Summus Proelium

“Well, if the project didn’t specify only one person to focus on, I’d say the Medici family would be good.” After saying that, Amber shoved half of a chocolate-covered éclair into her mouth while making noises of delight. That was quickly followed by the other half of the treat, and more happy sounds, as the other girl half-collapsed against Jae while smiling with delight. “Mmmm…”

The three of us were sitting in the school cafeteria the next morning. We’d staked out a small table far away from everyone else so we wouldn’t be disturbed, and were going over project possibilities.

“Medici?” I asked absently while flipping through one of the history books we’d taken from the library. Not that we really needed books when there was the whole internet, but still. Having hard copy sources tended to make teachers happy.

“Super rich family in Florence,” Amber explained. “They were basically this like… banking dynasty for a long ass time from back in the fifteenth century. They… hold on.” She glanced at her phone. “Yeah, four different popes came from them. So did two French queens. They funded the invention of the piano and the opera, and Leonardo, Michelangelo, and maybe some other ninja turtles. Oh, and Galileo. Seriously, dude, they were like… the money behind everything for a long time.”

Boy, did that ever ring a few bells. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought she chose that one on purpose. It took me a second to clear my throat. “Oh, uh, well yeah. If we could do it on a group or something, that’d work. But Mr. Dorn definitely said ‘single person’. Maybe we could ask him if that’s okay… or keep looking.”

“Let’s keep looking,” Amber agreed, looking over to Jae. “What do you think, any ideas?”

As she spoke, I took another quick look at my former cheerleading teammate. I still felt bad about how she’d quit the team back when her dad was killed in that hit and run. Apparently the coach had said she could come back this year and just pick up where she’d left off, but Amber refused, saying she was too busy. Personally, I was pretty sure cheerleading had been a big thing with her and her dad, and she didn’t want to do it without him around. Too many memories. Which was too bad, really, since she’d been one of the team’s best tumblers. Seriously, that girl could do some pretty crazy stuff.

Jae, by then, had answered the question about whether she had any ideas by passing over a piece of paper that she’d written a list of names on. Amber and I leaned closer to look at it while I read the names. “Laura Bassi – female physicist in the eighteenth century, Nicolas Steno – father of geology, Cleisthenes – father of democracy, Lucius Vellutus – successfully led a secession in Rome of the plebeians to advocate better treatment and actual representation…” Blinking up at the incredibly pale girl, I remarked, “Hey, these are all pretty good. I don’t think I’ve heard of any of them. Or if I have, I don’t really remember them very well.”

Amber nodded. “Yeah, and they sound important enough to fit Mr. Dorn’s request. Which one should we focus on?”

Biting my lip, I mused, “Laura Bassi sounds interesting, but so do the rest of them. This Steno guy is the father of geology? Cleisthenes is the father of democracy? This Vellutus guy basically took the working class on strike and actually changed things for the better? How do we pick out of options like those?”

Jae shifted in her seat a little before reaching out to point to a name that I hadn’t gotten to yet. Her voice was quiet as she read it aloud. “Laura Cereta.”

Exchanging a brief look with Amber, I asked, “Who?”

“Writer,” Jae answered softly. She fidgeted for a moment, clearly uncomfortable with the attention before pressing on. Despite her shyness, I could tell this was a subject she really cared about. There was obvious excitement and passion in her voice, quiet as it was. “She was a humanist and feminist writer… in the fourteen hundreds. She was one of the first people to actually write about female friendships. She wrote about how women should be educated, and how marriage should be a partnership. And she was smart. Like, one of the leading scholars in Italy smart.”

After saying all that, the girl hesitated. She was obviously embarrassed and wanted to return to her silence. But her love of this Cereta woman pushed her to add, a little more quickly, “In one of her letters, she wrote, ‘I am a scholar and a pupil who has been lulled to sleep by the meager fire of a mind too humble. I have been too much burned, and my injured mind has accumulated too much passion; for tormenting itself with the defending of our sex, my mind sighs, conscious of its obligation. For all things — those deeply rooted inside us as well as those outside us — are being laid at the door of our sex.’

As she finished that, I swallowed. “Wow… umm… yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess she didn’t really go discovering new continents or conquering other peoples. But she sounds pretty important. And I doubt she’s at the top of anyone else’s list.” Looking to Amber, I added, “What do you think?”

Her nose scrunched up a little thoughtfully. “I think she sounds cool. Come on, let’s see if we can catch Mr. Dorn before first period.” Picking up the books we’d spread out, she stepped away from the table, while Jae joined her. I started to follow too, but stopped to grab something from the table that Amber hadn’t picked up. “Oh, hey, you left your… pen?” I was blinking at it in my hand, not because a pen was so surprising, but because of the words written on it. Stamped across the simple white pen was, ‘Prime International Enterprise’. PIE. The bank that had been… well, almost robbed the other day.

Okay, it wasn’t really that weird that Amber had a pen from the bank. This was a private school. Private school often meant money, and money meant bank. PIE had a lot of clients, most of them not evil or anything. Still, seeing it like that made me do a little double-take.

“Oh, thanks.” Amber took the pen, blinking at me. “Uh, you okay?”

The bank thing wasn’t really a secret, so I just shrugged. “Yeah, I just–didn’t someone just try to rob that place the other day?”

“Huh?” The other girl glanced at the pen, taking in what it said before clearing her throat. “Oh, right. Yeah, sorry, my dad used to collect pens and there’s this whole big… jar of…” She paused, swallowing. “I just grabbed one. That was pretty screwed up though, huh? I mean, what kind of idiot tries to steal from the Super-Mafia?”

I thought of Josh’s brother, muttering, “A pretty big one, apparently. Come on, let’s go tell Mr. Dorn who we’re doing our project on.”

I really wanted to get this project done. Because I was pretty sure being a Star-Touched to make up for the horrible things the rest of my family was doing would take up most of my remaining free time.

******

As it turned out, all three of us had study hall right before lunch. Well, they called it study hall. There wasn’t really an assigned place to go, which made it pretty much a free period. So, since Mr. Dorn had agreed to let us do our project on Laura Cereta, we’d decided to meet at the library at the start of that study hall to get started. I was there now, scanning through some old news stories about Silversmith on my phone while desperately trying not to throw up in my mouth at the thought that he was both a villain and my father. He had been my hero, and now I tasted bile just from looking at a picture of him standing triumphantly in front of a group of Scions of Typhon grunts and acolytes (their term for regular foot soldiers or Touched) he’d helped bring down.

Yes, it had been a pretty big deal to stop Trolley and Hammock (The Scions had some kind of weird thing about Touched names. They always chose completely random, ordinary words that were often unrelated to their powers and had nothing to do with anything else. Their leader was named Pencil). They were nasty, horrible people who had been in the middle of a murder spree. Stopping those two and bringing them in was good. They weren’t just thrown in regular jail after being caught. They were sent to Breakwater, some kind of inescapable prison for the worst of the worst. According to the rumors I’d heard, it was an isolated island somewhere that the most dangerous Touched were left on to fight things out amongst themselves where they couldn’t hurt any innocent people.

It sounded a little fucked up, to be honest. And I was pretty sure there were like a dozen different movies about why that kind of thing was a bad idea. But it was what it was. And as far as I knew, no one had ever escaped from it once they were seen as bad enough to be sent there. Which, Trolley and Hammock definitely fit the bill on that. They’d been responsible for about sixty-seven murders just in that two week period where they’d been on their main rampage.

So… so my dad had put an end to that.

But he had also sanctioned other murders. Enough that it wasn’t a big deal to him at all. So… so…

My head hurt. And so did my stomach.

“Hey, Cassidy!”

Oh, thank God. Amber and Jae were here to distract me from what had quickly been turning into entirely too much obsessive brooding. Closing the news story on my phone, I quickly turned in the seat, only to find that it was actually only Amber. “Hey, I–”

“Miss O’Connell.” That was one of the librarians, Mrs. Mossing. She looked like she had been hand-picked from a casting department to play a stern librarian. She was old, with gray hair pulled into a severe bun, and she always wore frumpy clothes. “How many times do I have to tell you, keep your voice down in here?”

We both apologized to the woman, before I quietly asked, “Err, isn’t Jae with you?”

Raising an eyebrow, the other girl snorted. “Gee, thanks. Now I know which of us is more popular. But actually, I just stopped by to see if she was here already. And to uhh, tell you that we’ll have to take a rain check.” She looked apologetic. “Really sorry. Something came up.”

“Something came up?” I echoed, blinking at her. “At school?”

Wincing, the other girl nodded slowly. “Like I said, sorry. It’s umm, it’s kind of a personal thing. I mean…” She looked at her phone then, giving a visible grimace. “Shit. Um. When Jae shows up, could you please tell her that Uncle Don is sick? You, uh, you got that?”

“Uncle Don is sick,” I repeated back to her. “Sure, no problem. I can do that. And sorry to hear about your uncle.”

“Great, thanks!” Giving me a thumbs up, Amber turned to head back out of the library. She stopped to say something else to Mrs. Mossing before leaving.

Watching her go, I shrugged. Well, if nothing else, maybe I could use this time to practice with my power. God knew I needed all I could get. I just had to wait for Jae so I could tell her about Amber’s uncle.

Or I could get bored after like two minutes of that and wander out into the hallway to look around for her. Yeah, I went with that one. Turning in a circle in the hallway, I looked around and ended up asking a few people who hadn’t seen her before finally looking to one of the school’s baseball players. “Hey, Pat, you seen Jae Baek anywhere?”

“Oh, hey, Cass,” Patrick Aaron, a skinny black guy who was a star shortstop, shrugged. “Not really. Hang on. Hey, Francesca, you seen Jae around?”

The girl he was addressing, a slightly hefty brunette whom I’d never shared a class with, looked over from her locker. “What? Oh, yeah, she’s in the ladies room over there.”

Thanking the two of them, I headed that way. The hall was pretty empty by that point, since everyone who didn’t have study hall/free period was either in class or late. I stepped through the door, already starting to talk. “Hey, Jae, you–”

I stopped then, because the albino girl was there. She was standing by one of the sinks, and as I came in the room, she jumped, quickly starting to shove things from the sink into her bag. But not quick enough that I didn’t notice what they were. Self-tanner, dark hair dye, and some crumpled paper.

“Wh-what?” Flushing with obvious embarrassment, Jae stared at me, only seeming to belatedly realize who I was. “Cassidy?”

Oh. Oh God. There were tears. She was quick to recover and had already blinked them away, but the girl had definitely been crying. She wasn’t just embarrassed because I’d seen those things on the sink, she was upset.

“Yeah, I, um… are you…” Remembering why I was there, I quickly pressed on. “It’s Amber, she wanted me to tell you that she can’t make it. Apparently her Uncle Don is sick?”

“Uncle Don?” Snapping out of her embarrassment, Jae looked to me. “She said that? I–thank… thank you.” She shifted the bag back up onto her shoulder then, seeming to shrink in on herself as she mumbled, “I better go see if she… if she needs anything.”

Stepping out of the way, I let her start to walk past before speaking up. “Um, Jae? I know this is like… really none of my business. And I’m probably overstepping like…a thousand different bounds. But I still wanna say, whether you use those things or not, I think you’re really cool.”

For a moment, I didn’t think she would actually respond. The other girl was quiet, biting her lip as she seemed to debate back and forth with herself for a couple seconds. Then she looked to me, and asked something I hadn’t been expecting. “Why did you stop being a cheerleader?”

“Um. I… guess because the whole reason I joined was so that people would stop seeing me as a prepubescent little boy,” I answered honestly. “But it didn’t really work.”

It looked like she really wanted to say something to that. But she didn’t. Instead, the other girl hesitated briefly before nodding to me. Then she headed for the door, leaving me standing there in the restroom by myself.

I was about to leave, before noticing something on the floor next to the sink. Stepping over, I knelt to pick it up. It was a crumpled note. The same crumpled note that Jae had been putting into her bag with the tanner and hair dye. She’d missed the bag with the paper.

It was an incredible invasion of privacy, but I wanted to know if it was something I should chase her down for. Telling myself that if it looked personal, I’d stop reading, I uncrumpled the paper and gave it a quick glance. I’d just read a couple words, not the whole thing. Just enough to see if it was important.

As it turned out, a few words were all I needed to read. And far more than I actually wanted to. There were only four words on the paper, written in big bold letters with a red marker.

It read, ‘Kill yourself, albino freak.’

Okay, now I actually wanted to hurt someone. I wanted to find whoever had written this note and beat them into a fucking coma. What the actual fuck?

Crumpling the note even more, I shoved it into my pocket. My first instinct was to throw it away, but then I figured I’d keep it. If I ever found out who wrote the thing, I might be able to make them eat it.

Leaving the restroom a minute later, I looked around before heading down the hall. I figured that I could stop by the cafeteria to grab a sandwich from one of the machines, then head out for some practice over what was left of study hall and lunch.

That was the plan, anyway. It was derailed partway there, as I was passing one of the janitors talking on his cell phone. “Yeah, I told you, I’m sorry,” he announced with a sigh. “What can I say, Adrian never showed. Which means I’ve gotta stay. Look, Judy, I know. I know what I said, but that was before–I can’t just take off. I can’t just–damn it, we’ll talk about it later. Yes. Yes, later. Goodbye. Good–” Sighing, the man hit the disconnect on his phone before cursing under his breath.

“Um, excuse me?” I spoke up, waiting until the guy looked to me with an expression that made it clear he was surprised a student was talking to him. “Did you say Adrian didn’t show up today? Did he… call in sick, or…”

“Nope,” the man, whose nametag read Eugene, replied. “Just a no-call, no-show. Which, for the record, looks really fu–really bad on him. Unless he’s got a pretty good excuse, he might as well not bother coming in anymore at all. Little piece of advice, you get a job you give a crap about, don’t blow it off. Especially when you’ve only been there a couple days.” Muttering something about being left to clean the locker room by himself, the guy glanced to me once more as though just remembering who he was talking to. “Wait, you know Adrian?”

“Uh, we’ve talked a couple times,” I murmured. “If he didn’t show up or call or anything, did anyone call him? Or, you know, check his house?”

“Sorry, kid, we’re not his babysitters,” Eugene informed me. “If he can’t bother to show up or let us know what’s going on, there’s not much else we can do. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bunch of piss to wipe up from fifteen year olds who haven’t figured out how to hit the toilet.”

He left then, and I let him go. My gaze was on the floor, as my mind reeled. Adrian had never shown up. He never made it to work, never called…

It could be a lot of things. But from what little I knew about the guy, he seemed responsible. Hell, he mentioned taking care of four little brothers. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t just blow off work like this. Not without a good reason.

Or a very bad reason. And the last time I’d seen Adrian, he had been driving Josh out of town. Josh, the guy all those bounty hunting assholes had been after, so they could go through him to get to his brother, Ashton. Adrian had been driving Josh out of town, and now he was missing.

I had a really bad feeling about this.