But the tumult of her feelings, though it was dominated by anger and frustration, had other components, too. The pressure of her body against Nahir’s began to arouse feelings that were not entirely unpleasant, and when he kissed her, tentative, terrified of her rebuke, she responded.
Their relationship lasted for five weeks, long enough for the girl to decide that she’d been right in the first place: the annoyances and provocations caused by letting someone get that close to you far outweighed any possible pleasures. She told Nahir that it was over, much to his chagrin, and when he so far forgot his dignity as to plead with her, she walked away.
There was another fling, with a girl four years older than her, which she undertook in order to make sure that she hadn’t just picked the wrong someone. The results were much the same, although that relationship lasted a little longer and ended a little more stormily.
The girl trained for three years. It wasn’t, in any sense, long enough, but she knew that time was short. She could tell this from the way their teachers drove them, and from the fact that sometimes when she looked up from her exercises in the arena or in the classroom, she would see either Kuutma himself or one of his two angels watching her closely, with a grave, absorbed expression.
The teachers were not troubled by the high rates of attrition. One by one, the students fell away after failing this or that test, or else simply stopped attending classes for no reason that the girl could see.
As the third year wore on, they began to take the drug, kelalit. The first time the girl took it, letting just a tiny drop of the clear liquid fall from the eye-dropper onto her tongue, it was like being splashed across the brain with liquid nitrogen. Everything became incredibly sharp-edged, incredibly clear — and incredibly slow. She felt both strong and dead, as though what had been her body had been filled with molten metal, which had now cooled and hardened into some terrible machine in her exact shape.
They put her into the arena and sent three opponents against her at once — all Elohim like herself, but without the benefit of the pharmacon. The fight lasted nineteen seconds.
Afterwards the girl puked her guts up, and then lay awake for most of the night, trembling and sweating.
‘It’s poison,’ the teacher Ushana told her, when she asked. ‘The exact formula is known only to the chemists who make it, but all of its nearest cousins are utterly lethal. Adamites take them for pleasure and become addicted to them. They take larger and larger doses, and in the end their minds and bodies are destroyed by the cumulative effects of the toxins.’
The girl was shocked and afraid in spite of herself. Loss of control was high on her personal list of deadly sins. ‘How is the way we use the drug different?’ she asked, hoping to be reassured.
‘We take no pleasure in it,’ Ushana said.
No, Kuutma told her later, there’s more than that. The drug we take, kelalit, the curse and the blessing, is not a single substance. It’s a compound, made of many drugs, and some of them are at war with each other. The core compound induces a rush of euphoria, a feeling of omnipotence, but it clouds the mind and dulls the senses. Kelalit, by contrast, heightens the senses and speeds up physiological processes. The flow of information through the nerves of the body is hugely enhanced, which means that both perception and action are much quicker. Of that core sense of power and joy, meanwhile, enough is maintained to make the user shrug off pain that would normally distract or even incapacitate. Out of a filthy and shameful indulgence, the craftsmen of the People had fashioned a warrior’s tool, flexible and powerful.
But still deadly. Most of the Elohim who died out among the Nations did so from the cumulative effects of kelalit.
Over weeks and months, the girl became habituated to the use of this double-edged tool, this treacherously mixed blessing. By the summer of the third year, she could endure a full dose of kelalit, despite her relatively small body mass, and function at the heightened level of perception and action for hours at a time. She grew more adept, also, at handling the physiological and emotional crash that always followed.
Once again, she was the example held up to all the others, the model they followed and fashioned themselves upon. When another trainee, Esali, died of a kelalit overdose, and her stiff, grey body was brought through the dormitory in a deafening silence of disbelief and denial, the girl realised that being top of the class had its downside. Esali had been trying to become more like her.
The girl kept to herself more than ever after that. She hadn’t ever encouraged her classmates’ cult of hero worship, but now she repelled all advances with deliberate rudeness. She wanted no more deaths queuing up at the gates of her conscience, no matter how strongly those gates were defended.
She endured. She won out. She took all that her teachers could give her, internalised it, and like a spider gave it back as a single thread of woven silk. Only the oldest teacher, Rithuel, who taught some of the psychology classes, gave her a less than exemplary mark. In fact, he gave her a fail. When the girl sought him out to ask him why, he was blunt but — to the girl’s mind — enigmatic.
‘To make you pause,’ was all he said.
‘To make me pause in what?’ she demanded.
Rithuel opened his palms and held them out to her, empty. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.
‘Then—’
‘Inaction can be as important as action. The pause before you act is filled with many things, and one of them is truth.’
‘But I didn’t fail your tests,’ the girl protested. ‘I answered every question. I don’t believe I made any significant errors.’
‘You made no errors at all. That was precisely what troubled me. I think it may help you, some day, to know that you’re not perfect. To be so close to perfect can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Dangerous for the soul, I mean.’
And there was yet one more test, one about which all the students exchanged wild rumours, empty speculation and tasteless jokes. It would come when they least expected it, the students mostly agreed. And you could fail it by a single word or movement out of place.
One evening, after eating her evening meal in the refectory, the girl was sought out by a runner who said that Ushana was waiting for her in the gymnasium. When she got there, she found the teacher waiting in the dark. At her feet there knelt a man — a boy, rather. His hands and feet had been fastened with short lengths of chain to the tallest of the vaulting horses, where iron rings had been set — presumably, the girl now realised, for this purpose. The boy was her own age, but with the white-blond hair almost never seen among the People. He was slightly overweight, and dressed outlandishly in short trousers and a sleeveless tunic that bore the meaningless legend HOME-BREWED FOR FULLER FLAVOUR! He was terrified, the marks of recent tears on his cheeks.
The girl knew at once what was expected of her, but she said nothing. She presented herself to her teacher with a respectful bow, ignoring the boy utterly, until Ushana nodded in his direction. ‘That is Ronald Stephen Pinkus,’ she said. ‘Say hello to him, in his own language.’
‘What is his language, Tannanu?’ the girl asked. She knew better than to assume that the boy spoke English, just because that was the language of the words on his shirt.
‘English,’ Ushana said. There was approval in her tone.
The girl turned. ‘Good evening to you, Ronald Stephen Pinkus,’ she said.
The boy’s face underwent a convulsion of surprise and hope. ‘Shit,’ he yelped. ‘You speak English! Oh, thank God! Listen, there’s been some kind of a mistake. They think I’m someone else, but I’m not anybody. They took me right off the street, and it’s like — I don’t know. I don’t know what they want.’