Authors: Zachary Rawlins
“I guess,” Alex admitted, shrugging. “What can I say?”
“So, you’d go somewhere with me, if I asked you to?”
Eerie spoke casually, refusing to meet Alex’s eyes when he looked over at her, one hand picking absently at the hem of her skirt. Alex kept looking at her with a shocked expression for a little while, hoping for a reaction, then gave up.
“Sure.”
“For real?”
Eerie glanced up at him shyly, like he’d promised her something she was hesitant to believe.
“Sure,” Alex repeated, feeling surprised and a little embarrassed.
“Will you go somewhere with me?”
“Um, sure,” Alex said, laughing. “When did you have in mind?”
Eerie smiled at him, and grabbed his arm, fortunately not picking the one that still ached from class.
“Now,” she said, pulling him along behind her, away from the dorms, back toward the center of campus. “Right now.”
--
“I’d really like to go and change my clothes first,” Alex complained to Eerie, who dragged him along determinedly by his sleeve. “I didn’t think that I’d be going anywhere, you know?”
Eerie glanced back at him icily.
“Emily is in your room, remember?”
“Oh,” Alex said, blushing. “Right. That would be. Um. Yes.”
Alex felt, quite frankly, like an asshole. He didn’t know what either Emily or Eerie had planned, and he hadn’t had enough time to think about either to know what he would have picked, given the choice. His first day in Mitsuru’s ‘Program’ had been enough to leave his brain violated and muddled, and his body tired and battered. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing Steve’s broken head, the vile mess against the wall behind him, the gun in his shaking hands. He didn’t feel like going somewhere with Eerie, he felt like going somewhere and being sick.
But he didn’t want to go back to his room, and not only because Emily might be there.
Alex wanted out of the Academy, for the first time since he had arrived. He had thought that any world would be better than the one he had left behind, but after Mitsuru’s class, he wasn’t so sure. Despite what had happened to his family, and the role he had played in it, Alex had never thought of himself as a killer. After all, he had no memories of doing what the cops claimed that he had done, no hatred toward his family, no memory of the abuse that the cops claimed his father had visited upon him. If he was pressed, Alex would have had to admit that he often couldn’t even remember his parent’s faces without looking at the photograph his grandmother had kept on her bureau back in the trailer. How could he feel like a killer? He didn’t remember killing anyone. Most of the time, he didn’t even remember the people that he was supposed to have killed.
He’d seen Steve walk away, after the class was over, sneering at Alex as he left the classroom. He knew he hadn’t killed him, the same way he knew that he had killed his family – because other people told him so. But Steve didn’t feel any more alive than his parents felt dead, and in the back of his mind, all he could see was the contents of Steve’s skull spreading slowly across the blond wood of the floor.
Alex followed Eerie numbly through the campus, into one of the cavernous Administrative Buildings, then through a series of corridors and hallways, doing his best to think about nothing, haunted by the afternoon. He was glad that she didn’t want to talk, because he wasn’t sure if he wanted to say any of the things he was thinking out loud. He didn’t notice when they had walked out the back of the building, until they were halfway across a dark, secluded courtyard, overhung with the grey branches of ancient willow trees. Alex remained heartsick and oblivious to his surroundings, to the extent that he almost tripped over a tombstone.
“Holy shit!” Alex exclaimed, attempting not to fall over the mossy, fractured limestone that his foot was caught on.
“Quiet,” Eerie shushed. “We aren’t supposed to be here.”
“I sort of guessed that.”
Alex brushed the moss from the tombstone without thinking about what he was doing. The carving on the stone was in kanji, and unreadable to him, but it looked like someone important.
“Shh.”
Eerie led them on a winding path through the headstones. It was chilly and dim beneath the leaves and the high walls that surrounded the courtyard, the path overgrown and dotted with white marble benches that looked cold and uninviting. Alex shivered and hurried along behind Eerie, who continued to ignore his questions. The courtyard wound on and on, passing by glass-enclosed terrariums and rooms that, through leaded glass windows, appeared to hold endless shelves of books in varying states of decay. Above them the uniform slate-grey stone stretched up to shut out most of the sky, with only the silhouette of the occasional stovepipe to break the uniformity. Eventually, they came to a rounded platform lined with broken columns, limestone bas reliefs, and the faint remains of white marble inlays. The columns were thin, fluted, and utterly unlike anything else Alex had seen in the Academy, fragile and almost alien in their design, in their strange lack of symmetry.
Renton leaned against one of them, a dour girl in a blue dress standing discreetly behind him.
“Welcome, welcome,” Renton said, grinning expansively and motioning Alex and Eerie over. “Sorry for making you come all this way, but this is, well, profoundly against the rules. Now then,” he said conspiratorially, putting his hand on Eerie’s shoulder in a familiar way that Alex did not like, “who wants to go to San Francisco?”
“You did not have to do that crap with Alex and Steve.
I had intended for them to spar with each other to work out their differences, not this fiasco. You know better,” Michael said firmly, “and I want an explanation.”
Mitsuru looked up from her soup, annoyed.
“How did you hear about that already?” She sighed and dropped her spoon back in the bowl. “Never mind, I already know. Rebecca and her bleeding heart, right?”
Michael pulled out a chair and sat down across from Mitsuru at the staff cafeteria table, arms folded across his broad chest. The faculty occupying the adjoining tables universally decided that now was a good time to visit the cafeteria line, and disappeared in a rustle of whispers and the clatter of hastily gathered dishes.
“I’m serious, Mitsuru. It wasn’t so long ago that I was your teacher. And I don’t recall doing anything like this to you.”
“What did you think happened,” Mitsuru asked, eyes downcast, “when I went down to see Alice Gallow for ‘Applied Combat Fundamentals’? It’s the Program, Michael, and they run it on all the prospective Auditors. You know that. They’re just getting an early start with Alex.”
“I know what happened when you were with Alice,” Michael said sadly. “I remember the Program myself. It isn’t right. And I don’t like watching you do it to someone else, Mitsuru. Alex isn’t a candidate for Audits or anything else, not yet. I haven’t even had a chance to get him into shape. I’m doing you the courtesy of asking before I go to Gaul and lodge a complaint. Why are you doing this?”
Mitsuru flipped through the binder next to her lunch tray, and pulled out three plastic sheathed documents. She passed them across the table to Michael, who inspected them.
“No point in going to Gaul,” Mitsuru said, shrugging and picking her spoon back up. “My orders came direct from Alistair, and his got carte blanche from the Director. It’s all above board. The plan is to make Alex an Auditor, remember? Gaul doesn’t want to wait; it creates too many opportunities for the Hegemony and the Black Sun. We don’t have the luxury of letting him make the wrong decision.”
“This will force him make the wrong decision; no, worse, it will make him useless. The Program ruins people, Mitsuru, you should know that.”
“I do,” Mitsuru acknowledged, unblinking. “No one knows it better, except mad old Alice. But that changes nothing. Alex Warner will be an Auditor, and a Black Protocol user. He will complete the Program as the rest of us of did, Michael. Gaul wants another tame monster, and I intend to hand him one, gift-wrapped and ready to go to work. I’ve heard about your reputation for squeamishness. Don’t expect the same from me. I need to know that you’ll do your part,” she said, recollecting her documents and looking at him seriously. “I need to know that he’s being properly trained, so that I don’t have to worry about that aspect of the situation.”
“So you can make him into a monster?”
“You said it. The useful kind. Like me.” Mitsuru nodded and then spooned some of the noodles from her soup into her mouth. “Can I count on you to make him ready? Duly noting your objections, of course.”
“I wouldn’t want to disappoint you all,” Michael said sourly. “Of course. I’ll try and make him ready. And you, my dear, you should know – you sound more like Alice every day.”
“Good,” Mitsuru said tersely, returning her attention to her soup.
--
“Where are we?”
Alex glanced around at the neighborhood they’d emerged in. He’d spent a shaky few minutes in an alley behind some dumpsters after the apport, jarred by the abrupt transition and mildly nauseous, but it had passed quickly, and he felt alright now. He wondered if it had been that bad the other time, when Mitsuru had brought him back to Central, but he couldn’t remember anything about it. Maybe Svetlana simply wasn’t very good.
“The Mission,” Eerie answered, grabbing Alex by the arm and pulling him along. “There are some places I like around here. We’ll be able to find clothes and stuff.”
The Mission was an older neighborhood, grimy and dignified, poor and yet overflowing with optimistic entrepreneurs and vividly colored street art. The majority of the people on the street seemed to be Latino men, but there was fair representation of hipsters and young families on the busy street as well. They passed a flower stand staffed by a Vietnamese family, and Alex returned a smile from a cherub-faced little boy, who stood on top of the counter his grandmother worked. Outside, on the sidewalk, a half-dozen enterprising homeless had laid out blankets, and were selling second-hand books and knickknacks. The neighborhood was bustling and vibrant, the air thick with exhaust and the smells of a dozen different cuisines. After his time in Central, it seemed fantastically crowded and loud to Alex.
Eerie dragged him a couple of blocks up Sixteenth, turning at Valencia Street. She released Alex’s hand in front of a skate shop, explaining that she wanted to visit the boutique next door, which only did women’s clothing. Alex dug through the stock at the skate shop for a while, coming up with a couple black t-shirts, a pair of baggy drab green pants, and a heavy, dark grey sweatshirt for the evening. The sullen, heavily tattooed man at the counter took the money Eerie had given him with an air of bored resentment, slowly counting out change and then haphazardly shoving his purchases into plastic grocery bags. Alex stepped out of the skate shop, glanced at the boutique and didn’t see Eerie, and figured she was trying stuff on.
He wandered down the block and then across the street to a discount clothing store, where he bought a package of generic tube socks and a couple pairs of boxer shorts. By the time he returned the boutique, Eerie was waiting for him, a bag shoved underneath one of her arms.
“What now?” Alex asked, scratching his neck. He wanted to go somewhere and change, as he was tired of wearing dirty clothes, and it was too windy for pants with a hole in the knee. The breeze coming off the San Francisco Bay appeared to be every bit as cold as he’d been led to believe.
“I still need to go to some more places,” Eerie said with a frown. “Are you finished already?”
Alex shrugged.