This time, the cat ran toward the lake. Mal followed, always just a few inches of grabbing distance away from its matted tail and pink toe pads. It leapt over the low stone fence, and Mal vaulted over without hesitation.
He dropped onto a sloping grassy knoll, just barely getting his feet under him in time to avoid rolling down the hill headlong. He was grateful for his reflexes, since otherwise he would have landed in the cat-filled bushes at the foot of the hill. He could hear the rustling of long furry bodies in the foliage. Their luminous eyes glinted at him, bright reflections in gold and green gleaming in the gathering dusk. Any number of the eyes could belong to his stalker, so Mal sighed. His adversary wasn’t glaring at him from a tree branch high above him, but it’d still been an unsatisfactory end to the chase.
Mal swore, leaning forward with his palms braced against his knees as he caught his breath.
“Hey? You okay?”
There was a girl at the foot of the hill, he realized. She was crouched, ringed by a circle of cats. Short brown hair, slim limbs. Mal squinted, frowning. She was feeding them tablescraps from a plastic baggie.
Ellery Griffin. She was in his block, but she had joined the Academy in his absence, so he was not overly familiar with her. Mal paused a moment, trying to decide if he wanted to acknowledge having heard her question or not. The cats didn’t run from her the way they ran for him, so common sense said that she would be better equipped to deal with his problem than he was.
There was no good way to admit that he was partially convinced that a fifteen-pound ball of fur had marked him for death. If he hadn’t had overwhelming evidence, he wouldn’t have believed it himself. Hopefully, she would solve his problem. He was getting tired of running immediately after waking up.
“You feed them?” Mal called, picking his way down the hill. “They’re perfectly capable of hunting. They’re wild animals, you know.”
“I know,” Griffin called back, balancing precariously on her toes and offering the nearest cat a sliver of cooked chicken. The circle was wide enough that she had to reach; they hovered, just close enough to snatch bits of food out of her hands. “I like feeding them. They warm up to you if you give them time to get to know you.”
“But why would I want to do that?” Mal drawled, eyeing the horrible creatures surrounding Griffin.
Judging from her smile, she thought that he was joking. It was a common misconception shared by many when they first met him.
“I had a kitty back home,” she said, leaning forward just a hair more. The cat sniffed her fingertips cautiously. “I miss her. Since we can’t have pets in the dorms, this is almost the next best thing, y’know?”
“You can have the one that has been following me,” Mal said, slipping his hands into the front pocket of his sweatshirt. “It shows up regularly. I don’t even have to feed it.”
“What does it look like?”
“Big? Unkempt? It ran this way.” He resisted finishing the sentence with like the coward it is. For some reason, Griffin seemed to like cats. He would use that, if he could.
Griffin sat back on her heels. “Is he one of the special ones?”
Mal arched an eyebrow at her.
“I would say yes, but my definition of special likely differs from yours.”
“I mean, does he have powers? A couple of them do.” Fishing out another piece of meat, she offered it to a marmalade-colored cat that was vigorously grooming itself. Not as shy as the others, it trotted closer to her. “Like this one! I call him Wonder Cat. He’s really nice.”
She picked up an orange cat, petting him until he started up a healthy purr. Without warning, she dropped the cat. He hovered, all four feet pointed straight below him. As long as he was purring, he stayed afloat. Of course, Wonder Cat stopped purring as soon as he realized he was no longer being scratched. Whether or not the cat earned its moniker was debatable at best. His limbs clawed at air when gravity pushed him again; he landed on all fours, but only just. Wonder Cat began aggressively grooming himself, ignoring his own clumsy landing.
He’d heard of animals in the area manifesting abilities, but he’d never seen them himself. It was a relatively new phenomenon, and not one that the people in the research section of Foundation fully understood. The sheepdog that his aunts had adopted while he was gone had power, according to Rosario. Her sister had named the stray Sog, since his coat was incredibly absorbent. As a toddler, Libby had fallen into an ornamental pond. The big dog had heard her shrieking and had come to her rescue. Sog had soaked up gallons of water, saving Libby from drowning. His heroism had cemented his place in the Galan-Grant family.
Mal disliked dogs more than he disliked cats, but he felt that an absorbent mutt was more impressive than a hovering feline that didn’t understand how to make its own powers work. He shuddered to think what abilities his stalker might have. Until he knew what it was capable of, he would have to treat it as a legitimate threat.
“It’s kind of nuts when you really think about it,” said Griffin, stroking Wonder Cat’s head. She had to raise her hand with him as he began levitating again. “It can’t just be a coincidence that since posters started living out here, other animals have developed powers. Right? It’s like...it’s like we change everything around us.”
“Yes,” Mal said, staring back at the glittering animal eyes peering at him from between boughs and leaves. “Our influence spreads like a virus.”
Griffin avoided looking at him, her romantic notions dashed. She picked up the stupid orange cat, holding him to her chest as though to ward Mal off.
Clearly, he’d misspoken. She had been looking for agreement, not his opinion. Not an unusual thing in conversations, he’d learned.
“It is past curfew,” he said abruptly, straightening to leave. “If you don’t want to earn a week’s worth of KP duty, you should find your way back to the dorms. Goodbye.”
He didn’t give her a chance to rope him back into the conversation. He was too tired to think clearly, too frustrated to be patient, and the combination had proven volatile enough to upset his entire day. Mistakes only compounded the internal pressure. Zipporah was not an ideal partner, but she forgave him when he said the wrong thing. She told him why his behavior was, in her opinion, unacceptable. She didn’t force him to piece his mistakes together through context clues. She didn’t ask him to pretend to be nice. He appreciated that.
Perhaps Zipporah would have better advice, he thought, and turned toward the girls’ dorms.
°
“Time to train,” Mal announced the moment Zip opened the door. “The Night Games will be starting up in a few weeks, so we must be prepared to work in low-light conditions.”
Zip had been in the middle of getting ready for bed when Mal knocked on the door. She’d just finished her homework, and was looking forward to some well-earned shut-eye. Judging by the stubborn angle of Mal’s set jaw, a good night’s sleep wasn’t a part of his plans. It didn’t surprise her that he’d shown up in the girls’ third block dorms long after curfew. Mal just had a knack for getting places and doing things that bent rules, but asking him how he’d gotten into the girls’ dorms in the first place would have been like asking the world’s sourest and most secretive magician to explain all of his tricks in bullet points.
Zip ran a hand through her hair. She was hungrier than she was tired, but the mix of the two made her cranky. She got bearish when she was hungry, so she didn’t want to squabble with him on an empty stomach. She’d hate to undo the work of weeks of partnership-building patience over something so silly.
“We’re still gonna train tonight? I thought that you’d...”
“You thought what?” Mal asked, like he was daring her to finish the sentence. “I thought that it was understood that our appointments stand unless we expressly agree that we are not meeting that day.”
That wasn’t a challenge that Zip felt up to taking. Mal didn’t look good. The light in the hall wasn’t the best, but she would have sworn
that the thin skin around his eyes was bruised dark by exhaustion. He hadn’t seemed to be at the top of his game even before his explosion in their strategy class. He’d skulked in right as the bell rang, his hood pulled up, and he hadn’t said a word prior to his argument with the substitute instructor, Professor bint Balqis. She was one of the only teachers with a framed certificate in her office. According to that slip of paper, the University of Cambridge had knighted her as a Doctor of Psychology— or something like that, at least. Zip’s grasp on higher education was shaky at best. If the framed paper in Professor bint Balqis’ office said that she was an honorary unicorn tamer, she would have believed it. Professor bint Balqis was just the sort of person that you didn’t second-guess.
Unless you were Mal, apparently. She still didn’t get why he’d flown off the handle— or why he’d gotten thrown out of the classroom, exactly— but she doubted that Mal was feeling open to questions.
“Sorry, boss, but no can do,” she said, holding up her hands in treaty. “I had to cram for strat, so I missed dinner. My tank’s next to empty, and the mess hall closed an hour ago.”
His mouth scrunched into a scowl. “Damn.”
“Too bad there’s no fast food around here, right? Man, what I wouldn’t do for a burger right about now. And fries!” Zip sighed wistfully. “I miss fries.”
He got that frowny-squinty look that Zip knew meant that he was calculating something in his head. He called it evaluating their options, but she called it scheming. By either definition, he was cooking something up.
“What if I said that I know of a way off campus?”
Zip’s stomach answered him with a pitiful little whine of a growl. “I’m listening.”
“Do you trust me enough to follow my orders without hesitation, Zipporah?”
She grinned. “You’re my Alpha, ain’t you?”
“If you can run at least thirty miles round-trip, I have an idea.”
“I’d be running on fumes, but I’ll see what I can do.” Twisting to look over her shoulder, Zip glanced back at Cindy. “You interested in some fast food?”
The lump in the bed shifted. Cindy sat up, combing her tangled hair out of her face.
“As John Hughes as your plan sounds, I’m going to pass,” Cindy said, pulling her covers back up over her head. “Some of us can’t afford a strike two.”
If her stomach hadn’t been gnawing itself raw, Zip probably would have kept her lips buttoned. She wouldn’t have said anything. She would have let Cindy wallow in her bed, thinking that she was the only one that’d ever been punished unfairly.
But she couldn’t let it go this time. Frustration got the better of her.
“Take it from me: if I stayed in my room all day and waited for the second strike to hit, I’d never do anything that makes me happy. And fast food makes a fast-footed girl like me happy, so I’m willing to take the risk.” She knotted her shoelaces one last time, grabbing her running goggles from their hook above her desk. “C’mon, Mal. Let’s boogie.”
She could tell that Mal wanted to make a comment about Cindy— and no, she wasn’t proud of her new ability to predict Mal’s nastiness— but he kept it to himself. He liked to say that she was finally starting to learn from him, but she personally thought that it was the other way around.
“I hope you’ve got a good plan,” Zip said as they walked toward the north part of campus. Mal’s path was a winding one, but she had a feeling that it kept them out of sight. She’d never met anyone who knew the Academy the way he did. Zip had lived there for almost half of her life, but he’d shown her hidden caves and thickets that she’d never seen before. “I don’t want to end up eating my words with my roomie.”
“I refuse to be expelled for something as negligible as breaking curfew.”
It wasn’t a I know what I’m doing or a don’t worry, but it was as close as Mal got to being reassuring.
“Okay. So what’s the plan?”
“As I’m sure that you’re aware, the campus is patrolled at night by the part-time faculty. The younger specimens, as it were.”
“Which is, um, lemme. Gimme a sec. I know this.”
“We haven’t got all night, Zi— ”
“Mongoose-CMYK-Veritas-Synapse-Rush-who-am-I-forgetting-I’m-forgetting-someone-one-sec-I-know-it’sonthetipofmy— ”
“Copycat,” Mal supplied, before she had a chance to go through the rest of the staff roster.
“I was gonna say that!”
“Of course,” he agreed, managing to make it sound like he didn’t believe her at all. “And of those six, the only one that would give us any real trouble is Copycat. Her hand-to-hand combat skills are formidable.”
Catherine Newmeyer, the Copycat, was one of the new teachers at Maillardet’s. She was an Academy alumnus herself, and they’d been trying to get her on staff ever since her graduation day. As one of the best fighters in the world, Copycat was a lesson in not judging a book by its cover. She was bubbly, her arms covered in technicolor tattoos and her hair dyed bubblegum pink, but Zip had seen what she could do to a training dummy. Copycat could reduce her to a freckled smear without breaking a sweat.
“So we just make sure we don’t fight her hands,” Zip said, grinning.
Mal pinched the bridge of his nose. He gave a Zipporah, please kind of sigh. He had a whole language built around exasperated sighs. She was getting close to being fluent in it. She could read it, even though she couldn’t quite speak it herself.
“If Newmeyer is patrolling the campus tonight, we will not engage. If you see her— ”
“I’ll run.”
“If it is anyone but Newmeyer, I will stage a distraction. And you— ”
Oh, she knew what to do. It was the one thing she knew how to do best.
“I’ll run!”
“Yes. And you will run,” Mal said with a second, louder Zipporah, please sigh. “Once I have the night watch occupied, you will run north, toward Wakerobin. Fourteen miles there, fourteen miles back. It should take you less than six minutes, all told. Do not stop when you approach the outer wall of the compound. We can’t afford the time it will take you to lose and regain speed like that, so you’ll simply have to keep running.”
It’d seemed like such a good, doable plan until he’d thrown in the bit about running up walls. For half a moment, she thought that he was kidding— that Mal Underwood had made a rough attempt at a joke. But not even his poker face was that good. He’d read her file from cover to cover, so he should have known that defying gravity wasn’t in the bulleted list of nature’s laws that she defied on the regular.
“Do I look like I’ve got wings? I can’t do that!”
“Yes, you can,” Mal said, his patience audibly strained. “Given a minimum of a five hundred foot approach to gain momentum, you can run up a vertical surface for several hundred feet before gravity overtakes you.”
She looked uncertainly at the far, dark shapes in the distance.
“If you say so.”
“I do say so. Physics says so.”
“I believe you.” And she did. She had to. If she didn’t believe him about walls, she couldn’t believe him about anything. “So I run up the wall. What then?”
“Then, you run. Wakerobin is the closest small town with a twenty-four hour fast food establishment.”
A thought hit her— a worry that hadn’t crossed her mind in a long time.
“But how are we gonna pay?”
The Academy had rules when it came to money. Everyone had a little spending allowance every quarter, and parents could send extra money to their kids if they felt like they needed it, but nobody was allowed to handle cash. They had a system set up through the school’s General Store. They kept track of how much everyone had and how much they spent. If they wanted to take a Saturday trip into the town of Foundation, they had to cash out through the General Store first.
“I’m getting to that,” Mal said, kneeling and unlacing his left boot. He had a butterfly blad
e and a neatly folded wad of bills tucked between his boot and calf. The switchblade, she noticed, was identical to the one that Mongoose had shown in class. No big surprise there.
“You carry cash on you?”
“Yes. Enough for a room, a meal, and a change of clothes,” he said, tying his laces again. “Always. One of my father’s more sensible rules. You never know when you might need money or a knife, so it’s wise to keep both on your person.”
“Even in Foundation?”
“Especially in Foundation,” Mal said, very firmly.
If carrying a switchblade and cash around in a place where money and weapons were next to useless was one of the Rook’s more sensible rules, she had to wonder what else he’d passed down.
“We’ll meet back in my room,” he said, holding the money out to her. “Now, then. Are you re— ”
“Wait!” Zip interrupted, waving her hands instead of taking the money. “What do you want?”
He blinked, like the thought of eating hadn’t even crossed his mind. He’d given her more than enough money for the both of them, and she wasn’t about to stuff her face in front of him while he went hungry. There wasn’t much that she disliked more than eating alone.
Mal tapped his knife against his palm, thinking a beat.
“A hamburger without condiments. I prefer to taste what I intend to eat.”
Transfixed, Zip watched the sleek silver arcs flash in the moonlight as he flipped his switchblade open.
“And I would like a milkshake, I think,” Mal added, calmly slicing his right arm open from wrist to elbow. “A strawberry milkshake.”
Blood gushed from the wound, and Zip had to clap her hands over her mouth to keep from shrieking. A high squeak escaped between her laced fingers.
The Posterchildren: Origins Page 18