The Indifferent Children of the Earth

by Gregory Ashe

  Chapter 12, Wednesday 24 August

  I hardly slept that night, and when I did, I had nightmares. Some were the regular ones, old friends, the abandoned subway station, Christopher and Isaac fighting. Those kept me half on the brink of wakefulness, so that I could feel the scream lodged in my throat like a chicken bone. The other dreams were worse, in a way. Sinks surrounding me, chasing me through a flat, featureless landscape. I ran and ran in the way you can only run in dreams, where distance and terror are inversely related, until a great tree appeared before me, its taloned branches ripping the sky to shreds. And then I woke, covered in sweat, gasping for air.

  Growers. Something very different from quickeners. The opposite, perhaps. They had a magic of their own, but it was dark, evil. They looked like men, lived like men, but they were nothing like us. And, according to Grandfather, the only responsibility that every quickener agreed on, was our responsibility to hunt down and kill any grower we came across. I grabbed a dog-eared notebook from my desk and got back in bad; Grandfather had insisted we take notes, and they had come in handy at times.

  Theirs is a different magic: the slow-growing oak under a cold, distant moon; unfolding jasmine blossoms toppling into the turn of seasons. They pour blood into the land, and the land brings forth fruit in its season. That was what I had written about growers. Grandfather’s description of them. Word for word. I realized, sitting on my bed, how absolutely useless my grandfather had been.

  There were other things he had explained in that one, terse conversation, but I had not written them down, and so I struggled to remember. They grew stronger with age, and could live for centuries. They were something like what you would imagine from worship of pre-Christian gods—blood sacrifice, ritual, nature-worship. Their power was linked to the land, rooted in the earth. That had been Grandfather’s word—rooted. And most importantly, their magic, like quickening, could awaken something like a sink. A sprawl. But to what extent a sink and a sprawl were similar, I had no idea.

  Still, a grower and a sprawl were the only thing that could explain how the quickener had destroyed that thing. It had to have been a sprawl. And that meant that a grower was in West Marshall.

  But why?

  I mean, if you were a centuries-old, incredibly powerful sorcerer, would you choose to live in an obscure, slowly-dying Midwestern town? I had no good answer to that question. Grower or not, I didn’t want to spend one lifetime in West Marshall, let alone several.

  That question aside, a grower made sense in other ways. Why Grandfather would have come to West Marshall in the first place—to kill the grower. And why he left—one step ahead of the police after what they would assume was a murder. It also explained the conversation I had overheard between Mr. Wood and his customer.

  Although it didn’t explain why Grandfather had brought his whole family to settle here, built Lion House. That kind of settling in didn’t really make sense if your only goal was to kill someone. The neighbors tended to get upset about that. And, if Grandfather had killed the grower, then it didn’t explain why there were still sprawls around here. Had there been another grower? Or had the grower survived somehow, tricked him?

  All I could think about was the residual anger in Mr. Wood’s voice when he had talked about Grandfather. Mr. Wood would have been young, a teenager, when Grandfather had first moved here. He would have known whomever Grandfather had killed, and he clearly suspected Grandfather. That’s why he had gone to the sheriff when we moved back into town.

  But—

  A part of me wondered. What if Mr. Wood had a more personal reason to hate our family? I knew I needed to do some investigating, get some facts, but I couldn’t stop my mind from racing forward toward conclusions. Mr. Wood ran a garden supply store; that’s what growers were known for, right? Drawing their power from the land. Everything pointed to Mr. Wood being the grower, which meant he either survived Grandfather’s attack, or he was perhaps the former grower’s son. Either one would explain the continued sprawls in town.

  I finally got up, unable to fall back asleep, and after a shower I felt a little more coherent. Just because Mr. Wood didn’t like Grandfather, just because he ran a garden supply store, wasn’t proof he was a grower. I needed more.

  More importantly, I needed a way to deal with him. If he really was a grower, I would be completely useless stopping him. If I’d still had my quickening, then maybe. But my ground was still locked up, covered in dust and memory, and I couldn’t make the quickening work anymore. There was the mysterious quickener, but a part of me hesitated to involve him. If he lived here with the grower, there was a reason they hadn’t eliminated each other. After Grandfather’s teaching—more importantly, after Christopher—I knew that other quickeners couldn’t be trusted. I would have to handle this on my own.

  Classes were normal at school that day; we had moved on from Hamlet to Jane Austen. It was like a greatest hits version of high school. All the books you’d expect them to teach in high school, I was getting them in one year. Where was Leopardi? Where was Bécquer? Still, there were worse things than Pride and Prejudice, although I can’t imagine they’d teach any of them in high school. Chad and company were about what you’d expect, and though they were rowdy in history, they seemed content to enjoy themselves without paying any attention to me. I couldn’t help but feel a bit of frustration; Chad had healed remarkably quickly—or he had found a good way to cover up his injuries. There were still faded yellow bruises, and his nose still had one of those weird nose bandages, but he looked much better. I, on the other hand, still had a hard time drawing a full breath, and I couldn’t move without aggravating a bruise. My continued pain seemed to mollify them somewhat, though, so maybe there was some advantage to it.

  After history, I took my time getting to lunch; Wyatt had been friendlier in English, if not exactly back to normal, and I wasn’t looking forward to another half hour of Mary and Taylor’s gossip, of my trying to gag down some food so that people wouldn’t talk about how I threw away a full lunch every day, of having to talk and listen and smile.

  “Hey, Alex,” Mary called out to me, waving and smiling. I smiled back, but I could feel the groan inside me. Either she was way friendlier than I had realized, or she had a crush. I’d done everything I could to avoid social situations, but somehow I kept getting dragged back. I guess the riptide of teen interactions is somewhat unavoidable, but that wasn’t very much consolation.

  “Hey, Mary. How’s it going?” Taylor and Shawn sat across from us; Wyatt wasn’t there yet. Double date. That’s all I could think.

  “God, don’t even get me started. History was a nightmare, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was so bored. And I can’t stand listening to Chad and Rob, they think they’re so funny. How can you stand sitting next to them, especially after what Chad did to you?”

  “I dunno.” I took a bite of the sandwich to keep from having to say more. Ham and cheese. Not exactly kosher, but then, my family was kind of past that anyway.

  “You should ask Mr. Cherrie if you can change seats. It’s quieter up in the front, where I am.”

  I almost choked on my mash of ham and cheese. Grabbing the juice, I took a long drink, trying to quell the panic inside me. She did like me. Well, that was that. I obviously wasn’t doing enough to make it clear that I wanted to be left alone. By everyone.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Olivia stood there, a wrinkled paper bag in one hand, so pretty I almost choked again.

  “Sure,” Taylor said, her voice rising. The sound of over-eager friendliness. Or fake friendliness. I think it was the latter.

  “Hey, Olivia,” Shawn said, and Mary and I muttered our welcomes as well. For some reason, I was blushing. Then I realized why. Taylor had her eyes fixed on me. Not glaring. Triumphant. And then they shifted to Olivia, just for a heartbeat. I thought I would die.

  Mary did glare at Olivia, and she even scooted an inch closer to me. Olivia didn’t
seem to notice. She just set her camera down and took a seat next to Shawn, diagonal from me. At that moment, Wyatt arrived, out of breath and flustered. It was enough of a disruption that everyone relaxed; Wyatt had that nerdy, friendly vibe that either put people at ease or drove them off immediately. For all of us, it put us at ease.

  And that was it. Lunch was normal, although I could feel Taylor’s gloating, Mary’s possessiveness, like competing strands of the same spiderweb. Olivia fit in seamlessly; she was funny and relaxed and breathtaking. Every time I caught her hazel eyes, I felt something tighten in my chest, like an anxious breath I was waiting to release, and that I never could. No sign of whatever had upset her the last time we spoke; no sign, even, that she did not normally sit with these people. She knew all sorts of stuff about them. She asked about Mary’s two younger brothers, and told a story about seeing them wrestling in the park that made everyone laugh, and even Mary had a grudging smile and warmed up a bit. Olivia asked Taylor about college applications, commented on Taylor’s class standing, told us all how Taylor would be going to an Ivy League school for sure. Hell, Olivia even had something to say to Wyatt about music—some band I’d never heard of. It made me realize how new I was to this place, how little I understood. For the first time, I had a glimpse of what it meant for these people to grow up together in such a small town. They were tied together in ways that I didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, and all the cliques and petty high school divisions masked shared memories that ran deeper than labels like cool, popular, jock, nerd, emo. It made me feel hopelessly adrift; I didn’t have anything like that, not even with my family. And for the first time since I woke up from the coma, it hit me how terribly, devastatingly lonely I was.

  It was like breaking a thin layer of ice on a pond in winter. Suddenly I was falling, deeper and deeper, and it hurt and froze all at once, and I couldn’t breathe. I swept the half-eaten sandwich and the juice into the bag, grabbed my backpack, and stumbled from the table. I could hear them calling after me, but their voices were attenuated, unable to hold me. I found the bathroom, leaned up against the wall inside, struggling to take a breath.

  It was just loneliness; I was stronger than that. I didn’t need people, didn’t want people in my life. I didn’t deserve people, didn’t deserve to be loved, not after what I’d done. But all that was just words, and it wasn’t enough to stop the pain of that loneliness, sharper than lightning cutting the night.

  Doubled over, the pain so bad it was physical, I took shallow swallows of air. There were no tears; I was stronger than that, at least. Slowly, too slowly, I pushed back that pain, locked it away, letting cold practicality freeze the surface of those dark waters again. Sitting in the bathroom all day would change nothing, and I had to accept who I was. One last flicker of pain, and I shook it off and went back to the hall.

  People were filing out of the cafeteria; I must have missed the bell. Across the hall, leaning up against the wall, her camera around her neck, Olivia. She was so pretty, even now I couldn’t stop myself from tracing the curve of her lips, admiring the way the skirt she was wearing showed off the shape of her legs.

  “Are you ok?”

  I shrugged. “Just got a bite of sandwich stuck.”

  She made a face.

  “I know, sorry, probably shouldn’t have shared that.”

  “Wyatt was going to go check on you,” she said. “And Mary wanted to wait. I convinced them to go to class. I figured you needed a minute. To be alone. With your sandwich.”

  I tried to keep the shock from my face; she had known, somehow.

  “Am I that transparent?”

  “I don’t think anyone else realized,” she said. “I know what it’s like. Going through something like that. Sometimes it just hits you, out of the blue.”

  “Thanks for covering for me.”

  She blushed, just a scattering of pink in her cheeks. And then, over her shoulder, I saw Mike walking out of the cafeteria. Laughing, talking with friends, he didn’t notice me me, but just seeing him was like a punch to the gut. Good-looking, happy, popular. Remembering how he had helped me just days before. The feel of his hand on my arm. Remembering Christopher.

  I glanced back at Olivia. I knew what Isaac would do, what he would tell me to do. And I knew what I wanted to do.

  “Want to get dinner on Friday?”

  She smiled, and I loved the way it pulled her lips up, the way she caught her lower lip between her teeth for just a second before it became a normal smile again.

  “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll see you on Friday, then.”

  “And tomorrow,” she said with another smile. “And Thursday.”

  “Right. I guess I forgot about that.”

  “See you Friday,” she said.

  We parted ways at the next hall, going to class, and I realized I had a huge smile splitting my lips, causing the cuts to ache. And I felt better than I had in a long time.