by R. T. Lowe
“That’s where we are?”
“Yeah. Then that guy must’ve filled it back up with dirt and shit.”
“Kayla’s dead?” Felix asked, the image of the crumbling figure replaying itself in his mind.
“Yeah.”
They went silent for a moment.
“How far down?” Felix felt a sudden iciness on his backside.
“Not sure. Twenty or—what the hell?” Lucas squirmed. “What is that?”
Felix’s fingers went cold—and wet. Their trench was filling with water.
“Get us the fuck outta here!” Lucas pleaded, no longer whispering.
“Take it easy.” Felix tried to sound calm. “I’m working on it. Give me a minute.”
“Okay.” Lucas settled.
“That guy Lynch, you said he pointed and everything blew up?” Felix remembered Kayla telling him about Lynch when they’d met at the Caffeine Hut. Something along the lines of unleashing the hounds of hell or getting out of his way.
“Yeah.”
“And he melted her?”
“Melted or burned or something. The fire thing just touched her and she turned to dust. It was… sickening.”
“I think I saw some of it,” Felix said. “We have to assume he’s still up there, right?”
“C’mon, Felix!” Lucas said urgently. “Get us out!” The water level was rising, creeping up to their ears.
“I think I can blow a hole through this, but there’s gonna be a lot of, you know, falling rocks and stuff—it could crush you.” Felix was thinking out loud. “I need to use a shield but… shit!”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t control things on the other side of my shield. It’s like it blocks everything.”
“So?” Lucas screamed frantically. “So what? Just blow the goddamn roof off this thing! I can’t… I can’t breathe.”
“We’re getting out of here,” Felix told him, trying to redirect his mind to use a shield in a way he’d never even contemplated, let alone attempted. “Ready?”
“Hurry!”
With no room to navigate his hand out in front of his body, he struggled to find the connection between thought and creation, but when it clicked in his head, he formed the shield above them, an invisible barrier scaled perfectly, like the top of a container. Up, Felix said to himself, raising the earth with his mind, doing it slowly, trying to gauge how much weight he was moving. Rocks and soil pattered down, slipping in around the edges of the shield, splashing in the water.
Lucas screamed, fearing they were about to be buried alive.
“I got this.” Felix tried to sound confident. “Keep your light up, okay? I need to see where the ceiling is.”
“Okay.”
Felix widened and expanded the shield, extending it out in all directions, slicing through soil and rock as he continued to raise the ceiling, steadily. They transitioned to a sitting position, no longer in danger of drowning. The ground shook and the earth groaned, but this time it was Felix’s doing, not Lynch’s. The cavern seemed to grow brighter as Felix distanced the ceiling from the depths of the trench, Lucas’s phone lighting up the lengthening walls. Felix pushed it up higher, faster now, and he was able to stand, Lucas following suit, raising his phone over his head. They craned their necks and watched it ascend as if they were at the bottom of an elevator shaft observing a car taking its passengers to the higher floors. Tumbling soil and rock cascaded down the walls, settling into the icy water at their feet. Natural light flickered high overhead, broken lines that dimmed and brightened, finally connecting to form a rectangle.
“You did it!” Lucas said with immense relief in his voice. He took a big breath, filling his lungs with air.
“Not yet.” Lynch, Felix knew, was probably waiting for them, and if his first assault was any indication, he would attack them at first sight. From Lucas’s description, Lynch’s abilities sounded similar to his own, and that meant he could kill from a distance. Felix stared up, holding the shield just above the surface, thinking about his next move. He had an idea. “I have to do this fast now. Things are gonna get a little crazy in a second. You should cover your ears.”
“My ears?” Lucas looked confused.
Felix nodded. “Ready?”
Lucas cupped his hands over his ears and blew out a breath. “Do it!”
Felix accelerated the shield toward the heavens. The enormous land mass crested the surface and rocketed through the opening like the uncorking of a champagne bottle, shooting high in the brightening sky, shattering the shroud of morning mist. When only the bottom was visible through the low circling clouds, Felix stalled it, letting it hover. He stared at it for a moment and vanished the shield. It started to drop, the sky darkening as it cast a shadow over them.
“What are you—?” Lucas began, staring up, eyes widening.
“Your ears,” Felix reminded him. He concentrated his thoughts on the core of the falling object, imagining an explosion from within it. With that image fixed in his mind, he began counting down silently: three, two…
The darkness deepened as it plummeted toward earth, gaining speed, huge sections breaking off and trailing alongside it.
Lucas screamed.
“One,” Felix whispered, triggering the explosion then immediately conjuring a shield over them.
The ground seemed to heave even before the devastation blackened the sky. Lucas kept his hands to his ears and almost lost his footing, widening his base like a surfer riding a choppy wave. Felix felt the concussions in the earth, shaking his bones. Rocks and debris descended like missiles, slamming down harmlessly on Felix’s shield. Lucas winced and ducked his head, but kept his eyes up, watching the barrier absorbing the impact of the projectiles. Gradually, the earth seemed to regain its balance and the echoes of the blast diminished like distant thunder.
“Holy shit!” Lucas said in a soft voice, staring up. The shield was almost completely covered with debris. “Think that killed him?”
“I don’t know. Hope so.” Felix tilted the barrier, clearing it like a dump truck emptying its bucket, then vanished it, searching for a way to get back to the surface. One side appeared to be more scalable than the others. The blast had collapsed it, the tumbles of rock and earth providing a ramp of sorts they could use to make it topside.
“That way?” Lucas suggested, looking in the same direction as Felix.
“Yeah.” Felix glanced warily around the perimeter of the huge crater, the sky above churning with smoke and dust.
“That must’ve gotten him,” Lucas said hopefully.
Felix wasn’t so confident, but they needed to get going. “Follow me. Let me know if you see anything.”
They started off, staying close together as they jumped from rock to rock, clambering over obstacles along the way, finally dropping to all fours and using their fingers and toes to dig into the small depressions as their path steepened and grew more treacherous. Felix moved cautiously, stopping often to search for any movement above them, prepared to conjure a shield at the first sign of Lynch. Reaching the top, he took a clump of grass in each hand and hauled himself to the surface, jumping up, hand raised, ready for anything.
“Oh my God,” Felix whispered as he stared around the cemetery. The explosion had obliterated everything in a wide radius, scorching the earth, shattering gravestones and toppling tombs. Beyond the worst areas of destruction, some of the tombs had escaped virtually unscathed, while others had been reduced to gravel. He saw a casket leaning against a gravestone. It had flipped upside down and shattered its top, the occupant, a wispy haired skeleton dressed in a black suit and tie, reached out for the ground beneath him as if trying to escape his confinement.
My mom! Felix thought and searched for her tombstone among the carnage, spinning in a slow circle, seeing nothing familiar.
“Little help?” a voice grunted from below and he looked down to see Lucas struggling to pull himself over the rim.
Felix gave him a ha
nd and heaved him onto solid ground. Felix stared out at the horizon and then at the pit beneath their feet, and as he regained a shred of his bearings, he realized what had become of his mom’s grave.
Lucas was looking all around, shaking his head solemnly. “Damn,” he whispered. “This place is…” He saw the look on Felix’s face and guessed what he was thinking. “That Lynch dude just ripped a canyon in the ground right where your mom was. Sorry.”
Felix met Lucas’s eyes and nodded. He would never again be able to talk to her. On the drive up, he’d thought about making the trip here a tradition, stopping off on Christmas or his birthday. Flowers, he thought regretfully. He should have brought flowers.
“Felix!” Lucas screamed.
Shield! Felix thought, conjuring it with a wave of his hand.
Ka-wham!
The air rippled and his shoulder began to tingle. A boulder lay at their feet. Felix scanned the cemetery, clenching and unclenching his hand, feeling as if he’d hit a baseball off the handle of the bat.
Thump!
“What the—?” Lucas shrieked and jumped back, knocking up against Felix.
Felix snapped his head around, his hand still facing the other way. Less than a foot behind them, a column lay on the ground, fluted and capped at the ends with delicately carved leaves and trumpet playing angels. The stone pillar was taller than Felix and had to weigh a thousand pounds.
“He’s gotta be behind us!” Lucas said, breathing fast.
Was he? Felix’s eyes traveled over the landscape of headstones, tombs and a large domed memorial in the distance near the trees. One of the tombs, he saw, had crumbled like a house of cards. The column could have come from there, but did that mean Lynch was also there?
“He almost got us,” Lucas said feverishly. “I felt the wind.”
“He isn’t behind us,” Felix concluded, turning back. His shield, apparently, had a neutralizing effect not only on his own telekinetic abilities, but on those of other Sourcerors. “My shield did that.”
“Did what?”
“When I’m using it, I can’t control anything or use fire or anything like that on the other side. I haven’t”—he felt himself getting frustrated—“I don’t know how to do it. I think Lynch was trying to distract us with the big rock so he could crush us with the column, but I used my shield and he lost control of it.”
“Sneaky fuck,” Lucas muttered, squinting his eyes. “If he’s in front of us, where is he?”
“Good ques—” Felix began.
Something big and blurringly fast pounded into the shield and shattered in pieces. Lucas jumped in surprise and Felix sucked in a breath as his hand, once more, began to tingle. A gray object flickered off to their right and slammed into the shield, moving too quickly for Felix’s eyes to track. Another object burst into powder in front of them, and then more followed, more than Felix could count, a violent and sudden barrage that put Felix on his heels, concentrating with all his might to maintain the integrity of the shield. Gravestones, boulders, chunks of stone and earth, and the remains of the leveled tombs swarmed with a pulverizing intensity, crashing into the shield, blinding them in a cloud of dust.
“I think that’s him.” Lucas strained his eyes to see through the haze of destruction.
Felix was too much on the defensive to dare diverting his focus from fending off the onslaught.
“It’s him!” Lucas said in an urgent voice. “I see him!”
Felix kept his eyes—and his mind—on the shield, saying nothing.
“Felix,” Lucas said. “Felix!” he shouted loudly, nudging his arm. “He’s by that tomb thing.”
“I can’t do anything with the sh—”
“Let it go,” Lucas said. “Go after him! That fucker killed Kayla!”
The wreckage from the cemetery continued to rain down on his shield. If he dropped it, they’d be exposed, but if he didn’t, Lynch might be able to pin them down all day.
“Get behind me.” Through twisting plumes of dust and ground stone, Felix saw a man in a dark coat standing beside a tomb, arm raised and pointing in their direction. “This could get dicey.” Feeling the shield vibrating against the force of the impacts, he stared straight ahead, waiting for a pause in the attack. The pieces of a broken headstone collided with the shield and burst in a huge spray of gray particles. Silence. Felix watched. The silence stretched on. Taking a deep breath, he focused himself and disappeared the shield.
A slab of granite with rounded corners shot toward them, cutting a path through the settling haze. Felix reached out with his mind and caught it. It pushed against him and he felt the resistance like leaden weights pressing down on his shoulders. He focused his will, driving the stone backward, feeling the diminishing resistance of the force that opposed him. It wobbled as if guided by an indecisive hand, and then Felix raised the granite slab and slammed it into the ground, upright and half buried. He disengaged his mind from the object and immediately it began to rise, struggling to free itself. Felix directed his thoughts again and recaptured it, then squeezed, pulverizing it.
Take that, asshole! Felix thought, searching for Lynch only to find the air was alive with a host of projectiles blistering their way. He caught the wall of debris, stopping every item in place, and then held them as he tried to find the man who had sent them. Even the smaller objects resisted his will to varying degrees, but only one, an unusually large headstone in the center, stayed aloft and intact, hovering defiantly over the scarred field, the others, he ground to powder. Felix was determined to crush it into something even finer than powder when he saw a twitch of black fabric darting behind the largest memorial still standing.
“Watch our backs,” Felix said to Lucas, keeping his attention on the columned entrance of the memorial.
Lucas turned his head quickly. “All clear.”
Felix gave the headstone a hard push and then relented, allowing Lynch to push it back toward him, wanting him to believe he was winning the mental tug-of-war. Lynch was formidable, but Felix thought he’d gained a sense of the limits of his telekinetic abilities and he believed he was the more powerful of the two. Squaring off with Lofton had been a fundamentally different experience. No matter how much energy Felix had exerted, he sensed Lofton could have responded in kind. By comparison, Lynch’s powers felt thin and stretched at the edges, perforated in a sense, lacking the depth and the dimension that made Lofton—and Felix—so uniquely powerful. Felix pushed it again, a little harder than before, then let his control falter and the headstone lurched forward, accelerating as it tore across the cemetery.
“Felix?” Lucas said, his frightened eyes on the headstone barreling toward them.
His thoughts focused on the memorial, Felix snapped the columns and collapsed the roof straight down. He quickly shifted his attention to the headstone, but the resistance he’d felt earlier had already vanished and it dropped harmlessly out of the air, landing with a resounding thud not far from their feet.
“You get him?” Lucas asked eagerly, bouncing on his toes. “You got him, right?”
Felix stared at the cloud of dust rising up from the flattened memorial. Don’t get cocky, he reminded himself. Nothing stirred. If Lynch had slipped inside through a back entrance, which it appeared he had, the weight of the falling structure would have surely crushed him. There was only one way to find out.
“Let’s have a look,” he said to Lucas.
Lucas hesitated for only a second before setting off. The ground was pocked like the surface of the moon and some of the holes were too big to jump across so they had to go around them.
“I’m pretty sure he was in there,” Lucas said as they stopped short of the ruined monument. “He couldn’t have gotten away.”
Felix’s eyes wandered over the rubble, looking for pockets and crevices among the wreckage, someplace a person could survive if—
“Behind you!” Lucas screamed.
Felix spun around. A streaking ball of fire sped toward them, dark s
moke trailing behind it. Centering his mind on the object, he tried to impose his will. It slowed but kept coming, slipping through his mental grip like a wriggling fish through his fingers. He heard a grinding sound of stone sliding against stone and glanced over his shoulder, seeing the fragments of the domed roof and columns, and broken sections of the walls, rising up from the ground.
With his left hand, Felix showed his palm to the memorial, which appeared to be in the process of reassembling itself like a puzzle in midair, and conjured a shield, realizing Lynch must be readying the pieces for launch. Turning back quickly, he looked straight ahead for the flaming sphere and nearly missed it. He was looking over it. It had dropped out of the air and was scorching a slow crooked trail across the ground, tumbling to a stop and flaming out, dissolving in a puddle of oily blackness that spread outward, devouring the sod and a nearby gravestone. Felix’s shield, once again, had apparently snuffed out Lynch’s powers.
Lynch emerged, standing behind the memorial, hand pointing at Felix, his face intermittently visible through the shifting ruins. A scar ran from his forehead down through his eyebrow and cheekbone to his jawline where it turned back toward his throat. His eyes were dark and calculating, though otherwise, his expression was impassive, calm even. He stood there doing nothing, evidently weighing the utility of testing Felix’s shield again.
Felix didn’t give him an opportunity. With a thought, he vanished his shield and swept the floating memorial aside, sending the columns and roof on a towering flight, tossing them beyond the boundaries of the cemetery and into the nearby woods.
Lynch didn’t move, his expression unchanged.
