Gifted

Chapter Twenty-seven

|Two months later, Tuesday|

Minjoon

I am in Standard Biology, listening to the proctor carrying on with the effects of human intervention on sustainable crops. It’s not very interesting, but one of our national mandates is to turn out as many scientists and engineers as possible, so I better start early...

I write the date and then copy down a few lines about certain innovative progresses at the nearby Nampho University of Agriculture, when there is a sound like distant thunder and then the ground shakes. The lights flicker.

A few people joke about earthquakes caused by fat Americans jumping up and down on the other side of the world, but then it happens again: a louder roar, and a bigger quake. An earthquake? We’re in Nampho, and the nearest fault is in the Indian, so I don’t think that’s—

Then we hear the screams.

There’s no mistaking the voice of human anguish.

The explosions—and I can hear they are explosions now—are getting closer. Proctor Zhang Sol stops in the process of writing a formula on the whiteboard. Her thin face, fringed with short black hair, grows pale. She looks terrified, and it catches the rest of us. She snaps off the lights, plunging the room into darkness, as you’re supposed to do when there is any kind of threat.

Darkness apparently creates an illusion of safety.

“What is happening?” Yu Cho says near the front of the room; she sounds scared, her voice shakes—it sounds like there is a riot going on outside, and one of those has never happened here, that I can remember, and I’m nineteen this year.

“Stay quiet and in the room, I am going to find out,” Madame Zhang says, though her voice shakes too. After she leaves, the room erupts in speculations.

“Perhaps it is vandals,” Kim Lin says, but I know she is wrong; we don’t have vandals, not after the work-gangs were reinstated for that sort of petty subterfuge many years ago.

“Or...or maybe it is finally a rebellion?” Seung Nan says quietly. No one responds to his query, we know better.

“What about the strange ones?” I don’t see the speaker, he’s behind several people on the far side of the room. Then he stands: Shoulder-length black hair frames a squarish face, his dark eyes—dark brown or black? I can’t tell—simply watching her. “Perhaps they have had enough, and they are finally fighting back.”

This simple statement stops all other conversations.

“‘Strange ones?’” Kung Jimin snarls suddenly, her eyes blazing. “We’re no different from you, Ko Lee, I demand you prove me wrong!”

Jimin can scream so loud that everyone around her would go temporarily deaf, and so that things break around her. Supersonic blasts, or something, I think. Her screams can deafen you for several minutes to even hours afterward, depending on how hard she hits you. I know: she “demonstrated” it on me once, when I said a rather rude word to her last year—afterward, I didn’t quite recall the exact circumstances. I do know had to quit class for the day, as I couldn’t hear anything after that for several hours.

Lee regards her warily. “I, uh...I meant ‘different,’ Jimin. Not strange as in bad.”

Jimin’s eyes narrow. “Oh? Then what about—”

The left wall suddenly explodes violently inward, and then everyone is screaming. Somehow I am unharmed, and rise to my feet shakily in the thick chalky dust that chokes the air. I hear screams, moans, and crying. There is a lot of blood. God, there’s a lot of blood. My head spins: I hate blood.