They had nothing to talk about, at least, nothing that Rebecca hadn’t heard a dozen times before. Everyone knew what a protocol looked like, after all. And Alice’s little displays looked nothing at all like one.
“What did she do to Tung? What was that?”
Mitsuru’s voice shook, but Rebecca was already inside her head, soothing, reinforcing. Creating little spaces for doubt to erode away.
“I’m not sure, hon,” Rebecca said with a tired smile. She was actually glad to have the opportunity to tell the truth, for once, since Mitsuru wouldn’t remember a thing. “Nobody knows. Alice Gallow has been here longer than we have. Whatever Alice Gallow does is a secret, even to her. Even to me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No one does.”
“I don’t like it. It makes me nervous.”
“It made you nervous,” Rebecca corrected cheerfully. “It doesn’t anymore.”
“But, it could be dangerous…”
Mitsuru barely managed that, in a dreamy, half-removed voice. Rebecca pushed a little harder.
“That’s what everyone thinks. But, it’s not. Not while I’m here. You see, I know something about Alice Gallow that no one else does.”
Mitsuru’s eyes fluttered closed. She barely moved her lips when she spoke.
“What?”
“It’s our secret, silly. I can’t even tell you. She’s my best friend, after all. Now,” Rebecca encouraged, patting Mitsuru on the arm, “you go wash up, and go back to feeling good about the operation, okay?”
She stood there in silence, her eyes fluttering, before she was animated by a sudden internal signal. Mitsuru stretched like she was waking up, and smiled at Rebecca as if she hadn’t seen her in some time.
“Hey ‘Becca,” she said fondly. “Are you here for cardio-kickboxing?”
“I never understand the point of his lectures,” Alex complained. “I tried to take notes today, but how the hell can I take notes when I’m hearing all of this stuff for first time? I don’t even know what the important parts are. This is the dumbest class I’ve ever taken.”
Vivik laughed, peeling his orange in the shade of one of the massive HVAC units that had been crudely grafted onto the stone building. It was warm today, up on the grey slate of the roof, and Alex was glad to be outside. The three-hour long class had felt endless.
“It’s only been a few days, Alex. Did you take a look at the study guide I made you?” Vivik squinted up at Alex, half-blinded by the afternoon sun. “And do you have to keep pacing like that?”
Alex stopped, and realized that Vivik was right. He had been pacing since they’d come up to the roof for lunch. He sighed, and then sat down next to Vivik in the shade.
“Sorry — and no, I, um, haven’t had time yet,” Alex said guiltily. He’d tried looking over the guide the night before last, and he’d ended up falling asleep before he finished the first page. It wasn’t that Vivik’s study guide was bad, or even that the subject matter was boring. Rather, since arriving at the Academy, Alex had been extraordinarily tired, falling asleep not long after sunset most evenings.
“It’s not a big thing.” Vivik popped a section of orange into his mouth. “I think it might help you get up to speed…”
“Ha. You are worried about homeroom, when you should be worried about next Friday,” Anastasia smirked at him, around her the straw from her juice box. She was flanked, as always, by Edward and Renton, who were not eating. “Mitsuru is going to make hamburger out of you.”
“That isn’t helpful, Anastasia.” Alex grimaced at the reminder of ‘Applied Combat Fundamentals’. “I’m not exactly overflowing with confidence right now.”
“Well, you seem like a nice enough guy, Alex, so I’m sorry to see you go.” Renton gave him a toothy grin. “But, you had a good run.”
“What was good about it? I must have missed that part.”
Emily produced a number of sealed plastic containers from her purse, divvying them up between her and Alex.
“What did he ever do,” Vivik complained, looking enviously at Emily’s cloth lunch sack, “to deserve you making him lunch? I’ve been helping you with your biology homework since I got here, Emily.”
“And I fixed it so that Steve and Charles can’t seem to remember that you are in our class,” Emily said cheerfully, peeling a hard-boiled egg. “We are square. Alex is new here, and anyway, the poor thing is an orphan. It would be irresponsible of me not to look after him a bit.”
“There is a cafeteria, you know. He doesn’t need you to make him lunch.”
Anastasia scowled, looking angrily at her own lunch, which as far as Alex could see was made up entirely of raw vegetable slices.
“I was at my sister’s last night, so I had a kitchen available. And you brought your own cook to the Academy with you. When did you start eating up here with us, anyway, Anastasia?”
Emily smiled sweetly. Anastasia made a face in return. Renton laughed quietly to himself. And Edward didn’t react at all, which was par for the course, as far as Alex’s experience with him went.
“Well, I do appreciate the lunches,” Alex said quickly, trying to prevent the daily fight between the two. “But, how’d you make Steve forget about Vivik, Emily? I thought you were an empath.”
“Most empaths have some telepathic ability as well,” Emily shrugged. “I have a little bit myself.”
“Emphasis on the little,” Anastasia said acidly. She pointed at Emily with her nibbled baby carrot. “It’s a good thing that you can cook, Emily.”
“That’s mean, Anastasia,” Emily complained, unwrapping the plastic around her sandwich. “I’m doing the best I can with what I have. We can’t all be child prodigies.”
“You are only one year older than me,” Anastasia protested, waving her carrot in outrage. “I am hardly a child. As for being a prodigy — well, it would be foolish to deny it.”
Alex decided to focus on the turkey sandwich Emily had given him, which turned out to be unreasonably delicious, despite the fact that he’d never like turkey much.
“I have to get going to the Science building,” Anastasia announced, standing up and gathering her things. “I have lab to finish. Are you coming, Vivik?”
Vivik nodded and stood up, collecting the trash from his lunch in a paper sack for disposal. He’d told Alex the night before that he was a Sikh, from someplace in India, where his parents owned land. Alex wasn’t sure exactly what a Sikh was, though he thought it was a religion, sort of. Vivik’s explanation had been unclear. But, it did explain the turban he wore all of the time.
“Yeah, I’ll walk with you.”
Vivik looked over at Alex, who realized he was staring openly, and found something else to do.
“You want me to help you go over the homeroom lecture, later on?”
“Maybe,” Alex shrugged, staring off into the woods that bordered the building, for lack of a better option. “I was thinking about talking a walk or something. I’ve been feeling really cooped up today.”
“That’s perfect,” Emily said, looking at Alex hopefully. “Do you feel like taking a trip into town with me? I have something I want to show you.”
“And what would that be?” Anastasia demanded, suddenly face-to-face with Emily, glaring up at her. Alex had to stifle a laugh — Anastasia never looked younger or shorter to him than when she was near Emily. “Don’t you ever have to go to class?”
Emily glared right back, tossing her head indignantly.
“It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with. It’s none of your business what I do. You’re always going on about how clever you are, so figure it out for yourself.”
Emily turned to Alex, and put one hand lightly on his shoulder.
“Is it okay, Alex? I’d really like you to come, if you’re not too busy,” she said sincerely, her expression anxious.
Alex was stunned by the realization that she expected him to reject her. This girl, who was obviously nice, smart, and beautif
ul, had gotten so used to rejection that she anticipated it even from a brand new student. It must be a very bad thing, he thought solemnly, to be B-class.
“Sure,” he said, trying not to sound resigned. “I didn’t really have any specific plans, anyway.”
Anastasia shrugged, exasperated, and then stomped off down the stairs, followed by a smiling Renton and an expressionless Edward.
“Be careful, Alex,” Vivik whispered as he walked by. “Think about what you’re doing.”
Alex nodded amiably. But he didn’t really feel like it was any of Vivik or Anastasia’s business. Particularly since he wasn’t entirely sure what it was he was doing.
“Do you want me to — ”
“Hush,” Anastasia commanded, hustling down the stairs. “When I want you to do something, Renton, I will tell you as much.”
Ten steps. He was quiet for ten steps. She counted them. An old habit.
“But, don’t you think that Emily is going to try and, well… seduce him?”
Her laughter echoed back up the stairwell, no doubt confusing Vivik, somewhere above her. But, it wasn’t often she managed to make Renton feel uncomfortable.
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
She laughed again, quietly, this time. She couldn’t help it. The idea was just too funny. It was easy to forget that Renton was much older than he looked, most of the time. But it would occasionally shine through in his speech.
“I wish her the best of luck, then,” she said honestly. “And I do think that she will need it.”
She hurried ahead, so that Renton had to rush; and poor Edward, as well.
Anastasia liked to make them run after her, occasionally. It was a good reminder of place and role, she felt. For everyone involved.
It wasn’t far to the front gate, where Emily wanted to meet him, though Alex had never made the walk previously. She’d wanted to change out of her uniform, before they left for Central, so she’d given him directions to the front gate, and headed back to her room, telling him to meet her in about half an hour.
The Academy’s grounds were enormous, it was true, but most of the classrooms, faculty offices and student dorms were clustered near the front gate. It only took a few minutes for Alex to get there with the meticulous directions that Emily had given him, on a piece of off-white stationary, each step written out in lovely flowing cursive. It was so elegant that Alex found himself reluctant to fold it or throw it out, and he was still trying to figure out what to do with it when he rounded the last of the staff buildings and saw the Commons, and beyond that the front gate.
The Commons were like a bigger version of the quad between the student dorms; a large open space with carefully maintained green grass, a handful of stately old oaks and willows, a few strategically placed benches and tables, and a motley collection of students and faculty enjoying the weak afternoon sun. It was a nice scene, bordering on idyllic.
The gate behind it was impressive, an ornate piece of stonework that looked to Alex to be ancient, and though he wasn’t sure he could tell decades old from hundreds of years old. Like all of the major structures on the campus, it was made of tightly fit angular blocks with no obvious mortar, the same dull grey stone as the Academy walls, which stretched off in either direction for miles, perhaps twice as tall as Alex and thick, but in poor repair. In many places the wall had partially collapsed, and in numerous other places the wall was bowed and bent. The gate, however, had either aged more gracefully or seen more consistent maintenance. Some of the carvings appeared to have fallen off or been worn away, and a few of the capstones were gone, but as a whole the great stone arch was intact. Alex could not decide if the inscription on the gate arch was a language he didn’t recognize or simply a collection of abstract scribbles, but he found the whole thing a touch foreboding.
All of this paled in importance for Alex, next to seeing Emily in her street clothes for the first time.
Emily was pretty in the uniform, Alex wasn’t about to deny that. But in a simple white dress that looked a bit light for the weather she looked amazing, even with a sweater pulled over it, her blond hair curled and radiant in the late-afternoon sun. Then she smiled at him, maybe a little bit shyly, and he got very nervous indeed.
“Did you make it okay?”
She was anxious, leading him out of the gate and to the road outside, as if she wasn’t beautiful. As if she had anything to worry about.
“Were the directions alright?”
“They were very, um, accurate,” Alex said lamely, realizing he was still clutching the scrap of paper, and shoved it in his pocket. The dark grey hoodie he’d worn seemed a bit incongruous with Emily’s dress, but it wasn’t like he had any clothes that would have been appropriate.
The road itself appeared to be one uniform piece of worked stone, but when Alex got closer, he realized that it was made of the same tightly interlocking blocks as the walls of the Academy, worn smooth with age and traffic. In many places the stones had begun to buckle slightly, and the road’s surface was not nearly as even as it appeared to be from a distance.
“Who built all this?”
“No one knows,” Emily said, shrugging and leading him toward what appeared to be a totally conventional bus stop, with a colorful route sign, and a glass and metal enclosure complete with system map. Alex felt a profound sense of dislocation as they walked toward it. “Supposedly, it was all like this when the Founder discovered Central, empty and waiting. The road and the wall, the Academy Main Hall, Analysis and Operations, all the major structures, they were all here already. At least, that’s what they tell us in class.”
“There is a bus?”
Alex ran his fingers across the plastic covering a small system map, showing three separate lines, each with half a dozen stops.
“Well, yes. It’s pretty hard to get anything big through the Ether, and it’s not like we have a factory here or anything. We’ve got a few diesel buses. I hear they had to disassemble them, and bring them over piece-by-piece.”
He knew that Central was located somewhere in the Ether; Alex had gotten that much from Windsor’s lectures, and had somehow been found, rather than built. He couldn’t tell if it’s location was a secret or a genuine mystery, but without an apport protocol, he knew there was no getting in or out, something that caused him a certain amount of late-night anxiety akin to claustrophobia. But, even if he knew that, it was jarring to hear it said out loud, the casual practicalities of an abnormal way of life that he barely even noticed he was living, most of the time.
Alex studied the map. The area depicted was not really large enough to be called a city, more like a town, in a rough half-moon. The built-up neighborhoods were clustered in an area just to the east of the Academy. Alex was surprised to see that the Academy and its grounds constituted a full third of Central, and that a good portion of the remaining space appeared to be open.
“There aren’t that many of us,” Alex guessed.
Emily shook her head sadly.
“No, and there seem to be less every year. Only a few people live in Central full-time. But yes, there just aren’t that many of us. We could all move to Central, if we wanted to, and there would still be space to spare. I would swear there were more people here when I was a kid…”
Emily seemed sad, so Alex hunted for something else to talk about.
“What’s here?”
Alex tapped at the grayed out area that surrounded the town on the map.
“Wait and see,” Emily said, smiling playfully.
The bus arrived a few minutes later, a green-painted diesel that reminded Alex vaguely of pictures he’d seen of Europe. Emily refused to say anything about where they were going, responding with a smile and a ‘wait and see’ every time he asked. Alex eventually gave up, but it didn’t turn out to matter much — he had his eyes glued to the window the entire trip, while Emily amused herself by playing tour guide.
It took a few minutes of winding through the hill
s around the Academy before they entered Central proper, while Alex tried to remember the last time he had been in a motor vehicle of any kind. Only a matter of weeks, but it felt l
The Academy was set two-thirds of the way up the peak of a massive hill, and Central sat in a partial ring around it, about halfway down the slope. Below the city, at the base of the hill, there was only a great grey space, the vastness of the Ether stretching out like an endless lake in all directions, Central rising out of it like an island. After a few minutes of descending down the windy road, they crossed an invisible line and the sun disappeared behind the pea soup-thick fog that covered the town. Emily told him that the skies here never cleared, unlike the Academy, which was set high enough on the hill that the fog broke. Central itself started as a series of low grey buildings, no more than two stories tall, each set slightly apart and surrounded by small, neat yards and clusters of elm and oak trees.
“We think they were probably houses to begin with, though the proportions are a little strange,” Emily commented, leaning over his shoulder. “Some people still like to live in them for the privacy, but they get wretchedly cold in the winter.”
The road curved to follow along the bank of a moderately large, fast-moving creek, both sides of the road surrounded by the individual stone homes. Electric lines and various utility cables had been added to the structures, he realized, rather haphazardly in some cases, and he wondered again at the difficulty and logistics of transporting materials here. For that matter, he wondered, where did the electricity come from? He hadn’t seen anything that looked like a power plant.
After a while, the structures gradually got larger, and then started to fuse together. At first they grew closer to each other, but they rapidly started to include points of interconnection, and by the time they descended into the city proper, the buildings began to meld into gigantic structures. They grew taller as well, some five or six stories tall, though Alex was starting to notice the proportions issue that Emily had mentioned — the stories appear to be a bit too tall, as did the windows and the stairs.
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