Welcome to Gaia! ::

The brief was just that--brief--and he sank down on the edge of the bed to read it before he finished packing.

A small and modest British boarding school, a spate of illnesses and strange runaways, and a cyclical history that had piqued Deus's interest. The sudden apparent propensity of the students for nighttime excursions--and a general suspicion that the activity might be in some way drug-related--had the school bringing on third-party contractors for extra security, and here Deus had managed an unobtrusive foot in the door.

Certainly this was a role that he filled much more capably than that of a substitute teacher. A gritty, stubbled American, with scars and tattoos and a low-drawn scowl and a perpetual whiff of cigarettes, certainly seemed more like a private security officer than an educator, although Taym was skeptical, as he gave himself a once-over in the mirror before he left, that anyone in their right mind would hire him to guard a building full of children. If anyone looked like they might be dispensing illicit substances to teenagers, it was him. He was suddenly glad he'd already shaved.

He brought along a copy of Old School, for obvious reasons. He hadn't really realized that boarding schools still existed, let alone so widely. He was even more rattled, on his arrival, to realize that the place was positively picturesque: the genteely-crumbling old buildings on chilly and damp countryside, the encircling trees leaning towards autumnal. Under the grey sky the place was pleasantly ancient-seeming, enjoyably timeless.

He was introduced to the faculty, to the headmistress (who looked as if she'd been carved out of a gnarled bit of driftwood and seemed displeased with him immediately despite his impeccable politeness), and to the layout of the school, guided a couple of times through the areas he'd be expected to keep an eye on. Knots of students watched him, the younger ones wide-eyed and solemn or giggling, the older ones aloof and skeptical and disgusted.

He felt old, and as a girl of perhaps ten darted down a hallway with her hair streaming behind her, fearful. The banality of new marching orders gave way to worry--worry that there really was something, that a few hundred young lives had been abruptly entrusted to his shaky hands--a few hundred young lives blissfully ignorant of all the many horrible things that might or might not lurk behind the numbers in the folder he'd been given. He'd captured Canary on his last mission but that hadn't really solved any problems, had it? That was a symptom, not the disease.

But this was what he'd asked for. This was what he'd chosen to do. He'd wanted, desperately, to be the knowing shepherd to a flock of oblivious sheep, scattering the wolves from the fold before a single lamb smelled them on the wind.

(Too late, though, for that: something, human or otherwise, was already acting here. Deus had been too late for some, perhaps for many. This is not your fault, Fionnghal reminded him. It felt hollow.)

Distant and muted was the sound of a window being opened. Bars had been added years ago to the dormitories, and yet, a window was being opened.

Silence was all he was met with for awhile, broken only by the occasional murmur and movement of students settling into bed. There was one room, though, where the slightest of autumn breezes could be felt coming through the cracks. It was the sort of thing only those particularly sensitive to cold would feel.

The door was locked but he'd been given the master key. The door, if opened, would reveal a room that belonged to three students on his list. none of them were within, the window was open just a crack, but the bars remained sturdy and in place.

There were three sets of prints, two leading out toward the treeline, the last walking along the perimeter of the building.

It was sprinkling, lightly, by the time he reached the forest. In the distance was a fleeting glimpse of a smaller figure in white, still and then suddenly racing away.

After an hour of calm he breaks into the records office.

They'd told him that they'd brought him on partly due to a lack of cameras in most of the antiquated buildings. This was, he thought, either an incredibly stupid thing to tell a third-party security contractor, or else Deus had done a remarkably good job arranging his cover.

After a few minutes to figure out the filing system--this is not easy--he finds the laminated maps the faculty uses to keep track of which students are in which rooms, silently grateful that some old fogey has resisted going digital entirely, and from here he finds three files. He photocopies them, restores everything to order, and takes a few minutes out of lingering paranoia to wipe down everything he's touched.

He wonders, briefly, whether Deus has ever seen to that; whether someone dusting for prints would get a return on a dead heroin addict from Georgia with a long rap sheet. Better not to test it.

Tucking the photocopies into his jacket, he resumes his rounds and he sees to it that when the morning bell arrives for breakfast he's stationed in the hallway from the night before.

It's three girls that emerge, as he'd known it would be from the files: two thirteen, one fourteen, the first two mousey-blonde and green-eyed, the third dark-haired and tawny-skinned with dark doe eyes. She looks at him, politely curious as she passes him, and he doesn't give her more than a glance.

He endears himself to a pack of twelve-year-old boys by nimbly retrieving a run-away bouncy ball as it careens past him and returning it with a nonchalant pass, putting a finger to his lips with a grin because he knows as well as they do they aren't supposed to have the damn things in the hall. A teacher finds him in the hallway and invites him, politely, to join them for breakfast--dinner, for Taym.

He sits with the faculty at a long table and tries to eat normally, engaging in polite small-talk, enduring the curiosity of the younger staff and the disapproval of the older, and asking dumb-public-school-American questions about the boarding school, about the family atmosphere, about the building. This feels at times more like Death work, but the goal, Taym thinks, is different: this is the necessary exposition to the main story. This is the first course. He leaves his jacket on, explaining apologetically that it's a lot hotter in Florida.

The true work, the real work, comes later. But curiosity is a hard habit to break. He laughs politely at a joke, and his eyes scan the chaos of the dining hall, looking for some anomaly that isn't there, and never once looking at the trio of girls chatting by one of the time-fogged windows.

After the bell he shakes hands with everyone and retires to the room he's been given, and he removes the photocopies from his jacket.

He wakes up mid-afternoon desperate for a cigarette, realizing he hasn't had one since before breakfast, and he shelters in the overhang behind the library and smokes--he's been told stiffly that if he must smoke it is permissible to do so there and also that they will be looking for cigarette butts, Mr. Shepherd--and weathers the stares of the student body as they trot from one building to another, as they stream into and out of the library, their classes for the day over.

He is eventually accosted by the boys from the day before and he feels a pang of guilt at their obvious interest in him while he stands there with a cigarette in his hand. So he coughs, as disgustingly as he can manage, and they seem only slightly put off. They are full of questions and curiosity as the kids at the Mississippi high school had been, and eventually one of them asks the inevitable question about his throat, the scarf insufficient to hide it, and Taym glances up towards one of the adults in the vicinity, who isn't making any move to break up the interrogation.

He tells them it's a scar from throat surgery, and he indicates the cigarette butt as he field strips it and stashes it in a pocket. They don't seem convinced. It's not a very good lie.

One of them asks him if he's ever played football, and he starts to say of course he has before he realizes he means American football. "Not on a team or anything," he says.

He isn't sure how it happens but ten minutes later he's being run through the basics, surrounded by a mob of enthusiastic and laughing teenage boys, the maths professor, and the two teachers who double as football coaches--the presence of the latter three making him considerably less ill-at-ease.

He's been taking good care of himself. He's much stronger, now, than any human has any right to be, let alone one that looks like he does. He has to tone it down, constantly check himself. It's hard to juggle a soccer ball in motorcycle boots, and the boys are half-derisive, half-encouraging. He is gratified when a minor argument breaks out over whose team the American is on and that it's not because neither of them want him.

Two hours later it's almost dark and the rain's starting to fall again in a persistent, hazy drizzle, and the three adults present--Taym is no longer grouping himself with them but with the students in their vibrant, at times cruel, at times generous energy--seem reluctant to do it but put a halt to the game, the actual score of which has been forgotten in the greater pleasure of stretching legs and shows of skill or jester ineptitude. He's streaked with mud and grass stains, tired, laughing, hair slicked with sweat and rain across the back of his neck.

There are manful handshakes all around, a fact he finds it difficult not to grin over.

"Shouldn't have worn yourself out before work, Shepherd," one of the oldest boys jokes. "We're all going to make a break for it, old man. Right into our trap."

"Hook, line, and sinker," Taym agrees around a laugh, secure in Fionnghal's presence in the back of his head, of a strange life that's given him the ability to shrug off two hours of hard exercise with a few minutes of rest.



He smokes another cigarette as the field empties. Delyth Arthur, shy and quiet, watches him for a moment from the eaves of the dorm building before withdrawing inside.

He remembers the damp fur of the fawn's brow under his fingers, of the intact bars over an open window through which something had escaped.

Two hours of respite is enough, he thinks, as the resignation and the anxiety creep back in. He washes his face in the bathroom sinks and by the time the lights-out bell rings to signal the beginning of his shift all the exhaustion of the game has drained out of him and with it all the joy, all the relief, all the satisfaction of two laughing, normal hours with people like him he used to be.

She heads to the boiler room, because of course she does.