Paolo Bacigalupi: The Doubt Factory

HE’D BEEN WATCHING HER FORa long time. Watching how she moved through the still waters of her life. Watching the friends and family who surrounded her. It was like watching a bright tropical fish in an aquarium, bounded on all sides, safe inside the confines. Unaware of the glass walls.

He could watch her sitting at a coffee shop, intent on something in her e-book reader, drinking the same skinny latte that she always ordered. He knew her street, and he knew her home. He knew her class schedule. Calculus and AP Chem, Honors English. A 3.9 GPA, because some asshole bio teacher had knocked off her perfect score over a triviality of how she formatted her lab notes.

Smart girl.

Sharp girl.

And yet completely unaware.

It wasn’t her fault. All the fish in her tank were the same. All of them swimming in perfectly controlled waters, bare millimeters from another world that was hostile to them entirely.

Moses Cruz felt like he’d been watching all of them forever. But Alix Banks he could watch in that aquarium and hours could pass. Fund-raising events, field hockey tournaments, vacations to Saint Barts and Aspen. It was a safe and quiet world she lived in, and she—just like a beautiful neon tetra in a tropical tank—had no idea she was being watched.

All of her people were like that. Just a bunch of pretty fish in love with themselves and how beautiful they were, in love with their little aquarium castles. All of them thinking that they ran the world. None of them realizing that only a thin pane of glass separated them from disaster.

And here he was, standing outside, holding a hammer.

ALIX WAS SITTING IN AP CHEMwhen she saw him.

She’d been gazing out the window, letting her eyes wander over the perfectly manicured grounds of Seitz Academy’s academic quad, and as soon as she saw him standing outside, she had the feeling she knew him.

Familiar.

That was how she put it later, talking to the cops. He’d seemed familiar. Like someone’s older brother, the one you only glimpsed when he was back from college. Or else the sib whom Seitz wouldn’t let in because of “behavioral match issues.” The one who didn’t attend the school but showed up with Mommy and Daddy at the Seitz Annual Auction anyway because sis was Seitz Material even though he wasn’t. The resentful lone wolf who leaned against the back wall, texting his friends about how fucked up it was that he was stuck killing the night watching his parents get sloppy drunk while they bid on vacations to Saint Martin and find-yourself-in-middle-age pottery classes at Lena Chisolm’s studio/gallery.

Familiar.

Like her tongue running the line of her teeth. Never seen, but still, known.

He was standing outside, staring up at the science building.

Ms. Liss (never Mrs. and definitely not Miss—Ms. with the z , right?) was passing back AP Chem lab reports. Easy A’s. Even when Liss was putting on the pressure, she never pushed hard enough, so Alix had let the activity of the class fade into the background: students in their lab coats beside their personal sinks and burners, the rustle of papers, Ms. Liss droning on about top-tier colleges (which was code for the Ivy Leagues) and how no one was getting anywhere if they didn’t challenge themselves—and Alix thinking that no one was getting anywhere anytime soon.

Suspended animation was how she thought of it sometimes. She was just another student in a cohort of students being groomed and sculpted and prepped for the future. She sometimes imagined them all floating in liquid suspension, rows and rows in holding tanks, all of them drifting. Seitz-approved skirts and blazers billowing. School ties drifting with the currents. Hair tangling across blank faces, bubbles rising from silent lips. Tangles and bubbles. Waiting for someone to say that they were finished.

Other times, she thought of it as being prepped for a race that they were never quite allowed to run. Each Seitz student set up and poised, runners on their starting blocks, ready to take over the world—as soon as their control-freak parents decided to let them get their hands on their trust funds. But no one ever gave them the gun, so they all waited and partied and studied and tested and added extracurriculars like volunteering at the battered women’s shelter in Hartford so they could have “meaningful” material for their college-entrance essays.

And then she caught sight of him—that loner marooned on Seitz’s emerald lawns—and everything changed.

For a second, when she first spied him, Alix was almost convinced that she’d conjured him. He was so weirdly recognizable to her that it seemed like he could only have emerged from her own mind. A good-looking black guy in a trench coat. Short little dreadlocks, or maybe cornrows—it was hard to tell from this distance—but cool-looking whatever it was. A little bit gangsta… and he was so unsettlingly familiar to her. Like some kind of music star, some guy out of the Black Eyed Peas who looked better than Will.i.am. Not an Akon, not a Kanye. They were too clean-cut…. But still, somebody famous.

The more Alix studied him, the more he appeared out of place. He was just standing there, staring up at the science building. Maybe he was lost? Like his sister had been kidnapped and dragged to one of the whitest schools on the East Coast, and he was here to break her out.

Well, the school wasn’t all white, but pretty close. Alix could think of maybe six kids who were actually black, and two of them were adopted. Of course, there was a solid helping of Asians and Indians because there were so many Wall Street quants who sent their kids to the school, but they were, as one of Alix’s friends put it, “the other white meat.” Which said all you really needed to know about Seitz. If you were Ivy-bound, and headed for money and power, Seitz Academy found that it could hit its diversity targets easily.

But there was that black guy standing outside, looking in. Cool. Old-school aviator shades. Army jacket kind of trench. Looking like he could stand out on the grass all day long, watching Alix and her classmates.

Was he a new student? It was hard to guess his age from this distance, but she thought he could be the right age for a senior.

Just then, Mr. Mulroy came into view, striding with purpose.

From the man’s attitude, Alix could tell the Seitz headmaster didn’t think the black guy belonged on his lawn. Mulroy moved into the stranger’s space. Alix could see the man’s lips moving, telling the stranger he wasn’t at the right school.

Move along.

Mulroy pointed off campus, his body language loaded with authority—arm out and rigid, finger pointing—ordering the intruder back wherever he’d come from, back to wherever black kids came from when they weren’t here on a scholarship or given a pass via Nigerian oil money into Seitz’s manicured world.

Mulroy made another sharp gesture of authority. Alix had seen him do the same with new students who he nailed smoking. She’d watched them cringe and gather up their backpacks as the headmaster herded them into Weller House’s admin offices for their sentencing. Mulroy was used to making rebellious rich kids believe he was in charge. He was good at it.

The black guy was still staring up at the school, nodding as if he were paying attention to the headmaster’s words. But he wasn’t moving to go at all. Mulroy said something else.