CHAPTER 5
“We need to talk about the A word and no, I don’t mean the one you’re thinking of. This one’s actually far more offensive. No one admits they believe in it, yet they bleep it on some programs as if it was a real curse. In actuality, the A word is an oxymoron. A blind spot in the UNEOA’s research data. They won’t even disclose the actual wording of the Oracle’s so-called prophecy, so the rumor mill goes haywire and prepper supply shops make a killing. Damn it. I picked the wrong job to earn my first million, didn’t I?”
-Comedian Rick Akkerman on Sincere with Sinclair, 2012
Once Wisp felt safe enough to slow down, her first thought was for the safety of the others. Looking around, she recognized the car-jammed junction where the three lanes of Hardenberg Street transitioned into Budapest Street. The trees in front of the adjoining Zoo Palace movie theater looked a little less sickly than their cousins farther to the west, but the super-sized film poster above the entrance was blotchy and torn in places, the romantic couple it displayed faded out like a receding dream. The broad stretch of Budapest Street would lead northeast and, following the eastern border of the zoo grounds, open into the northeastern border territory and the new wall.
That’s where Luca went. Wisp strained her eyes but couldn’t see anyone moving in the distance. Hopefully, Luca had made it to his destination by now. He shouldn’t have been affected by the offbeat Deadening Smoker had inflicted on the city.
It didn’t keep expanding after I left, did it? Wisp turned around, scanning the gloomy cityscape. The quiet, sparsely moonlit night revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The breeze coming from the west carried no hint of toxicity. Relieved, Wisp picked out one of her spheres and set her sights on it, forcing it to stay still.
“Find Luca,” she whispered, watching its marigold hue soften to a pale yellow glow before it darted off into the darkness.
When it reached Luca, he’d know it was sent as a warning to be extra careful out there. At least until the gang got back together to reflect on new facts and share ideas.
After dispatching the first of her eight lights, she assigned two of her remaining cluster to Max and Sara. The shades of these two spheres were an identical yellow, a little redder than Luca’s had been, but not enough to concern Wisp. Apart from poor Hannah, the last of her dwindling gang looked to be reasonably safe for now. This gave her the freedom to think about herself and the dilemma she’d be facing come tomorrow night.
Because Luca was right. Constantine’s offer to trade Hannah’s life for a little ‘job’ had several dubious and problematic undertones; he wasn’t going to let Wisp off the hook that easy. Coincidence or not, she was now conveniently close to her favorite thinking place: home.
Taking a deep breath to steel herself, she plodded down the stretch of Budapest Street winding its way back toward the zoo and the dry Landwehr channel, hands jammed into the pockets of her light summer jacket. The encounter with Smoker still fresh in her mind, she wasn’t yet ready to feel safe on this street lined by dead and dying vegetation, but the sight of the small rise ahead – leading up to fresher air and a richer, more sheltered neighborhood – helped put her mind at ease.
Even with the city dying all around it, home would always be home. More importantly, her home contained things that would ensure the safety of her gang. Wisp had to make a stop here before checking on everyone else.
She crossed another smaller bridge, leading across the dry Landwehr channel, and followed the boardwalk to the blocky, moonlit silhouettes of two former embassies. Nestled between these were a handful of elegant vintage homes with arcing windows, brick fences, and heavy cast iron gates.
As she walked the last hundred meters, her heart pounded with anticipation and a twinge of anxiety. The four-story block of the embassy she’d passed had several of its ground floor buildings windows broken. This was nothing new. Dead City’s better neighborhoods had been among the first to be targeted by the outside looters who came in winter.
The moonlight revealed more destruction than she remembered from when she’d passed by the embassy three weeks before. Curtains had been ripped away and left to rot in the courtyard. The entry door, now wide open, revealed pieces of smashed furniture.
Had she missed this the last time, or were the other survivors becoming more desperate to carry off what the first wave of looters had left behind? More importantly, would her house still look the way she remembered it?
Wisp rushed the remaining distance to the brick fence surrounding her former home. Glancing through the iron fence gate, nothing looked out of order. All the front side windows appeared to be intact; not even the terra-cotta flower pots on the sills, lovingly painted by Grandma a few years back, had come to harm. Unsurprisingly, the flowers on the first floor had withered and gone limp many months ago. The rose hedges and berry bushes Grandma had planted during the last years of her life had fared no better. But up on the second floor, a resilient cluster of blue marguerites maintained its watch over what had been the old woman’s bedroom window, defying the ubiquitous death with its pastel bloom.
The sight of the stubborn, sturdy little flowers put a smile on Wisp’s face, her worries melting away in an instant. Why had she doubted this house? Her Dad had turned it into a bastion of familial defense soon after the first news of Evolved transitions back in 2010. The white bow windows had been reinforced and contained bulletproof glass. The massive oaken door, marked by a chalk drawing of an inverted ‘V’, was sturdy enough to deter most would-be burglars. The looters from last winter had tried their luck, of course. Once they realized they’d brought the wrong equipment to crack this kind of security, they’d given up and moved on to greener pastures in the neighborhood.
You were so scared of people like me, Grandma, Wisp thought as she guided one of her glowing spheres through the iron fence gate and into the dead garden that was beyond it. Scared enough that Dad did everything in his power to help you feel safe in our home.
As she looked at the lone sphere that illuminated the withered shrubs surrounding the house, she was overcome by a twinge of melancholic bitterness. That’s why I could never tell you. Would you have been scared of me, too?
She’d never know the answer to this question; maybe it was for the best. Grandma would never know what had become of her beloved garden, either. She had passed away three days before the incident that triggered the Breakdown. Even though the old woman’s death left a gaping hole no one else would ever be able to fill, Wisp had had the time she needed to come to terms with it.
What troubled her the most was the lack of a gravestone. Grandma had been taken away without claiming a resting place in the lush green cemetery she had picked out in advance. The first Deadening had made proper funerals impossible.
Grandma Rosie had been such an elegant, dignified presence, far more motherly than the mother Wisp had barely known. A trusted confidante and a voice of wisdom. Wisp tried not to think about where she might be, or what had become of the body.
Shoving the thought aside, Wisp swapped places with her dispatched sphere and blinked past the gate in an instant, her remaining lights streaking through the cast iron bars to join her on the other side. She picked her way through the garden, twigs and fallen leaves crunching beneath the soles of her boots, before turning her attention to the chalk drawing on the door.
The inverted ‘V’ on the entry door was more than a simple doodle. It marked the house as the personal property of one of the local gangs, providing some additional protection from looters. This far northeast, the Smog barely reached up to the first-floor windows, but wind and weather had still eroded the chalk marking. If Wisp didn’t stop by to re-draw it every few weeks, the local vultures would soon assume the property to be abandoned.
So before anything else, she picked up the piece of chalk from beneath the overturned flowerpot where she’d left it, and redrew the marking with straight, bold strokes. This was her place. It would always be her place, and she’d be mosh-
diddled before she let anyone demean Dad and Grandma’s legacy.
“Don’t worry,” she said to the small stone turtle that nestled within the withered grass by the doorstep. “I’m back now, so no one’s going to stomp around the place with their dirty boots. Scout’s honor.”
After putting the chalk back in its place beneath the flowerpot, Wisp wiped her hands on her pants and took a step back to inspect her work. Then, she stepped up to the living room window and flicked a finger, chucking one of her mini-spheres to the other side so she had a way in. She did have a key to the door, but opening it was out of the question. Doing so would destroy the sealant foam she had applied a year ago to keep the Smog from seeping through the cracks. There was none of it left now; Dad had only bought one bottle to calm Grandma’s nerves about poison gas attacks by terrorists.
No one entered this house without Wisp’s permission. Not even the local calamity.
After teleporting inside, she gave herself a moment to savor the house’s scent. While the majority of it was made from stone, its airy, high-ceilinged rooms sported decorative beams carved from firewood. In combination with the old-fashioned wooden furniture, they gave off the pleasant, homey smell that had accompanied Wisp throughout her childhood. It made her feel like she belonged and was sheltered by the walls around her.
Like a turtle, cozily hanging out inside its shell.
She slowly made her way along the living room’s seating area, tracing the long, fur-lined divan sofa with her fingers as she went. The parquet floor squeaked faintly beneath her boots, welcoming her home. She could have sworn that the fireplace still smelled faintly of smoke. The walls surrounding its brick frame featured the souvenirs her late Grandpa had saved from his various journeys through Africa back in the1980s: animal pelts, ceremonial swords and a slender traditional hunting spear.
She brushed her finger against the spear’s wooden shaft, wishing it were an amazing magical artifact, imbued with the kind of showstopping power she herself lacked. If this spear allowed her to call lightning from the sky and direct it wherever she wanted, even Constantine would think twice about extorting her.
Sighing, she pulled her hand back and went through the wooden door leading to the vestibule, careful not to defile the vintage Berber carpet with her dirty boots. The door opened with a low-pitched creak, allowing her a view of the small, cedar-paneled vestibule with the stairway to her left and the only window to her right. Across from her, the metal shoe rack reflected the pale yellow light of her floating spheres. Grandma’s rose red house slippers still rested on top, awaiting her return with Dad’s black officer’s boots right beside them.
Wisp touched both for good luck before turning to the stairway. What she needed to do was to go down, but a spell of melancholy drew her upward to her room on the second floor. She could still stop by the basement in five or ten minutes. Dad’s not so hidden stash of killing implements wasn’t going to run away.
As she climbed the stairs, the solar-powered ventilation system turned on with a soft, steady whir and a stirring of the musty air.
“Good to know you’re still doing your job.” Wisp passed by the small air duct at the end of the stairway.
If she ever had reason to lay low in this house, the option was there. She’d feel bad about the others. She wouldn’t be able to invite them in unless she was okay with the Smog getting in, too. They lacked the superpowers required to pass through airtight glass windows. If the Smog did get in … it would be a matter of weeks, possibly months before it started eating away at the memorabilia her grandparents had left her, which she treasured very much.
The thought made her shudder. She grabbed the door handle to her room and pressed down, opening the door with one strong pull. A rush of memories flooded over Wisp, enveloping her in their haunting embrace. Her spheres, lagging one step behind weren’t positioned to penetrate the darkness behind the door, but she didn’t need to see to know where everything was. Her shaggy, old grizzly bear bean bag sat beneath the window on the left side of the room, guarding a small stash of library books she’d never managed to return. The bed, with its carved dolphin frame, was still made. The white wooden desk, sitting across from the door and beneath the only other window, would be half buried under a heap of assorted notes, doodles, and abandoned homework.
Feeling herself drawn to the pinboard above the desk, she slipped out of her boots and put them on the floor just outside her room. The smoothness of the parquet beneath her sweaty socks set off another avalanche of nostalgia, and she had to fight the urge to drop onto her bed and bury herself in the comforting softness of it. If she lay down and closed her eyes there, she wasn’t going to open them for another hour, and she didn’t have that kind of time. Dawn was approaching. More importantly, her friends would be waiting, anxious and wondering why she’d sent them warning lights.
As she stepped up to the desk and the bulletin board, Wisp positioned her remaining spheres to scan the multitude of notes she had pinned there. The ones dubbed ‘Grandma’s happy words’ brought a grin to her face. They contained all the weird and funny swear words she had co-invented with her father to appease the old woman. ‘No swearing in the house’ had been a rule Grandma enforced to the bone. Dad, who was accustomed to strong language on the job, seemed to enjoy the creative cooperation even more than his daughter did. Maybe because the game of making up fuzz-covered naughty words let him be a defiant little boy again.
Somehow, the vocabulary stuck.
“Pimpleprimp,” Wisp read from a Post-it near the top. “Never really got the chance to use that one. Oh, how about Muppet lunch? Get cheese-faced and poke a stick in your muffin.” She read the words out one by one, but they rang hollow. Maybe they’d work on her friends, though. Lord knew the remaining Survivors could use something to laugh about.
Working her way through the hodgepodge of pinned notes, she soon discovered the one paper slip she actually needed near the bottom of the board, half hidden beneath the only photograph she had of her mother. She had honestly intended to ignore the picture, but the light of her spheres cast an almost magical shimmer over her mother’s features, making it impossible to look away.
Why did you leave me behind? The question popped into Wisp’s mind whenever she failed to ignore the photograph’s existence.
The picture showed her delicate raven-haired mother in profile, caught in a moment of unwary reverie as she sat by the living room window, gazing out at the world beyond. Already dreaming of going someplace far away, Wisp suspected bitterly. Because that was exactly what the young woman in the picture had done. She fell in love with someone other than Dad and moved to some hillbilly town in Idaho, USA. Her dump of origin, Grandma used to say with that ladylike snort of hers. Wisp was three at the time and had only fuzzy, indistinct memories of the separation. She received one letter from the USA when she was eight. Then, radio silence. Her own letters didn’t bounce back unopened, but she never got a reply.
She had come to terms with growing up motherless years and years ago. If she were ever in the situation of having to deal with youth authorities again, she’d either be carted off to a juvenile shelter or forced to live with her aunt, who hated children and despised teenagers even more.
Unless Dad is still somewhere out there, looking for me…
Knowing full well how unrealistic that would be, she welcomed the thought nonetheless. It gave her the warm fuzzies. Besides, she had come to the one place where dreaming was allowed and failure to adjust to reality didn’t get anyone hurt.
She had two pictures of her Dad on the board and spent a minute gazing at them to resuscitate her memory of his face. Then, she pried her mother’s photograph away to get at the note she had pinned underneath it: a sequence of six numbers. The key to the six-digit combination lock guarding Dad’s secret stash in the basement. Brazen as she was, she had figured it out three years ago, after snooping through old documents in Grandma’s absence.
The code referred to her mother�
�s birthday. Frankly, the unmasking of her father as a sentimental dork had shocked her more than the stash’s contents did.
After carefully tearing the code-inscribed slip of paper off the pinboard, she turned from the desk to the bed on the right side of the room. Her old stuffed sea turtle sat there on the pillow, gazing up at her with bulbous white eyes filled with adoration and longing. Its innocent, fuzzy green face transfixed her, setting loose another flood of memories. She couldn’t bring herself to turn her back and head down to the basement. Not just yet.
“Hey, Tapsy Turtle,” she said, feeling a little silly talking to a stuffed toy. “I’m sorry I haven’t come home lately. Must have been pretty lonely all by yourself.”
The turtle looked sad sitting in the dark. It must have been her imagination of course, but she still found herself shuffling over to the bed and pulling the toy into her arms. Holding it against her chest was like an embrace from a long-lost friend.
“Huh. Guess I’ve grown a bit.” She grinned and prodded Tapsy’s fuzzy little head. “The last time I held you like this, you came all the way up to my chin.”
Even though she was far too big to be playing with stuffed animals, Wisp felt justified in her fondness for this one. Tapsy held a special role as the second souvenir her dad had brought back from deployment abroad. The first one – a real shell without an animal in it – rested on the floor beside her bed. Back when her dad gave her that one, she had hated it with the passion of a five-year-old who’d asked for a pony and received a stupid rock instead. This was all she saw in it at the time, so she rushed up to her room, dug out her jars of finger paint and messed up the poor shell with the colors of the rainbow to make it ‘pretty.’ The paint never completely washed off.
Later that evening, her dad had pulled her onto his lap and revealed to her the awesomeness of the turtle shell. “This was a little creature’s home, Nicoletta,” he told her with his warm voice. “Turtles are not strong, you see. They’re small, and soft, and they can’t run very fast. This shell is something they’re born with, and they carry it on their backs wherever they go. It never leaves them, and they can never lose it. To them, it’s home. It’s the safest place in the world.”
Gift of Light_A Powered Destinies stand-alone novel Page 10
