Chapter Five
“YOU HAVE a car?” Farlden’s tone was accusing and Elliot stifled a sigh as he straightened from putting his course books in the back seat. What had he done wrong this time: breathed? Farlden’s usual bad temper had reasserted itself over lunch in the canteen yesterday and, while Elliot could understand why the unpleasant comments from some of the students would annoy him, his constant hostility made him impossible to get along with.
“As you can see.” He nodded towards the red Volkswagon Polo, noticing as he looked at Farlden that his own average height of 5’8” made him tall in comparison to the Neans. Farlden couldn’t be more than 5’5” and Barve was a bit shorter than that. “How are you intending to get to the other campuses without one?”
“There are these big things called buses.”
Elliot’s mother said buses were full of germs, but he wasn’t going to admit to Farlden that he’d travelled less than a handful of times on one in his life. “Good luck getting to your classes on time then.” Farlden’s sour expression said Elliot had scored a hit and he glanced at Barve, asking, “Which campus are your Art lectures on?”
“The small one on the edge of town. I’m just going to catch a bus there now.”
“I’ll drive you.” He had wanted to be early for his first lecture but, as long as there wasn’t too much traffic, he should still be on time for it.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” Barve asked a bit timidly.
“Of course not. I’m curious to see what it’s like.” It was crazy for Barve to waste time waiting about for buses for no reason.
Barve gave him a beaming smile, as if Elliot had done something amazing, and got into the passenger seat while Farlden hovered nearby in an uncertain way.
“I’ll be heading back to the main campus for my first lecture, so I can drive you back there if you want to come with us,” he said to Farlden, who gave a nod.
“Thanks.” He got into the back seat of the car, moving Elliot’s books to one side.
Elliot joined them, putting the briefcase that contained his stationery down on the floor. He mentally double-checked that he had everything with him that he would need today and, satisfied, turned the keys in the ignition.
“What’s your first lecture?” he asked Barve, who was clutching a multi-coloured backpack on his lap.
“Painting the Human Body.”
Elliot grinned as he pulled out of the car park. “Nude models then? Sounds more fun than mine.”
It was a sunny day and warm for the beginning of October so he wound the windows down for the short drive. They travelled through the back roads, away from the town centre, to the location, which had a more relaxed, rural feel than the main campus. The smaller building looked as if it had been converted from a medieval manor house, with a couple of towers and zig-zagging crenellations. It was surrounded by fields that were laid out for various sports, but only a handful of students wandered about them at the moment.
“Thanks for the lift,” Barve said as he got out of the car.
“No problem. We’ll see you later.”
Barve waited to wave them off and then Elliot saw in his rear mirror as he turned and headed into the building. Alone now with Farlden, silence descended.
“Are you feeling better after yesterday?” he asked.
“Fine.” The reply was curt and Elliot gave up on what was obviously an unwanted conversation, concentrating on his driving. They managed to travel back to the main campus and park there without exchanging another word.
As he got out of the car, Farlden muttered, “I appreciate the lift,” then, without looking at Elliot, he walked away.
Elliot said to thin air: “You’re welcome.”
He looked at his watch and saw with relief that it was still five minutes before his lecture was due to start. Thank goodness he had checked where it would be held on his first day here or he would have been late. He grabbed his briefcase, got out of the car and locked it, then jogged up to the open doorway of the large building. It took him less than a minute to hurry to the lecture hall, the large area resembling an acting theatre with a stage at the front and rows of seats in a semi-circle around it. He took a place in the first row right in front of the stage, at the centre of the room, as more students poured in around him. Relaxing, he got out his course book along with a notepad and pen as someone took the empty seat beside him. He turned his head and saw a black girl with dark, serious eyes who, like him, was defying convention by wearing something other than jeans, her knee-length dress and dark jacket the sort of clothes someone might wear to a job interview. He caught her eye and she smiled, cheeks dimpling.
The professor then arrived and the room felt silent. The man was about forty with grey hair and a close-cut beard, dressed in a suit but without a tie. When he spoke his voice carried easily to the hundred or so students in the room.
“I’m Miles Sandham and this is the History of English Language class. Anyone who isn’t meant to be here should leave now.”
Everyone glanced around them, but no one left.
“Well, that’s a better start than usual,” the professor said and a few people laughed.
Over the next two hours, he gave them an overview of what they would be studying, answered questions and set them their first essay. While there were some shocked murmurs around him from students who apparently hadn’t expected to do any work today, Elliot was more surprised that the essay wasn’t due to be handed in for an entire month.
The lecture ended, although a few students approached the professor to ask questions. Elliot packed up his things as the girl beside him cleared her throat slightly and said, “I’m Callie.”
“Elliot.”
“Do you have another lecture now?”
“No, not today.”
“Do you want to go to the canteen together?” she asked.
Liking her directness, he nodded. “I have to pick up a friend from another campus first. You’re welcome to come along or I can meet you in the canteen?”
She clearly didn’t want to be left on her own as she said, “I’ll come with you.”
They headed out to his car and found Farlden sitting on the bonnet. Refraining with difficulty from telling him how much the car cost and that it wasn’t made to be sat on, he instead introduced Callie who stared at him with a startled air, then seemed to shake herself out of it and greeted him politely. In return, Farlden managed to avoid offending her with some rude comment, so Elliot counted the meeting as a success.
“How was your first lecture?” Elliot asked Farlden as he got the car moving.
“Okay, I guess.” Farlden didn’t sound certain about this, but made no further attempt to talk, once again making it clear that he disliked Elliot’s company.
Elliot told himself that he didn’t want to be friends with Farlden anyway, but he wasn’t used to people reacting like this to him and wondered what he’d done to annoy Farlden so much. Turning to the person who actually wanted to spend time with him, he asked Callie what had made her choose to attend university.
“Everything,” she said at once. “Opening my mind to new ideas and the libraries and being amongst other students. It’s wonderful.”
Her enthusiastic response made him smile. He had looked forward to being here for years and it was good to chat to someone just as excited about it, who wasn’t just here because they needed a degree for the job they wanted or because their parents had expected it, which were the reasons most of his school friends had decided to go to Uni.
Barve was waiting for them in the elegant doorway of the small campus building. As Elliot parked the car, Barve came forward to join them but Elliot had another idea. “Do you want to have a look around while we’re here?” he asked the others, adding to the brothers, “If you have course books you need to get out of the library we can get them now or do any of you have another lecture soon?”
Only Callie had an afternoon lecture and that wasn’t for a couple of hours, so they headed inside the building, ignoring more racist comments and glares from the nearby students. Fal returned the dark looks and Elliot, for once, didn’t blame him for being bad-tempered. Elliot had only had two days of such comments – it would drive him mad to have to put up with them all the time, as the Neans clearly did.
The library was at the back of the building and, like the main campus, had a computer room behind it. “This doesn’t look like part of the original building,” Elliot said. He had an interest in architecture and loved imagining different periods of history.
Farlden had a distant expression on his face as he answered, “It isn’t. This section was only built five years ago.”
“How do you know that?” Elliot asked, looking about for a plaque or something similar with information about the building.
When his brother didn’t answer, Barve said, “Fal has magic.”
Elliot stopped walking and caught Farlden’s arm so he’d have to stop and face him. He’d been waiting for years for someone to say something like that and felt unexpectedly choked up. “So have I.” He had never met anyone else who possessed magic.
“You’re part-Nean?” Farlden asked and Elliot fought back the answer his mother or brother would have given, but somehow Farlden knew it anyway. His expression took on a sneering quality: “Let me guess: you only have the good Nean DNA.”
It was the kind of rubbish any Sapiens with a distant Nean relative said.
“My great-grandmother on my father’s side was Nean.” Elliot had been told no more than that and it made him feel utterly sick to think that his great-grandfather had probably raped a Nean slave and then taken the resulting child away from her, to be brought up as pure Sapiens. Magic was a rarity that only occurred occasionally when the two races mixed; there were probably less than a hundred people with magic in the world right now and somehow two of them were in the same place together. “What’s your type of magic?”
“I can see Time,” Farlden said.
“In what sense?”
“It varies.”
Elliot’s suspicion that the teenager was being deliberately vague was confirmed and he could have shaken Farlden. This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. His magic was something that had always isolated him from other people and he had finally found someone to share it with and it had to be bloody Farlden.
“I can see into people’s minds,” he said, hoping his willingness to open up would prompt the taciturn boy to reciprocate, “but it’s never worked very well. I get glimpses of their lives but nothing very meaningful.” The other children had often accused him of making up the magic, saying anyone could know what he did, and he hadn’t had any way to prove he was telling the truth. His parents believed him but, while they loved the idea of magic giving him power, they loathed the fact that it proved there was any Nean blood in their family. His mother, in particular, refused to even talk about it and Jasper had often taunted Elliot over it.
“Maybe you could use your magic together?” Callie suggested, looking from one to the other of them in the way of someone trying to solve a puzzle.
Elliot smiled, his insides jumping up and down with glee at the idea, eager to try it straight away, but Farlden took a step back from him, shaking free of Elliot’s hand. “No.”
“Why not?” Elliot demanded.
“We don’t know what would happen.”
“Exactly!” He walked up to Farlden, wishing he knew the words that would convince him to agree. He’d never wanted anything so much. “Please do this. Don’t you understand that this could change our lives?”
Farlden’s frown deepened and he looked up the corridor, in the direction of the front door, then back at the group. Elliot was about to try again to persuade him when Farlden said, “Okay, but not here. Somewhere private.”
“Fine.” Elliot would have agreed to any condition.
They left the library and, after a frustratingly long search, found an empty classroom that wasn’t locked. It had paintings hung up on the walls and easels on the back tables.
“We’ll read Barve’s mind,” Farlden said.
“Me?” Barve looked uncertain.
“It’s you or Callie.”
She shook her head at once, a flicker of something in her eyes that resembled fear.
Elliot held his breath in case Barve refused but, after a pause, the younger Nean nodded.
“You try to touch his mind and I’ll try to focus you on a particular memory,” Farlden said to Elliot, unusually decisive. “Say, the day we got our university acceptance letters.”
“Yeah, that’s good.” Barve straightened and nodded several times, making Elliot wonder what he hadn’t wanted them to see in his mind.
“Should we hold hands or something, to make a connection between us?” he suggested to Farlden.
“I s’pose.” Even his grudging tone couldn’t hide the fact that he was excited about this too.
They reached out, hands touching and then gripping firmly as they wrapped round each other. Farlden’s hand felt warmer than his and was slightly larger, the skin rougher. The touch felt oddly intimate, making Elliot’s body tingle. That must be the magic, he told himself. Nothing else.
He closed his eyes and let his mind seek out Barve’s. He’d tried to do this on his own – to read a particular person’s mind when he wanted to, usually when other kids were demanding he prove his magic – and it hadn’t worked. The flashes of information normally only came to him when they wanted to, with Elliot unable to control the experience. It felt different this time. He could feel Farlden’s mind like a solid presence guiding his mental touch. Their magic reached out towards Barve and he could feel the movement of time like a train rolling along, then with no effort at all, the memory they had chosen was there before them.
It was stronger than he’d ever experienced, like a 3D film scene appearing in his brain. He saw Barve and Farlden both holding the envelopes with the university stamps on the front and could feel Barve’s nervousness and excitement mixed in with the knowledge that their parents would rather they didn’t go, afraid something bad would happen to them. Elliot could feel Barve’s envelope as if it were in his own hand: the feel of the paper and the weight of it. Barve and Farlden opened them together and, when they found out they’d both been accepted, they were hugging and grinning. If he hadn’t seen the expression, Elliot wouldn’t have thought Farlden knew how to look that happy.
The scene faded into darkness. Elliot didn’t want it to be over but there was nothing he could do to recapture it. He opened his eyes.
“That was unbelievable.” He told Barve and Callie what he had experienced, half his attention on Farlden, asking him at the end: “Is it usually that precise when you do magic?”
“Never,” Farlden admitted, the glint in his eyes and slight upward turn of his lips revealing that this had been as profound for him as it had been for Elliot. “Mine’s always been vague too, like the magic was using me, not the other way around.”
“Yes.” That was how Elliot’s had felt but he’d never put it into those words before. “Shall we try again?”
Barve crossed his arms over his chest. “I think you’ve seen enough of my mind. Sorry.”
“I really don’t think I’d like you to read my mind,” Callie said. She was pale, as if seeing what they had done had unnerved her, but perhaps she was just hungry. His own stomach rumbled at the reminder that it was lunchtime.
“Let’s just go and get something to eat,” Farlden said. “I need to think about this.”
“All right.” Elliot wanted to consider what had happened and their implications too but also, more than anything else, he wanted to repeat the experience and find out what else he and Farlden could achieve by combining their magic.