Edward knocked politely before entering her office. Anastasia looked very small behind her mammoth desk, a laptop sitting open in front of her.
“The in the quarry is online,” he said quietly.
“Just in time,” she said, with obvious satisfaction. “This should be interesting. Edward, please tell the cook that I am ready for lunch.”
He closed the door so quietly on his way out that she didn’t even look up.
Alex stared at the crater in the quarry wall blankly. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then glanced over at Michael’s outstretched hand, blue smoke trailing from the palm, his fingers blackened from volatized carbon, and then looked back at the smoldering indent in the rock.
“Holy fucking shit,” Alex said breathlessly, turning back to face Michael with the biggest grin he’d ever seen on the kids face. “I mean, like, fuck! Man, just… wait. Wait, wait,” Alex said, rubbing his forehead, “so if you can do that, then…”
Michael let him trail off helplessly before he took pity on the obviously overwhelmed boy.
“Why am I not in the field?”
His expression was gentle, rather than was sad.
“Right,” Alex said, nodding. “I mean, can’t you just go blow those fucking werewolf things up or something?”
Michael laughed, but he tried to make sure that it didn’t sound unkind. He didn’t want Alex thinking that he was laughing at him — the kid had already proved to be sensitive, and Michael didn’t want to deal with him moping around for the next week because he’d taken an offhand comment personally.
“Good question, actually. Until you got to the ‘werewolf thing’ part, anyway. I can only do that once every so often, Alex,” Michael said, smiling and attempting to shrug off the ghost of past embarrassment at the fact. “Whether I knock over a matchstick or level a mountain, it takes me a long while to build it back up.”
“What,” Alex asked suspiciously, reaching down to finger one of the quartz fragments that had been scattered all around them by the force of explosion, “you mean like once a day or something?”
“I wish. It’ll be two or three days before I’ll be doing anything like that again,” Michael said, rubbing his hands against his pants to remove the soot. “So now do you understand what makes being M-Class so significant? You might not necessarily be able to wield as much raw power as me in a single instance, but you can do it over and over again.”
Alex tossed the sparkling piece of gravel in the air a couple of times, catching it midway down and then tossing it up again. He looked like he was thinking about things as he did so, so Michael let it be.
“That was telekinesis, huh?” Alex asked.
“I prefer psychokinesis,” Michael said, “but sure. Same thing. Moving things by force of will alone.”
“I still don’t understand how that’s related to, well,” Alex tossed the rock away and frowned, searching for words, “whatever it is that I can do.”
Michael had to think about it for a minute before he started, trying to couch it all in a way that Alex would be able to follow.
“I’m not going to ask you to understand it all. I don’t actually understand some of it all that well myself. But you don’t have to understand it all to make it work for you. There’s this guy, an Auditor here, his name’s Xia. He’s a pyrokine — basically, he can start fires by thinking about it, right? Well, for a long time, they thought that a telekine and pyrokine were two completely different things, so when we were going through the Academy, Xia and I barely even saw each other. These days, we’d be in all the same classes. Turns out what I do in my head, pushing against things, basically, isn’t so different from what Xia is doing when he starts fires. He’s just exciting the molecules within a flammable object until he gets them so energetic that they burst into flames. Same root concept applies to the protocol I just showed you.”
Alex frowned, and Michael could see he wasn’t buying it, at least, not yet. But he was thinking about it, so that was a start.
“Okay, but every time we talk about my protocol, you start talking about the Ether…”
“Right,” Michael said, nodding, “but it isn’t actually the Ether that you manipulate. You punch holes in reality, Alex, in whatever separates our universe from the Ether itself. Depending on how you do it, that creates a vacuum on one side or the other. When the vacuum is on our side, Etheric energy comes rushing over into our world to fill it, thus, the catalytic effect. When you create the vacuum on the Etheric side, matter and energy from our universe is pulled into the Ether, like water down a drain, or a hole in the side of spaceship. If the hole you punch is small, only energy can escape, and that creates extreme cold, and eventually kinetic stasis, on our side. A bigger hole and matter will be pulled through it. A big enough hole…”
“And the whole universe goes down the drain?” Alex asked, trying to sound contemptuous, but looking a little worried at the possibility.
“I don’t think so, but let’s not tempt fate, okay?” Michael said mildly. He had to give Alex time to wrap his head around it, he reminded himself, even if it meant going slower than he would’ve normally liked to. This wasn’t like teaching the kid to square his shoulders when he threw a punch, after all. “Besides, I think that a small hole, a little pinprick, might actually be more useful than a big one. I think even a tiny breach will be enough to pull most of the radiant energy, all of the heat and motion, out of the surrounding area. Do you know what happens when absolute zero is reached, Alex?”
“It’s impossible,” Alex said, with surprising firmness. “Anastasia told me so. You can only get so close, and then you’re always a fraction short. You can reduce the fraction, but you can’t make it go away.”
Michael covered his alarm with an indulgent smile. Why, he wondered, was Anastasia talking to Alex about absolute zero?
“True. But, if it was possible, do you know what would happen?”
While Alex considered it, Michael’s mind was elsewhere. Could Anastasia somehow already be aware of Alex’s affinity for the Absolute Protocol? Was that even possible? Rebecca’s notes, circulated only through the upper levels of the Academy’s staff, should have been the only source for such information. But, how could Anastasia have gotten access to those kind of documents?
From a staff member. That was the only way.
“Um. Everything would freeze…?”
Alex guessed more than he stated, not willing to fully commit to his answer, frowning and wrinkling his brow.
“Well, yes,” Michael said hastily, putting aside his suspicions. “More importantly, however, everything would
Alex nodded slowly, but looked doubtful at best. That was alright with Michael, though. Everyone had to start somewhere.
“Okay, so, what do I do?”
Michael smiled encouragingly, doing his best to put aside his concerns about Anastasia.
“Rebecca already implanted the Absolute Protocol in your mind. Do you remember how to activate it? The routine?”
Alex nodded slowly, clearly going over something in his head.
“Okay, then let’s try it. Go ahead and focus on that end of the quarry,” Michael instructed patiently, pointing at the opposite side of the depression, close enough to see, far enough to be safe. “You don’t need to do anything fancy. Let’s see how far you can reduce the ambient temperature.”
Michael wasn’t sure what the activation routine Rebecca implanted was — they varied, after all, depending on the protocol and the Operator involved. His own routine was loosely based on some Tai Chi movements that he found helpful when he was trying to focus. Whatever it was that Alex did, it was subtle. All that happened outwardly was that Alex sighed, shook out his hands, and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them again, took a couple deep breaths, and squinted at the rock face on the far side of the quarry as if it were very far away.
He was prepared to wait. Protocols were tricky to use, and even with the hypnotic routine implanted to make them easier, students often struggled for weeks before they got the hang of doing it on command. Alex apparently
