important.” Emily looked pleadingly at Alex. “I’m not trying to recruit you, Alex, I promise.”
“Not yet anyway,” Vivik muttered, pulling the foil cap off a container of yogurt. “Weren’t you going to do some introductions, anyway?”
“Well, I’d hoped to finish lunch first,” Emily complained, glaring at Vivik. “But since you’re getting all pushy about it.”
Emily looked around the room briefly, and then pointed to a nearby table where two boys and a girl sat, talking quietly and seriously.
“So that table over there are the other Hegemony cartel kids from our class — the girl is Louise and the guys are Manual and Gary.” Emily turned around in her chair, and pointed to a set of two tables in the center of the room, each with several students eating lunch at them. The conversations here seemed to Alex to be a bit more natural, more appropriate to the age of the speakers, if not the setting. “Those are mostly orphans, over there, Rise, Sujan, and Chris at the near table, and that’s William, Choi, and Marko at the far table. You already met Anastasia and the Black Sun contingent…”
“And what about them?” Alex asked, pointing at the far corner of the room.
“Who?” Emily asked, turning around to look. “Oh, bad scene.”
“How so?” Alex asked, feeling his gut tighten. Even from here, he could hear the big guy’s tone of voice, and he didn’t like it at all. He couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he’d been around enough to read between the lines.
“The bastard from earlier, his name is Steve, and his hanger-on is Charles,” Emily said grimly, “and they are bad news for the girl sitting at that table.”
“The weird one with blue hair, we call her Eerie, she’s half-Fey.” Vivik looked down at his food and shrugged. “The one they aren’t bothering, the redhead, Margot, is a vampire.”
“Wait, what?” Alex stared at Vivik, his fork frozen halfway to his mouth.
“It’s… complicated.”
“We don’t kill them?” Alex asked incredulously.
“Ha, uh, no,” Vivik sputtered. “Not since blood banks were invented, anyway.”
“But they eat at the cafeteria? I mean, like, food?”
“Well, yes,” Vivik said, brightening up at the change of topic. “Just because they can’t produce hemoglobin on the own doesn’t preclude them from varied nutritional requirements.”
Alex glared, and Vivik sighed.
“Yes,” he confirmed tiredly. “Yes, they eat food.”
“There is an understanding,” Emily interjected, shaking her head. “The vampires have a sort of embassy, here in Central. The younger ones usually come to the Academy for a while. The only Fey I know about is Eerie, so I don’t know what her deal is, but she’s been at the Academy forever. They’re both students here.”
“Except that they’re treated a bit different then everyone else, right?”
Vivik looked up at Alex’s strange tone of voice, and tried to look him in the eyes, but Alex refused to meet his gaze.
“Mostly, yeah,” Vivik admitted sheepishly. “Some people give Eerie a pretty hard time. Nobody bothers a vampire, particularly not Margot, but…”
As if on cue, there was a crash and then a brief cry from the corner table. Alex didn’t even bother to look up.
“And Steve, he’s a tough guy, right?”
Alex stood up, still looking at the ground in front of him.
“He’s the biggest and the strongest kid here, right?”
“I guess so,” Emily said, worried. “At the moment. I think Anastasia left already, or he wouldn’t have pulled this.”
“Alex, what are you thinking of?” Vivik asked, looking up with obvious concern. “The staff here won’t let anything too bad happen.”
“Right,” Alex said, turning away abruptly and walking from the table. “That’s good, then.”
“Alex?” Emily called after him, but Alex was already halfway to the lunch line.
It was the same everywhere. Alex could have written a book about it.
School. Mental hospital. Juvenile Hall. Work camp. Halfway house. Alex had been to them all, and he’d seen the same thing in every one of them. After the first few years, he’d pretty much gotten used to it.
There was always someone who threw their weight around, someone who intimidated everyone else. It didn’t even matter that Steve hadn’t started on him yet — he would eventually. It was inevitable, Alex being the new kid, lacking the obvious security that came with the cartels. Even if Alex hadn’t had a giant bull’s-eye hanging on his chest, he’d be targeted for being new, different, and friendless. This was yet another price that Alex would pay for staying unaffiliated.
He ran his eyes along the cafeteria counter, now half-disassembled by a host of white-clad staffers. Alex settled on a solid-looking metal tray.
“I’m going to borrow this for a second, ‘kay?”
Alex didn’t wait for an answer from the puzzled worker, heading rapidly off toward the corner table before his nerve gave out.
Alex had spent some of the time after his trial in a State Hospital. Two weeks after he’d arrived, he’d been attacked by a couple Dominican kids in the kitchen where he mopped the floors. He’d ended up half-killing one of them with a metal cooking pot, and then spent two weeks in the infirmary with a hole in his gut from where the other kid had stabbed him. No one had bothered him again, after that. He’d even played cards with one of the Dominicans, a few times, while they were both the infirmary.
It only lasted until he’d been transferred to a different institution, of course. The next time it had been a peckerwood cellmate, who’d probably grown up ten minutes down the road from Alex in some other white-trash hole, who had tried to bash his head in with a plastic chair.
Alex wasn’t thinking very clearly, and his head was buzzing. Some of it might have had to do with the training, too — in all honesty, he’d been all jacked up for days, just looking for an excuse to try it out on somebody. And the Academy, in Alex’s eyes, was simply another institution.
The redhead, Margot, was staring down at the plate in front of her, ignored and seemingly oblivious to what was going on around her. Even in the heat of the moment, he couldn’t help but notice that vampires ate a lot of salad, or at least this one did. Near the end of the table, Steve and Charles leaned over a girl sprawled out in spilled food and dishes. She was still sitting where she’d fallen, looking confused, and her eyes wide and blank. Her sweatshirt was splattered with red sauce, and the majority of a bowl of pasta sat on her skirt.
“Aw, poor thing,” Steve said, crouching down beside the girl with an oafish grin. The other boy cackled. “It looks like you had another accident. You have terrible balance, freak.”
Steve winked at Charles, who laughed even harder. Alex was very sure the toady wouldn’t be a problem.
“Let me help you with that,” Steve said, reaching toward the pasta, and then, casually, flipping the girl’s skirt up, exposing her panties. Charles howled with laughter, and the girl gasped.
“Hey, Steve…” Charles said nervously, much too late for a warning to help.
Alex would have liked to have said something cool. He was so angry his hands were white where he gripped the tray, and he would have shared his opinion of Steve, Charles, and his tittering classmates who were watching, but words wouldn’t convey the message the way a metal tray upside Steve’s head would.
He held the tray in both hands and swung it as hard as he could, catching Steve solidly behind his left ear with a meaty thud. Steve cried out in pain and surprise, and tried to turn around, but Alex had already pulled back for another swing. The second blow hit even harder than the first, connecting with the boy’s temple, and the tray warping with the force of the impact. Steve cried out again and fell to the floor, eyes closed, clutching his head.
Alex stepped over him, smiled, and raised the tray above his head. Steve opened his eyes just in time for the tray to catch him in the mouth. Steve shrieked again, and then rolled onto his side, spitting blood and a tooth on to the cafeteria floor. Alex dropped the tray to the floor with a crash, thought for a moment, and then kicked Steve in the side of the head for good measure. He shot a warning glance at Charles, but he’d apparently decided to let Steve fight his own battles, or at least the losing ones, and was standing nervously several feet away, trying his
