Chapter 16: Caught on Camera

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story about a boy who stands his ground and takes his punishment like a hero, close this book now. Dear Reader, Arthur Specter had a very different idea about heroism, and it began with him running away as fast as his legs allowed.

"Side door," he hissed. "Behind the equipment locker. Go."

"Arthur—" Hadjer started.

"He wants me. Not you. Go!"

Carter and Hadjer swallowed their pride and let their fear drag them toward the maintenance door. Arthur heard it click shut behind them. Then he turned to the stairs.

Boots on metal. Slow. Steady.

Blod Sac reached the top step and stopped, filling the whole doorway. His eyes were red and streaming. His breath was still held, his jaw clenched like a vice, and his lips had gone faintly blue.

He didn’t say a word. He lifted his hand.

Now.

Arthur threw the bottle.

It wasn’t a good throw. It didn’t need to be. The glass cracked against Sac’s forehead and burst, and the whole awful contents splashed across his face, his eyes, his open mouth.

He gasped.

That was all it took. The held breath tore out of him in a roar, and the air that rushed back in was thick enough to chew.

He staggered. A second bottle caught him square in the chest. A third bounced off his shoulder and rolled under the railing.

Sac clawed at his own eyes, bellowing.

Arthur reached into his jacket and pulled out the real weapon.

It was a flashlight. A battered silver thing, the size of a rolling pin, with a lens ground by hand and a switch wrapped in electrical tape.

He had stolen it three days ago from the bottom drawer of his mother’s workshop. Dr. Naomi Specter had built it for a ghost project that had never found a ghost. What it could do, according to the label in her cramped handwriting, was "illuminate to 40,000 lumens, DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY."

Arthur had always thought of himself as the crafty one in the family.

He was wrong. It was not close.

He pointed it straight at Sac’s face and clicked the switch.

The world turned white.

Sac screamed. He threw both arms across his eyes and went down on one knee, and for a long, glorious second, the man who couldn’t be frightened had no idea which way was up.

Arthur didn’t wait.

"Over here, Coach!" he shouted, already running. "I’m absent again!"

He ran down the back stairs, out through the service corridor, and straight into the cold morning.

Behind him, the building shook.

Sac came out of the arena door like a wrecking ball, blind, snorting, clawing at the air. He couldn’t smell Arthur. The stink had burned out his nose, and the flash had burned out his eyes. All he had left was sound.

So Arthur gave him sound.

He clapped. He whistled. He kicked a trash can down the alley, and the roar that followed was one of the most satisfying things he’d ever heard.

He led him around the dormitory, along the garden wall, across the training track. Sac followed every noise like a bull behind a red cape. Every few steps he swung blindly at the air, and every swing he missed seemed to hit something else. A signpost. A bench. A lamp.

Bloodrush, Arthur thought, with a cold flicker of fear. Every hit makes him stronger.

He’d just have to make sure the hits were worthless.

He cut left, through a gap in the hedge, and found the place he’d been steering toward all along.

The Academy parking lot.

It was dim, tucked behind the building where the morning sun never reached, and it was full. Rows of sleek black cars, rows of plain gray ones, a long yellow shuttle with its engine ticking as it cooled.

Arthur ducked behind a delivery truck and stopped to breathe.

He had visited this lot once before, the night before, with a water bottle and a very specific tire in mind. Nobody had noticed him. Nobody ever noticed a water bottle.

And, Dear Reader, that was when he found out something quite unexpected about his own eyes.

It started with a faint chime in the corner of his vision.

[VISUAL CAPTURE AVAILABLE.]

[RECORD? Y / N]

Arthur blinked. The words didn’t go away.

He thought what?

[BOOPHONE IS A PHONE.]

[PHONES HAVE CAMERAS.]

[YOU ARE LOOKING AT SOMETHING WORTH KEEPING.]

Slowly, the full meaning of it settled on him, and a grin spread across his face that he would later describe, accurately, as unholy.

His eyes were cameras.

Not metaphorically. He could take a picture just by looking and thinking yes. He could record a video simply by not blinking. Anything he saw, Boophone could store, sort, and send.

He thought Y.

[RECORDING.]

Across the lot, something enormous came crashing through the bushes.

Sac stumbled onto the asphalt, his eyes half-closed, his hands out. Tears carved clean lines through the grime on his face. He turned his head left, then right, listening.

"Specter," he rasped. "I can hear you breathing."

"Then you’ve got better ears than manners," Arthur called, from somewhere behind a bumper.

Sac charged.

He hit the first car at full speed, a gray sedan, and the roof folded like paper. He bounced off, spun, hit a second one. A fender flew across the lot. A windshield turned into a spider’s web of glass.

Every time he struck, he got stronger. Every time he got stronger, he struck harder.

Collateral, Arthur thought, watching, means damage done to things nobody meant to hit.

He kept recording.

At the end of the third row stood a car he knew.

He had seen it exactly once before. On the day Headmaster Voss had driven him to the Academy for the first time, in a cream-colored coupe with chrome trim and white-wall tires, a car so old that Arthur’s father would have wept at the sight of it. They didn’t make them like that anymore. They didn’t make them at all.

It had been polished to a mirror. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the dashboard. And when Arthur had leaned a sticky hand on the door, Voss had wiped the handle with a handkerchief, very gently, without saying a word.

He loved that car.

Arthur watched Blod Sac stagger toward it with his fists raised.

He didn’t have to ask himself whether to warn him.

The first blow caved in the door. The second took off the mirror. The third folded the hood back like a sheet of tin, and the fourth, a wild overhead strike with both hands clasped, drove straight through the windshield, scattering chrome and glass in a glittering fan.

Sac roared with triumph. He didn’t know what he was destroying.

Arthur did.

He ended the recording and thought, very clearly, Send.

[SEND TO: HEADMASTER VOSS.]

[SEND TO: ALL ACADEMY FACULTY.]

[SEND TO: ALL CADETS.]

[POST TO: THE SUPERNATURAL FEED.]

He hesitated for exactly one second.

Nobody in this school would do anything about the way Sac treated first-years. It wasn’t their problem. It was training, and they had their own classes, their own quests, their own bruises to worry about.

Then I’ll make it their problem.

He thought Send. All of it.

Somewhere across the Academy, every phone in every pocket buzzed at once.

A secret kept can rot a school;

a video sent can break the rule.

[YOU CAUSED MULTIPLE PEOPLE DISTRESS WITH YOUR ACTIONS.]

[EMOTION ABSORBED: DISTRESS — MULTIPLE SOURCES.]

[GHOST LEVEL 9.]

[GHOST LEVEL 10.]

STR 15 · AGI 15 · DEX 15 · INT 21 · VIG 17 · WIL 29

HP: 304/304 · MP: 260/260

Warmth poured through his chest like hot tea. His legs felt lighter. His head felt clearer. Two whole levels, handed over by everyone who had just watched Voss’s beloved car turn into a crumpled tin can.

He needed every point of it.

Because the crunching had stopped.

Sac stood in the middle of the lot, panting, one fist still buried in the wreckage. His head turned. Slowly. His eyes were slits, red and swollen, but his nose, scorched as it was, had picked up something.

Arthur’s footsteps.

Move.

He ran.

Sac ran after him, faster than a man that size had any right to be, shoulders heaving, power climbing with every blow he’d landed. The asphalt trembled. Arthur could hear him gaining, close enough now that he could feel the heat radiating off the man’s skin.

Not close enough to hit me, he thought. Not yet.

He yanked a water gun out of his pocket, a bright green plastic one he’d bought for four dollars and filled with a very special mixture the night before, and spun around mid-stride.

Sac’s mouth was open, bellowing.

Arthur pulled the trigger.

A thin jet of orange liquid hit the back of the man’s throat.

The bellow cut off.

Sac froze. His eyes went wide. His face went purple, then red, then a shade Arthur hadn’t known skin could manage. Smoke, or something like smoke, seemed to curl from his ears. He dropped to his knees and clawed at his throat, wheezing.

Spice. Pure, unfiltered, merciless spice.

Then Sac’s blurry gaze fell on something sitting beside the tire of a nearby car. A water bottle, half full, beaded with condensation.

He lunged.

He tore off the cap and drained it in three huge gulps.

Silence.

Then Blod Sac’s entire body began to shake, and Arthur, crouched behind a bumper with his hand over his mouth, whispered, with sincere and terrible joy:

"That one was special."

Sac looked up, tears streaming, to find the boy.

The lot was empty.

No Arthur. No footsteps. No sound but the ticking of a hundred cooling engines and the sizzle of his own ruined throat.

He did not see the hand that closed on the back of Arthur’s collar.

He did not see the man who had stepped out of the shadow of the delivery truck without making a sound, in a dark coat, with a phone in his other hand and a video still playing on the screen, the tiny glass tinkle of a windshield shattering over and over.

Arthur felt the fingers tighten. He looked up.

Headmaster Voss was not smiling.

He did not shout. He did not raise his voice. When he spoke, his tone was so calm that it chilled the air around them.

"Blod," he said. "You will come with me now."

And over the ruin of a cream-colored coupe, somewhere in the dim, Arthur Specter heard the sound of every single door in the Academy opening at once.

The brave break first, the clever flee;

the wise ones wait to see who’s free.

TO BE CONTINUED...