THE ENEMY IN THE MIRROR
A Novella
By Sandra Miller
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Sandra Miller.
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Until I rounded the corner of the engineering building and saw the rocket chair hovering in the university courtyard, I guess I thought I was used to the idea of Allacore attacks. I thought, like so many around me, that I knew everything there was to know about them. But an Allacore too lazy to fly? I despised them, but this was a new low even for them. This Allacore must have stood over ten feet tall--if she ever got out of that flying chair of hers long enough to stand. Her wings must have been curled against her back, because I couldn't see any evidence of them at all. The splintered ragged tips of her unkempt talons jutted out even when they were retracted. Her close-cropped white hair looked like it hadn't been washed in weeks. Their snowy white wing feathers and their equally white hair were the most attractive features Allacores had, if the word attractive could even be used, but on her neither were visible. Her gold metal armor must have been a sight to behold when it was new. At this point, though, it was dingy and pitted, and only added to her overall impression of disrepair.
Allacore. Just the name was enough to make my skin crawl, and here was one in my hometown! I stood there in shock as she hovered over the university path, herding students just like me into the holding cells that had been set up on the grass. We were out of her direct line of sight for the moment, but all too soon I knew we would be following our glassy-eyed peers into those dismal little cells. The Allacore mind-control devices were efficient. We were only spared the effect because we had not been there when she fired it. But she could handle the two of us easily enough. After that, who knew? Hard labor in their factories, servitude in their homes, forced indenture on their small attack ships--any of a hundred unpleasant fates could await this newest group of prisoners once they were taken back to the enormous generation ship that had brought the Allacore here, the generation ship that even now orbited Earth.
I glanced at Trevyn standing there beside me, his face a picture of shock as he surveyed the scene playing in front of us, fresh out of a nightmare. Of course we had all heard about the Allacore raids, but who expected them this far inland, here in the middle of nowhere?
Before I had recovered my wits, Trevyn had let go of my hand and was striding purposefully toward the Allacore's hovering chair. I should have guessed he would do something of the sort--Trevyn never could stand by and watch injustice. The battle may have been doomed, but he was determined to fight it, even unarmed. He would not go quietly, like the groups of hypnotized students around him.
"Commander! I demand that you cease this at once!" Trevyn's voice rang off the nearby buildings. I found time to wonder how he had known the Allacore's rank--I should have guessed that politically minded Trevyn would have been studying the Allacore raids much more intensively than I.
The rockets under the Allacore's chair glowed red as she swiveled it around to face Trevyn--and me behind him. I shivered under that emotionless stare; she regarded us as if we were so many bugs. "You demand?" Her voice grated like ground glass crunching under boots. "You? Who are you to demand anything of me?"
"I am Trevyn Blaine, and I am a citizen of this free country, a country which does not allow the sort of acts you are committing here." I stood as if my feet were rooted to the spot, horrified. Oh, please God, don't let her kill him, I implored in my mind.
The Allacore's face clouded with rage. "Filthy human!" she spat. "I'll teach you some manners, you rude little bastard." Her ragged talons were fully extended now, and she reached for the directional control on her chair.
The tension building in me was suddenly too much to bear. The capture of hundreds of students shocked me, but did not spur me to action; my own death I could have accepted with hardly a protest. But when she turned against Trevyn I could stand there no longer. Acting completely out of an instinct I hadn't known I possessed, I balled my right hand into a fist and held it high over my head. "Enough!" I cried, and against her will the Allacore found her attention pulled from Trevyn and focused entirely on me.
"Enough?" Her tone was syrupy sweet. Her broken, yellowed teeth flashed at me as she smiled a condescending smile. "Enough of what, human? I haven't yet begun!"
If she had dropped her superiority attitude and really looked at me, she would have noticed the bright yellow light streaming from beneath my curled fingers, pouring from between my knuckles. But she didn't see, and I held my hand clenched in that fist for a moment longer. "I command you to stop!" I shrieked, and to my surprise my voice echoed and re-echoed, even stronger than Trevyn's had a moment before. Before the Allacore commander recovered from her surprise, I pulled back my arm and flung it out towards her, opening my hand. The ball of light that left my grasp was like a miniature sun, racing toward her too fast for the eye to follow. It crashed into her chair and sent it reeling, casting scorch marks deep into her battered armor.
If I could have kept my wits about me, I would have grabbed Trevyn and run right then. But I was stunned, absolutely unable to believe what I had just done. I stood there gaping in disbelief while she brought her runaway chair under control and veered back toward me, whipping out a strange device that resembled a telescope. "So we have a powerful little monster here," she grated. "So this trip will be considerably more worthwhile than I had imagined. Your power will benefit me greatly, human." She leveled the telescope-thing at me, and it began to hum.
It was plain from her words that the thing was stealing whatever strange power I had, but I felt as though it was leeching all my energy. My knees buckled and I fell onto the sidewalk, marshaling everything I had for one last strike. This time when I flung out my shaking hand, no miniature sun burst forth. The Allacore laughed an ungodly laugh when she saw the wispy stream of light that issued from my palm--but she stopped laughing when the tendril of light wrapped itself around her telescope-thing and snatched it from her grasp. I jerked my hand to my chest, and the light recoiled, pulling the telescope-thing into my palm with a satisfying slap. "No, Allacore," I told her, leveling the device at her, "I think it is your power that will benefit me." The device hummed louder than before, and she began to shriek.
I was bursting with energy. I could have run a marathon, and I suppose at that point I should have stopped. I was past caring about the welfare of this despicable Allacore, though, and I noticed that her shrieks had gotten the attention of the masses of students around me. As she weakened, they came forth from the cells, broke out of the mindless lines they had been herded into, and encouraged by this, I held the device steady. The hum was deafening now, drowning out the Allacore's unholy screams. The device was shaking so hard that I needed both hands to hold it.
All at once the Allacore was silent. Her body seemed to crumble, to collapse in on itself--and then she was gone. The chair crashed to the ground and lay still, sitting at a sharp, broken angle. On the grassy field where hundreds of people had been prisoners only moments before there was silence, and then the cheering started. Grateful students surged out of the holding cells and toward me, cheering their happiness, their thanks. I knelt panting there on the path, the telescope-thing hanging useless from my hand, stunned. It was Trevyn who reached me first, Trevyn who pulled me to my feet and started dragging me away from the crowd. "We have got to get you out of here, Ellane!" he shouted over the noise, and the alarm in his tone brought me back to my senses. Without questioning why, I ran with him, following him away from the university campus and the masses of students who had so narrowly avoided capture.
*****
Trevyn secured the door, fastening the lock in the knob, the deadbolt, and the chain lock before he turned to regard me where I sat shaking on his couch. It was all too much, it had all happened too fast, and the shock of it was threatening to overcome me. The look Trevyn gave me as he approached said I had no time for that.
"You can go lie down and recover in a few minutes," he told me, sitting down next to me. "Right now I need to talk to you. The situation is very serious. What happened back there?"
"What do you mean, what happened back there?" I said indignantly, frightened by his grave tone and offended by his manner. "You played hero with an Allacore commander, that's what happened back there. And she was going to kill you for it."
"Probably," he agreed, with a calmness that frightened me further. "In the end it wouldn't have mattered. Lots of people would have died there, one way or another. I might have bought them some time, maybe time enough for some of them to escape."
"You would have bought them nothing," I said sourly. "You saw them; they were like sheep. They would never have thought to run. And you would have been dead. But they didn't have to run, and you didn't have to die. Why is that so serious?"
"Oh, Ellane," he sighed, taking my hand, "that is so typical of you. You think so much about some things, and then not at all about others. Right now all of those people are very grateful for what you did. They'll go home and they'll tell their families and friends about their miraculous savior. But in a day or two--or less--that will fade. Human nature is strange. They won't remember the terror of their capture, or the danger they were in, or any of that. What they will remember is you, and the impossible things you did today. The Allacore commander is gone. They will never have to deal with her again. But you are still here, and still among them. Do you think, after what they saw today, they will ever think of you as normal again?"
I sat there dumbfounded as his words sank in. "I'm not normal," I said finally, realizing it for the first time. I met his eyes, and they were sad eyes. "What can I do?"
"I don't know," he said heavily. "But I do know you shouldn't go back to your place. There was probably no one in that crowd who knew you, but you shouldn't take that chance. Stay here."
"But--what about you? You're student body president. Almost all of them knew who you were."
"Undoubtedly. But then, I wasn't the one who fought an Allacore with balls of light. I'm sure I will be asked about you. For your protection, I think I'm going to have to lie. I'll tell them I have no idea who you were. In their state, I doubt any of them saw us walk up together."
I frowned. "But if they find me staying here?"
"How? They will need a search warrant to get in, and if they get one, we'll get you out of here before they come to serve it. I can protect you, Ellane, but you're going to have to trust me."
"I trust you completely," I told him, and he squeezed my hand.
"Then tell me what that was earlier."
"I don't know, and that's the God's honest truth. I've never done anything like that before--I never knew I could. I only knew I couldn't let her kill you. I had to stop her. And I did."
"Yes, you did." He sighed, and patted my hand. "You'd better go rest now. You look like you need it. Whatever that was, it had to be a strain." He stood up and led me down the short hallway, into what was apparently the apartment's second bedroom. The double bed must have had an extra mattress on it, as tall as it was, and the bedspread and curtains were pastels. I glanced at him, and he flushed. "Well, I had intended on asking you to move in at some point," he said uncomfortably. "I just didn't realize it would be like this."
I hugged him hard. "Thank you, Trevyn." His shirt muffled my voice.
"You're very welcome, of course." He suddenly stepped back from me. "Now get some rest. I'm serious about that."
"Yes, sir." I saluted facetiously as he closed the door behind him.
*****
So that was how I came to be living with Trevyn Blaine. As he predicted, there was a hostile backlash against my actions, which I thought was completely insane. Where would all those angry people have been if I hadn't done what I had? Enslaved? In medical experiments? Dead?
It didn't seem to matter. Overnight, Trevyn became the hero of the campus, the one who had stood fast and saved them all from the Allacore commander. According to popular opinion, he had saved them from me as well, running me off before I could do them harm. I never left the apartment, but Trevyn brought home the papers. The editorials burned off the pages. I sighed and shook my head; what else could I do? Human nature was what it was, and if Trevyn tried to explain what had happened, they would have turned on him as well.
So I hid out in the apartment, and I stopped attending my classes, and I never went out into the world for a moment. I stayed in my room--and I practiced. What had come so easily in the high emotion of battle was hard to reproduce, at first. I had to concentrate till my eyes crossed to summon a wisp of light. But by the end of my third day in the apartment I could manage a ball of light almost as big as the one I had hurled at the Allacore commander. Trevyn never asked about my unusual power again, and when I tried to tell him about my practice, he just shrugged. I guess he figured he was better off not knowing.
That was when the headaches started. The first day I wrote it off to practicing too hard; after all I had summoned my biggest ball of light ever, and I had done it strictly through my own willpower. I was surprised when painkillers didn't help, but not unduly concerned. Typical stress headache, I told Trevyn, all I needed was a good night's sleep and I would be fine in the morning. He eyed my pale complexion dubiously but made no comment.
The second day was no better. My skull resonated with hammer blows from the inside out, my skin had all the color of pastry dough, and my eyes were surrounded by huge dark circles. I ached all over and I couldn't keep warm. When Trevyn came home for lunch, my sunken cheeks astonished him. My face had gone from merely sickly to downright skeletal over the course of a few hours. He skipped his afternoon classes and spoon-fed me soup at my bedside. When my eyes could no longer stand to have the lamp on, he spoon-fed me soup in the dark.
The third day I couldn't even get out of bed. Sitting up made me feel faint and dizzy, so I stopped trying. When Trevyn brought in the first soup of the day, I made a feeble attempt at humor and told him he should just hook me up to a soup IV. He didn't smile.
That afternoon the fever came. I soaked the sheets with sweat, and complained of the heat even with the fan on. My skin was on fire. I would no longer tolerate soup, and it agitated me so much that Trevyn quit trying to give it to me. By midnight I was having convulsions, and hallucinating. Trevyn told me I spent hours raving about Allacores, something he could only attribute to the attack a few days before. I thrashed around there on the bed, burning up with fever and unable to speak coherently, seeing things that weren't there, and Trevyn struggled with his dilemma. He was concerned for my health if he didn't take me to a hospital, and concerned for my safety if he did. In the end he made the difficult decision to keep me at the apartment. He draped me in damp towels, even wound my hair up in a wet towel on top of my head in a desperate attempt to bring my temperature down. He kept a wooden spoon by the bed for me to bite when I convulsed, and bathed my forehead with cool water while I hallucinated. And he prayed to a God many people found it hard to believe in since the Allacores came, and he wept when I finally fell asleep.
I woke up on the fifth morning. Trevyn slept in a chair beside the bed, his head slumped to one side at an angle that looked extremely uncomfortable. Towels covered me, stiff in that once-was-wet manner. I wanted to push them off of me, but I didn't even have the strength for that. In my weakened state, the frustration was more than I could handle, and hot tears slid down my face.
Trevyn jerked suddenly awake with a start, looking fearfully all around him. "Ellane? Are you alright? Where are you?" His wild gaze finally landed on me on the bed. "You're awake," he observed with surprise. "How are you feeling? Ellane, why are you crying?"
"I'm sorry," I sniffled, and managed to raise a hand to wipe at my tears. "I'm just so weak...."
He rubbed at his neck and leaned over, pulling towels off of me and piling them by the bed. "Honey, you've got to expect that. Do you realize how sick you were? You didn't know who I was--you didn't even know who you were."
Something in the way he said that rang flat. "What do you mean?"
Trevyn glanced at me sidelong. "You thought you were an Allacore," he said with a nervous laugh.
I sat there in stunned silence. I had thought I was an--Allacore? That was--was--unthinkable! Allacores were monsters, just monsters. I had more respect for the roaches that occasionally wandered into my bathroom than for Allacores. There was nothing in the world I despised more than Allacores. Nothing.
Trevyn took in the look on my face. "Don't look so upset. I know you're a xenophobe, but you were hallucinating, after all. Here, sit up a little and I'll take that towel out of your hair."
I struggled to cooperate, but in the end Trevyn put one arm behind me to hold me up, and used the other one to unwind the towel from my hair. I sighed in relief and flopped back on the pillows. Only then did I see the look on his face. "What? What's wrong?"
"Ellane....your hair...."
Panic gripped my throat. "What? What about my hair? Trevyn, talk to me!"
Without a word Trevyn reached over to the dresser and gave me a hand mirror. I took one last glance at his expression, and faced my reflection. The world seemed to stop, my gasp seemed to fill the room. The mirror fell from my hand.
My hair was white. Completely white, white like fresh-fallen snow. I looked up at Trevyn. He looked pretty much like I felt, like maybe we had both eaten too much cotton candy before getting on the tilt-a-whirl. "What happened to me?"
He shook his head slowly, picking the mirror up off the bed. "I don't know, Ellane. I don't know."
*****
In the aftermath of that traumatic discovery, I started down the long road to recovery. Trevyn fingered my hair and told me it was probably just some weird side effect of my illness that would reverse itself in time, but I couldn't bring myself to believe that. My hair was white--beyond blonde, and not at all like old people's white hair. Sitting alone with the hand mirror, I had to admit to myself that I had only seen hair like that one place before--on an Allacore.
A yawning pit opened in my stomach. I hated seeing any similarities at all between myself and those awful creatures, and I spent all morning working up the nerve to share my observation with Trevyn when he came home for lunch.
"Allacore hair?" He looked as shaken as I had been by the idea. "I don't know....I still say it's because you were sick. Why in the world would you suddenly have Allacore hair?"
I could feel the blood drain from my face. "Ohmigod....that's it. It was that device."
"What device?" Trevyn eyed me as if he feared I might start raving again.
"That telescope thing! That thing I used on the Allacore--didn't she say it was going to take my power and give it to her?"
He sat down. "Oh, Lord. If that thing transfers power....and you left it on her until it killed her...."
"I don't know." I swallowed hard. "I don't know what would happen. Do you think that's why I got sick?"
He considered it. "Maybe. That, or something you transferred."
That conversation was enough to give me nightmares. I couldn't stop myself from reaching the inevitable conclusion--if the device transferred power, and I left it turned on the Allacore commander until she died, then along with whatever power I had received I had also received an Allacore's life force. And if I had transferred an Allacore's life force into myself, then white hair was probably the least of my troubles. But I didn't say anything more on the subject to Trevyn. In my mind, though, I kept a list of troubling new symptoms...
My hair stayed milky white. Over the course of the next few days, my eyes faded to a steely, intense gray that was almost metallic. Trevyn suggested uncertainly that the new color of my hair must have been making my eyes look different. All I could manage for a response to that was a strange smile. I ate normally, but my strength was very slow to return. My face was haunting and gaunt, and my whole body looked skeletally thin. When I finally could stand up out of bed, I was a full four inches taller than I had been--and I was almost six feet tall before! My cheekbones were higher, and more prominent. My fingers were noticeably longer. My ears were taking on a strange shape--almost as if they were trying to come to a point on top.
I faced myself in the mirror over the dresser one day, and realized with a chill that the traits that made me recognizably me were slipping away. Already my own mother would have had to look twice to know me--I would have had to look twice to know me.
I couldn't deny what was happening to me. These traits that were slowly making me unrecognizable were Allacore traits. The abyss yawned open in my stomach, and my hands were slick with cold sweat. Allacore traits! Was the Allacore life force I had absorbed slowly dominating my own? The Allacore invasion threatening the world as a whole was taking place on a more immediate scale in the details of my own face, the features of my own body. And as I looked into the steely Allacore eyes in the mirror that looked levelly back at me, I knew that Trevyn couldn't protect me from this. No one could protect me from this, and the consequences were sure to be disastrous to anyone who tried.
I knew what I had to do. I dug out my old canvas backpack and filled it with everything it would hold--a few changes of clothes, my wallet, toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush. I threw my makeup bag disdainfully back on the counter. What use had an Allacore for makeup? All the creams and powders on all the drugstore shelves in the world couldn't disguise the changes in me. Surely it would be the height of vanity to use makeup to try to make this face beautiful--my problems went far beyond how I looked. I stuffed a thin blanket into the bag and zipped it shut.
I knew I had to leave, but I had no idea where to go. I walked through the apartment one last time, trying to memorize every detail. I wished I could say goodbye to Trevyn, but I knew it was better this way. The less Trevyn knew about my situation, the better off he would be. He was scheduled to graduate at the end of this semester. With his political savvy and ambition, I knew he would go far--if he didn't have some half-human half-Allacore freak holding him back. I wiped the tears roughly off my face with a hand that felt too large to be mine, and locked the front door behind me.
*****
I didn't even look at a map; I just picked a road and followed it out of town. Sixteen miles later I came to a small town. Sixteen miles--hardly worth starting the car for, and it had taken me most of the day to get there. My feet had big puffy blisters, my face was sunburned, and I ached in places I hadn't known I had. At the first diner I came to I stopped.
The bells on the door jingled when I pushed it open, and a woman's voice from the back called, "Be right with you, honey." I tossed my backpack onto the bench seat of a booth, and edged myself in beside it. Vinyl red and white checked tablecloths covered the tables, and a neon clock advertising some beer or another hung over the counter. One of the neon letters was on the fritz, and buzzed on and off incessantly. It gave me a headache to watch it, so I looked away.
The woman who came to the table had hair dyed so red it had a pink cast to it, and her lipstick was very red indeed. The crow's feet by her eyes told a story that her pancaked makeup couldn't hide. Her name was embroidered in blue thread on her pink uniform dress: "LaVerne." She smiled at me, though, and her smile seemed genuine. "What'll it be, hon?"
I hadn't even glanced at the menu--I probably couldn't afford half of what was on there anyway. The few dollars I had in my wallet had to last me indefinitely now. What on earth had I gotten myself into? "Do you have grilled cheese?" I said at last, uncertainly.
"Course. You have anything to drink?"
"Just water," I said softly, for some insane reason embarrassed by my order.
"Sure thing. I'll have that out for you in a sec, hon." She ripped the top sheet off her order pad and slipped her pen behind her ear, turning back toward the kitchen. "Got a big spender here for you, Charlie," I heard her say. She clipped the order onto the string stretched above the length of the counter.
I sighed and picked up a packet of sugar, playing with it idly. My situation was a good deal worse than I wanted to admit, even to myself. I had nowhere to sleep, very little money, and no way to earn more. What was I going to do?
I toyed with the sugar packet, but it was offering no answers.
I had arrived at no great conclusions when LaVerne brought my meal; a grilled cheese sandwich cut into triangles on a chipped plate piled high with broken potato chips. She set my water down beside the plate. It was in a big plastic cup that said "Enjoy Coke" in very faded white lettering, and it had a slice of lemon stuck on the edge. "Here you go, sugar," she said. "Need anything else?"
I hesitated, considering all of the things I might tell her, and finally shook my head. "No, thanks, this looks great." It was the truth. The sandwich was my first meal that day, and it looked great.
I ate in contemplative silence, turning my options over in my mind. I couldn't go back to Trevyn's without endangering him; I couldn't let him take that risk. I had to stand on my own. But I was almost out of money, and I had no place to stay. I was going to have to find a job, first of all. After I had a source of income, I could worry about finding somewhere to stay. It would overwhelm me if I tried to worry about everything at once.
Before I realized it, I had cleaned the plate, and drained the last of my water. As if the clatter of the ice in the empty cup was a signal, LaVerne appeared at the table. "How was everything? You need some more water?" She held the pitcher ready by the cup.
"Um--no, thanks. It was great." I hesitated as she gathered my plate and cup. "I'm new here, and....do--do you know where I might find some work?"
She eyed me a moment, the place and cup in one hand and the pitcher of ice water in the other. A large drop of condensation gathered on the bottom of the pitcher, and fell to the floor while she considered me. I watched it, fighting an urge to squirm under that silent gaze.
"I'm probably crazy," she said finally. "I don't know you from Adam, and it's plain that you've got trouble. But for some crazy reason I feel like I should help you." She shifted the pitcher in her grasp as if it was straining her wrist. "Lord knows we could use the help. Charlie and me, we run this place ourselves, you know. Was easier when we were younger, but now....well, I could really use another pair of hands to help me out around here."
I stared at her, afraid to believe what I was hearing. "You'd let me work here--for you?"
She shrugged, curbing the gesture short before she slopped water out of the pitcher. "Call me crazy. Like I said, we need the help."
Flustered, I scrambled around in my backpack for my wallet. "I--thank you....how much do I owe you?"
She gestured derisively with the water pitcher. "On the house. Look, I know it ain't my place to say, but it's plain you're on hard times. Charlie and me, we were on hard times too once...." She trailed off for a second. "Anyway, point is, there's a little room back of the diner. It isn't much, but it's a bed when you're sleepy, and a shower when you're dirty."
I was flabbergasted. And I couldn't help but wonder if she would have taken me in if she had known what I was, what I had done. "I--I can't thank you enough," I said, as clearly as I was able. "You're very kind."
"And you're very tired." LaVerne waved that pitcher my direction again. "Why don't you go ahead to the back and get yourself settled in...." she paused expectantly, and I realized that I had never told her my name.
"Ellane," I said, cramming my wallet back into my backpack and zipping it shut. "Ellane Williams.
She nodded in my direction. "I'm LaVerne Spencer. My husband Charlie is the cook, I expect you'll see him tomorrow. We open at six. See you then?"
"With bells on," I assured her, smiling in spite of myself.
*****
And so I worked at Charlie's Diner, six a.m. to ten p.m. every day except Sunday, when we were closed. The hours were long, the work was tiring, and the pay was minimal, but I was more grateful than I could say. The little room behind the diner was my haven, and in the cloudy mirror over the bathroom counter, I watched the disconcerting changes in myself continue.
My thick, white hair grew unbelievably fast--it was already halfway down my back. I wore it pulled up under a hairnet at work, and no one seemed to notice its incredible color. But the worst shock came when I went to wash my face one evening. When I stuck my hands under the running water, there were no fingernails on my fingers! The tips of my fingers were forming deep cracks in them, like you might expect in the middle of winter when your skin was too dry. I bought a pair of crocheted lace gloves at a thrift store and wore them constantly to cover my hands. What could I do? I was inexorably becoming that which I hated most.
Toward the end of my second week at the diner, a stranger in a dark suit came in early for dinner. He wore dark sunglasses even indoors, and carried a black leather briefcase that stayed on the table while he ate. He regarded me from behind those sunglasses with a long, steady gaze that made me acutely uncomfortable. I took his order and stayed away from his table, but I could still feel that prickly gaze burning into my back as I worked. I dropped his strip steak dinner on the table with a clatter, and backed a step away from him. "Anything else?"
"No, no, this looks fine. I'm famished," he said, ignoring the food. He barreled on with his one-sided conversation before I could retreat to the kitchen. "I'm on my way back to DC--I've been investigating an Allacore incident over at the university."
"Really?" I croaked. My hands felt clammy.
"Sure enough, and who would have thought such a thing would happen way the hell out here? That Trevyn Blaine, though, he handled it exceptionally well. I guess you've probably heard of him, everyone has by now. A real hero."
I nodded numbly. What was he doing? How could I get out of this conversation?
"That's actually the reason they sent me," he continued conversationally, nailing me to the spot with that dispassionate stare. "The President is very interested in him; in fact he's already been flown out to Washington for some interviews. Someone like that could go far right now, politically speaking."
"That's wonderful," I said, "but I really don't--"
"But I found some other things, too." He was still staring at me, speaking exactly as though I had not said a word. "According to several eyewitnesses, it wasn't Trevyn Blaine who defeated the Allacore at all. They say there was a woman there, who has since left town."