by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 26, Monday 12 September
The nice thing about traveling by quickening is that there’s no disorientation. No jarring, no dizziness. Just a smooth dissolve to white, like an overused film technique.
If it’s done right.
Mike did a decent job; for a moment, there was only white, and the feel of his arm underneath my fingers, and then we landed with a thud. Sunlight broke through pine branches, dancing back and forth across the red-brown carpet of dead needles. A breeze, surprisingly cool, washed over us, stirring the trees. It carried with it the smell of water—you know the smell, something refreshing and wet in the back of your throat. Bird song, interrupted by our arrival, resumed, a nice counterpoint to the beating in my heart. I hadn’t really been sure what would happen—it was Mike’s first time, after all.
He was still pale, but a smile grew on his face as he looked around. “Holy crap.”
“Yeah,” I said. I let out a long breath, trying to ease the tension in my shoulders. “Not bad.”
“Thanks,” Mike said. He glanced over at me. “I think you can let go of my arm now.”
I realized I had a death grip on his upper arm. “Oh, sorry.” I snatched my hand away, but then didn’t know what to do—what did someone do with his hands? Just let it hang by my side? Put it in my pocket? I took a couple step forwards, uncomfortably aware of how my arms moved at my side. “So, where are we?”
Mike walked up and clapped me on the back; pain rippled through old bruises and the still healing cuts of the sprawl. I grunted.
“Damn, sorry,” Mike said. “Are you ok?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just a leftover from Chad and his friends.” I pulled up my shirt a few inches to show my chest and side, still dappled with yellow and brown.
“I knew I should have made you go to the hospital,” Mike said. “Damn, I had no idea how bad they messed you up.” He paused. “Why didn’t you use the focus to heal?”
I shrugged, trying to give myself time to think of a lie, so I didn’t have to explain why I couldn’t quicken. “Guess I needed to learn a lesson from all that. Why don’t we see what you can do with the foci?”
Mike had a confused look on his face, but he nodded and led the way out of the trees. We stood on the rim of a large bowl, almost a valley, where a stream ran into a lake. Tall grass waved in the breeze off the lake, bending toward us in long, rippling swaths. The same breeze stirred the waters, so that the afternoon sun—almost hidden by the lip of the bowl—sent shattered lines of fire across the surface of the lake. A few puffy clouds hung above us, motionless against the first tinge of purple in the otherwise blue sky. Evening was coming. Side by side, we started down the hill until we stood at the edge of the lake, where the water’s noise was swallowed by grass and mud.
“What do you want to try first?”
Mike glanced at the foci gleaming on his arms. “Let’s do the more refined attack one.”
“Ok,” I said. “The blast will still issue from your ground, so be careful how you aim.” I took a couple steps back to stand behind him. “Maybe start with the lake. Just in case.”
Mike’s face became serious. He lifted his right hand, the yellowed amber darkening in the dying light, and pointed it toward the lake. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I hoped he was aiming at a spot far from us.
A moment later, a cable of white light, perhaps as thick as my arm, burst from the ground; it was so bright that I couldn’t look at it, but it seemed to consume Mike’s hand. It shot out, perhaps halfway across the lake, and struck the water. As it made contact, a low hiss burst through the silence, and steam rose, glowing in the light of the quickening. And then, as quick as it had begun, the light cut off. The bowl seemed dark in comparison.
Wisps of steam still rose from the lake, but they quickly faded as the heat dissipated into the cold water. I glanced at Mike; his hand was fine, but I had never seen something like that. Usually a quickening just issued from the ground.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
“Alright?” Mike said. “Of course I’m alright. That was bad-ass.”
“Yeah, but it shouldn’t—”
Before I could finish, Mike turned, looking up the shore of the lake. Another bolt of light blazed forth. This time I was sure of it; it was wrapped around his hand, although I couldn’t make out anything else. It was just too bright. The quickening slammed into a fallen tree, tore through it, and continued up the shore. Grass burst into flame, earth split apart in steaming chunks. And then the quickening cut off.
“That’s incredible,” he said.
I grabbed his hand, turning it over in mine, examining the focus. I could hear the fires crackling, but for the moment I wasn’t worried about a forest fire. “What are you doing?” I said. His hand was fine, of course. The amber focus was fine. “Why is it doing that?”
“Doing what?” he asked. Again, he seemed unperturbed by the fact that I had taken his hand. He just glanced down at me, grinning like he’d won the lottery.
“Why is it closing around your hand like that?”
“I dunno,” he said. “I’m doing it the same way I do when I just use the ground.”
“It shouldn’t do that,” I said. “I thought you had hurt yourself.”
“I’m fine,” he said, wriggling his fingers.
I let go of his hand and said, “Man, you are a strange one. I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s like you’re holding part of it back.”
“What now?” Mike said, still grinning.
“Maybe you could do something about those fires?” I said. “I don’t think the Forest Service would appreciate a wildfire.”
“How?” he said.
I tapped the gold pusher. “You could give this a try.”
“Pushing?” he said. “I’d have to go around to the other side of the water to push it onto the fire.”
“It’s just a name,” I said. “You can move stuff in any direction; we just call it a pusher. Be sure to try the gold one this time.” And I moved behind him again. I didn’t want to get caught in the way, just in case.
A moment later, I felt the vibrations in the ground beneath me; he was still trying to get focused, I could tell, and a gold pusher had a pretty wide range. The sensation passed quickly, and a wave of water surged up, slopping across the shore. The burning grass vanished under the water with a hiss, and tendrils of steam swirled up from the smoldering tree. And the water kept coming, pouring across the shore, racing toward us, higher and higher.
“Mike,” I said. “Mike!”
And then the water hit. It only reached about mid-calf, but it was enough to knock me off balance, and I felt my tennis shoes sliding on the wet, silty grass beneath me. I was falling. And for the second time, Mike caught me. He grabbed me easily, one arm looped around my waist, holding me up as his miniature flood continued its course. The water crested and then began to recede, some of it disappearing into the ground, the rest of it sliding past us back into the lake. My heart beat so loud in my ears that I couldn’t hear anything, feel anything, but Mike’s arm around me.
As the last of the water trickled past us, I got my feet back under me, and Mike stepped away from me. “Sorry about that,” he said. Twin red spots had appeared in his tan cheeks.
“Overexcited much?”
The red in his cheek increased, but he just shrugged.
“I’m just kidding, Mike,” I said. “That was kind of amazing.”
The smile returned so quickly that it took my breath away. “I know, right?”
“I do wish you’d left me out of your moment of triumph, though,” I said. I squished my feet in my tennis shoes to make my point.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s a place we can dry our socks and shoes over here.”
He led me along the edge of the lake, up the side of the bowl. Sure enough, there was a large, flat rock at the top of the hill, looking out over a long, forested stretch of land. Ahead of us, the sun continued its inevita
ble decline, angry and red. We sat down, took off our socks and shoes, did our best to get as much water out as we could, and set them to dry in the dying sunlight. I squeezed some water out of my jeans and then rolled them up to my knees, and a moment later Mike imitated me.
“So only one left,” he said. He tapped a silver focus. “To defend against quickening attacks.”
I nodded. “It works just like the other. A shell around you. The more you practice with it, the better you’ll be able to manipulate it.”
“Like how?”
“Well,” I said, “if you pour more energy into it, you can make it bigger. But you can also make it tougher. More likely to resist a refined attack, like what you were just practicing.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to have a gold one for that?”
“It would have some advantages,” I said. “But with gold, you’d lose a lot of the precision. Depending on the type of quickener you’re facing, he could use that to your disadvantage. Send you some very refined attacks that you might not be able to adjust for.”
“Why don’t we practice?” Mike said. He untied the amber ground and held it out to me. “I saw you didn’t bring yours, so you can borrow mine. You attack, I’ll defend. Just so I get a feel for it.”
The amber caught the falling light, spun it back at me in cutting twinkles.
“I, uh—” I cut off, suddenly embarrassed. Irrationally embarrassed. It wasn’t my fault, after all. Or it was, maybe. “I can’t quicken anymore.”
The amber ground slowly stopped its spinning, hanging in the air between us. Mike held it like an omen to ward off evil.
“What do you mean you can’t?” Mike said. “What happened?”
All the words inside me rushed together, trying to escape. I wanted to tell him about Christopher, about Isaac, about how I was responsible for both of them dying. About Grandfather, about the people I had killed. I wanted to tell him that I was broken. But the words stumbled over each other, overeager. Or perhaps they betrayed each other, hoping they would be betrayed in turn. Regardless, I just made a little choking noise and then sat there, silent.
Mike leaned back and lay down on the stone, retying the ground against his palm. For a long time we stayed there, me sitting, him lying. The space between us was rather small, actually—he had sat close to me when we reached the rock—but it was growing wider with every heartbeat, as though something invaded that crack and sought to pry it open, forcing itself between us. Entropy, eternity, time. Maybe it was just life, the way it beat out in a thousand different moments.
And then Mike’s hand found my shoulder, pulled me down so that I was lying with my back against the warm stone, and that space collapsed into a matter of centimeters. Close enough for words to pass again.
“My dad brought me here when I was a kid,” Mike said. His voice was tight, like tears tied into a knot. He looked straight up into the sky, so I imitated him, watching violet decay into black above us. “That was back when he wasn’t drinking so much, you know? Anyway, he brought me here. We spent a whole weekend. Left early Friday—I got to skip school—and didn’t go home until Sunday night. I fell asleep in the car on the way home, and when I woke up, I was in my bed. He must have carried me inside.”
I didn’t know why he was talking—if he wanted to explain something to me, or if he was trying to apologize in some oblique way. Perhaps he simply wanted to fill up that void of silence I had created. It didn’t matter. I clung to his voice like a lifeline.
“That’s why I picked this place. We camped under those pine trees. Dad brought a camp stove, but we didn’t use it. We just gathered wood, built fires, and cooked over that. He wasn’t a very good camper, actually, so we’d brought a lot of junk food. Some oatmeal. A few granola bars. I remember the first night we had steak, because he had brought some in the cooler. And it wasn’t any good. At least, not to me. But I ate all of it, and I was happy.”
There was a long moment where I could hear just his labored breathing, and the years of pain that were wrapped inside each gasp.
“We never came here again.”
I shifted on the smooth rock, and my shoulder ended up resting against Mike’s, closing the last space between us. There was something strangely intimate about that moment, the bruised sky above, the breeze over our bare feet. We spent the next while in silence, the world falling into darkness around us.
“I don’t know why I can’t quicken,” I finally said. “There was a fight. My brother died, and someone—” I swallowed. “Someone very close to me.”
“You don’t have to—” Mike started to say.
“It was all my fault.” The words came out in a whisper, but they cut him off. That thin, tiny voice seemed to stretch out from my lips, falling up into the black sky, as though the universe itself had stopped to listen, and then, with its merciless, eternal precision, continued its cosmic movement. “I’ve never told anyone that before. My parents think it was just an accident.”
Mike didn’t say anything. There really wasn’t anything to say, I suppose, but I was glad he didn’t try to convince me it wasn’t my fault. I don’t think I could have handled that.
Finally, when the sun had finished dying, I sat up and pulled on my socks in the near-darkness. They were still damp. My shoes followed. I heard, more than saw, Mike moving next to me in the dark. We both stood up at about the same time. Mike stepped next to me and put an arm across my shoulder.
“Ready?” he said. His voice sounded different in the darkness.
I just nodded.
In a shiver of white, we stood back in my room. I blinked against the brightness of the electric lights. I had left them on, I guess. Mike stepped away from me.
“Thanks,” Mike said. “That was—that helped a lot.”
I nodded. He started to untie the foci, and I shook my head. “Keep them,” I said.
“You sure?”
“What good are they to me?”
There was a frown on Mike’s face, but he just said, “Thank you.”
“See you at school tomorrow, I guess.”
He gave a sad smile and said, “Sure. And seriously, thanks again. There aren’t a lot of people I can talk to. If you ever want to—”
I stopped him before he could finish. “Thanks,” I said, mustering a smile.
Mike nodded and vanished. None of the sizzling heat from traveling with the ground; he just disappeared. The way a true quickener would.
In the morning, I would have to pack up the strange emotions stirring inside me, make myself presentable for another day. And there was always Olivia—Olivia who made me smile, who I wanted to be with, more than I had realized possible. Olivia who made me think I could be happy.
But in that moment, I just collapsed on my bed, a bittersweet taste on my tongue. I was decidedly confused.
Journal Entry, per Doctor Lumley’s request, Sunday 25 September
Time flew by. You probably still want to know everything. I guess I’ve already committed myself, so I can’t stop here. Olivia had even less free time than I had realized, for in addition to the exhibit, she had begun work on a secret project that she would tell me nothing about. When she was not working on her exhibition, though, I spent all my time with her. Every day showed me something new about her, something that made me love her even more. And I was in love—more deeply than I realized. The way she moved, the shape of her legs in those ridiculously retro skirts, the feel of her next to me on the motorcycle, so that I was lucky to keep us from falling. Most of all, her personality: calm, almost unflappable, like a fountain of life and happiness that was always waiting for me. A seemingly inexhaustible source of equilibrium. The darkest shadows lifted, pushed back by Olivia’s presence, by the way she made me feel. Things didn’t change much at home, but that was ok. I had come to a sort of peace with that; I couldn’t ask any more from my parents than what they were already giving. Even those vast silences at home seemed to grow thinner, as though they would break one day soon.
Other days, he reminded me of Isaac. Easy-going, with that relaxed smile, the steady self-confidence. Even the way his voice hovered on the edge of depth. Those days, I wanted to be with him, but not for the same reasons. Because it was easy to slip back into that relationship, imagine he was an older brother—that I didn’t have to be responsible for everything, that there was someone I could trust. Implicitly. That I was not alone. When he reminded me of Isaac, I felt none of the confusion that thinking about Christopher brought. Those times, thinking of him as Isaac, could not last, because I was constantly reminded of how little Mike knew of quickening, how much I needed to teach him before we tried to destroy the tree.
No matter how I understood our relationship, when our time together ended, I found myself suddenly lost in that same darkness, unsure of where to go, what to do, struggling to draw breath while I lay under six feet of pain.
Olivia’s dad wavered back and forth between sickness and health, but he continued to work at the cemetery because Mr. Wood’s sister was still in a coma. Dark circles appeared under Olivia’s eyes, and she was more and more tired. At first I just thought she was working too hard, between school, the exhibition, and her secret project. She started coughing; at first her mom insisted it was just a cold, but then Olivia missed two days of school, and her mom declared that she had the flu, and so this weekend she spent recovering in bed.
