The Academy (48 page)

“The lesson is simple – there’s no point in teaching you to shoot, Alex, if you aren’t going to pull the trigger when you are told to,” Mitsuru explained, clearly frustrated. “No point in sharpening a blade you aren’t going to use. We aren’t going to wait until you’re in the field, until your life and the lives of other Operators are on the line, to see you pussy out. Suck it up, pull the trigger, and then we both can go home.”

Alex looked down at the ground. His nose still ached a great deal, and it was bleeding consistently enough to make him sniffle.

“I guess I’m not cut out for this,” Alex said a moment later, sounding reluctant. “If that’s what this all means, then I don’t want any part of it. I quit, alright? I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m done.”

“Alex, Alex,” Mitsuru chided. “We already know that you are cut out for this. That’s what precognitives are for. What you want is irrelevant. We’re concerned with what you can do, not what you want do,” she said, shaking her head. “There would never be enough soldiers if we asked for volunteers. I told you, none of this will be fun, or easy. Most Operators would rather not do what they do. But they can, and the need is there, so they do what they have to.
We
do what we have to, Alex. We are weapons, both of us. The purpose of a weapon is to kill. Don’t you want to have a purpose, Alex?”

“This is fucked up, right here,” Alex said slowly, staring at the pistol in his hand as if it would speak to him. “Do Rebecca and Michael know that you are doing this shit to me?”

Mitsuru tittered, and Steve burst into laughter.

“I would think so,” Mitsuru said, smiling. “They’ve both completed the Program themselves, after all. Rebecca helped design the Program.” Mitsuru shook her head. “Okay, question time is over. Are you ready to do what you have to do?”

She looked at Alex, hard, for several moments, but he refused to look up at her, transfixed by the weight, the sheer reality of the gun in his hand.

“No,” he said, softly. “Why should I? Why should I do anything?”

“Because you have to,” Mitsuru said, looking mildly disinterested. “Again.”

“Right,” Steve said, from immediately behind Alex.

Alex jabbed an elbow back, digging it into Steve’s midsection, but he just grunted, his arms wrapping around Alex, one forearm reaching across his neck. Alex tried to lower his head, to put his chin between Steve’s arm and his throat, but he was too late for that. He stomped on Steve’s foot, several times, with all the force he could muster, grinding his heel against the boy’s instep. He drove a few more elbows into his body, but he couldn’t put much power behind them. Steve’s forearm crushed steadily into his larynx, and soon all he could hear was himself making ghastly strangling noises.

Alex woke on the floor, with his face in a shallow pool of vomit, unable to swallow and struggling to breathe. Mitsuru crouched above him, holding out the gun. He brushed her away with one arm, and then everything reset again.

This time he didn’t bother with conversation. When Mitsuru asked him if he was ready to use the gun, he ignored her. He put the echoes of the pain and the fear out of his mind, as best he could. He focused solely on Steve, standing a few meters away, looking like he hadn’t even broken a sweat, grinning like it was his birthday. Alex was ready when he came forward this time.

He was ready for Steve’s jab, too. He had gorilla-like arms that gave him a reach advantage, but Alex kept his hands up and his head moving, and Steve couldn’t do anything more than clip him. Alex was patient, protecting his head, absorbing the occasional shot to the side or the arms, waiting for his chance to close.

Steve threw a combination that ended in a right hook that was a little off, and Alex saw his footwork was bad, that he was punching while he backpedaled. Alex blocked the punch with his left arm, and then stepped inside, putting everything he had into a hard right that sank into Steve’s kidney.

Again, there was no apparent transition. Steve was simply one thing, and then he was the other. Alex didn’t even see it before he made contact. His hand crumpled against Steve’s rocky skin, folding and tearing like paper where it collided with the stone, and then he fell to the ground, while Steve kicked him with his heavy stone foot and laughed his booming laugh. Alex closed his eyes, protected his face as best as he could, and waited it out. He didn’t want to open them, because he might have seen what he had done to his hand.

When he finally did, he saw Mitsuru crouched over him, holding out the gun.

Alex refused three more times, and it ended horribly, three more times. Then he gave in.

The pistol was somehow louder with that shot than it had been when he shot at the range, the trigger much more difficult to pull. And when Alex stood and stared at the intact remainder of Steve’s head, most of his brain dripping off the far wall, Mitsuru put her hand on his shoulder like a friend.

“Combat isn’t fun, Alex,” she said, with surprising gentleness. “It hurts, and it is frightening. There are no good choices, only a series of compromises and things that you will regret later. This isn’t training, Alex, and it isn’t theory or philosophy. This is fighting and surviving, or it is fighting and dying. Nothing more. And it is the only thing that matters.”

She gently prized the Glock from his fingers, and then activated the safety.

“Welcome to the Program. When we are done with you,” she said, her bloodshot eyes full of sincerity, “you won’t even recognize yourself. Reset.”

--

Alex heard the door close behind him, and congratulated himself on not running. Mitsuru’s ‘class’ had turned out to be an eight-hour nightmare; Alex hadn’t seen Gustav again until right before Mitsuru dismissed him. Alex still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but he was fairly certain that much of it had been due to the old man’s purported telepathy.

Whatever they had done, though, it had consequences – Alex had bruises forming along his chest and above one eye and across the bridge of his nose, and he felt a strange lingering pain everywhere he’d been injured. Steve had left looking totally untouched, and Alex was fairly sure that the mess at the end of the session had been solely for his benefit. Mitsuru had bemoaned his performance, but Alex didn’t feel like he’d done too badly.

After all, it was his first time killing anybody. That he could actually remember.

Steve wasn’t about to let himself get shot, of course. He’d been grimmer, after the reset, but he seemed angry more than traumatized, which gave Alex the feeling that this was not an entirely new experience for Steve. After that, Alex was faced with an enraged, moving target, and he only managed to tag Steve once in the entire rest of the day, meaning that he was forced to go hand-to-hand with someone who was bigger, stronger and more experienced.

Given the circumstances, it could have gone worse. Mostly, things had ended with Steve bashing in his head, either with his elbows or against the floor, and Steve’s obvious wrestling background made this kind of close-quarters ground fighting particularly hopeless for Alex. But near the end of the day, Steve had gotten sloppy while setting up a choke, and Alex had managed to get a thumb up into Steve’s eye socket, and forced it in as far as he possibly could. Steve howled and reeled away from him, clutching his face, and Alex had time to pull himself to his feet, wipe the blood from his eyes, and find the Glock that Steve had knocked to the ground when he tackled him.

He hadn’t shot him. He’d intended to, of course, but instead he’d walked up behind the blinded kid and struck him in the base of the skull with the butt of it. He didn’t stop hitting him when Steve fell down, or when he stopped moving.

He’d only stopped when he heard Mitsuru laughing.

Alex stepped out of the hallway, and into the chill of the evening and the setting sun, never quite so grateful to be out of a classroom.

“Hi.”

She sat on the low fence that bordered the walkway outside the building, striped tights and shiny black shoes dangling, her nails painted to match her hair. Her face was impassive, her eyes wet and shining. She put aside her knitting and looked at him expectantly.

“Hi, Eerie.” Alex’s hand froze in the process of putting his headphones in his ears, and then they hung there, apparently determined to linger, useless and in-the-way. “What are you doing here?”

“I am waiting for you,” Eerie explained, hopping down to stand beside him. “Vivik said you weren’t in homeroom today because you had Mitsuru’s class, and Margot said you’d be messed up afterwards and that someone should keep you company. I am company.”

Alex starting walking slowly down the path, and Eerie fell in beside him.

“Wow. I’m surprised.”

“Surprised that we knew? Surprised that Margot said that?” Eerie was staring up at the changing leaves of the ancient trees that bordered the path, walking just out of reach. Every word had a ringing, musical quality to it. “Or surprised that it was me, and not Emily?”

Alex thought for a moment, trying to give an honest answer.

“No offense, but all three. I figured if anybody is going to be waiting for me outside of class like some kind of…”

“Stalker?” Eerie offered.

“Right,” Alex said uncertainly. “Well, that seems like Emily’s thing, you know?” He hesitated for a moment, then winced. “Hey, don’t tell her I said that, okay?”

Eerie walked along beside him quietly, and Alex started to worry that he handled the whole conversation very clumsily. She was short enough that when he looked down at her, he could see a quarter-inch of blond where she parted her hair, and he wondered absently whether she was changing colors, or was lazy about dyeing it.

“I will tell you a secret,” Eerie said finally. “Emily is waiting for you, back at your room. She has been planning this for days. She was very,” Eerie frowned, “loud about it. So, I decided to meet you here.”

“I see. Okay.”

Alex realized that his hands were trembling, an after-effect of the class, and buried them in his pockets. There was something about Eerie’s silence that seemed to imply to him that she was about to speak at any moment, and the anticipation stretched on for minutes. Alex stared out at the diminishing blaze of the autumn leaves, gradually being washed away by increasingly frequent rain, and tried to calm down.

“You went to Emily’s house, Alex. She talked about it,” Eerie said, her frown deepening. “She talks a lot, that girl.”

Alex shrugged, too surprised to formulate a clever response.

“She doesn’t seem like the type.”

“Not to you,” Eerie said, shaking her head sadly. “Because Alex is stupid.”

“What?”

Eerie glanced at him, her pupils massively dilated even in full daylight, her expression innocent and detached. He couldn’t help but wonder why she he was here, what she saw with her strange eyes when she looked at him.

“She wants you to feel sorry for her, I can tell. She doesn’t say it, but it’s obvious, even to me. And you have to be stupid,” Eerie said angrily, “to pity a pretty girl.”

“Huh?” Alex said, puzzled. “Are you mad at me, Eerie?”

She appeared to think about it for a while.

“Not really,” she said, shaking her head. “You are just a boy, after all. But…I do want to know. Why did you go home with her, Alex?”

“I don’t know,” he said, as truthfully as possible. “Because she asked me to, I guess.”

“You don’t like her?” Eerie asked, clutching her knitting basket in front of her with both hands, her fingers tight around the handle. “You aren’t seeing each other? Or kind of seeing each other?”

“What? What are you talking about? No. It’s not like that,” Alex said guiltily, his eyes on the concrete path in front of them. “I don’t even know her that well.”

“You went just because she asked you?”