Soulless The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,9
again, his fingers stuck in the loops of his old jeans. “Fast way to get yourself killed, underestimating the people you’re fighting – or did you not learn from my example today?”
“I got it.” I cleared my throat. “I won’t underestimate anybody.”
“Bold statement to make. Hope you’re right about that. You need to trust your teammates though, watch their backs, because they’ll be the ones watching yours, not anyone else.” He got a sour look and turned away from me for a second. “Get on home, then. Looks like you got the rest of the day off; might want to take your liberty when you can get it. Not much time off around here, you know.”
“I know.” Believe me, I knew. It’d been six months since I had a day off. I walked back to the dormitory thinking about how different training to be an agent of the Directorate had been from what I thought it would be when I started. Looking back, I felt naive, like I was a kid when I began, wandering in because I had no idea what else I should do with myself. I had, after all, been cast out into the world after the ultimate sheltered life. Sort of.
It was only a couple weeks after first leaving my house (for the first time in over ten years) that I decided to enter the training program. I hadn’t even come close to living a normal teenage life when I decided to really leave normal behind and become what amounted to a paranormal cop. The Directorate paid me a lot of money to do this, all in hopes that someday I’d be a useful member of their policing force. And I was good, at least if we went by the training results. I put Scott to shame and made Kat look like a helpless little girl by comparison in every exercise they threw at us, from martial arts to weapons to chase and apprehension.
It was the “soft skills” that I lacked. Diplomacy, presenting a kind face and sympathetic ear to a metahuman who has just manifested their powers or to a human witness, freaked out by something they’ve seen that defies explanation. That was part of the job I was training for, being what they called a “Retriever” – trying to convince the newly powerful to come to the Directorate to get some purpose and direction in their abnormal lives. I sucked at that. Probably because it was foreign to me.
Maybe it was because I left home at a dead run with only the clothes on my back, being chased by two guys with guns and then, shortly thereafter, a crazed homicidal meta who nearly killed me. I guess after my own experience, it was hard for me to feel a ton of empathy for someone who gets a gentle knock on their door from someone without a gun who explains that they’re different, they’re special, and that there’s a place for them, then offers them a chance to join a training program to channel their powers. It’s a little different than my first real encounter with powers, which involved me being nearly choked to death in a grocery store parking lot after watching a maniac kill two innocent people.
I entered the dormitory building and felt the beautiful bliss of the air conditioner unit working overtime, sending a sweet chill across my body. The smell of the air was even different in the dormitory than it was outside, holding some kind of magical scent, like the processed and machined smell of the indoors, so much different than the overpowering, heated and wet atmosphere of the outside. By the time I got to my dorm room all the sweat on my body had congealed, evaporated or turned to a freezing layer of moisture.
I closed the door behind me and peeled off the layers of sticky clothes. I grabbed a bottle of water out of the mini fridge by the desk and drained it on the way to the bathroom. As I stepped under the shower head I reflected that this wasn’t so bad; the cool water washed down, rejuvenating me. I was in there for about thirty minutes, which was a short shower for me. When I stepped out I heard someone out in the room, and brushed open the door.
Zack was standing in front of the windows, looking out on the sun-beaten grounds. The sprinklers were going just outside, spraying the thirsty grass with water. I