Chương 12: Welcome to the Freeks

Whenever a unique skill is invented, the interface will notify everyone about it. For the sake of privacy, we won't reveal names, but the planet and race will be revealed, so that everyone knows. It is done mostly to keep alive hope at this point that unique skills can be made. Any user can voluntarily reveal their skills to anyone through their interface of course, but for Epic skills and above, users can also send a notification to the Area ruling councils, who then decide on a course of action.

- From the memoirs of Karim Hannibal, Member of the 9th Ruling Council, Area 5 The newcomer was good. Better than good, if he was being honest with himself, which admittedly did not happen too often. To have evaded the Task Force for as long as he had, weeks from what he had gathered, required either exceptional skill or exceptional luck, and the boy had walked into this temple without tripping a single one of the seventeen alert systems they had running, which ruled out luck as the primary variable.

He had seen through the illusion at the entrance too, which almost nobody managed, even people who were specifically looking for it. The boy had not been looking for it. He had simply walked through as if the concealment were not there. That was the part he found most interesting. He could see how, having seen him now.

His own trait specialised in seeing through surfaces, literal and otherwise, which was how he had identified the boy before anyone else in the temple had registered the intrusion, and how he had given the order to stop before the less restrained of his companions had put several holes through their unexpected guest. They had not been pleased about the order. They were not, as a general rule, pleased about orders. But he was the only F-grade in the building, and the strong ruled here, and so they had stopped.

He also only had one eye, which people tended to assume was a disadvantage and which was, in practice, largely irrelevant. You didn't need two eyes to see what mattered. The boy stood in front of him now, in the main hall of the temple, which still had the faint residual quality of a place where something serious had happened for a long time. What that was, specifically, no one currently alive knew. The carvings suggested ritual. The stains on the stone floor suggested that the rituals had not been bloodless.

It made for an atmosphere that most people found deeply uncomfortable, which was one of several reasons it suited them perfectly. The boy was not flinching. That was notable. Most people, entering this place for the first time, had a physical response to it that they could not entirely control. The boy was looking around and cataloguing, taking in what he needed to know, setting aside what he didn't. He let him finish.

"Not very often that someone willingly comes in here," he said.

"Though considering your circumstances, I can see why. I'm interested in how you found us, but that can come later." He paused.

"I hope you know what it means to step in here." The boy nodded. No words. He had been told about the speech disorder, which explained it, but the nod itself was considered and deliberate, the nod of someone who had heard and accepted.

"Well. Welcome to the Freeks. There's no real criteria for joining, as you've demonstrated by being here already." He watched the boy's face.

"I'll warn you though, if you stop getting stronger, you'll die here. That's not a threat, it's a fact. Your little trick of appearing out of nowhere bought you some credit. We respect power. Most people outside call us freaks. They're not wrong about the label, just wrong about what it means. The only thing we seek is the freedom to get stronger. Whatever the cost." He let that sit for a moment.

"I imagine a fellow rapist and murderer would understand the appeal of a place with no interest in your history." There it was. A flinch, small and controlled, but present. The boy had not been expecting that word, or had been expecting it and had not finished making his peace with it. Either way, the reaction told him what he needed to know. He had suspected it from the intelligence he had gathered, but suspicion and confirmation were different things, and confirmation was more useful. So the boy was innocent.

No matter. Innocence was not a disqualifier here, just an irrelevance.

"Just so you know," he continued, in the same even tone he used for everything, because tone was information and he preferred to control what information he gave out, "everyone here has killed. Some have killed people they shared blood with. You're not unusual in that regard, or you won't be, eventually. Don't expect order. Don't expect loyalty. Sleep lightly, if you sleep at all.

The only thing that unites us is that we'd all rather fight the Task Force than each other, which gives you the protection you came here for. You should also know what this means of what others outside of this place will think of you from now on." He watched the boy process this. The sneer he had seen briefly when he mentioned what others would think, that was interesting. Not defiance exactly. More the look of someone who had long ago tallied up what other people thought of him and found the result unimpressive.

He was going to be useful. He still kept calling him boy in his head, which was a habit. What was the name again. Right. Ghilim Habuza. He would do. Narak Tamba was, for the first time in what felt like several weeks, having a good afternoon. The coffee was his favourite, a blend that required sourcing from two different Areas and which he considered a reasonable use of his position's limited perks. The armchair had been correctly broken in over years of use and it showed.

The show on his interface was a childhood classic involving a cat and a mouse in an ongoing conflict that had never resolved and never would, which he found restful in the way that things without resolution were sometimes. No outcome to manage. No consequences to anticipate. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. He liked it, if he was honest, because it reminded him of certain political dynamics he had been observing for thirty years.

The mouse always escaped. The cat never learned. People watched and found it charming. The notification arrived with a buzz the interface reserved for things that required urgent attention. He opened it. Read it. Read it again, because the first reading had not fully landed. His brain had processed most of it and then encountered one word and stopped. Unique. He sat with that for a moment.

He remembered the notification from a few years back, a unique skill by an Earth native, the first in over a century, every University deploying resources to find the user and coming back empty. He had followed that search with the interest of someone who understood what a unique skill meant for the institution that secured the user's enrollment, and had arrived at the same disappointing conclusion as everyone else. And now the user had walked into his city.

He was out of the armchair before the thought had finished forming. The coffee could wait. He had to get there before the musclehead got there and did something stupid. He moved through the University with the speed of a man who had learned, over decades of administration, the difference between urgency and visible urgency, and was currently deploying both. His interface was open, tracking the notification's source location, calculating who else would have received it and how quickly they would move.

Every University would send emissaries. They would arrive within hours, some faster. Whatever happened in the next ten minutes would determine whether University 11 emerged from the last few months of embarrassment with something worth showing, or whether they handed their one redemptive opportunity to a competitor. He arrived at the location and found that Adam Mink had gotten there first. Mink was a large man who was aware of his size and had organised his understanding of the world around that fact.

He was a council member, G grade Tier 9, with the political instincts of someone who relied on not needing them. He had two personal bodyguards flanking him and was in the process of explaining to the boy, who was standing very still with the expression of someone running rapid calculations, that he would need to come with them. Narak took in the scene with the speed of someone who had spent thirty years reading rooms.

"Mink," he called out. Mink turned.

"Tamba. Glad I got here before he could disappear. You know who this is?"

"I do." Narak kept his voice level. Level was the correct register for what he was about to say, because level communicated that this was not an emotional response but a considered one, which was considerably more dangerous.

"What do you think you are doing?"

"Taking him in for questioning. Given his brother's history with this institution, I think we have every-""You're arresting him."

"We're not arresting him, we're-""Mink." He said it the way you said the name of a thing which had limited ability to think.

"Did you read the notification? All of it?" He waited, watching Mink's expression perform the journey of a man who had read the name, reacted to the name, and not proceeded further.

"Emissaries from every University will be here within hours. Some sooner. When they arrive and find that University 11's first response to a unique skill user was to drag him in against his will, after everything that has already happened here, what exactly is your plan for that?" The guards had been listening. Guards always listened. They had taken a collective step back, which was an institution's instinct for self-preservation operating faster than individual decision-making. Mink's jaw tightened.

"Of course I'd thought of all that. Do you take me for a fool?"

"How'd you guess?" It came out dryer than he had intended, which was not entirely an accident. Mink's face cycled through several colours. His hands, at his sides, made and unmade fists with the energy of a man who had decided this was not the moment but was keeping very careful accounts for future moments that would never come. This wasn't his first time and wouldn't be the last. He turned his back on him, which was the most efficient way of communicating that the conversation was over, and approached the boy.

Up close, he was younger than the notification had made him feel. Seventeen, maybe, with the look of someone who had been through something significant recently and had not entirely finished processing it. His eyes were slightly wider-set than average, and they were doing what eyes did when the person behind them was reading a situation rather than reacting to it. That was interesting. Most people his age, confronted with a council member and an attempted arrest, were either frightened or performing not-frightened.

This one was thinking.

"Sorry you had to see that." He kept his tone warm and even, because he was genuinely, if cautiously, pleased to meet this particular young man, and warmth did not require performance when it was real.

"Why don't we find somewhere to talk that doesn't involve a wall of muscleheads?" The boy was quiet for a moment. The thinking-rather-than-reacting held a beat longer, which Narak respected. Then he nodded. Narak kept the relief off his face through long practice.

He led the boy through the University, pointing out structures as they walked, the research towers, the sport facilities, the living quarters that overlooked the coral gardens, not because a tour was what this moment required but because movement and context gave people time to settle, and a settled person was easier to talk to. He had learned this early and used it often. His mind was running the problem in parallel. The boy had known, or must have known, what kind of reception he might receive here.

He had come anyway, and he had revealed himself here rather than anywhere else, which was not a naive decision. Nothing about the last five minutes suggested naivete. It was a calculated gamble, and calculated gambles of that size implied a correspondingly large expected return. Narak had an idea of what the expected return was. It was the same thing he would have wanted, in the boy's position.

He had, in fact, been quietly preparing for a conversation like this for the last several weeks, on the off chance that the situation resolved itself in a direction that made it possible. The bait was ready. The question was how to present it without making it look like bait, which was the fundamental challenge of all negotiations conducted between people who were both aware they were negotiating.

He glanced at the boy walking beside him, who was looking at the corals with the expression of someone who found them genuinely interesting and was also still thinking about something else entirely. He was going to need to be careful with this one.