by K. A. Excell
I arched my eyebrows. “My psychology will be fine, and I can catch up on sleep over the weekend.”
He grinned and stood. “How’d you stay up so long with Hunt in your room? She’s usually really good about that sort of thing.”
I just shrugged, and didn’t bother to correct him. It was hard enough for me to understand what my mind was doing—explaining it to someone would just give me a bigger headache than I already had.
“What was that thing you were holding, earlier?” I asked instead.
“A toy.”
The probability of his lying was sixty percent with known factors, and probably higher once I had more information, but I didn’t press the issue. Mr. West had secrets—I’d seen as much when I’d found his eyes during the fight.
“Now go through morning warm-ups while I go check something.”
When he came back, I was sweaty but limber. He came up behind me fast. The intercept point flashed red, and I danced to the side to avoid his grab. He recovered and stilled while I watched him, blue lines ready.
He grunted. “You’ve got good reflexes and reactions when you can see your opponent coming. I figured as much. Let’s try something a little different. Close your eyes and turn around. Just see if you can spin and block the strike. I’ll go slow.”
My stomach twisted a little as I looked at him. “Close my eyes?”
“It’s not something to be worried about—it’s just an exercise.”
I wiped my palms down my pants and took a deep breath. Mr. West was right. It wasn’t anything to be worried about—just a few moments blind, while he tried to hit me.
He wasn’t actually going to hurt me.
I turned to see if I could catch his eyes. For once, he let me.
There was nothing behind those eyes except a cold, hard wall. No honesty, no dishonesty, no malintent, or even intent to help.
Just nothing—like something was shielding his eyes.
I had no choice but to trust him. He was a teacher, after all.
I closed my eyes and composed myself to listen.
The first strike came to my chin. It was just a tap, and the blue lines floating aimlessly in a sea of black seized the contact to recreate his position.
I was too late, though. Blocking after the first strike was worse than useless—there was no guarantee I would still be in good enough shape to respond.
“That’s alright, let’s try another one,” someone said—probably West, given that he was the only one in the room.
It didn’t matter how many times he tried, I couldn’t figure out where he was until after he’d made contact.
Finally, he called a stop. “Maybe that’s too advanced.”
He modified the exercise so that I was to block a given strike. That way, he reasoned, I would only have to figure out when he began his strike, not where he would aim.
This exercise was almost worse than the first. He never fell into a rhythm, and he steadily increased how hard he hit until I was just guessing when he would strike so I wouldn’t get bruised.
It had been going on for six minutes with no improvement before I was fed up. I snapped my eyes open just moments before he moved and intercepted the blow.
“Enough,” I said.
He moved back two steps and fell into a neutral position.
“You’ve learned what you need to know. I might as well be deaf when my eyes are closed. This isn’t teaching me anything, it just hurts.”
Mr. West frowned. “Just because you don’t see the lesson doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to learn.”
“Yeah. Keep my eyes open, and don’t trust my ears,” I muttered. “Can we do something else now?”
He tilted his head, and then sighed. “Take a moment, Farina. It’s never wise to fight while angry.”
I bit down a retort and took a deep breath. He was right. Fighting while angry was only going to get someone hurt. I soothed the blue lines on my vision and retreated to my safe space for thirty seconds where the only thing present was the steady thrum of my heartbeat and warm beige walls. No sounds. No threats. Just peace.
Mom had taught me how to create this place when I was younger and easily frustrated by my auditory defects. At first, I’d had to use it almost every hour, but it had gotten better. Now I only used it when I needed a break from the outside world.
I returned to myself slowly. Mr. West was still frowning at me, but his eyes didn’t give any indication as to why. He just started showing me how to refine some of the movements I’d learned.
An hour later, he said I was free to go.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead and stared at him. He looked back with that shield of icy calm behind his eyes.
“I heard you are the one who sponsored me into the academy.”
He dipped his head just a bit.
“Why?”
I’d never seen him before—and there was no way for him to have heard about me.
His eyes softened just a bit. “You needed somewhere to go, and I thought—correctly—that you would fit in well here.”
Fit in? I snorted. “I don’t fit in anywhere.”
“Not yet, but that will change.”
But it still didn’t compute. “I don’t understand. How did you know about me? Mr. West, I don’t know who you are, and you don’t make sense.” I frowned down at the floor. “I don’t like things that don’t make sense.”
The ‘social niceties’ module in the back of my mind pinged, telling me that I’d just been incredibly blunt; rude, even. It prompted me to apologize, turn, and get out of the situation before I angered the incredibly dangerous man in front of me.
Mr. West just smiled. “You’re right. I had never met you before you walked into my classroom. I’m an old friend of your family—though Adalind doesn’t seem to see it that way anymore.” His smile turned bitter sweet, and he ran a hand through his hair. “I was just trying to do her, and you, a good turn.”
An image of my mother appeared in front of my eyes. It was quickly replaced by a second image—completely blank, just like the images of my father. Maybe he was friends with my father? But, even if that was the case, I would have no way to know. Mom destroyed all the pictures of my father shortly after he left—and his was the one face I couldn’t remember. I could see Adalind, with her frail smile and fragile bones. The difference between her and the powerful man in front of me couldn’t have been more pronounced.
“I don’t believe you.” But somewhere, deep in my gut, I wanted to. Since Dad left, it was just me and Mom against the world. Maybe it would be nice to have an ally—or maybe he was just pretending, like Zach. I needed more data, but his eyes told me nothing.
The social niceties module presented its warning again, only to be brushed aside.
Mr. West’s smile turned sad. He shrugged. “You don’t have to. Only believe this: I want to be here for you. Don’t think this means I will go easy on you in class, though! You’re my student, first and foremost.”
I bared my teeth as the recording of his strikes that had given me that concussion played in my mind. “That, I believe.”
He reached up to run his fingers through his hair again, embarrassed. Almost as if he could read my thoughts, he said, “Um, that wasn’t on purpose.”
I turned and started toward the door as I finished reviewing the footage. I could see the intent behind his eyes—slight fear and movement prompted by necessity. Those strikes had been deliberately plotted and professionally executed. Earl West was many things; honest wasn’t one of them. The real question was, why?
Chapter Ten
The dining hall was empty except for a table at the back with a dozen sandwiches. I helped myself and ate quickly, then found my way to Ms. King’s office.
She called for me to enter before I could raise my fist to knock.
She looked up from a stack of papers on her desk and grinned. “You’ll figure it out eventually. Anyway, how are you doing with that Sociology book? You got time to look through it last night, I trust?”
“I got through most of it.”
Her eyes widened. “And here Hunt was telling us that you weren’t a fast reader. That’s truly impressive, Farina. Come over here and analyse these for me. When you’re done with that, I’ve got some studies for you to look at.”
Ms. King handed me a stack of paper thirty pages thick along with a pen, and I spent the next hour going through sociology problems—grateful for the distraction. She glanced through them when I handed them back, and whistled.
“One of these days, you’re going to have to tell me what changed. For now, I’d like to know what you think of this school.”
This time it was my turn to frown. “The school?” Why would she want to know about the school? She was the one who worked here, and she’d been around far longer than I’d been. My opinion after being here two—now almost three—days would be statistically insignificant. I wasn’t a good source for data.
Her long, red fingernails tapped the mahogany of her desk as I debated whether to point out the inconsistency in her logic. I pulled a card from the back of my mind. Tapping fingernails was a sign of impatience. Impatience quickly escalated to anger, then violence. I needed a strategy to gather more data. I sorted through the ‘toolbox’ file Mom had helped me make until I found something that might work.
“I don’t understand the parameters of the question,” I said.
She sighed. “What have you noticed about this school? Is it different from the ones you’ve spent time in?”
That, at least, had a clear answer. I nodded. “Aside from fighting classes, I’ve seen quite a few strange things.”
“Like what?”
I hesitated. Why would I tell her about the things I’d noticed? Why would she care? But she’d asked, and there was no reason to keep the things I’d noticed secret. She’d been here for a long time, so she obviously had to have noticed the same things I had. Maybe that was the point? To figure out something about me?
I took a deep breath. “First, why are you, Mr. West, and Mr. Mccoy the only teachers with offices?”
“I asked for observations, not questions,” she replied. “I’ll answer the questions later, if we have time. Now, you’ve noticed that we’re the only teachers with offices. What else?”
“Both you and Mr. West never wait for me to knock. You always know when I’m there. Mr. West wouldn’t look me in the eyes, and when I finally did find his eyes, he gave me a concussion.”
Ms. King leaned forward with a glint in her eye. “Is that what happened?”
I nodded. “Well, I let my guard down when I finally found his eyes. I took my attention off the intercepts my lines were plotting.”
She clicked her tongue. “Well, that’s a lesson in and of itself. Don’t let your guard down—especially not while you’re fighting. Now, did you notice anything else?”
I frowned, and pulled out the folder of notes about martial academy. “Well, there seem to be quite a few students here with strange minds. Tabitha Smith, for instance. She hears sounds extra loud.”
“How could you tell?”
“She cringes every time the bell rings, even now, when we’re three weeks into the semester. Either that gong sound is as new as I am, or she has abnormal auditory processing.”
Ms. King grilled me like that for an hour before she finally stood. “Alright, if you sit much longer, you’ll be stiff tomorrow. Make sure you do a cool-down before you go back to do your homework. In the mean-time, Mr. Salzar wants you to go over some of the regions you missed in Regional History, and then Mr. O’Brien wants to talk to you about your math class.”
I spent the rest of the day ping-ponging around the teachers until I was exhausted and my head was trying to split open for the third time in as many days.
Mr. O’Brien was starting me in calculus—which was still a review, but there were some interesting integrals—and Mr. Salazar had given me a packet of papers to read. I scanned them through and fell into bed before lights out.
The next morning, my head was mostly clear. Mom picked me up and brought me home before she went to work, and I spent the morning working on an engineering project I’d dabbled with for the last year—ever since Zach showed me how to work on a bike. It was a set of engines, only miniaturized. The math wasn’t difficult—it was the actual device that was causing me trouble. I saved up all my allowance to buy parts, and it still wasn’t really enough to get half the things I needed—especially since I’d diverted quite a few of the components to the plasma pulser.
I sat at my workbench, staring at the pieces of circuitry and metal placed with painstaking care in a grid on the tabletop, labeled to prevent any confusion. I sighed at the “matchstick” box. I didn’t really need a matchstick, but the pieces inside could be modified to make the equipment I needed to check the first section of the device. Once I had that, I could re-work the math and adjust my design. Until then—
My eyes slipped to the pegboard hung on the opposite wall where I pinned an envelope with my allowance money. I wouldn’t have enough for another three weeks, but—
I stopped and blinked at the note pinned above the envelope.
“Extras from work, love Mom” it said.
I pulled it off the pegboard and leafed through the green bills. It was enough—only just barely, but it was enough.
I hurried out back to grab my bicycle so I could go to the hardware store.
The store was only eight blocks away, and soon I was on my way home with the matchstick tucked in my backpack.
Two blocks from my house, all the lines snapped into my vision.
‘Abnormal conditions noted,’ they said in bright red letters written across the top of my vision.
I braked to a stop as I pulled the visuals from the last two minutes and watched through them on fast forward.
There!
It was a splotch of blood on the cement, still not congealed, which meant it was fresh. Someone was hurt.
I dismounted the bike and retraced my footsteps. There wasn’t any way to calculate the probability of danger, but I couldn’t just ignore someone who was hurt.
Half a block back, in front of an alleyway I knew well from my time with Zachary, was the original bloodspot. A shiver raced down my spine as I stared at the alleyway.
This was one of the places Zach had dragged the guys he caught looking at me before he and his friends turned them into sobbing, broken heaps of purple and blue skin.
I swallowed hard. Zach was paralyzed. There was no way for him to continue his dirty work. His friends were another matter.
I curled my bare fingers into a fist and wished I’d pulled the plasma pulser rings out of their hiding places before I’d tried to investigate. Still, the odds were that if this was the work of one of Zachary’s friends, they wouldn’t stick around after they saw me. They knew I’d done something to Zach, and none of them would risk it for their old ‘friend’.
I stepped into the alley with blue lines on high alert, running a compare-contrast on other videos from when I’d been here.
The lines found something in the corner, huddled next to the dumpster, in the shadow so there wasn’t that much of a difference from typical late afternoon shadows.
The heap looked up. “Farina?”
The lines analyzed the figure and wrote her name in blue above her head.
“Tabitha Smith? What are you doing here? How did you get hurt?”
She started to untangle herself. “You really shouldn’t be here. It isn’t safe.”
“Then what are you doing here?” I offered her a hand, but she
insisted on pushing herself up. Her jaw was set, and her eyes were hardened against the pulses of pain as she leaned on the wall for support.
“I’m serious, Farina. They could come back. You need to go.”
I let my eyes wander around the scene a moment, and pulled what data I could. There were footprints in the dirt—faint, but readable. There had been five people, likely male from what weight distribution and foot-sizes I could pull.
“One girl against five guys. I know you can handle yourself but, Smith, you need help.”
She took a step toward me, then thought better of it and leaned against the wall for support. “You have to leave.”
“Not going to happen.” I’d stood here, useless while people I knew got beat up in this alleyway before, and I wasn’t about to do it again. “Do you think you can walk two blocks?” I asked her.
She shook her head in a minute gesture, and then hissed.
“I’ll help. Come on, Smith. You can stay over at my house tonight. We have a full medical kit—I’ll get you patched up. Unless you want me to get you to the hospital?”
“No. Not the hospital.”
I shrugged. Why wasn’t that wasn’t surprising?
Between helping her, and going back for my bike, it took thirty two minutes for us to make it back to my apartment.
When I had returned from retrieving my bike and had locked the front door, I found Smith laying on the couch, a bandage across her shoulder.
She didn’t open her eyes when I approached, but she did release a heavy breath. “Thank you for your help.”
I sat down in Mom’s armchair across from the couch. “What happened?”
Her lips curved up into a sarcastic smile. “Nothing at all.”
When I started to protest, she just held up a hand. “I can’t tell you anything more, Farina, I’m sorry. You have been in class for one day. You can’t be involved yet, no matter what Burton thinks.”
“Involved in what?”
She shook her head. “You’ll have to ask Ms. King.”
Ms. King, who recruited special students for a class that taught battlefield tactics and strategic blackmail.