I suddenly begin to understand. “But—is that even possible? I thought that the keying sequence affects everything made of orichalcum within hearing distance.”
“Normally yes, that would be the case. But an advanced user of the voice is able to selectively manipulate one or more objects without affecting any of the others. Like this—”
Aeson glances down at the two pieces of gold-flecked grey metal. He parts his lips and turns his head slightly toward one of the two. He sings a single, very precise note, followed by two others in a minor chord keying sequence.
Like an ocean swell, the rich deep sound of his voice rolls through me . . . and suddenly it makes my fine hairs stand on end, while I feel goose bumps rising along my skin.
He grows silent then slowly lowers his open palm. I shiver, the echoes of his voice still caressing me along my nerve endings. And I see that only one of the two pieces is indeed hovering in the air before him. The second piece remains inert on his open palm.
“Okay, wow.” I say. “How did you do that?”
“I narrow-focused my sound output. Think of a narrow beam of light, sharp like a laser. Now do the same thing to sound. Each note you make is directed at an object, ‘thrown’ at it.” He points to the sofa. “Here, take these two pieces, go sit over there, and practice for ten minutes.”
I raise one brow, then take the orichalcum from him, and momentarily our fingers touch. At the instant of contact he flinches. And then he turns away and returns to the console surveillance area.
I watch him briefly, but his back is to me and it’s as if I am no longer in the room. So I sit down on the sofa, open my palm and begin singing to the orichalcum.
For several embarrassing minutes I feel like a dork because I am only able to do an all-or-nothing kind of levitation. Both pieces levitate, then I re-set them to “inert” so they drop on my palm, and I start over . . . and over . . . and over.
My voice sounds small and tired. I frequently glance up to see what Aeson is doing, but he is busy with the consoles.
At one point he receives a video call and briefly speaks in cold, authoritative tones in Atlantean with a pale-metallic haired girl. She wears an expensive and exotic looking outfit, against a background of waterfalls and rich emerald greenery that I can just barely see from where I’m sitting. Her tone seems upper-class and bored, and the lilting sounds of her voice are like a sweet running stream. It occurs to me, she is on Atlantis. Right now. She is calling from Atlantis.
The realization acts to stun me briefly. I remember seeing brief video propaganda images of Atlantis shown to us on TV, and the amazing scenery and nature shots. But it had all seemed unreal—until now.
Furthermore, how is that even possible? Shouldn’t there be some kind of time delay? And I am talking major time delay!
I pause momentarily, gathering my thoughts, then resume the singing exercise.
After the face-to-face call is over, another comes in, and this time it’s some Atlantean in uniform against a neutral background. Aeson talks with this guy quickly, and his cool commanding tone does not change. However when the second call is done, there is a sense of something grim and unpleasant that lingers like a foreboding.
Curious, I really wish I knew what they were saying.
Aeson gets up in that moment and approaches.
He stands looking down at me. “Time’s up. How are you doing?”
“Not too good.” I glance up at him, trying not to blink as I hold his icy gaze. “I can make both pieces levitate but not just one.”
“You will keep practicing until you are able to do it. We will continue tomorrow. Now, you may go.”
“Oh, okay. Can I take these back with me to practice in my dorm?”
He makes a sound of disdain. “Nice try. No, Candidate, you are the last person who might be permitted to take anything made of orichalcum anywhere.”
My lips harden into a straight line. “Okay. But how am I supposed to practice without—”
“That would be your problem.”
Anger rises in me, until my head is ringing with it. Oh, the things I could say now! But I don’t. I stiffen, and then I stand up and silently offer up the contents of my palm to him.
He takes the orichalcum from me, making a subtle point of not touching my fingers.
“If working with me is such a hassle for you,” I say suddenly, “why do you do it?”
“It is not a hassle,” he replies, and his gaze pierces me like a hard beam of light passing through glass. “It is a necessity.”
“But you kind of hate me. Why not get someone else to do it?”
His expression is closed up completely, and I cannot read anything in his eyes. “There is nothing personal here, Candidate Lark,” he says after a brief pause. “You are a valuable asset. And as such, you are treated accordingly.”
I snort. “Okay, you know what? What a farce! This whole thing is! If I am so valuable, why don’t you just Qualify me automatically? Pass me up to the front of the line and just Qualify me already.”
He watches me, composed and blank. “That’s not how it works. It is not up to me. I have no final say on the Qualification process. I can make strong recommendations which carry some weight toward your passing score, but that’s all. You still have to go through the Semi-Finals and then, if you advance, the Finals.”
“And who makes these determinations in the first place? Who decides?”
But he shakes his head. “No. We are done talking. You need to go now. Besides, you friend is waiting for you downstairs in the arena.”
I crane my head slightly. “Um . . . who?”
Aeson watches me and there’s the slightest hint of something dark and intense underneath the composed surface. “That boy. The one you’ve been running with, and who came with you at least one other time. Who is he?”
“Oh,” I say, and a slightly weird sensation awakens inside me. “That’s Logan. He’s from my high school and he’s helping me run better.”
Aeson nods. “Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And on that note we’re done.
When I get to the first floor arena level, Logan Sangre is waiting for me. He sees me, and he smiles, and immediately warmth surges through me. It’s as if everything is right with the world, if only for a brief moment.
“How did it go?” he asks, as we start walking together back to our dorms.
“Better than I thought,” I say with an exhalation of relief. My pulse begins racing once more, but with a giddy good feeling, as it occurs to me yet again, here is Logan, walking next to me, and he kissed me, and he actually likes me! Holy moly!
And then I tell Logan an abbreviated version, because I am not supposed to be mentioning Blayne and his training. Instead I make it out as though my own voice exercises took up all this time.
“He didn’t threaten you with anything else, did he?” Logan touches my back lightly with his palm, sending sweet shivers along my nerve endings, even through the layers of jacket and T-shirt.
“Oh no. Though I did ask him, how come, if I am so valuable to them, do I have to go through all this extended training bull. Why not just Qualify me automatically?”
“And what did he say?”
“Not much. Said it was not up to him.”
Logan raises one brow. “Interesting.”
I get back to Yellow Dorm Eight and say bye to Logan who presses my slightly trembling hands in his capable strong fingers and leans in closer to my ear.
I think he is going in for another kiss, but he only whispers, while his breath tickles my neck, “Sleep well . . . Yellow Candy.” It occurs to me, he knows we are directly in the line of sight of multiple surveillance cameras, so best to tone it down so as not to provoke any anti-dating reprimands.
My heart is racing as I make my way past many staring Candidates in the lounge. I remember once again that yeah, I am kind of famous now, in a weird way, not only among my dorm-mates but probably all around the RQC
, as word of my weird voice and shuttle levitation demo is spreading.
It’s been one helluva day.
Upstairs, the girls’ dormitory floor is no different. Girls glance and whisper and stare at me as I walk past the rows of beds.
“Gwen!” Hasmik waves to me enthusiastically. Laronda and Dawn are sitting on her bed wearing sleeping shirts and undies. They stop chatting and attack me with questions.
“Are you okay, girl? OMG, what happened?”
I smile and tell them, meanwhile noticing how other girls from distant beds look at me as if I’m some kind of alien zoo specimen. Even the alpha mean girls stop their own chatter and glare at me. I can see Ashley and Claudia giving me long killing looks, and then Olivia gets up and purposefully walks by in nothing but a sleek nightshirt and sleeping bra over her super-well-endowed chest, her smooth long legs glistening with newly applied lotion.
“Nice rack on that chick,” Dawn quips when Olivia’s far away and out of hearing. Laronda rolls her eyes and punches Dawn on the arm.
“What?” Dawn says. “I like boobs. Even on a-hole bitches.” And then she gives Olivia another glance.
“Since when do you check out other girls, girlfriend?”
Dawn shrugs. There’s a little shy smile on her face. “Since always.”
Laronda gives a loud snort-laugh and puts her hand to her mouth. “Wait, are you—”
“Yeah.”
I get into bed while they’re all still talking and giggling. Suddenly I am deathly tired. But my mind is swimming with so many conflicting emotions—joy and stress, exuberance and the ever-present old twinges of despair that comes from the knowledge of impending apocalypse.
When the dormitory lights go out, I am already on the edges of a fragile dream.
Chapter 28
The next morning I wake up to claxons and day seven of Qualification. It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole week at the RQC.
Suddenly everything is racing, it seems—events, levels of stress, difficulty of classes. Things good and bad, mixed up together.
It’s actually hard to describe that day—and now that I think about it, most of the following days—because after that first week, nothing drastically weird happens, and it all kind of runs together and becomes a blur of general routine.
Everything, all the three weeks of Qualification that remain to us, are leading up to the day of Semi-Finals.
And that time goes by quickly and uneventfully for the twenty-one days that follow.
We attend classes where we learn more about Atlantis and how to fight and defend ourselves with hand-to-hand combat and with weapons of the Four Quadrants, particularly our own nets and cords. We hone our singing with complicated note sequences. We tone our bodies. Yeah, even those of us who are nerdy klutzes such as yours truly, improve. . . . And while my body still hurts constantly all over with a dull neverending ache, it slowly lessens every night as my endurance increases and my muscles get stronger.
In Agility Training I still get occasional last place demerits for running laps, but only three times in week two and twice in week three. On the fourth week of Agility Training, to my own amazement, I manage to squeak by without a single running demerit. As far as climbing and monkey bars, yeah, I barely learn to hand swing halfway across the scaffolding by the middle of week two, and finally cross the whole distance with my hands by the end of the third week, though inconsistently, four times out of seven. And on week four I make it six times out of seven. Oalla Keigeri gives me a nod of approval the first time I do it. And it feels kind of amazing!
Talking about amazing—turns out, I am actually pretty good in Combat. After that first time when I held my own against Claudia Grito, I find that I am quick and steady with strikes, punches and parries, which more than makes up for my untrained muscle weakness. Er-Du Forms become relatively comfortable if not easy after I learn to hold each precise position, because they make good natural sense, and there’s a logic and beauty to the combinations of movement. When the Instructors start scoring us, I generally find myself in the top third of my class when it comes to Forms. Of course it helps that I get that extra lesson time every night from watching Aeson Kass and Blayne in the evening sparring sessions—but more on that in a moment.
Combat classes get more interesting on week two when we are taught how to use cords and nets as true weapons. The key to our native Quadrant weapon, Keruvat Ruo tells us, is the potential for entanglement of the opponent.
“Think of a spider weaving a web,” he says. “The strands stick together and bind the prey with a combination of adhesiveness and tight bonds. The spider also injects a paralytic to render the prey unconscious. In your case, all you have is one out of three—the ability to create tight restraining bonds. Your opponent is neither paralyzed, nor is there sticky glue involved. All you have on your side is speed and the ability to tie knots and otherwise shape the cord to restrain your opponent’s mobility.”
For all of week two we practice a variety of intricate knotting techniques, so that Tremaine walks around whistling sailor tunes. “We’re in the navy, man!” he drawls. “I’m gonna start tying my locks together in new combo knots!”
After the fancy knots, we are taught combinations of loops and string figures that feel like a complex version of the “cat’s cradle” game, using finger agility. On the first day of week three, Oalla Keigeri shows us how to “hand-crochet” a net using nothing but string and our fingers. It is amazing, because it really does resemble crocheting with yarn, except there is no crochet hook, and in its place you use your index finger to pull the string into loops.
“At last, I am a certified ninja granny,” Laronda says on the first night of week three, sitting on her dormitory cot, as she finger-manipulates coarse rope into a net that has grown to a radius of five feet around her—and I’m right next to her, doing the same thing on my cot. We race each other as our nets grow, and when we run out of string from the balls given us, we let it all out and start again.
“I love knitting and crochet,” Hasmik says from her cot on the other side of me, as her fingers fly in the making of her own net. “In Yerevan, Armenia, we all knit and crochet all the time. My grandmother teach me and my mother too. When we first came to Boston and started to learn English, I tell people I like to work with crochet hook, that I was a good hooker. Okay, they tell me, ‘No, no, hooker is a bad word, don’t say that!’ Oops! See, this is fun!” Admittedly, Hasmik has a point, because her nets are consistently the best in our class, and she has the fastest hands and fingers you can imagine.
During week four, Combat becomes truly intense. Because for the first time we are allowed to interact with Candidates from the other Quadrants, and their own native weapons are pitted against ours.
Mixed classes are taught in the Arena Commons Building. There we go up against the Reds and their sword and knife blade techniques, the Greens and their shields and bucklers and body armor, and the Blues with their projectile weapons and firearms which for now employ safety rounds, rubber bullets, and paintball pellets.
“Each Quadrant weapon presents a natural advantage and disadvantage,” Oalla Keigeri tells us, while Keruvat Ruo demonstrates.
“Blue holds the immediate advantage from a distance over everyone except Green and their shields. Yellows—do not let yourself get shot in the first few seconds. Move in quickly, and narrow the distance between you and Blue. Then you can overpower the Blue with your net and cord, up-close and personal.”
“Red is the exact opposite,” Xelio Vekahat tells us. “Yellow needs to stay as far away as possible, because you will be cut up with the blades, and your cord weapons rendered useless. However, you can still trap Red and render your opponent harmless if you cast your nets and cords in such a way as to disarm them.”
“Green is tricky,” Erita Qwas says. “Neither distance nor proximity is best when it comes to Yellow fighting Green. Instead, you need to maintain a middle distance and use speed and entanglement, whi
le faced with the blunt force of their shields used as impact weapons to attack you.”
And then they bring out the hoverboards.
Oh, yeah. We get to learn to fight while airborne.
It amazes me what a difference a few weeks makes when it comes to learning to keep balance on top of a hovering flat surface. By week two, we no longer use English commands to control the hoverboards in Agility training, and have switched to musical note sequences—since by then we’ve also become proficient in the Atlantis Tech classes with the basic levitation commands.
Week two is all about going up and down on the hoverboard and varying heights. Week three is all about speed. First we race along the perimeter of the basement Training Hall in our dorm. Then the later classes are taken to the Arena Commons where we are told to race around the entire arena track, moving as fast as we can without falling off. Many board riders capsize on that third week, and that’s when most of the more serious injuries begin to happen. . . . And yes, unfortunately people are Disqualified on that basis, as they get taken out of the RQC in medical ambulances.
By week four, my fear of heights is still there, but it has become a numb secondary thing that I overpower somehow every day, keeping it under tight control. I am never too fast on the hoverboard, but neither am I the slowest one. Instead, I clench my hands and maintain control, and breathe, breathe, as I make my flying laps sharp and effective, making each second count.
That way, by the time hoverboards are introduced in Combat, it’s no longer a shock.
Meanwhile, in all these days of training, there’s Logan Sangre. He’s what keeps me sane in all this pressure-cooker atmosphere of the RQC, as we meet every day, as many times a day as possible. Seems like wherever I turn, there’s Logan. We train together every night during Homework Hour. We eat lunch and when possible, dinner together. He walks me back from the evening training at the Arena Commons every night. And sometimes, when we get to a certain spot between two buildings where there’s no sign of surveillance cameras—at least not any we can humanly imagine in such a tight place—sometimes Logan and I make out.