Meta Box Set | Books 1-3, page 48
part #1 of Meta Box Set | Books 1-3 Series
"Thank you so much," the woman says. "You must be Tyler's roommate. How exciting!" She puts her hand out for me to shake it.
"Yeah, that's me it looks like. I'm Connor Connelly. It's very nice to meet you, Mrs. ..."
"Gordon, and it's Miss, but that makes me feel old, so please, just call me Stephanie."
"Okay, Stephanie," I say, feeling awkward calling a grown-up by their first name, which is weird because I hadn’t felt awkward about calling a grown-up “Midnight” for the past few months.
"Give it a rest, Mom," Tyler says from what is now officially his bed before he heaves himself up. "Are you going to get the rest of my stuff or what?"
Stephanie Gordon gives me a 'what are you gonna do, kids will be kids' sort of look and turns around only to walk right into Derrick, who is carrying a box that is blocking his view almost entirely. He stumbles and drops the box, spilling my underwear out onto the floor. This makes Tyler laugh maniacally. He’s definitely laughing way harder than how funny the situation actually is, which even I'll admit is kinda funny if for no other reason than Derrick is more embarrassed about it than I am.
"Oh my goodness. I am so sorry about that," Stephanie says to Derrick as she begins picking up my underwear and stuffing it back into the box. Okay, I take it back. Now I'm pretty sure I'm more embarrassed than Derrick.
"No, no, that's okay. It was my fault. I should’ve been more careful about where I was going," Derrick says.
It's obvious that he's not going to touch my underwear and pick it up off the floor, which is fine since I'm already trying to grab as much as I can before Ms. Gordon does. She realizes what she's picking up, why her son is laughing, and how red my face is, so she places the few clothing items in her hands into the box and allows me to pick up the rest. It's only now that she lifts her head up and looks Derrick in the eyes for the first time.
"Oh my," she says, blushing slightly and fluttering her eyelashes. "Now how on earth can a man this young and handsome have a teenage son?" Now Derrick is the one blushing.
"I'm Connor's brother, Derrick," he says, offering his hand for her to shake.
"Derrick, this is Ms. Gordon," I offer since it seems like she's too busy looking dreamily into his eyes to remember to do it herself.
"Colin, I told you to call me Stephanie," she says, still holding her gaze at Derrick.
"It's Connor, actually," I say.
"And it's Miss Gordon, not Ms. We wouldn't want anyone assuming the possibility that I'm actually still married," she says, still holding on to Derrick's hand. Now she's the one laughing maniacally, and I see where her son gets it. This might be the most uncomfortable I've ever seen Derrick.
"Give it a rest, Mom. None of the other parents are acting like this," Tyler says.
"Oh now, Tyler, I'm just being friendly. This is how adults talk to each other. He's always getting so embarrassed by me," Miss Gordon says to Derrick. "I'm sure your brother feels the same way about your parents, Derrick."
"Actually, no. Both our parents are dead," I blurt out, hoping that the shock of just coming right out with this will cause enough embarrassment on Miss Gordon's part that she'll stop flirting with Derrick. Although it's fun to watch, we actually do need to get moving. Though it would be fun to just walk out the door and finish unpacking myself, leaving Derrick here to fend for himself. My plan doesn't work.
"Oh my goodness. That is just the most awful thing I've ever heard," Miss Gordon says, covering her mouth with one hand and placing the other on Derrick's arm. When I said before that I've never seen Derrick so uncomfortable in my life, that's no longer true. This is now the most uncomfortable I've ever seen him in my life. "And you took care of your little brother here?"
"Yeah, I'm his guardian," Derrick manages to get out with volume barely above a whisper.
"That is just the most heartbreaking and brave thing I've ever heard. You're a hero, Derrick. I mean that. You don't see a lot of men who are so selfless like that nowadays," Miss Gordon says, her voice trailing off toward the end.
"I'm going to get food," Tyler announces as he jumps up from his bed and stands, waiting for his mother and Derrick to move from the doorway so he can pass.
"I'll come with you, sweetie," Miss Gordon says. "Not to eat, of course. The only thing I eat is salad," she says to Derrick, trying to impress him.
"Are you sure you don't want to just stay here and continue embarrassing yourself?" Tyler asks. Neither of us knows where to look.
"Oh, stop! Now you're just being ridiculous. Your mother is allowed to talk to a stranger once in a while too, you know. Not that you're a stranger, Derrick. Not now anyways," she says, looking into his eyes again.
Tyler pushes past the pair and heads down the hallway, intent on not waiting any longer.
"I'd better go catch him. It was really a pleasure meeting you, Derrick."
"You too," I say before Derrick has the chance.
"And you too, of course, Connor," she says, barely turning around to look at me.
"You too. I'm sure we'll see each other around," Derrick says to her.
"I certainly hope so."
7
The rest of the move goes smoothly, thanks mostly to the fact that I really didn't bring much stuff. A lot of my things are still in boxes from the last time Derrick and I moved, so my rule was if I hadn't taken it out of the box and used it by now, it probably wasn't all that important in the first place. I'm feeling pretty smart about that decision, which means I'm sure to find out that I forgot something super important at the worst possible time in the very near future.
Derrick gets a phone call from his office and has to leave in a hurry. He doesn't tell me what the call is about, and I don't ask. Nowadays it could be a breaking story or it could be that the water cooler needs to be refilled. There doesn't seem to be any problem too small to bother Derrick about lately.
This is fine by me since it's not like there's a whole lot of room to hang out in my dorm room. Even if there were, I don't think I could take the awkwardness of watching Derrick getting hit on by a woman twice his age again.
I was hoping to get a chance to walk around the campus and get a better look at everything, maybe even meet some people. I probably wouldn't have actually gone up and talked to anyone, you know, the thing that is required if you actually want to meet new people, but it's still nice to have dreams. My pretend mingling will have to wait until later, though. On his way out the door, Derrick told me he’d heard back from Michelle and that she wanted me to come meet with her now. Hopefully this means I won’t be getting my messages from her through Derrick anymore. Otherwise, this is going to start getting really tedious.
The place she asks me to meet her at is way, way on the other side of campus, which I'm actually thankful for. It's a nice fall day, and the walk gives me a chance to take a look around. Classes have already started for a lot of the people here. Since there's a steady flow of new students all the time, new classes are starting up every week. Maybe the only good thing that will come out of having state-mandated learning for the years prior to this is that everyone technically should be on the same page as far as lessons go, which should make it easy for students to come to this new school and pick up right where they left off ... at least in theory.
On paper, that all sounds great, but in reality I have to imagine people are still all over the map with what they've already learned and what still needs to be taught. Not everyone learns at the same speed, which is what the smaller classrooms are mostly used for, according to Derrick. Those rooms are perfect for after school tutoring and catch-up lessons. I was already warned to make sure I pay attention during class, because I won't have time for either of those.
The campus is full of people coming and going all over the place—the chaos of families dropping off their children. There seems to be thousands and thousands of students, a lot of them even younger than I am.
After walking what feels like the entire campus, I find the building where Michelle has asked me to meet her. The building looks out of place, but not for the reasons you'd expect. It looks out of place because it just looks ... ordinary. On a campus full of ugly, faux-futuristic buildings, this is the one old-brick building that wouldn’t actually look out of place on a traditional college campus. The building is large with three floors, but still smaller than many of the others I've seen. From the outside, the building looks to be made entirely out of brick with a handful of windows in every classroom. The windows look like they haven't been washed in a decade, which is probably true.
There isn't an obvious entrance to the building, or at least there isn't one that looks like the big entrances I've seen on all of the other buildings on campus. After wandering around the outside of the building for a few minutes, I decide to start trying the windowless doors that look like they're emergency exits. The third one I try opens without a problem.
Rays of sunlight pour in from the outside, illuminating the absolutely insane amount of dust coating the floors and lockers. Looks like the cleanup crew either hasn't gotten to this building yet or they forgot it exists.
I walk down the hallway, checking the door numbers to find room 143, where Michelle is apparently waiting for me. At the end of a very long hallway, I find the room. There's a window in the door, and through it I can see an empty classroom. The walls are bare, but the desks are all neatly aligned and facing the front of the classroom. There's something else different: the room is clean, or at least much, much cleaner than any of the other classrooms I've looked into in this building so far.
I momentarily wonder if I should just wait in the hallway for Michelle since I don't see her inside the classroom. Maybe she'll be right back. Or maybe she got tired of waiting for me and left. Ultimately I decide that hanging out in the hallway here might not be a great idea. Even though this end of campus seems deserted, it might look suspicious for me to be standing around in the hallway of an abandoned building. The windows on the opposite side of the hallway face the campus, and anyone walking by would be able to see me plain as day.
Carefully, I check the doorknob of the classroom to see if it’s unlocked. The knob turns with little effort, so I push the door open and immediately almost jump out of my skin. Michelle is standing right in front of me, waiting just inside the door.
"What the...?" I ask no one in particular.
Michelle is stifling a laugh at my reaction to her scaring the crap out of me. I pull the door closed and look through the window again: nothing, just an empty classroom. Swinging the door back open, there's Michelle, still standing there.
"Come inside; I'll explain," Michelle says with a smile as she takes my hand and leads me into the classroom. With her other hand, she closes the door. "Take a seat."
I choose the desk closest to the door in the front row since it's the nearest, and I actually feel a little bit dizzy after experiencing whatever the hell the trick was with that door.
"It's not a window. It's a very, very high-resolution 3D monitor panel. That's why you couldn't see me standing inside the room, because you weren't actually looking inside the room," Michelle explains.
"So it was a video feed?"
"Something like that. It's actually a little bit more complicated, but all you need to understand is that prying eyes won't find anything in this classroom if they come looking."
"Why go through all of that trouble just to conceal a classroom, though? There's nothing in here that looks like it's worth keeping a secret."
"Oh, Connor, you really think that this is just a regular classroom? You're disappointing me."
Michelle walks over to the desk at the front of the classroom and sits behind it. She fishes a set of keys out of her pocket and uses them to open one of the desk's drawers. I can't see what's inside the drawer from where I'm sitting, but I can see a faint blue glow emanating from it. A series of blue lights in the shape of a grid appears over Michelle's face, and I realize this must be some type of security system. Right on cue, I feel the ground beneath me moving.
It's subtle, making no noise at all. In fact, the way I notice it's even happening is that once again, I feel slightly sick to my stomach. While I'm not consciously noticing that the room is moving, my body can sense it. I look over toward the windows, and my suspicions are confirmed. Slowly, almost unnoticeably, I can see the outside view through the windows changing as the room descends and the bottom of the windowsill darkens.
"The initial descent is slow to avoid any disruption that might be noticeable from the outside. Once we clear the building's foundation, you'll notice that it'll start to pick up a bit."
The windows are completely dark, the outside world no longer viewable through them. I'm just going to assume that whatever electronic witchcraft powers the window in the doorway also does the same for the exterior windows.
All of a sudden, a huge pit grows in my stomach. I can feel that the room is dropping at a much, much faster rate. In fact, it almost feels like we're in a complete free fall. Out of instinct, I grab on tightly to the desk in front of me, like that would actually do anything if the room suddenly bottomed out.
"Sorry about the drop. It'll be over momentarily," Michelle says, looking so calm that you wouldn't think she even noticed it. And then, out of nowhere, the sensation just stops, like we've been caught. There's no jerk or anything. We just come to a smooth, but complete stop.
"Here we are. I told you it wouldn't be that bad," Michelle says.
"Actually you didn't tell me anything before you hit the basement button in your magic desk over there," I reply.
"Sorry about that. I thought it would be a waste of time to explain it to you when you were about to see it for yourself anyway."
"Still, a heads-up would have been nice. It might have helped me keep my breakfast down."
"You'll get used to it over time. Right now let's take a look around, shall we?" Michelle walks across the room and takes the doorknob in her hand. She waits for me to stand before pulling the door open and revealing what has replaced the dusty old hallways.
8
Outside the classroom door, there's now a hallway that’s so long I feel like I can barely even see the end of it. Everything is gleaming and metallic, and LED lighting fixtures are spaced out evenly along the bare walls.
"We've still got a little ways to walk. Security is of the utmost importance here, so the main facility was built underneath a nearby lake. It's technically off campus, but still owned by the academy. The water helps shield any kind of radioactive activity that might happen down here and keep it undetectable to the rest of the world above," Michelle says.
I'm following her quick pace as we both walk toward the end of the long hallway.
"Radioactive activity?" I ask a little nervously.
"It's nothing to worry about. We don't expect to see any, but just in case. Like I said, you can never be too careful. Now is probably a good time to explain to you how the elevator that you were just in works. Moving large numbers of students down here without raising suspicion is important."
"Obviously."
"Every weekday afternoon, you'll be reporting to the classroom we met at today. The cover you'll be using, if ever asked, is that the classroom is used for after-school meetings for a student group called the Circle that helps the less fortunate in the community by providing assistance with daily tasks such as reading, accounting help, etc."
"Okay, so then what happens when a non-meta shows up at the classroom someday, looking for something to put on their college applications?"
"We have safeguards in place for that type of incident."
"Like what?"
"The student is informed that we don't have additional room at this time, but we would still happily give them the recommendation for their application since it’s our fault that more space isn't available. Based on what we know, ninety-nine times out of a hundred this will suffice, and we'll never hear from that student again."
"And what about the one in a hundred kid who shows up because they actually want to help and don't care about the credit for college?"
Michelle turns to me and smiles. "In those cases, we recruit."
"Really? You give them metabands?"
"No, unfortunately we don't have extras lying around, but there are plenty of non-meta operational roles that need to be filled. These require a lot of trust on our part since we must maintain complete secrecy around the project. We find that the type of student who’s interested in helping out just for the sake of helping has the moral character we desire for our operational roles in most cases. In other words, they're the types of students who can keep a secret."
"And how do you make sure the metahumans that are here can keep a secret?" I ask.
"We don't."
"What do you mean you don't? I'm sure you have something in your back pocket to keep everyone in line. Some kind of failsafe or something if anyone ever spills the beans," I say.
Michelle stops walking and turns to face me fully.
"No, we don't. Everyone who’s been invited to this school has been vetted, thoroughly. It's how we knew who you were before you knew who we were. We don't take any chances when we're choosing who to bring here, and we don't recruit anyone who would need to be threatened in order to keep our secret safe. That's the kind of thinking that got the world into the mess it's in. Not every secret can be safeguarded with the threat of violence. Sometimes you actually have to put in the legwork to find out what kind of person someone is, and if you're going to expect them to trust you, you sure as hell better trust them back."
I nod in agreement, and Michelle turns to continue walking while I'm still trying to process exactly what she said to me. It seems crazy that there’re no safeguards against this place's secret being blown wide open, other than the word of the people here. It's a huge leap of faith on their part and a giant step forward if metahumans are going to find any kind of useful place in the world.
