Willful Machines (2 page)

Stroud frowned a second longer but didn't say anything more to the boy, or to the FUUWLs, either. Officially, the school administration condemned the Freshman Stand, but I hadn't ever heard of anyone actually getting in trouble for instigating it. “You may come in,” he told us, “and line up to enter the auditorium.” Then, to me, “Get up, Lee.”

“Yes, sir.”

Technically, Stroud was also my grandfather, but that didn't mean I was entitled to special treatment—unless you considered an extra share of contempt special treatment. While the other kids crowded toward the doors, their pucks swarming along with them, a hand appeared above me: the new boy's. I flinched as I took it. His skin felt hotter than I'd expected.

“Thanks.”

He gave me a wink and melted into the crowd. For a second I stood staring after him like an idiot, my face burning. Then I remembered Dr. Singh, and her hand clutching my wrist.
Just let him fall.
A cold breeze blew in from the lake, chilling the back of my neck. I looked for her, but she'd disappeared too.

T
he Spiders had left the main hall even more immaculate than usual. The dark wood paneling gave off an oily shine, and the crystals dangling from the drapey, oversize chandelier glittered. Even so, a gloom hung in here, and not just because of the dark clouds outside. Inverness Prep was always gloomy.

A line had formed at the auditorium entrance. We didn't usually have to line up for assemblies, but today a body-scan machine had appeared in front of the door. Students had to step into a glass booth one by one and wait for a green light to flash before a guard waved them through.

“You okay?” Bex drew up next to me and brushed off the front of my blazer. “That was very gallant of you.”

“Try mortifying.”

I almost started to tell her about the weirdness with Dr. Singh, but her attention had shifted to the hall around us. “This place is a circus. Just think, Lee: all this for your dad.”

I glanced at my father's staff cutting back and forth across the hall like they owned the place, all of them in sleek dark suits, their heads bent down, their pucks glued to their ears, their shoes ticking over the worn stone floors. And then there were the burly men in sunglasses standing here and there, failing to look inconspicuous. All this for Dad—it did feel strange to think of it.

“Hey.” Bex elbowed me and lowered her voice. “I told you he was good looking.”

Ahead of us in line, the new kid had just entered the body scanner. Bex was right: he was handsome. Not in a boring way, though. His good looks contained a hint of strangeness that made you think of words like “striking” instead of words like “cute.” Maybe it had something to do with his fuzzy ethnicity. He had one of those faces that could've passed for black, white, Pakistani, or Eskimo. Or maybe it was the huge mop of twisty hair that sat on top of his head. With his friendly face and bronze curls and tan skin, he seemed too warm for a cold place like Inverness Prep. Even though he wasn't balanced above a cliff anymore, I still felt my heart pick up speed as I watched him. “He's going to get in trouble for the tie,” I said.

The red light above the boy's head flashed, which meant the body-scan machine had found something. The guard glanced at the light, frowning. A split second later, the machine changed its mind: the red light flicked off and the green one came on instead. The guard gave the control panel a couple of sharp raps
with his knuckle, shrugged, and waved the boy through.

“Damn,” Bex said. “I was hoping we'd get to watch a strip search.”

A few minutes later, when the time came for her to step into the booth herself, she fussed with her bobbed hair and smoothed her pleated skirt like she was about to have her picture taken. Inside the glass chamber, she looked even tinier than usual, like a doll in a display case—albeit one that wore combat boots and smudgy black eye makeup.

Green light. My turn. The booth's overhead light blazed down on me, and I could feel all the kids behind me in line watching. I imagined what they saw: a skinny guy with chunky black glasses and cropped black hair that made his already big ears appear even bigger. Bex always claimed she liked my look. In my school uniform, she said, with my dark hair and pale skin and serious face, I reminded her of a cute mortician. But when the other kids at Inverness Prep looked at me, I knew they thought only one thing, and today more than ever: That
boy is Henry Stroud's grandson and John Fisher's son?

The green light flashed. I shuffled out through the booth's far door. Inside the auditorium, more suits sliced up and down the aisles, shouldering their way past students, and more hulking men with suspicious gun-shaped bulges under their jackets lined the walls. I noticed Trumbull among them. He gave me a grim nod, but I knew he loved days like this. It had to beat following me around from class to class, that was for sure.
High over our heads, news cameras wobbled through the air, watching everything. A mahogany podium stood on the stage, with a banner above it that read,
JOSEPH P. INVERNESS PREPARATORY SCHOOL TERCENTENNIAL
, and below that,
FOR THREE HUNDRED YEARS, SHAPING THE LEADERS OF TOMORROW.

Bex and I found places and settled in, at least as much as we could. The hard wooden seats, though polished to a shine, hadn't been replaced in at least a century. The way they dug into your back and forced you to sit up straight, they felt like antique torture devices. I always figured that was probably the whole idea.

Just about everybody had made it into the auditorium by now. I slid forward and scanned the crowd, searching for a head of curly, bronze-colored hair. Bex leaned behind me and called to the person sitting on my other side, “Hey, nice handstand.”

“Thanks.”

I glanced to my left, and my insides lurched. The new boy had sat down right beside me.

“Welcome to Inverness. This is Lee. I'm Rebecca, but don't call me that. Call me Bex. We're juniors.”

“Nico. Also a junior.” I noticed an accent. Italian? Spanish? “Sorry for scaring you back there, Lee.”

I gave a shrug I hoped looked nonchalant. “You didn't really scare me.”

Probably the most transparent lie I'd ever told, but he was kind enough to let it pass. He motioned at the stone walls, with
their narrow windows and gruesome carved ravens. “I feel like I'm in Transylvania.”

Bex nodded and crossed her legs, going into know-it-all mode. “Understandable. This building went up in the early twentieth century, after the original school burned down. The headmaster at the time wanted the new Inverness Prep to look like a medieval Gothic monastery. Apparently he was a little eccentric.”

“Let me guess,” Nico said. “He was also the one who thought of building the school on top of a waterfall.”

“For added drama,” she confirmed. “And to terrify the students. Fear was an important part of the teaching method back then.”

“Still is,” I muttered.

Nico threw his head back and laughed. He had the kind of booming laugh that seemed to say he found the world incredibly interesting and funny. A couple of students sitting in front of us turned around to stare at him.

“A lot of kids are convinced this place is haunted,” Bex continued. “It probably doesn't help that the school mascot is a raven and the school color is basically black.” She tugged on her necktie, which was, technically, midnight blue. “And then, of course, there are the Spiders.”

“Right,” Nico said. “The Spiders. I've heard about them.”

Up on the stage, the faculty marched out in the silly-looking midnight-blue gowns they wore for formal occasions, which
meant the assembly would start soon. They all sat down in chairs lined up behind the podium. Dr. Singh trundled after the others in her motorized wheelchair. That crazy look had left her eyes, but I still couldn't shake the memory of it from my mind. I knew the accident seven years ago had pretty much wrecked her, and not just physically. Could that explain what she'd done on the terrace? Had it been some kind of mental lapse brought on by the trauma?

“Okay, you two.” Bex grabbed her puck out of the air. “Talk amongst yourselves. I'm on duty now.”

I eased back in my seat and pretended to wipe a smudge from my glasses with my sleeve while I tried to think of something to say. Making conversation wasn't one of my strong points. “Where are you from?”

“Chile,” he answered.

I loved the way he said it: CHEE-lay. I searched my brain for an intelligent comment about the country, but I couldn't even remember if it was in Central America or South America.

“What's she doing?” He pointed at Bex, who'd started murmuring into her puck.

“Taking notes for an article,” I said. “She's the editor of the school news site. Or was, at least. She just got fired.”

“Silenced,” she corrected without looking over.

“Ouch,” Nico said. “What happened?”

“She wrote a feature about how the school board's thinking of making Inverness Prep boys-only again. Called it part
of a national trend of rolling back women's rights. Blamed the problem on the whole Human Values Movement thing.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“The headmaster didn't think so,” I said. “He had the article taken down seventeen minutes after it went up.”

“But she's still writing?”

“You bet I am,” Bex said.

“The day after she was fired—sorry, silenced—she started her own news site: the
Inverness Prep Free Press
.”

“Good for you,” Nico told Bex. He nodded at the stage. “I guess that means you aren't going to like what our special guest has to say.”

“I don't expect to, no.” She let go of her puck and turned to him. “Nico, what the hell is happening to this country? As someone with an outside perspective, can you shed any light on that question?”

He seemed to think she'd just made a joke, because he let out another inappropriately loud laugh.

“I'm serious,” Bex said. “Ever since Human Values started picking up steam, America has gone backward at least a hundred years. I'm not just talking about women's rights, either.”

“What about you, Lee? Do you have similar feelings?”

My eyes drifted to the empty podium. I shrugged. “I'm not really into politics.”

Nico followed my gaze. “I heard Fisher's son goes to school here too.”

“As a matter of fact—” Bex began.

I knocked my foot against hers. “He's around here somewhere.”

Headmaster Stroud made his way onto the stage, his limp noticeable, but barely. He gripped the podium and, without saying a word, waited for silence to fall. A risky tactic in a room full of kids, but for him it always worked.

“Good morning, students, faculty, alumni, and guests. Today we celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of this institution. I know this place means a lot to many of you. It certainly means a lot to me. The lessons I learned as a student here made me the man I am today. In fact, I believe they saved my life.”

Everybody knew exactly what he meant. My grandfather's story had already become an Inverness legend—an especially gruesome one. Long before he was the school's headmaster, he'd joined the US Marine Corps along with his best friend from Inverness, George Fisher (i.e., my dad's father; i.e., my
other
grandfather). The two of them got shipped off to battle terrorists in the Middle East. The terrorists captured them, held them prisoner for nine years, beat them and tortured them that whole time. In the end, Grandfather Fisher died, but Grandfather Stroud escaped . . . by using the titanium thighbone he'd dug out of his best friend's dead body to club his captors to death. Stroud returned to America a hero, earned a degree in education, and went to work at his alma mater. Even though the beatings had mangled his body, whenever
we students saw him, he was always holding his back ramrod straight—probably something he'd learned in the military, but I liked to imagine he'd picked up the habit after all those years sitting in Inverness Prep's excruciating auditorium seats.

“To mark this occasion,” Stroud continued, “we've invited a special guest to speak: my son-in-law, and one of Inverness Prep's most celebrated alumni.”

Down in front, the FUUWLs jumped up and cheered. Pretty soon the rest of the crowd was on its feet too. Bex stood, but only so she could see better, her mouth twisted into a dubious frown. She waved her puck higher, as if she thought it might catch something the news cameras would miss. On my other side, Nico whispered, “Here we go.” He'd broken into that sly grin of his, revealing two slightly crooked front teeth. I noticed the color of his eyes, too—light brown, with little threads of gold that reminded me of the glowing filaments in old-fashioned lightbulbs—and my heart sped up again.

The next second, out walked my dad, the president of the United States.