by Dean Murray
My between-class homework sessions from the day before meant that I was further along than Kat. I finished up my homework nearly an hour before she did, so I pulled out my journal and started writing. I started by talking about our house, the one where we'd lived for as long as I could remember. There was something grounding and centering about having always lived your life in the same town, in the same house, with the same people.
A lot of people would say a life like that sounded boring. Maybe they were right, there certainly hadn't been much adventure in my life, but there were offsetting benefits. I'd grown up feeling like I was perfectly safe inside of the four walls of our home.
It was odd, I'd never been much of a writer, but once I got past the difficulty of deciding where to start, the words just kind of flowed out of me.
I ended up writing about the things that were important to me, the places and people that had made my life what it was so far, and when I was finally pulled out of the zone by the sound of Ari slamming her book shut, I was more than satisfied with what I'd written down.
"Okay, I'm finally done. Come on, Jace, let's go out on the lake—daylight's a-wasting."
Jace very carefully didn't look at me before answering, but I could practically feel him choosing his words carefully so as to avoid leading Ari on.
"Actually, since we've got all afternoon, tonight and tomorrow morning until we have to go home, I was thinking that maybe we should change up our plans a little."
Kat's right eyebrow climbed up nearly to her hairline—apparently the two of them hadn't had a chance to discuss whatever it was that Jace had in mind. Jace gave all three of us a disarming smile.
"There's a set of hot springs that I was reading about online yesterday morning. It's only two hours each way and they are supposed to be spectacular. They are back further north, so it will be a little colder and they will feel absolutely perfect once the sun drops. What does everyone think?"
Ari barely waited for Jace to finish talking before she agreed. The little hussy was probably already thinking about getting Jace off by herself in the dark. Kat gave the plan a cautious nod, and I wasn't going to be the one to spoil the party, so it was agreed, with just one condition from the runt. First she and Jace had to spend some time on the lake together.
I watched the two of them race away as I reapplied sunscreen for the third time. Honestly, it was tempting to just go back inside and change into some real clothes, but we were going to be getting wet again tonight. Besides, I'd seen the way that Jace had looked at me when I'd first come out of the bathroom after changing.
Maybe it was silly to feel threatened by Ari, but things between Jace and I still felt so new and fragile right now. I needed every advantage I could get if I was going to keep him from getting distracted by all of the skin she was showing.
Kat sat down next to me and picked up the bottle of sunscreen that I'd just set down. "It feels like it's been forever since we stopped moving for long enough to sit outside and enjoy the sun like this. It always seems like such a waste to me not to spend as much time in the sun as possible since we can't get skin cancer and our skin doesn't get all leathery and wrinkled either."
"Wow, you're right, that is a big benefit to being an Awakened. So all of us just look like late teens, early twenties kids forever?"
"Nope. Your age freezes at whatever age you were when you were first Awakened. Each of us Awakens at the same age in every incarnation, but for some of us that age is quite a bit older than this."
"I guess that makes sense. Some of the gods were painted as old men or women."
We sat in silence for several seconds, and for the first time in a while, it felt strained. I cast about for a reason.
"Thanks for managing my dad so slickly. I don't know how you do it without even changing your clothes or makeup, but I totally would have believed that you were a couple years older than you look right now."
Kat started a little in her camp chair, and then shrugged. "It's mostly just about posture and attitude. You'd be amazed at the small things that make a huge difference in how people perceive you. It helped that I'd already fixed the idea of me being a mature eighteen-year-old in your dad's mind."
"Well, however you did it, thank you. I haven't seen my dad so relaxed in ages. He really needed today."
Kat gave me a distracted smile, but I could tell that her mind was a million miles away. I waited for nearly a minute before deciding to just jump right in.
"Is something wrong, Kat? Was it something I said?"
"Huh? Oh, no. I was just thinking about your dad. I looked at the fuel gauge in his truck and it looked like he was down to not much more than fumes. I was worried that he wasn't going to make it home without filling back up, and he only had fifteen bucks in his wallet, so I slipped a few extra twenties in there so he won't have to put this trip on his credit card."
I'd started out ready to get all self-righteous about the fact that she had looked inside my dad's wallet, but by the end of Kat's tale I wanted to cry. Apparently my emotions were more obvious than I thought; Kat looked at me and frowned.
"Geez, Selene. It's just sixty bucks. You transmuted ten thousand times that much platinum earlier today."
"I know, it's not about the money so much as it is about the gesture."
Kat shrugged. "I'm not like you and Jace, Selene. I've never clicked with another Awakened individual. Usually when I fall in love it ends up being someone normal, someone who has to put in sixty-hour weeks to make ends meet, someone who's never known anything other than a hard life. And all too often they still find an early grave despite my best efforts to hold onto them. I can't save everyone, but I'm not going to just sit by and let someone like him work themselves into the ground, not once I know them."
I shook my head at her. "There is so much more to you than meets the eye, Kat. Did I know all of this stuff before I died last time?"
"Most of it. Nobody knows everything about anyone in their life, but you knew more than anyone else."
"Well, for the third time today, thank you for looking out after my dad."
"Yeah. No problem." Kat stretched and then brought her hand up to her eyes so she could look out over the water. "So what do you want to do now?"
"I'd say that I wanted to spend some more time writing in my journal, but I'm not sure that I could dive back into that again quite yet. I need to write about my mom dying but I just feel so dead inside that I can't bring myself to write. It feels wrong to be reliving that and not feeling anything."
Kat nodded. "Just remember that there isn't anything wrong with you—you're just still emotionally depleted from all of the effects you worked earlier. After a good night's sleep you'll be back to feeling normal again."
"Yeah, I figured as much, but it still feels so weird that I'm having a hard time getting used to it."
"It will take some time—there are a lot of weird things that you're going to have to get used to. That brings me back to my original question though. If not journaling, what would you like to do next? It's kind of early for taking a nap or eating, and I'm fresh out of other ideas."
"Can you teach me how to bend time, Kat? I mean I know I won't actually be able to do it yet, but maybe you could teach me the theory behind it and then I can practice on my own later—like maybe tomorrow night while Ari is sleeping."
"I guess. It seems kind of silly, but if that's what you want I'll play ball." Kat bent down and picked up a small rock off of the beach. "Okay, so the first thing you're going to need is something to tell you when you've managed to successfully bend time. I like dropping a rock, personally. You count how long it takes for it to drop to the ground and that will give you an idea how much faster you are than normal."
"Okay, that makes sense. How long does it normally take a rock like that to fall?"
Kat shrugged. "It all depends on how fast you count. Once we're done here you can drop it and count until you're satisfied that you know how long it takes for you."
&
nbsp; "Then what?"
"So time bending is one of the more dangerous things we do simply because it's so easy to send yourself into a state of oxygen debt. If you bend time past more than two or three times normal without amping up your system to compensate, you risk putting yourself so far into oxygen debt that you pass out before you realize what's going on.
"Even if you realize what's going on, the first few times you run out of breath can be pretty intense and it's hard to amp your body up even further when you're freaking out like that."
"Okay, so it's dangerous and I should probably wait to practice until you or Jace are around."
"Yeah, I think I can safely say that you just won the award for the understatement of the year."
"Okay, so it's really dangerous."
"Much better. This time you only won the award for the understatement of the month. Time bending is the kind of thing that only a few pantheons even bother learning, Selene."
"That doesn't make sense. Isn't it a massive advantage in a fight?"
"Some. Not as much as you might think because you can't just ramp up to fifty times normal speed and kill your enemies."
"Why not?"
"Because it leaves you without any options if your enemy hits you with something that you weren't expecting. Maintaining a fifty-times time effect doesn't just require a ton of power to make the time bend happen, it also means that you've got to have your system amped up to the point where you can move and fight at that speed."
"How are they going to hit you with something at that speed?"
"By not targeting you, but rather somewhere they know you're going to have to be. Think carpet bombing. If nothing else, as soon as they see you disappear they can always throw down a blanket of fire for hundreds of yards in every direction."
"But wouldn't you already be gone by then? Or even have killed them?"
"Maybe, or maybe they are running a ten-times effect themselves and they have plenty of time to burn you to a crisp on your way in, especially since they don't have to amp themselves up because they weren't planning on moving around."
"Ah, I guess I can see what you're getting at."
"Right, plus when you add in the fact that bending time isn't a geometric kind of cost progression, it starts to make sense for some of those other pantheons to stick with the things that they do best rather than dabbling in stuff that might get them killed."
"Is that the only reason?"
"No, but it's the biggest. You have to remember that not all pantheons have access to a real researcher. Some of them only have whatever information they've been able to scavenge from stolen research journals. They might be able to amp up their strength or make their bones and skin strong enough to withstand the severe stresses created by time bending, but not have the knowledge required to amp up their lungs and circulatory system."
The situation she was describing seemed almost incomprehensible to me. "But once you know one of those things don't the others just logically follow?"
Kat's chuckle was a harsh, humorless thing. "You say that because even now, underneath that unassuming schoolgirl exterior you are still a researcher at heart."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that you make logical connections that the rest of us don't. Whether you realize it or not, you always have some kind of working framework in the back of your mind that you plug each new piece of knowledge into. The rest of us just tend to treat the things we know like a bunch of unrelated information. Even when we do have some kind of framework that we are working from, if something new comes along and it doesn't fit together with the rest of the things we know we don't fret about it too much. You on the other hand…"
"I can't leave it alone."
"Right, you just keep worrying at it until you figure out how to make it fit together."
I shook my head in amazement. "That can't really be that rare, can it? There are tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of scientists out there all over the world who think just like me."
"Even if you're right, Selene, what does that really mean? Let's say that there are millions of scientists out there in the general population. Out of a total of several billion people, that just means less than a tenth of a percent of the human race has the right mindset to put pieces together like you do."
I tried to get a word in edgewise, but she wasn't done.
"Even if that's right, how many of those scientists do you think would keep experimenting if each and every mistake they made could get them killed?"
"Probably not very many…"
"Right, and if the rest of the human race was going to try to hunt them down and kill them so they could steal their research, what do you think that would do to the rest of the research pool?"
"Probably drop it even more…"
"Exactly, and that is why people like you are so unique."
I tried from a different angle. "But what about you, Kat? You're not stupid, and there isn't much that you're really afraid of; couldn't you research if you wanted to?"
"Man, if only I had a peak memory for every time you and I had this conversation over the years. Look, Selene, I try, I really do, but the honest truth is that it's all that Jace and I can do to work through the stuff that you show us. We've had your research journals for almost two decades and it's been like pulling teeth for us to learn useful stuff out of them.
"The unfortunate truth is that there are relatively few people in any group who actually make a difference. The rest of us can mostly keep the wheels from coming off, but we aren't the ones that cure cancer or raise the national standard of living. I'm not special, not like you're special."
"Wow, when you put it that way it's no wonder you hate me."
"I don't hate you, Selene. You've kept me alive more times than I can count. Sometimes it was just the stuff you taught me that saved me from the long sleep, but more often than not you did it yourself, just like you did that last time."
I started to nod and then suddenly realized something that I should have realized back at the beginning of the conversation.
"Wait a second. If what you're telling me is true, then my old research journals are incredibly valuable. We never should have left town!"
Kat made a 'calm down' gesture at me. "Yes, your journals are worth more than our entire house, but we didn't bring them with us, at least not the originals. Those are locked away somewhere safe. All we brought with us to Cold Springs was the research journal that Jace has spent the last couple of years trying to decode, and the one from that box that Jace showed you."
"Still, we shouldn't have left them there in the house. If something happens to them…"
"Yeah, we'd be screwed, but we didn't leave them there. Our regular journals are back at the house, locked in the vault, but your research journal and the one you left yourself are hidden inside of the RV."
The wave of relief that crashed over me was so strong I couldn't breathe for a second. "Good, they're safe then."
"Well, safer. It's not like the other pantheons have forgotten that Jace and I are your heirs. They know that you left behind a treasure trove of information, and some of them are probably smart enough to muddle through your notes, so they've been chasing us unrelentingly for the last eighteen years. We were even more careful than normal when we set things up in Cold Springs, but that's still no guarantee. For all we know there's a kill team headed our way right now. If that happens then the best we can hope for is that the hiding spot inside of the RV will be good enough to stop them from stealing your journals out from under our noses, and that we'll be able to beat a fighting retreat out of here with them."
"You're not painting a very reassuring picture, Kat."
"That's good—I wasn't trying to. Did I convince you to hold off learning how to bend time?"
"Nope, from the sounds of it, I need to learn it even more than I realized."
"Okay, close your eyes and try to relax like you're summoning up your default emotion. I know you'
re too fatigued to do it, but that will help put you in the right state of mind."
I closed my mind and tried to do as she'd asked. She was right, I was too emotionally worn out to summon the all-encompassing feeling of happiness that I'd been experiencing earlier that day, but I did manage at least a weak shadow of it.
"Now what?"
"Once you're really calm, you'll be able to hear your own heartbeat. Actually, now that I think of it, 'hear' may not be quite the right word. It's possible that it will be more like you can feel your heartbeat in your ears."
"Gee whiz, Kat. That doesn't sound at all weird."
"Stop being a smart alec and just focus on hearing your heartbeat."
I took a deep breath, let it out halfway, and then held it. It took a couple of seconds, but I quickly realized that she was right. It wasn't that I could quite hear my heartbeat, but I got to the point where I could feel it thrumming through my entire body.
It must have been obvious that I'd managed to achieve the state that Kat told me I was after, because once I found it, she resumed talking.
"Okay, now that you've found your own heartbeat, you need to find the heartbeat of your surroundings."
"That's stupid, Kat. My surroundings aren't alive, how can they have a heartbeat?"
"Everything has a heartbeat, grasshopper. Listen to the waves lapping up on the beach. It creates an audible marker that signals the passage of time. Something you could, if you didn't have the literary acumen of a toad, call a heartbeat."
"Okay, point taken, this location has a heartbeat. What if we were somewhere else without water?"
"Every place has a heartbeat, Selene. Some are just harder than others. Whether it's the sound of your tires against the pavement, or the crooning of an owl, there is always something. You just have to listen for it."
"What happens next?"
"You quit rather than trying to create one of the more dangerous effects known to Awakened-kind while you are the emotional equivalent to falling-down drunk."
"Come on, Kat. I won't try to actually work the effect—just tell me though so I can think about how it would all come together."
