Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

“Anyway, if you want my guess, I think Vivik has no idea what Margot wants to talk to him about.”

“Okay,” Alex said, drawing his knees to his chest and looking at Emily curiously. “So, what about Margot? What was that all about?”

Emily put her pen down and frowned.

“That was pretty weird, wasn’t it?”

She twisted a lock of hair absently between her fingers, her nails painted mother-of-pearl. Her hair caught the afternoon light, golden and red.

“Margot’s emotions are muted, so I never get much from her. I do know she wanted to talk about you, though.”

Alex started.

“What? Why? I barely even know Margot…”

“I’m not sure why,” Emily said, shrugging. “Common sense, really. Vivik seems to know you best of anyone, so if she had something about you she wanted to know and she didn’t want to ask you directly, then Vivik’s probably the one to ask, right?” Emily returned to her paperwork. “Besides, Vivik’s easy for girls to push around. Even Margot has to have noticed that. And this is creepy, by the way.”

Alex shook his head.

“Wait, what? What’s creepy?”

Emily smiled but didn’t look up.

“Getting me to spy on people like this. It isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I suggested our arrangement.” Emily tapped the eraser on her pencil absently against the textbook while she read. “It’s not like I’m helping you out, or something. It’s more like I’m spying on your friends.”

“I’m not sure that I’d call them my friends,” Alex said crossly. She was probably right, he supposed, but at the same time, he’d felt constantly at a loss since he’d arrived here. Emily had laid it all out very simply, that night in her living room — if he would spend time with her, she would help him out, dealing with people at the Academy. Just hanging around Emily was enough to show her superiors that she was doing her job somewhat successfully, or that’s what she thought. Alex wasn’t sure himself how long the cartel would be content with that, but he acceded to Emily’s request. He couldn’t figure out a way not to.

And, of course, he was hoping for things between them to go further. At least a little further.

At the time, he’d been fairly sure that she was going to ask him to spend the night, but instead she’d taken the bus back to the Academy with him, saying she wasn’t in the mood to be there when Therese came home. There’d been a moment after the ride home, at the Academy gates, before they headed back to their respective dorms, when Alex was certain that he could have kissed her. Should have kissed her. But he’d chickened out, and he’d been feeling dumb since then.

“Does your arm hurt?”

Alex looked up in surprise, shaken from his ruminations by Emily’s voice. The concern in her eyes was obvious.

“Ah, well,” Alex muttered, realizing that he had been cradling his left elbow and jerking his hand away, “it might have gotten tweaked in class yesterday.”

Emily scooted over until she was sitting next to Alex, and then grabbed his elbow and inspected it, causing Alex to yelp and try and pull away.

“It looks a bit swollen,” she said sympathetically. “I thought Michael was your instructor? He did this to you?”

Alex shook his head. He had class with Michael three times a week, not counting the morning workouts. Alex couldn’t imagine him injuring someone. Not accidentally, anyway.

Michael had decades of discipline, training, and combat experience. Beyond that, he was a patient and genuinely gifted teacher. But he had twelve students in his Wednesday afternoon class, and though Alex suspected he got more than his fair share of personal instruction, he still spent half of every Wednesday in the less-capable hands of various student instructors.

He was certain that Margot hadn’t intended to hyperextend his elbow — in fact, he probably should have tapped the moment he felt her lock in an arm bar. But he hadn’t figured on her being so strong, and for a moment, he’d thought he might still be able to tear his arm back out of her grip. That hadn’t happened, and for the first time since he’d met her, Margot had looked pleased, tending delicately to his injured arm, until one of the instructors came over with ice.

“No, it was some student instructor,” Alex said, bending the sore elbow experimentally. “I got it checked out; they said it would get better on its own. It’s never really been totally right, since that thing with the Weir, actually.”

Emily frowned at him, and then poked at his elbow experimentally.

“Have you been icing it?”

“Sure,” Alex lied. “Just last night.”

“Really?” Emily looked at him skeptically. “How long are you going to keep lying to me, Alex? I’m an empath, after all.”

Alex sighed, and Emily smiled good-naturedly.

“You’re no good at keeping secrets,” she observed, continuing to poke at him.

“That makes me pretty unique around here,” Alex said darkly, looking up at the blue sky and the clouds passing overhead, and wishing that any of it made him feel even slightly more at ease.

Alex really tried to stick with homeroom. At first.

It wasn’t so bad, most days, because they spent much of the three-hour class in breakout groups or with student instructors and guest lecturers, which were usually fairly interesting. They passed the time, if nothing else.

A Punjabi researcher from Analytics came and taught the class to read a very simple probability matrix, potential futures radiating out from a baseline of functional certainty, branching and growing more unlikely the further they spread out on the page, implying other dimensions. Alex found himself reminded of a cable show he’d seen on the mandalas that he’d seen saffron-robed monks making with colored sand. He didn’t understand it in the slightest, but he found himself captivated by the evolving beauty of the model.

On a different day, Alex and the rest of the combat-track students were pulled to spend the period on the grass outside, while Rebecca (who had refused to teach if she was forced to remain in the nonsmoking class room) lectured them on the basics of psychic self-defense. That was the idea, according to the syllabus anyway, but what actually happened was Rebecca showed up hung over and grumpy, and talked about the topic at hand for less than half an hour. The rest of the time she spent making them sit in contented silence while she slept on the grass.

One entire morning was devoted to a short Mongolian professor, whose name Alex never did catch, lecturing semi-coherently on relaying coded field information via Internet message boards and social networking sites. Another afternoon consisted of tiny Mr. Huang demonstrating in rapid order how to open a dozen different models of locks with improvised tools, while the class watched in astonishment and envy. An alarming number of people stayed after.

And that was only the practical stuff — unlike, say, the two-hours they spent with a cheery empath named Mrs. Lovett who encouraged them to hurl paint at a roomful of blank canvases, or Mr. Brosnik’s interminable lecture on chess and a Japanese game called Go, or the various other sessions on gardening, ceramics, or the recreation of the American Civil War.

As far as Alex could tell, there was no particular pressure on the students to learn any of things guest lecturers taught, but for anyone who showed interest or aptitude, further instruction was made available. Accordingly, Alex was careful never to show either, particularly for the history teacher who showed up in full Union regalia.

The core course, and Mr. Windsor along with it, was another matter entirely. For one thing, the lectures were frustratingly broad and vague, the kind of topics that Alex associated with the questions that novels sometimes included in the back for book club discussions. Mr. Windsor was always encouraging them to ‘consider’ — to consider, for example, the nature of the Ether itself, or the oddity of Central being located inside of it, or what effects repeated transit through it might have on the human body. Alex played along for a while, until he realized that Windsor didn’t have any real answers — he seemed to think that any sort of discussion was a desirable thing in and of itself. And Alex resented being asked questions that there were no answers for.