The Indifferent Children of the Earth

by Gregory Ashe

  Chapter 38, Thursday 29 September

  In one easy movement, he reached down and grabbed me by the throat. I struggled to open channels to my foci—the pusher, the blaster. Hell, I even opened one to the burner in my panic, not thinking of Mike and Olivia and the other people who could be caught in the flames. But I was tired, and even though I had a store of refined energy, my exhaustion made me slow. Before the foci could react, Mr. Green reached down and, with two easy movements, cut the foci from my arms. His claws bit deep into my arms, tearing furrows from shoulder to wrist, and the metal foci tumbled into the misted grass without a sound. All I had left was the ground. The ground, and Christopher’s focus, tied around my neck.

  I sent energy toward the ground. For a moment, the refined quickening mixed with the chilly, alien magic that clung to the gouges in my arms. It was like throwing oil on a fire; the refined quickening flared in my veins, and I let out a scream that Mr. Green’s hand, still wrapped around my throat, choked into silence. I cut off the channel of energy, letting it return to pool inside me. The fires raging along my veins died slowly, so slowly that it was long moments before I realized what was happening.

  The lack of rain told me where I was as certainly as the tangled web of branches, barely visible in the darkness. Without my ground for illumination, I had to rely on the paltry starlight that was filtered first by the roiling storm clouds, and then again by the thick canopy of branches. Mr. Green carried me easily, his strength unnatural. For the first time, I noticed the texture of his skin, where his hand gripped my neck. Rough and grainy. Almost like wood.

  I tried to speak, but Mr. Green’s grip barely left me room to breathe, and my words came out choked squeaks. I kicked and flailed, but nothing I did made any difference. My foci were gone, lost in the grass beyond the hawthorns. My ground, well, my ground was inaccessible. I didn’t want to feel anything like that pain again. All I had left was Christopher’s focus. And I had no idea what that did. The wind whistling through the branches, shaped by memory, suddenly took on the sound of Isaac’s screams, from that night long ago. I didn’t want to use anything Christopher had made. But I didn’t want to die, either.

  Mr. Green moved faster than I realized, for I suddenly felt myself lifted, my legs drawn out, and then he set me down on the pitted stone of the altar. One hand—the hand that had gripped my neck—now rested on my chest. The long, obsidian claws that had marked it before were gone now, although they remained on the other hand.

  “Let me go,” I whispered, the words rough and raw in my damaged throat. “Let us go. Let it end.”

  “You don’t know what the eater will do if he’s free,” Mr. Green said. “Besides, you burned down my house.”

  The remaining obsidian claws moved; only their outline was visible in the darkness. With a speed born of total panic, I sent all the refined energy I had left into Christopher’s focus, lying flat against my chest. It blazed to life, hotter than a coal, and the world dropped away around me.

  It wasn’t the piecemeal, black-and-white shimmer of traveling. This was total darkness that was followed, an instant later, by a cacophony of sound and light.

 

  I stood in my garage. My old garage, back in New York. I was watching myself, just a few feet away, holding a small crucible with melted silver. On the workbench in front of me was a set of molds connected by a runner, where the superheated metal would be poured to fill each of the molds. I was casting foci; not an unusual event for me, although many quickeners would go their whole lives using the same foci. Not me, nor Isaac, nor Christopher. We had wanted to experiment, to invent. And that’s what I was doing this night.

  The back of a smooth, pale arm came up and wiped invisible sweat from my brow. Not my arm. Wonder and terror sank in my gut. I wasn’t me. I was watching me.

  I was Christopher.

  “I still don’t understand why you want to do this,” his voice said. None of the aggression that he used when he spoke to other people, none of the edges. Not with me. “What’s the point of being able to invert the energy and pour it back out of the ground? It won’t be any more effective than a normal bolt of energy through the ground.”

  I watched myself bite my lip and try to shake a thick curl of hair out of my eyes as I started to pour the molten metal. Christopher’s hand reached out from where I stood and tucked my curl of hair away. It was a casual, familiar gesture. A part of the real me, the me watching all of it, shriveled up inside. I remembered this night.

  This was the night when I had figured out how to alternate the flow of energy through a ground. It was the night I learned, without even knowing it at the time, how to kill Christopher. And I had to watch it all through his eyes.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the other-me said testily. “I just want to see what it does.”

  As other-me was speaking, though, something changed. Another voice spoke over me, Christopher’s voice, and everything in the garage changed. I could see another room overlaid, like a transparency, or like someone projecting two films onto the same screen. Even as I continued to cast the new ground in the garage, I watched myself sit on a low hill, looking out over the suburbs spread below me, and beyond them, the lights of New York spread out against the wine-dark sea. I barely had a moment to register the strange mixture of the two scenes.

  “ . . . different types of energy,” Christopher was saying, “and the ground can still convert them, even if they’re not what we’re used to using.” That had been a particular obsession of his, toward the end. How quickening might be able to take advantage of other types of power. The echoed interplay of voices continued as the two scenes unfolded, but I could hear Christopher in the newer image speaking. “Just imagine if you stood at the heart of a nuclear blast, and you could pull that all inside you, refine it just like electricity. Think what we could do—”

  Another me cut him off, stretching back on the low hill, purposefully letting my t-shirt slide up to expose my stomach. I remembered doing that; strange what stays with us. The other-me laughed and cut Christopher off. “God, if I have to hear about atomic energy, or nuclear blasts, or any of that, just once more, I think I’m going to lose it. Relax, Christopher; I didn’t want to come up here to talk about quickening.”

  The memory continued playing, still overlapping the scene in the garage, but something else appeared now—Times Square in the winter, flooded with multicolored lights. Icicles filtered the light, shattering it across an insubstantial crowd, while the other two memories continued to bleed through, so that the outline of my old garage mapped itself onto the blazing buildings. The only New Year’s Eve I had ever spent with Christopher. Just last year.

  Scenes continued to pour forth, a web of times and places, wrapping me tighter and tighter, a broken-glass cocoon stitched together of broken-glass memories. I could not understand all of them, not the way they competed with each other, a blur of ghostly lines and interfering voices. Seeing my life like that, or at least a sliver of my life, from Christopher’s point of view—it brought back other memories, my own memories. Two days after New Year’s, when I had slipped on a patch of ice and almost fallen down a set of concrete stairs, and then Christopher’s arm had been there, wrapped tight around my waist, pulling me close as though we were taking a picture together. And before that, fall, the leaves a crisp blaze against the sky, and using gold travelers to go to the Bahamas for the weekend. We slept on white-sand beaches and swam in warm water for three days; it was the first time I’d spent that much time alone with someone, with only the whisper of soft waters to speak between us.

  And then, in surprise, I realized that even though I was sad, heart-broken even, at what I had lost, that I wasn’t destroyed. That I was stronger today, a better person today, in spite of what I had lost, or perhaps because of it. And that I was happy, or at least, that I thought I could be happy again. And that was enough.

  The shifting field of memories froze and faded to blackness. A voice boomed in my ear, brea
king the perfect isolation.

  “Alex,” Christopher said, his voice sad. “If you’re hearing this, it means that you used the focus before I could tell you how it works. I don’t know why; I hope that you are alright.”

  A recording. Somehow, that genius had figured out how to leave me a message. It was incredible.

  “The focus is different from any other I’ve created,” he said. “It’s my masterpiece, really. It holds my most important memories, and it will protect you. It has thirteen channels in it; one each for twelve memories, and the thirteenth to protect you. You’ll have to learn how to direct the energy yourself.”

  There was a pause, a hesitation before he spoke the next words. “I have a new plan, Alex. A new dream. A way to change everything, to make it all right. To bring my mother back. If you’re listening to this, though, then maybe things didn’t go as I had hoped. Whatever happens to me, I want you to know— ”

  His voice cracked, and he started again. “I hope—”

  He stopped again. When he spoke the third time, his voice was so thick I could barely understand him. “Be safe.”

  The blackness vanished. I could feel the stone underneath me, saw Mr. Green’s claws above me, swooping toward my chest. Not a second had passed since I had activated the focus; all those memories, the message, they had happened in a fragment of time. I stared up, overwhelmed by what I had just experienced, unable even to defend myself.

  The claws passed through my body as though it were air. They struck the stone with a dull crack that reverberated through the night; I could feel it vibrate in my teeth. I glanced down. Mr. Green’s hand had disappeared into my chest. We stared at each other for a moment; I don’t think I could have been any more shocked than Mr. Green. His charred, rigid, inhuman face was painted with a mixture of wonder and fear.

  With a crack of thunder, the clouds opened above us, and torrents of rain broke the canopy, streaming down Mr. Green. I could feel thousands of drops of rain passing through my insubstantial body, splattering against the stained stone beneath me. The rain woke me from my stupor, and I scrambled off the altar and stumbled back until I felt the wood of the enormous tree against my shoulders. Maybe I could have passed through it, with Christopher’s focus working, but the thought of sliding through something solid made me freeze up in panic.

  Hot against my chest, I felt each of the thirteen channels of Christopher’s focus blazing with power. More importantly, I could feel my reserve of refined energy emptying, surging in frenzied currents as my body tried to continue to feed the hungry focus. Mr. Green still stood at the altar. Flashes of lightning broke the darkness as the storm raged overhead, illuminating Mr. Green in fitful bursts. His claws were stuck in the stone, it seemed; I watched him twist and turning, bracing himself against the uneven stone with his free hand.

  And then, with a final surge, my refined energy ran out. All the electricity I had taken in was gone, long since catalyzed and now used up. I stood there, injured and exhausted and powerless, and watched Mr. Green rip his claws free with a spray of loose stone. Several of the rocks caught me in the chest, giving me visceral evidence of how very solid I had become.

  He crossed the space between us in a matter of steps; I was too tired to run, I had lost too much blood, and my injured leg barely supported me as it was. I stared at him, hoping my face didn’t reveal the fear that came rumbling up inside me. I hadn’t felt this way since that night, in that abandoned subway station, when I had watched Christopher kill my brother in front of me. When I had stood there, frozen, helpless and let it happen. When I had watched, paralyzed with fear, as my life was torn apart in front of me.

  Mr. Green picked me up by the throat with his normal hand, raising me to eye level, and slammed my head once against the tree trunk. Alien flows of chilly energy leaked out around me; I had a sneaking suspicion that the tree was enjoying all of this. Mr. Green raised his other hand. The row of dark claws was ragged now, the remaining stubs splintered from when he had struck the altar. His good hand tightened, cutting off my air, and he reached in with the claws and plucked out Christopher’s focus from around my neck. One claw suspended the focus in front of me, gently tenting the cord that held it around my neck. Mr. Green snapped the cord easily, and the focus fell into his hand.

  “I’m going to enjoy figuring out how this works,” he said.

  Struggling to remain conscious, in spite of blood loss, in spite of the lack of air, I grabbed his arm, trying to pull myself up enough that I could breathe. The edges of my ground bit into my palm as I squeezed his rough, wooden flesh. Christopher had grabbed my arm like this, had pressed his ground against the inside of my wrist, when I had tried to save Isaac. Strange that I would die imitating his pose.

  My eyes landed on Mr. Green’s burned chest. The wounds from his enchanted thorns were still visible in the charred flesh. The only thing I had done to hurt him—turning his own magic against him.

  Mr. Green’s grip tightened, pressing me against the ridged bark of the grower’s tree behind me. I could feel that cold, sluggish energy seeping through the trunk.

  And suddenly, I knew what to do.

  I tightened my grip, the ground pressed against his arm, and I reached back my other hand and laid my palm on the trunk. Quickeners needed electricity to power their magic, and Mr. Green had brought me to the largest natural lightning rod I’d ever seen.

  I reached up into the clouds, where lightning swirled and stormed, and I pulled it down, hard as I could. For a moment it resisted, as though something in the tree held the lightning back, but I scrabbled and clawed and yanked on the electricity until it came shooting down, a blast of sorcerous lightning that struck the tree. In an instant, night vanished, replaced by shuddering brilliance that crackled down the length of the tree, splitting wood, boiling sap, burning to the core.

  As it came toward me, I felt it shift, cooling and slowing, like jellied fire, but it still came to me, pouring into my palm. It was like I had swallowed flame; everything within me burned, hotter than any inferno. It was not quickening, it was not electricity—this was something new, something different. Mr. Green had told me that the tree worked like a quickener, taking the building blocks of energy into itself and releasing something else. Well, I had just given it more than building blocks—I had given it raw power, and the grower’s tree, even as it died, did its job, converting the electricity into something new.

  My body couldn’t handle it, and so I burned as surely as the tree behind me. But I didn’t need to hold the electricity, didn’t need to refine it. I pushed it through the ground, my ground—the ground I had specifically designed to reverse the flow of energy. And I poured it from the ground into Mr. Green’s body.

  I could feel it enter him; he was like a tree, his rigid cells unable to take the boiling mixture of quickened magic. Instead of channeling the energy away, though, the way it had done with the pure, refined quickening I had tried to use earlier, Mr. Green’s body betrayed him. It tasted the grower’s magic that laced my power and it drank it up, ripping itself to shreds as the lightning tore through him inch by inch. I watched as surprise, and then horror, slid across his face. Mr. Green dropped me, stumbling back as firefly green flames burst from his skin, turning him to ash from the inside out.

  I barely had the sense of mind to retrieve Christopher’s focus from where Mr. Green had dropped it on the ground, and then I stumbled around the tree. It burned overhead, red-hot flames rising up from rifts along the polished midnight bark. Cinders fell around me, mixed with the deluge of rain, steaming and burning when they touched my flesh. I barely felt them; the poisoned fire I had conjured still burned me from the inside out.

  The yellow light of fire, real fire, illuminated the path back to the hawthorns. I followed it, but the world kept slipping into darkness around me. It was only the unrelenting pain inside me that kept me conscious, refusing to let me slide into oblivion, and so I moved as best I could, hunched over, crawling, toward the line of hawthor
ns. Through the shift and play of the fire, I could see those strange figures edging closer, stick-like wraiths that hovered just past the purging light. They did not approach me, though, did not pass the wavering lines of light.

  And then I staggered through the line of hawthorns to find a fire engine, siren blaring, pulling up in front of the inferno that Mr. Green’s house had become. Men in uniform were moving through the yard, dark bulks wrapped in raincoats under the downpour. Shouts arose, and men began to swarm toward me.

  It seemed the perfect time for me to lose consciousness, and for the first time in a long time, it seemed my body and I were in complete accord. I barely remember my gratitude as I felt the chilly, puddled water against my cheek, cooling some of the fire inside me.

  Journal Entry, per Doctor Lumley’s Request, Thursday 13 October

  You want to know what happened? My side of the story, I guess. I’ve told you too much already; there’s no going back. Two weeks in the hospital. Two weeks, and the doctors called it a miracle. I can remember bits and pieces of the beginning. All those memories are suspect, though—twisted, the edges running like melted glass—and they slip away from me when I try to focus too hard. My parents at the edge of the room, so much white and stainless steel and flickering fluorescent light. The doctor, speaking to them, his voice the gruff, over-assured voice of a long-term medical practitioner.

  “. . . massive blood loss, serious lacerations to most of his body, third-degree burns to his shoulders and back, severe internal hemorrhaging—Mr. and Mrs. León, I don’t know what that bastard did to your son, or how he did it, but his body is torn apart, inside and outside. It’s a miracle he’s still alive right now; I just can’t tell you what’s going to happen next.”

  A choked sob, but I didn’t know if it was my mom’s or my dad’s. When she spoke, my mom’s voice was even, if subdued. “That one boy, he says that Alex saved them. The police told us that. Can we talk to him?”

  The doctor hesitated. “He’s not well, Mrs. León. It’s hard to say if what he saw was real or fantasy; in any case, he’s not in any state to have visitors right now. And none of the others have awoken from their comas.” For a moment, real frustration coated the doctor’s words. “I don’t know what the bastard did to them,” he repeated. “They just won’t wake up, and they’re getting worse every day.”

  And then the last tendrils of chilled fire swirled up inside me, burning the room from my mind. That was how I spent much of the time—lost in a haze of pain, trapped under a gauzy layer of drugs that kept me from screaming. I think I knew I was dying, but it didn’t really matter. I was ready to die.

  Once, when the pain was the worst, threatening to tear through the flimsy barricade that medical narcotics had erected around me, something happened. Energy—warm, twinkling like starlight, pure—rippled through me, pushing back the cold fires that I had created. The flames flickered out, and for what seemed like the first time in weeks, I fell asleep. Really asleep.

  The drugs kept me sedated for a while longer, but the rippling swells of energy came twice more, driving back the darkness that clustered around me. And then, one fine autumn morning, cold enough that I could feel the chill through the thin glass of the window, I woke up.

  Lying in bed, the pale fall light draped across my legs and sliding toward the door, I realized I was awake. Really awake, not just slipping free of my anesthetic moorings. White bandages covered me, starting just below my collar bone, wrapping around my chest and back, both arms, and my injured leg. I felt fine, though. Well, not fine—I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. But I felt better. So much better, in fact, that hit-by-a-truck was a welcome improvement.

  I shifted in the bed, pushing myself up, and I felt pain kindle in both arms. I sagged back to the bed. Apparently I wasn’t quite as recovered as I had thought. I lay back and took stock of the situation.

  For the moment, I was alone, but my mom’s coat draped over a nearby chair told me that I wasn’t going to be alone for long. She was here, again, waiting for me to wake up. Guilt mixed with the warm satisfaction of knowing I was loved. I never wanted to put them through something like this again, but I couldn’t help being glad that she was here, that they still loved me. Even after everything that had happened, it was hard to reconcile that knowledge with everything in my past.

  I shifted on the bed, and something flopped inside my thin hospital gown. I reached under, pain burning to life along my arm, and fished it out.

  The gold healing focus. Mike was awake. And tied next to it, my ground. I don’t know how he got the ground, but it was probably the best present I’d ever gotten. And then I heard the clack of high-heeled shoes in the hall, and I tucked the ground and the focus away before anyone could see them.

  The reunion with my mom was surreal. The identical hospital room, the identical situation—it felt like we had gone back all those months, to when I had woken up after Isaac’s death. This time, though, was different. This time, I came back whole. This time, I came back myself. Different, in pain, with new griefs and new wounds, but me. Not the broken shadow that had come back last time.

  After a long hug, wet with tears, and an even longer mixture of recriminations and exclamations of gratitude, Mom called Dad; he was there so quickly I think he must have already been on his way. And then we sat there, glad to be a family again, and it was strange to think that tragedy could bring something good out of this.

  “What about the rest of the people?” I asked. “Olivia and Mike? Melanie and her kids? Are they alright? Did the police find them?”

  Mom reached out to smooth a tangle of hair. “Honey, they found them. You were with them, when they found you. The police say—they say that you were the only one conscious. That you dragged them all out, with all those injuries. Dragged them out of that burning house—” She cut off here, and two teardrops fell on her black-and-white checked jacket.

  Dad grabbed my hand tight in his. “Alex, you don’t have to talk about it, not if you don’t want to.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s ok. I don’t remember most of it, though.” I took a deep breath, and suddenly memory washed over me. That hopeless, terrifying fight with Mr. Green, as I realized all my magic, all my skill, would barely be enough to keep me alive. The fear of losing Olivia, or Mike, or both. The haze of blood loss and pain. And Mr. Green’s strange, inhuman, second face looming above me, the claws ready to tear out my life. My heart beat so fast that I thought might swallow my tongue, and one of those maddening machines betrayed my sudden agitation.

  “It’s ok, son,” Dad said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  I nodded.

  “The others are ok, though,” Mom said, wiping her cheeks. “At least, for the most part. That boy, Chad, though—they took him to the psych ward. Just for the time being. But the police who talked to him, well, they haven’t kept their mouths shut. They say that you were the one who rescued them from that . . . that man.”

  Dad let out a string of obscenities. I blinked in surprise; I’d never heard him swear like that.

  “And Olivia and her parents are still unconscious,” Mom continued. “The doctors say that they’ve stabilized, and they say there is a good chance they’ll still wake up. The others all followed a similar pattern; for a time, they were getting steadily worse, and then, one by one, they stabilized. After a few days of being stabilized, they started waking up, and by now they’ve all been released. None of them remember much after being captured, although they all agree that it was Mr. Green who took them.”

  “If that wasn’t enough, Jared Wood survived to tell the officers; he says that you called the police.”

  “I’d gone over to Olivia’s,” I said, “to check on her parents. They weren’t home, so I stopped by Melanie’s; Mr. Wood stayed there sometimes, and I thought he could tell me what had happened to the Weirs. The door was open, so I went in and found him; he told me what had happened, so I called the police and ran over to Mr. Green’s house.”
<
br />   My parents, both pale, just nodded. A mixture of lies and truth, but it seemed to satisfy them. Dad’s hand tightened again around mine, and Mom hugged me again. “You brave, brave, stupid boy. Why would you ever do that?”

  “It’s what Isaac would have done,” I said. The words left my mouth before I realized what I was saying, but I knew it was true. It struck me as odd that, after all that time trying to be Isaac, to become him, I had acted most true to his character when I hadn’t even been trying.

  Dad kissed the top of my head as he stood. “You, young man, are about as thick-headed as anyone I’ve ever met.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “You and Isaac were like twins when it came to all the big stuff. Oh, I know,” he held up a hand to forestall my comment, “you had some big differences as well. But I’ve never met two people more committed to doing what they thought was right, or more dedicated to helping other people, to protecting people. In that, at least, you’re both just like your grandfather.”

  His words left me speechless, and I was glad when Mom turned the conversation to something facile and everyday: the Harvest Festival, set to start the next week. Dad’s comment hung with me all day, long after my parents had left to go home and rest, long after the hall lights had dimmed and my own room was lost in shadow, with only a pale and smiling moon lingering outside to wish me goodnight. Maybe I wasn’t as different from my brother, or my grandfather, as I had thought. The thought left me with a mix of pride and worry.

  I spent another week in the hospital, carefully siphoning electricity from the outlets in the room, slowly using the gold healing focus to regain my strength—not too fast, but still enough to accelerate my healing and, if I was lucky, prevent the serious scarring that would otherwise accompany my wounds.

  The police came the following Monday, bringing with them my foci. The officers I had spoken to that night remembered that I had worn them, so they returned them to me, and with the foci, they brought a thousand questions. I gave them a variant of the story I had given my parents, with just enough to account for my conversation with the officers. I waited for them to ask about Mr. Green’s disappearing house, about the hidden, enchanted forest behind the row of hawthorns, but the questions never came directly. Instead, they came in roundabout ways. Had I seen any illicit drugs in Mr. Green’s house? Anything that resembled airborn toxins? Hallucinogens? I could see them trying to explain away the conflicting stories of their officers; I imagined that Chad’s story, garbled as it was by the magical sedation that Mr. Green had used, had only added to their confusion. The police officers finally left, somewhat satisfied with the web of convenient lies and explanations I had given them; I think they, as much as anyone, wanted a nice, pat explanation for what had happened that night. Mr. Green was to be dubbed a torturer and serial killer. He would have just been a serial killer, but when the officers had seen my condition that night—well, that had upped the ante. The search for Mr. Green was ongoing; apparently, no human remains had been recovered from the home, and so they assumed he was still alive. The image of him bursting into flame, cell by cell, in that ancient forest, was enough to keep me quiet.

  Every day I waited for Mike to come; he had been one of the first to recover, in spite of his more visible wounds, and I learned that he’d been out of the hospital for almost a week. Every day, visiting hours came and went without any sign of him, and I would wait into the night, hoping for the flicker of quickening that would bring him, hidden, to my room, until I fell asleep. And every day, I grew angrier that he didn’t come. Was he upset at me? I had been a jerk to him, that last night, about the party, but I had been a fool. I had tried to cut all my ties with him; was that how things had ended? Or were all my suspicions correct—had all of this been more about the quickening than about any friendship, and now that the grower was gone, Mike had no need for me? So my anger grew, until I decided I was glad Mike hadn’t come. I didn’t want to see him again, didn’t need his friendship.

  A tentative knock interrupted me. I glanced up, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more surprised in my life. Chad stood there, wearing loose white pants and a white shirt, almost like a doctor’s scrubs. He had none of the usual product spiking up his hair, and he looked pale. A man in a doctor’s coat stood behind him, and behind the doctor, a massive male nurse. Doctor and nurse both watched, impassive, as Chad took a step into the room.

  “Can I come in?” he asked in a low voice.

  I nodded, still unable to speak.

  He came over to the bed, eyes on the ground; the confident jock, the smug, arrogant kid who had it all—he was gone. Whoever this person was, he wasn’t Chad. Without raising his eyes, Chad slumped into the chair next to my bed. The doctor and the nurse stood just inside the room, watching.

  “How’s it going, Chad?” I finally said. My voice was tight; hell, everything was tight, the same nervous tension that I always felt around him, a mixture of fear and his ridiculously good looks.

  He glanced up at me, as though surprised. “They, um,” he glanced over at the doctor, “they thought I should come talk to you.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  Chad let out an explosive breath and lurched forward in the chair, toward me. The nurse took a pair of quick steps toward us, but Chad remained in his seat, and the nurse stopped. “God, it’s like they all think I’m crazy, you know? I’m not crazy, am I?”

  Hell, how was I supposed to answer that? My mouth answered before my brain could come up with a suitable response. “You might not be crazy, but you’re the biggest prick I’ve ever met.”

  For a moment, I saw the old Chad again—that crazy-confident smile that teased out the dusting of freckles across his cheeks and nose. He looked better without all that product in his hair, without the harsh cologne. More approachable. “Yeah, that’s for sure. But I don’t think medical science has come up with cure for being a prick yet.”

  That was definitely not the response I had expected. I took a long look at Chad, trying to figure out what his game was, but in the end I just didn’t know. For one thing, he actually seemed sincere. I shifted in the bed, wincing as everything twinged, and stretched out a hand. “Well, I’ve been a prick too, so maybe we should just call it even.”

  The surprise in Chad’s eyes was worth it; he just stared at my hand, and then at me, his eyes getting wider and wider. And then that perfect smile was back, and he grabbed my hand and pumped it once. “Yeah, ok.”

  I sank back in the bed, aching all over. Chad must have noticed because he said, “You’re still pretty banged up, huh? The doctors said it’s a miracle you survived.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard. I hope I gave him as good as I got.”

  Chad touched his nose, the nose I had broken in that first fight, and said drily, “Speaking from personal experience, I’m sure that little shit had no idea who he was messing with.”

  This time I was the one who laughed in surprise, and after a moment, Chad joined me. Other moments in the hospital had been strangely reminiscent of my past, but this one was by far the most surreal.

  When we both had quieted down, Chad leaned forward again, his handsome face earnest. “I wanted to say thank you. For saving all of us. For saving me. I was the last one, I know that. You could have left me; shit, after what I did to you, you probably should have left me. Thanks for being a better man than that.”

  I just nodded; I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but it was nice of Chad to give me credit for it.

  Chad stood up and suddenly his confidence seemed to melt. Shoulders hunched, he asked, “Look, could I—well, would it be alright if I gave you a hug?”

  I could see the surprise on the doctor’s face. I nodded, and Chad glanced back at the doctor, who gave a hesitant assent.

  Chad leaned in, wrapping strong arms under mine, pulling me close, so close that our cheeks touched. It was perhaps the most awkward experience of my life, especially when I smelled him, witho
ut that cologne, reminding me of freshly cut grass, or the first baseball game of the season. And then, still holding me tight, he whispered in my ear.

  “I know what I saw,” he said, so low I could barely hear him. His voice broke. “Am I crazy?”

  Before I could stop myself, I answered. “You’re not crazy. But no one will believe you. So let it go.”

  His arms tightened reflexively around me, and he let out a single, weak breath. And then he was gone, walking out the door. The doctor gave me a curious look, but he and the nurse followed Chad out of the room without a word. And I just sat there, stunned at myself. I had just broken the most important rule of quickening; I had told Chad something I had never told anyone else, not even my parents. But somehow, I felt like it was the right thing to do.

  The next day I was released from the hospital, and my parents took me home. Olivia was still in a coma, and Mike still had not come. But on the way out of the hospital, I saw his car sitting in the parking lot. For a moment, there was a blossom of incredible pain inside me, buried deep in my gut. He had been coming to the hospital. Just not to see me.

  And then, almost as quick as it came, the pain was gone. Everything in my life seemed to line up, neat and perfect. I loved Olivia; I loved spending time with her. And now I didn’t have to worry about Mike any more. I could move on with my life, move forward with Olivia, and not keep worrying about making the right decision. The edges of the wound would be raw for a time, but this was for the best. So I rode home, in the back of my parents’ car, and felt at peace with the rippling autumn corn and the clipped autumn sun and slow turn of the world around me.