School Arc

The morning sun beat down on the city. Hot wind blew through the streets, dragging rubbish through the gutters: scraps of plastic, cardboard, broken glass, and even chunks of loose bitumen. The facades of buildings were burnt or smashed and graffitied, and soot and ashes swirled around the pavement, some embers still hot.

Two people walked along the street. One was a tall, broad-shouldered young man in a neat second-hand suit, clean-shaven, with dark brown hair and eyes. He carried a battered briefcase, and had draped his suit jacket over the same arm; he’d also opened two buttons, and left his tie in a pocket, but there were already the hints of sweat stains at his armpits. He had a phone out with a map loaded, which he glanced at periodically.

The other person was a younger girl with russet hair, wearing a school uniform: black shoes and skirt, white socks, pink shirt with a cloth badge over her heart. She also had a pink backpack and a pink ribbon tying her hair into two short pigtails.

“Are you sure this is the right area?” asked the girl, Charlotte. “You said it would be nice, and, well …”

“And this looks like a warzone that the soldiers decided wasn’t worth sticking around for,” finished the young man, Roger. “This is definitely the right place. Remember, it’s the destination, not the journey.”

“If you’re sure,” she said. “Is Mum working there today?”

“Yeah. She said she’d meet us at the gates.”

They turned past a newsagent that looked like it had been hit by an airstrike: the roof was gone, windows were blown out, and walls were buckled and charred. Past it was a short metal bench with broken glass backing and an opaque plastic roof.

“Here we are,” Roger said, taking the bench. Charlotte sat on the far side, because there was something sticky spilled across the middle.

“Are we on time?” she asked.

He checked his phone. “ETA, a few minutes.” He let out a breath and wiped sweat from his forehead.

“Does the Lord Aquinas Academy have air-conditioning?” she asked hopefully.

“It had better.” He put the phone away and stretched. “Are you looking forward to your first day?”

She smiled. “I think it’ll be good. It’s a second chance, and I think you really worked things out this time. The odds are in our favour. What about you? It’s your first day too.”

“A bit nervous,” he said. “It’s something I’ve wanted for a while, so it’ll be disappointing if I screw it up.”

“You won’t,” she said simply.

He smiled back at her. Someone else might have wanted her to elaborate on that, but knowing her, the fact that she didn’t was more reassuring. It showed faith, that the idea was so obviously true that it stood without justification.

They heard the purr of an engine, and a minute later, a bright red-and-yellow bus pulled up to the bench. They climbed on board.

It was an autobus, with no driver and a vandalised ticket scanning machine and turnstile. Roger shrugged, hopped the turnstile, and helped Charlotte over. The bus smoothly accelerated from the curb and drove along the street, bouncing nauseously over rubbish and potholes.

Halfway along the rows of seats was an Asian-looking girl in a black-and-blue sailor fuku that wasn’t quite long enough to meet her thigh socks. A chainsaw with a lanyard dangled from a sash. She was hastily bringing her feet off the seat in front and stuffing a hand game console into a bulging blue backpack; she looked up, transferred glasses from her neckerchief to her nose, and offered a greeting smile.

“Er, hey,” she said, with a finger wave. “I’m Sue Wong. I, er, didn’t know anyone else took this route.”

Roger stepped forward and shook her hand. “Roger Abercrombie. This is my sister, Charlotte. You were right: we’re new.”

“Cool cool,” said Sue, standing to accommodate the handshake; the chainsaw bounced against her thigh. She smiled at Roger, looking him up and down, then switched to Charlotte. “Are you going to Aquinas, too? Nice uniform.”

“Uh, yeah,” said Charlotte. “Do you know your way around?”

Sue snerkled. “I don’t think anyone does. You know how they can’t just make roads that go straight from one end of the city to the other, they have to zigzag or have random dead ends everywhere? And you know how they can’t just call them First Street like they do in Manhattan? Aquinas is worse than that.”

“It can’t be too bad,” Charlotte said. “At least it’s small.”

“If it were, that would make three of us.” She looked up at Roger, who was more than a head taller. “No way you’re a student. Even if you were in year twelve …”

“I’m a teacher,” he said.

“Don’t you have to have a masters degree for that?” she said. “You don’t look that old either.”

“You did. They voted in a libertarian state government last election, and they scrapped all the requirements for that sort of thing. I haven’t even started my undergrad.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Sue said.

She looked out the window, and something about the motion drew Roger’s and Charlotte’s gaze. Where the rest of the city was filthy and burned, there was a sleek, gunmetal grey tower, stretching up too high to see its top through the bus windows. On the front, over automatic glass doors, was the legend, Chypros Inc.

“They outsourced the police to the low bidder and/or high briber,” she continued. “It’s been an interesting school year so far.”

“At least Aquinas is still a decent place,” Charlotte prompted.

“Well, yeah. Good luck with teaching,” Sue said to Roger, “we could use the help. Hey, you’re not from around here, are you?”

“The next place along,” said Roger. “Is it that obvious?”

“Uh,” said Sue. “It –”

The bus crunched into something, fishtailed, and braked. The door automatically folded in, and a dinosaur hopped in. It was like a human-scale T Rex, but with metal hands with long telescoping claws, a bionic eye studded with red LEDs, and a chequered police hat. It spotted them, hopped the turnstile, lowered itself to a crouch, and lunged.

Sue dashed forward to meet it. In a single, fluid motion, she took the chainsaw from her belt and yanked the starter cord, and the engine roared to life. At the same moment, the dinosaur reached her and double-swiped its knife hands; she ducked one, parried the other, stepped into the parry, and brought the chainsaw up and through the dinosaur’s midsection, chopping it in half. Dinosaur ichor sprayed her, and cybernetic parts littered the bus.

“It’s a little conspicuous that you aren’t packing, yeah,” she said, and killed the chainsaw engine; she twirled it and hooked it back onto her sash. The bus’s doors shut, and it began driving again. “Can you look inside my bag? I have tissues.”

Roger exchanged glances with Charlotte, and she went for the bag. She rummaged past textbooks, pieces of electronics, a spare chain, a change of underwear, a phone, and finally found a crumpled box of tissues. She wordlessly handed a wad over.

“Thanks.” Sue wiped the chain clean and put the chainsaw away, then cleared her glasses, face, and as much of her uniform as she could, although it was completely covered in oil and something too dark and viscous to be real blood. She opened a window and threw the used tissues out. “Ugh, I hate it when this happens. See, this is the problem with low bids, you never get any quality control.”

“Does this happen often?” Charlotte asked, concerned. She took more tissues and helped dab at Sue’s uniform and skin.

“Not every day, but yeah, often enough to be a nuisance. You should learn chaindo. We have an after-school club you could join.”

“I thought that was chain fu,” Roger said.

Sue shook her head. “The Chinese do a lot of things well, but chainsaw-based martial arts isn’t one of them. The Japanese are decades ahead of them. That was chaindo, with a bit of amateur chainjutsu. I need to find a real sensei.”

“So, that was Chypros’ budget police?” he asked.

“Yeah. Deinonycops, but everyone calls them raptors. They’re not human, so minimum wage doesn’t apply, but they also kind of just maul everyone, so they’re a real pain. I hope the libertarians get voted out, but it’s two more years. What can you do. Politics, right?”

“Right,” said Charlotte. “Maybe I should join your club, then.”

The bus scraped its undercarriage as it drove onto an arching stone bridge. To either side, they could see a blue river and a bay, glittering in the morning light, with more of the city ahead, a mixture of warehouses and towers.

“What do you study at school?” she went on.

“Maths and Eng are the only compulsory subjects,” Sue said. “You pick the rest out of a list of like twenty extracurriculars. I mostly do mathsy ones. Have you picked yours?”

Charlotte shook her head.

“I’ve got all three sciences, computers, and music,” Sue continued, counting on her fingers. “Oh, and they make you do phys ed too. It’s mostly just boys who do sciences, which” she smirked “has its moments. Are you into them?”

“Uh,” said Charlotte. “I guess? Do you mean science or boys?”

Sue just grinned at that.

The bus turned through a set of wrought iron gates into a grounds surrounded by brick walls, with grassy fields and a single massive brick facade building. They could see a sign reading, ‘Lord Aquinas Academy’. The bus drove up to a double doors and stopped.

“Mum’s not here,” Charlotte said quietly. Roger squeezed her hand.

Sue took the lead. “Let me show you around, then. Charlotte – that’s such a long name, can I just call you Lottie or something?”

“Isn’t that the same number of syllables?”

“Not in katakana. Lottie, let’s stick together for a bit. Mr Abercrombie –”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“– would you mind staying with us too? Our regular teacher’s moping in the cafeteria, something about a girl, has been ever since the parent/teacher night.”

“You did kill a cyborg raptor for us just now,” he said. “And admin hasn’t actually told me anything, so sure, no worries. I’m not as good as all that, though.”

“You did the same classes, what, like, three years ago? Don’t you remember any of it?”

“They will have changed the curriculum since then. Abolished it, probably.”

“We’ll figure something out,” said Sue, pushing through the front doors.

Inside was a sprawling lobby. There were wooden doors along each wall, marked with four-digit numbers; granite pillars holding up the ceiling, carved into the shape of the three wise monkeys; and a black marble floor shiny enough to see their reflections. Directly ahead of them was a help desk with an Out To Lunch sign, despite how early it was. Around the room were vending machines with soft drinks, junk food, and stationery. He’d been right: it was indeed air-conditioned. They took a moment to sigh happily and just stand there, cooling down.

“Where …”

“Through here.”

She led them through Door 9430, which opened into a nearly cubic room. There were four crates of textbooks, one of which had been upended; books littered the floor, along with sheets of working paper, and random stationery. In the middle of each wall was a door with a touchpad screen, glowing a soothing blue-green.

“To get to the next room, you have to solve the problems,” she explained. “This is the maths sector, so they’re all some variant of mathematical. We’ve made a lot of headway, but we’ve got stuck lately on a calc/trig one.”

“We?”

“Just a bit further.”

She led them through two of the touchpad doors, into a room with a fountain over a statue of a woman in a toga, holding a fish in one hand and a sword in the other. A girl sat on the edge of the fountain, working on a notepad; she didn’t look up. She had dirty blonde braids, and wore a red tie and pleated skirt with a white shirt.

“I come bearing gifts, partner mine,” said Sue.

The blonde looked up and did a double-take that she smoothly turned into a once-over for both Roger and Charlotte. She gave a professional smile, set her notepad aside, stood, smoothed her skirt, and offered her hand. “I’m Bright,” she said.

“Abercrombie,” said Roger, shaking. “This is my sister.”

“Charlotte,” she said. She wasn’t sure whether to wait for Roger to finish shaking Bright’s hand and then take her turn, or if that would take too long and be awkward, so she awkwardly waved instead.

“Charmed,” said Bright.

“There are a few more of us around here somewhere,” Sue said. “We’ve hit a few dead ends, so we split up to work on them separately. Lottie, do you want to come with me and meet Jase?”

“Um,” said Charlotte, looking from Sue to Roger. “If Rog’s helping, I’d think we’d go faster together. Maybe you and I should find him, then all meet back here? And Rog, you can get started here?”

He looked from her to Sue. “That’s logical,” he said.

“You could get a shower and change of clothes, while you’re at it,” Bright said.

“Yeah, in a minute. He’s through here,” Sue said to Charlotte, leading her through a side door, “over in the polynomial section. What a trooper.”

Bright watched them leave, then looked Roger over again. “Do you know anything about this sort of problem?”

She indicated one of the touchscreens. On it was a jumble of rotating triangles. Some periodically grew or shrank, like animations of tesseracts intersecting three-dimensional space. On the left was a green indicator.

“In any problem, you have to find some key value by combining other values according to a set of rules,” he said. He assumed she already knew this; it was for the sake of getting her on the same page, rather than telling her anything they didn’t already know. “The more rules you know, the more types of problem you can solve. In school, you’re supposed to learn more rules as you go along, so we probably have more of those than we need; but they usually give exactly the basic values needed, nothing unnecessary and nothing missing that you have to guess.”

Bright considered this. “That isn’t a bad way of putting it,” she said. “Very mathematical. Which I expect is a good thing for a maths problem.”

“There’s a list of operations on the sidebar here,” he said. On the left side of the screen was a section with animations, showing triangles folding into each other and themselves, their angles and sides warping as they did. “I’m not really allowed to tell you the answer, but I can say that it looks like this one already has everything you need. If it’s not obvious how, you can always just try every possible combination until you get one that gives you the right answer. Once you get enough experience, you’ll get intuition of which rules are most helpful when, so you’ll be faster because you don’t need to waste time with rules that don’t go anywhere.”

She sat back and looked at him. “That was interesting, how you talked with your sister,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“She wanted to spend some time with her new friend, so you told her to go off and do that. But she made sure that there was a natural time limit. Maybe you’re overprotective, and she knew you wouldn’t have let her go if she hadn’t … but I don’t think so, I think she just wanted an out. If Wong’s a jerk, she has a pretext to come straight back here.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You should be careful,” he said. “Lots of people are sensitive about being psychoanalysed like that.”

“I think decisiveness is a higher virtue than caution,” she said. “Are you sensitive?”

He shrugged and sat beside her. “No. It isn’t a secret or anything. I do what I can to look out for her. I’m her only reliable family.”

Bright was quiet.

“Are you okay?”

“Just thinking about something,” she said.

“Are you okay?” he pressed.

She met his eyes, then ducked her head. “Give me a hint on the door?” she asked.