The Talents

by Inara Scott

  “He’s not a bad person,” I pleaded, avoiding the issue. “There’s good in him, I know it. You can’t bring him back to Delcroix. Who knows what they’ll do to him there?”

  “They’ll watch him,” Cam said defensively. “It isn’t like they’ll torture him or something.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked softly.

  I had my answer in the way he avoided my gaze.

  “Cam, I know what they told you about him, but can’t you feel the good in Jack? You’re his recruiter. You know he’s not as bad as they seem to think.”

  It was a calculated risk. Cam could have felt precisely the opposite. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, his jaw clenched. The air around us grew heavy as Cam considered my plea.

  Then something incredible happened—even as I watched, the hard lines of his shoulders softened, drooped. As though he had reached an internal conclusion that he didn’t want to make.

  Jack looked from me to Cam, assessing, calculating.

  “Please, Cam,” I said. “For me.”

  “He’s dangerous,” Cam insisted, though his voice was less sure than it had been a moment ago. “How can you let a person like this go free?”

  “Because what they want to do to him isn’t right,” I said. “Jack’s a human being. You can’t pretend otherwise and treat him in the same way the program has for all these years. And it will only get worse now. You know that.”

  Cam didn’t respond.

  That was when we heard the roar of a car headed our way. Jack’s body tensed, and Cam sighed. “They’re here. I figured it wouldn’t be long.”

  I ran to the edge of the yard and peered over the fence. A car hurtled toward us from a few blocks away.

  “I’ve got to do something,” I said, turning toward Cam and pleading with my eyes for him to understand.

  He hesitated. As I watched the car approach, one of the windows rolled down, and something appeared. Something that caught a glint of sunlight. Something metallic.

  “Oh my God, that’s a gun,” I gasped.

  Cam and Jack ran to my side. The three of us stood there leaning over the fence to watch the approaching car.

  I poked Cam in the ribs. Hard.

  “Cam. Gun. You said they were just going to watch him,” I whispered, more urgently this time. It was one thing to believe the Watchers were capable of killing Jack. It was another to see the proof of it, pointed our way.

  Cam didn’t move, his eyes pinned on the car.

  Jack stood frozen, his gaze darting frantically between me and the car. His mouth fell open, and the whistle of his breath—fast, like a trapped animal—was faintly audible.

  No one seemed able to move. As the car reached the corner of my block, I realized if anyone was going to save Jack, it would have to be me.

  I took a deep breath and focused on the tingle of power still coursing through me. Then I deliberately stared at the car. With a nudge to the forces holding it in place, I knocked the gun from the Watcher’s hand. It hit the ground and skittered across the asphalt.

  The hand withdrew for just a second before another gun appeared in its place. A face half covered with mirrored sunglasses emerged from the window. I shuddered, recognizing the man I had seen following Jack what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  I knew I needed to do something more drastic, so I pushed a finger toward the windshield of the car, as if I were the weight of the sky pressing down on the glass, and it shattered, sending thousands of pieces flying in every direction. The car swerved but kept coming.

  They were two houses away.

  Sweat beading on my forehead, I studied a telephone pole and tugged it to the ground. A shower of sparks flew from the power lines overhead as it fell. The car—which I could now see was the familiar tan Buick—swerved violently left and right to avoid the falling pole, but didn’t stop.

  I was a second behind, too slow, too late. I could see the gun more clearly as they approached. That was when I heard our front door open.

  “Good Lord, what’s going on?” Grandma’s voice was almost lost in the roar of the car and the hissing electrical lines.

  Grandma. My heart almost stopped. What if they hurt Grandma?

  I narrowed my eyes. I had never used my power for a sustained time like this, and my body felt heavy, my head a weight on my shoulders that was difficult to control. But now they were messing with something sacred. Someone I would do anything to protect.

  I had vowed days ago not to break any bonds that might inadvertently set off another Hiroshima, so I flailed for a moment, unsure what to do next to stop the progress of that oncoming car and its horrible cargo. I looked up for a second, as if searching for inspiration from the heavens, and my eyes caught the corner of Mount Rainier, its flat top hidden by a thick cover of clouds.

  That was it. I needed help from something bigger than me. I focused on the street, this time studying the forces underneath, the cauldron under the pavement. I had never thought to look there before, and I recoiled at the forces I saw, surging and pulsing like hot lava. Aware that I could be doing something horribly dangerous, I held out one hand, opened my fist, and then squeezed, as if I could bring something from far below up to the surface.

  I heard a low rumble, felt a vibration in my shoes, and then the earth yawned. A sinkhole appeared directly in front of my house. The Buick’s brakes squealed as the driver tried to avoid the hole, but it was too late. It plunged into the ground, the front of the car and its occupants swallowed beneath the street.

  For a second, everything went absolutely still. Puffy white smoke billowed from the back of the car, which now pointed at a sixty degree angle to the sky. Then a car alarm started down the block, and life resumed. Voices emerged from the hole—angry voices, cursing the car and demanding to know what had happened.

  Across the street a door opened. Mr. James, an old man who always seemed to be wearing a bathrobe, emerged from his house. A second later, a woman appeared from the house next to his. They looked at the car, gasped, and ran back inside, I suppose to get a phone.

  Cam, his face pasty, shot me a disbelieving look. “We are going to get in so much trouble for this,” he whispered under his breath.

  “I couldn’t let them kill him,” I said, half pleading, half defiant. “And I wouldn’t let them hurt Grandma.”

  Cam swung around to face Jack. “If you’re attacked, just focus on your shield,” he said quickly. “Don’t let them distract you. They can’t fight your talent directly, but they will know the second you relax it.”

  “Do you have a car?” I asked Jack, looking back and forth between him and the gigantic hole in the middle of the street. I pictured the driver climbing out, gun drawn, and had to fight to remain calm.

  Jack nodded, the panic retreating from his eyes, replaced by a sad, hard defiance. “Around the block. I didn’t want them to see it out front.”

  I nodded. He knew what he was doing. He had been hiding a long time. “You’d better go. It won’t take them long to get out of that hole.”

  He wiped a drop of blood from his nose and turned his back deliberately on the street. “Are you sure you won’t come?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Without another word he ran and jumped the back fence.

  I wondered if I would ever see him again.

  By the time Cam and I got to the street, the wail of a siren could be heard in the distance and the two Watchers were climbing out of the car. One took off running down the block. The other pulled out a phone and started barking something into it.

  Grandma stood by the house, looking around anxiously. I ran over and gave her a hug.

  “Thank goodness you’re okay,” she said, patting me on the back. She peered over my shoulder as we separated. “Where’s Jack?”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “He had to go.”

  Grandma studied my face and then Cam’s, before nodding gravely, as if she understood.

  “I should get
back to school,” Cam said. He passed a quick, silent message to the Watcher on the phone. Then he leaned over and pressed a quick kiss on my cheek, got into the Mercedes, and drove away.

  If Grandma thought it was odd that he disappeared so quickly, she never said so, though she did raise her eyebrows when he kissed me. I must have turned red, because she chuckled and said, “About time.”

  “We’re just friends,” I spluttered, barely able to breathe as the feeling of his lips on my skin rippled through my body.

  “Of course,” she replied. “What did you think I meant?”

  The electric company arrived not long after the fire truck, police car, and ambulance. They had to bring a crane to extract the car from the twenty-foot hole. A geologist said an underground pool of water must have collected down there, causing the sinkhole and undermining the stability of the telephone pole.

  I stood there for a long time, looking at the street and marveling at what I had done.

  It was Grandma’s regular Friday bingo night, so I spent the rest of the evening alone, reliving the whole crazy afternoon and wondering what had finally convinced Cam to let Jack go. Had he done it for me, or had it been the sight of the gun that changed his mind? Over and over, I relived the moment where he kissed my cheek, and replayed in my mind the way Trevor had said, “I know you like her…”

  He must care for me, I told myself. He must.

  When I lay down in bed that night, something sharp poked at my head. I reached under my pillow and found two books. Instantly I understood why Jack had come to my house. He had never expected me to come with him. Maybe he had hoped that I would, but he had been through too much in his life to expect it.

  He had come because he wanted to show me the truth about Delcroix before he left.

  I turned on my light and stared at the books, awed by the damage they had done. They were slim, leather-bound volumes with soft covers, the leather so smooth in places it reflected the light with a yellow glow. One was titled An Introduction to Earth Talents. The other was A History of the Governing Council.

  Not wanting to touch them, let alone read anything between their covers, I wrapped them in a pillowcase and slid them into my backpack. Jack hadn’t lied. He didn’t have the books. He had given them to me.

  GRANDMA DROPPED me off at the Delcroix parking lot on Monday. It was the last week of school before Thanksgiving, and as I stepped out of the car, the cold rain that had been falling unexpectedly turned soft and white. I waved as Grandma drove away, and then looked up at the sky. Through the glow of the streetlight, white flakes drifted down toward me. For a moment I let the childlike thrill of seeing snow overwhelm the anxiety and fear I’d been fighting all weekend.

  The mix of snow and rain fell for a few minutes before turning to freezing rain. I wondered if Grandma would make it home without rear-ending someone. As if in perfect time with my thoughts, a gray sedan pulled into the parking lot and slid a few feet on the slick asphalt. A chauffeur jumped out and opened the back door. Catherine emerged with her navy coat belted tightly around her waist.

  For the first time as I watched her, pity outweighed my hatred. In her own way, Catherine was just as much of a freak as I was, and she didn’t really have parents to help her any more than I did. In all the time we’d been at school, she’d never gotten a visit from her mom or dad, who were in D.C. most of the time, and they had a chauffeur bring her to and from school each weekend, just so she could go to their empty house and stay with a nanny. At least I had Grandma.

  As the parking lot filled, I had to tell myself to stop hoping that Jack might suddenly appear. He was gone. I almost wondered if he’d ever really been here.

  My backpack felt heavy on my shoulders, the weight a painful reminder of the load I carried. The school looked the same way it had the week before, but everything had a new meaning. The wrought-iron gates loomed against the muddy brown lawn like a living presence, huge arms surrounding the school in a tight embrace. I pictured the library, the tunnel Cam and I had driven through, and wondered how many other secrets lay inside the innocent-looking, red brick structure.

  I wanted to be happy. I should have been happy. After all, just three days before I’d learned the truth about my power, found people who could teach me to use it, and the boy I’d dreamed about for months said he liked me. He’d held my hand and looked at me like I was more than just a friend. But looming above everything was an inescapable fact: Jack was gone, and a part of me had gone with him. I couldn’t pretend anymore that there were easy answers, or that burying my head in the sand would make my problems go away. And I was fairly certain that from here on out, life was only going to get more complicated.

  It wasn’t long before the people I knew best started to arrive. Allie got there first, her ponytail bobbing. I watched Hector jump down from the cab of a four-by-four, and Marika kissed her mom as she waved good-bye.

  They were probably thinking about homework and teachers and what they would wear to the dance in a couple of weeks. I had to worry about whether I’d set off a nuclear reaction the next time I played around with the forces of nature, and whether I’d done the right thing by coming back to Delcroix instead of running away with Jack.

  I mean, I knew I wanted to be with Cam, and I knew I wanted to use my powers to do good, but how did I know that would really happen at Delcroix? Everyone here seemed to think Jack was a horrible, dangerous person; so much so, they seemed willing to kill him. I couldn’t quite fathom that. It was wrong to kill someone just because you thought he might be dangerous, particularly if you had never really understood him in the first place.

  And then there was all the trouble I had created for Cam. He’d looked so worried when he’d driven away on Friday. I had no idea what he planned to tell Mr. Judan, but I felt sick when I imagined the trouble he might be in because of me. I wasn’t supposed to know what Delcroix was all about for another year, so it wasn’t like there were other freshmen I could talk to about what had happened. And Anna still didn’t like me—or maybe she liked me even less now that I knew the truth.

  It would have helped if I’d talked to Cam over the weekend. I’m sure he was too busy dealing with the mess I’d created to stop by. I didn’t even know if they would have let him leave school to see me. But it would have been nice to hear his voice or see him smile. To know that he cared about me.

  Just when I’d almost convinced myself to run back home and hide under my covers, Esther arrived. When she saw me, she squealed and ran over like we’d been separated for months.

  “I called you ten times this weekend and no one ever picked up. Enough is enough!” Proudly, she held out a little cardboard box with a picture of a cell phone on the top. “Now don’t be all weird and say you can’t accept it, because it’s really for my convenience, not yours. And we only prepaid two hundred minutes, but you’re so responsible, you’ll probably make it last till New Year’s.”

  I stared at the box, and a little fountain started somewhere behind my eyes. Two big tears slid down my cheeks. “There was an accident on my street,” I said, my voice shaky. “Our phone went out.”

  I tried to look away, but Esther just gave me one of those embarrassingly huge hugs and stared me right in the face.

  “Well, we were worried about you,” she said. “You looked really upset last week, and then when we didn’t see you Friday after school…” She gave me another squeeze and then released me. “Hennie and I decided we needed some way to get a hold of you.”

  Hennie ran up, her long hair flowing in perfect waves down her back. She stumbled over her shoelace and grabbed my arm to steady herself. “Did you already give it to her?” She scowled at Esther. “I wanted to be here when you gave it to her!”

  “This is really nice,” I said, looking back and forth between them. “I don’t know what I’d do without you two.”

  Hennie hugged me, less fiercely than Esther but with no less emotion. “For some reason I had this feeling you might have left school f
or good. But you wouldn’t do that, would you? Without talking to us?”

  I shook my head and wiped my face dry. “No way. I’d miss you guys way too much. Besides, who would pay my cell phone bill if I left?”

  We all laughed and hugged again, and a weight that had been hanging on my heart dissolved. “So what’s up with Yashir?” I asked Hennie. “Weren’t you going to call him this weekend?”

  “I bet she chickened out,” Esther said.

  Hennie stuck out her tongue. “Just goes to show you don’t know everything.”

  “No way!” Esther said. “You seriously called him? And talked to him?”

  “I’m not sure what else you’d do on the phone,” Hennie said smugly.

  “And…?” I said.

  She looked around as if to make sure we weren’t going to be overheard, and then whispered, “I think he likes me.”

  Esther threw her hands in the air. “It’s a miracle! She finally figured it out!”

  “We talked for an hour,” she said dreamily. “And I couldn’t have done it without you two.” She gave each of us a quick hug.

  “No problem,” I said, hugging her back. “Now, any chance you want to do my World Civ paper for me?”

  As soon as we got to school I went straight to Mr. Judan’s office and handed him the books. He just nodded and said thank you. Like he had expected me to come back with them all along.

  Crowds of students were streaming up and down the hallway when I emerged. Trevor passed me as I paused in the doorway. He raised his eyebrows in question.

  “I brought them back,” I said defensively.

  He turned his steely gaze to the wall of Mr. Judan’s office, and then turned back to me. “I never doubted you would. I just didn’t think it was right to ask.”

  I started to reply, but the words died in my throat as a tall, chestnut-haired figure approached behind him. Cam looked tired, dark circles under his eyes, and his hair was messed up in back. There was a purple bruise over one of his eyes and a Band-Aid on his jaw. He always looked so put together, it was hard not to gape at his disheveled appearance.