frost bite riot

001 clocklevel freefall

<Sep.9>

A regular Monday evening was a bittersweet grocery run, but it generally leaned more towards bitter than sweet for a number of reasons.

On one hand, the PM bus circuit on Monday was longer than any other day, and that meant far less walking for Jett to reach his school’s affiliated stores that gave the best discounts. Sometimes, it bordered on buying in bulk in terms of value. As far as the sweet side went, it was simple and easy to understand: a low-hanging but ripe and bulbous fruit, one that even an idiot would know not to pass up when it dangled right in front of their eyes.

It was so simple that it had quickly become bitter for the equally simple reason that everyone had leapt on such an obvious opportunity. The only advantage to not taking advantage was simply to avoid the consequences of existing around other people.

Considering what ‘other people’ entailed, Jett was giving that abstinence some serious thought.

“Drop it!”

Slam.

“Nice… try―!”

Limbs cut through the air as they flew in exchange with each other. Fists and heels found purchase in the targets and their goods alike.

Or to phrase it another way, the old adage of ‘you break it, you bought it’ was in full effect.

Despite the ordinary exterior and its placement in a perfectly public street, the inside of the store had become a space of a nostalgically warped sociality: a ritual battlefront. There was, after all, only a particular kind of customer here.

Strictly speaking, it was not a scene of tribal warfare, but the cacophony was more than sufficient to mistake it as such – or rather, to the untrained eye, it was impossible to recognize it as anything else.

Bare knuckles thrust forth. The punch was blocked by a bag of rice the size of a human torso. The form of the attack was excellent – efficient, elegant, a potent connection of force. There was room for improvement, but it was the kind of room that would be glossed over in praise from a trained fighter.

Even a champion of the ring would not immediately realize that the blow had indeed been a proper exercise of martial arts. It had simply not been ‘social’. A martial artist training for sport was a participant in a kind of socialized combat that existed to enrich life, a form of exercise to promote health and competition. Even self-defense was encompassed under such an umbrella as a form of combat that was acceptable under society.

This was quite unlike that.

It was certainly a kind of social competition, but the arts in use were dissonant with the circumstances. The strikes thrown within these aisles were strictly fashioned for antisocial means. They possessed a lethality appropriate only for true battlefields, found in moments of killing. Mosaics of genuinely deadly attacks were being used to argue over the same loaves of bread and instant noodles and boxes of cereal that were standing in as shields from merciless blows that would hospitalize any person on the receiving end of them.

It was like trying to compare the apples that were flying about to the oranges that they flew past. And for Jett, it was frankly embarrassing. There was no such thing as a food fight without mess, but at least most of them had the decency to occur in a space belonging to the fighters themselves.

The first time this had happened, bystanders had called the police, but after the company had managed to get his classmates out of trouble the first half-dozen times, it had apparently just become a fact of life. Birds flew, the sky was blue, and the students of the Harbor School would arrive in Manhattan to beat the living shit out of each other every Monday between half past four to six in the afternoon.

After more than a year of this, people would simply avoid the area, and the staff would simply retreat to the back rooms in preparation for the arrival of the storm. It seemed that even hurricanes could be weathered if they came with strict enough regularity.

Likewise, despite the fatal consequences of screwing it up, nobody had yet died – in fact, the few times that a solid hit had landed on anyone, the victim had walked it off instead and been fine within the hour.

He always felt a small pang of relief that his classmates seemed to at least subconsciously have some degree of restraint whenever it happened.

That didn’t mean he was proud of being next to it. Bordering on six feet tall with dark hair to his shoulders and a uniform he probably could have done with ironing a little more, he knew his image was already sitting on an inconvenient fence between ‘delinquent who wasn’t really feeling it’ and ‘2000s era scene kid who wasn’t really feeling it’ by pure accident. Even when he was being civilized, it was hard to separate him from the anarchy he happened to accompany. He simply stood out too much.

There were four separate brawls within his immediate vicinity alone, and half of them had more than two people involved. He sighed, picked out a netted bag of garlic bulbs, and then took a few steps away from the scuffle a few feet away over the jars of pre-chopped garlic. It was a reluctant concession, but it was worth the effort to apply a knife later than a fist now. He was even getting the hang of it, even if against his will. His gaze shifted to the tomatoes in the rack beside him, moving to gather some up.

He froze before he had even processed why. Instinct stopped him in his tracks.

Another hand was reaching over his target. He caught sight of braids and glasses in the corner of his eye.

That was enough to release the tension in his muscles.

“Go ahead,” he told the girl. “There’s enough for both of us.”

She seemed to hesitate, but started to harvest the bulbous red from the pile. He hadn’t spoken to Eris much before, but he knew she wasn’t a fan of this weekly free-for-all either.

“I don’t think scarcity is the problem,” she pointed out dryly, gradually filling up the small clear bag in her hand.

He looked to his classmates, exchanging blows in the next aisle across, teeth clenched in wide grins as they competed with animalistic intensity over one sack of rice among an entire shelf of identical packaging.

“Yeah, you have a point,” he sighed. “How did this even happen? I’m pretty sure no other school in the country regularly beats the crap out of each other over groceries.”

Eris shrugged. Her shoulders were relaxed, and she didn’t so much as flinch as she looked around. She recognized the eye of the storm around her with clarity. It almost seemed to him as though she had thrown her millions of years of carefully evolved self-preservation reflexes out with the trash.

“I blame the back half of the curriculum,” she finally concluded. “Jethro Régnier, isn’t it?”

“Reginier,” he corrected. “Friends call me Jett.”

“Huh. Interesting,” she observed. He didn’t care to know what she had observed.

“Yeah, I got dragged out of New Orleans.”

“That makes sense. I’m from Quebec myself.”

He had been faintly aware of her accent, but that wasn’t enough to parry the remark from knocking him on his ass.

She was from Canada? He had no idea that the Harbor School even invited students from outside of the country. He knew Lulu was born in France, but she’d once said to him that she had lived in New York State for ten years already. Even if she wasn’t legally a citizen – he wasn’t sure one way or another – she might as well have been at this point.

Then again, he supposed that private schools, being fundamentally businesses, probably didn’t have any particular desire to peacefully curl up within a strict international border. Colleges and universities rarely did. There was no way that an international megacorporation with so much power, whether it was based in the United States or not, would just roll over even if a government told them to stay in their lane.

“What’s the surprised look for?” Eris asked. “Your partner is English, isn’t she?”

“Well, not exactly… I think?”

At least, he assumed that girl was the same case as Lulu. After all, given what little he knew about her history…

“You don’t really talk about that sort of thing,” surmised Eris. “I probably should have expected that.”

“Is it that common?”

“More like there’s a lot of obvious… you know.”

Baggage.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Guess so.”

He’d never really been a fan of unpacking.

“Look,” she lowered her voice, just loud enough to still be heard over the sound of the surrounding carnage, “not for nothing, and I get it’s not really my place to say this, but you need to be careful that she doesn’t start to see you as dead weight.”

She gestured to his navy-colored necktie.

He sighed. “Little late for that.”

“What the fuck did I tell you idiots last time?!”

A voice like ringing steel split the air in two. The storm of battle was shattered in an instant.

Standing in plain view stood a girl of less than five feet, a hip-length ponytail bordering between brunette and dark red. Her wide stance turned her into a surprisingly striking figure for someone so diminutive.

“Great. We summoned her,” sighed Jett.

“I heard that,” she narrowed her eyes.

She spoke with an uncommon authority, her presence alone enough to freeze the various altercations in place like a stage director. Needless to say, it was more than enough for Jett to silence the part of his brain trying to muster some kind of witty retort. Perhaps it was just because of the last topic to hang in the air, but her white tie seemed to stand out more than usual. Most grades marked some specific degree of mastery, but for the class’s top student it was nothing more than an acknowledgement that she was beyond quantification.

Her crimson gaze scanned the state of the aisles, and her tongue clicked.

“Good to see none of you took a damn thing to heart.”

A stocky young man – cropped blonde hair and a face like his mother had given up halfway through – cut in. “They’re making room specifically for us!”

Jett knew the chronically-ruffled Draven well enough by now to know that his brain was wired for not much else besides the functions and applications of the humble combustion engine, but it showed more than ever at times like this. His hasty attempts to justify ignoring the class president’s instructions he didn’t like brought on a muffled pang of secondhand humiliation. Why exactly did he think people were making room for this…?

Fortunately, the girl wasn’t particularly impressed either.

“Is that what you call a justification? Are we doing things just because we can? Because we feel like it?” she snapped. “Have some fucking respect for your neighbours.”

There was some weak muttering of protest, but it was joined by some reluctant bending down to pick up the wreckage of the fighting, placing items in baskets and back on shelves.

“Draven, I can see the hole in that rice bag. You’re paying for it,” she instructed, marching with purpose towards the produce aisle. “I’ve been going door-to-door searching for you for the past hour, Jett Reginier.”

“Don’t give up the hunt, Blaze Thompson,” greeted Jett. “I believe in you.”

Eris folded her arms. “People actually do call you Jett…”

He felt his expression straining itself, but said nothing. He had taken her reaction for a charitable donation of embarrassment, not outright doubt. Even then, taking in what he said without believing a word of it was one thing, but she hadn’t actually shown a grain of suspicion. He didn’t need any more to tell that she was an unreasonably dangerous person to talk to for someone with as insignificant a social standing as him – he was more than capable of digging himself into a hole if she let him, and rumors were much more deadly when started by their own subject.

“His middle name is Barnaby,” Blaze informed her with a gentle, reassuring tone as though she were explaining a silver lining.

“You’re just gonna throw that out there?” he sighed.

“Well, I can’t have anyone taking you too seriously,” she replied. “I know it’s a low bar, Eris, but I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who gives a shit.”

“Jett wasn’t involved either,” Eris pointed out.

“Unfortunately, there’s a bell curve of shit-giving.”

Jett couldn’t really find fault in her observation. She wasn’t exactly wrong, but he still felt a pressing need to change the subject before she allotted the next dozen hours to chiding him.

“Weren’t you here for something,” he asked dryly, “or am I being hunted?”

“I can’t think of a trophy I’d want on my wall less than you,” she shot back. “Anyway, you need new razor blades while we’re out.”

He blinked, and for a moment he was caught off-guard to the point where it felt like the remark had physically ricocheted off his face. “Sorry, what?”

She frowned. “Razor blades. Get some. You’ve run out.”

“I literally just put a new one on this morning,” he replied. “And I have another set in the cabinet.”

“Not according to Lulu.”

Those four words, like a curse, rendered Blaze’s statement into absolute truth. Jett turned his gaze immediately to Eris. “Can you do something about your roommate?”

“I wish,” she muttered. “Every time I bring it up, she just deflects it and says it’s her hobby. All I can say is to thank God that I got an exception made for dorm-sharing, because who knows how her actual partner would handle being around her all the time…”

Jett sighed. “And I guess the great and mighty class president isn’t willing to do anything either?”

Blaze scoffed. “I don’t particularly like it, but it’s put to good use, and it’s a skill worth cultivating. Besides, if we don’t let her, think about how many holes we’re opening.”

He blinked, twice. His brain had shorted out just there, he was pretty sure — maybe he needed to get that checked out.

“The hell do you mean ‘holes’?” he asked. “Maybe I’m not following, are we really having a discussion about the pros and cons of stalking?”

“You telling me you think telling her to stop is going to do anything other than her just doing the same thing but quieter? Better to have her doing it where we can see her,” Blaze said. “Now go get razor blades.”

A sensation of defeat coursed through his body, filling his shoulders and jerking them with a brief spasm. He wasn’t invested enough to get into an in-depth discussion with her.

“Whatever you say, prez,” he sighed, turning to leave the aisle.

It wasn’t so much the part where she was constantly spying on them that really bothered him the most. What annoyed him more was that for Blaze, Lulu’s amateur espionage was entrenched as an easy way out of actually talking to other people, including himself. 

But still, he’d so far lived perfectly fine under all kinds of tyranny from his various peers. He was hardly in the mood to become a revolutionary now. He probably couldn’t even if he wanted to.

―

The class hadn’t broken any self-checkouts today, so they eventually lined up with their groceries, paid for everything they’d ruined and everything they were taking, and made their way up to the bus stop just in time to wait for fifteen minutes over a delay.

Jett hadn’t come into the city with Blaze, but she had wordlessly muscled up next to him on the ride home. The private highway joining Manhattan to Governors Island wasn’t especially flashy, and it took less than a minute to cross it, but he still wasn’t completely used to the sight of a setting amber light over the shoulder of the Statue of Liberty just out the window. There hadn’t been any landmarks so cinematic back home.

“Are you seriously staring at the sun?” Blaze asked.

He turned, blinking. “What, no, why would…?”

She shrugged, her gaze dropping from him and onto her knees. “Just making sure.”

Even now, despite her shrinking into her seat, she was dropping her barbed steel exterior.

────No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t as though her outer shell was a physical thing. It was a mirage, something that she had expressed. Ultimately, it was still imaginary.

He conceded.

“You doing anything Friday?” he asked.

Blaze looked up again slightly, frowning. “...Why?”

“You know why.”

She folded her arms. “Cemetery, I suppose.”

The undying scowl on her face deepened, or perhaps it was more to do with the light shifting onto her face as the bus turned off the highway and onto the island’s road. It didn’t help Jett’s stomach that was already churning from trying to push conversation with her.

“You go there a lot,” he said.

She shrugged again, and didn’t reply. She didn’t need to. Jett already had an inkling as to exactly what she was thinking about.

“Look, I was just going to suggest you go somewhere else this year,” he said. “Hell, I’ll go with you if it’s that bad.”

She paused. “Are you asking me out on a fucking date?”

Electric current shot through his temples. “I… guess…? But… don’t... say it like that.”

Her eyes only got narrower. “Don’t say yes, I was being facetious.”

Jett hadn’t been exactly invested in his own suggestion, but the fact that she had considered the idea that he was serious to be a punchline was like having a spear rammed into his stomach. He had imagined she took him about as seriously as he took her, but it seemed like he hadn’t even cleared a bar so low that it was leaving a print in the dirt.

Blaze sighed, turning her eyes dead ahead as the bus came to a halt. The pair in front of them got up from their seats. “You have a point though,” she muttered, hauling herself to her feet.

“Do I?” he replied. “That’s a first.”

“You know I’m the exact right height to punch you in the balls?” she said. “I’ve got a decent fucking arm.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he replied, pulling himself up too, mentally making a comparison.

She wasn’t wrong, actually. The top of her head only came up to about his chest. He was taller than average, sure, but the gap between the two of them was almost comically huge.

It felt smaller.

“When are we meeting then?” she asked, not even making an attempt at eye contact as she trailed off the bus behind everyone else.

“Wait, seriously?” he said. Hadn’t she just been mocking him for that?

“Look,” she said, “if you stop paying attention in math class for two years, do you think you’re going to be doing anything but catching up when you start again?”

“Are you trying to tell me your growth was stunted?”

Her glare came over her shoulder again as she stepped outside. “I’m seriously about to teach you what a fisting feels like. Answer the question.”

He got off after her, stepping onto the dusty road as the crowd of their classmates dispersed. “I guess we’ll just go straight after class?”

She clicked her tongue. “You’re such an amateur.”

“I’m sure you’re much more experienced, boss,” he shot back.

“Fisting height. Last warning.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m calling the shots on where we meet,” she decided. “I’ll text you.”

“Just write it on the fridge.”

“I’ll text you and you’ll show up,” Blaze said firmly. “You better come up with something good enough to make up for how tasteless you are.”

She turned her back to him, shaking her head as she walked down the path in the opposite direction to the dorm.

“I can’t imagine how much fucking gasoline you’ve dipped your brain in to think it’s a good idea to ask someone out on the anniversary of the Goliath Incident,” she muttered. “But I suppose I get what you’re going for.”

Jett didn’t respond, and turned his back to her too.

He parted with his partner, and as the bottled flame she was, Blaze continued to burn as usual. She naturally burned on contact, but a little distance was enough to keep warm.

He thought about that for a moment, and then found himself in a headlock courtesy of an arm so thick it could have fed a village.

“Real smooth, jackass!” cackled Draven. “You could literally have gone with 9/11 and it would have been better!”

Jett gritted his teeth, halfheartedly grabbing at the arm restraining him. “No, because 9/11 is on Wednesday,” he grumbled. “Friday night wins.”

“It’s messed up that they’re so close to each other, if you think about it,” Draven pointed out, suddenly quite pensive as he released his victim.

“And with your epiphany, the entire world population has noticed,” announced the dreadlocked boy in front of them, turning to walk backwards for a moment in order to give the appropriate applause.

“You wanna go again, Jamie?” Draven snarled.

“I was kicking your ass, so why not,” Jamie replied. “So did Jett seriously just ask Blaze Thompson out?”

“I’m not going to let it turn into anything,” grumbled Jett, pulling himself free of Draven’s grip to straighten up. “It’s a long story.”

“Trust you to go for a girl who is simultaneously the worst you can do and still completely out of your league,” replied Jamie. “Does that say more about you or her?”

“You’re not even listening.”

“All I know is that this is going to be hilarious.”

Draven cocked his head. “Hey, why did you do that, anyway?”

“Draven, you’re partnered with the class vice-president,” Jett sighed. “You of all people should get it.”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah… I guess living with Blaze probably wouldn’t go well for anyone else besides you.”

“You think we’re going well?” scoffed Jett.

“You can soak her up better than any of us. You’re a real wet sponge.”

He blinked. “…Wet rag.”

“Wait, what?”

Jamie shook his head. “And yet she still takes the long way around the island just to avoid walking with him?”

Jett didn’t have an answer to that. As far as he was concerned, Blaze just seemed to have better things to do.

―

Retreating into the trees around the side of one of the many school buildings, Blaze opened a classroom window from the outside.

It had taken some effort on her part to work out how to break a latch in such a way that it would go unnoticed, let alone on a window, but being able to use the same entrance over and over had paid off in the long run.

If this school were on the mainland, she probably wouldn’t have gotten away with even this much. It was lucky for her that the janitors here were complacent. She doubted that the company was paying them enough to deal with her anyway.

Sliding up the frame just enough for her to slip through, she was silently grateful for her small body on just this one occasion. Her foot tapped the floor of Lab 3 with just enough sound to bounce off the hard walls once and vanish, fitting in perfectly with the rhythm of the ticking clock.

The science block had the least surveillance inside – at least that she was aware of – so once she had gotten past the watchful eyes outdoors, she was more or less home free. Compared to the CCTV and motion sensors out there, this was trivial.

She opened the door into the corridor and started moving.

Lab 4, Lab 3, warned the signs – a countdown that was an omen to her and her alone.

She wasn’t interested in this floor and its banalities. The mingling scents of the neutered chemical reactions still stained the hall, only accentuating just how useless this place was to her. She was interested in the oldest section of this particular building.

It didn’t take her long to find the stairwell, and she started moving down.

DANGER, HIGH VOLTAGE, DO NOT ENTER.

The door at the bottom was marked with much more text than the others. The wood it was made from still looked fresh.

The innocuous silver lock looked normal enough at first blush, but Blaze had learnt from past encounters that it was sealed magnetically. She had also learned from experience that for whatever reason, the company had no way to tell that she’d cut the power to it last year. It was now just a simple matter of picking it whenever she came in. She was a practiced hand at that too.

As she heard it unlatch, she idly noted that she’d stopped keeping track of her best times already.

The room inside was a cavern. A perfectly flat cave floor sat at right angles from its perfectly smooth cave walls sat at right angles from its perfectly level cave ceiling, but a cavern it was all the same. If a mouth into the earth fit to house a monster could not be called a cavern, what could?

She had assumed, the first time she had found this place, that there would be a beast sleeping – waiting – in here somewhere. These days, that was none other than herself.

 There were only two sources of illumination: the interior of the lid of the large glass cylinder in the middle of the room, and the monitor in the corner was always giving a long stream of information. Blaze shut the door behind her, and quietly stepped over the rootlike snarl of cables to inspect the screen.

“Everything is looking good,” she muttered. “No problems. Nothing’s changed. Good for you.”

The glass cylinder did not offer any kind of response. From this angle, the sleeping figure floating inside it was much clearer.

Long black hair was splayed out in all directions behind her. Various tubes and electrodes bloomed from her and descended to the bottom of the cylinder. An oxygen mask was planted firmly over her face. She was perfectly still, just like usual.

Blaze sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall and staring at the girl in the tank.

“It’s almost been eight years,” she said. “I’m probably not going to the cemetery this year.”

No response, of course.

“I have a date, I suppose. A classmate asked me out. He’s… fine,” she forced the admission, even to someone who couldn’t hear. “He’s a real sandbag, but he’s not scared of me, so that’s something.”

Something somewhere was humming, and the whistling fan of the computer beside her was the only other sound in the room.

“When I think about it, it’s probably the exact opposite of whatever the hell you and my brother had going on,” she muttered. “Not that it matters anymore, but… Well, maybe it’s the same. I don’t know.”

She stared at the motionless figure, silently willing it to move, like tugging on invisible strings with nothing but her eyes.

She got no such miracle.

If not for the computer’s indication otherwise, she could have mistaken her conversation partner for a corpse. Considering the circumstances, perhaps that would have been less morbid somehow. She could no longer tell if it would have made her seem more or less deranged.

“It’s probably a bad sign that the only person I have to talk to about things back then is you,” she grumbled. “I have no idea what you were like, but… At least you were there. I still remember what you did.”

She hadn’t been expecting much else, but the silence didn’t let up – all that came back was an eight-year-old ringing in her ears, as though contouring a life that would no longer exist if not for a single act of courage from someone else.

And yet, Blaze was still losing patience with the comatose girl before her.

Can’t imagine why, she grumbled silently.

She pulled herself to her feet, knocked once on the glass, and made her way back toward the hallway, avoiding dragging her feet just enough to avoid tripping on the cables.

“Good talk, Mel.”

The door latched shut behind her, leaving nothing but the glow behind. The vital signs on the monitor didn’t shift a millimeter.