Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder) (19 page)

Daniel chuckled. “Trina
would approve it because of the added calcium.”

****

Before class the
second week, Daniel noted Zeiss squeezing his stress ball. “Z, what’s wrong?”

“Mom isn’t doing so
well,” the TA said glumly.

“You said last week
that she has diabetes,” Daniel recalled. “That’s nothing major. What else are
you bottling up?”

Once uncorked, Zeiss
rattled on for some time. “Now she has some other mystery problem the doctors
are trying to figure out. This Kendo class is in addition to my already packed
schedule, which we had to rearrange in ways I still haven’t mastered. Horvath
keeps nagging me for updates I don’t have. That Rex we’ve been watching just
got out of the isolation chamber test. He’s acting erratic and tracking him
takes most of my evenings. Meanwhile, Red keeps busting my balls to get more
people to help on her projects. This programming class just gives her more
ideas. Maybe you can talk to her about hygiene. She hasn’t showered in three
days because it ‘wastes too much time’. Sojiro wants to paint on Saturdays,
too, which I wouldn’t mind except that I haven’t worked on
my
dissertation since . . .”

Red examined a bucket
of red chalk powder, pretending not to listen as Zeiss’s voice got louder.

“You’re feeling
overworked,” Daniel echoed, lowering his voice as Kaguya entered.

Zeiss hissed, “I feel
like I’m at the bottom of an inverted pyramid, the tip of a phonograph needle.
Everybody’s pressuring me.”

Alistair strolled in,
a second before the class officially started. “Hey, Z, I need to ask a favor.”

Red covered her ears,
anticipating an explosion. Instead, Zeiss said calmly, “After class, A-man.”

Daniel bit his lip.
“We’ll discuss offloading you today at lunch. I can’t let my assistant burn
out; you’re too important. But I had a favor, too. Professor Lazlo has
something urgent he wants to tell me. He says it can’t wait and he’s camping in
my office.”

“Go,” Zeiss said.

Kaguya ducked into
the locker room where she made a phone call to Lazlo. Both her phone and the
professor’s were manufactured by a division of Mori Electronics. When he
answered, she said, “Enter the gates of my heaven forever.” After he dropped
the phone, convulsing in pleasure, she used a backdoor feature to erase his phone’s
call history and her own. She returned to the dojo in a cold fury. The little
prick had wanted to turn her in. A day of direct stimulation to the pleasure
centers would look to the doctors like his old epilepsy symptoms. They’d haul
him back to Ward Seven for examination by specialists, but outside the island’s
protection he wouldn’t be able to talk. He’d made his choice. Now she needed a
new faculty contact.

Red was putting on
thick pads for the lesson.

“Today we’re going
freestyle,” announced Alistair as Zeiss rubbed red chalk dust on his bamboo
sword and hands. “This exercise is called ‘doctor’. If Z connects with you and leaves
a red mark on a limb, you lose the use of that limb. If he tags you in the
torso, you’re dead. Same rules apply to him. We use the chalk because some
people,” he said staring at Red, “don’t believe me when I call a point.”

“Jeez, it happened
once, and I had a lot of padding. Let it go,” the girl complained.

“What about head and
neck?” asked Mori.

“Out of bounds until
you have better control,” ruled the judge. “Remember, the more you observe, the
better your analysis. If you can go five minutes without getting killed, the
defender wins and the match is over. Red, you go first to demonstrate classic
approach from behind.”

Red stood, turned her
back, and said deadpan, “I am an unsuspecting female. Woe is me.”

Zeiss made a show of
sneaking up with his left hand concealed behind his back. Red listened with her
special senses—nothing. When she felt the mat flex under his weight, she spun
to confront him. The TA triggered the flash from the camera in his left hand.
She instinctively blocked her face to avoid getting photographed. Zeiss seized
the opportunity to grab her right wrist and spin her inward. She ducked,
twisted, and escaped. “Defender right arm disabled,” the referee called.

“Sneaky bastard,” Red
muttered.

Zeiss dropped the
camera and picked up a bamboo sword.

After a minute of
leaping and dodging, she was panting. “Tired?” he asked with perfect calm.

Kaguya glanced at the
monitors. “His pulse rate hasn’t spiked since the first attack. What is he, some
kind of psychopath?”

“Meditates,” gasped Red
diving under another sweep. Before he could recover from his lunge, she
back-kicked him in the butt. Before his slide stopped, she tagged his ankle.

“Attacker left leg
disabled.”

He used the sword to
help him stand. Then the pattern changed. It took several near misses for her
to catch the new pattern. Then she blocked with her left hand and kicked his
right foot out from under. “Defender left hand, attacker right leg disabled.”

He circled the point
in front of him as they each calculated. “Three minutes,” said Kaguya. “Wait
him out.”

He spun the sword at
her legs and she flipped over the weapon, landing with her knees by his face.
“Clavicle strike,” she said, bending gently against his shoulder.

“Yield,” Zeiss
called.

“It took you over
three minutes to beat a nat with a camera,” railed Kaguya. “He didn’t even
break a sweat.”

Red opened a bottled
water and guzzled it. “Knock yourself out.”

When Kaguya took her
stance, Zeiss called, “Safety timeout. You need to have pads.”

“You don’t have any
here that fit
my
chest. I’ve analyzed him this whole time. He won’t lay
a finger on me.”

“Take my pads,”
offered Red.

“Your sweat would
ruin my new uniform.”

Zeiss faced the
camera. “Professor Sorenson. Please tell Mori-san we made every effort to
ensure his daughter was not bruised. I’ll slow my blows to compensate, but
someone may be injured.”

“Now you’re just
irritating me,” Kaguya sneered.

“Resume.”

She turned her back
and braced. When she heard the pit-pat of his feet, her eyes grew wide and she
reacted just in time to knock the sword arm aside and smash his knee. His
momentum knocked them both down.

“Point attacker,”
called Alistair.

“What?!” Kaguya exclaimed.

Red rushed forward.
“Z, are you okay?”

His mouth was clamped
shut against the pain as he stretched his right leg.

“Check your back,”
Alistair said as he probed Zeiss’s injury. “She bent your leg backward.
Hyper-extended. Shit, it’s longer now.”

“End recording,”
Zeiss said between gritted teeth.

The Japanese heiress gasped
as she saw the red streak on her expensive, white uniform.

“He couldn’t move
faster without bruising you,” Red told Kaguya acidly.

“That’s why you
scored him so easily,” Alistair said. “I’ve seen him school a couple
smartasses, usually when they forget safety. The stain comes out after about
three washings.”

“But you’re a nat!”
Kaguya objected.

Zeiss growled as his
assistant propped him up. “If one is not afraid to die, one can accomplish
anything. To paraphrase the Book of Maccabees: every war elephant has a
weakness, the fanatic willing to give his own life.”

Kaguya’s face changed
from outrage to embarrassment as she bowed. “Sensei.”

“Class over,” Zeiss
announced. “Get me to the clinic.”

“Allow me,” Kaguya
insisted. “This was my fault.”

“A, can you clean
up?” Zeiss asked as he limped out with Kaguya under one arm.

Alistair nodded and
started carting the gear to the janitor closet for cleaning. Red took an
armload over, too. When he opened the closet, the referee spotted a pair of
crutches. “Damn, those would have been good to give him. I feel like an idiot.”

“Go, I’ll clean up;
I’m used to it,” Red said. “Next you’ll think of pain meds.”

“Crap, I had those in
my pocket,” the referee admitted and then ran out with the crutches.

Looking at the scale
of the clean-up and the tiny basin, Red decided to carry the chalk-covered gear
into the women’s shower. She turned the water on full blast and filled the
floor with the armload of weapons. She hummed as she scrubbed for several
minutes. The red chalk melted in the stream and swirled down the drain.

Suddenly, something behind
her reflected the water noise back.

“Did you forget
something?” When she peeked with her special senses, she felt a Rex.

She heard Merrick raise his voice over the water. “We were hoping for Kaguya in the shower room. But
we’ll take a little
cherry
. Might be a welcome change of pace. Tighter.”

“I hear small girls
try harder,” said a man carrying a towel.

“Exactly,” said the
one with a Taser. They spread out.

Her goggles were in
the other room, out of voice range. The chalk-covered practice stick sat within
easy reach. “Hell, no,” she replied. “You’ve been warned. I let you off easy
last time.”

“That’s right, you
made me bleed,” recalled the Rex. “Seems only right I return the favor. You two
grab her arms, I wanna go first.” He opened the front of his pants.

“This is the path of
the destroyer,” she recited, planning her moves. She needed him closer for
maximum effect.

“If you scream, I’ll break your
pelvis with my first thrust. Those never quite heal right. You’ll always
remember your first. Every time some other guy mounts you, it’ll be me you feel.”

“Lights: out!” she shouted as she wheeled
back with the practice sword in an acrobatic roll.

The Taser fired and missed.

She had a few seconds and could see
each man by their aura prints. She killed the Rex first, smashing both collar
bones and then crushing his unprotected throat. Red rolled to the side, taking the
gunman out starting at the arms. When he fell backward, she jumped nearly to
the ceiling and landed on his pelvis. The sound conducted through her feet and penetrated
her adrenaline haze. “Two down,” she warned, not certain she could do this to
another person.

The man with the towel howled with
panic as he ran down the hall, straight into Zeiss, who was coming back into
the dojo on crutches. When the blond TA saw the stranger covered in red ribbons
of fluid, he tripped the running man and slammed his head into the wall. Then Zeiss
fell on the culprit like an Alpine avalanche.

“Z, you came out of nowhere,” the
man with the towel babbled.

“Stay down!” Zeiss growled in a
voice so loud it could’ve been a bear. The culprit wet himself but didn’t move
a muscle otherwise. “A, hit the panic button and check Red.” His voice was
shaking, as was his right hand. It kept clenching into a fist and unclenching.

Alistair followed the sound of the
shower and sobbing. Red had a glazed look on her face as he approached. When
she swung her sword, he blocked, shouting, “It’s me.” When she focused, the
referee said, “We’re here. We got him.” She lowered the bamboo sword and used
it to prop herself up. Drops of red fluid rolled down the side. “Is that blood?
Showers: off. Lights: on,” the referee ordered. When the lights came on, he
said, “Omigod, what happened?”

From Zeiss’s facial reaction,
Kaguya said, “I’ll take over here. You check on Miss Benson.” She nudged him
off and sat on the culprit’s back instead.

The towel man realized how
precarious his position was. “We didn’t actually
do
anything to her.”

Kaguya squeezed an artery and the
perpetrator’s eyes rolled up in his head.

“Three students down in the lower
dojo . . . correction four,” Alistair said into his radio. “Send trauma medics
and armed security.”

When Red saw Zeiss hobbling toward
her, she took a shuddering breath. “Those three were hoping to jump Kaguya in
the shower. They were going to settle for me.”

Hearing her own name and the plan,
Kaguya sent an angry psi-bolt into the towel man’s brain stem. He wouldn’t wake
up anytime soon. She ran to join the others at the crime scene.

Zeiss went to Red and held her
while Alistair used the injured attacker’s own Taser to put him out of his
misery.

“I had to put the Rex down,” Red
whimpered.

Zeiss turned pale, taking the
weapon from her as she summarized the attempted rape and defense with brutal
precision, as if it had happened to someone else. When she finished, he said, “Kaguya,
take her to the men’s showers.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” asked Red.

“It was pitch black in this room. The
only witness just said that I attacked them,” Zeiss stated.

“
I
was a witness.”

“We’ll tell everyone you’re in too
much shock to talk.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“What does every student do when
faced with a Rex?” asked the TA loudly.

“Run,” recited Kaguya.

“I couldn’t,” Red objected.

“They’ll say you could’ve escaped when
the lights were out,” Zeiss reminded her. “Because you have your black belt, your
attack is assault with a deadly weapon minimum.”