Daniel X: Game Over (10 page)

“That’s terrible,” I said, grimacing at the thought. “Shouldn’t I go get a teacher?”

“And then have said teacher ask me what happened, and have to implicate Ichi or one of his thugs—or pin the blame on somebody innocent—and deal with all the repercussions of that? No, thank you.”

“But if you don’t, you’re just giving in to those bullies!” I blurted.

He looked at me with a mixture of pity and impatience.

“As I’m sure you know, Daniel, there’s a long history of bullying in high schools. And Japan’s no exception. In fact, some statistics say we’ve got the worst juvenile bullying culture on earth.”

I found that hard to believe. The population seemed so… mild mannered. “Really?”

“Really,” he said. “Now, seriously, I’m losing feeling in my feet.”

“I’ll go get that ladder,” I said, and went to retrieve it.

“So,” he said after I came back, as I climbed up and somehow managed to help him out of the can without killing us both. “What’s another gaijin doing in this place?”

“Umm, I just transferred. Parents moved here for work.”

“What do they do?”

“Um,” I said, suddenly realizing there was a danger in seeming
too
stupid. “They, um, handle personnel training for a nongovernmental organization.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I didn’t think I’d seen you before.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “it’s not like I tend to make a big impression on people anyway.”

“Just the fact that you’re talking to me is all the impression I need,” Kildare said, fishing his book bag out of the bottom of the trash barrel. He put it on his back and made the weirdest noise—it was a like a cross between a sneeze and a cat’s purr.

“Odaiji ni,”
I said.

“What?!”

“It means ‘bless you’—you know, what you say when somebody sneezes.”

“I didn’t sneeze,” he said, starting to turn red.

“Oh,” I said, not quite sure how to respond.

“Anyhow, thanks for the help.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, meaning it quite sincerely. Other than making weird sneezing noises and then denying them, he seemed like a nice, grounded kid. I mean, I wasn’t exactly going to let my guard down to a child of two top-ten List aliens, but…

“Say, what class do you have next?” I asked.

“Introductory zoology,” he said.

“Really?” I said, whipping out a class schedule and pretending to read the same course. “Me, too. Can you show me where it is?”

“Sure,” he said. “But I suggest you not walk in with me. Ichi’s in that class. In fact, that’s kind of why he and his friends stuck me in the garbage can. They wanted to borrow my homework.”

“ ‘Borrow,’ huh?” I said.

“Yeah, well, there are worse things,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Well, if you’re still intent on coming to class with me, I’m sure you’ll see them do something worse than that. They’re especially rough on new kids.”

“
CELASTRINA ARGIOLUS, GLAUCOPSYCHE alexis, Vanessa atalanta, Gonepteryx cleopatra, Hesperia comma, Inachis io, Lysandra bellargus, Quercusia quercus,
and
Danaus plexippus.
”

“Very good, Mr. Gygax,” said Professor Kuniyoshi, beaming with pride at his star pupil’s recitation.

You know how some kids get geeky about computers or writing or drama or history or music? Well, for Kildare, science class seemed to be his thing. Big time.

When old Professor Kuniyoshi unstacked and displayed his enormous butterfly collection—after telling a long rambling story about how he’d been all over the world to obtain it—most of the students looked bored and on the verge of unconsciousness. But Kildare looked like a little kid on Christmas morning. And, when asked to identify
the specimens, he recited their scientific names with something close to bliss.

Which was a pretty bold move, since we all know that if there’s one truth about bullies the world over, it’s that nothing sets them off like other people’s happiness. So, as Kildare boiled over with geeky enthusiasm, Ichi began to boil over with malignant intent.

Ichi was a compact, muscle-bound kid with a face that seemed to know only two expressions: snarling resentment (which he wore when adults were looking), and belligerent disdain (which he wore when kids were looking). Right then, safely in the back of the room and sitting behind a tall kid so that Professor Kuniyoshi couldn’t see him, he was wearing the latter. And he was drawing back a very thick rubber band to which he’d fastened a metal paper clip.

Thwak!

Professor Kuniyoshi stopped talking and turned around at the noise but—not noticing the paper-clipped rubber band on the floor behind Kildare, or the tear trickling out of Kildare’s eye, or Ichi’s friends’ barely suppressed laughter—turned back to the board and continued to draw the common elements of moth wings.

Kildare looked like he was just going to suck up the pain. I, however, had reached my breaking point. I was going to teach this bully a lesson about entomology.

I turned my attention to the hundreds of butterflies and moths on their display mounts on the table in front of Professor Kuniyoshi. Then with my mind I popped the pins from their wings and
brought them back from the dead.

First one, then another, then every single specimen in the collection twitched, quivered, fluttered, and flew up into the air.

The entire class sat up and watched, openmouthed, as the butterflies gathered in an enormous colorful cloud in the middle of the room.

And then, en masse, they streaked to the back of the class and began to dive-bomb Ichi’s spiky-haired head.

“Ah-ah-ah-ah!” screamed Ichi in a voice so piercing and panicked he sounded more like a seven-year-old girl than a fourteen-year-old thug. “Get them off!!”

He leaped from his chair, swatting wildly about his head.

This time when poor Professor Kuniyoshi turned around, he didn’t fail to notice what was happening. But he didn’t quite know what to do about it.

“My collection?” He gasped. “My butterflies? Ichi, what are you doing to my butterflies?! Don’t you dare harm my specimens, young man!”

“Get them off me!” shrieked Ichi, running laps around the room now. They weren’t really hurting him, of course, but Ichi was apparently scared enough to fear the worst.

The rest of the class, including Ichi’s so-called friends, were roaring with laughter. Everybody, that is, except for Kildare, who had turned around in his seat and was
staring right at me
.

SCHOOL IS
EXHAUSTING.
I don’t know how human kids do it. By the time I got back to the suite, I could barely stand up. I wasn’t even going to change out of my dorky sailor-boy
seifuku.
I was just going to let myself in, unsling my book bag, and sleep on the nearest soft object I could find—a couch, a bed, an area rug, a pile of clothes…

But no sooner had I opened the door and stepped inside than—WHAM!—I was facedown on the bamboo floor with my arm twisted behind my back and the whining sound of a fully charged Opus 24/24 in my ear.

My powerful assailant’s weight shifted, driving a knee into the small of my back.

“You could be dead right now, Daniel,” whispered a voice I knew all too well, a voice I should have known to expect at just a moment such as this.

“Dad, I’ve had a rough day. Can you
please
let me up?”

“You expect to take on Number 7, Number 8,
and
Number 1, and you walk blindly into your hotel room without running a security sweep? Have you forgotten everything you’ve been taught?”

“Dad,” I pleaded, “my arm, my—”

Dad let go of my wrist and got up, but he didn’t power down the Opus 24/24.

Opus 24/24s have only one setting—eternal damnation. They contain an illegal molecular resonator that fires a gigawatt pulse that vibrates at the precise frequency of its victim’s neurotransmissions. In the simplest terms, it causes its victims to expire from pure
pain.
Which is kind of why they’re banned across most of the civilized universe.

Seeing one in my father’s hands was a little jarring to say the least. It was the very same weapon The Prayer had used to kill him and my mother.

“Dad, put that thing down already, okay?”

“
Make
me,” he commanded in a voice that sent chills down my spine. He was challenging me as part of our ongoing training exercises, but I don’t think he realized how truly exhausted I was.

Just as I was about to tell him he was seconds away from being dematerialized—stored in the lower levels of my consciousness until I needed him again—he grabbed me with one hand and flung me across the room into a Noguchi glass coffee table, which promptly shattered.

“Ouch. What the
heck?!
”

I struggled to my feet, anger boiling inside me. It was
one thing to keep me on my toes, but it was another to take advantage of a tired kid who’d already had a pretty rough day.

“Look, Dad. That wasn’t funny, and—”

“You might want to dive through, Daniel,” he suggested.

“Dive through? What’s that supposed to mean?”

By way of reply, he deftly aimed the Opus 24/24 at me and squeezed the trigger.

WAIT A
SECOND,
I thought.
Actually, wait a
whole bunch
of seconds.

Though my recollection is hazy at best, when I was just two—and he was still alive—my father had taught me how it’s possible to
dive through
the surface of time.

It’s something I recently pulled off while in the grips of a man-eating space anemone that had disguised itself as a van. And of course there was that time I managed to put myself back quite a few centuries, all the way to the time of King Arthur…

Anyhow, I’m not good at explaining the physics of the time-travel process, but suffice it to say it’s pretty taxing. The power to dive through the current, the fabric of the here and now, comes straight out of your emotions. So
you’ve got to be really riled up when you do it. Freaked out about something like, oh, say, your father firing the cruelest weapon ever created
right at your head.