The Unspeakable Unknown

by Eliot Sappingfield

The last thing I needed was a distraction. “Get out of here, or you’ll be killed, too. Go on, go wait for the bus like I said.”

  He didn’t leave. The door opened again, and the other girl was in the room. “What’s going on, Nikola?”

  “It isn’t Nikola,” the boy said.

  I didn’t like that. “Yes, I am. Get out of here. You’ll die, too.”

  “Nobody is going to die, Nikola,” the girl said, putting her hand on my other shoulder. “Let go of that.”

  Enough. I swept into their minds. It was like stepping through a curtain, much quicker and easier than this one had been. Familiar and uncomplicated like minds should be. I tried to make them stop touching me and leave—

  But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be in their minds. I wanted to leave my friends alone. I was back and they were still touching me. Their hands were warm and nice and awful. I tried to make them leave again, but I couldn’t get out.

  No. Stay here.

  I tore myself from her mind, ripped myself out. The boy could pull the trigger just as well once this one was ruined. He slid aside, and I was in. I reached for the weapon, but I was already holding it, because I was back. The boy stumbled but did not fall. “Let me out!”

  No. Stay here.

  I reached for the other girl—the blond one—but I was stopped. Held. Restrained. I tried to flee, to go back to my own form. I was close. I could come back quickly and deal with them in person.

  No. Stay here. I won’t let you.

  “Take my disruptor, quick!” I said, without my permission.

  The boy reached for it. I squeezed the trigger, but my hand wouldn’t move. What is this? I can’t move my own finger? I squeezed and was stopped again. I still held the weapon.

  You don’t want to do that. You’re here.

  The little insolent wretch. “I’ll leave and you’ll die!”

  You can’t leave. I’ll hold you, and you’ll die with us.

  “LIAR!”

  Try.

  I fled again with all my strength, pulled away. I was out . . . in the dark . . . free. But a force, a great force brought me slamming back. The body shuddered in the chair like it had been thrown down. I was trapped.

  See?

  I screamed, my voice cracked, and what came out was only a whisper. “Let me go! Let me go! Stop it! It hurts! Make them stop touching me! Stop it!”

  I’ll let you go, but you have to let me talk first.

  “No.” My voice was barely a whisper. I was hardly making a sound. “I won’t let you.”

  Actually. You don’t have to let me talk.

  “I can do it myself,” I said in my actual voice, feeling like someone who had just come up for air after too long underwater.

  Hypatia stuck her face in front of mine. “Nikola! What is happening? Are you back?”

  The Old One was hurting me, trying anything she could to get out. My head twitched hard at Hypatia and delivered both of us a solid head-butt. Really, it was more of a face-butt.

  “Ow!” she said.

  “Sorry. She’s still in here.”

  Then Warner’s head was in front of my face. I head-butted him, too, but managed to hold it back, so it didn’t hurt that badly. Everything else was blurry. She was using my eyes; I didn’t have them completely.

  “Can you . . . kick her out?”

  “She wants out, but I’m holding her,” I said. “If I let her go now, she’ll come straight here in person and catch us. She’s too close. Is the bus back?”

  Hypatia glanced over my shoulder out the door. “Yeah, but what do we—”

  “I’m bringing her with us.”

  “WHAT?” they both asked.

  “Blindfold me. Don’t talk about where we’re going. She’s seeing and hearing through me, I think. Once we’re far enough away, I’ll let her go, and she won’t be able to find us.”

  NO! a voice screamed in rage inside me. It was almost strong enough to come out of my own mouth . . . almost.

  “Can it. You’re a guest, so behave like you have some manners,” I said out loud with some difficulty. Everything I said felt like talking after you’ve just swallowed a giant drink of water.

  Jakki didn’t like that. She fought me, but the more I talked and thought, the more I realized that I was the one calling the shots.

  “Was that you talking to her?” Hypatia asked.

  “Yeah. Let’s hurry this up. Having her in here is awful. Is Darleeen okay?”

  Hypatia checked her out. “She looks like she’s sleeping. What happened?”

  “Metaphysical stuff. Come on, blindfold me. Tell the bus driver where we’re going, tell her not to say anything, and let’s get out of here. Warner, can you carry Darleeen?”

  He couldn’t carry her, but he was able to drag her pretty well. Hypatia found a stack of paper bags under the checkout desk and slipped one over my head. Jakki was flooding my mind with an endless string of violent thoughts and urges. To my credit, I only socked Hypatia in the gut once when I wasn’t paying attention because I was trying to climb the stairs onto the bus.

  I want you to take a moment to imagine something. Imagine you’re a bus driver and you’re making a little extra overtime on the sly for a slightly shady acquaintance. You drop three completely healthy-looking kids off at a closed library in the middle of the night, and when you come back thirty minutes later, they come hobbling out the front door. One has a badly swollen eye that looks like it’s taken a serious blow. Another has a lighter injury on his cheek. One is wearing a big brown paper bag on her head and is twitching uncontrollably to the point where she needs help walking, and they’re dragging along a third girl you’ve never seen before and who is clearly unconscious. What do you say?

  What our bus driver said was this: “That’s why I get all my books on the Internet.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The bus had been on the road for an hour when I turned Jakki loose. I’d gotten more used to the feeling of having a hostile personality inside my head, but that’s not the same as being comfortable with it. Imagine taking a drink of spoiled milk and having to hold it in your mouth without swallowing it for an hour.

  At the very least, she eventually gave up on trying to make me hurt myself and others and focused her energy on simply causing me physical pain, promising to get her revenge in various creative ways and insulting certain aspects of my personality and appearance.

  When I let her go, she was in such a hurry to get back to herself that she didn’t bother to harass Warner or Hypatia at all. To be honest, I’m not sure she could have messed with them if she’d wanted to. Being that far from her own body seemed to weaken her. Letting her go was less like releasing a balloon and more like releasing one end of a stretched rubber band.

  A minute later, feeling about a million times better, I took the bag off my head and spent some time studying the scenery. According to the signs, we were just leaving Atlanta.

  Shortly after that, Darleeen woke up in a dead panic, threw me on the floor beneath the seats, and demanded I leave myself alone. We were able to convince her it was really me, but not before I’d gotten a good lump on the back of my head.

  Warner, Hypatia, and Darleeen all had questions about how I had captured Jakki in my head and what it had been like. I answered them as best I could, but there wasn’t really a good way of explaining it.

  “It felt like remembering something important, like when you go to the store and repeat what you need to buy over and over in your head, because if I stopped remembering to remember she was in there, she could get away or start controlling me,” I said.

  What I didn’t tell them was that as awful as it had been, it also felt good. I was able to hurt an Old One, one of the monsters that had kidnapped my dad. At one point I even tried to get into Jakki’s thoughts to find out where
he was, but all I got before she blocked me out was an image, somewhere dark and muddy underground. I already knew that much.

  * * *

  Darleeen’s new home, which I had rented for the remainder of the off-season from the North Carolina State Parks’ website before we left school, was a little cabin nestled in a clearing of a national forest that was almost completely unoccupied during the winter and spring. I didn’t think my dad would mind the charge on the credit card, since it was going to a good cause. It was simple, but there was a working refrigerator and a microwave. Since it had electricity, she wouldn’t have to make her own generator, which was what had caused all the problems in the first place.

  The cabin seemed a bit spartan to me, but Darleeen was over the moon about it, going on and on about how she might save up for a chair to put by the bed once she found a job. Before we left town, we had the bus driver take us by a twenty-four-hour discount store, where, over her protests, I bought her some basic supplies as well as a poster of a well-known TV family I spotted her admiring repeatedly for some reason.

  Once she was all set up and it was time for us to go, Darleeen called me aside. “Listen, I meant what I said back there. I never would have called you all if I’d known—”

  “I know. It’s fine,” I said. “All’s well that ends well, right?”

  She wrapped her slightly too long arms around me and gave me an actual hug. “Keep telling yourself that. I owe you one now, so give me a call if you ever need anything. You got my number.”

  She winked when she said that.

  11

  DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION

  Did you see,” Hypatia said between sips of her smoothie, “that we have another field trip tomorrow? To the mall!”

  “Oh god. Can’t I get out of it somehow?” I asked. “It feels like we had to go to Arkansas and North Carolina just yesterday, and next week I have that Metabotany final. I’m supposed to be able to cold-sequence a viable new species from scratch. I just want a quiet Saturday at home to slack off, do a little studying, and kill a few aliens. I’ll go to the next one.”

  Hypatia’s mouth dropped open. “How could you?!”

  “What? Oh!” I said. I hadn’t suspected she might take it personally. “In video games, is what I mean. Bad aliens. Like the Old Ones, not friendly, peaceable aliens like you.”

  “Heh, you didn’t bother me,” she said, but I could tell she was underplaying it a bit. “Although, I should point out that for a civilized race, you humans are awfully violent. Have you ever noticed that pretty much all human entertainment centers on either killing or mating?”

  “I hardly think that’s true,” I said.

  “Try to come up with an exception,” she said, tenting her fingers.

  I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Okay. Snow White. Girl goes into the forest and makes friends with dwarfs.”

  “Because a witch tried killing her. Not to mention that she nearly succeeds with poison, but Snow White pretends to be dead, until a sufficiently attractive person performs a human mating ritual that persuades her to quit faking it. Is that the Snow White you’re referring to?”

  “Snow White was not a hypochondriac. That kiss cured her.”

  Hypatia rolled her eyes. “So human kisses allegedly have medicinal properties when they’re being administered by someone who is wealthier or better looking than average?”

  “It wasn’t a medicinal kiss; it was a magical kiss,” I said.

  “Magic is either unexplained science or trickery. The whole magic-kiss-from-a-handsome-prince thing sounds like a myth perpetuated by wealthy, good-looking people in order to get kissed more often—not that they have a hard time of it,” Hypatia said.

  I decided to let it drop.

  “So what are you wearing to the mall tomorrow?” she asked. “Remember, you have to blend in.”

  Hadn’t we already discussed that? “I told you, I’m not going.”

  “But it’s not optional. It’s an exam—look at your schedule.”

  I groaned in frustration. That was just the sort of thing I needed, mandatory shopping trips. Sure enough, according to my handheld, a large portion of Saturday was blocked off and labeled URBAN CAMOUFLAGE AND DETECTION AVOIDANCE CLASS (PRACTICAL EXAM).

  “I’ve never even heard of that class before,” I said, “and I haven’t studied at all.”

  “Stop complaining. You just have to spend four hours at the mall without anyone calling the FBI or NSA on you. You can do that.”

  It didn’t make sense to me. “So even human students need to prove we can blend in with humans? Shouldn’t the test be for parahumans only?”

  Hypatia was about to answer when the front doors slammed violently open and in walked Tom. Well, he was only kind of walking. His legs were walking. I mean, they weren’t his legs he was walking on. They were homemade legs.

  Here’s what I mean: instead of shoes, Tom was wearing long metallic stilt-like things that appeared to be somehow bolted to his calves. I’d have thought of them as stilts, but they had knees—the kind that bent the other way, like birds’ legs. As they flexed and moved, the joints creaked menacingly and emitted steam in high-pressure jets, in precisely the way that birds’ legs don’t.

  The stilts, undoubtedly some kind of device to help a person travel faster or jump higher, were in the process of causing all kinds of problems for Tom. They kicked and convulsed violently, their metallic feet skittering out of control on the slick tile floor. Look up a video of a deer or horse walking on ice, if you want to know what it looked like.

  Tom made an admirable effort to stay on top of his homemade mechanical disaster, pivoting athletically this way and that, maintaining balance against all odds while trying to maneuver the legs and himself back out the door.

  A few seconds and some creative hand-flapping later, he managed to get the legs settled. He smiled in satisfaction before realizing that everyone there was staring at him.

  “Oh, uh, sorry,” he said. “Prototype.”

  I guess cybernetic legs hate being called prototypes, because they immediately shivered spasmodically and smashed his entire body against the ceiling several times before dropping him unceremoniously to the floor. A second later the legs kicked over a couple of tables, shoved the door open, and stormed out, dragging a frightened-looking Tom behind them.

  As soon as this was done, the tables stood themselves upright, and the students who had gotten clear of the danger reclaimed their seats, sorted out whose homework was whose, and went on with their meals as if nothing had happened. Someone’s spilled ice cream melted and was absorbed into the floor just as a droid waitress brought a replacement.

  Hypatia sighed wistfully. “Sorry, I thought I’d wait till that was over. You wanted to know why they make sure human students can blend in with other humans?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I kind of figured it out on my own.”

  * * *

  The next morning, when Hypatia and I arrived downtown, we found the same disappointing yellow school bus with PILSSRTA emblazoned on the side waiting for us.

  Because Hypatia was involved, we were unreasonably early again, which again earned us first seating choice and a free dirty look from the bus driver. If she remembered us from our previous adventure at the Tomahawk County Public Library, she gave no indication of it. Hypatia wanted to sit up front, but I insisted on the back row, if only to get clear of the driver, just in case she decided to reminisce or ask questions.

  As the bus filled with students, Hypatia and I played a game. She claimed to know at least one interesting story about every person at the School, so I challenged her to prove it.

  “His parents live on the moon without permission from the government, which can’t do anything about it because the U.S. doesn’t have its own lunar space program right now.

  “She stole a book from the bookstor
e on a dare, and Ms. Botfly stole her bed in retaliation, which was especially impressive because she had the bottom bunk, so Ms. Botfly had to attach the top bunk to the ceiling first.

  “Her grandfather ran for the Senate and lost because he wears a prosthetic face to make himself look human, and the fake face kept fact-checking his speeches in real time.

  “He was born like that, but the accident made it worse.”

  The students were dressed more like normal humans than I’d seen before, but not all of them managed it well. The teacher, Mr. Marconi, a miniature old man in a tweed cap and checked shirt, was rejecting obvious failures as soon as they boarded the bus. For example, a small group of girls had dressed in semimatching color-changing outfits that went from green to pink and back again according to how close they were to one another. Percival Freuchen had to be reminded that his robotic emotional support chinchilla would not be allowed in public no matter how many languages it spoke. After each of these admonitions, the teacher made a note on his tablet, and the students had to run home to change or leave their contraband behind.

  That said, the failures were few and far between. I believed I could have been fooled by most of the disguises. That is, until Dirac and Majorana stepped aboard.

  The Fermion twins were unquestionably dressed to fail. Their chrome hair shone so brightly in the sunlight that it cast shimmering reflections all over the ceiling of the bus. Their pale eyes were unmasked, and their strange light-bluish skin was completely obvious.

  Dirac wore an outfit that would have looked garish on the pope, except that instead of gold embroidery, it was decorated with brightly glowing threads that snaked here and there in unfathomable patterns.

  Majorana’s garb consisted of a black tank top that appeared to be crafted from flexible wrought iron and a knee-length skirt made from some kind of living vines, which kept slipping down her legs and trying to become a full-length skirt until she moved, causing them to recede immediately. Occasionally, flowers would sprout and drop petals around her feet.