen and paper. “He’ll accept my note, but you’d better hurry.”

  I accepted the paper and hurried out the door. I plotted the least-time path to the Regional History class, and set off at a run—leaving Hunt trailing behind.

  True to O’Brien’s word, Mr. Salazar accepted his note and merely pointed to a seat. I spent the next hour staring at the board as he wrote things down, detailing the history of the early Italian Renaissance. I jotted down a few notes, but mostly stared at the people around me. When my head started to throb from all the data analysis, I took a deep breath and cleared my vision of all the extraneous tools I kept around in case I needed them. Then, when the throbbing still didn’t subside, I retreated into the depths of my mind—taking care to keep my eyes open and recording Mr. Salzar’s lecture.

  The ever present hum of unidentified sounds faded away. As they retreated into nothingness, the feeling of fabric, rough against my skin vanished and I was left floating in the dark. Alone in my mind. Safe.

  This was the place Mom showed me after Dad left, before her panic attacks started. It was room deep inside my mind where nothing could reach me. Colors, sounds, smells, and textures were all stripped away like I was in a dreamless sleep. My blue lines would wake me if something unexpected happened. Otherwise, I would stay here, healing, while my eyes recorded everything important happening around me. I could play the memory back at any time.

  I crept out of my safe place exactly twenty minutes later. The gong rang twenty seconds after that, and I flinched at the cacophony of sound against newly raw ears. Perhaps I should have set the clock to wake me after the gong.

  I filed that note away in my mind, then followed the students out of the classroom. Hunt found me in the crowd as I turned the first corner and opened her mouth to say something. She stopped, though, and put a hand to her ear. She stiffened, suddenly, and growled a response to whatever she’d heard from the wire she had stuck in her ear. Then she turned to me. Her eyes gave the impression of spitting fire. I shied back.

  “Farina, I need you to follow the other students to lunch. Something’s going down that I need to deal with.” She spat the last words, like she was trying to get the taste of something bitter out of her mouth.

  I squinted my eyes at the unfamiliar usage. “Going…down?” I rifled through the notecards in the back of my mind as Hunt put her hand to her ear again.

  If something was ‘going down’, what sort of aerodynamics would it have to have for Hunt to get there in time to catch it, anyway? She looked like she would run fast enough to break the sound barrier if it meant she would get there in time.

  “Don’t worry about it, kid. I’ve got to go.” She turned and jogged down the hall, leaving me to stare after her.

  Chapter Four

  Rather than attempt an aerodynamic model for Hunt’s impossible situation, I just filed a note under ‘ask Mom’ and hurried after the crowd of students heading for lunch. They turned into a thirty foot by ninety foot room with colored glass chandeliers that scattered spots of electric light where they could be caught by the occasional mirror on the wall or reflected by the glossy varnish on the rich wooden floor. Four long, skinny tables ran down the length of the hall on either side of a steel grey carpet, with seating for over three hundred people. Another table at the front ran the wrong way across, adding an additional seventy people to the room’s seating capacity. Most of those people were here today—and they were all talking.

  The sounds scattered off the hard, grey stone walls, blending with the smell of meat, grease, spice, and bread. I tried to take a deep breath, only for the feeling of stagnant air being breathed by too many bodies to steal my attention. The lights being refracted by crystal chandeliers, reflected by mirrors, and scattered by shining silverware were too much for me to follow, and I bit down on a scream. My blue lines went limp in my vision—paralyzed by the sheer amount of information in this new room. It took all my self control not to clap my hands over my ears and run from the room. Instead, I pulled at the blue lines and shoved them at the queue in my mind. The faster I could analyze the information, the faster I could clear it from my awareness. Moments later, my vision was crowded with notifications—but the sounds had faded to a dull roar.

  A girl in front of me pointed to the far right table against the walls—grey, but hex code #585a5e instead of the lighter #828385 of the rug on the floor. I sat down there, still trying to wrestle all the information into nice, neat categories in my head.

  When I finally managed to clear enough information from my vision to see again, someone was waving a hand in front of my face.

  “Kid?”

  I looked up at the
person trying to—get my attention? I forced enough cards from my vision to be able to make out his face, then pulled a card to be sure that his actions were consistent with a deliberate attempt to draw my attention. I replaced the card. That done, I traced the fingers waving in my face up the arm and to its owner’s face—careful to avoid his eyes.

  “Finally! Look, who told you to sit here?”

  This new person stood six inches taller than Vera Hunt’s five foot frame, with broader shoulders. His hair was longer than the school’s average by 0.68 inches, and his rounded fingernails bore the telltale reflection of a clear-coat.

  My shoulders hunched under his angry gaze. Even without looking at his eyes, I could feel his annoyance.

  “I asked you a question, newbie.” The sound was harsh in my ears as I dragged the meaning from the words and started to formulate a response.

  “I—I don’t—”

  “You don’t know.” His gaze intensified, and I could feel old machinery from the times I’d wilted under Zach’s eyes start to come back together. I tried to keep the pieces apart, but the longer he stared, the closer together those pieces came. A section locked. My hands curled into fists, and then released as he sighed and looked away.

  I risked a glance upward to see him staring at the chandeliers strung in a two-by-nine grid in the center of the room. More analysis surged to my vision, fighting for my attention.

  “Look. You’re obviously not supposed to be sitting with the third years. Go to that table over there, and try to pay attention. It shouldn’t be that hard to tell when you aren’t with other first years.”

  I sat there, silent, as I tried to clear my vision enough to identify the first year table and plot a course. Finally, the course was locked in. I stood under the Prefect’s laser eyes and followed the path like a train on tracks—hoping desperately that the way as clear now as when I had plotted the course. My ears were hot by the time I found a new seat. I checked the still-dismembered modules in my mind. They hadn’t retreated. Only paused.

  I pulled on the BYE-BYE module—one of the less volatile programs that had snapped together. I took one deep breath, then another as all the extraneous thoughts slid into a file marked “after the crisis is over”. Working mind clear, I pulled the video from earlier and noted an anticipatory gleam in someone’s eye that drew my attention—now that it wasn’t cluttered by hex codes. It was the girl who had originally pointed me toward the third-year table.

  I banished the tape and looked around, anger working around the edges of my vision. That same girl was looking at me from across the first year table, two people down. The people next to her were chuckling, like they’d just had a wonderful joke.

  Sure, point the new girl to the wrong table and watch as she gets in trouble. They thought it was funny, but I didn’t. I had ways of dealing with that kind of prank, though—I had to. It happened at least a few times every school year.

  The trickster and her friends were still nameless, but that didn’t matter. I pulled out my notebook and flipped to a well-worn page at the beginning with the word ‘untrustworthy’ written on it. A moment later, the word hovered next to each of them—a reminder I could see every time I saw them.

  That finished, and the blue lines finding nothing immediately dangerous, I released Zach’s module and grabbed food for my plate from where it was laid out in the center of the table. Buzzing started in my ears from noise I was too tired to decipher.

  Someone tapped on my shoulder and the rest of Zach’s modules—the ones I’d dismembered to keep them from activating and making me hurt someone—jerked closer to each other. I placed a mental hand on them then looked at who had nearly gotten their arm ripped off. She was petite, with brown hair that fell in her face as she looked at the floor. I blinked as a cross reference appeared over her head. She was the one who still cringed at the bell in Mr. O’Brien’s class.

  “Call me Smith,” she said, and stuck her hand at me.

  I looked at the offered appendage, then squinted at her. In all the footage I had of her, not once had she actually ever looked up. Could she be afraid of eyes, like I was?

  “Sure, I can call you that. What’s your name?” I asked. I took her hand to satisfy the complaining ‘social niceties’ program in the upper left of my vision, then dropped it quickly. The clothes against my skin were already taking too much attention in this room where sounds, lights, and smells were at critical density. I didn’t need my mind going off and trying to build premature models based on a handshake.

  She gave a slight grin. “My name is Tabitha Smith, but most people here just go by their last name.”

  I wrote that down on my notepad and stowed the information for later sorting. The social niceties program prompted me again, so I introduced myself between bites of lunch, then patted myself on the back for not shoving the program into the locked drawer at the very bottom of my social notes filing cabinet.

  Smith pointed at the guy across from her. “This is Briggs. I think he might be in a few of your classes.”

  I looked up from the ham sandwich and ran Briggs’ face through a quick matching program, then nodded. “Krav Maga.”

  His mouth opened 0.27 seconds longer than average chewing speed, then closed again. He finished swallowing his food.

  “You are observant—against all odds, it seems.”

  His eyes suggested that there was more to his statement than words, but I wasn’t about to hold his eyes—unassuming though they were—long enough to puzzle out any hidden meanings. I already had enough data to sort through. If I looked at eyes now, I might get lost in them like I always got lost in Mom’s.

  Smith’s laugh added to that data load, and I nearly covered my ears. I survived the sound, then used the BYE-BYE module to clear my working mind again. I took a few more bites, then realized that Briggs was staring at me.

  “Maybe not?” Smith was saying. She still looked like she was completely focused on her food. So why did I feel like she was evaluating everything I did?

  I finished the sandwich then reached for the water glass set at the top of my plate.

  “Hey, you know it is not polite to ignore others—especially not others who want to be your friends,” Briggs said.

  I looked up at him. There was no guile in his eyes, and the social niceties notification had been vibrating on my vision for eighty-six, now eighty-seven seconds.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is all hard to process.” The program changed, but didn’t go away. To satisfy it, I added, “What were you saying?”

  Briggs looked at Smith, who shrugged, but I wasn’t about to spend enough energy to decipher the gesture. I drank some more water and waited.

  “I was just wondering what you thought about West. You’ve had a class with him, right?” Smith said.

  I frowned. “I haven’t really been able to see him. He sent me out of the room with a Prefect the moment I arrived.”

  “Oh, right. You got here late—I had forgotten,” Smith said. I noted the lie in blue by her head. “Welcome to the late club. You’re probably going to want to keep an eye out. Kids who transfer here from other schools have to stick together, you know? Could be worse, though. You’re what, a junior in highschool? I heard there was a first year senior here a few years back. They gave him no end of trouble.”

  Briggs coughed. “Anyway, you’re going to want to keep your eye on Mr. West. He’s got some quirks for sure. ‘Course, he’s not as strange as some. Stiff, and I’ve heard stories of him pushing students hard. He’s had more students in the infirmary than even Ms. King, but I honestly think she’s stranger.”

  Smith bit the inside of her cheek. “Yeah, maybe. What do you think, Farina?”

  Mr. West was…well, I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t had enough time to analyze movement patterns, and I’d never directly seen his eyes. Without that information, I couldn’t evaluate him, le
t alone compare him to this Ms. King I’d never even seen.

  I opened my mouth to respond when Smith stiffened. I looked around to find the cause, only to spot a student limping in late. My blue lines noted it as a probable abnormality—but how had Smith noticed? She hadn’t even turned around, so there was no way she could see him.

  He found the seat nearest to the door at the second year table then stared silently at his plate. His face was shades of brown, blue, and green that turned my stomach. I’d seen them all too commonly on my own skin.

  The second years around the open seat all squished together to place a foot wide gap on either side of him, and I could see disgust in every eye. Heads turned as the doors to the lunch room opened again to admit Vera Hunt. Rage filled the air around her as she strode down the center of the room with her head held high. Her eyes blazed as she swept the room with her gaze. When she saw the kid who limped in late, I thought she was going to cripple him with sheer contempt.

  Instead, she moved her attention to the teachers scattered around the room. Some nodded, others just watched her. When the only teacher sitting at the long table stretching the wrong way across the end of the cafeteria nodded, the silence thickened and Hunt whirled around to address the room.

  “Of all the things a man can do, assulting a woman in this school is the most idiotic.” There were flinches and indrawn breaths from spots on the first-years table. Hunt raked her eyes across the room. “We are a martial arts school. Did you really think your actions would go unnoticed? That we would look the other way?”

  The man that had limped in earlier grit his teeth and met her eyes. “Assault is a strong word, Hunt. My business is my b—”

  Her eyes flashed and his words died in his throat. He dropped his gaze, though he still made a show of watching her. He was trying to project bravado, trying to pretend that what he’d done was no big deal. I had seen Zach do the same thing over and over again. It was obvious what kind of person he was, even without the comparison analysis.