Free Rupture by Curtis Hox

to his office. The school secretary working that morning stood at attention. Mrs. Ogilvey took a seat in one of Principal Small’s chairs.
    “So the branded boy was hiding?” she asked. “And he’s already been deformed?”
    Principal Smalls shut his door before hurrying to his desk. “Yes, and ... horribly.”
    “The government people don’t know?”
    “About him being found? No, ma’am.”
    “Good, we should keep this ... manageable for as long as possible.”
    “Of course.”
    She held onto a small clutch with both gloved hands. She opened this and retrieved a small hourglass with a digital readout on the bottom. She turned it upside down and let the sand pour. The digital numbers began ticking off as the first grains fell. She waited.
    It was a five-minute piece.
    When it finished the digital read out read: 05:15 .
    “Not good,” she said. “Fifteen second discrepancy. A Rogue incursion is highly likely at the Sterling School, Principal Smalls, and must be contained before this place becomes ... unrecognizable.”
    “Incursion? Oh my.”
    “In the meantime, the boy will bring the wrong kind of attention. We have to prepare a response.”
    “The Consortium people were a mistake—”
    “Yes, they were.” Mrs. Ogilvey looked like she’d just swallowed a stone. “Tell me about how our new student is doing. Was I wrong to side with her mother and go against your wishes in allowing her to attend?”
    “Simone Wellborn has made her beliefs known,” Principal Smalls replied.
    “Has she?”
    “She told the boy he was a tool of the Great Enemies, I think she called them.”
    “Did she?” Mrs. Penny Ogilvey sighed, expecting nothing less from the Wellborn girl. “We’ve kept you in the dark far too long, but I hate to tell you: The fact that a Rogue attack has begun here means the Council president will be pleased.”
    “Pleased?”
    “Anything that encourages the creation of Transhuman super warriors makes him giddy. He has fought all of his life, certainly since he was a student here and in one of my classes, to turn the world into two factions, one that clearly sides with his enemies, the pretend gods, as he calls them, so that he can weed them out, and those who do not, so that he can know who his allies are. He has lobbied the hardest for the inclusion of the Altertranshumans into society, and into Sterling.”
    She watched Principal Smalls sit quietly. She knew he was unused to hearing anyone talk about the Council president in such intimate terms. He had never met the man, didn’t even know who he was.
    She remembered her time here, not unlike Principal Smalls’ time. Both of them were defective. He was born without two functioning kidneys, and she was missing her uterus—two damaged, but otherwise normal human beings with simple intellect packages who didn’t amount to much in today’s world. They had gone to Sterling School decades apart, but both were now protected by Sterling in a world increasingly changing and fearful of what science had wrought. And Sterling was under attack.
    “Transhuman warriors?” Principal Smalls asked, as if he were hearing a dirty secret and was unsure how to respond. “What are those?”
    She waved his question away, as if he should know. She realized he probably had no idea. “What the students today deal with amazes me. The rapid change in what is considered normal is baffling. When I was a student there were no Nonhumans, just the new legal category of the Transhuman, someone changed biologically in a fundamental way by technology. The entrance of the ... what are the kids calling Nonhumans nowadays?”
    “Nonnys.”
    “Yes, the entrance of the Nonnys happened after my time, but I remember resisting allowing these monsters on campus. I lost that battle. But we kept the dangerous ones out. The peaceful ones came and were accepted, and I can admit I was wrong. But now the most dangerous types of human beings, Alters, the least controllable, are