by Sarah Jaune
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Maia said with a sigh. “You will definitely stand out, Pablo. You walk like police now. I don’t know that you can hide that. What about the other?”
“His wife is too far along,” Pablo reminded her with the shake of his head. “I can’t ask him to leave her now.”
Eli bit his tongue and tried not to scream in frustration. “What are you two talking about?”
Maia turned slowly towards him. “We only have three pursuers in the Guard, Eli. Everyone else has retired. There are just three of you who are active. You, Ivy, and a young man named Thane. I haven’t met him, but we have been kept appraised of his work. He’s about a year older than you are, but he’s been a pursuer for the Guard for almost two years now. He’s good. He’s been singlehandedly handling most of the cases.”
Eli tried, and somewhat failed, to picture the other kid. What he did feel was a small amount of grudging admiration tinged with a hint of jealousy. “Okay, and what?”
“He was sent to New Orleans, Eli,” Pablo explained quietly. “He was sent to check on those kids you told us about.”
Eli remembered now how they’d explained that another person had been sent. “He’s in trouble?”
“It looks like it,” Maia said as she worried at her bottom lip. “Eli, you have to know that Thane is really good at this. You and Ivy have only been to one city, and it was a city we were reasonably certain wouldn’t be a problem. This is going to be dangerous. It might be better for Pablo to go…”
He was amazed at how quickly she’d changed her mind. Moments before she’d said that Pablo would stand out. “Ivy and I will go. This is our job now, our turn to take the risk.” He said it with more conviction than he actually felt. Inside, he felt a little hollow and panicked. If someone with experience had been caught, then he wasn’t sure what chance he and Ivy were going to stand. “He doesn’t have a partner?”
“No,” Pablo told him sadly. “We have a difficult time finding pursuers, to be honest. As you’ve seen, none of your brothers even thought about it. Maia and I couldn’t retire until we had a replacement. I went out on my own many times after we took Oliver in. Someone had to stay behind and watch him, and in the beginning, Oliver couldn’t stand anyone but Maia.”
Eli clenched his jaw and shook his head. “We’ll go.”
“Elijah,” Maia began, but closed her mouth, pressing her lips firmly together. She reached out to cup his cheek in her soft hand. “Okay.”
Eli jogged over to Ivy’s house ten minutes later, grateful that it was Friday night and they wouldn’t be missed at school until Monday morning.
He felt a small thrill of excitement shoot through him, blotting out the fear. Eli didn’t want to be in school. He didn’t hate it, exactly, but given the opportunity, he’d have rather been doing something that was tangible, useful.
A few minutes later, Ivy’s foster father opened the door at Eli’s quiet knock. His expression went grim when Eli asked for her. “One moment,” Geir Carwyn told him.
Ivy came to the door in red sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, her face flushed from sleep. “What?”
“We have to go,” he told her. “Get your stuff.”
Her eyes came back to wakefulness and she nodded. “Give me ten.”
She needed only five to get dressed and gather the few belongings she would need to take with them. She waved to her foster father as she closed the door.
The moment they were out on the dew-dampened road, she sighed in relief. “I really hate it there.”
“Why?” Eli asked, a little surprised at how sad she sounded.
“The little girls are such a handful,” she explained as she picked up the pace. “They’re so out of sync, or something. It’s like they don’t know what to do with themselves so they bounce off the walls. Alba can’t even send them to the school because someone has noticed they’re different. She’s having to homeschool them, now. That was just decided today. She had to get special permission, but it wasn’t difficult. The teachers told the local representative to the Overseer that the girls were maladjusted or something like that. Their tantrums are unbelievable. I never see anything like that from your siblings. It makes Geir and Alba edgy all the time, and I feel bad for them, so I end up doing a lot of the chores around the house.”
Eli tried to think of what to say, but nothing came out except, “What does out of sync mean?”
“Well,” Ivy shrugged as she stuck her hands in her jeans pockets and shivered a little against the cool bite of the night air, “they just don’t mesh well. I think it’s their powers are uneven. Valerie, the older one, seems to be more genius than speed. Her brain moves really quickly, but her body isn’t quite as fast. She trips a lot, stutters, loses focus, you know.”
Eli wasn’t honestly sure that he did know. He didn’t interact with her smaller foster sisters very often, but he could sort of see what she meant by that.
“Then there’s Elisha, who is more speed than brains, although she’s very smart,” Ivy mused as they turned at the trees down his street. “She has half-formed ideas, which she acts upon quickly, then ends up in a major mess. She’s always bouncing off the walls and playing with everything. She can’t seem to sit still, which wouldn’t be a problem if she wasn’t into everything and making a huge mess.”
“She’s young, though,” Eli said as they made their way up his drive. “Just five or six, right?”
“Five,” Ivy confirmed with a long sigh. “This isn’t normal kid mess, Eli. Ava isn’t nearly this destructive, and she’s only a little younger. I’m afraid to see what happens when their powers finally come in. Thankfully, we have a few years until they’re thirteen.”
He pulled open the door and found his foster parents waiting for him with a bag of provisions and instructions.
“Be careful,” Maia said thickly as she hugged him tight.
“Off you go,” Pablo told him as he handed over the bag.
Oliver walked in, eating an apple. “Bring back a cute girl, will you?”
Maia gave Oliver a withering glare, but he only laughed and walked out again, crunching loudly on the fruit.
“The information you need to find Thane is all here, including a physical description,” Pablo told them as he handed over a piece of paper. “Find Thane first, then go for the Overseer’s kids. He may have information you will need to get in, but at the very least, you’ll have extra help. He’s very experienced.”
“We’ll be fine,” Eli assured them, even though he didn’t believe it for a second. If the seasoned pursuer had problems, he wasn’t sure they’d do any better. Also, although no one was saying it, this Thane guy could be dead. There would be no way to know until they arrived and started poking around.
Eli and Ivy turned to the door when Pablo’s voice halted them. “Don’t go to the police, there. They are notoriously corrupt. Use the street gangs to find information. I included a few things you’ll be able to trade with, in the pack, but only use them if you need to. They will make you stand out.”
“Okay,” Eli said as he gave a short wave and headed for the driver’s side of the jeep. Less than a minute later, they were heading out of Redmond Township just as they had weeks before.
They drove on in silence for a good fifteen minutes before Ivy spoke. “Do you think he’s still alive?”
“I hope so,” he grimaced as he turned left onto one of the main roads that led out of the Portland Zone. “What does he look like, anyway?”
Ivy maneuvered the paper around so she could read it in the thin beams of light that filtered down from the moon. “He’s… wow. He’s seventeen, six-foot-three and about two-hundred pounds. He’s black, with black hair and brown eyes.” She whistled softly. “He’s a big guy. We aren’t going to have any trouble spotting him.”
Eli stared at the road ahead of him and tried to picture the guy they were going after. Oddly enough, he figured that he’d never be able to picture him correctly.
He shot her a sideways glance. “You’re not the only one.” The kid was more than half-a-foot taller than Eli. “What did Pablo give us to trade?”
“I don’t know,” Ivy said as she picked up the bag to riffle through it. “It looks like… well.” Clearing her throat, she held up a small, gold disk about the size of his thumbnail. It was completely flat and round. “He gave us gold?”
Eli’s mind raced through what he knew about this, but all he could recall was the story that there used to be a way to trade coins for goods. “I guess so,” he agreed thoughtfully. “Those will be easy to trade for. Gold sells fast for other goods and services.”
“Yeah, but…” Ivy shook her head. “Never mind. I’m going to get some sleep, and I’ll take over for you in a few hours.”
The long, mind-numbingly exhausting ride was made exciting, only once, when a deer jumped out into the road, and Eli had to slam on the breaks to miss it. Thankfully, it hadn’t been raining so the jeep screeched to a stop, rather than spinning off the road. It woke Ivy, who insisted that they trade off.
Eli was in no position to object. He was so tired that his bones hurt and his eyes struggled to stay open. He moved into the passenger seat, wadded up a sweatshirt to rest his head on, and fell into a deep, dream-drenched sleep moments later.
The first dream was Eli walking into a building that he thought was familiar, but he couldn’t quite place where he was. It made him nervous, though, and he turned right down a long, blank hallway through to a door that had a number on it that he couldn’t read. The door swung open silently and a man stood there, his face in shadows.
“I’ve been watching you,” the man said in an oddly high pitched voice. “You disappointment me.”
“But I brought the apple,” Eli told the man quickly, holding up a red apple. “I don’t know what else you want.”
“That’s not enough!” the man shouted and Eli spun to run from the room, racing through a house and out the backdoor. He skidded to a halt at a large pond that was carpeted with lily pads and rushes that swayed in a breeze that Eli couldn’t feel. Something scared him about the water, which he couldn’t make out under the green, heart-shaped plants. Something was very, very wrong.
“Get away from there!” a voice called from behind him.
Eli’s feet wouldn’t move, even though he knew that he needed to run.
“Go!” the voice shouted more urgently. “That’s not the way! Go around!”
His eyes, which were fixated on the unmoving water, spotted a small bubble before a tidal wave of water crashed over him, followed by the humongous jaws of a giant alligator. Eli scrambled away, yelling at the top of his lungs.
Eli jumped, flinging his arms out as Ivy’s voice attempted to break into his brain. He turned his head quickly to see that it was still dark, that he was still in the car, and more importantly, that he hadn’t been bitten by an alligator.
Sighing in relief, Eli closed his eyes again.
“What was that?” Ivy asked him curiously.
“Nightmare,” he yawned, still completely exhausted. “It was an alligator or something that tried to bite me.”
“We’ve lived that,” she reminded him dryly. “You don’t need to dream about it.”
Eli wouldn’t soon forget the dark creature that had lived in the lake behind Campbell Hunt’s home. Eli’s father might be crazy, and he did seem to have a talent for collecting dangerous, huge animals that wanted to eat his son.
Sighing, Eli turned to stare out of the side window at the trees that zoomed by so quickly that they were difficult to distinguish. He didn’t know if he’d be able to fall back to sleep after that, but a check of the time told him he’d been out for several hours anyway. “Do you want to swap off?”
“I’m fine,” Ivy said.
With nothing to do, Eli pulled the backpack up into his lap so that he could sort through the contents himself. There were about a dozen golden disks, but Eli imagined that Pablo would tell him to use them sparingly. The trick would be not to let the backpack be stolen. “Maybe I should keep these in my pocket.”
“If you want,” she said in a non-committal, distracted tone.
“Are you okay?” Eli asked her, trying to read her expression.
“We don’t even know where to look for him,” Ivy said after a short pause. “We have nowhere to start, no idea if he’s even alive, or more than a general description of what he looks like. He’s huge, though, so that helps. Have you noticed that a lot of the Overseers are tall?”
She said all of this without taking a single breath.
Eli blinked in surprise, trying to figure out how to answer her. “Uh, I don’t think they’re all tall, but they do all eat well on a regular basis. That always helps with growing, right?”
Ivy sucked in her bottom lip and seemed to be chewing on it. “I’m really nervous about this one.”
“I am, too,” Eli admitted, glad that she’d said it first. “It feels like this is the real thing, and we’re in for a real test. Plus, we have a solid idea that these kids really do need our help. I never really thought about what Cole went through to get us out safely, but he had to get a job in my parents’ house, right under my father’s nose. My father is a murderer! He’s pure evil. Cole went through all of that to save us, and…” he let his voice trail off as his throat started to itch and it became too difficult to speak.
“I don’t know how I’ll ever be that good,” Ivy admitted with a small laugh. “I’m just not that brave, or smart, or… I don’t know. I just can’t see how I’ll ever do anything that amazing.”
Eli thought that they’d already done several amazing things, but he still didn’t feel like he could talk about it. They had been through a lot in the last six months, not least of which was their first escape from his father’s house before Eli’s powers had come in. At that point their only offensive power between himself, Ivy, and, Zen, had been Ivy’s manipulation of water. “We can do it,” he said as the sun began to rise on the horizon.
She grinned and kept driving.
CHAPTER 10
STORYTELLING
Just south of Salt Lake City, while still in that zone, the jeep blew a tire. Thankfully, Eli was driving and when the wheel jerked suddenly in his hand at the loud explosion, he didn’t panic. His heart-rate kicked into high gear as he fought to slow the car down and steer the jeep off to the side of the road.
Above them, a glaring sun beat down relentlessly on the jeep.
Ivy sat motionless in her seat, gripping the armrest. “What was that?”
“I think the tire went flat,” he explained as he shut off the engine and hopped out into dry, hot air that felt too close. Around him everything was browns and tans, scrub bushes, and rocks. There was no one around them for miles, Eli was sure about that. He moved around to the back left tire and saw that it was indeed flat. Eli sighed and glanced under the car to see where the spare was located. Nothing. He pulled open the trunk and again, saw nothing. “Daggers.”
“What?” Ivy asked, coming around to the back to check.
“We don’t have a spare,” he grumbled as he glanced back up the way they’d come. “Did you see any place that we could get one?”
“Back in the city, maybe,” Ivy said as her eyes tracked to where he was looking. “I don’t think we should go back, though. It’s not wise for either of us to linger in the seat of the zones.”
Ivy’s point was solid. The seat, the major city the zone was named for, was generally where the Overseer could be found. The magical children of another Overseer would do well not to be found in another zone.
In fact, it would be best if they were never found at all.
“I could run ahead,” Eli said after a moment. “I could try to find a tire and come back. I can make it to another town or something faster by myself.”
Ivy studied his face for a
long, tense moment, before turning to stare down the direction they were heading. “I think we should stick together.”
It was all she had to say. He didn’t have a good reason to leave her behind. If she didn’t want to stay back, then that was that. He wasn’t going to abandon her. “Okay.”
They gathered their belongings, grateful now that they had a gold coin to trade, and locked the jeep.
The walk was brutally hot.
“At least I remembered sunscreen this time,” Ivy said as she slathered the stuff all over her face.
Eli grinned at the streaks of white that were still left, marking the trail of her fingers. He rubbed at one with his thumb, smearing it more onto her cheek. “You look like a striped cat.”
