“Quang!” I said, and hugged him as hard as I could. “How are you?”
“I’m alive,” he said. “I thank the gods for that.”
He looked hungry, weak. Like he hadn’t been sleeping. Or eating. I said, “I’m so, so sorry for what happened to you.”
“Forget about me,” he said. “You have to come. Now.”
He grabbed my hand, pulled me with him. Toward Radha’s house.
She was standing in front of it. Surrounded by friends. I had never seen her face like that. Transfigured by grief, but not only grief. Rage was there too.
She wasn’t weeping. But something about her stony face was more disturbing than any amount of tears would have been.
“No,” I whispered, to myself, as the pieces came together in my mind.
“You!” she said, when she saw me.
Grief fled from her face. Only rage remained. And I knew.
Connor.
“Radha, please,” I said.
“You did this. You brought her here. They came looking for her in our home—because of you.”
Shortness of breath dropped me to my knees again. I had to cough, but couldn’t. All I could do was look up at Radha as she closed the few feet between us, this woman I loved with all my heart, who loved me more than probably anyone—who I had hurt so, so badly.
“I’m sorry,” I said, maybe out loud, maybe not.
And then I was up, off the ground. Hovering in the air. Radha held me there without moving at all, using only her mind.
Every muscle was on fire. Ankles, knees, wrists, elbows—every joint was aching, bent at an unnatural angle. I felt her power, felt how easy it would have been for her to jerk her head to the side and split me into a thousand pieces. How hard it was for her not to.
No wonder you wanna keep that a secret, I thought. Pretty nasty surprise for anyone unlucky enough to piss you off.
And then I thought: I totally deserve this.
Our eyes locked. I saw hers widen.
“Oh my gods, Solomon,” she said, and the fog of rage lifted, and I fell to the ground. She knelt down in the mud next to me. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Looking at me, the way my limbs were bent, the way my face was still twisted up in agony—that finally started her crying. And when she did, so did I.
I felt her inside my muscles again, soothing this time, finding every little stab of pain and snuffing it out.
All the pain except the one in my heart. That one just kept getting bigger and bigger, as the truth set in. She gathered me up in her arms.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “He’s gone. No one knows what happened to him.”
Connor. Gone.
Was he kidnapped? Broken? Dead?
Radha held me, and I held her.
Three charred corpses lay in the mud around us. “Your friend fought like hell,” a neighbor said. “Took out a whole bunch of them. But there were just so many. They got him too. Took them both away.”
Niv. Ready to sacrifice himself, for the people he loved. Just like when he ran away with Ash, knowing he’d be risking execution, because he put her safety above his own.
Pretty soon I’d have to get up from the ground, go meet Ash. Figure out how the hell we were going to save our friends.
I was so, so tired.
I howled. Wind echoed it. Rain fell down on us like we had done something horribly wrong, like we hadn’t suffered enough.
Forty-One
Ash
It rained like we had all done something terribly wrong. Like God was punishing us. My windshield wipers could hardly keep up. Nobody was out. The roads were ours.
“Stop the car,” Solomon said, after fifteen wordless minutes. I’d tried talking to him—asking him questions, about what went on back at the precinct—but he hadn’t answered. Just cried, as quietly as he could.
I couldn’t take him to my house. That’s the first place Mr. Barrett would have gone to. And I’d turned my phone off, so my parents couldn’t reach me when he told them about the idiotic thing I’d done. And I didn’t know where else to go. Where it was safe. So we kept driving.
“Please, Ash,” he whimpered. “Please stop.”
“Solomon, we’re in the middle of nowhere,” I said. We’d somehow ended up along the river, on the narrow rarely used roadway between the railroad tracks and the Hudson River, south of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge.
“Stop the car,” he said again, and reached for the handle.
Too late, I thought to lock the door. He’d already opened it, and the wind howled through the opening like a savage monster that had been waiting for its chance to get in. Only the seat belt he’d forgotten to unbuckle stopped him from leaping out.
“Okay, okay, Jesus,” I said, slowing down. “You’d fucking break a leg if you tried to get out at that speed.”
He sat back in his seat. Unbuckled his seat belt. He did not shut the door. As soon as I’d slowed to a stop, he was out of the car and off again.
“Shit,” I said, turning off the car, following him into the rain. I screamed: “Where the hell are you going?”
Forty-Two
Solomon
“Where the hell are you going?” I screamed.
Ash didn’t answer. She kept walking, along the rails, into the dark.
“What the hell, girl?” I asked Maraud, but Maraud was just as confused by her behavior as she was by all human behavior.
“Ash!!” I called. I could see her in the darkness ahead of me.
I’d returned from the Underbridge to find her sitting on the rails in a kind of trance, with Maraud standing guard over her. When I squatted down and touched her hand and said her name she’d opened her eyes, looked startled, then gotten up and walked into the darkness.
Was there something here she was looking for? Something she needed? Or was she broken beyond repair by the Palace’s powerful magic? Was this part of her healing, or part of her damage?
I ran after her. Already the storm had soaked me so thoroughly that I didn’t feel it anymore, couldn’t tell the difference between air and rain, water and wind.
And then she stopped. Stood still. Tilted her head back. Lifted her face to the downpour. Turned toward me. Her eyes were shut, but I could see her smile.
“I feel it,” she said, when I reached her side. “I can feel it breaking. The spell I’m under. The rain helps. It’s real. It’s here, now, in this moment. I’m here.”
“Okay,” I said. I had to say it loud, to be heard above the wind. “So . . . we just stand here?”
She opened her mouth, let rain collect there. Laughed, spat it at me. In her face, in her eyes, the old Ash was coming back.
We were standing on the railroad tracks. Riversea waves crashed at our feet. I knew what she was talking about. I felt it myself. The elements were strong, here. Everything else was stripped away. We were rooted firmly on the Earth, on the stone and metal of the train tracks. Breathing in air, surrounded by water. Fire burned inside of us, and twinkled in the distance—lights on the riverboats; cooking fires along the quay.
“It’s not safe here,” I said to her.
“It’s happening,” Ash said. “I remember.”
Forty-Three
Ash
“What do you remember?” I asked.
“That night,” Solomon said. “The night you fell.”
He grabbed me by the arms, pulled me into a hug. His whole body was shaking. Not from the cold.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re going to be okay.”
A bell clanged on a buoy out in the river. Thunder thudded, distant now.
“I’m slipping,” he said. “It’s like the rain is washing me away. Washing all of this away, this Solomon-shaped person I’ve constructed. The walls are coming down. And I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
Forty-Four
Solomon
So we didn’t talk for a long time. Just stood there in the rain, holding each other tightly, e
yes shut, tuning out the whole world around us. Until I wasn’t sure what world we were in anymore. Or who I was. Until I thought we were somewhere else—a place like ours but twisted, different, incomplete. I could see its outline, the shape of it, so close to ours, but not.
We held tight to each other. Like nothing else mattered. Like literally nothing else was real.
Lightning snaked along the edge of the sky. I braced myself for the thunder, prayed it would never come, wished I could stop time, keep this moment from ending.
But I knew I couldn’t.
I felt her, now. Coming back. Felt the way her posture and her face took on a new strength, a new confidence. Something they’d been lacking. And then that confidence, that fearlessness, began to bleed into me. My fear began to shrink. Not by magic. Just because we were together, we were united, we were strong. “Tell me,” I said.
“I can’t tell you,” she said, her eyes wide with excitement. “But I can show you. That’s what I can do. That’s my ability.”
Vision magic: a rare and valuable power. To be able to see with perfect clarity what would happen in the future, or had happened in the past, or was happening far away in that very moment—people had built huge and powerful empires on the strength of a gift like that.
“Show me,” I said.
She pressed her index and middle fingers to my forehead. Shut her eyes. The sound of the rain faded out. So did the darkness.
I was dry. There was no rain. No thunder. The smell of cold stone and chrysanthemums was in the air.
The Palace. The High Tower. Four years ago. Ash knelt on the floor of the central training area, twelve years old.
Ash’s voice was in my ear, back in the here and now. “My nine guards had spent that whole day, walking me through a seventy-two-movement martial arts routine, to focus the flow of energy through the body and awaken my ability.”
Twelve-year-old Ash stood up. Shut her eyes.
“I felt so powerful. Like I could finally save my city. Show everyone what was really happening.”
Twelve-year-old Ash stood in front of her guards.
“I looked, and saw this.”
She showed them. And she showed me. Screaming in the streets. Fires burning in storefronts. Fists flying. Daggers pulled. Bodies. Bloody puddles. Broken glass.
“The Night of Red Diamonds,” I said.
“I saw it all. The army of goons gathering at that very moment to go out and bash some heads. Me and my guards, we were going to stop it. I wanted to go with them, but they said it was too dangerous.”
The guards held hands. One of them teleported the whole group of them away. Ash’s vision shifted again, showed me the scene in Raptor Heights. No cops in sight. The goons arriving, brandishing sticks. A lot of them: thirty, maybe forty. Led by a woman in ultramarine. When Ash’s soldiers showed up, the hooligans laughed at first. They had them so outnumbered.
Then the mayhem started. Fire arced through the air. Lightning descended from the sky. Windows shattered. People screamed.
Both sides were angry. Both sides were afraid. Everyone was out for blood.
In the morning, the crowds came. I saw the Shield standing on the sidewalk. Indistinguishable from all the other gawkers. Looking young; looking scared. One of the corpses was the woman in ultramarine; his mother.
The dark returned, and the rain. Ash and I were both crying by then.
The night that split our city wide open. The moment everything went wrong.
“It was me,” Ash said. “I’m responsible for the Night of Red Diamonds.”
“You weren’t,” I said. “Those jerks came to start trouble, and they got it.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. I thought I could stop it from happening, but I caused it to happen.”
Thunder made her jump. I opened my mouth, but there was nothing I could say.
Forty-Five
Ash
Thunder made him jump. He stiffened, stood up straighter.
“Shhhh,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” he whispered.
He was right, of course. But I couldn’t let him know it. “It’s going to be okay,” I said. “You’ll be okay. Whatever he did to your mother—”
Solomon pulled back from me. Looked at me. His eyes were wild, haunted. “Did . . . to my mother?”
“Yeah,” I said, afraid, then, that I’d made a bad mistake, prompted him to remember something he wasn’t ready to remember. He’d said he recalled everything, but how would he know whether his memories were incomplete? “Mr. Barrett. He hurt her, didn’t he? And you were so small and helpless compared to him, you couldn’t help her. That’s what started all of this. You—”
Solomon laughed. I was expecting a lot of responses, but not that one. “Is that what you think?”
I opened my mouth, but then I shut it. Because why did I think that? Why had I jumped to that conclusion? What evidence did I have?
Only the fact that Mr. Barrett was lying, and Solomon was afraid of him. And Solomon’s mom was in jail.
Rain coursed down his face, flattening his hair to his forehead. He looked like a little kid who had just climbed out of a swimming pool. But when he spoke, he sounded less like a child than he ever had before.
“That night,” Solomon said, and pain settled into my heart as he spoke, as his words unlocked memory.
That night. No one answers the door when I knock. Solomon’s mother’s car is gone from the driveway, but his stepfather’s is there. A big bright red pickup truck, like something from a cartoon, except the smell inside is bad, like wet, dirty clothes. I hate when Mr. Barrett takes us anywhere in it.
So. Fifty-fifty chance. Either Solomon is home with his stepfather, or out with his mother.
Bingo, I remember. Wednesday nights his mother plays bingo at the American Legion. Solomon loves the game, but hates the smoky room where they played it. So he’s probably home.
I go around to the back. It’s so dark there. I raise my camera to try to take a picture, but there is not enough light.
I open my mouth to call his name, and then decide not to. Solomon’s imagination is very vivid, and when he plays his weird little game—Darkside City, he calls it—he hates to be jolted out of it. So I shut my mouth and begin to explore the yard. All the places he could be hiding: the shed, behind the trees, under the patio furniture. Even though I’m pretty sure I know where he is. Where he always is.
I climb the rungs nailed into the side of the really big sugar maple at the far end of the backyard. It is easy, now. I remember how hard it had been, back when Solomon first moved into the house four years ago. How much smaller we’d been. How we always had to stretch to reach the next rung. My camera swings slightly, around my neck, as I climb.
When I get to the top, I hear them on the other side of the tattered old red flannel blanket that hung in the doorway. Mr. Barrett, talking. His voice low, harsh, scary. Like how he talked to little Connor when Connor wasn’t doing well at soccer practice.
Solomon, crying.
I decide to turn around. If Solomon is in trouble, if he is crying, he wouldn’t want me to know. Walking in would only humiliate him.
I decide not to pull the blanket-door back.
I pull the blanket back.
I don’t know why, or even how. I don’t think about it. My mind makes one decision, and my arm makes another. Looking back on it so many years later—standing in the rain, between the river and the rails, there but not there—I realize why. Mr. Barrett had made my best friend cry. That was all I knew. My anger at him outweighed everything else. I grabbed hold of the curtain and I yanked it open, prepared to do . . . what exactly?
The film breaks down, at this point. The celluloid strip has snapped. Only freeze-frames remain. Photographs. A whole series of horrible images imprinted indelibly on my brain, stacked neatly in a folder. Hidden away for so long, but found now, and unforgettable.
Solomon, on his knees. Mouth open,
fear and shock on his face. He is a child. Anyone can see it. He is saying my name, yelling it, but I can’t hear him. All the sound is gone.
Mr. Barrett, on the far side of Solomon. Sitting on the bench. A cigarette in one hand. The other makes a fist. His face is clenched too, with so many emotions. You could spend a long time looking at the photograph, sorting them out. Frustration. Embarrassment. The struggle to come up with a Good Explanation for This. His eyes, however, hold only anger. They look like lightning might shoot out of them.
Close-up: Mr. Barrett’s gray sweatpants, down around his ankles.
In my brain: raw confusion. The pieces do not add up. The images do not compute.
The confusion fades. I understand exactly what I am seeing.
Rage.
My little fists.
I take a single step back. I want to go back in time, unsee what I’d just seen, unhappen what was happening, undo what had been done to Solomon.
None of these things are possible.
My fingers go to my camera. Even at twelve, this is my instinct.
I take a small step backward, into space.
I fall.
Forty-Six
Solomon
The rain had mostly stopped, by the time we finished piecing the rest of the puzzle together. We assembled it from what I remembered, and rumors I’d heard and newspaper reports I’d read, and Ash’s memories, and the scraps of images she could summon up. She wasn’t back completely, not yet. Her ability was still chaotic, uncontrollable. We sat on the rails, facing the riversea, watching waves lap at the shore.
“My mother,” Ash said. “She convened an emergency session of her governing council, told them about what I had done. Police Commissioner Bahrr used it against her—threatened to tell the press that it was my fault, reveal that I was an othersider and that I had instigated the attack.”
She picked up rocks, threw them into the water.
“It was a way to gain control. He told my mother I was dangerous, my power couldn’t be contained, and talked her into having the palace sorcerers sedate me. They agreed to cover up the alleged proof of my guilt, but forever after it was a threat hanging over her head. She knew if she pissed them off too much, they could reveal to the public the intel they had on me, and the public outcry could destroy the monarchy.”
Destroy All Monsters Page 16
