Alex waited for a moment, and then when nothing happened, he snuck a look over at Emily. She was lost in thought, absently brushing her hair back behind her ears.
“Should I go?”
He didn’t want to. That had to be obvious in his voice, to say nothing of empathy.
“You knew, right?” Emily asked, speaking slowly, her eyes unfocused. “About me and my situation, I mean? And you came anyway.”
“Sure,” Alex said with a shrug. “I was hungry.”
Emily laughed and slapped his arm playfully.
“It doesn’t really matter to me, what you did or didn’t do before you got here,” Emily said, with what appeared to be sincerity, or a perfect facsimile thereof. “And I’m not planning on asking any more questions that you don’t want to answer. But, I do want something from you, Alex.”
The wariness must have been obvious, because she flinched.
“Oh?”
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s nothing bad. I wondered if you’d consider coming to an arrangement with me. Maybe we could help each other.”
Nineteen
“The quarry seems a bit different than the last time I saw it.”
“Different how?”
“Well, there’s a lot… more of it, for one thing. I mean, that whole area over there, since when is that nothing but gravel and sand?”
“Since this afternoon, roughly three-ish?”
“And then there’s the frost. It’s just like my poor couch.” Rebecca pinched her lower lip and looked at Michael disapprovingly. “Did you freeze the quarry? Why did you freeze the quarry, Michael?”
“I didn’t do it,” Michael protested. “Alex did. Or rather, that was a side effect of what Alex did.”
“Alex blew up that whole rock face?”
Rebecca pointed incredulously at the ruined slope, at a deep crater that exposed the bedrock, covered with a fine layer of gravel and chipped stone.
“No, that was me,” Michael admitted, shoulders slumped. “I showed him the Vacuum Bomb Protocol, to give him an idea of what was possible, given the right control…”
“You were showing off,” Rebecca said, staring grumpily at the quarry wall. “And then what happened?”
“He activated the Absolute Protocol that you implanted. And then he started dumping all the local energy directly out into the Ether. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What does that mean? What ‘local energy’?”
“Everything. First thermal, then radiant and electromagnetic as well.”
Michael picked up a pebble and threw it toward the quarry wall, but it came up short, diving down early toward the black water at the bottom of the quarry and colliding with the ice on the surface with a crunching sound.
“I tried to get him to stop there, but he seemed like he was in a trance or something. Next thing I know, the rock where he was staring starts to disappear into the Ether.”
Michael gestured at the frost around him, as if it had just arrived, to his shock.
“I think all the cold is only a side-effect, you know?”
“You mean he was creating a vacuum? You are kidding, right?”
“I think so,” Michael said. “I think all the time, without even realizing it, Alex creates a localized void in our world, and Etheric energy leaks through to fill it. I think that’s where all that catalytic power comes from. When he activated the protocol, he created a much larger void in the Ether, so energy went rushing out of the world to fill it.”
“You could use that, maybe,” Rebecca said slowly, lost in thought. “The cold might be easier to control than an actual energy or mass transfer. Less dangerous for Alex, probably more effective.”
“No,” Michael said, almost sadly, shaking his head.
“Why not?”
“He can’t control the protocol, and he can’t stop it, once it starts.”
Rebecca frowned doubtfully.
“Okay, what then?”
Michael looked moodily at the frost covered hole in the quarry wall and sighed.
“It’s like Mitsuru all over again,” he said, turning to face her, with an expression that was filled with grief and frustration. “We can’t let Alex operate that protocol. He’ll kill everyone around him.”
Alex lay on his back, on top of the comforter, still wearing his shoes and uniform, and wondered why someone enrolled in the combat program had to study any math at all, much less the exact same math that had been kicking his ass back in the real world.
He looked idly over at the stack of books on his desk, the study guides that Vivik and Emily had made for him sitting on top. Vivik’s notes were typed, bullet-pointed, and exhaustive to the point of being incomprehensible. Alex often found the text book’s explanations to be shorter. Emily’s notes were handwritten, concise, and easy to understand — but equally as useless to Alex. They only made him worry about her, and their little ‘arrangement’.
The ceiling proved more interesting that the books. He wasn’t, he realized drowsily, going to be doing any studying tonight. He fished his headphones out of his pocket and hit play on his MP3 player, finding himself mid-song, halfway through a Portishead album.
Alex turned the volume up earlier when he’d gone for a jog on the Academy’s surprisingly modern synthetic-surface track. Alex hadn’t really felt like getting lost going running on the grounds, but he’d wanted the exercise, even if it was an off-day. The music was too loud now, in the quiet of the dorms, but he didn’t bother to reach for the volume, letting the lushness of the sound obliterate his thoughts, his skull reverberating with the slow, looping beats.
He couldn’t have fallen asleep. Not like that. Alex was a light sleeper, a very desirable trait for those who planned on surviving incarceration. He had trouble falling asleep almost every night, and even small noises tended to wake him up. He couldn’t possibly have fallen asleep with his headphones on.
But, Alex could have sworn that for a moment somewhere in the album’s final tracks, his head heavy and swimming with worry, that he felt the warmth of another body besides his own in the tiny dorm bed, a small hand resting on the pillow above his head. The illusion was so complete that he was aware of the smell of her hair, the weight of her head from where it rested on the hollow of his shoulder. He felt a tremendous sense of comfort and gentleness, and he lost himself in it.
He did not wake then. He could not have woken, because he had not slept. He opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. He was alone, and the place beside him on the bed was cold. The MP3 player had moved along to Massive Attack, but he felt too agitated to listen anymore. He pulled the headphones out of his ears as he sat up, puzzled and angry for reasons he couldn’t articulate.
There was no way for him to know how long they had been knocking on the door. He hadn’t slept, he didn’t even feel that sleepy. But, he hadn’t heard them until now.
Alex got up with a sigh and opened the door, expecting Vivik. He liked the Sikh kid quite a bit; actually, he was really good-natured and upbeat. But Vivik liked studying, as in he seemed to do it for fun, and sometimes he wanted to tutor Alex a bit more than Alex wanted to be tutored.
It wasn’t Vivik. It was Renton, and a Chinese kid who Alex recognized from class, but he couldn’t remember the name of.
“Hey, Alex,” Renton asked, smiling mischievously, “why are you still in your uniform?”
Alex looked down at himself, and wondered the same thing. He had he slept, then? Had he dreamed?
“I’m not really sure,” he admitted, rubbing his head. “I guess I was asleep. What time is it, anyway?”
“A bit after eleven. I’m Li,” the Chinese kid said, extending his hand to Alex. He had a firm hand shake and a smile that seemed friendly enough. “We have homeroom together.”
“Right,” Alex said. “You’re a friend of Renton’s?”
“Don’t think badly of me for it, though,” Li said, grinning. “It sort of worked out that way.”
Alex laughed, and then stifled a yawn, wondering how anyone could tolerate Renton on a consistent enough basis to be friends with him. Frankly, he wasn’t totally sure how Anastasia put up with Renton, as an employee or whatever he was.