Meta (Book 3): Rise of The Circle (17 page)

It's one of the biggest reliefs in my life when I hear the computerized voice say, "Training Sequence Complete." Was there an emergency shutoff?

"Dammit!" Nathaniel yells in frustration.

Calvin is on his back, panting to catch his breath, no doubt drained of a lot of his energy after the cyclone was destroyed. And behind me on the ground, just as I'd hoped, is the top of the box, cleanly severed from the base.

"Well done, Mr. Connelly," Michelle says into a microphone in the observation booth. "Very clever move to use your adversaries’ own attacks to gain the outcome you desired. I have every faith that you will pass this training scenario with flying colors one day."

"One day?" I say in between gasps. "I just opened your box. I finished the task."

"Indeed you did, Connor, and that is no small feat. However, you forgot about the most important part of the exercise, and the one you were told was given priority over everything else."

Michelle clicks off the microphone and gestures for me to turn my attention to the back of the room. There I see what she's referring to: the dummy with the knife stuck into its head.

"But that's not fair. He threw that knife before you even gave the command to start."

"And you think your enemies are going to play by the rules? Maybe you can tell the next grieving family member you're very sorry their loved one is dead, but the bad guy didn't play fair, so it's not your fault. I'm sure they'll understand," Nathaniel says.

I really wish that I had tried to take Nathanial down first now. It wouldn't have helped me finish the exercise successfully, but it sure would have felt good.

"Unfortunately, he's right, Connor. Don't worry, though. We'll have plenty of chances to run the simulation again," Michelle says.

"
S
o I take
it you're mad about the way the exercise went?" Michelle asks.

I'm up in the observation room with her. She's asked me to come up here to discuss my performance and any questions I might have.

"No, I'm not mad. I'm frustrated. You told me there were rules here, so I tried to follow them."

"Like how you followed the rules the other night and used your powers on campus?"

I don't respond.

"If you're going to break the rules around here, don't be surprised if we do it right back at you, Connor. We're trying to prepare you for the real world out there, whether it's fair or not."

"But I've already been out in the real world. I've already had to fight people who don't fight fair. If you had just told me the gloves were off in the first place, I would have known."

"That's just it, though, Connor. The gloves can't be off for you. You have to be better than that. You have to set an example that might seem impossible for others to live up to, but that comes to you as second nature."

"Even if that means innocent people get hurt? Because that's what would have happened today if this had been the real world and I'd played by the rules."

"That's why you're here. That's why you're training. No one ever said that you couldn't handle yourself out there already, but that's not what we're asking of you. We're asking you to hit a higher mark that no one else has so far, and we're only asking you to do it because we believe that you can."

I'm still not sure what to say, so Michelle takes the cue to keep talking if she wants this conversation to continue.

"Did I ever tell you how this place came to be?"

"Yeah, Derrick already told me about how they started building it during the first wave of metahumans."

"That's part of it, but do you know where the funding came from for this place?"

"No. I guess I just always assumed it came from the government or something."

"Ha, I wish. But you already know that the government has nothing to do with this place. They've already got their solution for how they think metahumans should be dealt with, or at least they thought they did until Silver Island was ripped apart," Michelle says.

She starts collecting a few papers from the desk in front of her and packing them into her bag.

"So where did the money to build all of this come from then?" I ask.

"From my mother. She wanted to build a place where metahumans like her could train and learn. A place where the good guys learned how to win."

"Your mom is a metahuman? You never told me that."

"My mom
was
a metahuman. She passed away during the first wave, unfortunately."

"Oh, I had no idea. I'm sorry to hear that," I say to her.

"Thanks. You had no idea because I don't talk about it with a lot of people. Derrick knows. Some of the faculty here know, but that's about it. Why don't you follow me to my office and I'll tell you about it."

M
ichelle's office
is located in a hallway that I haven't been down before. This hallway is much less sterile looking than the ones that house the various training rooms. For starters, this one has a carpet; that alone is a massive upgrade in the “not feeling like a hospital” department. It reminds me of a mix between the interiors of the actual school buildings above us and a nice hotel. Michelle leads the way to her office and swipes a badge, followed by a retinal
and
palm scan before the door's lock clicks open and allows us in.

"That's an awful lot of security," I say, meaning it more as a question than a statement.

"Can't be too careful. The security system knows that I'm not alone and requires additional checks to verify that you're a welcome guest and not someone with a gun to my head. If I hadn't used all three forms of identification, or if I had used them in a different order, the security system would still let us in, but it also would trip a silent alarm. I figured you probably would want to take a pass on having a rifle pointed at your head this afternoon."

"Good guess."

The office itself is nothing special, but if I had to guess, out of all the offices here which one was Michelle's, I would have guessed this one. It's clean and everything has its place. On top of the plain, brushed aluminum desk is nothing but a computer monitor, keyboard, and trackpad, not a single scrap of paper, no mementos from the outside world, no photographs of family on the desk. The walls are similarly bare with the exception of a TV monitor. There aren't any diplomas on the wall like you'd expect to see in a faculty office, but then again, Michelle's not the typical faculty member.

"Have a seat and take a break for a few minutes before I shove you back out the door to go to law class."

"Um, it's after hours. I don't have any more classes today," I tell her, wondering if being down here so long might be starting to mess with her perception of day and night.

"Not upstairs. Down here. You didn't think this training was all just physical stuff, did you? You're going to be taking a few more traditional, sit-down type classes here too," she says.

I take the only swiveling office chair across from her desk. She opens up a mini-refrigerator underneath her desk and takes out a few ice cubes, which she then places into a large glass that also mysteriously appears from under the desk.

Is she making herself a drink? Wow. Just when you think you know a person.

"I don't know about you, but I need a drink after today. Can I offer you anything to drink, Connor?" she asks me.

"Umm, I'm underage," I tell her.

She looks at me quizzically before looking down at her glass and laughing.

"You think I'm drinking alcohol in my own office, in the middle of the afternoon?" she asks, laughing again before I can answer her.

She reaches beneath her desk again and pulls out a pitcher from the unseen fridge. Whatever it's full of, it looks disgusting. It's dark green and the consistency seems to be somewhere between slime and chunky soup.

"This is kale, beet juice, spinach, garlic, and carrots," she tells me as she pours the concoction into the glass sitting on her desk. "I take it you're not interested?"

"No, I think I'm going to pass. Thanks, though."

"Well if you change your mind, don't be shy. It's not as bad as it looks. I find that it really helps to re-energize me after a long day."

Michelle kicks her shoes off under her desk and leans back to put her feet up, swirling her green health juice around in her glass with the ice. She takes a sip, which she seems to genuinely enjoy. I guess everyone's got their vices; sometimes they're just not actual vices.

"So, where was I?" she asks.

"You told me that your mom built this place," I say.

"Ah, right. Well, that's not actually a hundred percent true. A lot of the structure had actually been in place prior. The bunkers were built during the height of the Cold War as a fallout shelter. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they stopped work on it only to resume not too long after when some of the higher-ups in the US government became concerned that a place would be needed to house government officials in the event that there was ever a metahuman attack that wound up destroying large portions of the country."

"So it is a government facility? I thought you said it was autonomous."

"A few of the tunnels were once built by the government, but they've long been private property. After The Battle, the government updated its priorities. Instead of worrying about how to protect itself from seemingly nonexistent metahumans, it changed gears and began working on ways to reverse engineer metabands."

"Derrick's mentioned a little of this to me."

"I'd imagine. Derrick knows more about some of this stuff than I do even, which is saying something. Anyway, the tunnels were sold off to a private corporation years ago. Since then, they've changed hands multiple times until we acquired them and finished building out the facility here. The original project to build them was completely off the books, not much use having a secret bunker if others know where it is, so we're confident that it's been completely forgotten about by now. It was little more than some bare caves when we acquired it. Nothing like it is now."

"How did your mom earn enough money to do all of this? Most of the metas during the first wave didn't really focus on using their powers to get rich."

"Not the ones you hear about, unless they happened to kill someone while they were doing it. Then they became a ‘villain’ in the eyes of the media, and then you were sure to hear about them. Not my mom, though. She made sure she didn't rock the boat when she earned her fortune."

"And how was that, if no one knew about her? It seems like if you're not going to steal, the only other surefire way is some kind of endorsement deal."

"Nope, she didn't do either. Mom was a little more enterprising than that when it came to getting rich."

"How do you mean?"

"She found a unique way to acquire valuable minerals without stealing them from someone else. She mined asteroids."

I have trouble comprehending what Michelle's telling me because it seems too farfetched.

"She mined asteroids? Like she took minerals out of asteroids and brought them back to Earth?"

"Yup."

"But how? It's not like asteroids are just hanging around out there. She would have to travel into somewhat deep space, or at least deeper than astronauts have ever gone. And deeper than any metahuman who's returned to talk about it. I would have heard about a metahuman who could survive that. It would have been huge news."

"And that's why she never talked about it. Her buyers preferred not to ask questions about where she acquired the minerals. When someone shows up at a meeting offering to sell you hundreds of pounds of gold or diamonds, you just assume they didn't get it legally. And if that doesn't bother you, you usually don't ask either. The less you know, the better."

"But why would she keep it a secret that she could travel into space? That's a pretty unique ability."

"She kept it a secret because she always felt guilty on some level about what she was doing. Here we were in a world full of metahumans, super heroes, really, people who could do things we never imagined. The entire world was fascinated by them. Even the ones who were terrified were still completely enthralled by them.

"This was a time of a lot of suspicion, though, even jealousy. If you were a metahuman and weren't using your powers to help people or save them, then everyone started asking what you were using the powers for. It usually didn't take too much digging to unearth embarrassing or damaging stories about anyone who wasn't pulling kitties out of trees. Once that narrative was set, it usually wasn't too far of a leap to brand someone as a villain.

"Mom just didn't want to deal with any of that. She wasn't interested in being a hero. She just wanted to provide for us, for her family."

"So why fund a school for metahumans then?"

Michelle takes a deep swig of her green juice and wipes her mouth before placing the glass back on a coaster on her desk in front of her.

"Because she realized late in life just how selfish it was to keep powers and abilities like hers all to herself. Unfortunately, she learned this all too late."

There's a silence hanging in the room, but I'm intensely curious about what exactly happened. I weigh the consequences of asking for a few seconds before Michelle speaks up.

"You want to know what happened, don't you?" she asks before I can decide if it's a good idea or not.

"How did you know that's what I was thinking?"

"I know a lot about you, Connor. Your natural inquisitiveness is one of the reasons we brought you here in the first place. It's okay to ask. I reserved telling you out of concern for the memories it might stir for you, rather than my own reluctance to recount the story again.

"My mom died during The Battle. She changed her mind about how she was spending her life before that day, though. That happened when my sister died."

"I had no idea. I'm sorry to hear that."

"Mom was out somewhere toward the end of the galaxy, looking for a big asteroid she'd read about in a scientific journal. There was speculation that the rock might have been composed almost entirely of diamond. It was going to be her one last big score. Enough money to make sure even her great-great-great-great grandkids would be very wealthy men and women.

She'd been gone for over a week. I was barely an adult myself at the time, but she trusted me to watch my sister, Lily. Lily was around the same age you are now, maybe a little bit older. She was killed during a metahuman battle in the middle of the city. One of the metahumans threw a car at another and missed. I wound up in a coma for six months. Lily didn't make it.

“When mom came back, she was devastated. She had never found the asteroid she was looking for, but it didn't matter to her any more anyway. She didn't even want the money she had, said it reminded her of the fact that she hadn’t been there for the two of us. From that day on she used the money to start building this place. She wanted a place where metahumans who were on the fence about how they should use their powers could come and learn how to use them for good, learn how to use them to help people.

“She put the money into a trust in my name. Obviously she couldn't include in the trust that I was only to use the money for all of this," Michelle says as she gestures toward the facility around us, "but she made me promise. That was only a few days before The Battle."

"I never heard about her being involved in The Battle."

"You wouldn't have. She never wore a costume or anything like that. And she didn't fight. She hadn't had much of a chance to really learn since she spent so much time in space. On the day of The Battle, the most valuable ability she had was her invulnerability. It wasn't enough to save her life when the buildings started coming down, but it was enough to help her get some people clear before they fell.

"In her mind, as long as there were people out there with metabands doing harm, then it was the duty of others with the same abilities to do what they could to stop them."

"So would she agree with the Alphas that we'd all be better off had metabands never existed?" I ask.

"She probably would agree with that. She wouldn't have agreed that in order to enforce that idea there should be four metahumans who are given the reins. That doesn't solve anything. All it does is concentrate power.

“If we could put the genie back in the bottle and make metabands magically go away forever, then we could have a debate about the merits of that. We could argue whether it would be worth the sacrifice to ensure no more innocent people died, and whether we would be willing to risk that who or what created these things wouldn't come back for them.

“But we can't do that. We have to play the hand we're dealt. That's what my mom understood in the end, and what we're hoping everyone here understands too. And with that said, you'd better get hustling if you're going to make it to your law class on time. Doctor Hawk hates it when people are late."