Brilliance by Marcus Sakey

and organized her picture books according to the color spectrum. Who had a gift which, despite what he’d said to Natalie, showed every early indication of being quite powerful.
    Maybe even tier one.
    Cooper wondered if he grabbed Norridge by his gray tweed lapels and hurled him into the window the director would break through in a rain of sparkling shards or just bounce off. And if he did bounce, whether a second throw might do the trick.
    Easy, Coop. You might never have seen it firsthand, but you knew these places wouldn’t be rainbows and unicorns. Maybe there’s more here than you understand.
    Try not to kill the director until you do.
    He forced a neutral tone. “Central to your work? How? Is the older boy a plant?”
    “Heavens, no. That would defeat the purpose.” The director walked around his desk, pulled out a leather chair, gestured to one on the opposite side. “It’s crucial that all of the children here be gifted. Most are tier one, although there are a handful of twos who demonstrated significant aptitude in other areas. Unusually high intelligence, for example.”
    “So if they’re all abnorms and none of them are in on it—”
    “How do we incite incidents like this one?” Norridge leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Though these children all possess savant-level abilities, they remain children. They can be manipulated and trained just like any other. Disagreements can be fostered. Betrayals engineered. A confidence whispered to a trusted friend can suddenly be heard on everyone’s lips. A favorite toy can vanish only to reappear, broken, in the room of another child. A stolen kiss or the secret arrival of menstruation can become common knowledge. Essentially, we take the negative formative experiences that all children experience and manufacture them according to psychological profiles and at a dramatically higher rate.”
    Cooper imagined rows of cubicles with men in dark suits and thick glasses listening to late-night confessions, to the frantic sound of masturbation in a toilet stall, or to the sobs of homesickness. Analyzing it. Charting it. Calculating how each private shame could be exploited to maximum effect. “How? How do you know all these things?”
    Norridge smiled. “I’ll show you.” He activated the terminal on his desk and began to type. His fingers, Cooper noticed, were long and graceful. Piano player fingers. “Here we are.”
    He pressed a button, and sound came out of the computer’s speaker, a woman’s voice.
    “—there. It’s not so bad.”
    “It hurts.” The child stretched the word out into three syllables.
    “I told you to be careful with that one. That boy is trouble. You can’t trust him.”
    A moan, and then a quiet sob. “They were all laughing at me. Why were they laughing? I thought they were my friends.”
    Something cold snaked through Cooper’s belly. The woman, he presumed the one he’d seen break up the fight, continued. “I saw them all laughing at you. Laughing and pointing. Is that what friends would do?”
    “No.” The voice was thin and forlorn.
    “No. You can’t trust them either.
I’m
your friend.” Her voice saccharine. “It’s okay, sweetie. I’ve got you. I won’t let anyone get you now.”
    “My head hurts.”
    “I know it does, baby. Do you want some medicine?”
    “Yes.”
    “Okay. I can make it all better. Here. Swallow this—”
    Norridge tapped a key, and the sound vanished. “Do you see?”
    Cooper said, “You have the whole
place
bugged?”
    “That was our solution for the first years. However, in a facility of this size, and given the outdoor spaces, the rough play, it’s impossible to assure coverage. Now we have a better way.” Norridge paused, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips.
    Why would that be? What would make the man so pleased with himself?
    “It’s not the school you wire,” Cooper said slowly. “It’s the children. Somehow you’re bugging the