Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

Alex shook his head, bewildered.

“Look at it like this,” Michael said, leaning forward in his chair excitedly, “electricity, it isn’t much good, all by itself, right?”

“Huh?”

“You don’t just build a power plant and then sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor, right? Electricity alone won’t do it. You need light bulbs, right?”

“Light bulbs?”

His response was nothing more than a weak echo.

“Power isn’t everything, Alex, I already told you. Application, that’s what we’re talking about now, son. Energy alone is meaningless, unless you can make it work for you, and you need tools for that. Something inside you provides the power, sure, but those nanomachines, they’re the tools. With them, you can apply energy, and do work.”

Alex raised his head from his hands to stare at Michael incredulously. Neither of them responded to the quick knock and rapid entry and exit of Mrs. Nesbit, and neither reached for the steaming coffee mugs she left behind.

“So, what can I do?” Alex asked dubiously. “I have powers, now, because of these machines inside me, right? Can I fly or something?”

Michael laughed and picked up his coffee.

“That’s good, Alex. I’m glad you asked about flying.”

“I can?”

Alex almost jumped out of his seat, gaping and incredulous.

“No, I’m afraid not,” Michael said, chuckling to himself, “but it’s good that you asked. Normal people ask about flying. Perverts ask if they can turn invisible.”

Alex almost choked on his first sip of too-sweet coffee.

“I’m just playing with you son, trying to lighten the mood,” Michael said, with an amiable grin. “Yes, you’ll be able to do some things, now, but we won’t know what till we do some tests. It’ll take some time. And a lot of it, like I mentioned earlier, will be up to you.”

“I get a choice?”

Alex set his mug down on the edge of the desk, hoping he had sipped enough to be considered polite. Apparently, being injected with some sort of mysterious nanomachinery had not changed his opinion of coffee for the better.

“To some extent,” Michael affirmed, “you do. What you are capable of, well, that’s predetermined, but what you do with it — that’s going to be a bit of a compromise. Some of it will be about what you want. Some of it will be about what we need from you.”

“Oh?”

Alex didn’t bother to hide the suspicion from his voice. Normally, he would have been more diplomatic, but this whole situation had shaken his reserve.

“Don’t make it sound so sinister,” Michael protested. “We are like any other organization, son. We’ve got operational needs, and we need the right personnel to fill them.”

“What kind of needs?”

Michael stood up and looked out the window at the trees, the top of the clock tower visible above the maples, the green slowly eroding from the leaves.

“Well, this place is a lot of things, Alex. Like any school, we need teachers. Our hospital needs doctors, just like any other. Our laboratories need scientists and engineers. Our network needs programmers. But I can already tell that stuff isn’t for you, son…”

The ‘son’ was starting to irk him a little, but he suppressed it. Alex didn’t plan on embarrassing himself any more today, not if he could help it.

“Yes?”

“Yes,” Michael turned away from the window to look at him benignly. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Alex, a lot longer than you probably think. And I can tell an Operator when I see one.”

“What’s an Operator?”

“Mitsuru is an Operator,” Michael said by way of an explanation, “And, a long time ago, I was too. An Operator is a field agent, Alex.”

“A soldier?”

“No, not just a soldier. Soldiers fight wars. Operators do work, war or no.”

Michael frowned and looked back out the window for a moment.

“The world functions within set parameters, you know that right? Physics, that’s basically a set of rules that we think everything follows. Operators can, to some extent, modify those parameters. In particular, Operators are trained to affect parameters relating to combat and intelligence work.”

“You mean they fight those werewolf things?”

Alex tried to push the conversation in a more prosaic direction. He wasn’t sure at all what Michael was talking about.

“Weir, Alex. They are called Weir. And not just them — Operators fight the Witches, the Outer Dark, and the things that came before man, the named and the nameless. All the enemies of Central, the enemies of mankind.”

“I have no idea what you just said. You want me to fight monsters?”

Alex could barely keep from laughing aloud. He’d already met werewolves, so it wasn’t that he didn’t believe Michael, not exactly. The whole thing sounded absurd, even in the face of recent experience.

“I think that you want to, son. I can see it in your eyes already. But Operators don’t spend all their time fighting monsters. They spend a great deal of it fighting each other, or worrying about having to.”

Alex eyes widened.

“Why?”

“We’re no better than they are,” Michael said ruefully. “Normal people, I mean. Humanity. We create families, allegiances, cartels — and then we scheme, Alex, we plot out agendas and attempt to advance them, or try to stop others from doing the very same thing. Just like in the real world, eh?”

“That’s pretty depressing,” Alex observed. “All this power you keep talking about, and the best thing you can think of to do with it is fighting each other? Couldn’t we use it to help people instead?”

“Seemed like Mitsuru helped you a lot the other night, you know,” Michael said dryly.

Alex shook his head.

“That’s not what I mean. Fighting monsters, that’s one thing, whatever they are. But why fight each other?”

“It’s complicated, on one level. On another, it’s the same old stupid story — we aren’t enlightened, Alex. We disagree, fall in love, and hate each other, the whole spectrum of human experience. We have differences of opinion, and sometimes, we can’t resolve those differences peacefully.” Michael started to sound a lot like a teacher to Alex, in a very mundane way. “If a disagreement goes for long enough, and is important enough, people start to take sides. Once people start taking sides, conflict is inevitable. No different here than anywhere else.”

“So what is the disagreement about?”

“How best to protect people,” Michael sighed. “How best to apply the power we have. Like I told you earlier, it’s not a good-guy bad-guy thing — we all agree that we have a responsibility to protect humanity. We just have differing opinions on the most effective way to do that.”

“Different enough that you’re willing to kill another?”

“Sure,” Michael said, shrugging. “Don’t tell me you can’t think of anything worth killing over.”

Alex wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he kept his mouth shut instead, and reached for the vile, cooling coffee.

Blood crawled across the chain, red on black pitted metal, radiating out in coils from where Mitsuru crouched, motionless in the center. She bled freely from her palms, the wounds reopened, and the chain slid slickly through her hands, moving of its own accord. Her nosebleed was a steady trickle, and her blouse was red and wet all down the front. The floor where she had fallen was sticky, and there were two smeared red handprints on the white pine flooring.

Mitsuru felt the blood crawl along the chain, animating it, leveraging her will against gravity, through a headache so severe that it made her feel as if she was looking at the world from a distance, from the mouth of a dark tunnel. She ground her teeth against each other and the sound was terrible, reverberating in her head, but she could not stop. Her jaw was clenched, and her body shook with effort. In her head, she raged against the Black Door, dark pitted wood damp and sticky with blood, the dull iron of the heavy fastenings spotted with rust, the whole of it wrapped and sealed in luminous threads that resisted her efforts to throw it open. She tried to force it, straining against the gossamer bindings that shut it tight, the structure of her mind buckling with the effort.