ZERO

THE ONLY WAY I can explain why you’ll never see me again is to tell you about Hari.

This is how I visualize the conversation that ended up pushing me into Hari Michaelson’s life. I wasn’t there—I don’t know the details—but the images in my head are vivid as a slap on the mouth; to be a good thaumaturge, your imagination must be powerful and detailed—and I’m the best the Conservatory has ever produced.

This is how I see it:

“It’s all here in the telemetry,” says Administrator Wilson Chandra, Chairman of the Studio Conservatory. He wipes the sweat from his palms on the hem of his Costanti chlamys and blinks through a stinging cloud of cigar smoke. He licks his lips—they’re thick, and always dry—as he looks down at the rows of trainee magicians who meditate with furious concentration below. I’m not in that class, by the way; these are beginners.

Chandra goes on: “He’s doing very well on the academics, you know, he has a fine grasp of Westerling and is coming along very well in First Continent cultural mores, but as you can see, he can barely maintain alpha, let alone moving to the beta consciousness required for effective spellcasting, and we, we’re working only with Distraction Level Two, approximately what he will find in, say, a private room in a metropolitan inn, and under these circumstances I simply don’t believe—”

“Shut up, will you?” says the other man on the techdeck. “Christ, you make me tired.”

“I, ahm . . .” Administrator Chandra runs a hand through his thinning hair, sweat-slick despite the climate control. “Yes, Businessman.”

Businessman Marc Vilo, the Patron of the student in question, rolls the thick stinking cigar around his mouth as he stumps forward to get a better view through the glass panel.

Businessman Vilo is a short, skinny, bowlegged man with the manners of a dockhand and the jittery energy of a fighting cock. I’ve seen him in the netfeatures plenty of times; he’s an unimpressive figure in his conservative jumpsuit and cloak, until you remember that he’d been born into a Tradesman family; he’d taken over the family business, a three-truck transport firm, and had built it into the Business powerhouse Vilo Intercontinental. Still only in his mid-forties, he had purchased his family’s contract from their Business Patron, bought his way into the Business caste, and was now one of the wealthiest men—outside the Leisure Families—in the Western Hemisphere. Netfeatures call him the Happy Billionaire.

This is why Administrator Chandra is here right now; normally the Administrator has much more important duties than entertaining visiting Patrons. But Vilo’s protégé—the very first he has ever sponsored into the Conservatory—is failing miserably and is about to wash out, and the Administrator wants to soothe the sting, and perhaps retain a certain degree of goodwill, in hopes that Vilo will sponsor further students in the future. This is a business he’s running here, after all. Sponsoring an Actor can be extremely lucrative, if the Actor becomes successful—just ask my father. The Administrator wants to make Vilo see that this is only a single failed investment, and is no reason to believe that further investments of this nature will also fail. “There is also, ehm, a, well, a certain history of disciplinary problems—”

“Thought I told you to shut up.” Vilo continues to stare down at his protégé, a slightly built boy named Hari Michaelson, nineteen years old, a Laborer from San Francisco.

The boy kneels on his meter-square mat of scuffed plastic, hands curled in Three Finger technique. Of the thirty students in the room, only he has his eyes closed. The monitors on his temples that feed data into the Conservatory computer tell the whole story: Despite the slow three-per-minute rhythm of his breath, his heart rate has surged over eighty, his adrenal production is 78 percent over optimal, and his EEG spikes like broken glass.

Vilo pulls the butt from his mouth. “Why in hell did you put him in the magick program anyway?”

“Businessman, we went over this when he was admitted. His memory and spatial-visualization test out in the low genius range. There is no question that he has the intellectual equipment to be a fine adept. However, he is emotionally unstable, prone to irrational rages, and is, ah, uncontrollably aggressive. There is a history of mental illness in his family, you know; his father was downcasted from Professional due to a succession of breakdowns.”

“Yeah?” Vilo said. “So what? I know this kid; he worked for me two years. Sure, he’s got a temper. Who doesn’t? He’s smart, and he’s tough as my goddamn boot heel.” He smiles, showing his teeth, predatory. “Kind of like me at his age.”

“You understand, Businessman, that we take these steps only to protect you from the expense of sponsoring a boy who will almost certainly perish on his first transfer.”

“So? That’s his problem, not mine. The money is—” He spits a shred of tobacco onto the carpet. “—not an issue.”

“He will simply never become an effective spellcaster. I’m sorry, but there are certain restrictions imposed by the Studio. The examinations administered by the Graduation Board are very stringent.”

Chandra makes a gesture as though to take the Businessman’s arm and lead him away. “Perhaps I can show you our newest pilot program, the priesthood school. This particular spellcasting variant has the advantage that the practitioner need enter the casting trance only under very controlled conditions—that is, under the guise of religious ritual—”

“Cut the crap.” Vilo stuffs his cigar back into his mouth. “I got a shitload of money in that kid out there. A shitload. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Studio’s restrictions, or the goddamn examinations. That kid is going to graduate from this toilet, and then he’s going to Overworld.”

“I’m afraid that’s simply impossible—”

“You gonna make a liar out of me?” Vilo’s eyes seem to retreat into his face, becoming small and dangerous. He hammers the next word. “Administrator?”

“Please, Businessman, you, you must understand, he’s been in the magick program fourteen months; we must either, either, ah, graduate him or wash him out in only ten more, and his, and his progress—”

Vilo goes back to the window; he’s more interested in the cherry on the end of his cigar than in Chandra’s stammer. “Your parents live in, what, Chicago, right? That nice old frame house on Fullerton, west of Clark.”

Chandra stands very still. Ice water trickles down his spine. “Yes, Businessman . . .”

“You gotta understand that I don’t make bad investments. You follow? Hari gets his shot.”

“Businessman, I—” Chandra says desperately, then with a massive exercise of will steadies his voice. “There are other options that can be explored . . .”

“I’m listening.”

“Please, Businessman, perhaps I was too hasty in suggesting that Michaelson cannot succeed. He is, after all, in Battle Magick, which is the most difficult school, but it is the one place where his, erm, aggressive nature may work to his advantage. My idea—with your permission—is to provide him with a tutor.”

“He doesn’t have tutors? What the hell am I paying for?”

“Tutors, yes, of course, staff tutors. Michaelson doesn’t respond well to directed instruction. He, ah—” Chandra decides not to tell him of the brutal beating Michaelson had inflicted on Instructor Pullman. I knew about it, so did most of the students at the Conservatory; it was the best gossip we’d had all year. Chandra believes that issue is settled; and, really, the man had gotten no worse than he deserved. In Chandra’s mind, to make advances on a boy with Michaelson’s psychosexual dysfunctions had been irresponsible to the point of criminality. Speaking for the students—well, Pullman’s a nasty little groper; a lot of us wished we’d done what Michaelson did.

“I’m thinking more in terms of another student, someone who’d have no authority over him, who could, well—he doesn’t respond well to authority figures, as you might know—someone who could, well, be his friend.”

“What, he doesn’t have friends enough already?”

“Businessman,” Chandra says with a nervous laugh, “he doesn’t have any friends at all.”

And that’s when he decided to send for me.

2

OVERWORLD.

When the Winston Transfer first opened the gate from Earth to Overworld, the Studio had been lurking in the background, waiting to step through. Overworld is a land of dragons and demons, of hippogryphs and mermaids, of hedge wizards and thieves, master enchanters and noble knights.

It is a billion dreams come true.

I burn for it. I lust for Overworld the way a martyr dreams of the arms of God.

My father took me to first-hand one of Raymond Story’s early Adventures when I was seven years old, and when Story spoke a Word of Power and the Hammer of Dal’kannith smote an evil ogre and splashed the brains from its leering ten-gallon head, I felt the soaring echo of his joy of battle and the surge of pulling magick and well, you know: there really aren’t any words.

For my tenth birthday, my father bought me the cube of Story’s epic three-day battle with the mad dragon Sha-Rikkintaer. The very first of the thousand or so times I played it, I knew.

I had to do it. I had to be there.

Ten years intervening have only sharpened my lust.

Everything in my life was perfect. I was at the top of my class, had the highest psych rating the Conservatory had ever measured, my elving surgeries were going perfectly, and I was absolutely on top of the world until Chandra called me into his office and took it all away.

When I went in there and took his offered seat, I had no idea of the preceding imaginary conversation. I expected another stroke-up over my spectacular progress, and so it came as a rude shock to be told that I was to be this antisocial, ill-tempered Laborer’s new tutor.

I played it off, though; we of Business are trained to take bad news coolly. “Sorry, Administrator,” I told him, tapping my face guard. “I don’t think I’ll have time. I graduate in four months, and I have six more surgeries.”

Chandra had flinched visibly when I called him Administrator; he hates to be reminded that I’m upcaste of him. I slip the word in from time to time, when he needs to be reminded of his manners.

But now he shook his head. “You don’t understand, Kris. This is not a request. This boy needs a tutor. He needs the best tutor, and you are the top magick student. You will take him in hand, and you will teach him what he needs to know to pass the Battle Magick exams. Period.”

“I’m not interested, Administrator.” What does it take to get through to this lump of meat? “Ask someone else.”

He rose, and came around the corner of his big rosewood desk. He leaned on it and clasped his hands together. “The independence of the Graduation Board is sacrosanct. I cannot influence them to pass an unqualified student, but I can certainly prevent any student from ever coming before them, if I choose. Without my signature, they’ll never see you.”

He stared at me as though trying to see the inside of my skull—and there was something in his eyes, something dark and frightening: an eerily impersonal hunger that made my stomach knot.

It looked familiar, somehow; but I couldn’t guess where I’d seen it before.

“Do you understand, now?” he said. “If Michaelson doesn’t graduate, neither do you.”

The universe tilted beneath me, and I clutched at the arms of my chair to keep from falling off the Earth and tumbling into interstellar space.

Not graduate? Never go to Overworld? Far more than a sentence of death—this was the whisper of the headsman’s axe. The room darkened around me; when I could speak again, my first instinct was to bluster. “You can’t do that! If you even think about washing me out, my father—”

“Would thank me, and you know it.”

That stopped me short; I did know it. “But me? Come on, Ad—Chairman. I mean—Jesus, I was supposed to graduate last term, but I stuck it out for my elving—if you wash me out, I’ll be stuck with this face for the rest of my life! It’s one thing, if I’m an Actor, but—”

Chandra’s head wobbled on his scrawny neck; he looked very old and weak, but still capable of a dangerous vindictiveness, like a senile king. “This Michaelson boy,” he said. “His Patron is Marc Vilo.”

“The gangster?” I asked, startled. My father talked about him once in a while, about how he disgraces our entire caste.

“He was, erm, here today. He’s—he’s very interested to see Michaelson go on. Very interested. He, ah, he—” Chandra looked away, and coughed to cover the crack in his voice. “—he asked about my family.”

“Uh.” I understood now. He’d decided to handle his problem by making it my problem. Foolish—my father would have laughed at him and made some rude comment about the whole of the Administration caste, with its penchant for asscovering and buckpassing.

I couldn’t laugh. I remembered overhearing a couple of my father’s Laborers once, when one of them supported the other as he staggered out from a correction box: “I guess the best you can hope for is not to be noticed.”

I’d been noticed; and the simple fact that he was downcaste from me meant nothing at all. This weak buckpassing bitshuffler held the entire rest of my life in his palsied hands, and all I could do was grin and take it like a Businessman.

“All right, Chairman,” I said with as much of a front of confidence as I could muster. “Let me look at his file.”

3

I LEANED AGAINST the fluted door-column at the arch that separated the weight room from the main hall of the gym, looking in. I rubbed at the flexible white face guard that protected my most recent surgery; enough sensation leaked through the neural blocks that I had a permanent bone-deep itch. Someday, on Overworld, this surgery would enable me to impersonate one of the First Folk, the elflike aborigines of the northwest continent. They were the greatest magicians of Overworld; I might never match them—but I have a couple talents of my own.

Behind me, the hall was filled with Sorbathane-armored Combat students thwacking each other with swords of weighted rattan.

Michaelson stood out in the crowded weight room. Magick students avoid the weights until the late afternoon, when the Combat neanderthals would be in class or outside on the tourney fields. Michaelson was the only guy in the room under a hundred kilos; even the few women present each had at least ten or eleven kilos on him. He lay on his back under the bench press bar, face contorted with strain.

One of the neanderthals elbowed another in the ribs as I threaded my way across the room. “Lookie.” The neanderthal got up and blocked my path, rippling his hypertrophied pectorals. He topped my height by maybe a third of a meter. “What’s doing, magick girl? Aren’t you supposed to be on your knees somewhere?”

I grinned behind my mask as I sidestepped him. “Nah, you just wish I was a girl. Give you a choice of three holes, ’stead of the two your pal’s stuck with.” I moved on past while the frowning Combat student tried to figure out what kind of an insult that worked out to be.

Michaelson stared blindly at the ceiling while he labored under the bar, veins standing out on his forehead. I was kind of curious about him, I admit; reading his file, I’d discovered that his father was Duncan Michaelson the anthropologist, the same Duncan Michaelson whose book on Westerling was the Conservatory’s standard text on the language.

Duncan Michaelson had already been a big part of my life; I’d read his Tales of the First Folk—an oral history of the northwest primals—dozens of times. Tales of the First Folk had been what drew me toward the elves in the first place.

I couldn’t mention that to Hari, though; I’d also read in his file that he never spoke about his father.

Hari was almost a decimeter taller than I am, but wouldn’t outweigh me by much. Dark eyes and swarthy skin, black hair, muscles like knotted rope. He grunted as he powered the bench press bar up through another stroke; his lips twisted into a snarl fringed by a ragged growth of black beard.

I glanced at the bench press readout: 80 keys. I grunted out loud, impressed in spite of myself; I knew from his file that Michaelson weighed in around sixty-five. Then I looked at the repcounter. As Michaelson slowly straightened his arms, the counter clicked over to 15.

Chandra had said Michaelson spent a lot of time in the gym; I wondered if even the Chairman knew just how much.

We’d gone over a hasty plan to get Michaelson’s confidence; based on his psych eval, we’d decided that honesty wasn’t the best policy. A direct offer of tutoring would meet with, at best, sullen rejection; the plan involved a gradual building of a relationship—becoming friends first, maybe occasional advice on meditative strategies for Michaelson’s upcoming Virtual Acting seminar, then a casual offer to help him with his studies. No pressure.

But now, as I watched Michaelson pump the repcounter up toward 20, each slowing stroke pushing four or five explosive, gasping breaths through his clenched teeth, I flashed on him.

For that bare, eyeflick instant, I was Hari Michaelson, straining under the bar. I became a nineteen-year-old Laborer, with a visceral memory of countless upcaste spurns and the helpless humiliation of knowing that any payback was forever beyond my reach—with a nuclear kiln of permanent rage lodged behind my breastbone, fueled by the searing knowledge that I was failing.

This is one of my talents, the flashing. It’s not an ESP thing, more like that powerful and detailed imagination working overtime, but it serves me well enough. In that instant, I threw out Chandra’s plan. I had a better one.

As Hari’s arms hit their limit, half extended and trembling, his face gone purple and his eyes barely open, I stepped beside him, put both hands on the bar, and lifted it with him. It didn’t take much strength; I probably could have done it with a finger, lifting only the kilo or two that was beyond Hari’s capacity. When his arms reached their full extension, Hari snarled, “End.” The bar froze in place.

I said, smiling, “Shouldn’t press without a spotter, y’know.”

Michaelson sat up slowly. I felt his stare like heat from an open fire. “Nobody asked your opinion, asswipe,” he said evenly. “Or your help.”

“If I’d waited for you to ask,” I said through a smile, “I’d have been standing here till the next Ice Age.”

“Yeah, funny.” He squinted at my mask. “What’re you supposed to be, Boris Karloff?”

“Boris who? My name’s Kris—”

“Hansen. Yeah, I know. Everybody in Shitschool knows who you are, we hear about you all day long. What do you want?”

Shitschool: the derisive nickname Combat students give to the College of Battle Magick, from its initials. “A couple minutes of your time,” I said with a shrug. “I want to ask for your help.”

Michaelson turned away, toward the weight machine’s control pad. “Piss off.”

“Hey, ladies.” One of the Combat neanderthals came up beside us. “You need some help with this machine? You want a man to show you how it’s done?”

Michaelson didn’t even turn his head. “Take a fucking hike, Ballinger.”

“Uh-huh, right. Excuse me, ma’am.” He casually elbowed Michaelson off the bench and lay down under the bar. Michaelson got up slowly and stood with his back to the machine, very still, except for a muscle that jumped at the corner of his jaw.

The neanderthal—Ballinger—gripped the bar and said, “Weight up. Two-zero-zero. Begin.” When the readout had scaled up to 200 kilograms he started pumping the bar smoothly up and down, and said, “See? That’s your problem, not enough weight.”

“Come on, Hari, let’s get out of here,” I said. “I really want to talk with you.”

“You got nothing to say that I need to hear.”

I took a deep breath, held it, then took the plunge. “Typical Labor attitude,” I sneered. For an instant I felt like my father.

Michaelson turned like he was mounted on a millstone. “What?”

“You downcasters are all alike. ‘Fuck off, Jack. It’s not my job.’ It’s born into you. That’s why you Labor scum never get out of the ghetto.”

Michaelson took one deliberate step toward me. His eyes burned. “You are just begging me to kick your fucking ass.”

“Yes, in fact, I am,” I told him. “That’s exactly right.”

He blinked. “Come again?”

“Which part don’t you understand?”

He stared at me while his mouth stretched into a slow predatory grin: all teeth and no humor. “I’m into it.”

“Fine, then. Let’s get a hand-to-hand room.”

“Yeah, sure. One thing first, though.”

He turned back to the weight machine, where Ballinger’s heavy arms, trembling now, forced the bar up through the fourteenth rep. When they reached full extension, Michaelson leaned over him and rapped the insides of both elbows with the edges of his hands. Ballinger’s arms gave way, and the bar slammed down into his chest. Eyes bulging, Ballinger tried to gasp “End! End!” but he hadn’t enough breath for the machine to register his voice.

Michaelson patted his cheek and said, “Shouldn’t press without a spotter, y’know.” He grinned at me. “After you, ma’am.”

I grinned back. “Why, thank you, miss.”

The line was good, but I felt a chill. I began to comprehend how dangerous Hari Michaelson might be, and I knew I’d better be bloody damn careful.

4

THE HAND-TO-HAND ROOMS are a level higher and directly over the gym. They vary in size and conformation, but they all have floors and walls of three-centimeter Sorbathane to minimize impact injuries. On one wall the Sorbathane’s transparent and laid over a mirror, so you can watch yourself shadowbox or whatever.

Michaelson and I met in one. I was already in the required half-armor: a centimeter of Sorbathane protecting elbows, knees, vitals, head, and neck. Michaelson wore that sweaty cotton shirt and baggy black pants, and nothing else.

“You’re not wearing armor,” I said.

He sneered at me. “Brilliant, Businessboy. What was your first clue?”

To hold on to my temper, I conjured a vivid image of the night sky of Overworld, a dragon silhouetted against the full moon. If I didn’t make this work, that mental image was the closest I’d ever get to seeing it.

I said, “Hey, c’mon, armor’s required—” but before I could finish the thought he hit me from twelve directions at once.

It was like being caught in a threshing machine—he slammed his knees into my unprotected thighs, his fists and elbows against my ribs, and his forehead into the pit of my stomach and before I really knew what was happening he had my face guard mashed into the floor and my arms and legs pinned somehow and my whole body hurt.

“Tell me again about Labor scum, will you?” His voice in my ear sounded flat and metallic, and I suddenly, stunningly, arrived at the realization that I could die here.

If he wanted to, he could kill me. Easily.

And get away with it: an unfortunate training accident, and he goes right on with his life, while mine is snuffed in an instant.

And he sounded like he wanted to.

It’s a funny feeling: your bowels turn to water and all the strength goes out of your arms and legs, tears well up in your eyes—it’s a baby thing, I guess, a reflex to appear weak and helpless in hopes that you can trigger an answering parental reflex. But somehow I didn’t think Michaelson had that particular reflex.

I sneered into the floor. “Aaah, lucky punch.”

An instant of stunned silence; then he had to let me up because he was laughing too hard to hold me. I managed a little chuckle, too, as I rolled over, sat up, and tried to make sure all my joints still worked.

“Jesus. I didn’t think anyone could do that; not so easily, anyway. You know I’m near the top of my class in hand-to-hand?”

Michaelson gave a derisive snort. “Yeah. You’re near the top of your class in everything. Doesn’t mean you know shit about it.”

“I know, Hari. That’s why I came looking for you.”

He sat up and laced his fingers around his knees. “I’m listening,” he said, but in his eyes swam naked suspicion, the permanent shifty what do you want from me? of the downcaster.

“I hear you’re barely passing hand-to-hand,” I said. “And I hear that the only reason you’re not failing is that you—like you Labor guys say—can whip shit on every student in the class. I go to Overworld in four months, and I think there’s some things you can teach me that I’m not going to learn from Tallman.”

“Tallman’s a moron,” Michaelson said. “He’s more interested in making you do it his way than in teaching you something that’ll keep you alive.”

“That’s the part I want to learn. That part about staying alive.”

“What’s in it for me?”

I shrugged. “The chance to beat the snot out of a Business brat every day for four months.”

He measured me with his eyes, coldly, for a long time. I fought the urge to fidget. Finally he uncoiled himself, rising with a smooth motion into a natural stance. “Get up.”

“Aren’t you going to get armor?”

“You think I need it?”

I sighed. “Never mind.” I got up and matched his stance. I knew he wasn’t going to give me the Ready . . . Fight! of classroom sparring, so I was ready when his gaze flickered down to my groin. I dropped my hands to crossblock the kick and he cracked a left hook into my ear that made my head ring.

“Lesson one. That’s an eye-fake, Hansen. Every time I see you looking at my eyes, you’re gonna get a whack.”

I shook the ringing out of my ears and got my hands back up. Michaelson tapped himself on the sternum.

“Look here. Always look here. You can see my whole body—the eyes lie, Hansen, but the chest is always honest. And you don’t block a groin-kick with your hands, you take it on the thigh. Every time you drop your hands, you’re gonna get a whack. You understand?”

“Yes, I’m starting to—”

He whacked me with a right uppercut below the heart that left me gasping.

“Lesson two. Best time to hit someone is when he’s off guard. Best time to catch someone off guard is when he’s talking. When you talk, you’re thinking about what to say next, not—”

I hit him, a good stiff jab right in the teeth. My knuckles stung like a bastard. He took a couple steps back and touched his lips; his hand came away painted crimson, and he grinned at me.

“Y’know,” he said, “there’s just the faintest chance I could start to like you.”

This is going to work, I thought. I’m on my way to Overworld.

5

A WEEK LATER, I was sitting in Chandra’s office, so much of my body mottled with green and yellow and purple healing bruises that I looked like somebody’d spiked my shower with a carton of expired skin dye.

“I want permission to use the VA suite.”

The Chairman looked at me like I was some new species of cockroach. “Vilo screened this morning. He would like to know what progress Michaelson is making. I lied to him. I said everything is going well.”

“Ten days from now,” I said patiently, “Hari starts Virtual Acting 102. You want him to pass, don’t you? I’d think you’d be a little cooperative, here.”

“The clock is running on you, Hansen. I do not think that allowing your student to beat you senseless every day is teaching him very much.”

“Allowing? Administrator, you’ve never seen him fight.”

“His College is Battle Magick, as is yours. Have you even begun work on his visualization deficiencies? Have you begun work on his trancing? You are accomplishing nothing.”

“Administrator, I’ve been meeting with him for at least an hour or two every day—”

“And doing nothing of value to either of you. Did you think I was not serious, when I told you what was at stake?”

My temper flared. “Then find somebody else! I didn’t ask for this job, you forced me into it! I’m doing the bloody best I can!” My face burned. A true Businessman never loses his temper in front of a downcaster. My father would never have done it. Maybe after spending so much time with Hari, his attitudes had begun to color mine.

“No, no.” Chandra shook his head. “You’re the top student in Battle Magick. If I have less than the best, Vilo will think I want Michaelson to fail.”

He squinted at me, and I flashed on him.

I’m Administrator Wilson Chandra; I’ve spent my entire sixty-odd years of life in service, the last fifteen as Chairman of the Studio Conservatory—a position of great responsibility but very little power. I’ve had to kiss the crack of every Leisureman, Investor, and Businessman to ever walk through the front doors; I’ve had to coddle their whining protégés, handjob the Studio’s Board of Governors, soothe the swollen egos of the emotionally crippled ex-Actors who make up the faculty, and somehow in the midst of all this turn out Actors who will not only survive on Overworld but provide the Studio with the income that justifies my existence.

I’ve done a damned good job of it for a decade and a half, and what do I get? A murderous little gangster telling me who I can and can’t graduate, telling me how to do my job, and a snotty Business brat whining about having to do something his pampered little butt wasn’t in the mood for.

I leaned back in my chair, blinking behind the face guard. I understood now. He did want Hari to fail: because it would sting Vilo. He wanted to fail me, because I was born into Business. It would be a double slap at upcasters, one he thought he could get away with. Petty and vindictive, it was exactly the kind of underhanded knife his caste had always pointed at those above it. Whatever threat Vilo might have made against his family, he didn’t take too seriously, and Hari was only a pawn, a counter in his game.

I, too, was no more than a pawn. His malice wasn’t personal at all. I remembered that glimpse I’d gotten of eerie, impersonal hunger behind his eyes: he didn’t care about me one way or the other. I just had the bad luck to be conveniently placed for his little psychodrama of undercaste revenge.

Outside the Conservatory, things would be different. On the outside, I was Business, and he only Administration. If he so much as sniffed at me I could denounce him to the Social Police for caste violation—but none of that mattered, here. He had his grip upon me, and I could do nothing to loosen his fingers.

I started to understand from where Hari got his rage.

For a moment, I felt Hari behind me, at my shoulder, whispering in my ear the precise angle for the edge of my hand to slice at his throat and shatter his larynx; I shook my head to drive it away, and took a deep breath.

“I want permission to use the VA units,” I said again.

“This, I think is too much. Unsupervised use of the VA suite is dangerous, and Instructor Hammet—”

“Y’know,” I said casually, fighting down a queasy twinge in the pit of my stomach, “my father contracts with Vilo Intercontinental.” This kind of sleazy Business-club innuendo left a bad taste in my mouth, but I desperately needed some leverage—and Hari’s fetch still lurked at my shoulder, whispering violence.

Chandra looked blank, but he knew what I meant.

“You can authorize it. I’ll take full responsibility,” I said more insistently, because I understood the rules of this game. Chandra had to look like he was doing everything in his power to help me help Hari, so that he can shake his head and purse his lips in virtuous regret when he washes us out.

Reluctantly, he nodded. “All right.” He drew a card out of a slot on his desk and swiveled his deskscreen toward me. “This is my duplicate access card. Thumbprint the screen here, and also thumbprint the liability release at the bottom of the screen. Any injury to either one of you is wholly your responsibility.”

I nodded. “You won’t regret this.”

He didn’t answer. He looked profoundly skeptical.

6

HARI FACED ME over the angled tip of his bokken—a wooden practice sword weighted to three-fourths the mass of an Overworld broadsword. He wore the required minimum armor now, as did I; bokken are real weapons, and can kill.

Without warning he lunged at me, forcing down my blade with his; when we came into the corps-a-corps an elbow I didn’t even see coming slammed into my face guard and lifted me off my feet. I went down sprawling and my bokken spun away. He stood over me, wooden sword against my chest.

“You lose.”

I slapped the blade away and climbed angrily to my feet. “Goddammit, Hari! You’re not supposed to hit me in the face! You could rip my sutures, and you know it. And we’re supposed to be working on swords.”

He shrugged and tossed his bokken aside. “Supposed, supposed. You’re supposed to be a pretty good swordsman, for a Shitschooler. Then why do you always lose?”

“Because you always cheat.”

To a Businessman, those are fighting words. Hari only shook his head. “Listen, there’s no such thing as cheating when you’re fighting for your life. A very bright guy once said, ‘Winning’s not the most important thing. It’s the only thing.’ ”

He came up to me, an oddly gentle expression on his face. “Kris, you’re pretty good, y’know? You’re fast and you learn quick and everything. You’re better with a sword than I am. If I play by the rules you’re gonna beat me. But on Overworld, you play by the rules, you’re gonna get killed.”

I thought, Don’t talk down to me, you low-rent Labor prick, but I said, “Yeah, all right.” I went after my bokken, picked it up. “Let’s go again.”

“You never quit, do you?” He looked kind of disgusted, and kind of uncomfortable. “I’ll hand it to you, you sure can take a beating. But I don’t think this is doing you much good. And I think I’m going to need my free period to work on trancing for a while.”

That was almost good news—he’d finally recognized that he’d have to put in extra magickal practice if he wanted to graduate. But practice alone doesn’t make perfect—you only get perfect through perfect practice. And I knew exactly what he needed. The only way either of us’d ever get to Overworld was if I could convince him to let me help him.

“You’re quitting? Just when I’m starting to catch up?”

“Kris, man, I’m sorry. You don’t have it, you know?” He started stripping off his armor, every zzzip of parting Velcro driving a needle into my chest.

“What do you mean, I don’t have it? Who made you the expert? I took the same classes you did—I may not be as good at it, but I know as much about it as you do.”

His penetrating black eyes took on an empty gaze, like he looked through my head to the wall at my back, and his mouth twisted into the kind of half smile you get when you suck on a sore tooth. “You’ll never know as much about it. You’re too old. And you don’t love it.”

“Don’t give me that crap, Hari. I know—”

“You don’t know shit.”

I thought about what I’d read in his file, about his father’s insanity and downcaste slide from Professional—a professor of social anthropology—to a Temp in San Francisco’s Labor slums, and about the physical abuse he’d almost certainly suffered at his father’s hands, and for a moment I thought I knew him. “Hey, so you had a rough childhood—”

He laughed in my face, an ugly grunting sound that had no humor in it. “I had a great childhood. Where do you think I learned how to fight? By the time I was eight, I knew: Every fight is a fight to the death. That’s what makes it fun. You still don’t get it, and you probably won’t. You won’t live long enough. And I’m sorry about that, because I kind of started to like you.”

“All right, fine.” I felt the singing surge of my temper as I stripped off my armor. “You’ve a fine taste for melodrama, Hari. It’s a pity you’re so full of shit.”

“Eh?”

“This I’m-so-worldly-wise-and-you’re-just-a-babe-in-the-woods act. Give me a break. I’ve seen it done better; my father has it down to a science.”

“Yeah, whatever.” He gathered up the pieces of his armor and bundled them together. “Been all right working out with you, Hansen, but now I gotta go.”

“Why don’t you try coming over to play in my yard?” I put a sneering edge of contempt in my voice that stopped him in his tracks. Maybe I didn’t understand him completely, but I knew there was no way he’d take that tone from some upcaste boy of questionable masculinity. He looked at me over his shoulder.

“Your yard?”

My heart pounded, and I fought to keep the tremors out of my voice. “Yeah, tough guy.” I flipped Chandra’s access card between my fingers like a stage magician. “You’re so damn tough in your specialty, come try mine.”

“What’s that you’ve got there?”

“It’s an access card that’ll get me into the Virtual Acting suite after hours.”

A flame of interest kindled within his eyes. “Y’know, I start Virtual Acting a week from Friday . . .”

I shrugged. “Here’s the difference between us. This Conservatory is loaded with Combat students who can stomp you without raising a sweat—”

“You think so?”

I ignored him and went on. “—but there is no one, no one, who can beat me in a VA suit. I’m the best there is. Check the records, if you want: I’m the best there has ever been. You dish it easily enough, Michaelson. Can you take it?”

Hari, I hoped, was that one kid in every neighborhood who’ll take any dare, no matter how dangerous, the one who never runs from a fight, especially when the odds are against him. And I really thought that with my coaching, he might pace through Virtual Acting with high enough marks to push him over the top for graduation. I gave him a grin that lied: it said I didn’t really care one way or the other. It was a grin that dared him to take me up on it, and it was a grin that dared him to back down. It was a grin that kept him from noticing I was holding my breath.

My future teetered on his answer.

He squinted at me like he could read my mind. Then he said, “After hours, huh? Like when would that be?”

“Say, 2200?”

“I’ll be there.”

He walked out of the hand-to-hand room without a backward glance, so he didn’t see me fall to my knees and thank the gods for my deliverance.

7

I RUBBED MY stinging eyes as I threaded through the departing Combat students toward the VA suite. I’d been pushing a ragged edge of exhaustion; in addition to healing from my surgeries, recovering from the workouts I’d had with Hari, and constant worry over my future, I had course work of my own to complete. My extra term consisted of studies in the history and culture of the First Folk, not to mention their hideously elliptical, metaphoric, and inflected language. To make it worse, they had no written histories, since all First Folk have flawless eidetic memories and no Actor had successfully infiltrated their society; all I had to study from was second- and thirdhand accounts full of cultural references that I didn’t understand and couldn’t look up. Like the Actors who had gone before me, I’d be playing an elf who has—for one reason or another—chosen to move through the human world, but still it frustrated me until my head spun.

So I was in no mood for neanderthal crap. The departing Combat students laughed and joked among themselves as they lumbered along the hall like elephants, but less gracefully; I did my best to dodge between the swinging elbows of these two-meter behemoths.

They were all heading for their dorms, or for the venerable rathskeller—except for one, an enormous one with shoulders like wrecking balls. His back was to me, and he seemed to be shaking his fist at someone I couldn’t see around his titanic chest. A sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach told me it was probably Hari.

The enmity between the Conservatory’s Combat and Magick students is, I think, part of a long historical tradition, stretching all the way back to at least the nineteenth century’s rivalry between student athletes and student scholars. They see us as effeminate bookworms, and we regard them as meatheaded apes who think with their pectorals. The situation here is a bit different, though. Most of what we study here prepares us, in one way or another, to kill people.

This colors your thinking—to put it mildly—and raises the stakes in any confrontation far beyond a little humiliation. From time to time, people get hurt—usually, the Magick students. We trainee adepts are mostly helpless without the differing laws of physics on the far side of the Winston Transfer. The Combat students train here in skills that work exactly the same on Earth as on Overworld.

And they’re all huge.

So my heart stuttered a little as I approached. The crowd had thinned to emptiness, and the last of their voices faded down the hallway. Now I could hear what the neanderthal said.

It was that guy from the weight room, Ballinger. He hulked over Hari and jabbed at him with a finger the size of a sausage. “We’ll see how funny you are, you little bastard. One of these days, when I catch you on the grounds. We’ll see.”

A strange, manic light shone in Hari’s eyes that looked nothing like fear. “Fuck off, Ballinger. I’m busy. I’ll kill you later.”

Ballinger’s ham-sized fist tangled itself in Hari’s shirt and pinned him to the wall. “You want to say that again?”

I’ve seen this kind of confrontation before; a Magick student gets tired of the constant harassment and finally decides to fight back. This is the one where he gets hurt. Other times, I’ve hung back, to help the poor guy to the infirmary. Or if I saw the chance, sometimes I’d step between and try to defuse the situation. But this time—

I caught Hari’s eye and tipped him a wink . . . then I got down on my hands and knees right behind Ballinger’s ankles.

I don’t know. Maybe it was from spending a week with Hari, fighting with him, breathing his air. Maybe he had infected me, somehow; maybe I was coming down with a bad case of Michaelson.

Hari got the biggest, most honestly happy grin I’d ever seen on his face. “What’s the best season for a vacation, Ballinger?”

“Huh?”

“Fall, I think. Have a nice trip.”

He rapped the inside of Ballinger’s elbow to bend his arm, then pushed off from the wall. Ballinger went down over my back with the slow majesty of a toppling redwood. He hit whack-on his upper spine with a thunderous crash that shook the floor, and he lay there, stunned. Before I could get up, Hari skipped around me and kicked him with shocking force in the side of his head; Ballinger groaned and tried to cover, rolling weakly into a fetal position.

I got to Hari and shoved him off balance as he clambered for a kick at the back of Ballinger’s neck. “Stop it, Hari! You’ll kill him!”

He batted me aside. “Fucking right I will—”

Professional Hammet—the Virtual Acting instructor—came limping out the door on his mechanized legs just then and saved Ballinger’s life. All he did was put himself in Hari’s way until Hari got control of himself again; not even Hari would risk the consequences of striking an instructor.

Hammet was a retired Actor, an ex-swordsman who was far too bitter and generally too crusty to tolerate any bullshit from anybody, especially not Ballinger when he tried to whine about Hari beating him up. Any Combat student who couldn’t handle a couple Magick pussies wasn’t worth his time. He wasn’t interested in writing us up for fighting—too much goddamn trouble, filling out reports—but he also wasn’t about to allow any crap to go on in the vicinity of his VA suite. He sent Ballinger one way and us the other. Ballinger stumbled off, muttering under his breath and giving us murderous looks over his shoulder. I, on the other hand, flashed Chandra’s access card.

Hammet didn’t like the idea of letting anyone into the VA suite unsupervised, but he couldn’t argue with Chandra. A quick screencall to the Chairman confirmed that I hadn’t stolen the card, and Hammet reluctantly let us in. We slipped inside, and I closed the door behind us.

“Jesus, Hari,” I said, leaning against the door. “That was too close. That was too scary. You could have killed him! Hari, your temper—that was frightening, seeing you that angry.”

Hari sighed; his shoulders slumped and he sank into a cross-legged tailor’s seat on the floor. “What makes you think I was angry?”

“Well, Jesus—”

“You should have let me kill him. It was my best chance. Next time I won’t be able to catch him alone.”

I stared, openmouthed.

He shrugged at me. “This thing between Ballinger and me, it’s been building for a while.”

“You provoked it,” I said breathlessly. “You wanted that fight.”

“Kris, it’s him or me. If it’d been me on that floor, we wouldn’t be having this little talk. Or any talk.”

“Drop the melodrama, Hari. So you’ve bumped chests with the guy once or twice, so what?”

He made a chopping motion with his hand. “You’re Business, Kris. This is a Labor thing.” He curled his fingers into a fist and stared at his knuckles like they were an unpaid invoice he couldn’t cover. “Ballinger, he’s from Philly’s inner city. Him and me, we understand each other.”

“I don’t accept that. I can’t accept that.” But even as I said it, I found myself staring at his knuckles, too, which were mostly just knots of scar tissue like wads of old chewing gum.

“You don’t have to. You’re from a whole different world, Kris. That’s why, once we get out of this toilet, I’m gonna be a famous Actor, and you’re gonna be an elf-looking corpse.”

He pushed himself to his feet. “I thought you were going to show me how you can whip shit on me in a VA suit.”

8

I SPENT A few minutes in the claustrophobic cubicle with Hari, helping him calibrate the inducers. The feedback suit is simple enough; it’s mostly mechanical—it squeezes and pokes and shakes you or whatever. But the induction helmet takes some getting used to.

This is based on the same technology that allows first-handers in the Studio Adventure Rooms to share an Actor’s sense/experience in real time. Calibration is really a pretty simple process, a matter of tuning the helmet to make a black dot coalesce on a white field, then stretch to a line, and spread into a well-focused version of the Studio logo; an analogous process takes white noise down to a pure tone, et cetera. It’s easier in the VA suite than in the Studio, in fact—the inducers here don’t have to deal with scent, and the touch/pain data and kinesthesia is all handled by the feedback suit.

This kind of calibration is easy once you’ve done it a few times; it’s practically second nature for anyone of a reasonable level of birth, but Hari was a Laborer, and so of course he’d never been inside a Studio and had never in his life adjusted an induction helmet. It made him edgy and snappish; he ended by slapping blindly at my hands—the induction helmets have eye shields to prevent actual vision from interfering with the neural stimulation—and telling me to get the fuck off him.

After I left his cubicle I went to the instructor’s station, three broad curving banks of keys stacked like a steam organ. Four screens loomed over my head, where the VA computer would display multiple points of view for the benefit of the rows of empty seats in the Aud behind me.

I sank onto the bench, lowered my head onto arms folded across the lowest bank of keys, and gave myself over entirely to shaking.

I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you’ve grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step. I kept seeing the corridor ceiling, as though I had lain where Ballinger did; I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily, almost carelessly, Hari could have taken his life. I saw myself on Overworld, walking along a city street: in the vision a man stepped out of an alley and drove a knife into my throat without a word—no demand for money, no snarl of threat, no chance to prepare myself.

No chance.

I’ve heard that your heels kick, that you convulse and shit on yourself when you die by violence. I felt it, again and again, feeling my own heels kick helplessly, far deeper than imagination, feeling it with the astonishing vividness of my flashes.

When I first started working with Hari, I’d felt like a lion tamer working with new cats. If I showed no fear, did nothing to trigger those predatory reflexes, I’d be safe. I’d felt even moderately heroic, kind of proud of myself, because I thought that by sheer force of character I could shove my life into shape. I could help Hari, I could beat Chandra, and I would sally forth into my vague and misty though certainly glorious Acting career.

But I sat there shaking because there is no safety.

Someday, you say the wrong thing to some random Hari Michaelson and an instant later you’re on the floor choking out the last of your breath.

And it wasn’t Hari that frightened me, even now; it was the world he lived in, the way I’d begun to see my life through his eyes. It was his intimate understanding of the fragility of my life, of his life, of anyone’s—and that he just didn’t care.

And he wasn’t unique; he wasn’t even rare. Our Labor undercastes spawn endless Hari Michaelsons. Now, I began to understand what Hari meant when he said I “don’t have it.”

But did it matter? Without Overworld, did I want to live?

I keyed the default setting, then entered my own cubicle and quickly dressed. I needed no calibration; the computer recognized my neural field as soon as I keyed my helmet, and it automatically loaded my file.

The Meadow took shape around me, gently rolling grassy waves that stretched to the horizon in all directions. The sky above was cloudless and startlingly blue, and the sun hung motionless. This is the most basic level, often used for “duels” and magickal practice of all sorts. I had spent a lot of hours in this meadow. The soft ground is forgiving to knees bent in meditation, and no cloud ever passes before the sun.

The generic-featured manikin that represented Hari stood about four meters away. He stepped toward me, then stopped and looked around; suddenly he knelt and ran his fingers through the grass. “Wow.”

“Yes, I know. Impressive, huh?”

“Wild. Hard-core wild.” His planar features showed no expression, but I could hear the grin in his voice. “You look kind of faggy.”

I shrugged with a sigh. I’d programmed my file to bring up features that looked more or less the way I would after my surgeries were completed: thick, close-cropped hair of platinum, elegantly delicate bone structure around large golden eyes, extravagantly pointed ears like a lynx. Maybe I’d overdone it a little.

He came closer. “You know, I’ve never seen you without that white mask on. Is this what you look like?”

“I might, eventually,” I told him. “I’m not sure. I won’t find out for another ten weeks.”

He nodded. Suddenly I wished I could see his expression. “All right,” he said. “What now?”

I took a deep breath. I’d been working for a solid week to bring him to this point; now that we were here, I had butterflies, a twinge of . . . I don’t know. Stage fright, maybe.

Maybe I was afraid he could beat me at this, too.

“No spells for this one,” I said. “I’m going to take it easy on you. I should be able to whip you just fine using only Flow. Bring yourself to mindview. The computer will sense the pattern in your neural field and start to show you simulated Flow currents. You should also see my Shell.”

His manikin closed its eyes, and its thumbs and first two fingers of each hand came together. I, of course, no longer needed the Three Finger technique to shift to mindview—breath control and a simple act of will tuned my consciousness to the proper level. It worried me that Hari, ten days from his VA seminar, still needed physical cues.

The worry vanished in mindview; while working magick, it’s impossible to worry. The function of the advanced meditative techniques taught at the Conservatory is to focus the whole mind, even beyond the surface of consciousness, fully and without distraction upon the desired magickal effect. After two years of practice I could tune my mind like a surgical laser.

I’ve heard it said that every mage sees the Flow in terms of his or her own personal metaphor: as streams of light or a ghostly river, as long glowing strings coiling and uncoiling as they twist through the air, as floating globes of energy like ball lightning; I won’t find out what mine will look like until I get to Overworld. The VA suite simulates Flow as shimmering lattices of force, over which scroll pulses of greater brightness or differing colors in the direction of the current.

His Shell looked pretty standard: an auralike netting of lines. It pulsed subtly in time with his heart and flickered like heat lightning around his hands and feet. I watched the Flow, waiting for him to start pulling.

His eyes opened, and he murmured reverentially, “I see it.”

I let out a slow, whistling breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “All right. I know this is new to you. I’ll give you ten seconds to pull enough current to defend yourself.”

He stretched out his hand, upward toward the thickest part of the current, and his Shell extended a slow-moving pseudopod that touched the shimmering net and opened itself to power. The Flow swirled toward him, its stream deepening as it whirlpooled energy into Hari’s Shell. His gesture indicated a future problem: an adept who needs his hands to pull is easily disabled—but this could be ignored today.

I counted a slow ten to myself, then another five, while I watched Hari’s Shell spin up into ever-higher levels, brighter and brighter and scaling up the spectrum toward violet. He’d feed energy into his Shell until he could hold no more, then lash out at me with undifferentiated power. This is the crudest and least dangerous form of magickal combat, rather like fencing with foam-rubber paddles, but it’s a pretty good place to start.

I didn’t trouble to pull; he couldn’t hurt me.

I said, “Begin whenever you’re—”

He fired on me, as I’d known he would. More than ready for his clumsy stream of power, my Shell not only deflected it but spun it swirling around my chest to slingshot back at him. What had approached me as a ragged head-sized stream returned as a focused javelin that punched through his Shell into the pit of his stomach and doubled him over.

“You’ll have to do better than that.” I hadn’t even moved.

He tried again, and again, with similar results, but with each attempt he closed the gap between our virtual selves by a step or two. From this perspective, in the detached calm of mindview, his intentions were transparent. He intended to step outside the rules once again: these clumsy Flow bolts were only cover, to get him close enough to rush me.

I opened my Shell and pulled.

Hari had tapped into a Flow current, diverted some of it for his use; I created Flow currents—those shining lattices of force swirled into my Shell like the funnel of a tornado reaching down from a thunderhead. From where I stood to the visible horizon, all Flow drained toward me. My skin sang with power.

When Hari leaped at me, I let him have it.

Flow doesn’t interact directly with the material world until it is patterned by the mind of a spellcaster; in its basic state, it only affects the Shell, altering the matrices of energy that surround material objects, especially living ones. About the worst you can do with raw Flow is give somebody a bad charley horse. I gave Hari seven of them.

His arms and legs, his chest and belly and back all cramped convulsively in midleap. He gave out a strangled croak and collapsed at my feet.

I stepped a prudent distance away from him before I let him up.

“That was too easy,” I told him. “I’m a better fighter than you are a spellcaster. First off, if you ever want to be good at this, you’ll have to improve your reach. Right now, your Shell stops at your hands and feet. But your Shell can have any size and shape that you wish, if you properly visualize it. Start by reaching for Flow without using your hands.”

Hari’s manikin still sat in the soft virtual grass, arms wrapping knees. He looked up at me, and I wished I could read an expression on those blank features. “This’s been fun, Kris. I’ve been a good sport, and I let you whip me. Now I gotta go.” He stood up and his hands went to his head, feeling for the cutoff.

“Let me?” I sneered. “Like you could have stopped me.”

He sounded tired. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m not good at this. But I will be.”

“I’d say so. Shit, Hari, with my help, you could be great.”

He stopped. His head swiveled toward me, and he neither moved nor spoke for a long time. I began to sweat inside the VA suit, wondering what was going on inside his head.

Finally, he spoke. “You think I’m a fucking idiot, don’t you?”

My mouth worked, speechless. I forced out, “Hari, I—”

“You think that because you’re Business, and I’m Labor, you can think rings around me, you can manipulate me and push me around and I’ll never even know it.”

Suddenly I became acutely glad that Hari’s real, physical body was two doors away in the VA suite. “That’s not true—”

“Drop it. I’ve bought too much of your shit already.” His manikin stepped up to mine. “I don’t much mind you thinking you’re smarter than me. It might even be true.”

It’s unquestionably true, I thought.

“What bothers me,” he went on, “is that you think you’re smarter than me because you’re upcaste. Like, if I had any brains at all, I would have known enough to be born into a better family.”

“It’s all about caste to you, isn’t it?” I said, turning to the attack. You couldn’t deal with Hari by going defensive; it brought out his killer instinct like a guard dog that smells fear. “That’s your answer to everything.”

“I don’t need answers,” he said, rising and turning as if to leave. “I don’t need to know why you’ve been all over me this past week or two; I don’t care if it’s some upcaste liberal befriend-the-Labor-punk project, or an anthro experiment, or you’ve developed a taste for my butthole. It doesn’t matter. You’re trying to con me, and I’m tired of it. Shit, mostly I’m tired of you thinking you’re getting away with it.”

“Y’know,” I said slowly, “your street-butch act goes only so far.”

“Hah?”

“Why are you still here? No matter how good your exit line is, it only works if you actually exit.”

“Yeah,” he said, reaching up for the cutoff switch on his sleeve, but I was ready for him: the instant I finished speaking I drew the slow, controlled breath and summoned mindview, and I gave him a cramp in that arm that would stun a horse.

He grunted.

“I’m not ready for you to go, yet,” I said.

He dropped his hand and fixed his manikin’s blank stare on me, and I could imagine all too well the homicidal gleam that would be in his black eyes right now. “Don’t jump in this shitpool, Hansen. You don’t swim well enough.”

“Cut it out, will you? I’m not Ballinger—you don’t have to intimidate me to prove you’re a man.”

“Don’t pretend you understand.”

“I’ll tell you what I understand. I understand that you are going to fail. Do you understand that? You’re going to fail. You will never see Overworld. You will never be an Actor. You will be some meaningless shit-shoveling Laborer for the rest of your life. You will always have to suckass the upcasters—and everybody is upcaste of you, Hari.”

He shrugged and looked away; he knew, or at least suspected, that I was telling the truth, and he couldn’t face it. “Why do you care? What’s it to you if I live or die?”

“Nothing. I don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to you,” I said. “What I care about is getting there myself. You get it? Yeah, you’re a project. Chandra assigned me here. I’ve got the word of Chandra himself that if you don’t graduate, I’ll never even get to take the examinations!”

“Then I guess you got a problem,” he said, and flicked his cutoff switch before I could react.

His manikin vanished; I was left alone in the virtual world, staring at the vacancy where my hope had been.

9

I DON’T REMEMBER much of that night.

Lurking somewhere in the back of my brain are vague recollections of coming back to myself again and again out of daydreams of Overworld, sitting at my desk in my dorm room or wandering vaguely on the darkened campus lawns, through tangled native scrub the color of corpse flesh in the moonlight.

I couldn’t get a handle on what had happened, not really; whenever I wasn’t actively reminding myself that my life was over, I stopped believing it. I couldn’t make myself understand that I’d really blown it this time, that some fundamental incapacity in my nature had thrown a wall into my path and I’d dashed out my brains against it.

It was as though I’d spent so many dreaming hours on visions of Overworld that my mind automatically turned to them, despite the cold fact that I’d never see those skies, never breathe that air, never come closer to the surge of true magick through my nerves than the pale tingle of a VA suit’s tawdry replication.

And every time I did remember, each time I forced that knowledge back through the muddy strata of my rebellious mind, I had to wade through each level of muck again, one at a time: cursing Chandra, cursing Hari, cursing my father, the Conservatory, the Studio itself, until I finally slogged through to the truth.

It was my fault.

It’s crushing, when you’ve made it through twenty years or so of your life, when you first find yourself against a wall you can’t climb. Gifted in caste as well as genetics, I had wealth and status and looks and brains and athleticism, and I could always find a way to get what I wanted: grades, girls, friends, whatever. Until I found the one thing I couldn’t live without.

It was a hell of a time for my first failure.

I’d made a fatal error with Hari, and the worst of it was, I still couldn’t figure out what I should have done to make things work out any better. I mean, sure, thousands of plans and ideas poured into my mind that night, limitless and swirling, funneled from the stars by a quiet maelstrom of the chill Aegean air, all equally futile—I should have done this, I could have tried that, why didn’t I think of this—until finally it was morning and I hadn’t slept at all. I stopped by my room just long enough to dry-swallow a couple of caffeine pills, then I stumbled off to class, to spend the next few hours, the next few days, pretending that my life wasn’t over.

At least I didn’t have any trouble staying awake. I couldn’t have slept if you hit me with a rock.

Sometime during that hopeless blur of days, Chandra called me into his office again. I don’t remember what he said or what I replied; I think, at that point, all I could do was bluff. With my father’s voice whispering advice and scorn alternately in my ear, I sneered at my executioner. Show no weakness to the undercastes, I thought. Fuck him. If he had any brains at all, he’d have known enough to be born into a better family. That phrase kept ringing inside my head, again and again.

On top of everything else, I had to live with the knowledge that Hari despised me.

In some strange and inexplicable way, that hurt nearly as much as the rest put together. His harsh judgment gnawed at me like a hungry dog worrying a bone. Maybe it was because I was accustomed to the affection of my peers and the respect of those below me; maybe I was appalled that a Labor thug would presume to judge me at all.

Maybe it was because I felt like he was more real than I was.

Something about his Labor life, his street life, gave him what looked to me like a mystic connection to some level of existence at which I could only peer from the outside, through streaked and darkened glass. He was right: I’d never understand, not really. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

I was sure that I wanted his respect more than I’d ever wanted anything, short of a Transfer ticket to Overworld.

A few days passed in this fog of mingled self-pity and self-loathing. I checked my messages obsessively, hoping for any word that he’d relented; all I got were nagging whines from girls who wondered why I hadn’t called them back. I didn’t try to call him, or catch up with him at any of his classes; that would have been too pathetic, even for me.

One morning I woke with something resembling my old resolve, and without even stopping for breakfast or a shower I jogged across campus to the gym, foggily wondering if I might find Hari there.

I had no idea what I would say to him if I found him. I suppose I was half planning to fall to my knees and hope the pathetic blankness of my postsurgical mask might soften his clockwork Labor heart.

It was a stupid thing to do; if I’d been thinking clearly, I wouldn’t have come within a klick of the gym in the morning. Before noon, that’s where the neanderthals gather to flex their muscles and sniff each other’s assholes.

Hari wasn’t there, of course. He was too wise for this, too experienced to be caught out like a young rabbit upwind of a wolf pack. I strolled into the weight room like I belonged there, and it wasn’t until I met Ballinger’s eyes, small and red and hungry like a bear’s, that I understood how stupid I had been.

Then I made my second mistake of the morning: I turned and tried to walk out of there coolly, with a show of calm confidence. Even though my heart roared in my ears, I would not show fear before these hyperthyroid pinheads. Hari would have been smarter; he would have understood how much trouble he was in.

He would have bolted like a scalded cat, and got away.

I made it through the fluted arch, and past the door from the gym’s main hall, and was congratulating myself on my narrow escape when a huge hand grabbed my hair and slammed me against the wall.

The corridor spun around me; grey patches floated raggedly through my vision. Ballinger towered over me like a giant, like a dinosaur, incomprehensibly powerful. Half his face was still swollen and purplish yellow from Hari’s kick, and there was nothing human in his eyes.

I sagged against the wall, trying to catch my breath, and Ballinger’s mouth split in what he probably thought looked like a smile. “Hey, aren’t you Kris Hansen?” he said, his voice rough with mock awe. “Pleased to meet you, you little faggot.”

Then he hit me, casually, a kind of paternal slap, just to establish our relationship. His open palm struck the side of my neck and clubbed me spinning to the floor. I skidded a little ways, and I curled up into a ball and lay there, gasping at the shower of stars inside my head.

“Have a nice trip,” he said. “Bet you thought that was pretty funny, didn’t you? I know I did. Shit, I’m still laughing.”

He tangled his fist in the front of my tunic and hauled me up dangling above the floor. He set my back against the wall and leaned on his fist to pin me there, driving the breath from my guts. He put his other hand up under my chin and started to force my head back, and up, against the slicing pressure of my collar at the back of my neck, the numbing yoke of the tunic tearing down on my shoulders. I pulled at his arm, which felt like stone under my useless fingers, and I punched weakly at his face with nothing but the meager strength of my scrawny arm behind it, and all I could think of was that Tallman’s hand-to-hand combat classes, and Hari’s training, and my wit and good humor and brains and my record as the top Battle Magick student in the history of the Conservatory, everything I am, everything I will ever be, all came down to the tensile strength of my cervical ligaments. Nothing in the universe was as important right now as whether or not my neck was stronger than Ballinger’s arms—and I knew it wasn’t. I could hear the creaking and popping of my neck giving way. Stretching wires of pain sang all the way down into my toes.

And I was wrong about his eyes: they weren’t hungry like a bear’s. What I could see from point-blank was an impersonal hunger, an abstract and dispassionate lust.

They were hungry like Chandra’s.

This wasn’t about me at all; it was about him. He was going to kill me just to make a point. To prove something to Hari, and to himself.

I’d done one foolish thing—one thoughtless, fatal act. When I’d dropped to my knees behind him, I’d mixed into a situation I didn’t understand. Now I was going to die for it. I couldn’t even plead for my life; the pressure of his hand held my jaw shut and cut off my wind.

Then suddenly, blessedly, the pressure slacked and I could breathe again, and I found myself staggering under my own weight as he let me go.

It took a few seconds for me to understand what had happened. There were people around us, and an instructor—I think it was Tallman, but I don’t remember for sure—and Ballinger was laughing and joking with them and cheerfully pretending that he and I had just been horsing around. The instructor and his group of students must have come into sight in the corridor just in time to save my life.

Somebody asked me if I was all right, and I choked out some kind of lie. “Yeah, yeah, Ballinger just plays kind of rough, that’s all.”

I could have filed a complaint against him, sure, but the corridors don’t have the same kind of security camera coverage that the rooms do; we were in a blind spot, and probably the worst trouble I could have gotten him in was a reprimand and a few days of push-ups and extra laps.

As they moved past us toward the gym, Ballinger leaned over to me and spoke softly. “I’m gonna find you, Hansen. Nobody does me like you did, you hear me? And you tell that faggot Michaelson that I’m gonna find him, too. And then I’m gonna show both you pussies how we do shit over here in Combat School.”

And that’s what gave me the idea, right there; it came like a sudden rent in a storm cloud, a shaft of brilliant sunlight straight into my brain, and I thought, All right, why not?

“Sure, I’ll tell him,” I said, grinning behind my mask, the surge of adrenaline making me forget how scared I was. “I’ll tell him all you really want is a chance to suck his cock.”

And in the half second while what I’d said percolated through twelve layers of solid bone to reach his walnut-sized brain, I kicked him in the balls.

His eyes bulged out, and his mouth twisted open to release a strangled hiss. He reached for me as he doubled over, but I ducked under his hand and ran like hell. He might have come after me for a few steps, but I’m quick and he was hurt. He didn’t have a chance.

From behind me as I ran, I clearly heard derisive laughter from the other Combat students. Even through his pain, I’m sure Ballinger heard it, too.

10

I DIDN’T MAKE the mistake of assuming Ballinger was stupid just because he was big. I didn’t know whether or not he was popular with the other Combat students; I assumed he was. I assumed that any Combat student who spotted me anywhere on campus would take the news back to him.

Only five students in the Conservatory were undergoing elving surgeries that term; it wasn’t like I could wear a disguise. For nearly a week I was extremely careful about where I went and when I went there: I cut some classes, stayed late at others, kept my movements meticulously erratic, and kept in sight of crowds whenever possible.

Another mistake I didn’t make was to try dealing with Ballinger rationally, to tell him I thought he was overreacting to what was, essentially, nothing but a schoolboy prank. I understood that the next time he caught me alone, he was going to kill me. I understood that no amount of logical argument, or threat of legal reprisal, would change this fact.

Besides, I didn’t think he was overreacting. Hari and I, we’d challenged his manhood. A Labor kid like Ballinger, manhood was all he had. He’d defend it to the death.

Even his own.

I didn’t need to wonder from where this understanding came; I knew it clearly. I was starting to think like Hari.

I left messages for Hari every day of that week, but he was still ducking me. The few times I spotted him around campus, he’d go the other way, heading places I didn’t dare to follow—lonely places, like the windswept crags above the beaches. I had to get to him, though; I needed a place I could corner him, and I needed a way to convince him to listen.

On the morning of his first Virtual Acting seminar, I was waiting outside the door of the VA suite when Hari came walking up. He walked in the midst of a steady stream of Battle Magick students, but as usual, the tangled darkness of his demeanor made him look like he was alone. He stopped when he saw me down the hall, but I knew he’d chew off his own arm before he’d skip VA. He shook his head disgustedly and came toward me.

I could read his walk well enough to know that he was planning to brush past me without a word, counting on the other Battle Magick students to keep us apart. I stepped out to meet him and stiff-armed him in the middle of his chest.

He looked down at my hand as though he could wither it with a glance, then he met my eyes. “You don’t want to be touching me, Hansen.”

I matched his tone as best I could. “I have news for you, Hari.”

“Fuck your news. Move your hand or I’ll break your arm.”

The last of the BM students filed into the VA suite; we were alone now in the corridor.

“Hari, just listen for one second, will you?”

“You’re the one who’s not lis—”

I popped him across the mouth, a good smooth right hook with my open palm, not too hard but with my hip behind it to drive the follow-through, just the way Tallman teaches it. He staggered across the corridor, off balance, and caught himself on the wall.

He bared his teeth. “Do you have any idea how dead you are?”

He delivered the line pretty well, but I knew his heart wasn’t really in it; if he’d meant it, we wouldn’t be talking.

“You want to kill me?” I said with a shrug. “Get in line.”

“Yeah, I heard about you and Ballinger.” He spat on the floor, then scowled at the pink trace of blood in his saliva. “That ‘enemy of my enemy’ shit doesn’t fly with me, so don’t bother. It was a stupid thing to do.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I told him. “It was the smartest thing I’ve done so far. It’s so smart it’s going to get us both graduated with honors, and on our way to Overworld.”

“Yeah, swell. I’m late for class.”

“Can’t have that,” I said. “Hammet’s going to call you for the first solo simulation.”

Now I finally had his full attention. His gaze sharpened. “Bullshit.”

I just smiled.

He stepped closer to me. “How do you know?”

“I bribed him for it.” I chuckled right into his astonished face. “What’s the point of being rich, if you don’t use money to get what you want?”

He took another step, now close enough that I could smell coffee on his breath. His eyes glittered like the edge of a knife. “Why?”

“It’s because of this idea I have. To solve our problem.”

Faintly, through the door at my back, I heard Hammet launch into his classic Risk Lecture: “You, as Actors, have a precisely defined role, irrespective of whether you swing a blade or throw a lightning bolt, joust or heal the sick. It is purely and simply this: Your function in society is to risk your life in interesting ways.”

Hari heard it, too, and he glanced past my shoulder with thinly veiled longing. I didn’t need to flash on him to know that he was wondering if he’d ever get the chance to do exactly that.

“All right,” he said grimly. “All right, I’m listening.”

“No time to explain right now. When he calls you, he’ll put you into the Waterfront. I’ve been through this sim, and it’s a tough one. Don’t use any magick.”

No surprise, no incomprehension showed on his face; he watched me with transcendent concentration. “Why not?”

“Because you’re not good enough, Hari. Hammet will make you look like a fool. He’s a sadist; humiliating his students is the only real pleasure he takes in life.”

“But if I don’t use magick—”

“Just don’t, you hear me? Magick is exactly what they’re expecting. You’re a shitty thaumaturge. Stick with what you know.”

I studied him, trying to see if I was making any impression, but he was as blank as stone. I shook my head. “Get in there. Hammet will be calling you any second.”

“Kris—”

“No time, Hari. You want to talk about it, I’ll be at my usual table over lunch. Now go.”

11

I SAT IN the back of the Aud, behind the other BM students, and watched Hari on three of the four big screens in front of the banked keyboards of the instructor’s station. The three views showed him from behind, before, and above; the fourth didn’t show him, but instead was Hari’s POV.

He moved with some assurance through the Waterfront; he, like the other students, had had two dry runs the week before, to become accustomed to moving in the feedback suits and to get the feel of pulling the simulated Flow. On the screen, he looked again the generic-featured manikin I’d fought in the Meadow, dressed in loose, nondescript tunic and pants.

The Waterfront was another standardized encounter environment, modeled on the Terana docks on the west coast of the Ankhanan Empire. A tangled maze of clapboard shops, taverns, and brothels crowded what once were broad rights-of-way between massive stone-built warehouses. The streets teemed with people of all descriptions as well as a liberal sprinkling of the subhuman races of Overworld, but these were only for atmosphere. Hari could actually interact only with Hammet’s TAs, five retired Actors who waited in feedback suits of their own, in other cubicles of the VA suite. They would take on the roles of the other characters in this encounter.

The first Waterfront encounter is pretty simple. As he’s walking along, the student hears feminine screams from a nearby alley; when he investigates—which he will, as avoiding the encounter is not an option if he wants to pass VA—he sees a man using a stout stick to beat a woman. The student has three spells to call upon: a Minor Shield, a fairly powerful Telekinesis, and, of course, the basic Flow bolt that any spellcaster can use.

What most students do—what I did, in fact—is self-righteously order the man to lay off, and when he refuses, to enforce the order with magick, either Shielding the woman or attacking the man with the TK or a Flow bolt.

This is where your average student gets stomped, because there isn’t just one man, there are four: one behind him, and two more lying low on the one-story rooftops to either side of the alley. As soon as the student enters the trancelike state of mindview, all three of them jump him.

Now, don’t get me wrong: You can fight them. The street and alleyway are even designed with a number of features that can be improvised into weapons by a resourceful student, like some broken jugs and splintered timbers, loose cobblestones as big as your fist that can be thrown by TK, and a couple of nooks you can back into and seal with a Shield.

In the end, though, they’ll get you. Even if you manage to fight off all four—which, as far as I know, no one has ever done successfully, except me—the woman herself is part of the plan, and she’ll knife you at her first opportunity. That’s where I lost.

The whole purpose of this encounter, it seems to me, is to humiliate the student who goes through it—and to impress upon all the BM kids how vulnerable they are when they enter mindview. You can’t win the fight; what Hammet does, afterward, is talk about how you could have made losing more entertaining.

Hammet’s first clue that Hari’s encounter wasn’t going to go entirely according to plan probably came when Hari peered around the corner of the alley and saw the man beating the woman with the stick. His manikin’s face was, of course, expressionless, but Hari’s distinctive mutter came over the Aud’s PA rich with scorn.

“Oh, that’s original,” he snorted. “Give me a break.”

He shook his head and shuffled his feet a little; I thought he was searching for a balanced stance to enter mindview, and my heart sank. But he had other things on his mind: his shuffling feet had found one of those loose cobbles, and he bent and picked it up.

This is where the student steps forward and utters some fatuous variation on the time-honored “Stop, you fiend! Unhand that woman!” but Hari just stood there for a moment and watched him beat her, holding the cobblestone thoughtfully.

Hammet keyed his mike. “Michaelson, what are you doing?”

“I’m intervening,” came Hari’s muttered reply. “That’s what I’m supposed to do, right?”

“Get on with it, then.”

“All right.”

He took one step forward and fired the cobble overhand. As the stone left his hand he shouted, “Hey, asshole!” The man with the stick turned to look, just in time to catch about half a kilo of stone full in the mouth. The impact lifted him off his feet and dumped him to the ground like he’d been hit with a bat.

Every student of Battle Magick in the Aud gasped like an affronted Leisurewoman.

“All right, I’ve intervened,” Hari said to the air, sounding bored. “Now what?”

Some of the gasps gave way to snickers.

Hammet snarled something unintelligible, and the two men who had waited atop the single-story buildings leaped down toward Hari as though they wanted to land on him. Somehow, he’d been expecting this; he darted toward and past one of them, his arm extended to hook the falling man’s legs out from under him. The poor guy tumbled in the air and landed hard on the back of his neck.

The other rolled with the fall and came up with a knife in his hand, but Hari had kept moving to the alley wall, where the pile of timbers stood. By the time the knife guy rolled to his feet, all he had a chance to see was a long section of two-by-four swinging down at his head. He got his arm up in time to take the blow, but it drove him back down to his knees, and Hari kicked him in the face.

By the time the fourth TA arrived, sword in hand, three men were down. Hari faced the fourth with his two-by-four angled before him like a bastard sword at garde. He hesitated, and through Hari’s POV I clearly saw his gaze shift over Hari’s shoulder; on the front view I saw the woman lunge toward Hari’s back.

But again he was somehow ready for this; with uncanny, almost prescient assurance he slipped to one side and backhanded the two-by-four across her chest. It stopped her cold, and in that one second of stunned stillness, he dropped the board, took the knife from her opening fingers, and yanked her around in front of him as a shield, the knife against her throat.

“Drop the sword or she dies,” he rasped, and I don’t know if the TA believed him or not, but I did.

There was a moment of shocked silence in the Aud, then a scattering of applause, which turned to shouts of useless warning as the man Hari had felled with the rock rose up behind him and clubbed him across the back of the head.

Even then, Hari didn’t fall immediately. Half stunned, he still managed to slash the woman’s throat and cast her aside to turn on his attacker, but now the man he’d kicked in the face had risen as well, and the one who’d fallen on his head, and they all waded in on him with knives and clubs. He fought with desperate ferocity, but he couldn’t handle them all at once.

They beat the crap out of him.

The feedback suits in the VA suite are loaded with failsafes; they can’t do much worse than raise a welt or give you a minor bruise and a lump or two. On the other hand, the simulation programs were supposed to shut down a feedback suit when its sim takes what should be a killing or incapacitating blow.

From his keyboard at the instructor’s station, Hammet had altered the simulation’s parameters, to let his TAs get up after they should have been eliminated—even the woman whose throat was supposed to be cut.

They spent longer than they really needed to take Hari out, battering him from one side of the virtual alley to the other and back again. They punished him as much as the feedback suit would allow, and he never made a sound. When his manikin lay stretched out and bleeding on the cobbles, Hammet ended the simulation.

He rose and keyed his throat mike. “Michaelson? You want to tell me what that was supposed to be about?”

Hari’s response, muffled perhaps by the simulated unconsciousness of his manikin, sounded something like, “Cheating bastard . . .”

And a faint rustle of assent came from the BM kids in the seats of the Aud.

Hammet’s tone went icy, and I could see the man was livid, as though he’d received a deadly insult. “Are you some kind of a joker, Michaelson? Why didn’t you use any magick?”

Hari’s reply was an open sneer. “What for?”

“Because that’s what you do, you dumb shit. You’re supposed to be a thaumaturge, aren’t you?”

“What I am,” Hari said, “is an Actor. What I do, is risk my life in interesting ways, right?”

“Don’t mock me, you Temp sack of shit. How do you expect to graduate from the College of Battle Magick if you can’t throw a fucking spell?”

I rose quietly in the back of the Aud; I had a feeling this argument was going to escalate in an unpleasant way, and I had already seen everything I needed to see.

This was going to work.

12

I SAT ALONE in the dining hall. For self-protection, I chose to be in public view as much as possible, so I’d begun a habit of lingering there at mealtimes.

My friends often sat with me; I was still as popular as ever, and it was considered something of a coup in Shitschool to be seen eating at my table. None of them really understood what was happening; they all thought I was very brave, for the way I’d faced down Ballinger, and they all joked and laughed and told each other, See? Those Combat jerks aren’t as tough as they think they are. Most of them are only Labor trash, after all. Hollow men, they said smugly, congratulating themselves for their superior breeding, covered in muscle but empty inside.

I could have told them how tough those Combat jerks are. I could have told these scions of European Business houses, these social-climbing Professionals and self-conscious Tradesmen, that those hollow Labor men are filled with a terrifying solidity.

But what’s the point? They wouldn’t believe me, not really; I had no way to bring them to the understanding that Hari had given me. They’d only think I was putting on airs, that I was being melodramatic, the same way I’d thought Hari was. I ached to find a way to lock each of these smug creeps that I used to think were my friends in a room alone with Ballinger for ten minutes.

Let them look into the eyes of that hollow man as he looms over them like a thunderhead. It’d change their fucking lives.

That noontide, after Hari’s VA debut, these creeps and hangers-on had left early, and I sat alone at my table, going over Hardanger’s Primal Culture, barely seeing the words on the screen, wondering if Hari was going to find me here.

I was slogging through the third of Hardanger’s five alternate translations of the heroic epic Dannellarii T’ffar when Hari came through the door. Two weeks ago, maybe, I would have kept reading, to pretend to be cool and nonchalant; I had neither time nor patience for that now. I flipped the screen closed and waited for Hari to reach my table.

He had a couple lumps coming up on his face, and he approached me cautiously. “All right,” he said, eyeing me with a kind of animal wariness. “I’m listening.”

“Sit.” I waved an offering hand to the chair opposite, and waited while he thought it over.

Slowly, watching me, he slid into the chair. “So. What was that about? Hammet hates my guts, now.”

I shrugged. “Hammet hates everybody. Don’t worry about it.”

“They beat the shit out of me.”

“Only because Hammet reset the sim parameters, and everybody in that room knew it. The story will be all over campus by tonight. Nobody beats that encounter. Nobody. Not even me. You’re going to be a legend in the College of Battle Magick, Hari.”

“Like you? Big fucking deal. Am I supposed to thank you for it?”

“It’ll make your career,” I told him. “It’ll get you graduated with honors and off to Overworld.”

“How am I gonna graduate when I can barely throw a fucking spell?”

“Hari, Hari, Hari,” I said, shaking my head in mock pity. “I think you’re the only guy who was in the Aud today who didn’t get it. You don’t need magick, Hari. Leave the spells to upcaste pussies like me, huh? You’re going to graduate from the College of Combat.”

Give him credit as a flexible thinker: he didn’t scoff. He leaned back in his chair and stared through me with narrowed eyes, thinking hard. I went on, “Did you get a recording? You proved today that you can fight—and win—even when you’re completely overmatched. Hari, that was five to one! You weren’t even armed. I’ve never seen anything like it, and neither has anybody else around here.”

He shook his head, and his eyes went cold; I could see him talk himself out of it. “Proves nothing. That’s why they call it a simulation, Kris.”

“Yeah, I know. Chandra won’t even consider it—unless we force him to.”

“How do you plan to do that?”

I took a deep breath and sighed it out; for a moment I had a fleeting fancy of being on Overworld, of summoning mindview and slipping a Suggestion into Hari’s unconscious mind. It was a pleasant fancy, and it gave me a warm little smile.

“The whole thing revolves around proving that you, Hari Michaelson, skinny little Labor trash Shitschool student, can take on a highly trained warrior three times your size in the real world, straight up, no rules,” I began. I would have gone on, but Hari was right with me.

“You’re talking about Ballinger.”

I nodded. “You can bump chests with him all you want, but me?” I spread my hands. “I need this settled before he kills me. I have it worked out so we can tie the whole thing up with a ribbon, and everybody’s happy.”

“How do you figure?”

I held up my hand. “First, you tell me: What do you think?”

“Going over to Combat? Shit, Kris, it’ll never happen. Even the girls over there outmass me by ten kilos. You ever been hit by somebody who is, like, double your mass?”

“Just once,” I said grimly. “I didn’t care for it. But we’re talking about you. Forget whether you think it’s possible. Do you want to?”

He sat there and stared through me, and didn’t answer.

I leaned forward. “I know,” I told him. “I know why you’re in Battle Magick. Why you want to be an Actor. It’s because, deep down, what you really like is to hurt people.”

He didn’t deny it. I grinned. “Do it on Earth, you’re in prison, or cyborged. Do it on Overworld, you’re a star.”

He squinted at me.

“Sure,” I went on, “BM was your best chance to get to Overworld—but not anymore. You don’t have it, Hari. You’re not going to make it.”

His lips compressed, and his face darkened.

“But, you know why you don’t have it?” I said. “Why you’ll never be an adept? I saw it all when we fought in the Meadow. Your Shell? It stops at your fists. It’s because when you think about hurting people, when you really let your passion run, you don’t care about magick. You want to do it by hand.”

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 shitter 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 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 with 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 IV 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 pain.

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.”

Hari didn’t so much as blink. My first instinct was to bluster, but I followed Hari’s lead and held my expression as neutral as I could.

Chandra looked from me to Hari, then back again, and the hardness in his face melted back into weary despair. “But I don’t know why. I don’t know how this—we—ended up here, in the infirmary. I don’t know why we’ll have to find a donor eye for Pat Connor, why Jan Colon is undergoing reconstructive knee surgery even now. Ballinger is in a coma in Athens; the best neurosurgeon in Europe has just finished pulling splinters of his skull out of the right lobe of his brain. They say he’ll probably survive, but the extent of the permanent damage won’t be known for days, or weeks.”

A slow, sick weight gathered within my chest.

Chandra’s eyes were raw with pain.

“You have what you want. Both of you. I—I cannot stand . . .” His breath hitched, then steadied. “I will have no further bloodshed. One student maimed, another crippled. A third with a fractured skull and permanent brain damage. You did this, Hansen. And you, Michaelson. And for what? To get a transfer into the College of Combat?”

He opened his hands helplessly. “Why did it have to be this way? Was there no other choice?”

I wanted to answer him, but no words came to my lips. The respirator seemed to suck air from my lungs, just as it had sucked all the moisture from my mouth. I glanced at Hari, but his face was as unreadable as a fetish mask.

Chandra shook his head, and his eyes glistened with unshed tears.

“Couldn’t you have asked?”

17

HOURS BECAME DAYS, and weeks. Hari was released from the infirmary long before I was; by the time I saw him again, he was already established in the Combat school. Though he would never have the size and strength necessary to be competitive in the tank warfare of the lumbering, heavily armored Combat Trials, he liked to point out that no one wears armor all the time, not even on Overworld. He never bothered to train in armor, himself, and there was no man or woman on campus who would care to face him over a pair of bokken without it.

He spent much of his time working with Hammet and Tallman on techniques that would allow him to defeat an armored opponent, taking advantage of his superior speed and mobility to knock a man down or to close with him into the infighting range where a sword is useless and a stiletto can enter a visor, or slip beneath a gorget. He got good at it, too, as I knew he would. Never good enough to consistently beat a really gifted Combat student—like Ballinger once was—but good enough that no one, not even the best, was entirely comfortable coming into the ring with him, or facing him in a VA sim.

He was a celebrity on campus, a curiosity, a traveling one-man freak show. There was no one on the island that didn’t know who he was, no one that didn’t want to be able to say they’d spent time with him; he began to hold court in the cafeteria, just as I once had.

He was the idol of a growing circle of awed magick students, and he became the unofficial mascot of the College of Combat. Connor and Colon took to following him around like bachelor wolves behind their pack leader; far from holding a grudge for their injuries, they would proudly point them out and tell the story of how Hari had gouged out Connor’s eye, and why Colon still walked with a slight limp. All his course work improved, especially his academics. By the time the Combat Trials rolled around, the week of my Graduation Boards, it was clear that Hari would graduate near the top of his class.

I didn’t grudge him any of this. He deserved it. Setup or not, Hari was a real hero. Fighting four Combat students, single-handed, had never been part of our plan—but Hari hadn’t even hesitated. I never forgot that he could have just stayed in that supply closet and let them kill me.

Ballinger, though—the bone splinters had sliced into his brain. He has recovered limited use of the left side of his body, they tell me, enough to walk with a crutch strapped to his shoulder, but his eyes will not focus, and half his mouth is forever frozen in rictus, and he will never be an Actor, never go to Overworld; he’ll live out his days in a Temp house in Philadelphia, on subsistence.

I almost screened him, once. I don’t know what I would have told him, what I could possibly have said. There was no way to make him understand that I flashed on him in unguarded moments, every day; that every day I became him, in his hospital bed, incontinent, a nurse emptying his diaper into a bedpan. I became him struggling through rehab with a steel strut buckled to my shoulder to take the place of a working leg, dragging the dead half of a body that once had been my greatest pride. Feeling the twisting rivulet of drool that constantly trails from my half open lips.

Maybe I wanted to tell him that I would never forget how expensive my dream had become.

I made up my midterms, took top honors in each, as usual. I went through the rest of my surgeries, took my classes, did my course work, went on with my life.

Stayed away from people.

I took my meals in my rooms, didn’t speak on campus. I drifted from class to class like a ghost. Soon enough, no one bothered to speak to me, either. My circle of creeps had a new hero to suck up to, and Hari was welcome to them.

It wasn’t Ballinger’s face I saw in my nightmares. It was Chandra’s. It was Chandra’s voice I heard, asking if there had been no other way.

Hari, though, he stuck by me. I don’t think he liked me much, either; I think he felt like he owed me something, and that kept him coming around, talking to me, trying to keep me going.

It was Hari who kept telling me not to surrender to Chandra’s guilt-laying game, who kept reminding me that it was Chandra who put this whole thing in motion. Chandra’s speech in the infirmary, he said, had been nothing more than a weak man’s attempt to avoid responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Which may have been true, but it changed the facts not at all.

I hadn’t tried another way. I hadn’t even thought about it.

Maybe, if I had tried, I could have saved my dream without killing Ballinger’s. I had slid right into Hari’s world. I had turned to violence and slaughter because it was easier: simpler, more efficient.

More fun.

I could not pay this price for my dream. I stayed in my classes on pure inertia. Though I had told no one, not even Hari, my mind was made up. I would give up Acting. Give up Overworld. Let my dream of magick die. It wouldn’t help Ballinger, of course; but it would let me sleep.

All I had to do was shitcan my Boards, and then I would never have to face this choice again. There is no second chance; if you fail before the Graduation Board, they just go ahead and send you home.

The night before I was to go in front of the Graduation Board, Hari Michaelson saved my life again.

18

WE SAT IN my room, sharing a liter of retsina, talking about our careers. It’s traditional, at the Conservatory, for a student’s friends to sit up with him the night before his Boards. The night before, you’re too nervous to sleep anyway, and you need friends to keep you company.

Hari was the only friend I had left.

When his Boards came, next term, he’d have a crowd of well-wishers in his room, a party so thick you couldn’t squeeze from one end to the other; that night, the two of us sat at the edges of a pool of pale yellow light from my desk lamp, drank the bitter pine-flavored wine, and talked in low voices. We talked about him, because the words that would come if we talked about me, I could not bear to hear, or speak.

“C’mon, Kris,” he said, a little unsteadily, as he drained the last glass. “You really think I’ll make it?”

“Hari,” I said seriously, “you’re a star already. Look at the way people watch you around here. Everyone knows you’re going to be huge. You’re like something out of a twentieth-century samurai film—or a pirate movie. This industry lives on novelty . . . and it’s more than that, too. You’ve got it, whatever it is. Star quality. I can see it. You can, too—I mean, think about how you, like, came alive when everybody started paying attention to you. It’s like you’re a whole different person, now. Shit, if I didn’t know you so well, I’d say you were happy.”

He smiled into his empty glass, his eyes fixed on some far-distant future. “Where do you think we’ll be, twenty years from now? Big stars, all over the nets? Whole magazines devoted to our sex lives, that kind of shit?”

I shrugged. “You, maybe—if you live. Me? I guess I’ll be VP of something in Malmo, in the family industry.” I managed to say it like it didn’t even hurt.

He blinked owlishly, staring at me in half-potted confusion.

I shook my head at his silent question, and took a deep breath that slid painfully around the knot at the bottom of my throat.

In the end, I guess, I had to tell him. It was vanity, really. I thought I could handle the snickers, and the I knew he never had it in him stories, and the false commiseration I would get from the other students when word got out that I’d failed. But I couldn’t take it from Hari; I had to let him know I was tanking the Boards on purpose. Of all the people I have ever known, he was the one that I most wanted to understand that I could pass, if I wanted to.

I needed him to understand that this was a failure of nerve, not of ability.

“I can’t do it, Hari,” I said slowly. “I think about it this way, that way, every way, and I just can’t do it. Remember what you told me all those months ago, right when we first met? I don’t have it. You were right, man. I don’t have it.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true.”

“It fucking isn’t true,” Hari said fiercely. “This is still about Ballinger, right?”

“Yeah.”

“He got what was coming to him, that’s all. He was begging for it.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it? What?” His face flushed red, and he looked like he wanted to hit me, as though he could slap the weakness out of my head.

If only he could. “I’m a coward,” I said helplessly.

“What, because you folded when he hit you? Jesus Christ, Kris! Ballinger was three times your size, a fucking stone killer. You had no chance against him—but you walked into that shitter anyway. There are different kinds of courage, Kris. The hot kind, that’s mine. Once the action starts, I’m all into it—but there are lots of people like that. Yours is the cold kind. Cold courage, man. You have to be just about the bravest son of a bitch I ever met.”

My eyes went hot, and my tongue went thick, and all I could do was shake my head. How could I explain? But if I didn’t start talking, I was going to start crying, and I would have rather died.

So I said, “All I ever wanted was to go to Overworld. My whole life, all I ever wanted was to be an Actor. But you know what being an Actor is, Hari? It’s stepping back into that bathroom, every day.”

“You can handle it,” he insisted. “On Overworld, you’re gonna be the toughest kid on the block—like when you tore me up in the Meadow—”

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s not the danger. I don’t care about the danger. It’s stepping back into that bathroom because I’d have to hurt somebody, to kill him—just to get another point of market share, a few bloody thousand marks. And what does that mean, to me? I’m rich already. What do I need so badly that it’s worth somebody’s life?”

“Fucking upcaste liberal,” Hari muttered. “There’s nothing cheaper than somebody’s life. If you were Labor, you’d know it—Laborers are born knowing it. Shit, in the Mission District, you can buy a murder for less than the price of a steak dinner.”

“But that’s you,” I said. “That’s not me, and I can’t pretend it is.”

“Then I guess we got a problem.”

“We?”

He settled back into his chair and set his wineglass on the floor. “Yeah. We. This isn’t just your problem. You’re my best friend, Kris.”

“Huh? Hari, you don’t even like me!”

“You saved my life. I don’t forget that.”

I started to protest, and he cut me off. “No,” he said sharply. “You did. You wash out, you go back to the life of a Businessman on the Nordic Peninsula. Hey, that’s one thing; it’s not so bad. I wash out, I go to the Temp slums of San Francisco. That’s something else. You saved my career, and that’s more important than my life. I’m not going to let you suffer for it.”

“Too late,” I said bitterly.

“Listen, let’s say you graduate after all. What then?”

“The usual. Two years of Overworld freemod for acclimatization and whatever final training I can manage; say, if I can find an adept who’ll take me on as an apprentice. Then I come back for the implant—”

The possibility bloomed within my head, and Hari tracked its growth by the birth of my first smile in months. He grinned in reply.

“See, Hansen? You’re still too locked into the rules, man. You’re obsessed with what you’re supposed to do. What’s the real issue here, being an Actor or going to Overworld? Who says it’s both or nothing?”

“I . . . I . . .” I couldn’t think of anything to say; inside my head, my brain rang with Hari’s echoes.

Who says it’s both or nothing?

19

THE NEXT MORNING, I passed my Graduation Boards with the highest score this decade.

20

I SPENT THE next week or so hanging around the Conservatory, packing, making preparations. It had been my home for three years, and it was hard to believe I’d never see it again.

That week, my surgical mask finally came off for the last time. Now, when I look in the mirror, I see the alien features of a primal mage.

My true face.

It still gives me the shivers, a little.

I’m an elf, I say to myself, over and over again.

I’m an elf.

I also spent some time watching the Combat Trials. I led the wild cheers from the Shitschool students as Hari battled his unconventional way up the ranks. He lost in the finals, but the feral joy that showed through the blood on his face when he congratulated the winner made him look like he was the champion, instead.

Then I went home for a week, to see my father and my mother, my older brothers and my little sister, and to walk the fields of our estate, to fish, to wander through the neighborhoods of Malmo, where I grew up.

To say good-bye.

Then I came back to the Conservatory, to write this all down and tuck it away, so that someday it will be found, and someone—maybe my father, maybe Hari, maybe even I myself—will read it, and understand.

Tomorrow, I make the Winston Transfer to Overworld, on freemod. I’m crossing over into the Promised Land. At the end of two years, I might present myself at one of the Studio’s fixed transfer points, to return to Earth and an Acting career.

And, I might not.

A lot can happen in those two years of freemod. Many students die. Overworld is a dangerous place—more so for us, who know of it only secondhand. Some students vanish, and are never seen or heard from again.

I have a feeling that this is what will happen to me.

It’s all about Hari, you see. He’s smarter than I ever gave him credit for. He was right: I never wanted to be an Actor in the first place.

I want to be a primal mage.

Maybe I’m just pretending. Maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe I’ll die trying.

So what? I’ve faced that choice already, and I see no reason to change my mind now.

I can’t stop thinking about the look in Chandra’s eyes, the morning he started all this. I can’t stop thinking about seeing that same blank hunger behind Ballinger’s ursine glare. The link, the common thread between them—I spent days turning it over slowly in my mind, again and again, looking at it from every angle, trying to understand, and I couldn’t quite put it together . . . until I saw the same look in my father’s eyes, as the Social Police transport van arrived with a new load of Workers for the factory.

I mean, precisely the same: as though the same creature had worn all three faces like a mask. My nightmares whisper of some vast, unknowable power, buried in bedrock slumber, whose dreams reach out and don us like hand puppets. Like masks. Like one of those mirror masks of the Social Police.

I’ve been thinking about that creature a lot. At first I thought it was just a metaphor: a myth I’d invented to solidify the way it made me feel. Now, I’m not so sure. I think that creature wore my face, for a while: I have a feeling that Hari saw that same abstract, impersonal hunger in my eyes there in the weight room, the day we first met. I have a feeling that’s why he hated me on sight.

He beat it out of me, literally—but that didn’t stop me from using Ballinger as ruthlessly, as coldly and impersonally as Chandra was using me. I used him until he was all used up.

I guess it’s a habit. I guess it’s the way the world works. That’s what keeps the gears of civilization grinding along.

But Hari . . .Well, nothing impersonal there: he hated Ballinger’s guts. Maybe that’s what it’s really all about, in the end. Hari and that blankly hungry creature, maybe they’re natural enemies.

With Hari, it’s always personal.

Me, I’m going to run and hide. Hari won’t; I can see it every time I look at him. He’s going to wade on in and slug it out.

It feels strange, to write that: to admit, even to myself, that a savage, antisocial Labor thug is a better man than I am. And there I am again: He is not a savage, antisocial Labor thug.

Well, he is, but that’s not all he is.

I don’t think I even have the vocabulary for this. He’s Hari, that’s all. That’s a lot.

I tried to be his teacher, but I learned more than I taught.

I told Hari that Acting was stepping back into that bathroom, every day; what I didn’t tell him is that for me, a Businessman born and bred, I’m stepping into that bathroom every time I get up in the morning. That’s the inescapable structure of life on Earth.

Use and be used, until you’re used up. It’s the way the world works.

This world, anyway.

I can hear, with my enhanced elvish ears, Hari’s footfalls on the walk outside, far down in the dormitory’s courtyard. I’m saying good-bye to him, too, tonight.

We save the most important good-byes till the last.

Good-bye to my best friend that I never liked.

Strange world.

I go to a stranger one tomorrow.

I’ll look for you there, Hari. Maybe someday, twenty years from now, you’ll be sitting in an Overworld tavern, and a familiar-looking primal mage will offer to buy you a drink. There really isn’t any other way to say thanks, for saving my soul.

I only wish I could save yours.

What the life you’ve chosen to lead will cost you, I can’t begin to imagine.

I guess the best you can hope for is not to be noticed.

SHE WAS ONLY a goddess part-time, but she loved her job, and she was good at it. She went to and fro upon the earth and walked up and down in it, and where she strode bloomed flowers and sprouted grain; when she spread her hand, the winter was mild and the harvest bountiful, a summer storm brought showers warm and sweet as a sunlit pond, and the spring sang of things green and growing.

The First Folk called her Eyyallarann, the Flowmind; the stonebenders called her Thukulg’n, the Drowner; to the treetoppers she was Ketinnasi, the Riverman; to mankind, she was Chambaraya, the Water Father; but her name was Pallas Ril.

It was said she had a human lover, in some far-off place; that for half the year she took the form of mortal woman and lived in peace with her lover and her human child. Others said her lover was himself a god, her shadow-self, a dark angel of slaughter and destruction, and that the half of each year she spent at his side was the world’s ransom: that she paid with her body to keep him beyond the walls of time, and preserve the peace of the good land.

As is common with such tales, both were true; and false; and to the same degree.

The part-time goddess had no church, no religion, no followers; she could not be propitiated by sacrifice or summoned by invocation. She walked whither she willed, and followed the course of her heart as though its turns were the twists of her riverbed; she loved the land and all things in it, and all prospered under her hand. The only prayer that might sway her was the sob of a mother over her ill or injured child—be that mother human or primal, goshawk or bobcat, elk or rabbit—and this only because the human part of her remembered what it is to be a mother.

This was probably, in the end, the real reason why she and her lover both had to die.

For the scent of her green and growing land troubled the slumber of another god: a blind and nameless god, a god of dust and ashes, whose merest dream can kill.