Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) (7 page)

She’d been expecting this, too. She turned around and laughed. “You don’t get it. You watched me set myself on fire—and not get burned—and you still don’t get it! Everybody here is special—”

“You mean muy loco,” he muttered, sneering.

“If it’s crazy to Call Fire like I did, and like you can—” she shrugged. “The rest of us are here ‘cause we want to be. Annabel calls storms. Sarita Heals, and Chris sees the future. Lalage’s a Witch, like me—”

“Whoa, whoa—a Witch? Like—” he clearly fumbled for a comparison. “Like on Charmed or something? Or you mean brujeria—”

“Brujeria” was Black Magic, and something much closer to Shamanism than to anything either VeeVee or Lalage called Witchcraft. VeeVee decided to explain, not that the explanation would do him much good at this point.

“I’m a techno-shaman and a Fire Witch; I do combat magic. Nothing like on TV or movies.” She shook her head at him. “It’s complicated, but I’ve been doing this since I was nine, and this is the safest place for me ‘cause my parents travel a lot.”

“You mean they dumped you here.” His look was a mixture of pity and contempt and again she had to laugh.

“OK, I was saving the best part for last, but I guess I’ll show you now. You come have a look at the Student Union and tell me I was dumped here.” Once again, she set off at a brisk pace and was pleased to see that he actually had to stretch his long legs a good bit to keep up. She was heading for the building that held the dining hall, and he was about to get the surprise of his life.

They stopped in at the dining hall first. Their tour of the grounds had occupied most of the lunch hour, and the place was empty again—nothing to see but long rows of refectory-style tables and benches. If Tomas was hungry, they could probably go around to the back and cadge a snack before dinner; nobody went hungry at St. Rhia’s.

Lunch was always sandwiches, though you could have them toasted if you wanted. The setup was a lot like a good Subway Shop except there were lots of veggie choices. It beat the heck out of the “mystery meat” and bland mac-and-cheese in most high school cafeterias.

Dinner was another affair altogether.

VeeVee had seen St. Rhia’s austere little brochure. “Students will be encouraged to sample the cuisines of many countries at dinner-time,” it said primly. At best, this was misleading. At worst, you could say that the brochure was lying through its teeth. The “encouragement” consisted of the following: you could eat what was on the line, or you could have yesterday’s leftovers heated in a microwave—if there were any leftovers—or you could build yourself another sandwich. When confronted with their first sight of, say, stuffed Portobello mushrooms or calamari, it was surprising how many of the kids opted for bologna and cheese on white.

To be fair, the chef—because the guy in charge of St. Rhia’s kitchen was a chef, a chef with Talent as almost all the staff were, though no one knew exactly what his Talent was—didn’t spring really weird stuff on the kids very often. And there were some things you could count on: Friday night was always pizza night, for instance. VeeVee had gotten an international palate over the years, so she regarded the forays into the unexpected with anticipation. But the faces of some of the kids—half of them the ones from the inner city, which made sense, but a lot of them runaways from white-bread suburbs—when confronted with something they didn’t recognize was entertainment in and of itself. Lalage, for instance… you would have thought that with a name like that, she’d be as used to exotica as VeeVee was. But no. The first time she had been presented with sushi, you’d have thought she’d been handed a bowl of monkey brains.

Come to think of it, VeeVee was kind of looking forward to seeing Tomas’s reaction to sushi.

They went back outside.

VeeVee folded her arms over her chest and grinned. Tomas’s jaw was somewhere on the floor.

As well it should be. Behind a forbidding cellar door was Ria Llewellyn’s most expensive concession to the fact she had forty-odd kids locked away from malls, fast-food joints, and skating parks.

The Student Union was in the cellar of the Dining Hall. It had been an ordinary storage cellar before the renovation, but now the food storage had been moved upstairs and the basement had been put to a much better use. Now top-of-the-line commercial-quality Arcade machines lined one wall. Six game-consoles took up the next, with a seventh solely dedicated to Dance Dance Revolution. The biggest plasma-screen TV VeeVee had ever seen occupied the third wall, hooked up to a DVD and VCR that read both PAL and NTSB format video. There was full satellite too, and a cable package that got just about every station there was. The one thing you couldn’t have in your room was a television, because there was no reception and no way to get cable or satellite into all those individual rooms—of course, with full Internet who needed one? And for a lot of shows, it was a lot more fun to watch together on a 120” screen. The “furniture” was all the expensive kind of beanbag chairs, easy to clear off the floor for whatever reason. A microwave, a restaurant-sized fridge, and a drink machine rounded out the fourth wall. Right now, with everyone in class, the place was silent except for the pings and sound effects of the arcade and pinball machines.

“‘Dumped?’” VeeVee prodded.

“I bet everybody doesn’t get to use this stuff,” Tomas said snarkily.

“Actually, we do,” VeeVee said, tossing her head. “You can use any of the machines—or anything else down here—once you’ve done your coursework, whatever it is. Of course, you do have to access both the pinball machines and the arcade games with your ID card, which keeps track of the amount of time you spend on the machines. So you can’t goof off.”

Tomas was staring at her as if she’d grown an extra head.

“Oh, yeah, pachuco,” VeeVee said. “There is serious money involved here. And even more scary: serious brains.” She shrugged and smiled. “Upstairs in the Dining Hall is where we have concerts and dances. And “lights-out” in the dorms doesn’t mean “curfew’, it just means if you’re gonna do something noisy, take it here so everyone else can sleep. There’s a skater park I didn’t show you yet—you don’t skate, do you?”

He shook his head, looking as if she’d just hit him with something large and heavy. He probably hadn’t looked this stunned when he’d been arrested, VeeVee thought. Considering that had been less than 48 hours ago, Tomas Torres had received a large number of big shocks in a short time.

“Then you won’t care,” she decided. “What do you do?”

His mouth opened and shut a couple of times. Finally a strangled “—cars—” came out.

She facepalmed. “OK, then I got one more thing to show you. It’s a long walk, though.” She grinned, maybe a little cruelly. A barrio boy might not have a good idea of just how long a long walk was. “You better be up for it.”

Tomas just glared at her. She knew perfectly well he’d never admit weakness to someone like her. She’d known enough Hispanic boys to know the mindset, and Tomas seemed to be about as “old school” as they came. And so she was determined to make him stretch his legs and maybe get a little out of breath.

“See,” she said, as he puffed a little, determined to keep up and not let her know it was an effort. “Thing is, there’s money here, like I said, but this isn’t like some fancy-schmancy prep school either. I mean, not everybody’s going to college. So you learn how to use your powers, and you learn you aren’t alone, and then if you aren’t going to college, you learn how to make a living. And I mean a living, not starving in a fast-food or mega-mart job.”

She didn’t say why. If he thought about it, the answer would be obvious. People with powers like his—and hers—faced temptations all the time. And being stuck in a burger-joint, or behind a cash-register—well, when you were trying to figure out how to pay the bills and eat, it made the road Tomas had started down look real attractive.

Ms. Llewellyn was nothing if not pragmatic. Anyone who left here, if they weren’t college-bound, would be able to buy one of those big screen TVs he’d seen in the Student Union for themselves out of what they could make honestly. And not every kid here at St. Rhia’s was college material. Ria Llewellyn knew this. The point was to train young mages and psi-talents in how to safely master their abilities, not prepare them for a life of crime. And so there was what even VeeVee callously referred to as the “Bonehead Track”—the vocational courses. But, as with everything else here, they were vocational courses with a difference.

They might call it wood-shop class in the catalog, but it was a full apprenticeship with a professional cabinetmaker. There was an accredited course in home heating and air-conditioning repair and installation—which included, according to Mr. Fred, a section on removing the Portal to Hell from your furnace (VeeVee still wasn’t sure whether this part was tongue-in-cheek or not). There was another in TV and appliance repair, and one on computer repair—and the sections on exorcising the baneful spirits from all three, VeeVee knew from personal experience, were not tongue-in-cheek.

And there was “Auto Shop.”

This course was taught by a tiny blonde woman named Dottie Davies, who had been recruited from a place called “Fairgrove Industries.” Fairgrove made race cars, and not just turnkey check-book racers either. Real race cars, of the sort that ran at La Mans and Petite La Mans, and Dottie had been one of the chief mechanics there. Dottie didn’t just teach people how to repair vehicles, she taught them how to rebuild them.

That was obviously where Tomas was going to end up, because even on only a couple of hours’ acquaintance, Tomas didn’t strike VeeVee as the college-bound type.

The route Tomas would probably be taking every day was a well-traveled dirt road that wound down through the grounds towards County 6, and St. Rhia’s next-door neighbor.

A junkyard.

A very, very special junkyard.

The “Auto Shop” class took junkers and turned them into working cars, then sold them. Every student in the class had their hours logged, and the proceeds from the sales of the cars were distributed in the form of credit on the basis of hours logged. The credit went towards “buying” your own junker, and the parts, so you could build yourself a set of wheels of your very own.

VeeVee led Tomas up to the high chain-link fence that surrounded the yard. They walked along it until they came to the gate—unlocked and open at this time of day—and then walked through. She’d watched his eyes when he saw the big new industrial garage and the old, the very old, junkyard with its 1920s Art Deco garage and former gas station, and she grabbed him by the elbow before he could start wandering off down the seemingly endless rows of lovingly parked junkers. He barely noticed.

Towing him mercilessly in her wake, VeeVee hauled him in through the side door of the industrial garage. As she expected at this hour, class was in session, and the place was awash with sound—tools on metal, banging, the roar of a welding-torch, and over it all, the blare of rap music.

Five sets of eyes turned in their direction.

The owner of one of those sets of eyes turned off her torch and slapped the mute button for the shop-wide stereo system.

“Folks, this is a new student, Tomas Torres, and he’s a Firestarter.” As Tomas goggled at VeeVee’s bald statement, she turned back to him. “Tomas, this is auto-shop class. And that—” she pointed to the person peeling off her welding helmet, a graying blonde no taller than VeeVee was, “—is the instructor. Dottie Davies.”

“She’s a girl?” Tomas blurted.

“You could say that, if you didn’t want to get to be much older than you are now,” Dottie said. “Know anything about cars, homeboy?”

“Uh—” Tomas goggled at Dottie, who briskly shoved him towards a bench with a gloved hand.

“There. Carburetor rebuild, ‘57 Chevy, should be a piece of cake. Show me what you can do.”

Tomas still had that cartoon-stunned look on his face, but it didn’t affect his abilities. His hands moved surely among the parts and the tools in a way that looked as arcane as anything VeeVee could do. Dottie watched silently over his shoulder, saying nothing, eyes thoughtful. After a moment, Aaron Clark and Brian Walker—the latter a drawling tow-headed backwoods kid from Appalachia, the former a square-built black boy from Atlanta—sidled over to watch too.

After about fifteen minutes, Dottie put a hand on Tomas’s shoulder, making him jump. “That’ll do, homie. You’re in.” She grinned, and slapped his back hard enough to make him stagger a little. “Tell Ms Clifford. For the next three years or so, your ass is mine. Now, you finish that rebuild while these two knuckleheads watch.” She gave the other two a sidelong, amused look. “On the whole, boys, you’ll discover knowing what you’re doing rather than trying to intuit stuff from the way the parts are shaped tends to work better.”

“Well, what do you think?” VeeVee said.

Auto Shop class was over—she didn’t think she could have pried Tomas out of the garage with heavy machinery, and so she hadn’t tried—and the students were cleaning up, putting away their tools and getting ready for dinner. “Think you’re going to like it here?”

He’d been smiling and easy with the other bolt-heads, but now she saw him hesitate, and visibly remind himself he wasn’t supposed to want to be here.

“It’s still a prison, rubia,” he said.

“Fine,” she said. “Come on and have dinner, then.”

The next morning, Tomas went to see Ms. Clifford.

He wasn’t looking forward to it at all. Que linda rubia had told him Sarah Clifford was the school Guidance Councilor, who would set up his class schedule. What he knew for sure was that he wanted to spend every minute down at the garage and no time anywhere else. Dottie Davies might be a crazy smack-talking old lady, but Tomas liked her already, and she spoke his language. Cars.

Ms. Clifford was another matter. He’d met her kind before, back in El Paso. Social Workers who didn’t have a clue, who figured any problems you had were all your own fault. She take one look at him and probably tell him he’d have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get what he wanted, because that was what her kind always did.