“After all these years!” he whispers. “You promised.”
"I didn't promise you anything, Roberto. I only told you that you would be rewarded based on your results, just like everyone else. We are still a school, after all." I find the remark rather funny, but I suppress a smile. "Did you notice anything different at school today?" she continues. "Something strange or mysterious, maybe? Something out of the ordinary?" Fred looks at her vacantly and shakes his head. “Exactly what I thought. And you, Maxime?”
I’m taken completely by surprise. I had hoped to stay out of this a little longer. “Well, um... maybe you could have warned me?”
“About what, Maxime?”
“Duh. Walls... moving around like in a Harry Potter book, things appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, and... this whole time machine stuff.”
"Ah, yes, that. Did you see any of it, Roberto?" Fred shakes his head as the immense magnitude of his defeat slowly dawns on him. "I thought so. And to your point, Maxime, I would have warned you if I could have. The problem is that I’ve never seen it happen before myself."
The vice-principal. Not knowing her own school? I think, but keep my mouth shut. "I read about it in a half-decayed ancient document," she gestures vaguely towards one of the bookshelves. "But I could never tell if it was fact or fantasy, but now that I know, I can only come to one conclusion: it was you all the time. Of all people—the one with the least self-knowledge or control—you seem to have the most potential. The universe does seem to have a sense of humor."
“Mpfff.”
“Mpfff, indeed. And because of that infamous lack of control, you have been leaving a trail of chaos and destruction behind you. One would almost forget that you are our last hope.”
“She? Our last hope?” Fred blurts out. The idea that an insignificant girl like me is the vice-principal’s “last hope” is so ridiculous in his eyes that he dares to raise his voice again. And I agree. It’s absurd. “She’s a joke,” he continues. “Look at her. She’s puny. She can’t do anything. I can—”
“Look at the palms of your hands.”
“That’s nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Roberto, even you should be able to put two and two together. If not after this afternoon, then when?”
“No! I won’t! I don’t!” Fred is almost shouting now.
“Me neither,” I add, equally confused. The vice-principal looks from Fred to me and back again.
“Okay, the short version, then. We don’t have much time. It’s like this: This school is the last fully functioning outpost of The Guild, a secret organization dating back to the heyday of ancient Egyptian culture. The main objective of The Guild is to protect what we call The Equilibrium—the balance between the opposing forces of Vivenergio, the world’s life-force. These opposing forces go by many names: good and evil, creation and destruction, Yin and Yang. You need to understand, though, that this has nothing to do with what you read in most books or see in movies. ‘Good’ must not triumph over ‘evil.’ On the contrary, good and evil are equally important. The Guild’s task is to ensure that the balance between them is maintained within acceptable margins, so humanity will live to see another day.
As you know, some students and teachers here possess extraordinary talents—some powerful enough to destroy a small village or wipe all minds within miles—each posing a potential danger to The Equilibrium. Not necessarily out of malice or intent, mind you; destruction doesn’t need intent. It can happen purely by accident, through a lack of awareness, training, or simply due to bad luck by essentially good people. That’s bad enough. Now, consider how much damage a truly traumatized or evil person—yes, they exist—can inflict.
The inconvenient truth is that we can’t do much about it. Each of you must discover your talent in your own time and develop it at your own pace. It’s a universal rule. Forcing you doesn’t work; believe me, we’ve tried. You can’t make a lion eat salad. So what we do here in school your first three years is not so much training your talent as monitoring your progress. "Roberto and his friends have been training for a year and a half now. Your training would have started in a few months. She sighs. “So few of us left. Only eighteen students throughout all the years attending school today,” a hint of sadness colors her sphinx-like face. “Once we were legion; we had Guild posts all over the world, even before schools existed: monasteries, abbeys, mystical brother- and sisterhoods, and later governments, advisory councils, special interest groups, boardrooms of multinationals, old boys' networks, Freemasons, and much more, from which we influenced the trajectory of the world, protecting it from self destruction.” But then she regains her composure, with a resolute jerk of her shoulders straightening her back and controlling her voice.
“But before we can do any monitoring or training, we need of course locate the children with a talent first. And that brings me back to the list.” Carefully she lays it down on her desk almost tenderly stroking the first page. "This is maybe the most mystical precious artifact in history. Nobody really knows how but the name appears on it of every person the moment his talent manifests, roughly between four and eight years old. It is the living, evolving, always growing reflection of The Balance. It warns us of potential imbalances and danger. You could say that, in a very specific way, it predicts the future."
“Yeah, right,” escapes me. “In some magical way, a name appears on this list when a talent manifests in someone,” she goes on undeterred, “usually between their third and fifth birthday. Half of them green, the other half red, depending on how they will use their talent. Red for evil, green for good. Although, as I explained earlier, we don’t really believe in the traditional interpretations of good and evil, both are equally important. That’s the balance we protect.”
“Like in superhero comics.”
“What’s that?”
“Eh, like in the old comics. For every superhero a super-villain.” She gives me an unexpected little smile.
“Sometimes you remind me of my little brother.” This remark confuses the hell out of me, so I do the only thing I can think of: I ignore and deflect.
"Those red and green names... um, miss... are they archenemies?"
"Oversimplifying, you could call them that. However, it's more accurate to say they are two sides of the same coin: forever connected. Both play a different and essential role in maintaining balance." She sighs. "As you can imagine, interpreting the list is extremely complex, especially because it tends to change. Sometimes red names change into green or green into red. Occasionally they even move around to form new combinations." Fred and I look up in surprise. Everyone develops, matures, and overcomes personal issues. When someone does, a red name changes to green. Conversely, if someone is overcome by grief, anger, or traumatic events, their green name will turn red. That's why I made you both go through all this trouble to retrieve this list for me. I need to check it to assess where we stand right now and perhaps even understand why Mr. Kwant has kept the list from us for so long."
“So, my name is opposite this little shit’s,” Fred unexpectedly interjects, regaining some confidence after his embarrassing defeat.|
"You would think so, wouldn't you? But then again, not everything that seems logical necessarily is. Let me indulge you—I'm a bit curious myself."
She starts leafing through the pages, her elegant fingers moving purposefully along the names until she stops halfway down the second-to-last page. She looks. She looks again, but her expression remains unreadable.
"No, Roberto, your name is not next to Miss Kwintens’s." Not? I think; it seemed only inevitable. “Your name’s next to that of Mr. Stanislaw.”
“Slug?” I ask.
“The fat one?” Fred exclaims. “Impossible! It must be someone else, someone serious, someone with real power.” The humiliating notion that he’s paired with someone so insignificant, seems to be enough to shake off his last constraints. Red spots crawl up his neck to his face. I have seen it before, explosion hazard.
"Never underestimate the power of a gentle heart, Mr. Pugno. You even share his first name.” Fred shakes his head.
“Nonsense... unworthy...”
“Let it go, Roberto. You’ve been useful, but I have more important things to do now. You can leave. Tomorrow, I want to see you in class like any other student.” Without waiting for his response, she turns to me. “And now you. I know you're tired, but we have to…”
“You thought you were smart, right?” Fred’s voice rings uncomfortably loud through the office. His tone has completely transformed now that he realizes his protector has betrayed him. No trace of sadness or shock remains—only smoldering rage. “You think you hold all the cards? You think poor, stupid Roberto is only good for doing your dirty work.” All the anger and frustration, long suppressed by fear and a longing for motherly acknowledgment, have built up so much pressure that they burst out of him. “But poor, stupid Roberto had a plan B. I have a powerful friend. I’ve gone over your head.”
“There’s no ‘over my head,’ Roberto. Don’t be delusional…”
“Of course, there is. Above every vice-principal, there’s a principal. You weren't the only one who told me to look for the list. Not to retrieve it, but to destroy it. Kwant must have known that. Why else would he have disappeared?”
“Mister Kwant,” the vice-principal corrects reflexively. For the first time, though, she seems taken aback, staring with wide-open eyes at the boy-giant standing before her. “The principal? He wouldn’t…” Abruptly, her gaze snaps back to the page where my name is written. She scans it again until she stops in the middle of a chaotic tangle of minuscule, scribbled names. Because the lines are so close together, I only now notice that the spot next to my name is empty. There’s no red name. The vice-principal turns chalky white.
Flipping further back through the list, she finds another green name, also without a red name next to it. I don’t understand. There should be a balance, right? That’s what she told me. That’s the whole point of the list.
“He wouldn’t…” she repeats, her voice now so cold it cuts through the air, like daggers of ice.
“Never underestimate a Pugno,” Fred exclaims almost jubilantly. “I would have done anything for you, but you betrayed me, and a Pugno answers betrayal with betrayal. An eye for an eye.” Fred’s face has transformed into one of triumph. He laughs, and with his laughter, the trembling starts so suddenly and violently that it’s impossible for me to keep standing. I drop to the ground and crawl behind a showcase, praying that nothing heavy will fall on top of me.
It's only the beginning of a nightmarish series of events. While the trembling intensifies, small clouds escape my lips as a fast-growing layer of ice covers everything around me with astonishing speed, except for a small circle around me. The vice-principal is fighting back, balancing on her one good foot, her arms stretched out like a priest blessing a congregation. It must cost her an enormous amount of energy.
Before my eyes, she transforms into... something else. Thick dark rings form around her eyes, which look more and more like black empty holes with every passing second. Her hair turns white, her skin shrivels and darkens, stretching ever tighter around her skull. Her hands are nothing more than bones covered with paper-thin skin. Her custom-made suit hangs oversized around her shoulders. It’s a scene straight out of an old horror movie, the difference being that in those, the transformations always looked choppy and clumsy. This one is so fluid and seamless that I need to constantly readjust my mind to process what I’m actually seeing.
The slender, pale, beautiful woman is now barely recognizable anymore. She resembles something that has wandered out of fairy tales or nightmares—one of the three Fates from Greek mythology, a witch, an ancient being older than anything still alive.
All I can do is hide and wait. But for what? A bolt of lightning striking from the heavens? The hand of God crushing me like an insect? A burning spear through my heart? I brace myself for anything.