Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

HED BEEN WATCHING HER FOR a long time. Watching how she moved through the still waters of her life. Watching the friends and family who surrounded her. It was like watching a bright tropical fish in an aquarium, bounded on all sides, safe inside the confines. Unaware of the glass walls.

He could watch her sitting at a coffee shop, intent on something in her e-book reader, drinking the same skinny latte that she always ordered. He knew her street, and he knew her home. He knew her class schedule. Calculus and AP Chem, Honors English. A 3.9 GPA, because some asshole bio teacher had knocked off her perfect score over a triviality of how she formatted her lab notes.

Smart girl.

Sharp girl.

And yet completely unaware.

It wasnt her fault. All the fish in her tank were the same. All of them swimming in perfectly controlled waters, bare millimeters from another world that was hostile to them entirely.

Moses Cruz felt like hed been watching all of them forever. But Alix Banks he could watch in that aquarium and hours could pass. Fund-raising events, field hockey tournaments, vacations to Saint Barts and Aspen. It was a safe and quiet world she lived in, and shejust like a beautiful neon tetra in a tropical tankhad no idea she was being watched.

All of her people were like that. Just a bunch of pretty fish in love with themselves and how beautiful they were, in love with their little aquarium castles. All of them thinking that they ran the world. None of them realizing that only a thin pane of glass separated them from disaster.

And here he was, standing outside, holding a hammer.

ALIX WAS SITTING IN AP CHEM when she saw him.

Shed been gazing out the window, letting her eyes wander over the perfectly manicured grounds of Seitz Academys academic quad, and as soon as she saw him standing outside, she had the feeling she knew him.

Familiar.

That was how she put it later, talking to the cops. Hed seemed familiar. Like someones older brother, the one you only glimpsed when he was back from college. Or else the sib whom Seitz wouldnt let in because of behavioral match issues. The one who didnt attend the school but showed up with Mommy and Daddy at the Seitz Annual Auction anyway because sis was Seitz Material even though he wasnt. The resentful lone wolf who leaned against the back wall, texting his friends about how fucked up it was that he was stuck killing the night watching his parents get sloppy drunk while they bid on vacations to Saint Martin and find-yourself-in-middle-age pottery classes at Lena Chisolms studio/gallery.

Familiar.

Like her tongue running the line of her teeth. Never seen, but still, known.

He was standing outside, staring up at the science building.

Ms. Liss (never Mrs. and definitely not MissMs. with the z, right?) was passing back AP Chem lab reports. Easy As. Even when Liss was putting on the pressure, she never pushed hard enough, so Alix had let the activity of the class fade into the background: students in their lab coats beside their personal sinks and burners, the rustle of papers, Ms. Liss droning on about top-tier colleges (which was code for the Ivy Leagues) and how no one was getting anywhere if they didnt challenge themselvesand Alix thinking that no one was getting anywhere anytime soon.

Suspended animation was how she thought of it sometimes. She was just another student in a cohort of students being groomed and sculpted and prepped for the future. She sometimes imagined them all floating in liquid suspension, rows and rows in holding tanks, all of them drifting. Seitz-approved skirts and blazers billowing. School ties drifting with the currents. Hair tangling across blank faces, bubbles rising from silent lips. Tangles and bubbles. Waiting for someone to say that they were finished.

Other times, she thought of it as being prepped for a race that they were never quite allowed to run. Each Seitz student set up and poised, runners on their starting blocks, ready to take over the worldas soon as their control-freak parents decided to let them get their hands on their trust funds. But no one ever gave them the gun, so they all waited and partied and studied and tested and added extracurriculars like volunteering at the battered womens shelter in Hartford so they could have meaningful material for their college-entrance essays.

And then she caught sight of himthat loner marooned on Seitzs emerald lawnsand everything changed.

For a second, when she first spied him, Alix was almost convinced that shed conjured him. He was so weirdly recognizable to her that it seemed like he could only have emerged from her own mind. A good-looking black guy in a trench coat. Short little dreadlocks, or maybe cornrowsit was hard to tell from this distancebut cool-looking whatever it was. A little bit gangsta and he was so unsettlingly familiar to her. Like some kind of music star, some guy out of the Black Eyed Peas who looked better than Will.i.am. Not an Akon, not a Kanye. They were too clean-cut. But still, somebody famous.

The more Alix studied him, the more he appeared out of place. He was just standing there, staring up at the science building. Maybe he was lost? Like his sister had been kidnapped and dragged to one of the whitest schools on the East Coast, and he was here to break her out.

Well, the school wasnt all white, but pretty close. Alix could think of maybe six kids who were actually black, and two of them were adopted. Of course, there was a solid helping of Asians and Indians because there were so many Wall Street quants who sent their kids to the school, but they were, as one of Alixs friends put it, the other white meat. Which said all you really needed to know about Seitz. If you were Ivy-bound, and headed for money and power, Seitz Academy found that it could hit its diversity targets easily.

But there was that black guy standing outside, looking in. Cool. Old-school aviator shades. Army jacket kind of trench. Looking like he could stand out on the grass all day long, watching Alix and her classmates.

Was he a new student? It was hard to guess his age from this distance, but she thought he could be the right age for a senior.

Just then, Mr. Mulroy came into view, striding with purpose.

From the mans attitude, Alix could tell the Seitz headmaster didnt think the black guy belonged on his lawn. Mulroy moved into the strangers space. Alix could see the mans lips moving, telling the stranger he wasnt at the right school.

Move along.

Mulroy pointed off campus, his body language loaded with authorityarm out and rigid, finger pointingordering the intruder back wherever hed come from, back to wherever black kids came from when they werent here on a scholarship or given a pass via Nigerian oil money into Seitzs manicured world.

Mulroy made another sharp gesture of authority. Alix had seen him do the same with new students who he nailed smoking. Shed watched them cringe and gather up their backpacks as the headmaster herded them into Weller Houses admin offices for their sentencing. Mulroy was used to making rebellious rich kids believe he was in charge. He was good at it.

The black guy was still staring up at the school, nodding as if he were paying attention to the headmasters words. But he wasnt moving to go at all. Mulroy said something else.

The stranger glanced over, taking in the man for the first time. Tall, Alix realized. He was at least as tall as the headmaster