Harken (Harken Series)

by Kaleb Nation

  There was no time for me to let the alarm wear off. I rose higher against the heat of the sun. The ground disappeared, the trees and the battered trailer left behind. The moment I could see the city I knew exactly where I was—not even a few miles from Arleta.

  At first I thought that I could call the fire department from my phone but I was in too much of a panic to get my fingers to press the right numbers. I was focused on a single, desperate thought: reaching the house in time. I would fight Wyck off with my own hands if I had to.

  Don’t die! was all I could think, a painful internal sob like a black hole threatening to consume me from the inside out. I couldn’t cry now. I couldn’t waste what precious breath I had.

  I saw smoke in the distance: thick, black and repugnant, like the morbid breath of a volcano. My eyes and throat burned as I found myself in the way of the smoke. I coughed but didn’t pause, diving from the sky and ignoring the flashing lights of the fire trucks as they raced down the highway far below.

  The ground came upon me in seconds. I hit my backyard and rolled in a flurry of grass and dust. I got to my feet instantly, shaking my hair out of my eyes, looking up in horror for a moment just because I couldn’t stop myself. The entire house from floor to rooftop was already burning, shingles and wooden supports breaking off, red and orange fire flaring out of the broken windows. The back porch had collapsed onto my mom’s swing and my sister’s now-melted drawing easel. I could see through the kitchen window that fire and ash continued to rain inside. A firefighter’s water would do nothing to stop this in time. Even the roof that I’d sat upon not many hours before had already caved in with crater-like holes.

  I heard a pop like a gunshot and the back door of my house exploded, shaking me as a rain of shrapnel and splinters flew in all directions. I dashed toward the house anyway, the heat rising with every step as I ran up the porch and shot through the door.

  It was an inferno. Fire had crawled up the walls in erratic patterns, the ceiling ablaze and dropping ash where giant, jagged pieces of wood had already fallen. Furniture was alighted like giant torches, the noise deafening as everything crackled and flames leapt from one end of the room to the other. And the smoke! It burned my nostrils and lungs and eyes, like airborne toxins entering me, so that I stumbled back toward the door again just to breath.

  “Alli! Mom!” I yelled, but the fire masked my voice. I got to the kitchen but my mom wasn’t there anymore. I called for my family, spinning in a circle and hoping that maybe my mom had awakened and crawled to safety. All of my skin felt sunburned at once.

  There was a crash as something fell through the ceiling from the second story. Orange and black and red rained like hot sequins around me as I dove for cover in the doorframe. I still couldn’t see my mom, and I was running out of time. Could Wyck have dragged her somewhere?

  I found one safe step then another, trying to reach the stairs as the broken boards wobbled under my shoes. My mom’s medicine cabinet was wrecked. The couch was destroyed. Everything I’d once known was melting away before my eyes.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I saw the most horrific sight of all.

  A body lay crumpled like a discarded doll, only the head visible beneath giant beams of fallen wood that had crushed her body. Her eyes were open but stared blankly, emptily—wide in shock, but showing no Glimpse.

  I was too late. My mom was dead.

  Everything stopped.

  The hallowed face of my mother was a single fragment of peace in the hellfire. Her face, though bruised and beaten, showed no fear of death—no concern for herself, dying in the same way that she had lived. I stumbled forward, falling to my knees in front of her, trying not to look at her blood soaked shirt. I touched her open fingers but they did not move to curl around mine, her empty eyes continuing to stare, her lips parted like she had tried to utter her last words but had been cut off by the unrelenting fire.

  A falling beam smashed our coffee table behind me. The chairs scattered when the ceiling panel above them crumbled. I paid no heed to any of this. It was like a tragedy film was playing out around me and I was stuck in its script. Kneeling before the broken body of my mother, I was merely an actor in a screenplay. A puppet in a show.

  This isn’t how it was supposed to happen…

  I was broken from my tears when part of the second-story balcony collapsed behind me, striking me in the back and hurling me forward. My hands flew up into a mask that deflected the debris from my face, but I was now perched against the wall across the room, coughing for air. I inhaled smoke. My mom’s face was already gone, now covered by what had been our ceiling. I’d seen her for the last time.

  I couldn’t mourn for her any longer, not as the house was collapsing and there was still one hope left. I soared into flight over the stairs, shouting my sister’s name. I hit the floor above but had to catch myself as the wood crumbled beneath me. Alli’s room was already taken over by the flames. But I knew if she had run to hide anywhere, it would have been my room next door.

  The burning had not neglected my bedroom. My dresser was toppled with my clothes spilling out in piles—likely the work of Wyck as he’d ravaged my house in his quest to defile it. All the camera lenses were knocked to the ground and shattered, thousands of dollars of my life’s savings spilled across the room.

  But worse: my Great Work. As I spun, I saw that every photograph was alighted; the ones on the ceiling breaking off and fluttering like flaming snowflakes to the floor. All of the faces were blackened with holes through them, their eyes fading against the smoke. It pierced my heart to see all of them dying like the slow-burning carcasses of old friends.

  I panicked and almost ran to save them. But my sister was still somewhere in the house. My Great Work was nothing.

  I threw my closet door open. She wasn’t there. I stepped back and the floor shifted from under me again. Where was she? I spun to get out but found that the floor outside my room had already collapsed.

  I wasn’t ready to give up. So I slammed shut what remained of my door and went to the wall I shared with my sister’s adjacent room. Even then I hesitated, though only for a second, before my fingers went flying to rip my work down, tearing the photos to pieces and letting the shreds hit the floor without so much as a glance. The wall beneath it was already hot, my fingers stained black. But I went on, slamming with my fists and digging with my claws into the already weakened panels, hoping that I could break through.

  My eyes burned as ash and wood stuck to my sweaty face. An opening finally broke. It was like I had opened a furnace. I could not step inside, fire leaping through the wall at me and my scaly hands flashing once again to my protection. Still, I forced myself ahead, trying to look inside, to see if I could drag my sister out.

  I saw her shoes across the room, shrouded in smoke.

  “Alli!” I shouted again. But there were just too many flames to see, and the smoke only served as a precursor to the explosion that threw me off my feet.

  I was standing one second, vigorously fighting to press forward, and the next I was in the air, powers struggling to catch me, my back slamming into the opposite wall. I tried to get up, but couldn’t as the smoke slowly began to seep through my lungs.

  Hands grabbed a hold of me. I was pulled through the window, hit with fresh air that expelled the smoke.

  Someone held me up. Wyck? No. Someone else.

  I struggled to keep my eyes open, and through slits I saw that I was hanging over Callista’s shoulder. We were high in the air, the wind whirling in gusts against my face.

  “I couldn’t save them,” I said. I collapsed into her arms and didn’t even try to hold back my tears anymore.

  19

  Sophia

  With her arms wrapped around my middle and mine around her shoulders, Callista carried me across the city until I couldn’t smell the smoke or hear the sirens anymore. Thad appeared beside us, guarding the air as we went, his claws out and ready to defend.

  Even after we�
�d landed she still wouldn’t let me go—or maybe it was me who wouldn’t? I was in a daze. I wavered between being awake and falling into sleep-like shock, where I would just stare silently, my body trembling, my hands clutching each other to keep them still.

  Thad and Callista never left our sacred circle on the mountain, the same edge of the cliff where I’d first awakened with scales and claws. Neither of them spoke. Their mere presence brought me a tiny comfort.

  I wasn’t a crier, and yet I’d already cried more that day than I had in my entire life before it. I’d always thought that weeping over dead people merely stretched the period of pain out longer when it should have ended when they did. It wasn’t like tears would bring anything back.

  Still, I wept. I just couldn’t stop myself.

  A time came when I could not cry anymore. When the tears dried, I told Thad and Callista everything that had happened. When quiet finally set, so did the sun, and we pressed close as the chilly night swept over the hills. Thad gathered enough courage to leave and get food and flashlights, Callista standing over me like a guard. Even when he returned, we continued to sit in the silence and listen as the voice of the city rose up over the cliff.

  “Why are we out here instead of at the house?” I asked. The bed would have been far better than the rocks.

  “It isn’t safe anymore,” Callista replied. I dusted off my hands.

  “Nowhere is safe anymore,” I spat. She walked away from me to ignore the sourness in my voice. Thad came between us.

  “Callista is right,” he told me. “We need to move. We can’t stay in Los Angeles.”

  His voice dropped. He didn’t want to say what was coming next, but he knew he had to.

  “Right now, I guarantee you they’re headed to Lodi,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “The least we can do is use that as a head start…to get away.”

  “Once they have it, we can’t be here,” Callista said with insistence. “We have to leave. And we need a plan, Michael. A real one.”

  I drew in a quick breath, feeling my muscles tense. I knew what they were thinking: Michael had run off and nearly got himself killed again. Ruining everything, as usual. I straightened my shoulders.

  “Here’s a plan for you,” I hissed, picking at rocks on the ground. “Let’s go right in the middle of the city, and stand on top of one of the buildings, and shout the truth to everyone. Let’s make the Guardians send someone to shoot us down, and kill that person.”

  I piled the pebbles into my hand in angry motions. “Then they’ll send another, and we’ll kill him too. Then we’ll track each and every Guardian down. And we’ll keep killing until every one of them is dead, or we are.”

  Callista shook her head disdainfully.

  “What is wrong with you?” she said with dismay. “Do you have any idea what you did earlier? Do you have any idea that every time you put yourself in danger, you put Thad and I in the same spot? We didn’t even have a choice.”

  “Being out there is better than sitting here waiting for them,” I said.

  “And if you go out, they will hunt you down!” Thad shouted suddenly from the other side, in an irate tone that I’d never heard him use before. I pushed myself up to my feet, throwing the rocks to the ground in fury.

  “Then why the hell did he let me go?” I yelled back. “He had me and he could have killed me in a second.”

  “Because he wants to come back and kill you with the Blade instead!” Thad’s voice roared into the trees above us. “He knows you’re giving up. You’ve gone weak.”

  My jaw tightened, hands now fists to hold the claws in.

  “Now you have nothing left,” he said. “That’s what they’ve wanted all along. To break you, just like they broke us. They want you reckless so they can calculate everything you do, until you’re theirs. Callista’s right—we need a new plan.”

  “I don’t have a plan,” I said.

  “Well you need to come up with one!” Thad waved an angry hand at me.

  “Why?” I returned sharply.

  Thad let a quick breath out but I refused to relent. He turned away, walking off as if he wasn’t going to stoop so low as to reply to me.

  “Because you’re the one who got us into this mess,” he muttered over his shoulder.

  He could have shot my knee with a bullet and it might have hurt less. All of a sudden, hot tears of rage brimmed in the corners of my eyes, and before I could stop myself, I was dashing toward Thad with my fists out.

  He reacted faster, hearing me and spinning around. I hadn’t realized that my claws were out too, and our silver edges clashed together like swords. But he was far better than me, far more prepared, and in one swift motion his blades wrenched in a circle, catching against my scales and flipping me over onto my back.

  “Stop!” Callista shouted, though the short-lived battle was already over. Thad breathed heavily, standing away from me at the ready. I coughed and rolled over, the impact having shaken my urge to attack, but not my rage.

  Callista held out her hand, but I hit it away, getting to my feet on my own. I turned from both of them and started to run for the edge, and before anyone could stop me, I was in the air again. I heard Callista calling after me but I ignored her voice, and flew all the faster.

  * * *

  Being solitary was almost painful. As soon as there were no voices of the others, the sounds in my head bubbled up with memories of my mother’s screams, Wyck’s ghastly voice, and the laughs coming through the screen.

  Had I really meant what I’d told Callista and Thad? I was such a mess that I couldn’t trust my thoughts anymore. I had never believed in capital punishment before. Who is a judge to say that someone doesn’t deserve to live? Life isn’t something that is given on loan by a government, a privilege they can recall if someone doesn’t follow their rules.

  Sometimes, though, I would watch the news about death row prisoners and study the Glimpses in their eyes. Most would have a dazed, empty space inside, like they’d already died and were simply waiting for the formalities to wrap up. But the serial killers and the psychopaths were different. Their faces might be calm but inside their eyes was still a terrifying, uncontrollable urge to kill, like kleptomaniacs addicted to stealing lives.

  When I put the pieces together, I saw the Guardians as genocidal psychopaths. How many disasters had been by their hand? How many more would they kill, if someone didn’t kill them first? Was that to be my grim responsibility—to kill the killers?

  Who wept when Hitler died? Murder is good sometimes.

  I wrestled with these heavy thoughts as I flew, until exhaustion sank in and I was forced to the ground with an ache of thirst. I walked the sidewalks of an unfamiliar part of the city. None of the people near me gave any hindrance or even a glance my way. I was like a ghost.

  That association fit me far too well. I felt as empty as a ghost inside. Without my mother and sister, I had nothing to go back to. I had no hope, no reason to fight. There would never be a normal again. Everything I’d once known was now turned to ashes.

  I wandered in this aimless state as the night darkened further and the sidewalks began to empty. My surroundings became lonely and decrepit, slovenly-kept shacks and buildings growing like fungus against the sides of the road. When I spotted an open door radiating light ahead, I turned to go in.

  It was a messy bar that I was too young to enter, neon beer advertisements glowing on the walls and animal heads studying me with blank gazes. Even at that hour, the bar was nearly deserted, only two men talking in a corner booth with their voices masked by low rock music and the television. The bartender behind the counter turned to me.

  “Can’t come in here, kid,” he said, eyeing me as he cleaned the inside of a glass with a towel. He had long dreadlocks and a black tattoo on the right side of his face like a half-skull. The inside smelled of old sweat and cheap alcohol.

  “Do you have water?” I asked in a soft voice, because it was all I could muster. He glared at me.
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  “You’re too young to be here, man,” he said. “There’s an In-N-Out down the road.”

  “I just watched my family die,” I replied. “Can I just have some water?”

  The bartender didn’t have an answer. In my life’s study of eyes, I’d discovered that sometimes, even people who didn’t have my power could read the gaze of another person. This was simply part of being human—the ability to see fear in enemies, or pain in a friend, or affection in a lover. The bartender must have read such intense pain in my own eyes that he was forced to concede, and he filled the cup for me without any more objections.

  I swallowed all he gave me, coughing smoke up. He poured more, then went to the other side of the building to clean a table.

  The television was on, so I watched as it played rerun shots of a football game. The fat reporter spit his “S’s” and “P’s” so much that I expected the camera lens to get covered in saliva. Why did I hold so tightly to these tiny details now?

  Unexpectedly, the report changed, and before my startled eyes, my own face appeared on the screen. I nearly choked.

  The anchor turned to the camera with my photo hovering at his side: my school portrait, zoomed in so closely that it was pixilated and made me look far more sinister. The subtext beneath my photo read: TEENAGE TERRORIST MICHAEL ASHER MURDERS OWN FAMILY, DISAPPEARS.

  My mouth hung open in shock but I immediately had the sense to shut it, to turn around in the stool so my back was to the booth of men and the bartender. There was another television across the room playing the same thing: TVs all around, so that any of the patrons could just look up and match my face to the one on the screen. My heart beat faster, but I didn’t move, fearful that anything would bring attention to myself.

  It was hard to hear the anchor without straining, so I leaned in as best I could.

  “…Asher displayed sociopathic tendencies as early as six years old…” the reporter said, emphasizing all the right words with a professional—but obviously uncaring—tone.