"This the one they talking about? One like Ender? Top scores?"
"Just get him down to the launchy level."
"Come with me," said the girl, taking him firmly by the hand.
Bean came along meekly.
"My name is Petra Arkanian," she said.
Bean said nothing.
"Come on, you may be little and you may be scared, but they don't let you in here if you're deaf or stupid."
Bean shrugged.
"Tell me your name before I break your stubby little fingers."
"Bean," he said.
"That's not a name, that's a lousy meal."
He said nothing.
"You don't fool me," she said. "This mute thing, it's just a cover. You came up here on purpose."
He kept his silence but it stabbed at him, that she had figured him out so easily.
"Kids for this school, they're chosen because they're smart and they've got initiative. So of course you wanted to explore. The thing is, they expect it. They probably know you're doing it. So there's no point in hiding it. What are they going to do, give you some big bad piggy points?"
So that's what the older kids thought about the pig list.
"This stubborn silence thing, it'll just piss people off. I'd forget about it if I were you. Maybe it worked with Mommy and Daddy, but it just makes you look stubborn and ridiculous because anything that matters, you're going to tell anyway, so why not just talk?"
"OK," said Bean.
Now that he was complying, she didn't crow about it. The lecture worked, so the lecture was over. "Colors?" she asked.
"Green brown green."
"Those launchy colors sound like something you'd find in a dirty toilet, don't you think?"
So she was just another one of the stupid kids who thought it was cute to make fun of launchies.
"It's like they designed everything to get the older kids to make fun of the younger ones."
Or maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was just talking. She was a talker. There weren't a lot of talkers on the streets. Not among the kids, anyway. Plenty of them among the drunks.
"The system around here is screwed. It's like they want us to act like little kids. Not that that's going to bother you. Hell, you're already doing some dumb lost-little-kid act."
"Not now," he said.
"Just remember this. No matter what you do, the teachers know about it and they already have some stupid theory about what this means about your personality or whatever. They always find a way to use it against you, if they want to, so you might as well not try. No doubt it's already in your report that you took this little jaunt when you were supposed to be having beddy-bye time and that probably tells them that you 'respond to insecurity by seeking to be alone while exploring the limits of your new environment.' " She used a fancy voice for the last part.
And maybe she had more voices to show off to him, but he wasn't going to stick around to find out. Apparently she was a take-charge person and didn't have anybody to take charge of until he came along. He wasn't interested in becoming her project. It was all right being Sister Carlotta's project because she could get him out of the street and into Battle School. But what did this Petra Arkanian have to offer him?
He slid down a pole, stopped in front of the first opening, pushed out into the corridor, ran to the next ladderway, and scooted up two decks before emerging into another corridor and running full out. She was probably right in what she said, but one thing was certain--he was not going to have her hold his hand all the way back to green-brown-green. The last thing he needed, if he was going to hold his own in this place, was to show up with some older kid holding his hand.
Bean was four decks above the mess level where he was supposed to be right now. There were kids moving through here, but nowhere near as many as the deck below. Most of the doors were unmarked, but a few stood open, including one wide arch that opened into a game room.