The Point

by John Dixon

  Clayton pointed out Thayer Hall, the Superintendent’s House, and Flirtation Walk—“Flirtie,” Dalia chimed in—a riverside path off limits to the cadre.

  “This is General Sedgwick’s monument,” Clayton said, leading them around the back of the statue, which stood atop a stone pediment, putting the general’s boots at eye level. Clayton pointed to the statue’s heels. “Behold General Sedgwick’s spurs.”

  “Note the color,” Dalia said.

  “West Point cadets are superstitious as Southern grandmothers,” Clayton said. “Everything here is tradition and superstition and do-this-don’t-do-that hoodoo juju. Cadets get behind, need some luck, they come out here and spin ol’ Sedgwick’s spurs.”

  Scarlett grinned. The statue was made of dark metal—bronze, she thought—but the spurs were lighter, as if many hands had spun them over the years.

  Clayton laughed. “There’s a whole bunch of rules. You gotta be desperate. I’m talking stone broke in the hope department. And you gotta spin it at midnight on the dot.”

  “Which means they have to be really desperate,” Dalia said, “since they’re not allowed out of their rooms at that hour.” Up here Dalia was way cooler.

  Or maybe I’m less uptight, Scarlett thought. Either way, she’d judged Dalia too harshly down in The Point.

  “Well,” Scarlett said, “I hope I’m never that desperate.”

  Coming back, as they passed the Combating Terrorism Center, they saluted a ruggedly handsome colonel, who smiled and wished them a good afternoon.

  “That guy’s one of the baseball coaches,” Clayton said.

  Incredible, Scarlett thought. West Point had some sincerely high-speed individuals. This colonel could teach classes, combat terrorism, and still find time to coach a sport?

  The thought made her feel small. She knew that she’d been born with natural advantages even without this crazy energy thing, but her whole life was a series of blown opportunities, limping failures, and pitiful implosions. She had a lot of quit in her. What was she doing here among all these incredible people?

  Clayton was laughing at Dalia’s joke as he pushed through the do-not-enter door and back into The Point, but his laughter disappeared as shouting filled the hall.

  “Cadet Dunne! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Scarlett recognized the guard by his chipped tooth and unibrow. He was one of the meanest. He leveled a Taser at Clayton.

  “Wait,” Clayton said. “Don’t—” Then he howled with pain, his big muscles going stiff as the Taser crack-crack-crack-ed.

  Dalia pushed past Scarlett and into the hall.

  The Taser stopped, and Clayton stumbled backward. Scarlett lowered her shoulder and bent her knees and managed to keep Clayton from tumbling backward down the stairs.

  “Cadet Amer,” the guard said, “I didn’t see you there. I never meant—”

  And then he was skittering backward, brushing frantically at the front of his uniform. The Taser fell to the ground. A high-pitched eeeee whistled from his throat like helium escaping a pinched balloon.

  Scarlett gasped.

  A shadow appeared, shifting over the guard’s body…then came clearer, and she saw that the shadow was made of smaller shadows, tiny pockets of darkness scampering up the guard’s chest and arms and neck.

  The guard slammed into the wall, eyes wide, brushing furiously. “Get off me!”

  The shadow grew clearer still, and Scarlett felt like brushing her own uniform. The guard was covered in spiders. Hundreds of spiders. Thousands. Crawling over him with jerky spider speed, pouring into his collar and up his sleeves and into his ear canals.

  Scarlett twitched with revulsion.

  A ghastly grin twisted Dalia’s face into a mask of cruelty. Her eyes gleamed, merciless and insane. The guard collapsed to the ground.

  “Stop,” Scarlett said.

  Dalia panted, enraptured. She didn’t seem to hear Scarlett, didn’t seem even to be aware of her or anything but the shuddering, blubbering guard she was torturing.

  He flailed on the floor, making horrible animal sounds, his form indistinct now beneath a mound of scurrying spiders. His bowels let go, filling the corridor with stink.

  She was killing him.

  “Dalia, stop,” Scarlett said.

  But Dalia was growling now, growling and panting and laughing all at once, her fingers arched like claws.

  Scarlett reached out and touched her shoulder, saying, “Please, Dalia, stop—you’re killing him,” and Dalia’s fiery eyes turned in her direction.

  Scarlett shouted and stepped away, suddenly covered with spiders, millions of tiny spider legs tickling across every inch of her body. They packed her ears and nostrils and filled her mouth, choking her, and—

  Then they were gone.

  Gone from Scarlett, gone from the guard. Gone.

  Dalia loomed over the weeping man, hands on hips, and spoke in a cold whisper. “Do not mess with the Queen Bitch.”

  “YOUR REAL GOAL,” RHOADS SAID, setting a black case on the floor at Scarlett’s feet, “is holding on to energy, letting it build.”

  Room 17 again. Day after day after day…

  Scarlett sat in a wooden chair, unrestrained. Strange gloves—hard black plastic on the outside, soft rubber on the inside—covered her hands. The rubber insulation ended at her fingertips, which pressed against something cold and smooth. Probably metal. The gloves ran nearly to her elbows, and a black cable ran from each wrist to the boxy machine atop the cart that Rhoads had pushed into the room, one of its wheels squeaking like a lab rat.

  “I already hold on to energy, sir,” she said.

  “To a degree,” Rhoads said, “but mostly you’re channeling energy. There’s a brief pause while force builds inside you, but you’re basically acting like a conduit. Force flows in, force flows out. We need to hold the energy longer, let it build.”

  She shook her head. The force dictated its own release. Once it built to a certain point, the energy just exploded. If anything, she should release it sooner. Holding on hurt. “Impossible.”

  “Impossible is a word I hear more frequently from new cadets than from upperclassmen,” Rhoads said, unsnapping the latches of the black case. “The Point’s motto is ‘Training tomorrow’s leaders today,’ but I’ve always favored ‘Never say never.’ Not very original, perhaps, but true. And truth trumps both originality and any notions of what is or isn’t possible. Certainly you’ve seen enough here to understand that.”

  Remembering the frantic fraction of a second when she’d been covered in ghostly spiders, she nodded. That had been terrifying but somehow not as scary as the casual way Dalia had joked afterward. Geez, she’d said, never even addressing the fact that she’d nailed Scarlett with what amounted to somnopathic friendly fire, that guy really hates spiders, and then, squeezing Clayton’s bulging biceps, Nobody messes with my teddy bear.

  In the weeks since that night, Scarlett had continued to meet with Dalia for meditation and yoga. Not that they actually meditated or did yoga. They just stretched and talked. Well, Dalia talked. And talked and talked and talked…

  Scarlett had never met someone so stuck on herself. Everything was about her.

  Rhoads made things worse by doting on Dalia. The guards feared her. The cadets didn’t really interact with her. Dalia felt nothing but contempt for her classmates, including Clayton, who clearly had a thing for her. Sometimes she pulled Clayton from class, but only when she wanted an audience, Scarlett figured.

  Dalia talked about Scarlett like a pet project, some poor little lost kid she’d been kind enough to take under her wing. All that head patting drove Scarlett nuts, but she didn’t feel like getting covered in spiders, so she kept her mouth shut.

  The best days were the ones when Dalia left The Point to work with active-duty teams, though she was
even cockier after returning from those sessions, glowing with her own importance and dropping constant and cryptic hints at what she’d been doing, clearly wanting Scarlett to pry.

  Those days, Scarlett just chilled in the yoga room or used the time to catch up on studying, cleaning, or writing letters. Every few days, she wrote Dan another letter. No reply yet from her brother. She shouldn’t be surprised, she knew—Dan was probably still pissed and never had been much of a letter writer, anyway—but she honestly missed her big brother and wanted to bury the hatchet. That was clear now.

  Another thing she’d learned since coming here: she needed freedom.

  Evenings, she and Lucy talked and played chess. That freedom—hanging out and losing herself in a game—felt great, like getting back to her true self.

  Lucy was cool and smart. Decisive and realistic. Perpetually upbeat but tough, too. A confident, hardworking professional. At twenty-three, she was the oldest third-year cadet. In posthuman terms, she’d been a late bloomer, and then she’d hidden her talent, which had scared her badly. As she’d become more comfortable with the fact that she could move things with her mind, she’d used it to scam free beers at college bars. At Rutgers, before The Point found her, she’d been studying electrical engineering, with a minor in German. Sometimes, when she and Scarlett played chess, she spoke with an overdone German accent. When she was feeling particularly upbeat, she even sang with the exaggerated accent. It was horrible and hilarious.

  Lucy had another side, too, a strength born of genuine morality and impulsive boldness. One night, when Scarlett was complaining about Hopkins, Lucy shrugged matter-of-factly. “He’s a big shot now, but he’ll never hack it in the real Army.”

  Scarlett grinned. She’d never heard Lucy bad-mouth anybody. Normally, she was Miss Upbeat, a very positive individual who didn’t seem bothered by anything.

  Even now, Lucy smiled happily as she said, “Hopkins is more suited to rising through the political ranks than he is to leading troops. Think he has some magic switch that he can flip at will, turn him into a strong, compassionate leader? No way. Out in the field, he’s done. Honestly, his best bet would be to get out and go corporate. But he would never do that. He wouldn’t have the confidence.”

  Scarlett leaned back, warming to the idea of Karma going upside Hopkins’s angular head. “You really think so?”

  “Absolutely. He’d better avoid combat arms. He’d draw friendly fire like honey draws flies. He should get into supply, something like that, create a petty empire. King of the Fobbits.”

  Scarlett laughed. “He would never go supply. His ego wouldn’t let him.”

  Lucy’s grin stretched wider. “Exactly, Bro-fessor. Don’t sweat Hopkins. He’s doomed.”

  Unfortunately, Lucy wasn’t impulsive enough to join Scarlett on her nighttime excursions. After lights out, Scarlett used Dalia’s secret subway exit and escaped from The Point. She loved to drink the night air and stroll the darkened campus alone, with great stone buildings rising all around her like sleeping giants. Whenever a vehicle approached, she hid. Twice, she’d run from MPs, which had been fun and strangely nostalgic. She’d been dodging cops since middle school.

  Luckily, she’d always been a fast runner. Since coming to The Point, she’d gotten much faster. Stronger, too. Swapping out partying for PT had no doubt helped, but she figured the gains had more to do with the pills and injections they forced on her daily.

  Medicine to enhance your genetic advantages, Rhoads told the cadets.

  Steroids, Scarlett guessed, among other things.

  Just fucking take them was Lopez’s answer when Scarlett asked about the pills.

  Scarlett shrugged, popped the pills, and spit them into the latrine down the hall.

  Unfortunately, she couldn’t escape injections. Maybe they were causing her crazy dreams, which had been incredibly vivid, like reliving the past. Her fight with Dan, troubles she’d gotten into, guys she’d gotten with—and boring stuff, too: brilliant dreams of her room at home, perusing her books and music and posters. Weird.

  She was tempted to ask Dalia about them, but what would be the point? Instead of helping, Dalia would call her “poor baby” and go off about how she had no troubles with dreams and how she simply wouldn’t accept such a reality.

  Dalia wanted her to be in awe of her powers, the fear she engendered, the way she had Rhoads wrapped around her finger, her wit, and her unpredictability.

  Scarlett didn’t have her power, Lucy’s focus, or the work ethic of the USMA cadets. She just hoped to ride whatever talent she did have. Daily, she vowed to work hard, but in her heart, she feared that eventually she would let everyone down.

  “Okay, Scarlett,” Rhoads said, and opened the case. Inside, what looked like a car battery with dials and meters sprouted a tangle of red and yellow wires. “Let’s begin.”

  Your turn, Scarlett felt like saying, but she nodded and said “Yes, sir” instead. As a Level III, she had escaped her cell, her solitude, and hazing, not to mention the unrelenting pressure of a nonstop day with no breaks, no freedom, and no friendship. She couldn’t go back. She had to keep Rhoads happy.

  “Relax,” Rhoads said. He unstrung a thin red wire with a round sticker at the end. “No big blast today.”

  “What, then?”

  Rhoads stuck leads onto Scarlett’s arms, neck, and forehead. “We’ll go slowly. Just a trickle of current.”

  Scarlett smiled bitterly. “Low and slow, huh? Like a chicken.”

  Rhoads looked confused for a second, then grinned. “Ah, barbecue humor. Yes, like a chicken. We know that you can absorb a tremendous amount of energy in a blast, but we’re hoping that you can absorb even more this way. With faster methods, I’m afraid that you might absorb too much energy too quickly. We can’t have you blowing out your circuit board.” He turned a dial on the battery. “Can you feel that?”

  Scarlett couldn’t.

  Rhoads adjusted the dial. “Now?”

  Scarlett started to say no, but then she felt a slight warmth at the contact points on her neck. “A little.”

  “Good,” Rhoads said. “I want you to try to hold on to this energy as long as you can, okay?”

  Scarlett nodded. She could feel warmth in her temples and arms and back.

  So pointless. She had no control. You couldn’t ask a quart jar to hold a gallon of juice.

  Rhoads indicated the control box. “This will register how much energy you can build prior to release. Congratulations. You’re now storing as much energy as a nine-volt battery.”

  “Gee, thanks, sir.”

  “Now a whole pack of batteries.”

  Scarlett raised an eyebrow.

  Rhoads nodded, looking serious. “You’re approaching the capacity of a car battery.”

  Scarlett concentrated on her breathing. Earlier, they’d tried hooking her directly to batteries but to no avail. She had no way of drawing upon potential energy.

  “Creeping up now,” Rhoads said.

  After several minutes, she felt the all too familiar burn at the center of her chest. Her muscles tensed. She wanted to release the energy and tell Rhoads, Sorry, I just can’t do it, but the colonel wouldn’t believe her, not with all those meters at his disposal.

  “It hurts, sir,” Scarlett said.

  Rhoads nodded without looking up from the readouts. “Training is often painful, Scarlett. Better to suffer here than die in battle.”

  Force built. Each point of contact burned now. Each stream of energy moved in a line of fire toward her center. The leads at her temples burned like twin suns and sent fiery spiderwebs around the back of her skull to join the river of electricity coursing into her neck. The force at her center pulsed white hot and urgent.

  “I have to let it out,” she said. She was sweating now.

  Rhoads shook his head. “Hold
on, Scarlett. Keep trying. This is very important.”

  Scarlett gritted her teeth. Her eyes twitched uncontrollably. Her muscles hummed, hard as rocks, aching. Inside the gloves, her fingers pulsed, tingling against the metal tips. Everything hurt, and it was all so stupid, so utterly pointless.

  And whoosh…the force blasted out of her fingers, into the cables, and away. She fell back in her chair, shaking. Her head pounded, her muscles twitched, and her chest ached as if Clayton Dunne had nailed her with a haymaker.

  A red light atop the meter stared coldly up at her.

  Rhoads frowned and gave the slightest shake of his head.

  Scarlett started ripping wires away, a clumsy affair in the bulky gloves. “Can’t just…hold it,” she said, struggling to catch her breath. “Like chugging spoiled milk…and trying not to puke.”

  “That’s enough for today,” Rhoads said. “Soon, however, I’m going to need results.”

  She tore away the last of the leads and glared at Rhoads.

  “You obviously have some kind of internal capacitor,” Rhoads said, “or current would just flow through you. No build, no blast.”

  If only, she thought.

  “Find that capacitor within yourself,” Rhoads said. “Learn to control it, like concentrating your mind or flexing a muscle.”

  “What if it isn’t like a muscle?” she said. “What if it’s like a bone, just a thing inside me, something I have no control over?”

  “Even bones bend,” Rhoads said.

  * * *

  —

  LATER, IN THE yoga room, Dalia rolled her eyes. “You’re a Level III, Scarlett. Tell Rhoads to chill out.”

  “Yeah,” Scarlett said, shifting to stretch her other leg. “I don’t know if that would really work.”