You little shit.
A whistle blew. A man and a woman hurried across the playground. The children scattered, retaking the monkey bars and resuming games of tag. The blond kid sprang to his feet, stuffed his hands in his pocket, and assumed a sudden interest in the western sky. The younger boy rolled onto his side.
Cooper’s knuckles ached from clenching. “I don’t understand. Your ‘faculty’ just watched a ten-year-old beat another child senseless.”
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration, Agent Cooper. Neither boy will suffer permanent damage,” the director of Davis Academy said mildly. “I understand that it’s startling to watch, but this kind of incident is central to our work.”
Cooper thought of Todd the way he’d seen him last night, asleep in Spider-Man PJs, skin warm and soft and unmarked. His son was nine, about the same age he guessed the black-haired boy to be. He imagined Todd on a playground like this one, pinned under an older kid, his head throbbing, rocks digging into his spine, a circle of faces surrounding him, faces that belonged to children he had been playing with only moments earlier, and who now jeered at every wound and shame done to him. He thought of four-year-old Kate, who alphabetized her toys and organized her picture books according to the color spectrum. Who had a gift which, despite what he’d said to Natalie, showed every early indication of being quite powerful.
Maybe even tier one.
Cooper wondered if he grabbed Norridge by his gray tweed lapels and hurled him into the window the director would break through in a rain of sparkling shards or just bounce off. And if he did bounce, whether a second throw might do the trick.
Easy, Coop. You might never have seen it firsthand, but you knew these places wouldn’t be rainbows and unicorns. Maybe there’s more here than you understand.
Try not to kill the director until you do.
He forced a neutral tone. “Central to your work? How? Is the older boy a plant?”
“Heavens, no. That would defeat the purpose.” The director walked around his desk, pulled out a leather chair, gestured to one on the opposite side. “It’s crucial that all of the children here be gifted. Most are tier one, although there are a handful of twos who demonstrated significant aptitude in other areas. Unusually high intelligence, for example.”
“So if they’re all abnorms and none of them are in on it—”
“How do we incite incidents like this one?” Norridge leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Though these children all possess savant-level abilities, they remain children. They can be manipulated and trained just like any other. Disagreements can be fostered. Betrayals engineered. A confidence whispered to a trusted friend can suddenly be heard on everyone’s lips. A favorite toy can vanish only to reappear, broken, in the room of another child. A stolen kiss or the secret arrival of menstruation can become common knowledge. Essentially, we take the negative formative experiences that all children experience and manufacture them according to psychological profiles and at a dramatically higher rate.”
Cooper imagined rows of cubicles with men in dark suits and thick glasses listening to late-night confessions, to the frantic sound of masturbation in a toilet stall, or to the sobs of homesickness. Analyzing it. Charting it. Calculating how each private shame could be exploited to maximum effect. “How? How do you know all these things?”
Norridge smiled. “I’ll show you.” He activated the terminal on his desk and began to type. His fingers, Cooper noticed, were long and graceful. Piano player fingers. “Here we are.”
He pressed a button, and sound came out of the computer’s speaker, a woman’s voice.
“—there. It’s not so bad.”
“It hurts.” The child stretched the word out into three syllables.
“I told you to be careful with that one. That boy is trouble. You can’t trust him.”
A moan, and then a quiet sob. “They were all laughing at me. Why were they laughing? I thought they were my friends.”
Something cold snaked through Cooper’s belly. The woman, he presumed the one he’d seen break up the fight, continued. “I saw them all laughing at you. Laughing and pointing. Is that what friends would do?”
“No.” The voice was thin and forlorn.
“No. You can’t trust them either. I’m your friend.” Her voice saccharine. “It’s okay, sweetie. I’ve got you. I won’t let anyone get you now.”
“My head hurts.”
“I know it does, baby. Do you want some medicine?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I can make it all better. Here. Swallow this—”
Norridge tapped a key, and the sound vanished. “Do you see?”
Cooper said, “You have the whole place bugged?”
“That was our solution for the first years. However, in a facility of this size, and given the outdoor spaces, the rough play, it’s impossible to assure coverage. Now we have a better way.” Norridge paused, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips.
Why would that be? What would make the man so pleased with himself?
“It’s not the school you wire,” Cooper said slowly. “It’s the children. Somehow you’re bugging the children.”
The director beamed. “Very good. When subjects enter an academy, Davis or any other, they are given a thorough physical examination. This includes inoculation against hepatitis, PCV, chicken pox. One of those shots implants a biometric device. It’s a dazzling piece of work, recording not only physiological statistics—temperature, white blood cell levels, and so forth—but also relaying an audio broadcast to receivers placed all over the school. It’s quite something. Advanced nano-technology, powered by the child’s own biological processes.”
Cooper felt dizzy. His job didn’t really entail any overlap with the academies, and so while there had always been rumors about them, he hadn’t really imagined they might be true. Yeah, every few years some journalist tried to write an exposé on the places, but they were never granted access, so he’d chalked up the more outrageous claims to sensationalism. After all, there were rumors about Equitable Services, too.
His first taste of the reality had come on his way in, when he’d passed a group of protesters on the road. Demonstrations had become a fact of everyday life, part of the background that people didn’t really notice anymore. There was always someone protesting something. Who could keep up?
But this group had been different. Maybe it was the size of the police response. Or that cops were arresting people rather than just containing them. Or maybe it was the protesters themselves, sane-looking people in decent clothes rather than shaved-headed radicals. One in particular had caught his eye, a woman with pale, slack hair who looked as if she might once have been lovely but now was shrouded in sadness; sadness draped her shoulders, sadness hugged her chest. She held a placard, two pieces of poster board stapled across a wooden handle. The sign bore a blown-up photo of a grinning child with her cheekbones and the markered text, I MISS MY SON.
As two cops closed in on her, she’d locked eyes with Cooper through the windshield and made a tiny gesture with the sign, just raised it an inch. Visually underlining it. A plea, not a screech. But with his eyes, he could see the turmoil beneath.
“Who’s the boy?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The boy who got beaten. What’s his name?”
“I know them mostly by transponder number. His name is…” Norridge clicked at the keyboard. “William Smith.”
“Another Smith. John Smith is the reason I’m here.”