by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 3, Friday 19 August into Saturday 20 August
Lightning in a clear sky. A cold shock ran down my spine, and for the first time in weeks, I felt awake. I tried to push that feeling away; it was probably nothing. Heat lightning, maybe. Or the lights on a plane, and I was just being overly sensitive. Nothing I needed to worry about. I lay there on the bed, ignoring the fidgets, smoothing out the comforter underneath my hands and then wadding it up again.
I could hear my grandfather’s voice. Quickeners police themselves. He’d said it so many times, it was like one of those childhood mnemonics, but without the catchy rhyme. And he didn’t mean anything Zen when he said they police themselves. It had nothing to do with self-restraint. It meant that, literally, we policed each other. And he’d decided that was the only part of quickening that was worth enjoying, and that’s how he’d trained Isaac, and then me. Quickening was a tool to stop other quickeners from taking advantage of their power. It wasn’t until I met Christopher that I realized how beautiful quickening could be. And then, of course, I lost it.
Rolling onto my feet—still wearing my scuffed tennis shoes—I made my way downstairs, spurred by Grandfather’s voice. He wouldn’t leave me alone, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to slip back into my stupor until I’d gotten this out of my system. I’d follow where I’d seen the lightning go, and then I’d get there, and I’d find nothing. Maybe an old tree blown to bits and still smoking. Maybe a cell tower that had some weird new track lighting. And then I could go home, and wrap my curiosity up, and stick it in the chest under my bed, and I’d go back to sleep.
Dad’s clicking filled the foyer, so I took my time on the steps; two of them gave mournful creaks—old houses, you know, and I still hadn’t figured out which ones were the culprits. No pause in the incessant ricochet of steel and ink that marked the creation of something beautiful. Something pure and simple—white on black, carving out the spaces between words, between clustered sounds, between phonemes, between the trip of the letter on the tongue and its crash into the palate. Nothing that could interest me; what use were words, or the spaces between words, to someone like me?
I slipped out the always-unlocked front door and rounded the house to the garage. My precautions were pointless—I should have just gone through the house, instead of trying to avoid my mom inside. That’s because I heard her in the backyard, still working in the garden. Well, I didn’t hear her, exactly, but I heard the dull chink of the spade, and the spatter of turned earth, dark as the sky above us. Still in the garden. Not moving across the country, not a family crumbling around her, not even the death of her first-born son would stop Esperanza León from growing prize-winning roses, or orchids, or whatever the hell she was growing. Maybe I’d write that on her trophy, when she won.
In the garage, the shadows full of the smell of fertilizer and grass seed and gasoline, I hesitated. Two cars sat there. My parents’ responsible choice, one of those import, hybrid sedans that gets ridiculous gas mileage and is as soulless as the Dow. Then the other. A 2011 Mustang. Cherry red. I’m not a car guy, but I knew how much my parents had paid to get that car for Isaac, and I knew how much he had loved it, for the few months he had had it. The keys to it sat in my front left pocket, hot as coals. My parents refused to sell it, refused to buy me something different. Something that wasn’t slowed by all the memories it dragged behind it. It was one of the few times I’d seen my dad truly angry.
And I felt that same anger now. That they had kept it. They had dragged it all the way across the country, and they wanted me to drive it. As though every time I looked at it, I didn’t hear that last, empty whoosh of air leave Isaac’s lungs. As though I could sit on that leather and not remember how it felt to be in there with Christopher.
I grabbed my back and headed outside. The lightning had moved fast—not as fast as most quickeners, but faster than a teenager on a bike. So I headed in the direction I had seen it last, down the hill from my house, keeping to the back streets. They were all pretty much back streets in a town this small, but I stayed off the main road. West, toward the river, and the road constantly going down, as the town sloped to meet the water.
Humidity trapped the heat in the air, but a night breeze off the water, even broken up by the buildings, gave some relief. The buildings around me grew smaller and smaller, as though shrinking with the landscape. Run-down apartment complexes, old brown paint peeling in long strips. Houses with weeds higher than my head growing along rusted-out fences. If West Marshall had a ‘bad’ part of town, this was probably it. I shivered; the breeze off the river was stronger here, with the smell of silt, and I realized I was being stupid.
Then, to my left, another flash. Not a traveling quickening—this was something different. It wasn’t lightning, connecting earth and sky. This was a bolt at ground level, and it left a purple after-line in my vision, parallel to the ground. This was someone fighting with quickening.
Pedaling toward the bursts of blue-white light, I realized the skin across my knuckles was stretched and burning. I tried to relax my grip on the handlebars. So I was doing what, exactly? Going to police a quickener, the way Grandpa had taught me? That was all fine and good, except for one thing—I wasn’t a quickener any more. It was hard to remember that sometimes, as funny as that sounds. Like trying to remember you don’t have a lung. You don’t miss it until you go to use it.
A wrought-iron fence, the top full of loops and swirls, met me at the end of the next block, and beyond it, well-trimmed grass and row after row of headstones. A graveyard. Perfect.
Whoever this quickener was, he was an idiot. The quickest way to make a sink was to use quickening around a graveyard. Or maybe a mortuary. Either way, that was Quickening 101. Stay away from graveyards unless you had to be there for some reason.
Rows of old trees ran up and down the graveyard, as though marking some other race of dead; while the trees were beautiful, and probably a relief to families during the hot summers, they were a damned inconvenience right now. I had no idea where the gate might be, so I dropped my bike at the fence, climbed over—ripping a hole in my shirt in the process—and hit the ground running. No flashes of quickening. No sign of traveling. No sign of sinks, even.
The graveyard was huge; it probably had more dead people than West Marshall did living. Many of the stones had been worn down by wind and rain, leaving little more than the impression of memory, like rough-shaped clay. That was a good sign; the old dead had a harder time becoming sinks than the recent.
I found my way to the center of the graveyard, where gravel roads came together to encircle an enormous tree. When I say enormous, I mean California redwood enormous. Maybe not quite that tall, but it dwarfed the other trees. It was all twisted, too, its branches as looping and gnarled as the ironwork of the fence, and the trunk split and forked several times. A good tree for climbing, if not exactly picturesque. Although I suppose not many people have their photos taken in a cemetery.
And then I saw someone on the far side of the tree. My breath had caught in a long stitch along my side, so I slowed, crouched, and made my way from headstone to headstone. Blood pounded behind my eyes so fast that I thought I might pass out. From stone to stone, corpse to corpse, I made my way closer to the tree. Whoever this person was, he was just standing there. Where was his opponent? Who had he been fighting?
Then I was behind the tree, the crisp smell of broken bark filling my nose, its roughness against my cheek. I moved around the bole. He was about fifteen yards away now, back to me. Dark clothing. No weapon, although if he were a quickener, he wouldn’t need one. He’d just blow me apart.
The dark-clothed man shifted, his head raised, and then trotted forward a few steps. Afraid I might lose him, I scurried after him. And then he turned.
It was the hole rotted through his cheek that gave him away. That or the missing nose. It was a sink. And not a particularly fresh one. A corpse left to rot that absorbed some leftover quickening, clawed its way free, and wo
uld attack and kill until the last of the quickening energy dissipated.
I felt a moment of silly relief; even if I had been a quickener, it wouldn’t have helped me. Quickening does nothing to sinks. That’s why they’re so dangerous.
Then I turned and ran.
Outrunning a sink, especially a new one, is like trying to outrun a bear. You’re not going to win.
Unless you’re very, very close to somewhere safe.
Two steps brought me to the tree, and I clambered up it. The bark scraped my hands and legs raw, but I was more focused on the mindless killing machine that was racing toward me. Always before I could just quicken away, or use different foci to distract or drive off the sink. Now I had to escape on my own.
I looked down and felt a cold sinking in my stomach. Did you know that outrunning a sink is like trying to outrun a bear in more than one way?
Turns out, sinks can climb trees too.
