The Academy (42 page)

“That what you think, Alex? Then maybe I was wrong about you after all. Maybe you aren’t in the right place, if you’re that eager to play good soldier.”

“What?”

Alex’s jaw hung open in frank astonishment.

“Michael isn’t going to fight for you, or even with you, Alex,” Alice said bluntly. “Michael is going to teach you what he can, and he’ll do the best possible job of it. But once you are in the field, Michael will be back here at the Academy with the next generation of promising youngsters. Nobody can make that kind of decision for you,” Alice warned him, “no matter how good their intentions. Or your own. You have to take ownership of your life, eventually.”

Rebecca nodded, looking sadly back at her cigarettes, sitting back on the window sill, where she’d left them.

“Alice is right, Alex,” Rebecca said. “This is something you have to decide for yourself.”

Michael looked helplessly from one woman to the other, eyes blazing, but neither one would meet his eyes. Alex shook his head and looked glum.

“Well, then I don’t know enough about it to make the decision,” he snapped. “It’s not even a fair question. But, I do know that if you smoke another cigarette in here, Rebecca, that I am leaving,” he added crossly.

Rebecca froze, her expression wounded.

“Why is it that no one respects my office?” Rebecca slumped into her chair in resignation. “First people start coming here to have arguments, now students are telling me I’m not allowed to smoke. What’s next? Enforced nap time?”

Michael stood up.

“Well, I think this is settled for now…” he began, turning towards the door.

“What’s settled, exactly?”

Alice’s tone was jovial, but Alex was starting to notice something about the tall woman’s smile. It was off, somehow. Whatever a smile was supposed to be – warm, bright, inviting, comforting, whatever – Alice’s expression was the polar opposite of that. The last thing you wanted to see.

The last thing, Alex reminded himself, that any number of people had seen, if even half the stories were true.

Michael paused on his way to the door, but didn’t look back at Alice.

“Alex said he doesn’t understand what we’re talking about,” Michael said calmly. “Until he does, this discussion is pointless.”

Alice sat down next to Alex on the couch, and gave him a friendly pat on the knee.

“Here, I’ll make it simple,” Alice suggested. “Alex, you remember the Weir who attacked you and Mitzi in the park?”

Rebecca’s jaw almost hit the floor, though again, no one seemed to notice. After a moment, she decided the expression was wasted without an audience, and quietly closed her mouth.

“Did you call Mitsuru…?”

Again, no one paid her any attention. Rebecca had to fight the impulse to go and check to see if her name was still on the office door.

“Did you like that?” Alice asked Alex, inspecting his face like she actually expected him to look happy. “Did you like lying there while Mitsuru did all the work?”

Alex stared at her, eyes wide.

“Um…” he muttered, shaking his head. “I don’t really…”

“Damn it, Alice.”

Michael glared at Alice, but she paid him no mind.

“Or did you like being saved, Alex?”

Alice pushed one finger against his chest playfully.

“It makes things a whole lot easier, when you are the victim. Everything is black and white, and nobody ever expects anything else from you.”

Alex pushed her hand away, clearly annoyed.

“Of course not,” Alex said, his voice trembling. “I didn’t want any of that stuff to happen. But it isn’t like I had any options.”

Alice stood up and smiled at Michael triumphantly.

“And if he gets his way,” Alice said ominously, pointing at Michael, “that’s exactly how things will stay. You’ll never have any options. You’ll never be able to protect anyone, Alex, not even yourself. Instead, you’ll get to watch your friends die protecting you.”

Michael’s fist slammed into the door frame, causing everyone but Alice to jump.

“No need to get pissy,” Alice said lightly, rummaging briefly through her coat pocket before coming up with a folded piece of paper. “I already talked to Alistair and got permission. You keep training him however you like, Michael,” she said, eyes sparkling. “I’m going to have Mitzi put him through the Program. Out of your jurisdiction.”

“Not a chance,” Michael said firmly. “I’ll go over your head, straight to the Director if I have to.”

“Then go talk to Gaul,” Alice said, shrugging. “He’ll back me on this. We all know that this is too personal for you to make an impartial decision.”

“Uh, what Program?” Alex asked softly, afraid to actually interrupt. “Is that bad? Am I in trouble?”

“Alice, you’re insane,” Michael growled. “Rebecca, say something.”

Rebecca smiled ruefully.

“Actually, I’ve been talking pretty much the entire time…”

Rebecca trailed off when she realized that no one was listening to her. Alice dropped the paper on the floor in front of Michael, shrugged, and started for the door.

“It’s quite simple, Alex,” Alice said over her shoulder. “You can do things Michael’s way. You don’t have to make a choice. But, if you want out of the Program – and you will – then I suggest you find a way to impress me with your personal development. Because it doesn’t end until I say. And I won’t say, until you’ve learned to take care of yourself, at the very least.”

Alice turned back towards the door, and motioned for Michael, still frozen, one fist pressed up against the door jam, to stand aside.

“Move it, Mikey,” Alice said, jerking her thumb to the side. “I’ve got things to take care of.”

“Thanks for stopping by, you guys,” Rebecca hinted.

Michael’s arm didn’t move, but his hand reddened where it pressed against the old wood of the door frame.

“Have to go practice being a cunt?”

Michael spoke through gritted teeth, his arm falling reluctantly to his side.

“You think I still need practice?” Alice asked, smiling as she squeezed past him and out into the hall.

Emily had her hair up in curlers
, and was about halfway done with her eyebrows, when Margot came into the otherwise empty dorm bathroom, wrapped in a bathrobe and looking like she had just woken, and wasn’t too pleased about it, a yellow plastic basket with her toiletries hanging from one hand. She walked over to the long faux-marble counter and set her stuff down on the sink and mirror combo next to Emily’s, giving her a nod. Emily smiled at her and then went back to tweezing her eyebrow. She waited until Margot had started taking the top off a bottle of facial cleanser before she snuck a look at her halo.

There were all sorts of ways, as Emily understood it, for empaths to realize their talent. Some of them saw emotions as colored auras surrounding people, others heard music associated with a specific emotional state, while some particularly unlucky empaths even experienced a mirror-image of the emotions that they sensed around them. Emily, being only moderately unlucky, saw what she called halos – a roughly circular hollow ring of colored smoke that floated above people’s heads. She couldn’t see them all the time; she’d had to learn how to look them, and the halos were even more difficult to see here at the Academy, where almost everyone had been taught to resist such things. But, if Emily tried hard, most the time, she could see it, at least a little bit.

Margot’s halo was thin and reedy, almost broken in places, but that was normal for her. Her halo was a uniform grey-blue, which in Emily’s own personal interpretation, indicated either apathy or a tremendous ability to control her emotions. For Margot, this too was normal.

Then Sarah came breezing in, greeting both of them cheerfully and then walking over to the sink on Emily’s opposite side, the tiled space echoing with the sound of her sandals. Emily didn’t even have to check Sarah’s halo; as always, it was a ring of pulsating rose-pink light, which for Emily indicated optimism, good will and excitement, which was Sarah’s default emotional state. But there was something a bit unusual about it, in that it was shot through with the silvery metallic tone that Emily associated with curiosity, curiosity she was certain was directed at her, when she noticed Sarah glancing over while she got her hairbrush out.

“So,” Sarah said, her eyes locked on the hair she was brushing as if it required her full attention, “when were you going to tell me about your little date with Alex?”

Emily did her best to look composed. She’d guessed at the source of her curiosity, of course, and she kind of did want to brag about it. Only kind of, though, because it hadn’t gone exactly how she’d hoped. Then she saw herself in the mirror and realized she was blushing, and that made it all worse.

“We didn’t go on a date. I made him dinner, that’s all.”

“At your house,” Sarah offered, smiling eagerly.

“At my parent’s house,” Emily corrected.

“But, they weren’t there, right?”

“How did you know that?”

Sarah waved her hairbrush dismissively.

“I didn’t think you’d invite Alex over to meet your mom on a first date. Come on, tell me, how was it?”

Emily put away her tweezers, and then started to carefully remove the curlers from her hair, one at a time. She hoped her hair came out looking alright, because sleeping with the curlers in had been a pain. The Raleigh Cartel’s precognitives had told her that Alex would like her hair better this way, so she’d been dutifully curling her hair since the session had started. She thought it looked good, but she was getting a little tired of all the work entailed.

“It was pretty good. I mean, Therese showed up, even though she wasn’t supposed to be there, and she made a scene, as usual. But, it could have been a lot worse.”

Sarah glanced over sympathetically.

“Therese still does that, huh? Doesn’t she ever get tired of scaring your boyfriends off?”

“Did she?”

Emily turned to Margot, who was filling the sink while watching her in the mirror, surprised that she asked anything at all. She thought that she and Margot got along fine, for two people who barely ever spoke to each other, but she didn’t think she’d ever actually shown any interest in her personal life before. Margot was looking at her expectantly, so Emily couldn’t risk peaking at her halo to try and figure out her motivation.

“Did she what?”

“Did she scare off Alex?” Margot asked, putting one hand in the water briefly to check the temperature. “Or is he your boyfriend now?”

The curler in Emily’s fingers at that moment slipped from her hand and clattered off the counter and onto the ground. Sarah picked it up for her, and then set it down next to the rest of Emily’s toiletries on the counter.

“Well,” Emily stalled, trying to reason out some kind of answer, “not exactly. She didn’t seem to scare Alex off, though it was a little bit weird after she left. And no, Alex isn’t my boyfriend. We don’t even know each other that well, yet. But,” Emily said slowly, enjoying saying it out loud, even if it wasn’t exactly the whole truth, “well, we are kind of seeing each other.”