Chapter 3: Ponder

The morning broke with a blustery chill in the air. Storm clouds of varying shades of gray lay heavy in the sky and the smell of snow was thick. It was a perfect Detroit day – dark and menacing – and Calix couldn't help but think that the day somehow reflected his mood.

The young man walked carefully out of the back door of the house he was living in. He'd spent much of the night changing his security; no one would sneak in through the closet doorway now – he'd added a hidden keypad to the locking mechanism. Then, with a visible grimace, he'd added a keycode for his cousin and texted it to him.

His retreat from the bitterness of the world was already compromised; there was no reason to force his cousin to break things to get in. He was just thankful that Rico didn't know all of the various entrances into that sub-basement. At least, he didn't think Rico knew; like him, Rico held things close to his chest so it was possible his cousin knew more than he let on.

After sleeping for a few hours, he'd rose, did his stretches and then his normal 10 mile run. It was a routine he'd started years ago; 10 mile run in the morning followed by an hour and a half of exercise and weight lifting targeting his core, chest and arms. All of that followed by a light breakfast. In the afternoon, he'd spend a half hour doing yoga, run 10 miles parkour, then another hour and a half using weight-training and other exercises targeting his back, legs and shoulders. He followed it all with a light, nutritious dinner. It kept him fit and lean and probably had saved his life more than a few times.

Calix walked through the backyard to the alley and then turned to his left. Three yards down, he stopped and opened a garage door, using a key from his pocket. He'd done old man Pestle a favor a few months back and the slim, gray-haired octogenarian had agreed to let him use part of the garage to store his motorcycle. Of course, the fact that Calix had spent a few nights making sure the garage would be difficult to break into also helped the negotiations.

The motorcycle was necessary both to his daylight persona as well as the ghost he became at night. Western International High School was firmly situated in Bruiser territory; it wouldn't do to walk to school and the buses could be downright dangerous. The motorcycle wasn't safe either, of course, but the freedom of movement provided options that simple walking couldn't. Besides, he could always get off the motorcycle in the event of trouble.

He reached into a hidden opening under the motorcycle's seat and pulled out a long, thin metal plate. He touched a small metal wand to the license plate currently mounted on the motorcycle and caught it as it fell off. He swapped the two; the plate from under the cycle's seat went on the plate holder with a heavy clink and the plate he'd just removed was put back into the hidden seat cache. Two plates – one for day, one for night – further protecting who he was. The plates had been remarkably easy to attain and the magnetic locks he'd welded to them allowed him to swap them fairly easily.

He keyed the bike's lock and pressed a button next to it, raising the garage door. He frog-marched the bike out of the garage and then re-pressed the button to shut the garage door. It was a courtesy to Mr. Pestle; the acoustics in the garage made the motorcycle sound even louder than it was. Taking it out of the garage before starting it up might just let the old man sleep for a while longer. It was a minor thing but Pestle was doing him a huge favor and Calix didn't like abusing it.

The ride to school was uneventful. Cal noticed several Bruisers walking in a small group and acting for all the world like they were the masters of creation but he didn't draw attention to himself. Right now, he was Calix Gebel, student, not Espanto, enforcer of the Cholos. It was a slight distinction but he worked hard to keep the two halves of his life separate. It was the only way to make this work – and Rico had told him in no uncertain terms that he was expected to make this work.

Rico. He still wasn't sure how to take his cousin's news. Rico had a CAP of 6.7. His cousin, the man he respected probably more than any other, had a high enough CAP to volunteer for the Confederacy Marines; he could be 'picked up' and go off-planet.

Rico wouldn't be here when the Sa'arm arrived. Cal would be by himself, completely alone. Somehow, deep inside, he'd always known he would end up alone. It just seemed – appropriate, somehow. The feeling was cold as it surged through him but he paid it no mind. Alone or in a crowd, he would do anything needed.

He couldn't help but recall all of their talks about what bullshit the CAP system was. They'd denounced it angrily, spitting about how it was just another way for the rich to screw the poor. Although none of the one percenters admitted it, the two of them had been positive that when push came to shove, the hallowed wealthy would be off Earth laughing as the Sa'arm came to eat their fill.

Fucking Rico. How could he test? How could he do that, knowing what they knew, living as they lived? Calix felt it was a betrayal at the most fundamental level of their brotherhood. They were familia and family didn't treat each other that way.

Rico had said that Alicia had convinced him. 'She wore me down, ' he'd said. As he'd thought about it, long into the night, Calix couldn't come to grips with that. Rico made concessions to the young girl he claimed to love – and Calix had no basis for doubt on that score – but he would never allow himself to be led blindly. In order for her to convince him, he had to be half-convinced already. What had changed his mind?

And Alicia ... Why would she force that? Didn't Alicia see how the others were treated? Didn't she see what the other people – the ones they called concubines – the people who didn't have the CAP score to get off planet on their own but had to rely on those rich bastards with a high score – didn't she see how they were treated? The internet was full of stories; the dark web, the near-mythical, exclusive and encrypted part of the internet that required special software to access and was the haunting ground of hackers and rebels, had even more. He'd read everything about it voraciously, unconsciously trying to align the memories of his prim and proper step-Mom with the cold facts he'd had to witness on the recording during her pick-up. What he'd found nearly made him vomit. The concubines were no longer even considered human. They weren't what the aliens called citizens. They were property. They could do nothing without their owner's approval. Calix just could not see Alicia fulfilling that role. She was too headstrong. She was too willful.

Rico had also wanted him to test. His cousin had thought he had the qualities to get a high score for himself. It was a pipe dream, though. Calix knew he could never be what they wanted him to be. He could never become a monster.

Buried deep in the back of his mind, though, there was doubt. The voice inside took a perverse glee in reminding him that there were some places he knew he could fit. He could kill. He had killed. Although it ate at him sometimes, seeing the faces of the men he'd ended, he was capable of dealing death and he could do it quickly and cleanly with a minimum of remorse (at least at the time).

Like everything else in life, the bill came later and it had to be paid. There were times when the nightmares would come and he couldn't stand to be inside of his own skin; he could never kill for no reason, but he could kill. That's how he could justify it, how he could push back against the nightmares; he'd always clung to the fact that the men whose lives he'd taken needed killing. He'd grounded himself on the idea that if he didn't kill them, they would gladly have killed him. Life in southwest Detroit was rough and if you didn't take control of it, it would take control of you.

So, Calix knew he could kill. He knew that he was pretty smart. Maybe not a rocket scientist but he could hold his own when going over computers and other machines. He was a whiz with the alien technology for whatever reason. It galled him, at least a little bit, to think that he might actually think like they did; that he might think, even slightly, like the aliens that were turning the human race into monsters.

He could accept Rico's statement of his loyalty at face value; he was loyal. Loyal to his family, at least. The Cholos were family. Rico was family. Even Alicia was family – you didn't necessarily have to like your family. In Calix's mind, family stood greater than anything else. Family ... then everybody else. Us vs. them.

Calix didn't believe in bravado or false modesty; lying to yourself could get you killed no matter if you over-estimated or under-estimated yourself. Rico was right, as far as it went. If CAP were based on or heavily influenced by bravery, intelligence or loyalty, he'd probably manage a good score. The problem was that Calix didn't believe that was what the CAP was based on – but Rico believed it. Either way, though, he couldn't be the last thing that seemed to be required.

He couldn't be a monster. He couldn't treat others like they were property; to be discarded by his whim. He couldn't go into a room and force a woman to strip and then fuck her. It just was not in him. For that among the myriad other reasons, he knew that he would never even test for a CAP score.

His thoughts in turmoil, his body did the routine chores of chaining his motorcycle and setting the motorcycle's alarm on its own. Chaining the bike really didn't help; any of the gangs could strip the cycle down to bare metal in minutes. They'd have the thing stripped before anyone around could even respond to the alarm – not that anyone would. In Detroit, you minded your business.

The alarm, though, had a cellular component that would let Cal know someone was messing with it. He'd been suspended last year responding to it – but managed to catch a few thugs in the act of taking his bike apart before they could get anything fully off it. It had been worth the suspension; the bike could be replaced but it was his only method of transportation ... and it held sentimental value. He'd rebuilt it himself from the motorcycle his father had left him after his death.

It wasn't until he found himself on the steps of the school that he could clear his mind of the previous night's conversation. Pushing the conversation into a box and storing it away, he took a deep breath and then plunged into the school. He kept his eyes down, never looking up except to make sure he was going in the right direction – but he'd mastered watching out of the corner of his eyes to make sure he was on the correct path so that was easy. He kept to the sides of the hall, never walking quickly, always shuffling his feet. He wore big, bulky sweatshirts and baggy pants; nondescript clothing that was easily forgotten. Calix was the master of going unnoticed. It worked well in the nighttime when he moved effortlessly from shadow to shadow; hiding in school required a whole different skill set but he'd mastered that as well. Unnoticed and invisible – that was what he strove for. Espanto. Ghost. That was what he wanted to be in both halves of his life.

The game continued in his first period class. He sat in the far back, his face blank. He never looked up, never raised his hand. Mrs. Calavierri droned on about 'Julius Caesar' and he drifted off; he'd read all of the books on the syllabus within the first 3 weeks of class. As soon as his mind drifted, however, it moved to pull the compartment with last night's conversation back open.

He headed that off quickly. The betrayal he felt was too new, too raw to be examined without the passion of his anger. He needed to give it some time to truly understand what Rico had said. Now was not that time. Instead, he allowed the teacher's voice to drone out and started going over his plans for Wednesday night in his mind. He didn't have the plans with him – he didn't dare get caught with them – but he had them memorized in his head and he went over them carefully.

The hard part would be getting up to the top floor. He considered trying to climb all the way to the top on the outside of the building but that would be foolhardy. The party – some premier party for GlobalTech's new personal protection system that Calix knew had more flaws than he could poke a stick at – would be limited to the first floor showroom and the gallery on the second and third floors. That meant he only had to climb to the fourth floor and make his way inside; of course, he could climb to the top if he had to but why court danger?

Thankfully, considering his options made the first period go much faster. He didn't learn anything – but then he seldom really learned anything at school. It was one of the reasons he'd talked to Rico about dropping out ... and one of the things that annoyed him when Rico ordered him to continue 'his education'. If only his cousin knew...

Calix absolutely hated the long walk from first to second period on 'A' days; he always felt so exposed. As a rule, he didn't wear his armor to school though he could have; all of his clothing was baggy enough to hide the armor under it. Occasionally, though, if he had absolutely no time between end of class and having to be somewhere for the Cholos he'd carry the armor in the saddle bags on his motorcycle. That was a last resort, though; he didn't want to chance someone swiping it – or even, really, learning about it. Rico was the only one in the gang who had any idea what the armor was capable of and even he didn't know everything. As for outside the gang, most people thought the Cholos' enforcer just preferred black clothing.

"Cal! Dude!" He heard the voice and closed his eyes. He didn't need this today. He recognized the voice and wasn't really prepared to deal with his friend today. Still, he knew that Jay wouldn't give up, so he turned and flashed him a small smile. "Dude! Did you get the answers to 12 and 14?"

Jay Manning was, for all intents and purposes, Calix's oldest friend. At one time, Cal had considered the boy his best friend. That had been before that horrible time 2 years earlier, though, when his world had collapsed. With his world falling to pieces around him, Cal had collapsed into himself. For a time, he became completely anti-social, pushing others away viciously. Only Rico had been able to reach into the dark, cold, empty place to which Cal had retreated and lift the boy out of it. His friendship to Jay, unfortunately, had been a victim of that time.

Jay still considered Cal a friend; maybe even one of his best, though he had other friends who he spent more time with now. Still, Jay had never given up on Cal; he'd just wanted to give the angry, hurt teen some space to come to grips with losing pretty much all of his nuclear family. Unfortunately, that space had grown into a chasm and, while still friendly, things weren't the same between the two.

"Yeah," Cal nodded. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a folder. Rifling through it, he pulled out two sheets of paper. "Here."

"Shit!" Jay groaned. "Two sheets? Dude, it's gonna take me too much time to copy all this!"

Cal shrugged. "I can't help it. That's how much it took."

As he spoke, he became aware of a disturbance down the hall; the noise from the far end had increased a bit and people around him were suddenly craning their necks to see what was going on. Eyes narrowed, Cal pushed closer to the lockers and let his shoulders fall. He then tilted his head around, trying to see what everyone else was looking at.

He wasn't sure what was going on. There was a young man he didn't recognize walking down the hall, a huge smile on his face. He stopped frequently to talk to people as he passed, mostly girls and young women with whom he was laughing and apparently flirting. The young man was tall, perhaps as tall as or taller than Cal himself, and he sported long, disheveled blonde hair and a dimpled smile. His teeth were white and even and his eyes a shocking blue; only his nose detracted from the look – it appeared not quite straight, as if it had been broken and fixed. The young man was broad-shouldered and his arms appeared fairly well muscled. He had some kind of blinking light on his left shoulder.

"Who's that?" Calix asked, in spite of himself.

Jay glanced up quickly and went back to copying the problem from Cal's sheet. "Oh, him. He's a new guy. Doug Henshaw. His Dad's some big honcho at GlobalTech that just got transferred here; must have really pissed someone off to get stuck out here in DEE-troit. He's a junior, like us, but word is he's got a golden fucking arm and is going to take us to State next year." He rolled his eyes. "Of course, he has a 6.7 CAP and wears that stupid fucking button to let everyone know. I heard he's already gotten into Lisa Shunt and Desiree Crump's panties."

Cal's face darkened. Out of the 600+ students enrolled in the school, only 2 had CAP scores high enough to volunteer: Jason Chaikin and Evangeline Houghton. Jason was a white kid whose father was a criminal attorney with an office on Vernor just past Clark Park – a small, urban park just across the street from the High School – and his mother owned a jewelry store over on Fort Street; he was from a rather rich family and the only reason he was at Western was because his parents could drop him off in the morning before work and he could walk to either the store or the office after school. His family actually lived in the northern suburb of Novi – but they'd bought a cheap house locally that they used as Jason's official address. Cal was sure there was more to it but he'd never been close enough to Jason to really ask.

He didn't know Evangeline well enough to make a determination one way or the other but he could bet there was some wealth or power somewhere in her history. It would be the only thing that made sense.

And now there was Doug Henshaw, son of a big-wig at GlobalTech. He could only bet that they came from money somewhere. Maybe they had lost it and had to come slumming in Detroit but there was money in their past, Calix was almost positive. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Or got eaten by aliens.

Jay glanced up, excitement in his eyes. "You should see his sister, though," he laughed, dragging Calix's thoughts away from the rigged CAP system. Jay's eyebrows raised and lowered several times. "She is FINE with a capital 'F'. Girl's only 14 but she's 5'5" or 5'6", no more than 110-115lbs, legs up to here and a body that won't quit. She has this caramel skin that makes you want to lick it and these blushing blue, almond eyes that make you want to fall over. She gots this real shiny black hair right, not the thick kinky stuff like Angela Robicheaux but the thin, soft hair like Lisa Shunt and it just kinda swirls all around her face. And her body?!? Mmm-MMMMMM, girly's got some major bullets and the nicest ass this school has ever seen. I swear, you hate to see her go but're happy to see her leave, yah-know-whut-ah-mean??"