The Shibboleth (34 page)

I have no sense of time, out in the ether—it could be moments and it could be hours. But finally, I pull back the
loosely tethered awareness from the black plains and open my eyes.

Always, in the East, I feel the slumbering beast. It stirs and shifts, massive and invisible. There might be other eyes upon it in these etheric heights, but I cannot sense them, or they me.

It stirs.

It's cold now as I climb down. If I fall, I'll hit the earth with a soft explosion of dust and ash, to be blown to the four corners by frigid wind. Getting back into the dorm room is more difficult than leaving it, and there's one instant of terror when I lose my balance, teeter.

Hollis is in the room when I come through the window. Tap, our other roommate, is absent.

“Hey.”

“'Sup,” Hollis says. Still trying to be tough.

I move to my bunk—the one above Jack's, just like back at Casimir—and climb up. Cradle my head.

“So, how'd they get you?” I ask, glancing at his still-bruised face.

“On the way to the gym.”

“They got a gym here?”

“Sure. It's Montana. It gets cold in the winter, I hear.”

“Where you from?”

“San Bernardino.”

“That in California?”

“Yeah.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen. You?”

“Seventeen. Almost.” I think a bit. “Who did that to you?”

“I don't know who they were. Couple of guys and a girl.”

“You don't know why?”

“Jack says they do it to all the noobs. Keep them in line. See what kind of power they got. Might be because of Tap. He doesn't like me much. He's a competent flyer, but they paired him with me. I'm having trouble with training. Like Jack.”

“So both you and Jack are having trouble? Like, how?”

“Tap doesn't listen to me when I try to help him. He can't lift me or doesn't want to. Jack doesn't even try.”

“They had you paired with both of them?”

“Yeah. For just a little while. Neither of them wants to be handcuffed to a bugfuck.”

“That's right. You said you could influence time.”

“Sorta. The perception of it.”

“Do it to me.”

“What? Right now?”

“Sure.”

“It's better when it's outside.”

“Why?”

“Easier to notice the change.”

“Show me.”

He gets out of bed, takes off his watch, and hands it to me. “What time is it?”

I look at the watch. “Little after six.”

He smiles and pauses. “You sure about that?”

“Yeah. See?” I hold up the watch, notice the face now reads after eight.

His hair's wet now, and he's changed into warm-ups. Like
he's ready for bed in a blink of an eye. But
oof
, my body aches. I've been still too long.

“That's a neat trick.”

“Thanks. Probably can't do it again to you. It's especially hard to affect other telepaths.”

That makes me think about time. “How long have you been here?”

“Two weeks.”

“So, when we met in the testing, you were fresh off the boat.”

“Pretty much.”

“That was two weeks ago?”

“Almost. You said in the testing that they had you in a bunker. What was that like?”

“Dark. And now it seems like it was longer than I thought.”

“You lost track of time.” He laughs. Hollis does a good job covering up his fear and nervousness. Where Jack used to go all still, Hollis gets loose. Familiar. But he's scared. Doesn't take a mind reader to see that. Suddenly, the laughter dies. “They want us scared,” he whispers.

“Yes.”

“They're doing something to keep us from sleeping.”

“You can't sleep?”

“I can sleep, but it's not restful, if that makes any sense.”

“They're not doing that.”

“Then who is?”

“Something else.” I wave my invisible antennae in the air. No Helmholtz. I slip out and settle on Hollis like a vapor. No Rider, and his consciousness is as tremulous and wavering as a flower blooming in the snow.

I slip behind his eyes and light the match head of his consciousness. He blinks.

I waggle my fingers at him.
Magic
.

He smiles, but it only lasts a moment. Emotions stall out on his face. He frowns, puzzling things out. Then, kind of sheep-ishly, he smiles, a bewildered yet elated look.

“War. Terrorism. Mass murders. You name it.” Hollis looks surprised at the sound of his own voice.

“Get out of here. Like from outer space? Area 51?”

“More like the darkness between stars. Bodiless.” How do I tell him it's the mythical dragon? That it doesn't require form to exist?

He stands and winces a little. His wounds are still sore.

“They must've really worked you over.”

“I think I broke a rib.”

Wordlessly, we've agreed to stick with our normal voices, incarcerado within convention.

“You want to go get something to eat?”

“Not hungry.”

“Okay.” He sits down and then stretches out on his bunk. “I'll just hang here with you.”

Hands cradled behind my head, staring up at the ceiling, I drift off for a moment. I don't want to close my eyes, but it's been a big day.

He's reading a paperback when I come out of my doze. The ether is still open, quiescent, and I when I ask Hollis where the restroom is, he tells me, stifling a yawn.

I trudge down the empty hall, stretching, and enter the communal bathroom.

I never even sense them until they spill out of the stalls.

My body compresses as if clutched in a great fist, bones creaking and stressing, my air gone. A wolfish dark boy darts forward and cracks me in the eye, rocking my head back and sending bright stars and imaginary tweety birds whistling in circles around my head.

When I regain my senses—still can't breathe—I see the other wee brutes stepping forward from stalls. It's my old friend Solomon Blackwell—the guy I bum-rushed in New York as he sat behind the wheel of a van—and he's got his hand up and out in a grasping pose, as if clutching a torch. Our gazes meet and he twists his hand and I feel my body twist in response.

Neat trick.

A battered metal trash can whips across the bathroom with a motion from a dark-complexioned boy. It makes a dull hollow
bong
as it caroms off my skull.

Blackwell is kind enough to let me fall with the blow. I do so with all the grace of a drunken, poleaxed steer.

When I can get my mouth working, I say, “You must be the ladies of the Welcome Wagon. Not really in the market for any Tupperware.” My face hurts pretty good. The warm red sticky stuff courses down from my forehead and makes my left eye, the outraged blooming one, hard to open.

These idiots stare at me like I'm speaking Mandarin. Hell, maybe I am. Blackwell chucks his head like a horse tossing against the reins, and I fly up and smack the ceiling with an
ooof
. Come flapping back to the ground, an over-cooked steak dropped from a skillet to splat on the floor.

“Payback's a bitch, ain't it?” he says, like he's the star of some crap B movie.

It sounds like a rhetorical question so I don't bother answering. My mouth is full of blood anyway.

I can't see very well, or at all really, so the shuffling and slapping sound I hear must be these assholes standing over me and performing ritual hand gestures. High fives all around.

One of them kicks me so hard in my crotch I can taste my own dick.

“And that's for Glouster. You
do not
mess with Red Team.” Glouster must be the poor sap whose testicles I punted in the elevator while fleeing Jerry's. Hard to believe Glouster would hold such a grudge, that was so long ago. I've been to the underworld and back since then.

I try to get out into the ether to stop them, take one of them over and flail into the others, turning their bodies traitorous. But everything spins, pitching and yawing. Blood fills my eyehole, pools in my ear. Drips across the bridge of my nose and onto the tile floor of the bathroom.

The last thing I hear before everything goes dark is “Look! He's pissed himself!” Followed by cheery laughter.

Hell, yeah, I pissed myself. That's what I came to the bathroom to do, anyway.

I wash out my clothes in the sink, scrub the blood off my face, and hobble back to the room, prickled with goose bumps and buck naked. Hollis snores lightly. Tap has returned from eating and lies on his bed, headphones blaring music directly into his head. He glances at me, snorts, and then pulls a comic from under his pillow and begins reading.

Jack is nowhere to be seen.

I climb into bed, painfully, my testicles screaming outrage.

When I wake, the room's flooded with light. Jack stands above me with a surprised look on his face.

“Holy crap, man, you look like ground beef. They messed you up for real.”

“You should see the other guys.”

I begin pushing myself up from the bed. What sleep I did get was full of throbbing. Painful throbbing, which is not my favorite kind.

“Assembly in ten minutes, bro. Up and at 'em.”

“Assembly?”

“Yeah. This ain't summer camp.” He walks over to where Hollis snores and kicks the leg of the bed. “Yo, man. Assembly.”

Hollis raises a tousled head from the pillow, glances at the
window. “It's not even daylight yet.”

“That's right. Assembly comes early.”

Tap rolls out of bed and tugs up his trousers and pulls on some combat boots, an old campaigner.

“Did you even sleep here last night?” I ask Jack.

He shrugs. “Some.”

“Thought there was no fraternization in dorms?”

“Ember's Red Team. And her room has roof access.”

“Nice. Never realized how handy your powers were, did ya, till you got a girlfriend?”

He ignores this and digs a clean, white T-shirt out of his trunk and tosses it to me. “You might want to clean yourself up. They love weakness.”

“Who?”

“The other kids. Ruark. The bulls.” He shakes his head. “Hell, everybody.”

“Who's weak?”

“It doesn't matter if you can lift a car, Shreve, you
look
totally spent.” He pokes me in my ribs. “Damn, bro, you look like a little old man.”

Standing, I hobble over to the chair and begin painfully shrugging on clothes.

I look down at my chest, my ribs, the purple-black fields of bruising. The scar in my gut given to me by the psychotic Dubrovnik woman. The gunshot wound on my shoulder. I look like a prisoner of war. And maybe that's what I am, a soldier in an invisible war.

I turn seventeen in a couple of months.

I almost scream pulling my jeans up and over ye olde testicles. They're a little testy.

We trudge down the stairs into the still-dark morning air. It's not freezing, but the breeze is brisk, and once the cold settles in, I'd maim someone for an overshirt. I have trouble keeping up with the other boys. The nuts are a problem, and my side is seriously tender. Blackwell and his cronies might have cracked a rib. Might be a little score to settle there.

Gravel crunching under our feet, Jack and Tap lead us down a path and through a lovely little copse of aspens standing like sentinels as a group. Other inductees and extranaturals migrate down the path, some chatting, some carrying flashlights, beams swinging wildly. On the paths, employees, men and women—some in lab coats, some in overalls, some in jackets and ties and business casual—breathe into steaming coffee mugs and make their way toward their duly appointed tasks, whatever those are. Auditing expenses, brewing up mutant superpowers, tightening up bolts on the rocket launchers.

You know, everyday, normal stuff.

Once we're through the copse of trees, the land opens up to a large, grassy field ringed in small outbuildings—maintenance and storage, I figure. Halfway up the steep slope of the far side of the narrow valley is a great behemoth of a building. It's got a massive front porch with benches, three stories of plate glass framed out like for some rich guy's hunting lodge. A paved road passes the field and runs up to its front door.

“That's Admin,” Jack says, a little ominously. “Where Quincrux has his office.”

“Ah. How much do you see of him?”