Crystal Mind: A novel in the Projector War Saga

by K. A. Excell

“I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  If they decided that counted as a fight, then I’d be in the ring tomorrow. I was going to be sore enough as it was without being taught a lesson by the teachers. Being in that ring, in Liam’s place—it would be worse than Zachary. He pretended to know about pain, but the teachers didn’t have to pretend. They would take me apart.

  Smith forced her head up, though her eyes never focused on my face. Her lips wore a smile. “No problem. I shouldn’t have touched you. You would have been within your rights to put me on the ground.”

  I let out a heavy breath. The teachers’ attention faded away—all except for one.

  I looked across the room to see an unfamiliar woman dressed in all black. She had auburn hair cut at her chin, much like how Hunt kept her hair, and brown eyes so dark they might have been black.

  I shivered.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  Tabitha didn’t look up from collecting her backpack. “That’s Ms. King. She teaches Advanced Krav Maga, but she’s proficient in anything you’d like to name.”

  Dangerous woman, then. So why was she looking at me? I was probably the least dangerous student they had.

  I looked back at her to see if there might be some answers in her eyes, but she’d left the room.

  I checked the time at the top of my vision. Three seconds since I’d last looked at her.

  She was fast.

  I turned to leave, only to find Mr. West leaning against the doorway. “Come on, Farina. We need to talk.”

  I followed him to his office and sat down in the chair opposite his desk. He sat on the corner and looked past me.

  “It’s the end of your first day. What do you think about Martial Academy?”

  I bit the inside of my lip. I wasn’t really sure what to think. I’d started a list of strange things I’d noticed—like how Mr. West wouldn’t look at me, and how Tabitha Smith didn’t want to look at anyone—but there wasn’t enough data for me to form conclusions.

  After a moment of silence, Mr. West looked down at his hands which were clasped in front of him. “I get it, Farina. Why would you trust me? You don’t have any idea who I am—other than a teacher at your new school. Believe it or not, that’s a good quality. The fewer people you trust, the fewer people can burn you later.”

  I nodded. He hardly had to tell me that. The only person I could trust was Mom, and I couldn’t really even do that. She had my best interests at heart, but she could be a little bit useless. That didn’t keep me from loving her, though. Before the panic attacks had started, and she stopped remembering things, she’d helped me put together the programs in my mind that made life bearable. Mom was the only one who would ever look out for me all the time. It was just a fact of life.

  Mr. West sighed. “Crystal?”

  I looked up at him.

  “Why did you complete all your math work for Mr. O’Brien during class today when he said you had the rest of the week to do it?”

  Mr. West had called me in here to talk about Math? I checked the map in my mind to see if he also had a Math classroom, but there was nothing. The social niceties icon was blinking in the corner of my vision, so I didn’t run a cross check. Instead, I focused on forming a response.

  “The math was kid stuff. The calculations only took a few minutes. Most of the rest of the time was actually writing it down.”

  He frowned. “But you could have waited and turned it in during your next class with him. Right?”

  I shrugged. “Yes. But why would I do that?” My blue lines said that the best way to finish school work was one assignment at a time. Getting the easy assignments done during the designated time period was best practice.

  “Because now Mr. O’Brien, Miss Hunt, and anyone else they choose to tell—which includes most of the teachers—know exactly what your mind can do. Any advantages your very special mind would have given you can be mitigated once people know what you can do.”

  Like Zach. If he had known about the Plasma Pulser—if I had given him even a hint of what was coming—he would have shattered every bone in my hand so I couldn’t wear the weapon.

  I shuddered.

  “That’s right,” Mr. West said, and stood. “Maybe you should refrain from showing off, Miss Farina. It’s easier to stay under the radar that way, and you never know who might be looking for you.”

  Mr. West’s warning appeared in blue, written across my vision. I swallowed hard. He was right. There was no way for me to know who might be a future enemy. Anything they knew about me, or Mom, or any of the things I cared about could be weaponized.

  The social niceties icon blinked in the corner of my vision again, so I nodded. “Thank you.”

  As I hurried out of his office, I couldn’t help but wonder why he had told me that. What was in it for him? But my blue lines didn’t have any answers, so I archived the questions and went back to the dormitories.

  That night, I spent what little free time we were given for homework compiling lists of things to process while I was asleep. The backlog of data in my mind was enormous. I used my notepad to jot down a reminder to take some acetaminophen in the morning; the headache was going to be extreme. Hopefully there would be less information to process tomorrow, and even less the day after that. I would get through this—it would just take a while.

  I was just finishing writing out my directives for the night when Hunt entered the room. I looked up, but she just crossed the room to another bunk and put her stuff down. I frowned.

  “Don’t Prefects have their own apartments?” I asked.

  She grinned and pulled a textbook out of her bag. “Yeah, but I’d rather get to know the students. I shift around the girls dormitories to make sure everyone’s doing alright.”

  “And you’re staying here tonight?”

  She shrugged and opened the textbook. “The room’s only half-full, so I won’t have to climb all the way to the top bunk.”

  I checked her eyes, but they didn’t tell me anything.

  I finished getting ready for bed in silence, expecting my other roommates to come in any moment, but they never did. Five minutes before lights out, I looked up.

  Hunt was watching me from the corner of half slitted eyes as she lay face up on the bunk across from me.

  “You ready to talk?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  She snorted. “I heard what happened with Smith earlier. It’s really not hard to figure out.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “That’s crap and you know it. Farina, you need help—and I mean before you hurt someone. It was close with Smith today.”

  I swallowed hard. She was right. I had been prepared to do anything I had to in order to get her away from me. It was only due to Smith’s own skill that it hadn’t gone any farther.

  And what if she hadn’t been paying attention?

  Her average movement speed was slower than mine. She didn’t have the same analytical tools I had at my disposal. Yes, she was in the advanced Krav Maga class, but that only meant that she could hurt me just as badly as I could hurt her. And for what? She was trying to make sure I was alright. I rewarded her friendship with violence.

  “I don’t want to hurt people,” I finally said.

  Hunt swung up to sit on the side of the bed and met my eyes. “But you’re afraid.”

  I nodded. “I can’t—” my voice cracked as Zachary’s ghost floated past my vision. When he met me, I was helpless and naive. I said no. He said yes. He said yes again and again and again until I couldn’t do anything but capitulate.

  I was weak, and he was strong. I couldn’t do anything but cry and stand there while he hurt me and others that tried to help me. The inability to defend myself drove me to design modules threaded with targeting systems. Identifying the weak points in the human body wasn’t difficult
once I’d memorized the human anatomy, and hitting them was only a matter of plotting the correct course. Muscle memory came from hours of reaction games—a desperate attempt to become physically fast enough to follow the courses my lines plotted. After Zachary’s accident, I had dismembered the modules and hidden them—but that didn’t help. I was still too weak to defend myself against real threats, and too violent to have friends.

  But what was the alternative? If I hadn’t put those modules together, I wouldn’t have learned how to turn to minimize the damage his fists did. I wouldn’t have realized that beating him with my hands was impossible without more formalized training than I had access to. I wouldn’t have designed the plasma pulser. I would still be curled in a ball, trying desperately to avoid Zach’s rage.

  I pictured the words I wanted to say and forced them out through my teeth. “I can’t be weak.”

  “And hurting people that try to get close to you is the answer?”

  Hunt’s eyes were narrowed. Challenging.

  “No.”

  “Then what are you going to do about it?”

  The obvious answer was to refuse to fight. If I didn’t raise a hand, then no one would be hurt. The thought made my stomach turn.

  “I can’t stand by and let that happen again.”

  “No one’s asking you to, Farina. Think about it. What do we teach here?”

  “Fighting.” The word was slimy as it exited my mouth. I’d seen blood before, and bruises, and bones that snapped like candy. Why would a school teach that to so many people?

  “Wrong,” she snapped. “We teach control. Yes, we use violence to do it. If you can’t control someone who tries to hurt you then you surrender control of your own body. That is unacceptable. The only way to win a battle without fighting is to know that, if they start it, you will come out the victor with the body of your enemy broken at your feet if they decide to continue. You control the situation.”

  I swallowed hard at the image of Zachary half buried under the car, screaming and crying for help. If he had known how it would end, he never would have set his sights on trying to own me.

  “Get it now?” Hunt asked.

  I nodded.

  “Good.”

  She stood and opened the dormitory door. Smith and two other girls I’d seen in classes but not met spilled through the doorway as the timer shut the lights off.

  Hunt sighed and slapped the lightswitch back on. “You’ve got five minutes to be in bed, or you’ve got detention.”

  I pulled the covers over my head and willed myself asleep.

  For the first time since the accident, I didn’t wake up in a cold sweat.

  Chapter Six

  I woke two minutes before the first gong, vision clear of the usual notifications and analyses. I took a deep breath in the quiet morning. When everyone else woke up, the calm would be gone. The air would be filled with the buzz of excitement, anxiety, happiness, and pain. I looked around the room at all the girls peacefully sleeping. My eyes caught on Vera Hunt’s prone form.

  Who taught her about control? Who helped her find that icy calm that shielded her eyes?

  She shifted, and then sat up—as if she could feel my eyes on her. She met my gaze, then pushed back the covers and stood.

  Following her example, I swung out of bed and hurried to get ready. After the gong startled the other girls out of their beds, Hunt offered to show me the way down to warm ups before she went to find her class. Castillo was still subbing with West because the usual Prefect was still in the infirmary. Absently, I wondered what had happened to put her there for so long. Sure, this school was more dangerous than most, but this Prefect had been in the infirmary for three days, already.

  I managed to keep up through warm-ups in spite of my aching muscles. West wandered through the class, offering suggestions and pointers as we stretched and did basic exercises to get the blood flowing.

  Not once could I meet his eyes through anything but the mirror.

  Breakfast passed quickly, filled with chatter about last night’s tournament and speculation on what would happen tonight between Tabitha Smith and Doug Houston.

  The gong rang too soon and I hurried to psychology. I stopped outside Mr. O’Brien’s room and swallowed my dread. Dr. Carlisle wasn’t waiting with his endless unanswerable questions and searching stare. It was not a psychologist’s office—just a math classroom.

  I stepped inside and found a desk. A few moments later, Mr. O’Brien dropped a textbook in front of me.

  “We’re on Chapter 5 as a class. You can just use today’s class to get caught up—and tomorrow’s detention, if your Martial focus teachers don’t take up your whole day Friday.”

  I stifled a groan and opened the book. Of all the ways to learn psychology, this was probably the worst. While I wouldn’t have any trouble recalling the information once I read it, actually getting through the textbook was going to give me the mother of all headaches.

  Still, I bent my head over the textbook and started to scan through the words as quickly as the lines on my vision could go. I could already see the weekend full of textbook pages. Forget detention, it was going to take both Sunday and Saturday to read to chapter five.

  By the time the class ended, I was half-way through the first chapter.

  Mr. West was standing by the door to the Krav Maga classroom when I entered, and I caught him staring at me through the mirror more than once as I tugged my shoes off and set them on top of the textbook in the corner.

  I ran his behavior against average data and frowned. Sixty percent match with his being bothered or confused by me, coupled with thirty percent his wanting to talk with me, nine percent his keeping an eye on me—the lines were undecided between my troublesome history and the fact that I was new—and one percent outliers given by the fact that he refused to meet my eyes.

  I turned to him when he approached me, but he still insisted on orienting himself so he could talk to me through the mirror instead of face-to-face.

  Could he possibly know the kinds of things I saw when I met another’s eyes? I batted that thought away almost as soon as it surfaced. Sure, I could tell things about people when I looked at their eyes, but who couldn’t? The eyes were called the window to the soul for a reason. Whatever I could do, it wasn’t any more abnormal than the blue lines on my vision.

  I stored the analysis in a folder on the back of my mind labeled “West”, and focused my attention back on the room.

  “Your performance in last night’s class was abnormally poor given your reflexes and history, Farina. I expected better.”

  My eyes widened. “Sorry, Sir. I’m not great at copying people.”

  There was too much data to compile, analyze, and execute. It would get a little easier once I understood the structure of the class and perfected each move. For now, though, I couldn’t do much without giving myself a data headache.

  “That’s not what I saw,” he said.

  I stiffened.

  “You were trying to copy too much, and you were ignoring your natural responses.” He raised his voice, and turned to address the class. “Fighting isn’t about the forms we teach—it isn’t about getting it perfect. There is no one attack that will bring a target down, and there is no one defense that will keep you safe. If something works for you, use it.”

  He turned back to the mirror and met my eyes. “Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good, then fall in and warm up. Castillo, get them started.”

  Warm-ups weren’t difficult. I almost had them memorized because they followed the same pattern every class. That didn’t keep me from being sweat-soaked by the time we finished. I started technique drills with West’s words heavy in my mind.

  Instead of spending my energy on averaging the class’s form when they did the technique, I watched the blue lines in my v
ision calculate energy outputs. Castillo had said before that Krav Maga was all about putting as much pressure in as small an area as possible—preferably over a soft target. The throat, balls, or eyes were always preferable to the body. After a few sets of the technique, I closed my eyes a moment to build a basic model of the human body, drawing from the hours I’d spent studying human anatomy on the internet. The manakin was in front of me when I opened my eyes. I watched the energy readouts as I hit the imaginary target. While they didn’t have the same sheer force as Castillo’s did, they were higher than the class average. By the end of the first drill, the blue lines had hit their stride, and it only took a few repetitions to maximize energy output.

  Mr. West moved throughout the class, watching through slitted eyes. When he stopped behind me, I dedicated a few of the lines to watching him through the mirror. He just nodded and moved on.

  “Alright,” West called as Castillo started to transition between drills. Everyone fell into attention and turned to look at him. “Pair off into sparring groups. One referee per group, Castillo floating, Farina with me.”

  The other students grouped themselves into threes as I stood there motionless. Then two of the three faced each other and, at the third person’s word, began one-on-one fights.

  “Farina, I’m waiting,” Mr. West called.

  I hurried over to him. “Sparring?” I said, “I’ve only been here twice.”

  Mr. West’s lips twisted into a grin. “Yes, but you have the analytical skills of someone who’s been fighting most of her life and the control of a three-year-old. If I let you loose sparring with anyone else, I’d have to call the nurse’s office to pick your opponent off the floor.” He flashed the silver band on his wrist meaningfully.

  “Sir, I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  “None of us do, Farina. I can’t teach you control until I know what I’m starting with, though. Take your stance.”

  I frowned, but did as he said. He had to be mistaken. I couldn’t even touch most of the kids in this class. They were all strong and fast, and they’d been studying the style far longer than my two days.