Initiation of the Lost (Book 1) (8 page)

"Yes,
Cliff
, might as well start from the beginning." She folded her arms, picking at the silk lavender blouse she wore.

"Fine." He folded his arms as well. "Let's see. Basically, I let the boys work their own stuff out. I don't hold their hands, telling them how to stand up and be a man–an adult. Being an adult is something you figure out. It's your own journey."

"And I hold hands?"

"I'm just saying. We have different methods."

Cassandra raised her chin, her jaw tightening. "You've never seen me interfere with the students' affairs. I help them learn from their experiences, learn how to evaluate how they've acted so they can choose their responses in the future. I help them act more deliberately, choosing to act from their beliefs and values, not their hurts and fears, to be proactive not reactive. So I have no idea the basis of your assessment of me, but...I sense your concern. I assume you keep an eye on them."

"Of course I do. I know my students. There was no need to tell Quake he wasn't going to be leader because of his attitude. We all knew Derek was going to be leader, and–"

"I didn't."

"And if I had told Quake, he would've just felt like life was unfair and we were all against him. Okay? You have your favorites, doctor. I bring balance, and make sure Quake, Flare, and Klug have someone to go to." He sighed; he was just talking, unsure if he was saying what he truly wanted to say.

"They can come to me."

"I mean someone they are comfortable with, someone they can develop more of a rapport with. They need mentors just as much as Ellington. They look tough, because they are. They're hardened and need help breaking the walls down. If Quake got what you gave Ellington all these years, he wouldn't be a bully. That's why I brought them to Hyperion Academy–I believed in what you were doing here. But when it comes to kids, the aggressors need as much help as their victims. They've been through a lot."

She shook her head. Head bowed, she walked around her desk and sat. She nodded to the chair; Cliff seated himself.

"First," she said, "I've been working with Ellington since they were five. Quake and his friends came two years ago. You were not here when they first came. You dropped them off. Quake was violent, a danger to himself and others. The fact that by the time you got here he was just hurling slurs instead of fists is thanks to me. Secondly, you were the one who undermined my connection to the boys. Not on purpose. Your machismo was identifiable to them and brought friendship. I, the doctor and teacher, could not compete with your acrobatics and combat training. I was okay with that. I trusted you to take my place and continue my progress. But you still had a responsibility to reach out to Ellington, Meghan, Abbey, Connor, and Derek. Granted, you did form secondary bonds with Derek and Connor, but Ellington, Meghan, and Abbey you took no interest in. Yes, I am close to Ellington, I raised them. I'm also close to Derek and the Bishops. And if not for you, Quake, Flare, and Klug would still be more of my concern. But I trusted you could mentor them without favoring them, still sharing your experience with
all
the students."

"We'll just have to agree to disagree."

Cassandra leaned over, resting her elbows on the desk: "Did you know Klug has a crush on Abbey?"

Cliff leaned over, resting his elbows on his knees: "No. No I did not."

"He told me. Last week. Wondered if he should tell her."

"What did you say?"

"It doesn't matter. I've made my point." She sat back. "I understand the need to defend your students, but...you are aligned, not with their deeper thoughts and feelings, but with their excuses and justifications. A bad childhood only gets you so much leeway, especially when you are harming others. But even more importantly, you don't have empathy for August, another one of
your
students. If you had, you wouldn't be monologuing, showing me how objective you are with your rational tone, trying to paint yourself as the voice of reason–me, the emotional overreactor–whose version of events should be the ones recorded."

"Look, I get it." He stood, his hands raised to her, palms out.

Deliberately, she stood. "Saying you get it, doesn't mean you get it. It's a tactic, using words to blind people to the truth. Say what you need to say to end the conversation and keep being however you wish to be. But I see you, I hear you–I don't need to feel you–but I do. And trust me, you don't get it."

"Well, Dr. Farling, you'll have to excuse me if I'm not blubbering over all the kids. All I'm saying is that sometimes people–well meaning people–exaggerate when it comes to children and teenagers. They are resilient; they will figure it out."

"They will figure something out. But here we want to make sure they are guided to finding solutions that will benefit them and their fellow peers. You need to understand. Not just intellectually, but emotionally. That is the only way to know–to truly know."

Cliff sat back down, rubbing his hands together. He wasn't sure if he should've said it. But she was attacking him. She needed to see how blind she was to August:

"Did it occur to you August was lying?"

"Why?"

"I don't know. Attention?"

"You don't even know him. You don't know what his deeper wants are." She was now the only one who had the right to claim him.

Cliff shuddered. He had felt a wave of...shame? Guilt? He felt stupid. Maybe she was right. Oh God, he was so sorry. He sniffled. How could he? He just wanted to leave.

"How do you feel?" said Dr. Farling.

"I don't know. God, what's happening? I'm sorry." Tears pooled in his eyes.

"August knows how you feel. I know how you feel. And now you feel how he feels, what I feel when he sits in my office. But unlike you, he didn't start 'blubbering.' He kept it all in, locked up. He was prepared to let it fester, to just stay inside while everyone else lived. So tell me? Is he making it up? Am I making it up?"

He cried. The discomfort. The shame pounding against him in swells.

"You're doing this to me?" he said, burying his head in his hands, embarrassed, trying to hide but not run, to be strong, to fight her. But he wasn't fighting her, he was fighting his own feelings, himself. "This isn't fair. It's not right. How can you even do something like this?"

Ethically or technically? After years of reading fields, learning how different emotions changed their shape, she wondered what the true difference was between sensing and influencing. She deemed the distinction superficial. The rest was practice. Ethically, she was principled not moral. In general, one could say that everyone was entitled to their feelings and the right to keep their thoughts and emotions private. But principally, to Cassandra, reason had failed and too much was at stake in this particular situation not to push boundaries. Her students would need him; he had to be invested, mentally and emotionally. She did the minimum required to ensure he was the man he needed her students to be.

"I've stopped influencing your field. But it will take time to recover. Even though your feelings were not prompted by an actual physical experience, your psyche will never completely tell the difference. You will always at least have these feelings as a memory, unless you forget. And I assume you are a good enough man to not forget. Stay here, gather yourself, and go to bed. Daniel asked me to inform you that you would not be needed at this meeting."

And she walked around her desk, the coach, and slipped into negative space.

<<>>

Daniel sat in an overstuffed leather armchair. Before him was a disc projecting a beam of light and the hologram of a news broadcast. When Cassandra entered, the news anchorman disappeared. She sat opposite Daniel on a pale cream love seat, the column of light between them. Through the hazy illumination, employer and employee saw each other, half in light, half in shadow, wondering if their gaze was contemplating one another, or some place else entirely.

"Will you be attending the funeral?" she said.

"No. I think it best I maintain distance."

"Of course."

He was immune to her readings, but she knew him. She knew what he wanted to say, but she had opened the door to let him say it anyway. Times likes this reminded everyone of how burdened they truly were.

"Damn it, Cassie." Daniel ran his hands over his hair. He tilted just enough for Cassandra to see how much more grey had come into his hair. "If they were where they needed to be, a mission like this would've been child's play. It would've been beneath them. You had a responsibility to push these kids, make them become their best."

"Their best meaning child soldiers?"

"They'd be alive."

"No they wouldn't."
They?
One had died. But it didn't matter–not at that moment. Losing Connor made everything, everyone, seem lost. "Doing things your way, we would've buried them years ago. Or worse, we would've locked them up for their own protection." She lifted the arm to her love seat, revealing a compartment filled with bottled water, glassware, and a cup of lemon wedges. She fixed a drink with a squeeze of lemon and brought it to Daniel. He took the glass:

"Something a little stronger?"

"No."

She returned to her seat and fixed her own drink. He wanted to smile but even after all these years he never knew how to act around her. Her student had died, her team was sleeping in a lab to recover, and yet she was calm. He never interacted with the children; he avoided attachments. She essentially raised them, but was so cold.

"Everything has gone to plan," she said, crossing her legs and easing back. She sighed. "I told you the initial years would be slow as we emphasized structure, creating a safe world for the children to work through their traumas and live blossoming childhoods. And look, look at the rapid progress they've made. Every week they discover greater and greater depths and breadths to their sympathies. Raising soldiers was not the answer. They would've been driven by anger, explosive and reckless. They never would've developed the moral and work ethic, the stability, the creativity, the personalities to manifest, harness, and evaluate their full potential and use of their inherited gifts and talents."

Daniel swigged the last of his water. Reaching into his suit jacket, he pulled out a golden flask engraved with a bull grazing in a pasture. Like any businessman, he had the urge, the thirst, for security, independence, to be in control of every government, economy, and person who could ever take away what he had achieved. But he resisted, with much assistance from Cassandra, the kind of egomania that crippled visionaries, turning their legacies against them; yet still there was a fast talking presence inside of him, needing everything to happen faster–"Now!"–confusing "getting things done" with "getting things done
right
." He reminded himself of the futility of acting unprepared, without having gone through the necessity of right process, the painstaking steps essential to right achievement; but the idea of action, any action, whether right or hasty, was still so comfortable. The work, the potential, was everything; and everything was fear.

He had seen the world collapse due to "quick thinking," knee-jerk reactions to losing money by arrogant men who threw civilization under their muck just to keep playing King of the Hill.

"Alright." He took a deep breath. "Talk me through Derek and the mission."

Cassandra looked at her hands folded in her lap cradling her glass:

"James Crawford will not be coming home. He has enough of an emotional field for me to sense him, but the best we could have done was bring him home the way we did Connor. They wanted that. To not leave him as some guinea pig. But it just wasn't possible. I will inform his parents of their loss. I have an idea as to how to approach his sister. And Silby will be verifying that his birth mother is secure." She sighed. "As for Derek, he did admirably. He executed the plan with confidence and precision. Unfortunately, we were surprised by a squad of Benzaiten bunking under the institute. I never thought to scan underground."

"I went over the briefs." Daniel wanted to sit next to her, but he was afraid of being patronizing. "He, and
you
, did what was necessary. I'll be going through our intelligence department to see what went wrong with the intel."

She knew he was trying to spare her going over the details. But the finer points, the ones she left out the briefing, were important:

"Derek's true power was triggered during the attack. He's sympathetic to physical energy."

Daniel perked up: "Excuse me?" He leaned over, looking intently upon her.

"Silby ran tests while Derek rejuvenated. His cells absorb physical force, protecting him from taking the full impact of blows, and he redirects the absorbed energy to his other faculties–the heightened awareness and increased agility when he's struck. The resilience and increased physical prowess weren't just adrenaline rushes or psychological ticks–they're phenotypes. Most of the blows he suffered in training were not enough to create a superhuman response, hence our ignorance. However, what he did with the Benzaiten, absorbing all of that sonic energy and redirecting it as one massive blast...that was different. I always sensed a blockage in his emotions, something holding him back. We were chipping away at the walls he had built within himself. He was growing and in the meantime supplemented his sympathy with strategy and combat training. His greatest weakness became his greatest strength: by not being as powerful as the others he worked harder and knew how much he needed others–he couldn't do it all himself. It was humbling for him. But anyway, the point is: in the moment he unleashed his full sympathy...the block was gone."