Deviate

by Tracy Clark

  Forty

  Cora

  After dinner, most of us headed to the rooftop garden to relax and get acquainted. My shoulders were tight with anxiety, which I could only pin on Dr. M’s evasiveness when I’d asked him about his investors. Mari had been reluctant to leave the dining room and its walls that enabled her see the world the way the Scintilla did, but finally agreed when Teruko invited her. From the back, she and Teruko looked remarkably similar with their short black bobs. Teruko’s hair was tipped with deep pink, though, like a black silk paintbrush dipped in bubble gum.

  They were deep in conversation about auras and energy and how Teruko came to be here. She always knew her grandfather could see auras because he’d read hers many times. She had tried to research online what he had told her about his aura being silver and unlike anyone else’s, but could find nothing until she came upon information on a seminar that Dr. M was giving in Japan. She went. He had asked the audience if they’d ever heard of anyone with a purely silver aura. She was the only one who raised her hand. He convinced her to bring her grandfather to Ireland.

  Dun walked silently beside them. I was suddenly distracted by Mari’s spliced aura. The same swirling pink that had been directed so often at Dun was split in half, projecting toward Teruko. A delicate twirl of attraction danced from Mari’s belly across the air to the boy and to the girl. The girls’ arms brushed lightly, causing Mari’s aura to flare a deeper shade.

  I looked from Mari to Dun, Mari to Teruko, trying to connect the dots, draw new lines between what I believed to be true and what I was seeing.

  Mari glanced my way and fixed me with a stare. It was amazing how fast her aura flashed to anger when she caught me observing so intently. Her colors morphed from warmth to warning. Her chin thrust up a fraction of an inch, a show of pride, but she looked away too fast to seal the deal. Was I reading this correctly? Did she actually think she could hide anything from me?

  Dun fell out of step with them, trailing behind like a forgotten puppy. His own colors were retracted and forlorn, a dirty bluish-green. When he looked back over his shoulder and saw me watching, he stopped and waited for me to catch up. “How’s my girl?”

  “If I don’t say peachy—”

  “I’d totally understand.” He slipped his arm around my shoulder. “You’ve been through more crap in the last two months than some people go through in their entire lives. You’re strong, girl.”

  I looked up at him, my best friend. He must’ve seen the question in my eyes because he said, “I always knew you were strong. But the still waters kind. Mari is strong like…” He watched Mari as she laughed at something Teruko said. His aura reached for her as his attention did. “Mari is strong like waves.”

  “Relentless and predictable,” I joked.

  “They rush at you, then pull away.”

  We came to a bench between two trees and sat down. Red lanterns cast spots of light on the garden path. “So, why haven’t you guys admitted to me that you’re crushing hard on each other?” I thought again of Mari’s apparent attraction to Teruko.

  Dun started to protest with a lot of started and stopped sentences before he leaned back and surrendered. “Yeah. Okay. Fine. We weren’t sure whether to lay it on you with everything else that’s going on. But I don’t get her. One minute she’s fire-hot.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. I elbowed him. “Then she’s totally cold.”

  “She’s always been like that, Dun.”

  “I know. But it’s different when your heart’s on the skewer and she controls the heat.” He laid his head on my shoulder and I patted his cheek. Could it even end well? She was into him, too. That was clear in the colors.

  Giovanni approached, regarding us with creased eyes and uncharacteristic fidgeting of his fingers. “Hey,” I said. Giovanni still stared, like he didn’t know how to start over with me since our cosmic-oneness spat. We were still charged from it. I could feel the zing of frenetic energy pulse between us.

  “I’m going to bed,” Dun said, with a final glance through the trees to where Mari and Teruko sat together in rapt conversation. This ordeal couldn’t be easy on either of them. They should have stayed in Chile with Mami Tulke. Though, my grandmother’s grieving AWOL stunt was the reason they’d jetted to Ireland in the first place. I was upset that our phones didn’t work inside the safety of the compound. Dr. M explained that he’d had many of what he thought were confidential conversations on a cell phone only to find out that they weren’t. For our safety, he said, we couldn’t make any calls.

  “G’night,” I said, giving a quick peck to Dun’s cheek. He shuffled off to his room.

  Giovanni sat in Dun’s place. “Can I put my head on your shoulder, too?” he asked with a smile in his voice.

  “No. I reserve that spot for lovesick friends.”

  “Still applicable.”

  I decided to ignore that comment and instead asked if I could spend the night with the Dante book. I’d requested a computer in my room and I intended to continue exploring our possibilities even as Dr. M pursued his. The problems between the Arrazi and Scintilla weren’t likely to be solved on just one front. This was a multilayered offensive. Or defense. Whatever.

  It was war.

  “Si. Of course,” Giovanni said. “What are your thoughts?”

  “I can’t sit around here like I’m in some luxury hotel and while away the hours in between being poked, prodded, and interrogated. I need to keep looking for answers. I want to know more about Dante Alighieri’s life. I feel like if we go ahead and take the mental leap, just go with the theory that he knew about Scintilla, then follow what appear to be his clues, it’s as though he’s leading us somewhere, maybe to some knowledge he had seven hundred years ago. Maybe to find a clue that will save us.”

  Giovanni nodded, absently it seemed.

  Was he even listening? “Somehow? Maybe?” I sighed. The more I talked, the nuttier I sounded. “I don’t know. I’m sure it’s crazy. I’m sure countless other Scintilla have been trying to find a cure for centuries.”

  “No, Cora. Not crazy. We have to pursue every path. That’s what I’m doing. That’s why I support Dr. M’s work. If he can discover a way to, how did he say, regenerate our energy? Then maybe his work could help us. We’d be less weak.” He spat that word like it was poison. “We’re easy targets right now. We have to level the playing field or it’s only a matter of time.” He stood and held out his hand to help me up. “Come. Let’s go get your book.”

  I thought I’d read and search online on my own, but Giovanni wanted to help. I didn’t mind. We slid the rice-paper door open to the night, reading and typing to the soothing sounds of the water fountains and the far-off current of Dublin traffic. This facility felt like another world. It was hard to believe we were still in Dublin, still close to Clancy Mulcarr and the hive of Arrazi. It was hard to believe I was still so close to Finn.

  My soul tightened with the harsh memory of seeing him at the party. How strange and agonizing to act like strangers, to dance around the truth of our history. The worst kind of pretending was pretending that you don’t want to fall into someone’s arms again. How do you unbind your heart? How do you unsee the look in someone’s eyes? How do you untaste their lips? How do you unfeel love?

  How do you unexperience their moving on?

  By moving on, myself.

  I glanced at Giovanni stretching his long legs out on a chair perched in front of him. His sandy brows bent in concentration over Paradiso. His silver aura rolled like the sea as he read, calm but in perpetual motion. It reminded me of the silvery-blue ocean back home in Santa Cruz. I wondered if I’d ever return to that place. I’d have a new family with me. I knew that.

  He caught me looking and smiled. “Listen to some of these phrases from canto twenty-eight. From the Pure Spark… From that one Point hang Heaven and nature all… Whence orders three with trinal rapture ring.”

  I leaned behind Giovanni and read over his shoulder, my fingers stinging wi
th energy as I placed my hand on his back. Again and again, I read the canto. Words jumped out at me: pure spark, heaven, three, trinal. Three with trinal rapture ring. I didn’t know what it meant, but the more we read, the more convinced I became that one of the world’s most famous poets knew the truth.

  “I found some things, too,” I said. Giovanni removed his feet from the chair, pulled my hand, and led me around to sit in front of him. “Guess who was one of Dante’s biggest fans?”

  “Who?”

  “Michelangelo. Apparently, he revered Dante. Even wrote sonnets about him.” I slipped my hand from Giovanni’s to go and grab the laptop. “All that should be said of him cannot be said for too brightly did his splendor burn for our blind eyes. He also said of Dante, Ne’er walked the earth a greater man than he.”

  “Maybe he’s just being overly exultant in his description of Dante. Figurative.”

  “Could be. But get this.” I turned the laptop around so Giovanni could see. “Get a load of how Michelangelo signed some of his works.” Giovanni and I stared at the emblem; three connected circles so much like the triple spiral, my breath had halted when I first saw it. “He called the signature the tre giri and—”

  Silver beams projected out from Giovanni like lasers. “Means three circles. And you’re thinking it’s a nod to the tre giri in Dante’s Paradiso?”

  I grinned wide, thrilling at the discoveries that were piling up. “Exactly. When asked about the signature, Michelangelo said, contemplation of the three circles raises the thoughts to heaven. My mother’s journal said that the Scintilla hold the keys to heaven, or something like that.” I slipped the key out from under my shirt. “My grandmother gave this to my mother. The key, threes, and the triple spiral, all of them connected by one word: heaven. I know in my gut that all these things are linked. I feel it.” Elation that we might be onto something made my skin tingle.

  Suddenly, Giovanni leaned forward and placed both hands on the sides of my face. I stopped talking, stopped speculating, stopped thinking clearly. The voltage of his hands swirled heat on my skin, warming my open lips with sparks.

  “Your aura lights up this room when you’re excited.” He scanned my face before a hopeless look passed over him and he dropped his hands. “It lights me up.”

  “We—well, we can’t help that,” I said. “We’re, like, superconductors.”

  His eyes darkened in that way they did when he was thinking something he wasn’t saying. He studied me and then looked out beyond me, to my aura. I was sure he’d be able to see the ripples of conflicted feelings I experienced when he held my face, but he wasn’t looking at my aura anymore. He was looking into me.

  “Cora—”

  Insistent banging on the door startled us both.

  Forty-One

  Finn

  “What’d you do to him?” Saoirse screamed at her brother, slipping her hands under my arms in a futile attempt to lift me from the floor. Even if she were feeling normal, she couldn’t lift me. She was a sparrow and my body had become deadweight over legs that could not support me. I was weak and needed to kill, I knew that. But this was different, like being struck with sudden paralysis.

  “Get up. Stop acting the maggot,” Lorcan said, now towering over me.

  “I can’t!” I said, ineffectively trying to move my legs and feet. The words had barely left my mouth when Lorcan grabbed a fistful of my shirt and heaved me upward. Even then, my legs could not hold me, and I buckled to the chaise as though I were frozen from the waist down.

  All three of us looked at one another as a grandfather clock taunted with its heartbeat.

  “Explain this!” I yelled, though feeling less bold since my arse was firmly planted on a chair and I was forced to look up at him. “One minute you threaten that I’ll not be able to walk out of here, and now this?”

  Lorcan looked muddled—not superior, not satisfied, but confused. “Jaysus, that’s the second time today that something like this has happened,” he said, uncharacteristically diffident. “I don’t understand it.” He walked to a cupboard, pulled down a decanter and a glass, and poured himself more than he surely needed. He was already sloshed, as it were, and I was unable to stand on my goddamned feet. This was not a time to drink more.

  “You two think Lorcan did this?” Saoirse scoffed, then turned to him. “Please. I know you believe you’re God’s gift, but hexing people? That’s grandiosity at its finest.”

  “Sortilege?” I wondered aloud.

  Lorcan narrowed his eyes and took another swig.

  “You—you have a sortilege?” Saoirse asked him. “Nobody does. Not anymore. How is that even possible?”

  Lorcan threw up his hands, sloshing the amber liquid on the floor and the front of his trousers. “I couldn’t tell you what the hell is possible!”

  The fear in his eyes made me nervous. I gathered this was a new development, and that scared the crap out of me. We didn’t need any more superpowered Arrazi running around. “You’ve taken from a Scintilla,” I accused, breathless. His mother couldn’t possibly pretend she believed there were no Scintilla around if her own son had his sortilege.

  “If I did, I didn’t know it!” The smug smile I had expected when I fell to the floor now spread slowly over Lorcan’s face. He looked to the floor and back up with a start, nodding to himself. “Ah,” he said, lifting his glass in the air like a toast. “I’d wager it was the party girl. The one with the knife on her creamy back. I knew there was something different about her when I attacked her. Aye, I believe I did take from a silver one. She was a delicacy.”

  Every drop of blood drained from my body and pooled in my stomach. Cora. He’d attacked her. My God. While Clancy and I were out at that damn cottage being lackeys for the Society, looking for them because there’d been an Arrazi tip, Lorcan had pounced on her. I could hardly let myself envision it. “You—you didn’t kill her, did you?” I barely choked out the words while not daring to look away from my fists curling into the sides of my useless legs. I was afraid that I’d betray myself right there.

  Please. Please say you didn’t kill her.

  “Of course I didn’t kill her, you eejit. She was with the Society. Had the ring ’n’ everything. As soon as she shoved it in my face, I backed off.”

  Saoirse put her hands on her hips. “Wait, the Society wants all the silver ones dead. They wouldn’t have one in their ranks, would they? This makes no sense.”

  My head spun. I wanted to pin Lorcan to the floor with knives, but I had to put that out of my mind for the moment so I could think clearly. I didn’t understand. Where would Cora have gotten a ring to get into the Society? “Tell me about this ring.”

  “Only those within a certain level have the rings. My mother has one. Your uncle Clancy has one. This girl had one. It’s the only reason I didn’t kill her, and even then it was damn near impossible to stop myself.”

  Controlling the shaking that had taken over my body was proving impossible. Thankfully it could be masked as Arrazi need. All I could think of was Cora being drained of her beautiful energy by that thug. How afraid she must have been. How alone. What had happened to her after he attacked her? I should never have walked away from her, especially not there. I had thought I was helping her.

  “My God, yes,” Saoirse whispered. “She’s the reason this has happened to me, isn’t she? I’d never felt anyone like her. Incredible. Do you suppose I’ll I get my power, too, from being so near her?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered through a clenched jaw, hating the hope in her voice. “She might not have even been a Scintilla,” I said, trying in vain to deflect their attention from Cora. But it was ineffectual. Of course, now she was all any of us could think about. It killed me. I wanted them to know nothing of Cora and what she was. But Cora had done this. It was her foolish idea to infiltrate that party.

  Even as I inwardly chastised her, I was proud of her guts to fight for answers. She could have run. Should have. Instead, she was sniffing ou
t the right trail, the same trail I was on.

  Lord, she was brave.

  “All I know,” Saoirse said with a rigid set of her thin shoulders, “is that I felt pulled like a riptide to her. Even after we walked away, I wanted nothing more than to turn back. I haven’t been right since. And now, now my energy is fading so fast I fear it’ll be a matter of hours before I have—I have to kill someone.” She gulped loudly, swallowing the hard, bitter truth.

  “Do you know her?” Lorcan asked me. “I watched you talking with her. Pissed me off that you’d moved in on her, especially with you bein’ there as my sister’s date ’n’ all. Who is she?”

  Both stared at me expectantly. “I—I thought I knew her,” I stammered. “She had a damn mask over her face, for fook’s sake. But when I spoke with her, I realized I was wrong. She—she was a stranger to me.”

  Lorcan seemed satisfied but Saoirse’s shrewd eyes lingered too long on my face. Finally, she plopped down next to me and sighed, cradling her head in her hands. “I’m more tired than I’ve ever been.”

  “I know. That’s me, as well.”

  “Go take care of that already. I’m going to bed,” Lorcan said with a wave, walking from the room. How could he be so indifferent about his sister’s first time?

  “I can’t move my fookin’ legs!” I yelled to his back, but he laughed and kept walking. If he could do this to me, he could undo it. Though, clearly, he wasn’t going to do so at the moment. Bastard. Using my arms to scoot back farther into the cushions, I fell into them and closed my eyes. Saoirse did the same, sighing heavily next to me. I knew we were both thinking the same thing, and we were both staving off the inevitable.

  Soon, it would be do—or die.

  Saoirse jiggled my arm to wake me. Her already-pale face had whitened to a ghostlike hue. Morning had come, and no relief with it. Not from the soul-consuming hunger for someone’s spirit, not for the affliction Lorcan had seemingly placed on me. I tried, but still couldn’t wiggle my toes or move my legs.