Page 21 of An Academy for Liars

She hadn’t felt the same empathy toward Dante during the entry exam. He had been smug and undaunted and clearly capable—as a seasoned practitioner of this strange magic himself. Besides, he’d asked her to persuade him, so Lennon had had no qualms about doing just that. But the rats weren’t the same.

They looked terrified, cowering in their cages. Gregory was especially pitiful—timid and runty, quivering with fear. The idea of forcing her will upon such a small and harmless creature made her want to throw up. She could feel a panic attack coming on, her first since coming to the school.

Trying to get ahead of it, Lennon slid out of her desk and stepped out into the empty hall, making it only a few paces before the terror seized her. Every panic attack that Lennon suffered was slightly different. Some started in the back of her head, a fuzziness like thefeeling before passing out. Others began with a wave of nausea that sent her fleeing to the bathroom. This attack began in her chest, a cruel constriction that bent her double there in the middle of the corridor and made it hard to breathe.

“Are you all right?” Dante asked behind her.

“I—I can’t do it.” Lennon could barely get the words out. “He’s so small and weak, and I’m afraid I’ll kill him.”

“The rat?”

She nodded, dragged a hand through her hair, the feeling of her fingertips scratching along her scalp grounding her some. She sucked in a deep breath. Then another.

Dante came to stand beside her. “You persuaded me just fine.”

“You’re different.”

“How so?”

“You fucking deserved it—”

“So persuasion is something that a person either deserves or doesn’t? Like a punishment?”

“I—I don’t know, I guess? It’s certainly not a gift.”

“So during the entry exam, you saw yourself as punishing me?”

“I didn’t think about it like that.”

“What did you think about?” Dante pressed her. “I want your take.”

“I guess…I thought you were smug. And I thought you were goading me, intentionally pissing me off, and that made me feel small and…and—”

“And?”

“Desperate,” she said, and realized she was beginning to feel better. Her hands weren’t shaking as violently. Her heartbeat had drastically slowed. The floor firmed beneath her feet. Dante had distracted her, talked her down out of a full panic attack without hereven realizing it. Damn, he was good. “I felt desperate to prove that I was worth something. Not just to you but to myself. Benedict did the same at his house, during that interview. He dredged up all this shit about my past that made me so ashamed and so eager to prove that I could be something more than what I have been.”

“And what have you been, Lennon?”

“Weak.”

“Just like that rat back in the classroom?”

She froze, flinched. “Don’t you do that. Don’t try to get into my head.”

Dante only smiled, raised both hands in a gesture of submission. “I won’t argue with you about the morality of what we do here. You’re too smart for that. But I will say that rats have been used—for decades—in the pursuit of knowledge. There are undergrad psych students who perform more invasive and painful experiments on rats than anything we do here. On a personal note, I’m rather fond of rats, and I can assure you that the ones we keep are about as well cared for as any. We source most of them when they’re young, from pet stores where they would’ve been food for snakes. If anything, they were saved from a worse fate.”

“But it’s not just the rats,” said Lennon, in a quiet voice. “There are human lives on the other end of this. Outside of the classroom. That’s what we’re training for, right? To change minds by force? Make puppets out of people?”

“That’s a harsh way of putting it.”

“Well, how would you put it?”

Dante considered his answer carefully, frowning. “Persuasion is morally neutral. It’s just a tool, really.”

“But what happens when that tool falls into the wrong hands?” Here, Lennon thought of elections and democracy, campaigns ofmisinformation, nuclear codes and espionage, coups in the dead of night. On a geopolitical level, the power that they wielded here could rise to the level of a weapon of war, if not one of mass destruction.

“It already has,” said Dante, “and it will again. But the question we’re asking tonight centers around you—your capabilities, your worthiness. Do you trust yourself with this power?”

---