He picked up my notescreen and fiddled with the lid; he lowered his face, underlit by the screen's sporadic flicker as he flipped it back and forth.
"Today, in the simulation, after you threw the rock, when they all started coming at you you never even thought about pulling magick, did you? It had nothing to do with what I told you; it never occurred to you to throw a spell. You forgot, didn't you?"
"No," he said, so softly that I could barely hear him, and his eyes were hooded. "No, I didn't forget. I was just ..
"Just what?"
He met my eyes, and his face shone. He had the steady, concentrated stare of a stalking lion.
"I was having too much fun."
13
It only took three days to set up.
At the end of that time, I slipped into the men's washroom in the Language Arts building after my midterm on the western dialects of Primal—my first test of that day—and Ballinger was waiting for me.
The Language Arts shifter isn't much: four stalls, six urinals, a pair of sinks, a small supply closet. Hari and I chose it because it has only one security camera, which covers pretty much the whole space.
I stood at a urinal with my dry dick in my hand, skin crawling up my back; I was too scared to pee. When I had told him my plan, Hari had measured me with that squint he got whenever he was surprised, and murmured, "Y'know, you're betting your life that I can take Ballinger."
"Yeah, I am," I had told him easily enough at the time. "Or at least slow him down enough for Security to get there."'
Now, though, as I stood at the urinal, the doors of all four stalls behind me opened at once, and a hand like the claw of a steam shovel took the back of my neck and forced my face into the cold tile wall, and Ballinger said, "Tone, hold the door," and suddenly I didn't have any trouble peeing at all.
He wasn't alone.
We were sure he'd do this by himself; why wouldn't he? We were sure he didn't think he'd need help, not against me. We were sure he wouldn't want any witnesses, damned sure.
Dead sure.
I'd been expecting, too, some of his brutal, predatory playfulness, some mock-cheerful one-liners to draw things out for a minute or two before fore he got down to the serious business of killing me. Instead, he bounced my face off the wall.
Stars showered behind my eyes, and my knees went slack. The washroom wobbled around me as his irresistibly powerful hands turned me to face him. He held me pinned against the wall, and his tiny bearish eyes swept contemptuously down my front to my shriveling penis. "Nah, leave your pants down," he said. "That suits."
"Ballinger," I gasped, "don't—"
He slammed me against the wall again, and the lights in the washroom went reddish brown in my eyes, and I couldn't tell if he had two friends in here, or four, or six, because I'd forgotten how to count, or even what numbers might mean.
"You shouldna made a pass at me, Hansen," Ballinger said thickly. "I coulda let that go, but then you jumped me. I hadda defend myself. It was an accident, that's all. I dint even really mean to hurt you."
"Ballin—"
"Shut up." His massive fist hit my short ribs like a freightliner, and something broke inside me. Blood bubbled up my throat.
"Here, you little fuck," he said, his thick fingers clawing under the edge of my plastic mask. "Let's have a look." He ripped it off my face. Some of my flesh went with it.
"Jesus," he said, eyes full of revolted surprise. "Dint you used to be good-looking?"
My hands went to my violated face, and he threw me to the ground. I caught myself, just barely, and my palms left bloody streaks as they skidded along the tile; gasping, I stared at these twin parallel scarlet smears as though they had some arcane meaning that could save my life.
Ballinger kicked me in the guts hard enough to lift me off the floor. When I bounced back down, he stepped back for his friends to take a turn.
I heard a wet splintering rip, like a rotting door being kicked in, but at the same instant a boot hit me in the head and darkened the world.
The last sight I clearly remember was the security camera, high up in a corner above me; its little indicator diode, which shines red to let you know it's working, was as black as a seagull's eye.
14
The thing that strikes you the most, watching the recording of the fight in the bathroom, is how fast Hari is, all speed and preternatural assurance, like a ballet dancer executing well-rehearsed choreography.
Even as I'm hitting the ground after Ballinger's kick, you see him fly from outside the frame, already in the air, having thrown himself into a vicious cut-block that brings his hip against the side of the nearest Combat student's knee. The knee bends sideways, making the ripping, splintering sound that I thought was the door, and the Combat student—Jan Colon, from Madrid, I found out later—falls hard, too stunned to even guess how bad he's hurt.
One down.
Ballinger kicks me again then; he doesn't yet realize what's happening. The recording shows me still semiconscious, curled around my broken ribs. Another of Ballinger's three buddies, Pat Connor from a suburb of Dublin called Dun Laoghaire, has a weapon, a half-meter length of pipe; but even as he's turning and starting to lift it, Hari leaps into his arms, locking his legs around Connor's chest and his arm around Connor's throat. His back's to the camera; you can't see what he's doing there, but Connor hits him across the back two or three times with the pipe and Hari doesn't seem to notice.
Then Connor drops the pipe and Hari lets him go, and Connor staggers away, howling, his hands to his face, blood leaking through his fingers. By the time we reviewed this recording, I had learned that Hari had stuck his thumb into Connor's left eye hard enough to rip the socket muscles.
Two down.
Actually, three: Anthony Jefferson, the one guarding the door, had come into this expecting a cheerful afternoon outing, a nice, safe beating; he claimed, later, that Ballinger had told him he only planned to rough me up a little. Whatever the truth may be, he certainly hadn't planned on sticking his hand into this particular meat grinder. When two of his friends went down screaming in less than ten seconds, his nerve broke and he ran out the door, yelling for Security.
Ballinger, on the other hand
The shrieks of his friends seem to make him happy, somehow—to fill him with some inexplicable confidence and joy. He turns on Hari like a bear facing a wolverine, his huge shoulders hulking forward into a graceless wrestler's crouch; there's something of the bear as well in his loose-jointed shambling step, a slow and powerful clumsiness as though he's not used to walking on his hind legs.
Hari strikes like a rattlesnake, an unhumanly swift uncoiling that swings his shinbone toward Ballinger's knee faster than the eye can follow, a kick that will cripple him. That's when you learn that Ballinger's clumsy shamble is an act, a con, a sucker play to draw Hari in. There's a reason why Ballinger's at the top of his class.
He picks up his foot not high, a few centimeters, just enough that the kick lands harmlessly on his shin—and then falls on Hari like an undermined wall.
His weight bears them both to the ground. Ballinger's on top, and once again you can't really see what they're doing. Part of the training of Combat students is jujitsu matwork; that grunting and those liquid crunches you can hear are the sounds of bad things happening to Hari's joints.
In the background, you can see me, rolling over, trying to rise. I remember knowing that Hari was in trouble, and that I had to move; I'd like to think that I was getting up to help him, but I don't know, that may be wishful thinking.
I was probably getting up to run.
Even as I find my unsteady feet, Hari somehow frees an arm from Ballinger's smothering embrace, and his hand closes around that half-meter length of pipe that Connor had dropped. He bangs Ballinger on the back of the head once, and then again, as though to let him know that the first one wasn't an accident. Ballinger, though, he's no amateur; instead of rolling off and giving Hari an opening for a full swing wi
th the pipe, he snuggles his head down closer to Hari's and reaches out to gather in that free arm. But then you see him twitch, then convulse, and rear up, reaching his feet in a powerful surge that ignores the weight of Hari, who is hanging from Ballinger's face by his teeth
Ballinger roars and shoves him away, and blood sprays; Hari slams off a wall and caroms from a stall divider, but bounces upright like a pop-up punching bag. One of his arms hangs limp from a dislocated shoulder, and one of his legs doesn't seem able to bear much weight, and he's still smiling as he spits out a mouthful of Ballinger's cheek.
Ballinger lunges for him again, but now Hari has room and leverage for a full-armed swing of that pipe. The pipe hits the outside of Ballinger's forearm with a wet crunch, neatly breaking the bone, and instead of trying to recover for another swing, Hari uses the momentum to carry himself into a spin like he's delivering a backfist. Ballinger's wounded arm drops; he has no guard at all as the pipe whistles around—actually whistles, like a bottle when you blow across its neck—and splinters his skull just above his right ear.
Ballinger's eyes roll up, and he drops to his knees, his face utterly blank, a doll's face, a corpse's, then he pitches forward to bounce, once, on the cold tile floor.
Hari stands over him, swaying, his face burning like a torch.
By the time Security arrives, I'm in the process of striking my sole blow in this battle: I'm on my knees next to Ballinger's body, puking all over his back.
15
Later, it made us heroes, of course—especially Hari. The evidence on the Security cube was incontrovertible: he had unquestionably saved my life.
There was a discrepancy or two, though, that interested the Security investigators quite a bit. For one, they couldn't seem to figure out how Hari had gotten in through the bathroom door when it was being held by a Combat student who outmassed him by forty kilos. "I don't know," Hari repeated endlessly. "I didn't even see him. Maybe he was just standing by the door, instead of actually holding it."
We certainly weren't going to tell them that Hari had been hiding in the bathroom's supply closet for more than an hour, waiting.
They also couldn't seem to figure out how Ballinger had planned to get away with it, when the whole act was carried out in full view of the bathroom's security camera. They kept after us for a few days on that one, and we steadfastly proclaimed our ignorance until finally Ballinger woke up enough to answer questions in his now-thick, halting, slurred voice.
It seemed that a certain Battle Magick student, Pierson by name, had conceived a rivalry with me. Not understanding the deadliness of Ballinger's intentions, he had offered to help Ballinger get even with me by disabling a security camera in the area of his choice. After tracking my movements for a couple of days, Ballinger's cohorts had established that the Language Arts shitter would be the place to take me—I hit it every day at the same time, between classes.
When questioned, Pierson admitted the whole thing with well-acted sheepishness. Of course, he'd had no way of knowing that Ballinger planned to do more than frighten and humiliate me; how could he? As for the security camera, he gave them a shrugging, "Guess I didn't know as much about it as I thought. All I managed to disable was the indicator diode. Kinda embarrassing, really."
Pierson came from a Professional family; both his parents are electrical engineers. He'd done it exactly the way I'd told him to—he was one of those social-climbing creeps who wanted to sit at my table—and he'd also managed to patch into the camera cable to make our own recording of the incident.
That recording was read into the Conservatory computer from an open terminal in the library and was tracelessly e-mailed to Hari's Patron, Businessman Marc Vilo, along with a note from Hari comprising some specific suggestions on how this recording might be used.
Hari and I and Pierson, we'd had our stories straight well in advance, and they weren't complicated enough to lead us into a tangle of lies; handling the Security investigators didn't even make me nervous.
It was a little different, the day the Social Police came in.
Four of them—a whole enforcement squad—came to see me, blank and anonymous behind their shapeless body armor and their mirrored helmets, to park themselves on either side of my infirmary bed and take turns asking me questions in voices flattened to absolute neutrality by the digitizers in their helmet speakers. Talking to them, I was more frightened than I'd been when Ballinger slammed my head into the wall in that bathroom.
They weren't interested in anything I might have done; they were gathering evidence against Ballinger for capital Forcible Contact Upcaste. My father was pressing charges; he thought our family lawyers might be able to find a loophole in the Conservatory's statutory caste-neutral environment. If so, Ballinger could be executed.
All the Social Police wanted was to establish that Ballinger had known I was upcaste of him. That's all. But I could barely speak to them. They scared the crap out of me.
Through it all, the only face I ever saw was my own, distorted and leering in their silvered masks. They spoke only to ask me questions, never among themselves, and each digitized voice was indistinguishable from every other.
I've always believed, along with the rest of the world, that the masks of the Social Police were designed to protect the identities of their agents, so that these agents' ability to go incognito, to infiltrate the ranks of society's enemies, could never be impaired. No Social Police officer's identity was ever made public; no Social Police officer ever appeared without his or her silver mask, shape-concealing body armor, and vocal digitizer, not even in court.
Kids like to tell each other stories that even the wives and husbands of soapies never learn the profession of their spouses; I was old enough to know that those stories had to be wild exaggerations, but now I felt shifting beneath me some underlying truth, as though the earth moved and carried me to a new way of seeing, a perspective that harshened the light of the infirmary and made the antiseptic odor of my skin and bedclothes into something mephitic and sinister.
I caught myself wondering if there was a room somewhere within the Social Police headquarters where soapies might remove their masks and be simply men and women with each other. Instinctively, I doubted it; even a moment of admitting a personal identity would somehow undermine their power—would weaken the invincible magick armor of their anonymity.
They kept pressing me on Ballinger, from one side and another, as though if they kept asking me the same question long enough they'd eventually get the answer they wanted. And I wanted to give it to them, I really did but the truth was, I didn't know if Ballinger really understood that I was from a Business Family. I told them that again and again, but they kept after me like a pack of dogs harrying a stag. Somehow, down inside, I had a sickening feeling that it wasn't really Ballinger they were after—that their real goal was to drag a lie out of me, a lie they could use to kill him.
They wanted him dead, sure; but more than that, they wanted me to be their accomplice.
This didn't come to me in a flash. Once or twice, I kind of had that half-dizzy feeling a flash gives me, but I never got anything from them. And maybe that was it; maybe that was it exactly.
Maybe I did flash on them, and there was nothing there.
16
Early that evening, not long after dinner, Chandra came to see me in the infirmary, and he brought Hari with him.
I was pretty well tubed up in the bed—on a respirator and an N drip—and a little woozy from anesthetic by-products that still lingered in my bloodstream. I'd had a couple hours of surgery, to repair the lung one of my broken ribs had punctured, and to fix the rupture Ballinger had kicked into my spleen. I'd gone through hours of questions from the Social Police. I was exhausted, dazed, and in a growing amount of pain, but when I saw the look on Chandra's face I felt like dancing.
He looked confused, and frightened, and old. Beaten. More than beaten: wounded. He looked like a gutshot deer, getting weaker without understanding the p
ain.
Hari rode beside him in a motorized chair, one leg splinted straight out before him to immobilize his sprained knee ligaments, and his left arm in a clear plastic shoulder cast. But if he felt any pain, I couldn't see it through the fierce triumph on his face.
"Hansen," Chandra said, his voice stretched thin with tense exhaustion, "I have been in teleconference with your father, and--" His face twisted bitterly. "—with Businessman Vilo."
His eyes met mine, and some kind of spasm passed over his face, leaving emptiness in its wake. "Effective tomorrow, Michaelson will have his academic credits transferred and will be enrolled as a student in the College of Combat. You ..." his voice faltered, then regathered some vague strength. "You will come before the Graduation Board in July, as scheduled. In exchange for this, your father has agreed not to press charges against poor Ballinger for Forcible Contact Upcaste, and Businessman Vilo will leave me—leave the Conservatory—alone."
Poor Ballinger? I thought, but had other things to say; I had prepared for this moment, and I had no intention of being gracious in victory.
"I think that's generous of him," I said. My plastic respirator mask gave my words a muffled, hollow authority. "I think that's generous of them both. I think that there is a tradition of lax leadership here, Administrator—and it is this failure of leadership that has fostered a permissive and violent atmosphere, where bullying and beating are more than tolerated; they are encouraged. I very nearly lost my life because you failed in your fundamental responsibility: to keep order in this institution."
It sounded good coming out, and felt even better: I sounded like my father, and I began to understand the keen pleasure of self-righteously dressing down an undercaste.
But Chandra was far from crushed; his sorrowful expression hardened. "When Vilo threatened to petition the Board of Governors for my ouster, I was tempted to laugh at him. Let them investigate. Let them find out the truth. I know, you see, Hansen. I know that you and Michaelson set this whole thing up. I know."