Tanderon (32 page)

“Count!” he ordered, nearly quivering with anticipated pleasure. I counted slowly to five while he put everything he had into the strokes, but he didn’t get the sort of reaction he’d obviously expected. At five, still feeling the slashing edge of the tickler on my hand, I simply stopped and waited.

“Get back to your seat!” he snarled, the knuckles of his hand white around the tickler. “I’ll be trying you again later!”

I turned in the deep, charged silence of the room and went back to my seat without saying anything, primarily because there wasn’t anything I wanted to say. Langley grabbed some papers and returned to section A with the rest of the class, but he came back to me two more times that hour. Each time the result was the same:

“Wrong. Five demerits. Up front.”

I continued to give him the same lack of reaction I had the first time, and when the hour ended he was gray with rage. His eyes burned into me as I filed out with everyone else, but he didn’t say a word and didn’t notice the looks he got from the rest of the class. They all knew a private vendetta when they saw one, and had all been trying very hard not to get caught up in it. They didn’t know how wise they were.

The rest of the day passed without my noticing it. At 1910 I went back to my private room and finished up on the notes on the class at 2, not having gotten very far with them during the day. At 2035 I went back to my quarters to pick up the knife and a jacket, and was waiting outside when 2045 came. I expected to see Freddy, but Sergeant Cambet showed up instead.

“I’ll be piloting you to 2,” Cambet said as he came up. “Major Drummond is …

otherwise occupied.”

Cambet wasn’t a very good liar, not when he’d had such a sincere look on his face as he’d said his piece. But I still left it like that and took the pass he handed me, put a copy on the OD’s desk as I had before, and we went to 2.

The class was all there, including Val, and I got right down to work because I wasn’t in the mood to play. Val fidgeted the entire time and looked as though he was trying to decide whether or not to say something to me, but he had the decision taken away from him. I walked out of the room on the dot of 2300, and Cambet took me back. I stripped off the uniform when I got to my quarters, and was about to get into bed when Olveri walked in.

“I thought so,” she said quietly to keep from waking my roommates, her pinched face wearing a look of satisfaction. “Regulations state that pajamas are to be worn by all cadets, so get with it, Santee. I think you’ve found that being the colonel’s daughter doesn’t exempt you from following orders.” She waited until I’d gotten the pajamas out and was wearing them before she nodded and said, “And keep them on because I’m leaving word for you to be checked on during the night.”

She went out again and closed the door, and I lit a cigarette and lay down in the dark. I thought about the smoke curling up to the ceiling and happily nothing else.

The rest of the week floated by in a dark fog that got deeper as the time passed. I began to think about nothing but Langley’s class, the only reality in a universe of shadows. Every day it was the same, three times up in front of him, five demerits each time. His face hung in front of my eyes even when he wasn’t there, and I dreamed about him when I slept – although I wasn’t sleeping much. I would fall into an exhausted sleep after the class at 2, but would wake up choking a few hours later.

I’d begun to chain smoke, and whatever food I managed to force down my throat tasted like straw.

Captain Ellis had begun to stare at me with a worried look, but hadn’t gone so far as to ask me about what was happening. Morrison asked point blank, but I was able to put her off. I lost myself in crowds of cadets to avoid Pete and Freddy, knowing I’d never be able to stand the distraction of their questioning. And I’d taken to wearing the knife all the time.

Langley’s class became a pit from the depths of hell, Langley himself a Hadean disciple. I had a role I couldn’t break, but he knew nothing about that and wouldn’t have cared even if he’d known. He struck at me each time with all the strength of his body, no longer minding that I refused to cry out with the pain. He could see the pain in my eyes as it reached me, and his pleasure came from knowing he was the one who caused my agony.

What he didn’t know about was the knife only inches from my hand when he hit me, but in the end it didn’t really matter. The discipline of a job to do held my hand back from the knife, keeping Langley safer than he would have been with a real cadet.

Langley looked forward to seeing me every day, never knowing how close he was to the sharpened edge of the end of pain.

On day 5 I was at 2 listening to someone’s work when I realized that he’d stopped speaking some time before. The class had been very quiet the last couple of days, and even Nalvidi hadn’t acted up. Cambet had tried to make conversation when the trips first began, but he’d given it up quickly and simply stood at the side of the room every night without commenting. Now I tried to remember the last words I’d heard but nothing came through, so I took a breath and stood up.

“Let’s save it for next week,” I told them, then took my jacket and started for the door. But suddenly Val was there, standing in my way, the first time he’d come near me all week. I tried to step around him but he put up his arm, barring the way, then took my left wrist and turned it. With my hand palm up he could see that it was black and blue from wrist to fingertips, and it must have been obvious that I hadn’t been able to use it in a while because of the swelling. Val raised his eyes to mine, and he looked almost unfamiliar.

“Give it up!” he ordered harshly, some unnamed emotion writhing in his stare. “Talk to the colonel and give it up!”

Val’s face kept shifting in and out of focus, sometimes appearing as his face, sometimes as Langley’s, sometimes a combination of the two. I stared at him until the face in front of me was his alone, then I told it “No.”

That single word from me had always gotten him angry, I recalled, but that time the flash of fury in his eyes was so strong it almost crackled. Possibly his anger was intensified by the way my attention kept turning inward, toward things he couldn’t see. But whatever it was his hand suddenly came out of nowhere, slapping me so hard that I nearly went down sideways.

My cheek flamed with the slap, causing something inside me to flare in response, and when I jerked straight and faced him again the knife was in my hand and moving toward its target. I wanted so much to touch Langley with that blade, to see him fall to the ground at my feet and empty of lifeblood. I wanted it with everything inside me, and it almost took too long to understand that it wasn’t Langley standing in front of me, it was Val!

The breath caught in my throat when I realized what I was doing and I forced the knife down again, but Val hadn’t even moved! He stood there with no expression on his face and there wasn’t a sound around us, just as though everyone in the class was holding their breath. Cambet had started over to us when Val slapped me but he stood frozen in place now, his shocked gaze on the gleaming knife in my hand. I stared at it myself as though seeing it for the first time, resheathed it slowly, then looked up at Val again.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, feeling a shudder pass through me. It wasn’t Langley in front of me it was Val, and I’d come so close! Val’s face contorted in a look of agony and he tried to stop me, but I tore my arm from his grip and started for the door. Chopping at him blindly kept him from getting in my way again and let me just keep going. My run through the halls is no more than a blur in my memory, but Cambet was just catching up when I reached the hopper field. That time we flew back to the Academy in a deeper silence than ever before.

I didn’t sleep at all that night, doing no more than lie there staring into the dark.

Langley’s face hung in front of my eyes as usual, but then Val’s came to block it out.

I saw the look of agony again and again, saw the knife so close to his body, and I turned over onto my stomach and moaned out the pain. I’d been holding the pain away from me, trying to finish the job, but it had come at me from a different direction and I couldn’t hold it off any longer. The constant stabbing ache in my left hand was nothing compared to the new pain, and I didn’t know how to cope with it.

I shuddered a while in the silence and dark, then pushed everything far away from me where I didn’t have to cope with it. There was still a job to do, still a god-forsaken job to see out to the final scene, and everything else could be forgotten until that was done. After that… after that everything whirled and blended, and I couldn’t see anything at all. Maybe I’d get lucky and the future would actually turn out to be that empty and dead.

I walked into Langley’s class the next day feeling very lightheaded. As usual, the conversational buzz from the hall died out as soon as people passed through the doorway, but that day there was more than the usual uneasiness in the air. Kids glanced at my face then leaned over to whisper to one another, and as I sat down in my seat I wondered distantly if any of them could tell what I was feeling. Something had shifted inside my mind, had been shifting the entire morning, and now I finally knew what direction the shift was taking.

That morning at calisthenics I’d been very careful not to let Morrison see my hand, more careful than I’d been since the thing with Langley first started. Now I rested my left hand on the writing ledge in front of me, palm up, staring at the bruised and puffy flesh as the fingers of my right hand rubbed at my forehead. There was a tightness behind where my fingers rubbed, one that had been growing for days even though I hadn’t noticed it.

The pain in my hand underscored the tightness past my eyes, and somewhere deep inside part of me was crying. I’d sworn no one would die during my stay at the Academy, but Langley had ruined my resolve and turned it to nothing with the viciousness of his actions. I’d taken all I could from the man and now the basic me refused to take anymore. In other words, if he tried to hurt me again I would kill him.

The deeply buried crying seemed to be protesting that decision, protesting that I hadn’t been hurt so badly that I needed to kill. In a sense that was true, but in another sense it made no difference at all. Langley had managed to cross a line of some sort, and beyond the line I had no control over my actions.

A wordless stir went through the people in the room, and I raised my head to see that Langley had arrived. He dropped his books on the desk to the accompaniment of the class bell ringing, then got down to the assignment he’d given everyone the day before.

My eyes clung to his face, seeing nothing of the neat uniform beneath it, completely unable to look away. Whatever was going to happen would happen very shortly, and the crying inside found no sympathetic echo in my face or outward manner. It wasn’t my place to kill in a situation like that when killing hadn’t been made part of the job, but I’d lost all choice in the matter even though I didn’t know why. Confusion whirled around my head, demands for explanations rang inside me, breath-light tremors ran up and down my skin. My reactions seemed abnormal even to me, but I didn’t struggle to understand them. I did no more than accept those reactions, and wait for Langley to choose the time of his ending.

It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes into the class before Langley grew bored with the frightened, stumbling children he so loved to browbeat. The answers they’d given his questions hovered on the fringes of my awareness, but my full attention hadn’t moved from Langley’s face. He turned his head to look in my direction, grinned as he misinterpreted my stare, then he moved closer to his desk to lean back against it.

“Santee,” he said in a voice full of pleased anticipation. “Get up.”

I got slowly to my feet in the thick silence around me, feeling the tightness behind my eyes grow stronger and more demanding. Then I became aware of another thing inside my mind, a fierce opposition to the tightening that would take Langley’s life.

The new thing clawed at the tightening, trying to loosen it, trying to force it back from wherever it had come, but Langley’s actual presence defeated the effort before it had gotten more than the barest clawhold. There was a tension in the air as though everyone in the room knew about the battle I fought, but Langley wasn’t one to notice things like that.

“Section C,” he said through the faint ringing in my ears, his arms folded and his body relaxed. “Articles six through seventeen, and you have ninety seconds in which to finish, starting now.”

He looked down at his watch, but I couldn’t speak. The struggle in my mind made speech impossible, and I knew that if I even tried to speak I’d pass across the line that I’d never be able to cross back from. In the shadowed corners within me something dark red waited to flow free, a presence that would never again accept captivity once it found release.

Sweat broke out on my forehead and my breathing grew ragged, but all Langley could see was that he was being disobeyed. His expression grew ugly as he straightened away from the desk, but before he could say anything the door opened and two men walked in. Langley’s attention went to them, and when I forced mine to follow I felt a shock coursing through me.

The two men were Pete and Ringer, and Ringer stared at me white-faced. Langley started over to Pete, but a gesture from Pete stopped him in mid stride about two feet in front of the board wall. Ringer, standing alone by the door, hadn’t stopped staring at me.

“Diana,” Ringer said very gently and softly, putting his hand out. “I have something I have to talk to you about. Come with me so we can talk privately.”

I was still filled with confusion and battle, but the shock of seeing Ringer had done something to me. I still wasn’t sure which side would win the battle, but I knew instantly that there was something that had to be done no matter which way it went.

Ringer’s stare was very intense while he waited for an answer, so I shook my head very slightly.

“I can’t come with you,” I told him dreamily, really feeling the unreality of the scene.