Evan tugged at his collar, which threatened to choke him anytime he looked down. His uniform was dark blue with pale trimming that stretched to his wrists and down his torso. The school’s coat of arms clung to his left pec; a white crescent moon tri-pointed by the school’s initials, N.C.A. Gilded buttons ran down the length of the coat, which was finished off with split tails in the back. He didn’t want to wear the uniform, he didn’t want to be there, he didn’t want to carry on like nothing had happened. But what else was there for him to do, trapped in a uniquely secluded section of the Midwestern Federation? Nothing, but keep praying that his father would find a way to save Ken.
He slunk into a grey chair, a half-sized partition separating him from his classmates on either side. Directly in front of him stood a small table with an obsidian-dark box on top. Its face had a small slit and camera lens that watched Evan closely. One-hundred and ninety-eight other students sat in similar cubicles that were arranged in rows around a stage, not too dissimilar to that of an opera hall. There was an empty seat in front of Evan, one that was meant to be filled.
He almost made it, but you killed him. Evan sunk as deep into his chair as he could, still able to see the faces of the other students around him. He noted three faces in particular – Nicholas, Anthony, and Vulture. All too satisfied. Evan knew why, and it took everything in him not to leap at them – press his hands to their faces, melt their skin like wax…
Monster.
Evan still felt the bruises in his neck from Nicholas’ chubby digits pinning him against one of the school’s outer concrete walls. Evan had tried to twist free, but his toothpick-thin arms didn’t do him any favors against the bulky kid who held him.
“Stay out of this, GK. This doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Nicholas had said. His uncanny egg-shaped head shining from the Sun.
All Evan could do was yell as two other brutes smashed Ken’s head against a metal lunch table, spraying the contents of a nutrition shake everywhere. His glasses snapped in half as one of the bullies smooshed his face harder against the surface.
“Come on freak, do something,” one of the bullies had said to Ken. Her real name escaped Evan, but he’d seen her beady vulture eyes somewhere else before.
“We know you’re one of them. Come on, use your Affliction, try to hurt me. Save yourself, freak. Do it freak. Freak. Freeeaaak,” Anthony said, an equally skin-headed fiend.
They were wrong about Ken; his power wasn’t dangerous. He could mimic voices, that’s all, like a video recording or a corvid’s mock vocals. He was exceptional at controlling his powers, unlike Evan, however. Sure, Ken talked to himself regularly, along with a dozen other quirks that made him, him. But It wasn’t Ken who they’d seen use powers. It had been Evan, it had to have been. His power was dangerous. Molecular Dispersion, his father’s private scientists had called it. The ability to change the state of matter. But in truth, it just meant he was good at disintegrating stuff with his mind – or more often in his case, losing control and falling into a seizure shortly after. He was always slipping up some way or another, and these pure-bread animals must had seen it – but because Ken was the different one out of their duo, they’d assumed it had to be him.
Evan had searched for a way to save them without giving himself away. It was stupid, but maybe if he disintegrated the buttons on the bullies’ pants, make their uniform slacks fall around their ankles, they might let go in shock and give Evan and Ken an opportunity to escape. He’d call father and it’d be their word vs. the Governor’s.
Just the buttons. Evan focused in on the tiny circles at the bullies’ waists, imagining them slip their bonds.
“What are you looking at?” Nicholas snapped.
A solid fist dug into Evan’s stomach. Shock ran up his chest, scattering his focus. Instead of just the buttons, the entirety of their pants disintegrated into dust, exposing their various styles of underwear. The bullies reeled.
Nicholas fled, tears flying off his face, tailed by Vulture and Anthony – Toward the Dean’s office, Evan realized in retrospect.
“You ok, E-friend?” Ken had asked.
“This is bad, man. I messed it up,” Evan admitted. The metallic taste of blood came from his inner cheek after chewing on it too hard, and his eyes burned from not blinking enough while looking for an answer.
Ken braced Evan with an arm and guided him inside the school. “Going to be ok, buddy,” he said with a reassuring smile. It had been enough to set Evan’s mind at ease for a brief, gullible moment.
I’m an idiot. Evan thought, snapping back to the present. Three buttons. That was the thing that got Ken arrested. Three insignificant circles of plastic. He wished he could blink himself out of existence. Yet, his existence persisted, and he’d have to endure the graduation ceremony that was ahead of him. He stopped looking at the bullies, stopped remembering the past, and stopped giving them any more of his fraying sanity. Instead, he set his mind on how he was going to survive the next few hours.
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The chattering of students dissipated as plump Dean Van’Dusen walked on to the auditorium stage and braced himself at a podium made of twisting onyx with veins of cream. An orb-shaped camera drone hovered in front of him. He licked his potato skin lips and began.
“This is a blessed day. The day that you step into your familial legacies as capable men and women of the Federation of America,” he declared.
Evan wanted to escape, but he knew the eyes of the nation were watching. Enforcers could be waiting for him just outside, waiting for him to confirm their suspicions that he was an Afflicted sympathizer, waiting to stick a needle in his neck and cart him away to an uncertain future. So, he forced himself to watch the Dean’s lips dance, threatening to chase after him if he dared to leave the theater before the ceremony was complete.
“Before we begin, please stand with me to recite the Federation pledge.” The Dean waved his hand, and a projection of the pledge and Federation crescent moon spread out into the air above him.
The floor rumbled as the entire student body rose. Evan toyed with the idea of staying in his seat, but still the mind sought to preserve the body. He did stand – but he refused to speak the pledge and said his own prayer instead.
“I Pledge Myself to the Federation of America,”
Why did I do it?
“Oh, Federation of Freedom, of Faith,”
What should I do?
“No Villain, No Demon, No Wraith,”
Please help me.
“Will sway me from your call,”
Help me find him.
“For even in the night,”
Help me do something right.
“You shine on us all.”
Help me save someone other than myself.
A smile wriggled across Van’Dusen’s face. “Please, have a seat.”
Evan sat, looking anywhere other than Ken’s empty chair. He couldn’t bear to listen to what else the Dean had to say, but still the words bore into his mind without consent.
“Never, in my twenty years serving Nero Caine Academy, have I been more pleased with a class than I am with this one. You, the 20th graduating class, have proven that the Federation’s future is here. Your blood is pure! To this day, we are the only Federation school never to have graduated an Afflicted, and we have paved a bright future in which our society may no longer live-in fear of such poison.”
The student body erupted in applause, including a very satisfied Patel.
Get ready to have your crappy record broken. Evan smirked. At least one good thing would come from the day.
The event’s end was close, all that was left was for their citizen IDs to be distributed – or so Evan had thought.
It turned out the Dean’s presentation was far from over.
Van’Dusen depressed his hands and quieted the applause. “Now, usually this would be the point where you receive your identification cards and are set out into the world as proud members of the Federation. But in light of today’s triumph over a dangerous parasite-”
The students booed at this mention of Ken.
Evan found his eyes dropping to that empty seat.
“Now, now,” Van’Dusen continued. “I thought it would be appropriate to show off President Caine’s legendary speech from the first Unification Day.”
Not that. Evan winced.
A decade ago, a group of terrorists had blown up a Federation bio-lab. The explosion had released some form of radiation across the East, thus creating the Affliction. President Caine was elected purely because he promised to remove the Afflicted, and this was his first address.
The projection flashed to a video recording of the President’s speech. Thousands crowded around the terraces of the capital. Several broad steps led to the front of what was “The White Tower”, with pillars stretching thousands of feet past low clouds. At the top of the steps stood a glass cage, and within it shimmered a three-dimensional image of the President – the first president who refused to make an address in person (too many assassinations of previous presidents, no doubt). His hair was stiff and black. A single metal pin of the Federation flag was clasped to his coat, a white background with a blue circle at the center of a black crescent. Dark eyes peered from his angular visage as he looked upon the legions gathered before him.
That same day, soldiers came searching for Afflicted.
That same day, Evan discovered his powers.
That same day, it would take four showers to get the smell of blood out of his hair.
Evan sucked in a rigid breath at the same time as the President always did before giving his infamous speech.
“Today marks the age of unification. The decades of war are finally over.”
Evan forgot his body, entranced by his memories and the horror of what had just happened to the only friend he’d ever known. To his brother.
Finally, the recording was nearly over.
“We will undo separation. We will undo the Titan Project.”
With that, the student body erupted in cheers.
The Dean said, “Well, students no longer! You are now Federation citizens!”
Somehow the students manifested an even greater cry of celebration, except for Evan who sat frozen in his chair, staring blankly at Ken’s seat. A metal card pushed out from the black box in front of it.
His focus snapped to a similar card that came from his own box, his citizenship identification card. The cold of it bit his fingers. It was laser cut with a barcode and the classification, “Evangelos Hendricks Junior, B3-1984.”
A great rustling threw Evan out of his thoughts as his class turned and filed out of the auditorium with their new IDs clutched in hand. Ruce, Patel, Nicholas, Anthony, and even Vulture Eyes – his enemies – all allowed to walk into the future unscathed. But Ken’s ID still lay there in front of his empty seat, no destination for it other than, perhaps, a landfill.
“No,” Evan said. He slid over the chair and grabbed the forlorn card. His heart danced. What was he doing?
I don’t know, but something, he thought.
He nodded at another student who eyed the stolen card. She opened her mouth but was tugged away by the wave of excited classmates. Evan seized the opportunity to escape the auditorium, tapping his ID on his right thigh, while gripping Ken’s in his sweaty left palm.