by Dean Murray
Chapter 11
I only made it to the kitchen before Kat suddenly materialized in front of me, her back against the garage door.
"It wouldn't have worked, Selene. The locks still don't have you down as an authorized thumb print."
I laughed. It came out bitter and with a touch of hysteria, but that wasn't entirely surprising. "Honestly, I never expected to make it even this far."
"Why'd you run then?"
"Because apparently it's all I know how to do. I can't fight back, can't even see the threats coming, all I can do is just run away and hope that will be enough to keep me alive for another day."
Kat winced. "I'm sorry about that. I shouldn't have sprung so much on you so quickly. Jace just made me so mad. He promised he was going to tell you everything, that we weren't going to let another day go by without starting to prepare you for what's coming."
"No, you're right, I needed to know. I'm off with my heads in the clouds, wrapped up in little schoolgirl fantasies while people I don't even remember meeting are hoping to find and kill me before I get old enough to figure out that I'm even more of a freak than I always thought I was."
Kat grabbed my arm and pulled me towards the solarium. "Come on, I need some air and you need some distance from all of this."
"Is it safe? I mean, out there where people are hunting me?"
"Honestly? No, but right now there isn't really any safe place for any of us. It's as safe as anywhere else, and that will just have to be enough for both of us."
I followed her out into the cool night air and immediately started shivering. I'd hoped that she was going to close up the solarium and turn on a heater, but she didn't even slow as she led me out into the darkness.
"How far are we going? I don't even have any shoes on."
"Me neither, princess. Don't worry though, we're almost there."
'There' turned out to be a heated reflecting pool that was surrounded by rose bushes and a few small solar-powered lights. It was late enough in the year that the rose bushes were all bare, but in the pale moonlight there was still a haunting elegance to the scene.
"Wow, this place is amazing."
"Yeah, I'll let you in on a little secret—this place is my absolute favorite spot here. It gets better though. Roll your pants up and put your feet in the water."
"No way, I'm already cold enough as it is."
"Do it, you wuss."
I sighed, but I did it. That was the crazy thing about Kat, it was rare that she couldn't get me to do exactly what she wanted me to. The water wasn't just warm, it was hot enough that I kept thinking it should be steaming.
"This is actually new. We had something like this a couple of houses ago and I've had the same kind of thing put in all of our places since. The details change, but there is just something about sitting in the cold with your feet in a warm pool that relaxes me."
I just nodded. The feeling of all my stress melting out through the soles of my feet was just too perfect to spoil it by talking if I didn't have to.
"Okay, now hold still and don't freak out."
"What do you—?"
Between one heartbeat and the next the water turned hard. Not like a rock exactly because there weren't any sharp edges, more like mud that had dried and become unyielding. Given my current company, there wasn't any way to know for sure what had just happened, but I had a pretty good guess.
"You just sped us up."
"Yep, somewhere around fifteen times normal speed, which should mean that we have plenty of time to talk while Jace keeps Ari distracted. That's the new plan, by the way. Sorry, it's going to suck for both of you, but you and he are going to be spending a lot less time together for a while. That's actually what I was about to suggest right before he and I got into our big shouting match. Ari isn't going to rat you out to your dad if she's the one who's spending the most time with Jace."
My objections were piling up faster than I could get them out. "No, Kat. First of all, slow us back down to normal speed. I don't want either of you burning up your memories for me. Second of all, even apart from how I feel about Jace, I don't want him playing with Ari's emotions. It would be cruel for him to get her hopes up and then dash them."
Kat gave me a tired look, and I wondered just how long her day had been. My time sense was all kinds of screwed up, but I was reasonably sure that it was past eleven. That was a long day for just about anyone, but she'd been adding to it every time she sped herself up. An hour when she'd forged the note from Sandra, a few minutes when she'd jetted downstairs after her shower to talk to Jace, at some point it added up to a twenty-four-hour stretch without any sleep.
"Jace is right to warn you about the dangers of over using your gift, but the kind of low-level stuff we've been doing for you lately doesn't burn peak memories, it just burns the routine background stuff."
"What do you mean by peak memories?"
"A peak memory could be a first kiss, or bungee-jumping, or drag-racing down Main Street. A peak memory is any time you were feeling especially high or exceptionally low. It's the kind of stuff that most people spend their lives subconsciously chasing, but allow themselves to get so tied down with a job and mundane tasks that they only rarely find. You've been gathering a lot of peak memories over the last two days."
I started to agree and then one of the pieces clicked into place for me. "The drive over to pick up Ari in the Viper—you were purposefully trying to scare me."
"Scare you, no. Create a peak memory, yes."
"How come?"
"Because that's part of what a pantheon does. We help each other create peak memories because that's the bank we draw on when things get really rough and we have to do something major with our abilities. Your power hasn't manifested yet, so you don't have a photographic memory right now, but when it does you'll be that much further ahead because you've been living it up over the last two days."
"The food was part of that too, wasn't it?"
"Smart girl! Yep, the food was definitely designed to be a peak memory that you could burn if it came to that. It helps that Jace really is a good cook, but there was more to that burger than you realized."
"Oh, no. You guys put a drug into it, didn't you?"
I got another eye roll. I shouldn't have been able to see that well in the darkness, but I could. Maybe it was a side effect of being an Awakened, a benefit that came even before my ability fully manifested itself.
"No, we didn't drug you—at least not in the conventional sense. You've heard of ambrosia?"
"The food of the gods?"
"Yeah, that's the stuff. You just had your first taste of ambrosia. It was invented by the Greek pantheon before they were destroyed by the Roman pantheon. It was part of their advantage for a while there. Back then you couldn't go skydiving or bungee-jumping, so mostly the gods had to look for other more dangerous ways to build peak memories. You've heard of the running of the bulls?"
"Wait, that was started by you—by us—too?"
"Yep. Of course it isn't much of a challenge if you can speed yourself up, but I don't think the pantheon that started it had figured out how to bend time. The Awakened who did it later on all swore that they wouldn't use their abilities so as to still create the kind of adrenaline rush they needed."
Kat reached down and put her palm flat on the water, pushing against the warm, perfectly smooth surface.
"Did you know that it's actually possible to run across water if you bend time far enough? Of course if you're moving that fast nobody can see you do it, but it is possible. Anyway, ambrosia was the Greeks' secret weapon because it let them build a store of peak memories without having to put themselves in jeopardy."
It was almost physically painful to ask the question, but it needed to be asked. "Is that why Jace has been the way he's been—you know, touching me and making me feel all melty inside?"
"Melty?"
"Yeah, you know, weak knees, racing heart, a sudden desire to start taking clothes off."
"Not to Jace or anyone you think might eventually talk to him."
Kat pouted. "You really suck all of the fun out of life."
"Is that a new development?"
"No, you've always been a fun-sucker. Who knows what it is that the two of us see in you." Kat studied the palm-shaped imprint that was slowly forming on the top of the pond and then sighed. "No, Jace isn't consciously trying to generate peak memories in you, he's just having a hard time keeping his hands off of you. It's always like this when the two of you are together…unless there are other considerations."
I felt a little thrill of warmth shoot up my center. I already had evidence that Jace liked me, but I still craved reassurance where he was concerned. Craved it the way I craved air.
"Well, you've given me a lot to think about."
"I hope so. It really is important that we get you started training right away. I know you're not comfortable with us bending time to speed the process up, but given that we have perfect memories when we aren't using them to fuel our powers, it really ends up just making us a little more human."
"Meaning it's just like what happens to us—I mean, humans—as they age. They forget the mundane stuff and only remember the high points."
"Yeah, except that humans forget the high points too—it's just part of having a porous mind."
"Does it bother you?"
"Honestly? Most of the time I just accept it as a natural part of life. The past just kind of evaporates and drifts away. Sometimes I can remember back a hundred years, sometimes I can remember back a hundred and twenty. When things get really bad I might only remember eighty years. Individually the memories I give up really don't matter much. It's just boring crap like going to the post office or having coffee with someone while we are both lost inside our own heads."
"But in the aggregate?"
"In the aggregate those stupid, unimportant memories are a big chunk of what defines me as a person. More than that, they are what define the people I've lost. You're here with me now, but I still remember what you used to be like twenty years ago before you were killed. So full of life, so in control, the best friend a girl could ever ask for. I worry that this time you'll turn out differently, and then when I've lost all of the old memories of you, you'll really be dead, permanently dead, but I won't even remember enough to mourn you."
"Do you wonder what else you've lost, things that happened four hundred years ago, things that might have been life-changing at the time?"
"Every damn day."
That nearly succeeded in killing the conversation. We sat there in silence for several seconds, but in the end my knowledge of what it was costing Kat to keep us out of sync with the rest of the world compelled me to ask my questions and get as much benefit as possible out of her sacrifice.
"So what's the deal with the Chicago…was it pantheon?"
"Yeah, pantheon—the proper name for a related group of gods."
"Related like family, like you and Jace?"
Kat's laugh had an edge to it that could have etched steel. "Jace and I aren't actually related. It's incredibly rare for two Awakened to be born to the same family, and even when it does happen, there is a certain amount of debate as to what it really means.
"None of us remember all of the way back to when we were all created, so all it means for two Awakened to be born into the same family is that they start out with a chunk of similar DNA—most of which disappears when they hit puberty and they undergo a more accelerated change back to what they were before they died."
Kat pulled her hand away from the surface of the pond and waited as the water slowly filled back in the impression she'd left there.
"By the time the two of them turn eighteen all they have left in common is some memories of growing up in the same house together, which sounds all warm and fuzzy, but you're a bright girl—you've got a pretty good idea by now just how little value memories have for people like us."
I swallowed, unnerved by the bleak picture she'd painted, but I forced my question out anyway. "You said it's rare, but what does that mean? How many Awakened siblings do you know about?"
I think a tiny part of me must have been hoping that Ari would turn out to be an Awakened too. I was already terrified of the things that were going to happen to me, but it would have seemed less scary if I'd known that I was going to be facing it together with Ari rather than just with Kat and Jace.
That hope died when Kat finally responded. "I only know of one time that it's ever happened, Selene, and being siblings has brought those two nothing but grief and heartache."
Something tore inside of me, and tears started to pool in my eyes as my body began shaking. Ari and I had our share of arguments, but Kat was saying that I was going to have to watch her grow old and die while I remained seventeen until another Awakened caught up with me and managed to put me down.
As hard as it was to think of Ari growing old and dying, it was even harder to think of my dad dying. By the time you're eight or nine you understand intellectually that you're going to outlast your parents, but that doesn't mean that you understand it on an emotional level. That understanding hit me like a wrecking ball and I felt myself start to come apart at the edges.
Kat reached over and put her hand on my knee, somehow calming me with just a touch before I could get worked up enough to go into oxygen debt and start hyperventilating. I would have thrown myself against her shoulder, but my feet were still encased inside of almost a foot of cement-like water.
"How do you stand it, Kat? You must both feel so alone. Everyone you meet comes with a built-in expiration date."
"It's not as bad as that. Don't get me wrong, it's tough. Any kind of relationship between an Awakened and a normal human is generally only good for a few years. After that they start noticing that you aren't aging and things get tricky. Occasionally you run into someone who can handle knowing what you are, and when that happens you can spend decades as friends or even lovers, but eventually they either die or grow to resent the fact that you're still young and beautiful while they've become old and decrepit."
"You're right, that doesn't sound so bad."
Kat just smiled at my tone. "Just because a relationship has an expiration date on it doesn't mean that it can't be fun while it lasts, but you're right, if that was all there was to it, there wouldn't be enough to keep me going. In the end it's our pantheons that keep us relatively sane.
"That's what Jace and I are. We're not family in the sense of sharing blood, but we're closer than most human families ever have a chance to be. Before you died, you were part of our pantheon too."
"So what, a pantheon is just a family that isn't going to die from old age, a family that will maybe even last as long as you do?"
"That's part of it, but it's a lot more than that. For as long as humans have been able to communicate they've realized that forming into groups makes them more powerful than they could ever be individually. We aren't any different in that regard. If one Awakened is powerful, then two Awakened are twice as good. A pantheon provides a measure of protection and safety. Even if sometimes you hate each other, you still know that your group has your back if an outsider shows up and tries to take you all down.
"It's more even than that though. A pantheon functions a lot like a miniature research group. In theory, if we are in the grip of a strong enough emotion, and are willing to burn up enough of our memories, there isn't much that we couldn't accomplish, but it doesn't really work like that."
Now she was messing with the vision I'd started crafting of nearly omnipotent beings who had nothing to fear but each other.
"What do you mean?"
"The reality is that a lot of what we do is knowledge-based. If your power manifested this instant and someone was trying to kill you, you could probably bend time, but you wouldn't be very good at it. You might only get up to two or three times normal speed, you wouldn't know to amp your b
ody up to where it could function at those speeds, and you would have to burn peak memories to do it rather than just the base memories that Jace or I use to power such a minor effect."
"So the more I know, the more efficient I can be with regards to burning my memories."
"Right, and the more power you'll ultimately have access to. Not everyone has the right mindset for research, so most pantheons only have one or two researchers, but they make a huge difference because the things they teach their members can easily make the difference between life and death."
"Wow, that's a pretty hefty responsibility. Anything else?"
"Yeah, pantheons tend to serve as a kind of grounding point for their members. Memories tend to make up a big chunk of who we are, but how our peers react to us also helps to make up our self-image, and that can be incredibly valuable if you've just lost a big chunk of memories and are adrift in the world. Sometimes a member of a given pantheon will be caught separate from the group and be forced to burn nearly everything they have in order to get free.
"Having a pantheon means that when you get back you'll have people around to help you find your way back to being the person you were before you lost your identity. The pantheon's home base also serves as a safe place for an Awakened to store journals that can be used to at least partially piece themselves back together."
"That's what you're trying to do for me."
"Yeah."
"And the leather books in Jace's bedroom are his journals, the records he uses to try to keep himself from drifting into becoming someone else."
"Right again."
The memory of the leather book contained in the box I'd given Jace before I'd died last time seemed seared into my mind. It had seemed so innocuous nestled there in between my old jeans and shirts, but now I knew it for what it was.
A message from my past self, a message from the person Jace and Kat wanted me to become.
