“‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘You just want to win.’
“‘Not this badly,’ I told her. I was lying through my fucking teeth, Cooley. I hit the switch again. Her body gave out on her. She lost consciousness. I won. Lang and the headmaster rushed in and started congratulating me, but it was all coming too late. I had Selmer-Dubonnet won the moment I stepped in the room four hours earlier. Nobody else had a chance.”
Cooley looked at Goldsmith. He no longer seemed upset. There were no tears to be seen. His voice had returned to normal. The med cycle pushed whatever ugly things he was hiding back to the dark place from where they came.
“Camilla and I are both smart, Cooley. But she’s got a soul left. I don’t.” Goldsmith stood up. “Which one of us would you rather have on your side?” Cooley stood up and looked him in the eyes.
“You’re still inside that last Selmer-Dubonnet room,” he said. “Test hasn’t ended yet, man. You can get your soul back. You can still walk out of there with your honor, Goldsmith.”
“Second chances don’t exist in this place.”
“Yeah? Yours is standing right in front of you.”
Goldsmith stared at Cooley for a long moment, studying his face, using all of his valedictorian’s skills to check for any signs, tip-offs, or agendas, and not finding anything—just the unblinking face of an eighteen-year-old misfit orphan. After hundreds of peer reviews on the disciplinary level, that kind of face looked unfamiliar. It looked like a shot at redemption. Goldsmith glanced away to check his watch. “It’s time,” he said.
Cooley nodded. They stood up and headed for the door. A twinge of fear in Goldsmith’s stomach brought him back to reality. He reminded himself that if Cooley tried to double-cross him, he could still turn him in and get his confidential file from President Lang. But he started to think that they might be able to pull this thing off. And if he cleared an innocent specimen of a multiple homicide rap and maybe even found out who really did it, Lang might give it to him anyway.
Two steps behind him, Cooley started to think that his new savior was a better guy than he would have ever given him credit for. Human. Just trying to make things work the same as anyone else.
19
In the girls’ restroom on Level 82, Miss Caroline Melissa Keating—a sophomore specimen—washed her hands before her sixth-hour German Existentialist Literature progression. Miss Keating took her time because all she had to do was hand in a forty-page final paper on the theme of death in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (which, incidentally, she read in the original German). She reached under her white dress shirt, adjusted her bra and frowned. No good. She still had the figure of a lanky thirteen-year-old boy and thought it was ironic that Stansbury could train her to crank out a stack of forty publication-worthy pages filled with musings about death and angst in a single evening, but they could not get her to grow a decent set of boobs.
The door to the restroom swung open. In the mirror, Caroline saw Miss Sadie Sarah Chapman walk in. Sadie glanced at her. Caroline looked away out of deference. She’d kill for the kind of boobs that Sadie had. It was so not fair. Why, just last week Caroline had finally mustered up the courage to talk to Mr. Carl Maxwell Hainey and, five minutes into their perfunctory small talk about the night’s plane geometry homework, cute Mr. Hainey was glancing over her shoulder without any subtlety whatsoever. Caroline could practically sense Sadie Chapman and her perfect tits walking down the corridor behind her.
The door swung open again. Hey, thought Caroline. What’s Cooley doing in here? Without even so much as apologizing for his intrusion, he grabbed Sadie by the arm and pulled her into a stall. Caroline heard a few whispers. She stood there drying her hands a bit longer than usual, straining to hear.
“Hey,” came Cooley’s voice echoing against the white tile walls. Caroline realized he was talking to her. “Can we get a minute alone?” Before she could even utter a subservient, obliging response, he cut her off. “Thanks.” She packed up her things in a huff and headed for the door.
Inside the stall, Cooley took Sadie’s face in his hands and gave her a kiss on the lips. She pulled back at first and then relented, kissing him back.
“You need to do this, okay?” he said.
“I just … I don’t know why you’re so trusting of Goldsmith all of a sudden.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“But I do.”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “None of us do. Not inside this place.”
“You look tired. You look so beautiful, but tired.” Hearing her say this made him smile. “I know you didn’t kill those people,” she whispered, looking up into his eyes. “And if the school keeps on saying you did, I’m getting out of here with you. I won’t have anything to do with this place.”
“What about—”
“I don’t care about anything else. That’s why I’m about to do this.”
“I love you so much.”
“Not more than I love you.” Sadie glanced at her watch: 1:08 P.M. “Let’s go,” she said. “We’re almost ten minutes late. Just like he told us to be.”
* * *
In Progression Room #231 on Level 52, Professor Jeffrey Nelson’s image was broadcast onto a plasma screen hanging on the wall. His eyes scanned the area, always stopping on the two empty chairs smack dab in the middle of the room. It was the first time Miss Chapman had been late for his French Revolution progression. Mr. Cooley was regularly tardy, and since he was absent as well, this could only mean that he had gotten her involved in something unsavory. The professor had no idea what a beautiful girl from a prominent New York City family saw in a ragamuffin like William Winston Cooley.
Nelson was actually on campus at the moment, but was simulcasting from his private office on Level 29 because he had just wrapped up another simulcast address to certain members of the United States Senate, providing them with the philosophical justification—talking points, if you will—for the government bestowing Stansbury with a $1 trillion grant with the Select Committee on Education’s big vote that evening. A vote that, if the grapevine was correct, was looking like more of a formality than the hotly contested debate that was anticipated. At the relatively tender age of thirty, Professor Nelson was the youngest faculty member at Stansbury and, as he was up for tenure the following fall, his consultation with the senators on such a crucial day could not have come at a better time for his career. He prided himself on relating to the specimens better than most of the stodgy old academics around this place, but still the sight of two empty desks at his final lecture before exams was a blemish he could not tolerate.
At that very moment, who entered but Mr. Cooley and Miss Chapman. They tried to be discreet while taking their seats, but with only fourteen other specimens in the room failed miserably. Sadie glanced up at Professor Nelson’s image and gave him her best up-from-under-the-lashes smile. He tried to suppress the involuntary urge to smile back at her but only managed to turn it into a thinly disguised smirk. He felt himself blush. Get it together, he thought. Sure, he was only thirty—and single, at that—and finding this eighteen-year-old girl as attractive as he (and everyone else) did was not, on the face of it, a perverted embarrassment. But still, affairs between faculty and specimens were strictly prohibited and penalized by immediate dismissal of both parties involved. But he could look, couldn’t he? She leaned back in her chair, crossing her legs as that gray pleated skirt rode up the thigh just a bit.
“What’re you looking at?” snapped Cooley, glaring at Nelson’s roving eyes. Nelson cast his sternest authoritarian look back at him and effortlessly summoned the condescending tone of all the teachers he hated while growing up.
“Mr. Cooley,” he rumbled. “Now that we’ve been honored with your presence, please give us your thoughts on Montesquieu’s themes of religious freedom in The Persian Letters and how they were embodied in Robespierre’s speech before the Assembly.” Take that, you little shit.
“Uh … well…” Cooley
scratched his head, trying to buy himself some time. A specimen’s hand shot up a few rows back. The professor saw who it was and smiled. If only they could clone that kid a thousand times over.
“Thank you, Mr. Goldsmith, for saving us once again.”
“Given the fact that The Persian Letters were a metaphor for the French religious state,” Goldsmith began with his trademark, crisp, controlled delivery, “one would postulate that…” His voice trailed off. “That … that…”
The other specimens in the room looked over. Goldsmith had his eyes fixed on Cooley, who was leaning back in his chair and staring holes through the valedictorian’s head. Never breaking eye contact, Cooley snapped his pencil with one hand and the sound of wood and graphite splintering echoed around the silent room. Some of the girls gasped. Goldsmith shut up and looked over at Professor Nelson for some support, but Nelson was missing out on the whole thing. He had been watching Sadie the whole time.
“You finished?” Goldsmith asked Cooley, a slight quiver in his finest pseudo-tough-guy voice. Specimens stared in disbelief, like they were expecting him to spontaneously combust under Cooley’s evil gaze. Cooley didn’t smile, didn’t blink.
“I haven’t even gotten started.”
A pregnant pause filled the progression room. Goldsmith ended the staring contest and looked down at the notebook on his desk, nervously doodling something in the margins. Cooley did not look away. Professor Nelson finally broke off his appreciation of Miss Chapman’s aesthetic qualities and looked over, realizing what had just transpired. Someone had better watch those two, he realized.
* * *
Bunson and Cooley sat with Sadie at their usual table in the cafeteria. They watched everyone around them inject lunch (grass-fed angus steak, organic greens, and spirulina protein smoothies). Their IV jars were full of nutrients, but they didn’t touch them. Bunson looked at the table across from them and saw Mr. Ralph Owen Satterlee, John Jason Stevenson, and George Craig Jenkins set down their laser syringes and start to twitch. As if in synchronization, the noise level in the room rose and conversations took on a rattling staccato rhythm.
“Jesus, look at everyone,” said Bunson. Jenkins’s leg started to bounce uncontrollably, but his eyes were darting around too quickly for him to notice.
“It’s working,” said Sadie.
“Bunson emptied two liters of pure meth into the feeding vats,” whispered Cooley. “Of course it’s working. It throws the Normalcin doses out of whack … the med cycle can’t keep up with that kind of pure chemical concentrate.”
Sadie checked her watch. “It’s time.” She stood up.
“You don’t have to—,” started Cooley, but she was already walking off toward the exit.
“There he is,” said Bunson, nodding in the direction of Goldsmith, who was walking from the food vats over to an empty table with a tray full of liquid nutrients. Cooley rose and cut into his path. He bumped him, throwing his shoulder into Goldsmith’s chest and knocking the tray from his hands. Glass jars shattered on the marble floor. The cafeteria instantly went quiet, hundreds of pairs of unblinking eyes focused on the two of them in a standoff, everyone expecting Goldsmith to take the high road and let the janitors clean up the mess.
But he reared back and slammed a hard right hook against Cooley’s jaw. Cooley stumbled back two steps and then threw his body into Goldsmith, taking him low and tossing him to the ground. The broken glass shards on the floor crunched beneath them. Every specimen in the cafeteria rushed over—adrenaline mixing in with the methamphetamine coursing through their veins—and gathered in a circle around the brawl. Cooley rolled on top of Goldsmith and smashed his head against the floor. Goldsmith reached a big hand over Cooley’s face, raking his eyes until his fingers slid down to his neck. He started to squeeze. The crowd gasped.
“Security!” shouted Bunson from the doorway. Cooley and Goldsmith jumped up, brushing themselves off. The spectators dissolved and rushed back to their tables. A moment passed. “We’re clear!” called out Bunson.
Cooley shoved Goldsmith one last time and headed for the cafeteria’s exit. Goldsmith stalked after him. The specimens looked at each other and leaped up from their chairs, instinctively knowing what would follow. After all, there was only one thing that could come next. They rushed for the doors and filed out, sprinting for the elevator banks to catch up with the two nemeses.
Seventh grade specimen Mr. Joshua Calley had never seen anything like this before. It was the first real, live fight he’d ever witnessed, and between two of the most famous specimens in the whole tower, no less! His excitement made him forget all about the fact that his heart was racing at twice its normal speed and that he—like everyone else around him—seemed to be sweating and panting like an animal. Mr. Calley followed the flow of specimens toward the elevators and his curiosity got the best of him. He grabbed the arm of the closest upperclassman around, Mr. John Jason Stevenson, not caring in the least about coming off as naïve regarding the subtleties of Stansbury ritual.
“Hey! Mr. Stevenson!” chirped Calley. Stevenson looked down at him, annoyed.
“What?” he said, not breaking stride. Calley started jogging to keep up with him.
“Where’s everyone going?”
Stevenson’s eyes went into a shadowy squint. He cracked his knuckles. They popped, sounding just like the sound of glass crushed beneath Goldsmith’s writhing, struggling body. “The warehouse,” he answered. “Level 3.”
* * *
The warehouse was a sprawling space that was rarely visited by specimens, except for occasions such as this. It was filled with row upon row of crates containing foodstuffs, school and office supplies, linens, uniforms, shipments of meds, spare Nature & Co. windows, disconnected plasma simulcast screens, and just about any other material or infrastructure that was necessary to keep the tower running smoothly. The stacks of boxes reached almost all the way up to the eighty-foot-high ceiling. Forklifts weaved in and out of the industrial maze. Over the years the shippers, packagers, receivers, and other below-the-stairs folk who occupied this level learned that the specimens only came down here when something had gone awry upstairs and order needed to be restored. When there were scores that needed to be settled. So, on rare days like today these burly men parted ways in order to clear a path for the crowd that was following Cooley and Goldsmith toward the dark, dingy corner reserved for the most hallowed—and illegal—of all Stansbury traditions: the game known as dodgeball.
Up until 2012, dodgeball was played regularly in all levels of athletics progressions, just like any other school on the outside that needed to fill time during gym class. But, as Stansbury found out the hard way, the seemingly harmless game changed dramatically when played by beneficiaries of the med cycle: the IGF-1 protein had made male specimens so big and strong that the red rubber balls in their hands inadvertently became lethal weapons. The sight of several agile, six-foot-four-inch, 220-pound teenagers whipping shots at each other at speeds of up to one hundred miles per hour was certainly something to see. The rubber balls became projectiles that whistled as they cut through the air, unleashing a grotesque, meaty smack when striking a participant’s head or chest. An unintended consequence of the then-sanctioned dodgeball matches was that they provided the specimens with a type of raw, physical stress relief and primal excitement (for both the competitors and the audience) that meds and progressions simply could not satisfy. But it all came to an abrupt halt one fateful day during the 2012 school year.
The names of those involved have since been forgotten, lending the story a feeling vaguely reminiscent of an urban legend, but still, the tale was passed on from year to year and dodgeball was no longer a part of the curriculum. During a match in an upper-level athletics progression—the rumor held that it was Practical Applications of Kinesiology, now considered a mundane gut course—a cuckolded male senior specimen found himself on the opposite side of the court from the young Casanova who stole his girlfriend’s heart. While the med
cycle had revolutionized the work ethic, physical prowess, and intellectual performance of thousands of young adults over the years, Dr. Stansbury’s genius could not produce a pill to mend a broken heart. The match began and this sad, angry guy who only two days prior had lost the love of his life waited for the right moment and, when his rival left himself exposed, took advantage in the most brutal way. Some insisted that the professor supervising the progression—who also remained nameless—was said to have clocked the throw at 113 miles per hour. Others claimed that it was not the speed of the shot, but its placement that made it so deadly. Either way, the impact of the ball against Casanova’s face was such that it shattered his nose and sent splinters of bone up into his brain, instantly rendering him a vegetable. His parents came to see him in the infirmary and held a weeklong vigil before they consented to have the life support system’s plug pulled. Casanova’s assailant hung himself from a holographic projector in the atrium the very same day, his limp body swinging among the digitized branches and artificially green leaves. What happened to the tragic girl who came between them was anyone’s guess. Following the two funerals, the headmaster laid down the decree: Dodgeball would never be played in the tower again.
Specimens were obedient and sensible, but they were still similar in many ways to their less-gifted counterparts in the outside world, despite the dignified mien they were given in the media and the school’s glossy brochures. No kind of education could quench the taste of young people for dangerous, forbidden thrills. Almost immediately after the headmaster’s proclamation, underground dodgeball matches began. They became a means to settle longtime grudges once and for all, on a field of battle that was storied and sought out by only the bravest specimens. The contest was governed by very few rules, acknowledged by a silent code of honor: matches were three-on-three; no female specimens were permitted to participate; the personal differences that brought on the match were permanently quashed following the conclusion; and, most important, no headhunting was tolerated. Bored warehouse level employees helped clear enough room for a makeshift court in a particularly grimy corner of their space. Behind a crude sliding door made from scrap metal lay a concrete floor with a single yellow line painted across the middle, separating one side from the other. Three red balls remained placed along the line, glimmering like blood-red gems in the shadows. There was enough room around the court for roughly a hundred spectators, usually specimens and warehouse workers who wagered on the outcome of matches.
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