by Dean Murray
Chapter 9
A 'little something-something' turned out to be a movie in their home theater. Ari wasn't very excited about that until she found out that they had a pre-release version of some street-racing movie she'd been excited about for months.
In between gushing about how awesome the movie was going to be and needling Kat in an effort to find out how she'd gotten her hands on a movie that wasn't due to be released for more than a month, Ari settled down in one of the overstuffed leather recliners with an extra-large tub of popcorn, two cans of pop, and three candy bars. Apparently the room next to the theater was a fully-stocked concessions booth.
Jace offered to grab something for me when he disappeared to grab himself a glass of water, but I was feeling oddly full after the burger. Kat brought another plate of fries with her, which boggled my mind, but when I asked her why she would eat fries instead of just having another of Jace's burgers she shrugged.
"I'm slumming. You can't just eat only Jace's best stuff or you start to take it for granted. It's all about keeping a proper sense of perspective."
"Right, it has nothing to do with the fact that my fries are world-class, or the fact that I refuse to fix more than one hamburger for you on any given night. You keep telling yourself that."
Jace slid into the chair next to me and put two bottles of water in the cup holders between us. "Just in case you decide later on that you're thirsty."
I leaned in close enough that I'd be able to whisper without Ari overhearing us. "Thanks, but we aren't really going to watch a movie, are we? I thought Kat was going to distract Ari with a tour of the house while you filled me in on everything we started talking about earlier in your room…"
"Yeah, that was the original plan, but you seem pretty worried about not making Ari think anything is happening between the two of us, so we thought maybe it would be best if we kept the two of you together for now."
"Doesn't that kind of make it impossible for the two of us to talk?"
"Just wait—you'll see."
It was cryptic, but I shouldn't have expected anything else from Jace. Still, the promise of a full explanation was enough to make me settle back into my chair as the opening scenes of the movie started playing. We were only five or six minutes into the movie when it happened.
The movie froze between one heartbeat and the next. I started to get up, but Jace grabbed my arm and pulled me back down into my seat. "That was supposed to happen. Just sit back down and try not to make any sudden moves if you see Ari start to look back here."
That made me look down at Ari, which delivered a second shock to my system. "She's not moving! What did you do to her?"
"Actually nothing, everything that's been done was done to you and me."
"That's not an explanation."
"I've changed the passage of time. You and I are still in the same reality as Kat and Ari, but we're experiencing it at about ten percent of normal speed. Ari is moving, she's just moving very slow.
"It's not the best option, it's going to come with a price for me, but it was all I could think of that would let us seem to still be here while also giving us enough time to talk. You're going to want to hold still though because I'm not augmenting your system enough to allow you to really function at this speed."
I started to ask him what he meant, but then it hit me. I was suddenly out of breath and gasping for air. I could feel the air coming in and out of my lungs, but it felt thin, like it wasn't providing me with any oxygen.
Jace reached over and laced his fingers through mine and I finally felt a measure of relief.
"Sorry, setting the effect so that it would let you move at this speed would have dramatically cut down the amount of time I could have maintained it. I amped your systems up enough that you should be able to get enough oxygen to carry on a conversation, but don't expect to be able to do much more than that."
"How is this even possible?"
Jace gave me another lopsided smile. "I'm not human, remember?"
"This is what you did this morning, wasn't it? That's why we were able to talk for so long without me being late for class."
"Yep, that's exactly what happened. It was a lot less expensive of an effect because even though I amped both of our systems up to the point where you could walk around without going into oxygen debt, I only made us function at about four times normal speed. Also, I put us in a cone of silence and manipulated light around us so that you wouldn't be able to see the fact that the parking lot was full of people, all of whom had stopped moving."
I shook my head in amazement. "What about the note? How did Kat do that?"
"Something similar. She waited until those two girls were in mid-handoff and then accelerated herself to something even faster than we're experiencing right now. At that speed she's basically invisible to anyone who is still moving and thinking at normal speed. She grabbed the note, ran off to an empty room, and practiced forging Sandra's handwriting until she had something good enough to convince everyone else that Sandra had written it."
I let out a low whistle. "After which she came back to our class, swapped the notes and then let time speed back up to normal."
"Yeah, that's the basics of what happened, along with some telekinesis to make sure that the note landed in her hand like she wanted it to."
"When did she tell you about all of this?"
"As soon as she finished up her shower. She buzzed down to the kitchen and then we both jumped to ten times normal speed while she explained it all."
"I think my brain is starting to hurt. How do you keep track of when you're talking to someone whether or not you sped time up or slowed it down?"
Jace hadn't ever released my hand, which should have been incredibly distracting, but I'd been so busy fighting for air when he'd first grabbed my hand that I'd missed the normal flush of excitement. Now my system had mostly adjusted to the feel of his skin on mine. It meant that I could enjoy the feeling without being overwhelmed by it.
He gave me a gentle squeeze. "Don't worry about it. You learned all of this before now, which means that you're fully capable of getting up to speed on it all again."
"Pun intended?"
"Yeah, pun intended."
"Okay, I'll stop worrying about my brain coming out of my ears."
Jace looked down at Ari and Kat as though checking something and then turned back to me. "In answer to your question, the proper way to discuss it is to say that we slowed down time, or that we sped ourselves up, but for all practical intents it doesn't really matter because it only works going in one direction. We can slow time down, but we can't speed it up."
"So you just throw out a number like ten times or a hundred times and everyone in the know understands that you're speeding yourselves up to that level."
"Yep, exactly."
"Wow, that must be amazing."
"Yeah, it's a major perk, but it's not without a price, Selene, none of what we do is."
"What do you mean?"
Jace ran his fingers through his hair and then sighed. "What do you know about mythology?"
"What do you mean? Greek? Norse?"
That won me a chuckle. "Just the fact that you know there are multiple kinds of mythology puts you way ahead of most kids these days. You could have added Egyptian, Sumerian, Mayan, and Aztec mythology to your list if you'd wanted to, but that still wouldn't have been enough to really be comprehensive."
"So which pantheon are we talking about?"
"All of them and none of them all at once."
I rolled my eyes at him. "Well, that's helpful."
"Sorry, I think I'm still waiting for you to freak out and try to run away again."
That drew a sigh out of me. "I'm sorry I ran away, but you have to be able to see how freaky all of this is. Go ahead and do your worst, I'm prepared to suspend my disbelief—at least temporarily."
"Okay, the basic truth comes down to this. All of the myths from all of the different cultures are true. Not exactly o
f course, there are some things that they got wrong, but those people all really existed. Zeus, Mars, Thor, Freya—they were all real beings and they did most of the things that the stories say they did."
"Wait, you're telling me that you're a god?"
My voice got so shrill that I expected Jace to shush me, but apparently he had that angle covered too. Ari didn't even budge.
"No, I'm not a god. I'm just part of a group of beings that ancient civilizations believed were gods."
"It sounds like the same thing to me."
The sarcasm dripping off of my voice was probably not the smartest thing considering that I'd just learned that Jace was capable of vaporizing me with a thought, but my tone didn't seem to bother him.
"There's a big difference. People who believe they are actual gods tend to become unhinged over the long run. We already have an unhealthy amount of power, the last thing Kat or I need is to have that going to our heads as well."
That made sense, and ironically the fact that Jace had told me he was only five hundred years old was now a source of comfort rather than being the craziest thing I'd heard yet.
"Okay, so you have all of the powers one would expect out of a god—lightning, pestilence, plagues, that kind of stuff—but you're young as far as gods go, so you weren't around during the fall of Troy or anything…"
Jace gave me a hesitant smile. "Maybe it would just be best if I started at the beginning and worked from there."
"What, like the Garden of Eden?"
"No, the beginning of the explanation that I originally planned on giving you."
I successfully resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at him, but it was hard. "Fine, go ahead, but where do you stand on the whole Garden of Eden thing?"
That question earned me a glare, so I put my free hand up in a gesture of surrender. "Sorry, please proceed, your holiness."
"I'm not the Pope, Selene. You can just call me Jace."
"Yes, your holy Jaceness."
"Now I know you're yanking my chain."
"Of course I am. I expected you to realize that a while ago, based on the fact that you seem to be able to read my mind—wait, can you actually read minds?"
Jace looked like he wanted to put his head in his hands and pretend like he couldn't hear me. Maybe that should have been terrifying, but it actually finished putting me at ease. Apparently I was wired so that I couldn't be scared of someone that I successfully teased without getting vaporized.
"No, we can't read minds. May I proceed?"
"Sure, by all means, oh omnipotent one."
"Fine. So as we've already discussed, those like me are capable of a number of different things that modern science doesn't have any explanation for. Thousands of years ago we used those…powers, for lack of a better term, to set ourselves up as gods to a variety of early societies, but by and large we were anything but godly. Reading about ancient mythology, especially Greek mythology, is uncomfortably close to watching daytime soaps."
"Right people cheating on each other, stabbing each other in the back, dying and then coming back to life after a cheery visit to the underworld. I know, I took the class."
"Yeah, basically, people are jerks and when you give them extra power it just turns them into bigger jerks. That would have been bad enough all by itself, but there is a price for all of the feats we're capable of. Using our power causes a kind of permanent amnesia. The bigger and more spectacular the effect we unleash the more of our memory we lose."
It took me a couple of seconds to process the implications of what he was saying. "Wow, that's terrible. I always thought the Greek myths tended to focus on the most erratic of the gods because that was where all of the stories were, but that wasn't it at all, was it?"
"Nope, the flashiest of the Greek pantheon were so erratic precisely because they tended to walk around with huge chunks of their memories missing. They were the ones who got the most involved with human affairs, sometimes because they wanted worshipers, sometimes because they were legitimately trying to help, but the result was always the same. Eventually they became so disoriented that someone manipulated them into acting against their own best interests."
I opened my mouth to ask how that was even possible and then really thought about what he'd said. I couldn't think of many worse fates than trying to help those around you, but being forced to trade away your memories in the process. I'd always thought that we were mostly a result of our experiences. Jace's theories on reincarnation—combined with how well he knew me—seemed to at least partially invalidate that world view, but even so it would still basically be like trading your soul away every time you used your power.
Then, after all of that, having someone trick you into doing other, probably terrible, things would be even worse. Eventually you wouldn't even be able to remember who your enemies were. All someone would have to do was be nice to you for a few days and you'd be willing to do practically anything for them.
"That's terrible."
"Yeah, it's even worse than you realize. Since it's a combination of strong emotions and memories that fuel us, as we lose more and more of our memories we become weaker and weaker until we're basically no different than normal humans."
"So the gods who don't actually use their powers are the ones who end up being the strongest?"
"Yeah, only like I said, most of us don't call ourselves gods anymore. Other than a small group of psychopaths, we mostly prefer the term Awakened."
"So the more an Awakened uses their powers the weaker they get, but if they can avoid burning up memories they eventually end up more and more powerful?"
"Yeah, we all have eidetic memories, so if we don't use our powers we'd never forget anything."
"Wait, you mean that there might actually be Awakened whose memories stretch back thousands, or even tens of thousands of years?
"In theory, yes. There is a pretty persistent set of legends among our people about Awakened who have resisted using their abilities and therefore have been able to watch history play out over thousands of years.
"The reality is that being one of the Awakened is a pretty dangerous gig. Not only do you have to worry about other Awakened, other pantheons if indeed you're part of a pantheon, you also have to worry about humans trying to use you for their own ends. And through it all you're fighting a constant low-level temptation to use your powers in a hundred little ways to make your life easier or better."
It should have been obvious to me at the start of the conversation, but it only hit me just then. "Oh, no, Jace. You're losing memories right now! Kat too. Because of me you've both lost experiences that you wanted to remember. Stop the time thingy. Put us back to normal speed right now. I believe you—every word. Put time back and we'll talk later when you don't have to use your powers."
I tried to get to my feet, but Jace pulled at my hand to stop me.
"Stay sitting, Selene. You'll go into oxygen debt if you keep this up and then I'll have to amp your system up again. That's going to use up more of my memories than letting the rest of the time effect run its course."
I stopped resisting him immediately. "That's fighting dirty. You've backed me into a corner. If I let you continue to play with time it will cost you, but if I do anything but just sit here and listen that will cost you too."
"Welcome to my world. The costs of doing what we want are always unpleasant—it's just a matter of deciding what price we're willing to live with."
There was a double helping of unhappiness in his voice right now, but I wasn't sure what to do or say.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to touch a nerve there. I just didn't want you to have to give up bits and pieces of your life when it isn't necessary."
Jace managed a smile for me. "No, you're okay. It's just that after a couple hundred years this can get a little tiring."
"I guess there is a lot more that got left out of the mythologies than most people realize."
"Yeah, like seeing someone you care about slowly melt away
right in front of your eyes over the course of just a few days or weeks, until what is left walks and talks like them, but doesn't even remember your name."
"That's terrible."
"Yeah, but most Awakened don't agree because someone like that at least got the full use of their memories. Most Awakened think that the worst way to go is to simply be killed. If that happens then you die with a bunch of memories that you never got to accomplish anything with. 'The great waste of untapped potential' is what one of my fellows called it."
"So you can be killed?"
"Yeah, after a manner."
"What does that mean?"
Jace sighed heavily and I suddenly got the feeling that this was what we'd been circling around for hours now. This was the thing that he was the most worried about freaking me out. "It means that if you cut our heads off or shoot us with a gun our hearts stop beating and what you're left with is only good for burying."
"That sounds pretty dead to me."
"Yeah, but we don't stay dead. Within nine months of our death we are reborn into new bodies. We start off as infants indistinguishable from any other human child, but as we grow, our appearances gradually change. Eventually—often by the time we hit our mid-teens—we look exactly the same as we did before we were killed.
"We think the same way, talk the same way, act the same way. We are the same person, just without all of the memories we had before we died."
I wanted to run away, but I couldn't. Jace had locked me inside of a strange alternate world where running would just result in me suffocating. I looked up at Jace with tears in my eyes and saw the answer to my question even before I asked it.
"But that would mean…"
"I'm sorry to break it to you like this, Selene, but you are an Awakened just like Kat and me."
