“Do you like having Miss Gallow as a teacher?” Mitsuru asked, not sounding the least bit out of breath.
“She’s good,” Alex said carefully. Michael liked to talk with him while he ran, too, even claimed that it was an important skill to have, though Alex suspected that he was just chatty. Nonetheless, he could manage a conversation while running, at least for the first few miles, as long as the listener was patient enough to put up with the gaps his breathing created. “But I hate the Program.”
“As much as you hated it when I was in charge?”
He snuck a look over at Mitsuru, looking for signs that this was some sort of trap or setup. He didn’t see anything other than polite disinterest, so he took the risk.
“More,” he admitted. “It’s bad enough having to do those things, but Miss Gallow thinks it’s funny, and that makes it worse…”
To his surprise, Mitsuru gave him a thin but genuine smile.
“That sounds about right,” she said, moving ahead a little, and forcing him to pick up his flagging pace. “That’s the way it was for me, too. And I also hated it.”
“So,” Alex panted, “Miss Gallow was your teacher as well?”
“No,” Mitsuru said, shaking her head, “it was Alistair.”
Alex mulled it over the next quarter-mile.
“Miss Aoki,” he managed, between breaths, “I’ve always – meant to ask – what’s up – with the eyes? Same as – the Director?”
He had braced himself for a bad reaction, but she just laughed, a first, in Alex’s experience.
“I have an implant,” she said, tapping the side of her head, just above her temple. “Two grams of nanomachinery introduced into my brain that spontaneously evolved surgical components and attached itself to my nervous system. The Director has an identical implant.”
“Huh?”
“I have a computer in my brain,” Mitsuru said, rolling her eyes. “The Director does as well. It’s an uplink to the Etheric Network, and from it, we can download data and temporary protocols, and upload information as well.”
“Protocols?” Alex asked, both amazed and out of breath.
“Yes. That was the reasoning behind my implant. You must be aware of the… drawbacks to using Black Protocols. In my case, those consequences were judged too severe to merit using the protocol, so an alternative was devised. Along with seven others, I volunteered for the process. Only the Director and I survived it, and the procedure was banned. We are the only two of our kind, which is unfortunate, because it is very useful device. Such a pity.”
“Director,” Alex wheezed. “His protocol is black?”
“No. And the Board fought him tooth and nail when he announced his intention to undergo the upgrade. Nevertheless, he designed the procedure, and he wouldn’t let the testing go forward unless he was the first subject. Black Protocols have always worried him excessively. He thought that maybe this would eliminate the need to use them. There was some precedent, actually. There are other ways to perform implants, or any secondary introduction of nanites, which have better survival rates. But the experiment that created us was deemed a failure.”
Alex managed a gasp as a response, but that was all he could do. Miss Aoki seemed to take pity on him, because she didn’t ask anything else while they ran. Alex tried to get into a groove, that place he’d become aware of lately where he stopped noticing anything other than the action of running itself, the obsessive mechanics of movement, but that was proving impossible when running with Miss Aoki. She’d started to stay a little bit ahead of him no matter how fast he went, probably with the intention of pushing him. In a way she was, because the last thing Alex wanted was to be caught staring.
Maybe that was why, somewhere around mile three, his leg cramped up. He limped off the track and tumbled down on to the grass next to it, his right calf in painful knots. Miss Aoki trotted back a moment later, with what might charitably be termed as concern on her face.
“Did you get a cramp?”
“Ow. Yes,” Alex said, kneading it with his knuckles. “Sorry about that. Not sure what happened.”
“Here,” Mitsuru commanded, “give me your leg.”
She snatched his leg and pulled it taut; ignoring his pained expression, and then leaned on it gradually. Alex tensed for tremendous pain, but there was none, just a gentle, facilitated stretching. After a minute or so, she slowly changed directions, so that she was pulling, rather than leaning on it, but that didn’t feel bad either. The pain subsided a few minutes later, and with some coaxing from Miss Aoki, the muscle finally ceased its spasms. Alex stood up carefully, testing his leg to see if it would take his weight. He had a bit of a limp, but he was otherwise fine.
“Thanks, Miss Aoki,” he said hurriedly. She seemed to be ignoring him, staring off into space with a peculiar intensity. “I think that’s it for me this morning. I’m going to head for the showers, okay?”
She gave him a bit of a nod, so he shrugged and headed for the locker room, perhaps a bit too eagerly, but Miss Aoki didn’t pay him any attention.
If Alex had stayed a bit longer, he might have seen Mitsuru staring at the inside of her arm intensely for several moments, as if lost in thought, and then, slowly, raise her hand and drag the jagged edge of one fingernail sideways, across the soft skin below the elbow, until she pierced it. He would have needed to be very close to see the blood seep out, first one small drop, then a moment later, another.
He probably wouldn’t have noticed that while the first drop hit the grass, the second did not. Instead, it formed a perfect sphere midway to the ground, and then it reversed itself, floating back up until Mitsuru caught it in her hand, something indefinable, between happiness and fear on her face, as she examined the bloody smear across her palm.
“It was right there the whole time, from the first night I met him. Rebecca,” Mitsuru asked sadly, looking over at Alex as he slowly limped up the steps from the track, “what did you make me forget?”
18.
Emily wasn’t used waking up this early and heading to the gym, but ever since she’d agreed to go to Anastasia’s island for spring break, she’d started to worry about how she would look in the bathing suit that she hadn’t worn since last summer. It was too late to do much of anything about her tan, but at the very least, she wanted to make sure that she finished shedding the last few extra pounds she’d been trying to lose since Christmas. She was too busy to make it to the gym after class, so she’d decided to start working out a couple mornings a week.
The locker room was quiet when she came in, with just a handful of girls changing into workout clothes or swimsuits. Since the central gym was the only one with an indoor pool, and the mornings were still a bit chilly, it was seeing more traffic than usual. Emily picked a row of lockers at random, squeezing politely by a couple of younger girls who were toweling off from a very early swimming session, and took the first available open locker. She didn’t even notice the girl a few lockers over, right above the floor, until she had already unpacked her stuff. She was already half-changed into her gym clothes when she realized that she had blue hair.
Emily quickly considered her options. The idea of trotting to the next row, partially dressed and holding her gym clothes and shoes didn’t seem appealing or dignified, so she resigned herself to changing rapidly and hoping that Eerie either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t talk to her, or wouldn’t talk to her if she did. Emily took her shirt off; glad that she had put her sports bra on in her dorm room, and grabbed her gym shirt and pulled that over her head. When she finished putting it on, she found herself standing almost toe-to-toe with an obviously surprised Eerie, wearing a black one-piece swimsuit and frozen stock still, in the act of tucking her blue hair into a swim cap.
“Oh,” Emily said faintly, trying to summon a smile, “hello.”
“Hi,” Eerie squeaked. “Yes. Um. Hi.”
“Well, Eerie,” Emily asked, hurriedly turning back to shoving her clothes into her locker, as if the
activity required her full attention, “how have you been?”
“Not great. In trouble,” Eerie said sadly, shaking her head. “What about you, Emily?”
“Things are fine,” Emily said, her voice oddly shrill, since she was talking to the main reason that things were not, in fact, fine. Her hands were trembling so slightly that no one else would notice it, but Eerie looked no more than slightly nervous. Emily was surprised and emboldened by the rush of self-righteous anger she felt.
“Good,” Eerie said, sounding doubtful. “You are here very early”.
“So are you,” Emily said defensively. The last thing she was about to admit to was her current weight loss regime. Even admitting the necessity would be, she felt certain, some sort of moral victory for the blue-haired freak.
“I always swim in the morning,” Eerie explained in her odd, melodic voice. “But you do the three o’clock yoga class with Anastasia. Everyone is talking about it.”
“Is that so?” Emily asked as she pulled on her running socks, hoping to draw Eerie out. She was secretly pleased with the idea that people were talking about her, even if it was about her and Anastasia.
“Yes,” Eerie said, apparently uninterested in explaining any further. After a moment’s delay, she just turned back to her locker, pulling out a pair of flip-flops and then closing the door behind her. Emily reached for her trainers, and then she got a nasty idea.
She tried unsuccessfully to put it aside while she laced up her left shoe, but it wasn’t going anywhere, even if it was mean, even if it was beneath her. Emily reminded herself that this was not just any girl, but her rival, who would doom her entire future, unchecked. This was the person, she thought angrily, who had almost managed that once before, with her infamous jaunt to San Francisco. And probably, probably just because she liked Alex right now, another airheaded crush, one that Eerie would lose interest in, sooner or later. Did it even matter to her, Emily wondered, that she was screwing up her entire life? Did it bother her at all?
“I’ve been so busy lately, it’s been a struggle to make it to the gym,” Emily said lightly, loudly enough that Eerie stopped walking away to listen. “First there was the dinner party, and now, with spring break coming up, there are of course a million details to take care of before I go away to Anastasia’s. You know, what to wear, what to pack, that sort of thing. Then, of course, Alex needs help with all the same things. The boy hardly knows anything at all about that sort of thing, don’t you agree? Do you think he even has a swim suit?”
Emily looked up at Eerie and smiled sweetly. The girl’s face remained as flat and expressionless as always, but Emily could see her hand twisting one of the corners of the white towel she clutched to her chest, and she knew that she had gotten through.
“I don’t know,” Eerie said quietly. “I have never seen him swim.”
She wasn’t sure what to make of that. Her expected elation mixed with more than a hint of doubt. Was Eerie really so dense? On the other hand, was she simply unconcerned? She hadn’t made any secret of her interest before, and even if she actually was Alex’s girlfriend, how could she possibly be so confident when he was going away with Emily for nearly three weeks?
She couldn’t be. Emily decided to twist the knife.
“What are you doing over break, Eerie?”
Was there a flicker, a glimmer of light above her head? Perhaps the barest hint of a halo?
“Coding down at Processing in Central,” Eerie said slowly. “Field study. It’s not so bad.”
She thought she could see it again, above Eerie’s head. Never long enough to read it, never vivid enough to identify the hue, but she knew that she was rattled, if it was visible to her at all. She had gotten to the changeling, she thought triumphantly.
“You poor thing,” Emily said sympathetically. She did feel some sympathy for Eerie – after all, she fully intended on taking Alex from her while she was stuck in Central, working in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, staring at a monitor. But that, she was starting to realize, might still not be enough. Emily was not about to lose to her, and she didn’t like the idea of Eerie being there for Alex to come back to. “That sounds awful.”
“It’s not so bad,” Eerie repeated, not sounding too convinced. She turned and took a step away, then stopped and looked back. “Have a fun break, Emily.”
“I will,” she promised the girl’s back, surprised and emboldened by her bad intentions. “And you, too, Eerie.”
* * *
Somewhere in London, in a fashionable loft with a view of the Thames, Margot killed four members of the former Taos Cartel, fast, but not so fast that she didn’t notice that the first one, the black guy, had still been at the Academy when she was a kid. She remembered watching him play basketball, out the window of the little house she shared with Eerie, while she fractured his skull against the white-painted concrete wall. His wife and the other two weren’t people she knew, so they were easier. She found herself staring at the way the blood pooled and collected on the flat’s antique Persian rugs after, marring the delicacy of the designs.
She was glad, for the first time since she had started working for Audits, not to be at home, back at the Academy.
* * *
“…it was fascinating. Apparently, Professor Khan is part of a Black Sun splinter cartel called the Far Shores, which maintains a private institution in Central out on the Fringe, you know, the edge of the city, right where it hits the Ether. Anyway, that’s what they study there – the Ether – and some of theories they are exploring are nothing short of revolutionary. One possibility he discussed revolved around the idea that the Ether is actually a solution, a complex stew of constituent elements. Not chemicals, of course, but something analogous; and that Central and even the Earth itself, the whole universe, all a crystallization of these elements, like a pearl forming in an oyster’s shell, lacquer building around an irritation, an anomaly within the Ether that enlarges and solidifies over time. That was just one of the ideas he talked about! He discussed various scenarios for an hour, and then I stayed after and listened to him talk after class until dinner, and it was one mind-blowing idea after another…”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said, not looking up from the screen of his laptop.
“Well, think about the potential!” Vivik raved. “If Central and our world crystallized out of the Ether, than that means there could be other places in the Ether! Other worlds, other universes, even. Professor Kahn thought that it was a real possibility, that the Ether serves in one form or another as a boundary between universes, and that it might even be possible to travel within it, from our universe to another one, Alex! We might even be doing it right now, if he was right about Central. Can you imagine?”
“Uh-huh.”
Vivik looked over at his friend, who was lying on his stomach across his bed, staring at his laptop, one hand propping up his chin. His other hand was wrapped with bandages and in a skeletal black brace, rested on the touchpad. He wasn’t sure what it was that he was looking at, but Alex didn’t seem any more absorbed by it than he was by Vivik’s ongoing lecture. Vivik sighed, but it was an affectionate sigh.
“You couldn’t care less about this stuff, right?” Vivik said, both disappointed and amused. “Did you even hear anything I said?”
“I heard that you stayed late after class so you could hang out with a teacher,” Alex said dryly, “again. You are a total nerd, you know?”
“Oh, well, that’s something, I guess. What is it that you are looking at, anyway?”
“Nothing really. Just this thing that’s been bugging me, I’ve been trying to read about it on the network but, you know, I’m lazy and clueless, so…” Alex said, shutting the laptop and sitting up. “I wish I could go see Rebecca before break, even if she is in a coma or whatever. I’d just feel better somehow.”
“Can I ask you a question, Alex?” Vivik asked hesitantly.
Alex just nodded, futzing around with the clamp on his forearm.
&nbs
p; “What are you going to do? About Emily,” Vivik said, feeling his checks redden, but unable to look away, “and the trip and everything. You do like Eerie, right?”
It wasn’t that Vivik didn’t want to go home. Actually, he missed his family, particularly his older brother, a great deal. However, given the choice, Vivik would have given up a million trips to visit home for one vacation with Emily. Not that it seemed likely that anyone was going to give him the option.
“I don’t know,” Alex said morosely, folding his legs in front of him and resting his chin on his knees. “I think so, most of the time. It’s kind of weird, being with her. It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking, or what she wants, or what she’s talking about. Eerie is cool, don’t get me wrong, but Emily’s more…” he said, trailing off self-consciously. “It kinda sucks, you know, talking to you about Emily and stuff. I feel bad about the whole situation.”
Vivik smiled at Alex, partly because his favorite thing about his friend was his almost compulsive honesty, partly to hide the bitterness he couldn’t help but feel over the issue. He had spent the whole of his tenure at the Academy trying to build something more than friendship between himself and Emily Muir, and he hadn’t had any success at all. Then Alex - dopey, perpetually confused Alex - showed up, and suddenly Emily was all smiles and availability, but not for him. Vivik had wanted to ask her to dance at the Winter Dance, and he knew that she would have said yes, even if it was out of charity, but she’d been so resplendent with her hair down and in a tapered silver dress that he hadn’t managed to say anything to her at all. Instead, he had insisted on taking pictures of the event, not because he was a great photographer, but so he could hide behind the camera. He had taken several candid shots of Emily that evening without her realizing, and though he felt guilty over it, that didn’t stop him from taking them out of his bottom desk drawer and looking at them often enough that the corners were blunted and bent.
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