Laurie King Anne Weverley 01 The Birth Of A New Moon

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She sat down. "I can wait."
It annoyed him, as she had known it would, although there was not much he
could do about it. He hunched his muscular little body over his paperwork,
lips pursed tight. She sat and waited.
She could hear the sound of Steven's voice, though not the words. He seemed
to listen a great deal, and contribute only brief phrases, for a long time.
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Fifteen, twenty minutes crawled by, and though she was careful to show no
impatience, she could feel Mallory's growing satisfaction in this small
vengeance.
Eventually, Steven seemed to have outlasted the speaker on the other end of
the line. His answers grew longer, his tones sharper, until one stretch of
perhaps three minutes, when he spoke continuously. He stopped, listened, said
a few words, went silent again, and finally launched into the truncated rhythm
of farewells. Silence fell. After a minute the inner door opened and Steven
came out, already speaking to his right-hand man.
"Jonas is getting all worked up about " He saw Ana and caught himself. "Good
morning, Ana."
"I wanted to have a word with you. I can come back later if this isn't a good
time." But, damnation, how she wished he had finished that sentence first.
"This is fine," he said. "Thomas, remind me to give Jonas a ring before
dinner, see what's happened during the day. Come on in. A cup of tea to warm
you up after your morning walk?"
"Thank you, that would be nice." She took a chair in front of the open fire,
placed the armful of heavy outerwear on the floor at her side, and planted her
sandy hiking boots on the floor in front of her while Steven went over to a
small sink-and-electric-kettle kitchen arrangement in the corner. He asked her
two or three general questions while waiting for the water to boil, and she
gave him general answers while studying the room.
This was a public room, intended for consultations not only with Change
members but with outsiders as well. The bookshelves were impressive, their
contents generic and little used, with many titles on psychology, educational
theory, and the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. The art was a
combination of Western landscapes and small sculptures from the East, with a
nice bronzenataraj taking pride of place above the fireplace. She wondered
briefly whether the statue depicting Shiva dancing amid the flames of the
earth's destruction meant anything to him other than a decorative piece of
tourist art.
"Milk?"
"Please," she said, and reached out for the mug. When she took a sip, she
nearly choked: the tea was Earl Grey.
Fortunately, Steven had turned to lower himself into the chair across from
her, for he could not have missed her look of shock as Antony Makepeace
flitted through her mind and was gone again.
"I'm glad you came to talk with me, Ana. I always like to get to know new
members. Teresa tells me you've been helping out in the school. What do you
think of it?"
"It is impressive. The kids are impressive."
"Yes. Ironic, considering how grateful society is to get rid of them. We
couldn't have a stronger bunch of kids if we had the entire school system to
pick from, rather than a handful of castoffs."
"You're allowed some choice, then?"
"Well, in a sense. There are more kids than we could possibly absorb, so we
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only take those who we feel would most benefit by the structure of Change. I
don't encourage them to send us hard-core drug users, for example. There're
too many peripheral problems with druggies that we're not equipped to deal
with. Have you ever taught special-need kids?"
"Not exclusively, but I worked for a while in a tough urban school where half
the kids were nodding in their seats and the others were bouncing off the
wall. I didn't last long, but I sure learned a lot."
"Why didn't you last long?"
"I was young. I took it all too personally, couldn't distance myself enough.
The kids were far tougher than I was. I burned out."
"The kids had no choice but to stay; I imagine that was the primary
difference between you and them. They burned out by retreating into drugs and
violence. Like the ones presented to us, ninety percent of whom are brain dead
by the age of fifteen."
"And you take the remaining ten percent?"
"I grab them for the valuable resource they are, kids who have been, as you
yourself put it the other day, through the fires of hell abuse, neglect,
violence and come out toughened. Purified, if you will."
"Transformed."
"Precisely."
"But not easy kids to handle."
"Give them a goal and a reason to reach for it and they handle themselves."
Ana thought it was not quite as simple as that, but then, Steven did not work
inside the classrooms, and might not realize how much the teachers did.
"It all comes down to transformation," she commented, casting around in
growing desperation for a lead that would take her to the heart of this
conversation.
"Transformation is the only goal that matters," he replied. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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