Persuasion was Lennon’s last class of the day, and she arrived just a few moments before the period began. The classroom was already full, students seated behind all but one of the twelve desks in the room. On each of them, there was a small glass cage that contained a single live rat.
Dante stood at the front of the classroom—dressed smartly, in wool trousers and a white button-down, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows to expose tattooed forearms. If he had any memory of their encounter outside of Irvine Hall, he gave no indication. “Lennon, nice of you to join us. Have a seat.”
She claimed a desk in the middle of the room, stared into the cage in front of her. The rat on the other side of the glass was dun brown with a little white patch on its left ear. He was shaking.
“I have no idea if you’re a boy or a girl, but I’m going to call you Gregory because you look like one,” said Lennon in a whisper, and the rat looked up at her, nose twitching, as if he understood.
“What’s the difference between training and an act of persuasion?” Dante asked the class, but his gaze lingered on Lennon.
Nadine raised her hand, her arm stiff with urgency. Behind her, Ian rolled his eyes.
“Go on,” said Dante, nodding to her.
“Persuasion is forced. Training is taught,” said Nadine, and she cut a quick glance back at Ian, her cheeks flushing pink. Was she just embarrassed—Lennon wondered in passing—or was it that even nuns weren’t immune to the wiles of tattooed, toxic men?
“An interesting perspective…but is that entirely accurate?” Dante picked up a nub of chalk from the sill below the board and sketched the question: Is persuasion an act of force?
This question, once written in full, triggered a chorus of murmurs. The class dissolved into a general conversation, no one bothering to raise their hands, people talking over one another, or interjecting in the short breaths between words and sentences.
“Persuasion is the ability to project one’s own will onto a being, object, or entity,” said Dante, and everyone fell quiet. “There is not a living being in the world that lacks the ability to persuade. It is a gift inherent to all of us. From the smallest microorganism to the smartest humans that have ever walked the face of the earth—every one of us is bestowed with the power to enforce our own will upon the world. I want you to think of a newborn baby, crying for its mother’s milk. This early instinct is, for most of us, our first discernible act of persuasion. Now imagine this same newborn baby grown into a man. He goes to a bar, flirts with a woman there, and he ends his night in bed with her. This too is an act of persuasion. But while persuasion is a skill we all possess, our degrees of efficacy vary greatly depending on our social status, natural intelligence, nationality, the money in our bank accounts, even our race.
“Here at Drayton, we believe that a handful of extraordinarily gifted individuals can be taught to command a persuasive ability powerful enough to bend, or even break, the rules of reality itself. This skill is well beyond the natural limits of most people walking the planet. Most who would so much as attempt to wield such a power would either die or go insane. Which is how we come to you, the chosen few.” As Dante said this, his gaze again affixed itself to Lennon. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
“For the rest of the semester, you will work to persuade—not train—the rat sitting on the desk before you. So I suggest you spend this class session building a sense of rapport with your charge, learning its peculiarities, understanding the subject onto which you intend to impose your will. Cruelty—by way of pain, starvation, or verbal abuse—will not be tolerated. Nor will it help you achieve the kinds of results you’ll need to pass this class. Am I clear?”
Lennon nodded along with the rest of her classmates.
“Good,” said Dante. “Then let’s begin.”
What followed was a brutal crash course in rudimentary persuasion. Dante adopted a sink-or-swim approach to the lesson, which Lennon privately suspected was more a test of natural aptitude than anything else, a way to gauge what he was working with. What little instruction he did offer was vague and rooted not in pragmatism but in feelings and intuition. “Think of your will as an extension of your body. No different than a limb. When you extend it to the rat—as you might your hand—imagine yourself expanding around it, the fingers of your psyche closing into a fist. That’s how you make first contact and establish control.”
Other tips adopted a more athletic approach, focusing more on the body than the mind: “Breathe through the belly, not the chest. Try to keep your hands from fisting up. Palms to the sky. It’ll help you relax.”
Dante delivered one of the most helpful tips of the evening while standing behind Lennon’s desk: “Focus and stress are not synonymous. Try to concentrate without tensing up.”
As the night progressed, the class dissolved into utter chaos. There were rats that raced in circles around the perimeters of their cages. Rats that stared blankly into the eyes of their persuaders. Some rats who did nothing but shit and burrow into the pine shavings for a nap. But one, Ian’s, convulsed pitifully on the floor of his cage, only to go limp, then startle awake a few moments later. Ian received a sharp scolding from Dante for his heavy-handedness.
Lennon, for her part, couldn’t bring herself to impress her will on the timid creature cowering in the cage before her. Gregory was smaller than the other rats—just a baby, really. And despite her best efforts to remain stoic, she felt strangely protective of him. She didn’t want to hurt him and couldn’t ensure that she wouldn’t if she attempted to persuade him.
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 the feeling 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 her even 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 of misinformation, 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?”
She didn’t have an answer to that yet. How could she? “I just…I don’t want to hurt anybody or anything. Okay? That’s my limit.”
“You can do better than that,” said Dante. “You don’t want to hurt people, and I understand. Respect it, even. But you can aim so much higher than pacifism. I can teach you how to protect people if you’ll let me, how to prevent harm, how to undo it. But if I’m going to do that, you have to grow a backbone and get the hell out of your own way. Do you understand?”
“I—I think so.”
“There will always be someone who will use the power they have to hurt those who don’t deserve it. That’s why it’s important that people like you become competent enough to stand between them and those they’d otherwise harm. To let your scruples get in the way of that vital work is cowardice. Now let’s get you back to class.”
That night, back in Ethos College, Lennon returned to her dorm to discover that Blaine wasn’t in. She didn’t want to be alone, so she found her way to Ian’s room in Pathos College instead. She could tell he wasn’t expecting company. When she knocked on the door and showed herself inside, Ian looked more startled than anything else. There was a composition book lying open in his lap, filled with notes from Dante’s lecture.
“Where’s your roommate?” she asked.
“Don’t have one. I got lucky.” There was an awkward pause. Ian swallowed, and Lennon saw the bulge of his Adam’s apple rise and fall. He looked so young then, so helpless, that Lennon was reminded of that poor rat she’d failed to persuade. “You could stay…if you want?”
So Lennon climbed up into bed, sat beside him, drawing her knees up tight to her chest.
“What were you and Professor Lowe talking about out in the hall?” Ian asked, staring down at his journal, all that tangled writing on the page.
“It was less a talk than a debate.”
“About what?”
“The rats,” said Lennon. “I don’t like what we’re doing to them. I don’t think it’s right.”
“They’re rodents, for fuck’s sake,” said Ian. “They can’t think past eating and shitting. We’re practically gods to them.”
“Even still,” said Lennon. “Something about it doesn’t sit right with me.”
“Tell me you’re not going to abandon all of this because of some inbred lab rats?”
“No. I’m just saying it feels wrong. They don’t deserve to be meddled with.”
Ian closed his notes. “You ever heard of a rat king?”
“The Rat King? Like from The Nutcracker?”
Ian shook his head. “A rat king. The idea is that a bunch of rats get their tails knotted together, and the knot gets tighter the more they struggle to get away. With time, their knotted tails get glued together with all this shit and piss and grime. The filth fuses them together.”
“Ew.”
“People say they don’t exist. They call them some type of cryptid, but I swear to God I saw one. I was in New York, and I stepped out onto the street to smoke and saw what I thought was a cat, but when it crawled out from behind the dumpster and into the light of the streetlamps, I saw it for what it was. And it was fucking vile. It looked more like an arachnid than a mammal, this ball of grimy fur, scrabbling across the concrete. I fumbled for my phone—I was pretty fucking drunk—but by the time I managed to fish it out of my pocket, it had disappeared, back to the sewers, I guess.”
“What’s your point?” Lennon asked, unsettled and disgusted but still unwavering in her conviction. Rats could be vile—so what? They were still living creatures, and she still felt guilty for hurting them. “Are you saying that because rats are less than us, they deserve to be experimented on?”
He shrugged. “More or less.”
“But it doesn’t bother you, even a little bit?” Lennon asked, searching his face for some trace of remorse. But she found none. “You don’t feel guilty hurting something so small it can’t defend itself?”
“I like being good at things,” said Ian simply, “and I’m not good at much…but I’m good at this persuasion business. I’m not going to give it up just because I feel bad for a couple of rats. Besides, I’ve got no other options but this.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true. I was nothing back home. I’m not a college dropout; I wasn’t even good enough to get in. Didn’t even bother to apply. I worked at a fucking convenience store and probably would have until I drank myself into liver failure or found some other way to kill myself. I was nothing to no one. But here things are different. You know what I mean?”
Lennon nodded. She did know. In fact, she empathized with Ian more than she cared to admit. She’d felt the same, until the moment she’d picked up that rotary phone in the booth in the middle of the parking lot. Drayton had lent her the rare opportunity to make something of herself for once, and she knew—just as Ian did—that she’d be a fool to squander that chance. If only she could set her moral qualms aside, like Dante urged her to. But a part of her was beginning to wonder if guilt, or in Ian’s case, denial, was just the price of the work they did here.
Lennon had known, since the moment she’d first arrived at Drayton, that in order to become someone she would have to let go of the person she was before. Maybe that meant setting her morals aside, if only for a little while. And what was the harm in it? How guilty was she, really? Lennon hadn’t hurt anyone, and all she’d been asked to do thus far was persuade a rat who’d been damned to death anyway.
Ian slid a hand along Lennon’s inner thigh. “Are we going to do this? Because if not, I need to sleep.”
Lennon nodded, turned to press her lips to his. It was wordless and slow, and while Ian moved within her, Lennon thought of Dante and their exchange out in the hall. The way he’d talked her down out of that panic attack, the moth tattoos on the backs of his hands, the tattered wings that stretched and moved when he flexed his fingers.
That night, in Ian’s bed, Lennon slipped into a dream that didn’t belong to her. In it she walked barefoot through the Twenty-Fifth Square. The campus had emptied itself. There wasn’t a soul in sight. She walked beneath the cover of the live oaks and magnolias, through the fog and dark. The air was wet and heavy, and she felt less like she was walking and more like she was wading through waist-high water, dragging her way through the murk of the fog and heat.
She found her way to the wrought-iron gates of a house half-swallowed by blooming magnolia trees, the blossoms large and monstrous, like the severed heads of white lions, gaping down at her, open-mouthed and starving. The house itself stood proud amid a blizzard of falling petals. On its porch was a boy, barefoot, his back to her. She gazed upon him—the tight frail shoulders, the goose bumps along his nape, the fingers that flinched and shuddered at his sides.
She realized then that this dream was not hers, but his.
The boy turned suddenly. The moment their eyes met, some powerful thrall—like a cold riptide swirling about her thighs—drew her violently through the boy’s back, into his body, so that she was within him, housed in the cage of his skeleton, the two of them tragically enmeshed, like rats with their tails tied tight.
The boy turned back to face the house. He raised a hand to the door, pressed his small palm flat against it. Then drew back, clenched his fingers into a fist, and knocked and knocked and knocked. Until his bulbous knuckles blackened with bruises.
No one answered.