The Expatriate-the story of a Prodigy

25. Disappointment

He had hoped for a solution to pop into his mind in seconds as soon as they got back home, but nothing occurred to him as he simply sat on his bed and stared at the covers, as if willing for some idea to jump into his head happily from the depth of the covers. Still, he waited and waited and waited, eyes not faltering, but he was simply not a Prodigy in eyesight, so his eyes started to ache and burn after a few minutes, so he gave up, wandering down to the first floor, vision blurry.
He only found Melanie on the couch, flipping the channels on the TV in front of her, the rest of the room dim and empty.
"Shit, where are the others?" He asked, then had to be amused when Melanie jumped up on the couch in surprise just as Miles had had the night before. He waited patiently for her to calm down and turn the TV off.
"They're on the third floor, training," She said, rubbing her knees, eyes boring holes into Alex's head. Confusion spiked Alex and he narrowed his eyes. "You guys use the third floor? I mean, I knew this building was third-floored, but you guys never introduced me to it-" "I know that Thomas can be a nerd and forget to introduce you to everything you're new at. I'll show you-it's Miles' favorite place to exist in, obviously. Maybe you can run around with him," She got up from her couch and walked back to the stairs, gesturing Alex to follow.
So, they managed to hide this from me, Alex wondered as Melanie led him to the end of the hallway with the rooms, then turned right to a steel door, which somehow, was painted white and blended in with the walls. Melanie opened the thing, then waved Alex inside. "Well, just climb the stairs-I don't want to just waste my Sunday running around in the house."
So in he went, smelling a strange mixture of sweat and plaster, able to see nothing for his eyes weren't nocturnal eyes. Still, he managed to find the first, cement step with his toes, and slowly inched his way up, legs wobbling the way everyone's legs do when they are in a room with no light and have to find each step with your foot.
Finally, he made it up, taking up 3 minutes, which was more than a lifetime for Prodigies. Stressed out that he wasn't able to give the solution to the problem of the Raiders, frustrated that Thomas had forgotten to tell this space to him on the first day, angered that there was no light bulb above the staircase, he kicked a door open, sighing out with his nose.
However, in seconds, the feelings all vaporized into amazement.
Now, he was looking into a huge room that was wooden-tiled, with a few tall, ceiling-to-floor windows on the sides, and a high ceiling, which was crisscrossed by wooden beams. And that simply wasn't everything. At a side corner, metal beams and dumbbells and plastic javelins lined the walls proudly, gleaming and fat with weight, and BB gun pistols hung from a bar, shaking a bit from the strong gusts of air pumped up by the electronic A/C attached to the corner of the ceiling furthest from him. Also, a single bench lined the wall beside the door.
Alex's eyes went back to the center of the room and found the three other Raiders-Thomas was aiming at a makeshift round target with the thinnest circles and lowest scores scribbled onto each circle with two BB gun pistols in both hands, Miles was throwing a javelin so accurately that they flew back to him perfectly into his awaiting hands loyally, and Lyra was hitting two shuttlecocks at the same time with a single badminton racquet so fast against the wall that she seemed to be shaking the racket timidly and the balls were simply crazy.
"Freaking Jesus," Alex muttered, and while Thomas and Miles saw him and merely summoned him into the room, doing their exercises all the while, which he obeyed thankfully, letting the wind from the A/C hit him, Lyra stopped shaking the racquet and let the shuttlecocks, almost barren of any feathers by now, fall to the ground and rest for a while. Since she was the only one who had summoned him to herself, Alex walked over to her, shaking his head.
"Alright, why didn't you tell of this place?" He asked. Lyra glared at the ground, hesitating her words. "Well, Al, you should know that we don't use this place often-it's only to get rid of stress, which became accumulated for me for sure-I am angry at myself that no solution has come to my mind of today's situation," Hell, she used the nickname often, Alex thought before clearing his throat, taken aback. "Oh. I also came here after nothing came to me also-Melanie showed me the way," Lyra put down her racquet, sighing out loud. "I got rid of the stress a bit-thought I sacrificed them," Alex had to smirk when she jutted her jaw and shot a look of pity at the shuttlecocks and the fallen-off  feathers around them like tribunes to the dead.
Lyra didn't reply to the smirk, but sank onto the bench as if she had something to tell Alex, so he also sat down.
"Something's wrong with you," She said after a moment of staring at the wooden tiles.
It wasn't that Alex Mars hadn't expected those words from her mouth it was only by the way that she said them so slowly, articulating them, that made him give her a humorous look, to which Lyra Cannes glared back.
"Well, it's unsurprising-I saw you frowning this morning. Explain," he demanded, leaning back onto the bench, taking in a deep breath. He watched subtly out of the corner of his eye as Thomas walked to Miles, picked up a javelin, then challenged the other boy to throw two javelins at the same time.
"Well, you're rising on the list," She finally said, so serious.
Alright, Alex Mars hadn't been expecting to hear this. The girl seems to be speaking alien-ish, he frowned himself. "Er, what do you-" he was saying when she cut his words, faster and nimble-r than him as usual.
"I keep a list in my head on stuff which had the highest value of the day. And you're number's not shrinking but...you're inching up and up on that list, hell who knows by god's sake why you, among all the others, is. Such a thing has never happened before, and I don't know how to act," She was still frowning as she ended her sentence.
Now, at her words, he cringed. Well, he had been happy at the first part-yes, he was somehow becoming more recognized by the smartest girl in the Raiders, but his whole posture drooped when he heard swears and a sensation of not being able to understand come out of her mouth. It was as if she couldn't believe at all why he, "among all the others", just as she had said herself, was important.
As if she despised his rank.
These thoughts raced and galloped inside his head, while on the outside, between her and him, only silence stood firm, making them distance each other.
"Right. I don't know myself," That was all Alex could utter, and he got up, ruffling his own hair, confused. After the special sense of connection that she had managed to grow with him during the past 3 days, this cold treatment was foreign to him-well, too foreign.
"Oh, Al. I only said my thoughts out loud, no offense-" Woah, now she is excusing herself-just like all the other normal people, using others to their benefit, Alex groaned. Also, the thought that she had had such criticizing thoughts of him inside her head and hadn't told him about them till now annoyed Alex Mars further.
"It's too cool here, and seems like a waste of time for me now," Eyeing the racquet and bald shuttlecocks on the ground, telling with eyes for her to continue goofing around with them with acrid thoughts on him running in her calculative way of thinking inside her own brain.
He wondered how he had felt so close to her a few hours ago, swearing and swearing and swearing as he slid down the stairs.
However, he wasn't able to focus on the gist of the problem: why he cared at all about her with so intensity to be this angry at her.

He pushed a single pill into his mouth once he got back on the first floor and approached the couch on which Melanie was once more lying on, who had turned to some old nature documentary which had been in the memory file of the TV even before the desertation of the town. Though a voice was avidly explaining how the planet Mars had become civilized by whom and how, she was yawning and staring at a stray thread on the couch when he sat on the couch, 10 feet away from her. Since it was obviously awkward to be lying on the couch shared by others with a boy a few feet away, she coughed and got up, hair unkempt, eyes at the TV-but only eyeing the rims of the TV, at the walls right behind the thing. Alex didn't bother to ask why she was anxious and made his eras only tune the sounds of the program into his ears. So when Melanie asked him something, it was as if he had lowered down the sound of the TV.
"Alex, what happened?"
He had to inevitably turn up his volume.
"I can take care of it on my own, Melanie," he said.
Maybe she hurrumphed, but he had already muted her out once more.
The anger from Lyra didn't disappear-it was the first real and serious anger he had ever felt in his 'second-life', as Lewis loved to call it, much worse than even the anger Miles had caused him in the earlier days. An act of betrayal, Lyra Cannes had done to him...
Just then, the voice in the documentary flew and got stuck on his part of the brain for concentration, and Alex's eyes stared at the screen for real, surprised.
Alright, what's it now? What hit me just before? he thought, scrunching his brows at the screen.
Just then, the word Mars, then an unfamiliar name, Ryan Marvick, flashed on the screen, with the narrator blabbering about how the Mars civilization came to be...
"As a kid, the Canadian boy was already showing his genius talents in his Canadian house, drawing plans of all sorts, which started to become oriented toward civilizing the planet of Mars. "Well, my parents didn't know what to do with me-whether to support me or to accuse me of using up boxes of A4 papers each week," Marvick himself said at the last conference he held with NASA before becoming distant from any relationships with the U.S. at all, nor any other countries existing on Earth-the cause is guessed to have been the U.S. government' urge directed to Marvick to utilize his own Martian citizens to send back bodily analyzations and how well they were adapting to the foreign environment for future experiments in various fields. All we know of the civilization now is simply the information Marvick talked of at that last conference-that his civilization is abundant of food and human resources-or Martian resources, to be precise-, but lacking in adapting and developing extensive technology, for the resources on the planet is simply not enough and few-"
Alex hopped up, electrocuted, eyes glaring at the screen like mad. Fuck, the answer was simply all neatly packed into this single video, Al! he yelped in joy to himself, then even before Melanie could get force him to unmute her and ask him what was happening, he raced up to his room, his brain feeling just like how Archimedes must have felt as he raced out of his tub, naked, yelping 'Eureka!'.