“I know,” Alex said, stepping on to the track and smiling with forced cheerfulness. “Out of character, right? But I couldn’t seem to stay asleep last night, so, I thought maybe if I went for a run…”
Mitsuru nodded, and started fooling around with the other shoe. She was wearing the same grey t-shirt and red running shorts that the Academy handed out to all of its students, but it looked somehow risque on her. Alex couldn’t help but notice that it was the first time that he had seen her legs bare, but Mitsuru’s vivid red eyes were too nerve-wracking to risk appreciating, so he actually went out of his way not to look in her direction. This probably meant he was over-thinking it, since she didn’t seem concerned with him at all. He hurried through his warm-ups, eager to get moving, to get away from his former instructor and repeated savior. He’d just about finished when he realized she was just sitting by the side of the track, watching him.
“Do you miss her?” she asked abruptly, her expression offering Alex no clues as to her motivation. He didn’t bother to ask who she meant. No one had talked about much of anything else since the attack, even though no one wanted to talk about it.
“Yeah,” Alex admitted, surprising himself a little. “I guess I do. I didn’t really think that much about it while she was here, but I think I sort of started to rely on our little chats to put things in perspective, you know? She was, like, the most levelheaded person here, and I, I don’t know… I guess I felt like I could trust her.”
“I thought you might,” Mitsuru said enigmatically. “You were her special project, after all. I remember what that felt like.”
Alex was immediately curious, but he let it pass. Not that Mitsuru had ever been reluctant to answer his questions, but her demeanor didn’t normally encourage it, and he wasn’t about to bank that her current mood gave him a free pass.
“She worried, you know,” Mitsuru said, standing up next to him. “About you finding out that she was an Auditor.”
“I see,” Alex said uncomfortably. “I was surprised about that, but I never had a chance to talk to her about it… I mean, I haven’t had one yet.”
“Right,” Mitsuru said, flipping her hair back and adjusting her ponytail. “You were going to do some running, right? I’ll join you. Unless it would be weird, having your former teacher run with you…”
“Not at all,” Alex said, a false, reassuring smile plastered across his face. Internally, a voice cried out that it would, in fact, be very weird, but what could he do?
He shook out his arms, bounced a few times on the balls of his feet, and then fell into the slow-but-steady jog that he preferred anytime Michael wasn’t there to force him to go faster. He was a bit worried that Mitsuru would want to push him the same way, but either she wasn’t as much of a conditioning fanatic or she was distracted by whatever was going on in her elegant and inscrutable head, because she just fell in beside him and let him set the pace, more-or-less. They finished the first few laps in silence. It was the first time in a while that Alex had run without his headphones, and it was weird, how loud his breathing seemed, how loud the sound of his feet on the synthetic track was in the still of the morning.
“Do you like having Miss Gallow as a teacher?” Mitsuru asked, not sounding the least bit out of breath.
“She’s good,” Alex said carefully. Michael liked to talk with him while he ran, too, even claimed that it was an important skill to have, though Alex suspected that he was just chatty. Nonetheless, he could manage a conversation while running, at least for the first few miles, as long as the listener was patient enough to put up with the gaps his breathing created. “But I hate the Program.”
“As much as you hated it when I was in charge?”
He snuck a look over at Mitsuru, looking for signs that this was some sort of trap or setup. He didn’t see anything other than polite disinterest, so he took the risk.
“More,” he admitted. “It’s bad enough having to do those things, but Miss Gallow thinks it’s funny, and that makes it worse…”
To his surprise, Mitsuru gave him a thin but genuine smile.
“That sounds about right,” she said, moving ahead a little, and forcing him to pick up his flagging pace. “That’s the way it was for me, too. And I also hated it.”
“So,” Alex panted, “Miss Gallow was your teacher as well?”
“No,” Mitsuru said, shaking her head, “it was Alistair.”
Alex mulled it over the next quarter-mile.
“Miss Aoki,” he managed, between breaths, “I’ve always — meant to ask — what’s up — with the eyes? Same as — the Director?”
He had braced himself for a bad reaction, but she just laughed, a first, in Alex’s experience.
“I have an implant,” she said, tapping the side of her head, just above her temple. “Two grams of nanomachinery introduced into my brain that spontaneously evolved surgical components and attached itself to my nervous system. The Director has an identical implant.”
“Huh?”
“I have a computer in my brain,” Mitsuru said, rolling her eyes. “The Director does as well. It’s an uplink to the Etheric Network, and from it, we can download data and temporary protocols, and upload information as well.”
“Protocols?” Alex asked, both amazed and out of breath.
“Yes. That was the reasoning behind my implant. You must be aware of the… drawbacks to using Black Protocols. In my case, those consequences were judged too severe to merit using the protocol, so an alternative was devised. Along with seven others, I volunteered for the process. Only the Director and I survived it, and the procedure was banned. We are the only two of our kind, which is unfortunate, because it is very useful device. Such a pity.”
“Director,” Alex wheezed. “His protocol is black?”
“No. And the Board fought him tooth and nail when he announced his intention to undergo the upgrade. Nevertheless, he designed the procedure, and he wouldn’t let the testing go forward unless he was the first subject. Black Protocols have always worried him excessively. He thought that maybe this would eliminate the need to use them. There was some precedent, actually. There are other ways to perform implants, or any secondary introduction of nanites, which have better survival rates. But the experiment that created us was deemed a failure.”
Alex managed a gasp as a response, but that was all he could do. Miss Aoki seemed to take pity on him, because she didn’t ask anything else while they ran. Alex tried to get into a groove, that place he’d become aware of lately where he stopped noticing anything other than the action of running itself, the obsessive mechanics of movement, but that was proving impossible when running with Miss Aoki. She’d started to stay a little bit ahead of him no matter how fast he went, probably with the intention of pushing him. In a way she was, because the last thing Alex wanted was to be caught staring.
Maybe that was why, somewhere around mile three, his leg cramped up. He limped off the track and tumbled down on to the grass next to it, his right calf in painful knots. Miss Aoki trotted back a moment later, with what might charitably be termed as concern on her face.
“Did you get a cramp?”
“Ow. Yes,” Alex said, kneading it with his knuckles. “Sorry about that. Not sure what happened.”
“Here,” Mitsuru commanded, “give me your leg.”
She snatched his leg and pulled it taut; ignoring his pained expression, and then leaned on it gradually. Alex tensed for tremendous pain, but there was none, just a gentle, facilitated stretching. After a minute or so, she slowly changed directions, so that she was pulling, rather than leaning on it, but that didn’t feel bad either. The pain subsided a few minutes later, and with some coaxing from Miss Aoki, the muscle finally ceased its spasms. Alex stood up carefully, testing his leg to see if it would take his weight. He had a bit of a limp, but he was otherwise fine.
“Thanks, Miss Aoki,” he said hurriedly. She seemed to be ignoring him, staring off into space with a peculiar intensity. “I think that’s it for me this morning. I’m going to head for the showers, okay?”