Freakling

by Lana Krumwiede

  He drove around the block and willed himself to be at peace.

  The wind had smeared purple and gray across the twilit sky.

  A squirrel bounded across the road.

  The crickets began their song of darkness.

  And Taemon parked Uncle Fierre’s unisphere in the driveway.

  Once he put the emergency brake on and withdrew his psi, the fear came back in a rush. He had come within a breath of dying. He started shaking.

  Taemon stumbled off the seat. His legs felt too weak to stand. But before he could steady himself, Yens yanked him sideways and shoved him up against the splintery rough wood of their fence. He wedged his forearm across Taemon’s neck. Even stronger than the pain and fear was the humiliation of being manhandled. Yens was attacking Taemon, which meant he had to do it with his hands. To use psi against another person, you had to be defending, assisting, or showing affection. And Yens was doing none of these.

  “How did you drive it? You said you’d never seen one before.”

  “I had to do something.” Taemon choked out the words. “You almost got us killed!”

  Tiny splinters dug into his scalp as Yens pushed harder, forcing Taemon’s chin up and his head back.

  “Tell me what you did just now,” Yens said, a terrible fierceness in his voice. “You shouldn’t be able to do that.”

  His brother let the pressure off long enough for Taemon to gasp out a few words. “I can’t. I don’t even know what I did.”

  “Taemon! Yens!” Mam called from the house. “Time for nut cake!”

  Yens slammed him against the fence again. “You’ll tell me. I’ll make sure of it.” He let go and walked away.

  Taemon sucked in short breaths and forced his tears back. He never should have allowed his mind to wander. It was bad, like Da said. What about what Yens had done? Placing yourself in danger so you can act outside authority?

  Cha. That was bad, too.

  Taemon sat in the backseat of the quadrider, with the luggage under his feet. Da was driving, Mam sat next to him, Yens and Uncle Fierre sat in the middle seats, and Taemon sat facing the back. It was just as well. Last night’s argument had picked up again, and he could steer clear of the bickering by sitting all the way back. At the moment, Yens was badgering Da.

  “One of these days, you’re going to have to admit that the old ways don’t matter anymore.”

  “Strength comes in many forms,” Da said. “Psi is only one of them.”

  Yens snorted.

  Taemon turned back to the view from the rear window, letting the others argue to their hearts’ content. They drove east toward the shore, passing the farmland that fed the city. In the backseat Taemon faced west, watching the city wall grow smaller in the distance and admiring the mountains that rose behind Deliverance. At their base they were green and lush with the early summer rain. Higher, the peaks were craggy, a row of spikes that protected the city from the rest of the world.

  It had been Taemon’s own ancestor, the prophet Nathan, who had yanked those mountains out of flat ground. Talk about some powerful psi. Nathan was the one who discovered it. Only Da wouldn’t use the word discovered. Da said that the Heart of the Earth granted psi to the prophet Nathan because he was so righteous that he would never use it to hurt anyone or do anything selfish. Either way you look at it, Nathan was the first one to have the power to visualize something and make it so.

  It had been over two hundred years since Nathan had fled from the Republik with his family and friends during the Great War. You’d think a person with psi would be revered, but the opposite was true. People had feared Nathan, despised him. The Republikite army had wanted to use him as a weapon in the Great War, but Nathan refused. He and his followers moved to a wilderness area by the coast and built the city of Deliverance. Nathan passed psi on to his children and his followers’ children, charging them to use it for good. Before long, Deliverance became a city of psi wielders. They tried to keep to themselves, but the Republik still harassed them. So Nathan used his psi to make the very mountains Taemon was staring at right now, the mountains that kept them separate from the rest of the world. The world finally got the idea and left them alone. Even now, there was no contact at all with the psiless cities of the Republik and the powerless people that lived on the other side of those mountains.

  Taemon wondered how people lived without psi. Their lives must be so primitive. Did they even have running water? How would you turn it off without psi? It would have to have a lever of some kind that would move up and down to control the flow. Or maybe something like a screw would work better. But how would you turn a screw without psi?

  Thinking up crazy machines and gadgets was Taemon’s favorite way to daydream. Soon his brain had moved from psiless faucets to Uncle Fierre’s unisphere. He saw its engine so clearly in his mind. As images swam through his head, his fingers twitched with anticipation; he longed to draw the unisphere.

  He could do it. Da had given a journal to each of his boys as a way to encourage them to practice reading and writing. Yens had thrown his away, but Taemon had been filling his pages with sketches, bits of ideas, and questions about how things worked. His journal was tucked inside his suitcase, which was underneath his feet.

  But he shouldn’t. If anyone saw his drawing of the unisphere, he’d be hard-pressed to explain how he’d seen the engine. Not only that, but reading and writing were old-fashioned and thoroughly uncool. Most people didn’t even know how to read anymore, and only those who had to keep records knew how to write — the clerks in the guilds, the priests in the churches. Prestige and privilege went to people who could wield psi with skill and talent. And who would be foolish enough to write down all that hard-earned knowledge in a book where anyone could steal it? Might as well give away all your money.

  But the urge had taken hold of Taemon, and it wouldn’t leave until he’d drawn what was speeding through his mind.

  He set to work using psi to rearrange the luggage, stacking it on the seat as a barricade between himself and the rest of the family. He padded a corner with the beach blankets Mam had packed, a space just big enough to curl up in with his journal. With his back to the family and the luggage piled up between them, no one would notice that he was writing.

  Now to get his journal. He located his suitcase and used psi to unzip the outside pocket of the bag and imagined the journal easing out of the pocket and into his hands. Be it so!

  Nothing happened.

  Hmm. Maybe he hadn’t put it in the pocket. He opened the main compartment with psi and prepared to rummage by hand through the swimming gear, underwear, and T-shirts.

  But as soon as the bag was opened, Taemon realized his mistake: this was Yens’s suitcase, not his own. The bags were identical, and Taemon had mixed them up when he’d rearranged the luggage.

  Something caught his eye. The tan corner of a book poking out from underneath a shirt. Taemon’s heart raced. What was his journal doing in Yens’s suitcase? Had Yens stolen it? What could he possibly want with it?

  Taemon called the journal to him with psi, zipped the bag closed, then curled up in his corner and tried to think what to do next. Should he put the journal back and hope that Yens returned it? Or should he hold on to it and risk a confrontation once Yens realized it was missing? He thought back to Yens’s outburst the night before. He didn’t want to risk that again. Even so, Taemon’s fingers still itched to draw. Yens already knew that Taemon could drive the unisphere; what harm could there be in sketching the parts he’d seen?

  He opened the journal to begin drawing. But rather than seeing his neat, blocky handwriting and his sketches, he saw spiky, awkward letters on the page.

  T drove a unisphere. said he never saw one before but he knew how to drive it. how? it has to be a mind trick of some kind but he doesn’t even know what it is or what it can do. i should have it. i will have it. it can’t be that hard. i will make him tell me how he does it and i will be the true son. yens the true son.

/>   Skies! It was Yens’s journal. The one he said he’d thrown away. Yens wanted to learn mind wandering? How would that help him be selected as the True Son? Didn’t he know how dangerous it was?

  He flipped through the previous pages. The entries spanned several months. It seemed like Yens was experimenting with psi, looking for ways to get around the safeguards, ways to be more powerful.

  danger increases power, but fear weakens it. facing danger without fear gives the most power. authority doesn’t matter anymore.

  Taemon slipped the journal back into Yens’s suitcase and zipped it up. It took longer than it should have because the whirling thoughts in his head made it difficult to focus enough to use psi. He thought again about what had happened on the unisphere last night. Yens had purposefully put himself and Taemon in danger in order to expand his psionic power. How many people could do that? How many people would do that? Skies, Yens had the icy nerve of a jaguar.

  Still, Taemon shuddered to think how wrong that was. Authority doesn’t matter? Your own brother’s life doesn’t matter? Was that the big change that the next Great Cycle would bring? He wasn’t sure he wanted to live in a place where psi had no boundaries and where power was more important than people’s lives.

  Worry tightened Taemon’s chest. Yens was determined to seek out danger in more ways than one. And no matter what the goal was, Yens always scored.

  At the beach, Taemon walked the path that followed the rocky shoreline, hoping for a few minutes alone — and something to distract him from his confused thoughts about Yens. He had a school project he was supposed to work on over the summer, and he needed some ideas. The assignment was to design your own psi lock for your locker. The lock had to be unique so that only its maker knew how it worked. Unlocking it meant picturing the mechanism releasing, then using psi to make it happen. Make it too simple and anyone could figure out how to unlock it. Make it too complicated and even the maker might have trouble holding the release image in his head. The assignment wasn’t that hard, but this was the kind of thing Taemon loved puzzling out. He wanted to create something truly original.

  Da always said the best inspiration comes from nature. Taemon walked over to the knee-high stone wall that ran along the sandy path, just high enough to keep someone from accidentally falling off. Looking over the ledge, he saw the ocean a few feet down and wondered how it might help him design a lock.

  Waves.

  Rocks.

  Crashing.

  He’d been lucky to avoid a crash last night. Maybe he could use something from the unisphere’s design for his lock. Maybe . . .

  “Dare you to jump in right here,” Yens said.

  Taemon turned around. Yens had crept up next to him. Once again Taemon found himself right where he didn’t want to be — alone with Yens.

  “C’mon, freakling. Jump in,” Yens repeated.

  The water didn’t look too bad. He was a good swimmer. He could probably do it. The problem was that Yens would turn it into something else, something dangerous. Taemon stepped away from the edge and back to the path. “Nah,” he said.

  “Right,” Yens said. “Let’s go for a walk instead because that’s so much more exciting.”

  Yens was bored. And a bored Yens was a dangerous Yens.

  Taemon kept walking. Both boys were quiet for the next few minutes, Taemon keeping to himself and Yens poking the sand with a stick. Then Yens began walking on top of the rocky ledge.

  Taemon watched his brother out of the corner of his eye. It made him nervous to see Yens flirting with danger again, but he was certain that’s exactly what Yens wanted. If he ignored him, maybe Yens would give up. It wasn’t easy, though, with Yens pretending to stagger and stumble, leaning this way and that with a smirky grin on his face.

  “Whoa,” Yens said, teetering dramatically. He waved his arms to gain balance.

  Taemon looked away.

  “Whoa!” Yens called, more loudly this time. Taemon rolled his eyes and looked back — just in time to see Yens teeter toward the edge and then disappear over the wall.

  Was it a trick? It must be. Taemon waited for Yens to jump out or yell or anything.

  Nothing happened.

  Taemon wouldn’t go near the edge. He wasn’t going to fall for Yens’s prank. He waited several minutes, listening to the surge of the surf, the cries of the gulls. Another several minutes. Nothing.

  What if something had happened to Yens? Shouldn’t he check, at least? Just one tiny look. He walked over to the ledge, planted his feet solidly on the ground, and peeked over the wall.

  And there was Yens. Crouched on a rock on the other side. His laughter was loud and cocky.

  “Got you that time!”

  “I had to check on you, that’s all.”

  Yens climbed up the rocks toward the wall. Taemon helped Yens up with a little psi boost. Before he realized what was happening, Taemon felt himself being yanked forward, his belly pinned to the stone wall. He hung there, head on the ocean side of the wall and feet on the other, slowly tipping forward.

  “Let’s go for a swim,” Yens said with a snarl.

  “Stop it, Yens.” Yens shouldn’t be able to use psi to hurt anyone, especially his own brother. But after reading his brother’s journal, Taemon was beginning to think that Yens was capable of just about anything.

  “Tell me how you drove the unisphere.”

  Taemon’s head was pounding, and the stone wall jamming in his gut made it hard to get a good breath. “Skies! Is power all you care about?”

  Yens’s face contorted into an odd scowl. Taemon felt a shove of psi and toppled over the wall. A shower of pebbles escorted him into the water below.

  The water was warm, but it was strong and deep. The small waves on the surface hid an incredible force that shoved and pulled at Taemon as he tried to swim to shore. The water tugged him outward, then thrust him back toward the rocks and jammed him against a boulder. Before Taemon could climb the rock, he was thrust outward again by the sea.

  He wondered how fast he was moving. Fast enough to break a bone if he hit the rocks wrong? Don’t panic, Taemon told himself. Focus on breathing. The water would eventually push him back toward the rock, where he’d have another chance to climb out.

  And it did. Taemon tried to keep himself aligned so his feet would hit the rocks first. Better his legs get broken than something indispensable like his head. He glanced up and saw Yens standing on the boulder. He breathed a bit easier.

  Taemon’s feet hit the boulder just as he’d planned. He bent his knees to cushion the impact, and nothing broke. Swinging his arms forward, he managed to hug the boulder, but his toes found no footholds. He scrabbled for purchase on the smooth, slippery rock. “Help me!”

  Taemon felt psi pulling at his shoulders. His body started to lift out of the water. Relief washed over him.

  Just before Taemon could get to a safe position, his forward momentum stopped. He hung suspended above the rock.

  “Tell me how you worked the unisphere,” Yens said. “Then I’ll help you.”

  “I told you, I don’t know! I just saw it. I can’t explain how!”

  “Try.”

  The waves returned, engulfing Taemon from the waist down and pressing him up against the rock. He fought to breathe.

  “If I concentrate,” he began, knowing that he had no choice, “I can search things with my mind. See how they work. But I don’t know how I do it! I just do. Da said never to tell anyone. He said it’s dangerous!”

  “Dangerous for you. But I know what to do with it.”

  “Forget all this stuff about danger increasing power. You’re asking for disaster.”

  Yens grinned. “That’s the whole point.” And he let go.

  Taemon fell into the water, and the sea hauled him out again.

  Once more Taemon fought to position himself for another chance to climb onto the rocks. But this time he felt something different. This time the ocean pulled him sideways. Not much, but it meant h
e’d end up someplace other than the big boulder. Maybe a better place to climb out. Maybe worse. No way to know.

  Sure enough, when Taemon was pushed back to shore, he missed the boulder by a few feet. Yens was yelling something, but Taemon couldn’t make it out.

  Here the rocks were submerged under the churning sea. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel them scraping his knees and shins. He had to find someplace safer.

  In the rocks he could see, there was a gap that caught his eye. Maybe that would lead to a way out. He tried to aim toward it.

  It worked. Taemon reached the gap. No more hidden rocks smashing into his body. But it wasn’t just a gap. The sea pushed him into a cave the size of his living room.

  At least he was safe. He’d rest here awhile and swim out in a few minutes. It should be easy. He would figure out the timing of the water’s pull and use it to help him swim out of the cave. With his strength back, he should be able to aim himself at the boulder once again. He needed to rest a bit, that’s all. Catch his breath.

  Taemon waded through the shallow water to the back of the cave and found a ledge that he could sit on, the water up to his waist. As his breathing slowed, he looked around at this strange hidden place. Sunlight poured in from the opening and reflected off the water, throwing beams of light in various directions on the cave walls, and creating rippled rainbows.

  Taemon wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but the water was up to his chest now and he figured it was time to swim out. He concentrated on the rhythm of the waves and timed his swimming to match it. He swam toward the opening, but the ocean’s pull was deceiving. When the water’s direction changed, he found himself pinned against the wall of the cave.

  He soon realized that swimming out of the cave was going to be anything but easy. If he swam as hard as he could, he could manage to get a little way out of the cave, but the sea battered him against the rocks and eventually pushed him right back in, with several new bruises for his efforts. Taemon was exhausted. He swam to the ledge again to rest.