The Genius of Victoria High

  Three days was enough time for bruises to fade at the edges but not enough for anything else to return to normal. Alicia came back to school with her bag over her shoulder and walked into a classroom that had been rearranged in her absence into something resembling a tribunal.

  Eight of her classmates were standing at the back of the room in the particular posture of students who have already accepted their fate and are now simply waiting for it to be administered. At the front, the discipline and mathematics teacher was pacing with his cane, which he used as a walking aid and an instrument of emphasis in roughly equal measure. He was a man who communicated most clearly through the sound of wood on surfaces.

  When Alicia sat down, the cane came down on her desk with a crack that would have made a less prepared person flinch.

  "Alicia. Welcome back. Three days of absence. I don't want to hear about extenuating circumstances or medical documents or anything else that has been said to me a thousand times by a thousand students before you." He looked at her with the expression of someone who has pre-decided the outcome. "Did you complete your schoolwork from last week?"

  Alicia looked at the eight students standing at the back, whose posture told her everything she needed to know about why they were standing. She reached into her bag.

  She placed six thick notebooks on the desk. Then eight textbooks, all of them mathematics, all of them filled so completely with her handwriting that the original printed text was almost crowded out. The teacher picked up the first notebook with the scepticism of someone who expects to find it stops two pages in. He turned to the middle. Then to the end. He opened the first textbook. Every exercise. Every worked example. Every proof, rewritten in her own notation with annotations in the margins where she'd found a more efficient approach.

  He put the textbook down.

  He stood for a moment in the silence of someone who has prepared a response that is no longer applicable.

  "Fine," he said, which was the most extraordinary word he had produced in twenty years of teaching. He raised one hand in a gesture that was almost formal. "You have proven something to me today. Do whatever you wish with the remainder of my class."

  Alicia opened the book she had brought to read, which was not a mathematics book.

  The lesson resumed. The teacher wrote problems on the board and the students attempted them with varying degrees of success. At a certain point, something in the teacher's relationship with being outclassed shifted from reluctant acceptance to the particular irritation of a man who still has a card to play.

  He erased what was on the board and wrote something new. The students nearest the front read it and said nothing, which was itself a kind of response.

  "Since you have so much free time," the teacher said, in the direction of Alicia's reading, "perhaps you would like to try this one."

  Alicia looked up. She read the problem. She put her bookmark in and walked to the front.

  She picked up four different markers, colours chosen with a deliberateness that suggested she had already seen the answer from her seat. She began filling in a complex map across the board, and as she coloured she talked, without hurrying, in the measured voice of someone explaining something they find genuinely interesting rather than impressive.

  "The Four Colour Theorem states that for any map, regardless of how many regions it contains or how complicated their borders, four colours are sufficient to colour it so that no two regions sharing a border share the same colour. Four is both the minimum needed for the most complex cases and the maximum needed for any case at all."

  She capped the markers and put them on the ledge.

  The teacher's cane hit the floor, not as punctuation this time, but because he had let go of it.

  "You're not human," he said, with the sincere resignation of a man who has arrived at the end of a long argument with a conclusion he was not expecting. "Enough. From today, you have no obligation to study with me. The room cannot contain you."

  Shadows of the Bully

  The canteen offered fried rice and fried chicken, which was the correct order of priorities for a Thursday afternoon, and Alicia was preparing to exercise both of them when five senior girls stepped in front of her with the confidence of people who have been large fish in small ponds for long enough to forget that other ponds exist.

  Alicia said something measured about the concept of queues.

  The lead girl turned around with an expression that had been honed over several years of nobody pushing back. "How dare you speak to me? Do you have any idea who I am?"

  Alicia considered this genuinely for a moment. "I don't know who you are. But I know that you are rude and uneducated, which is a more relevant piece of information."

  The girls laughed in the cold, practised way of people who use laughter as a prelude. "After school," the leader said. "We'll be waiting."

  Alicia collected her fried rice and fried chicken and sat down.

  When the final bell rang, she walked toward the gate at her normal pace, because adjusting her pace for five people who had decided to intimidate her felt like giving them something they hadn't earned. They fell into position around her at the entrance, which was the kind of move that works better when the person being surrounded doesn't notice how little it changes.

  Alice, Jasmine, and a teacher arrived at the precise moment required to make the situation visible to authority without resolving it, and the girls dispersed with the practised ease of people who know when a confrontation has an audience. Alice moved to pursue them and Alicia caught her arm.

  "Don't," Alicia said. "Let them go. This is between them and me, and I don't want you getting caught in it."

  Alice argued, because Alice always argued. Alicia listened, which she didn't always do, and let herself be walked home by a teacher who was worried about repeats.

  The discipline teacher handled it the next morning with the surgical precision of a man who has been in the business of consequences for a long time. The five girls stood in front of him and received a warning that left no ambiguity about what the next step would be if the warning was ignored.

  For a day, it seemed to have worked.

  Jasmine was the one who noticed. She had been quiet since the confrontation, quieter than her usual quietness, checking corners before she turned them. Alicia noticed and said nothing because Jasmine had said it was fine, and sometimes saying it's fine is a way of asking to be allowed to handle it yourself.

  After school, Jasmine went to the bathroom. Alicia and Alice waited by the gate. They waited longer than the situation warranted, and then they went to find her.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  She was behind the stall at the furthest end, on the floor, her face swollen in the specific way of someone who has been hit by people who knew what they were doing and had time to do it properly. The five girls were still there.

  Alice moved immediately, which was both brave and predictable, and within four seconds two of the girls had her by the arms and a third had hit her hard enough to produce a sound that Alicia heard from the doorway.

  "Run," Alice said, through the situation she was currently in.

  Alicia put her bag down on the floor beside the door. "Let them go," she said.

  The voice she used was not loud. It was the kind of quiet that has already moved past whatever comes before it and is now purely about what comes next.

  The girl who was raising her hand toward Alice's face found her wrist caught, and found, a moment later, that the slap she had intended had reversed its direction.

  After that it moved quickly. Alicia was not large, and she was thirteen, and none of what happened next was graceful or contained. It was close and messy and completely one-directional, and the bullies discovered, one after another, that the precision she brought to mathematics extended to other forms of problem-solving. She moved through them in sequence, targeting each weakness as it presented itself, until four of them were no longer in a position to continue.

  The fifth one had found a stick.

  She hit Alice with it, not Alicia, Alice who was already down, and Alice went still in the particular way that makes everyone in the room go quiet.

  Something in Alicia's expression changed. She walked toward the fifth girl with the complete focus of someone who has stopped weighing options. She did not stop when the girl dropped the stick. She did not stop when the girl stopped fighting back. She stopped when the teacher's hands found her shoulders and removed her from the situation by force, which required some effort.

  The Mercy of a Queen

  Two ambulances. An office full of competing voices. Jasmine's mother weeping in the corner. The bully's parents arriving in sequence and each one escalating the register of the room before having any idea what had actually happened.

  Jasmine's family told the real sequence of events plainly and in order, and the room's energy shifted from chaos to the specific quiet of adults who have realised they are defending the wrong position.

  The principal waited for it to settle. "The five students are expelled immediately. A police report has been filed. Juvenile proceedings will follow."

  Alicia said, "Please withdraw the report."

  The room looked at her.

  "They were wrong," she said. "What they did to Jasmine was wrong and what they did to Alice was worse. I'm not pretending otherwise. But juvenile proceedings will follow them for years. Transfer them to another school. Give them the kind of second chance they didn't give my friends. If it happens again somewhere else, that school can make different decisions. But give them the chance first."

  The principal looked at her for a long moment with the expression of someone recalibrating an assumption they had held for a long time.

  He turned to the parents of the expelled girls. "This child," he said quietly, "has more intelligence and more decency than everyone in this room combined. Including me, and I am including myself deliberately. Take your children home. Educate them. If I hear of this pattern repeating anywhere, there will be no conversation to have."

  The case was closed. The police report was withdrawn. The bully's parents apologised to Jasmine's family with the specific humility of people who have had something large and uncomfortable held up for their inspection.

  The next morning, the five girls came to school for the last time to collect their things and complete the necessary paperwork. Before they left, they came to find Alicia.

  All five of them knelt.

  Alicia looked at them for a moment, and then she reached out and took the nearest one by the hand and brought her to her feet. "I forgave you before you asked," she said. "I hope the next place is better for you."

  She watched them go, and then she was alone in the corridor, because Alice was still in hospital and Jasmine had stayed home, and being right about something doesn't make the corridor less quiet.

  The Return of the Killer

  Two days later, Alice was back. Jasmine came with her, closer to herself than she had been, which Alice had something to do with and wouldn't admit to. The school's International Sports Day had been planned for weeks and carried its usual atmosphere of organised chaos and optimism.

  Alicia was sitting with them in the classroom when the screaming started outside.

  It was the kind of screaming that separates itself immediately from the sound of sports events and excitement. Alicia was at the window before she had decided to go to the window.

  The two monsters were in the school yard, moving through the structures with the particular economy of things that have been pointed at a target and released. She recognised them. The bear. The dog-man with the axe. And on the rooftop of the building across the field, the man with the rifle, watching the yard with the patience of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment to arrive.

  Alice caught Alicia's arm. "Where are you going?"

  Alicia reached into her bag and produced the sword. Alice looked at it. The engraving caught the afternoon light for a moment.

  "With this," Alicia said. "Stay here. Both of you. Stay away from the windows."

  She went down.

  The fight that followed was not what the training in the basement at two in the morning with an accidental fall off a chair might have suggested as preparation. The monsters were larger in the open air than they had seemed in the clearing, and they moved with a speed that the eye kept being surprised by. She climbed the crumbling surface of a wall that was becoming less of a wall as she climbed it, reached the height she needed, and swung.

  The monster dodged it in a way it shouldn't have been able to and hit back in a way that sent her through the wall of the adjacent building and into a room full of sports equipment and debris. She came back out through a different section of wall.

  The rifle found her twice and missed twice, and then found her angle and forced her behind cover, and while she was behind cover the axe came down through the cover and she dropped with it, three floors, and the scream that left her was involuntary and complete.

  And then she stopped.

  Not on a surface. In the air. A few feet above the ground, hovering with no mechanism she could identify, her feet producing a light that was the colour of blood but had none of blood's warmth. She looked at it. She looked at the ground beneath her. She lowered herself to it slowly, and the fire touched the concrete and the concrete didn't burn. The fire was cool against her skin, which was wrong, and also the only thing that had felt entirely right since she had fallen.

  From the far end of the field, Alice screamed her name. Which meant Alice was at the window, which meant Alice had not stayed away from the windows, which meant the monsters had a new direction to face.

  The fire in her feet doubled in temperature. Something in her chest did the same. She moved faster than she had moved yet, covering the distance between her and the monsters in a time that her brain registered as shorter than it should have been, and when she swung the sword the lion was there again, not just a sound but a presence, something occupying the same space as her intent, and the first monster's head left its body on a clean arc and the body came apart a moment later.

  The killer landed on the ground. He raised the rifle.

  "This time," he said, with the specific courtesy of someone who intends to be the last voice you hear, "you aren't running."

  "The one who ran was you," Alicia said. The fire was moving up from her feet now, reaching her waist, her chest, her hands, until the sword she held was burning with it and her skin was not. "I have something to protect. That changes how afraid I am."

  He shot at her. The bullets met the fire and the fire made them irrelevant. He emptied the rifle and drew two swords, because he was a man who had prepared for contingencies, and the swords were fast in his hands and he was skilled in ways that showed in his footwork and his timing. He cut her three times and the fire closed each cut before it finished hurting.

  He retreated. He called the remaining monster, the dog-man, and gave it the gesture that meant everything, the final committed attack, and the axe that came down at her was glowing with an energy that bent the air around it.

  She braced. She pulled the fire into the sword and pulled whatever was below the fire into both of them and the lion on her forehead arrived like a seal on a document, official and complete. The sound that came out of her was not a scream and was not a roar. It was the sound of something that has decided.

  The sword went up. The axe came apart. The monster came apart a moment later, and the explosion that followed was the physical record of the energy involved, and it found the killer and put him against the building behind him with enough force to settle the question of whether he was going to continue today.

  The helicopter arrived into the settling dust. Special forces in full equipment descended into a schoolyard that had been converted, in the last fifteen minutes, into a geography of scattered rubble and two distinctly former monsters.

  The officer who reached her first looked at her for a long moment. She was thirteen years old, covered in fire that was visibly cooling, holding a sword that still had light in it, surrounded by the evidence of a fight she had won alone.

  He reported back in a voice carefully chosen to convey information without editorial: "We have located a child who has neutralised two high-level summons without a summon of her own. Instructions required."

  By the following morning, the name Alicia had moved from the school to the city to the reports that moved between government offices in sealed envelopes, and it was attached to a new title that nobody had planned to give anyone this young.

  The Monster Exterminator.