Robert Crane: Soulless

“It’s not Wolfe, is it?” Scott stared me down. His T-shirt had been white when we started, but now it was gray in the places where he had sweated through, and bore the stains of dirt and grime from where he’d been pinned to the ground. “He’s not breaking out or whatever—”

“He’s not,” I said. “I haven’t heard from the rogues’ gallery in my head in months. I think Zollers and I have that under control.” That was mostly true. The medication Zollers had given me was working, but I had other help as well.

“I guess it was hard for us to tell by the way you acted back there,” Kat said, sarcasm oozing through her words, which were laced with a kind of bone-weariness. Her eyes flicked down, and they were lacking the brightness that was ever-present in them. “I didn’t mean that. Accidents happen, especially when they’re trying to train us for all the possibilities that could happen out there. It’s just not like you.”

“It happens.” Another voice joined our conversation. My head swiveled and I saw Glen Parks, shifting out of the shape of a wolf again. “You get reckless after playing this like it’s a game for too long.” He got taller as he walked, leaving behind all fours as his fur receded into the long beard and hair that I was accustomed to seeing. “Too much of this type of training’s not good. We need some real world experience for you three.” He halted behind me. I didn’t look away, even though my eyes were burning, this time from the sweat. “Especially for you, before your killer instinct gets away from you.”

I felt a burning again in the back of my throat. “I…do not…have a killer instinct.”

Scott coughed. “Um…haven’t you already killed three people?”

My tongue seemed to stick to the roof of my mouth and my jaw fell open. “I didn’t…I mean, Wolfe was unintentional and Gavrikov…he was gonna nuke Minneapolis.”

“And the other guy?” Scott stared back at me. “Henderschott? The one you tried to teach to fly?”

The angry red settled in my cheeks, burning me as I took a breath before answering. “That wasn’t me.”

Scott looked back the way we had come, back toward the creek, which I could still hear running in the distance. “Yeah, well that was all you. And Eve wasn’t an enemy.”

“This is a pointless discussion.” Parks’ voice was rough, like a flint striking a rock or a knife running over a sharpening stone. “Byerly, help Forrest back to her room. And let her rest, will you? You know how using her power takes it out of her.”

The burning in my cheeks got a little worse; I was pretty sure that Scott and Kat were sleeping together, but I didn’t really want to know for fact if it was true. Most of that was because there was someone I wished I could be sleeping with, but it wasn’t possible for me to touch him for more than three seconds without causing him excruciating pain followed by death. They walked away, Scott half-carrying Kat toward the dormitory building, which was quite a distance.

“What’s your problem, Sienna?” My head snapped back around to find Parks still looking at me, the rough, wrinkled skin around his eyes folded more than usual. They weren’t quite slitted, but they were a lot closer to closed than normal. It was the same look he got when we’d go to the firing range for weapons practice and he had to focus on a target at some distance. Parks was blunt to a fault, but he didn’t mean anything bad by it. He just said what he thought and let you sort it out.

“I’m just tired.” I couldn’t get a hand up to cover my mouth without Parks knowing I was lying. Hell, he probably knew anyway because his eyes grew more closed and he nodded. For the last six months he’d watched me as he trained all of us. We were a class of three, so it’s not like he had a ton of people to pay attention to. “We’ve been at a higher tempo of training lately, early mornings, late nights, all that. Like you said, it just wears on me. I’m ready to get to it.” I tried to hold my head higher, look him in the eyes, all that point-the-chin-in-defiance stuff. “I’ve had enough of the games. I want to get out in the field and go to work chasing down rogues.”

His gaze softened, the wrinkles spreading out. “Ariadne says you’re not ready.”

“That would matter to me if Ariadne was my training officer and worked with me every day.” I found I no longer needed to fake the defiance, the chin jutting. “I’m ready. Like it or not, me and the Junior League just took out two members of M-Squad. What do you think?”

He played it cool, too damned cool, not looking away but not registering a thing until he kicked his old, brown cowboy boot into the dusty ground. “We’ll find out soon enough if you’re ready. I must be getting old and senile to have taken down Kat first instead of you.”

“She’s easier to sneak up on.”

“Don’t get cocky.” His eyes found me again, his fingers stuck in the loops of his old jeans. “Fast way to get yourself killed, underestimating the people you’re fighting – or did you not learn from my example today?”

“I got it.” I cleared my throat. “I won’t underestimate anybody.”

“Bold statement to make. Hope you’re right about that. You need to trust your teammates though, watch their backs, because they’ll be the ones watching yours, not anyone else.” He got a sour look and turned away from me for a second. “Get on home, then. Looks like you got the rest of the day off; might want to take your liberty when you can get it. Not much time off around here, you know.”

“I know.” Believe me, I knew. It’d been six months since I had a day off. I walked back to the dormitory thinking about how different training to be an agent of the Directorate had been from what I thought it would be when I started. Looking back, I felt naive, like I was a kid when I began, wandering in because I had no idea what else I should do with myself. I had, after all, been cast out into the world after the ultimate sheltered life. Sort of.

It was only a couple weeks after first leaving my house (for the first time in over ten years) that I decided to enter the training program. I hadn’t even come close to living a normal teenage life when I decided to really leave normal behind and become what amounted to a paranormal cop. The Directorate paid me a lot of money to do this, all in hopes that someday I’d be a useful member of their policing force. And I was good, at least if we went by the training results. I put Scott to shame and made Kat look like a helpless little girl by comparison in every exercise they threw at us, from martial arts to weapons to chase and apprehension.

It was the “soft skills” that I lacked. Diplomacy, presenting a kind face and sympathetic ear to a metahuman who has just manifested their powers or to a human witness, freaked out by something they’ve seen that defies explanation. That was part of the job I was training for, being what they called a “Retriever” – trying to convince the newly powerful to come to the Directorate to get some purpose and direction in their abnormal lives. I sucked at that. Probably because it was foreign to me.

Maybe it was because I left home at a dead run with only the clothes on my back, being chased by two guys with guns and then, shortly thereafter, a crazed homicidal meta who nearly killed me. I guess after my own experience, it was hard for me to feel a ton of empathy for someone who gets a gentle knock on their door from someone without a gun who explains that they’re different, they’re special, and that there’s a place for them, then offers them a chance to join a training program to channel their powers. It’s a little different than my first real encounter with powers, which involved me being nearly choked to death in a grocery store parking lot after watching a maniac kill two innocent people.