“I know,” said Dad. “I know her better than you do. But she also knows better than to take her fears out on you kids.”
“Mom knows better than a lot of things she does,” said Ryan, “but still she does them.”
Dad nodded. “As do you. As do I.” He looked sad, but he didn’t look like he was going to cry again. He was his calm, controlled self again. “Your GRUT team—they really came through, it seems to me.”
“I don’t know who Dr. Withunga ended up bringing. The yawns were Dahlia, but I don’t even know what else the others might have done.”
“And having them in the house,” said Dad. “Do you think it helped you?”
“Yes,” said Ryan. “It made my micropower work even faster than usual. So I was already shooting those guys in the shoulders before I knew I was going to. And the first guy through the door, putting a bullet through his head while he was still yawning and trying to talk. I didn’t know that was coming. Even though my finger pulled the trigger, I didn’t have a chance to argue with myself about it.”
Dad said nothing, just looked forward at the street, where drivers were still slowing down their cars to look at the crime scene tape and police barriers that were still scattered around.
Ryan knew that when Dad was silent like that, it meant Ryan was supposed to think of something Dad didn’t want to have to tell him.
“All right,” said Ryan. “Maybe I did know. In time to change my aim. Maybe I always have time to change my aim.”
Dad nodded.
“I knew shooting their shoulders would stop those fake cops. I knew that it would put them on the ground. In stupid movies, heroes get shot and they keep on fighting because of, like, adrenaline and they’re superheroes or whatever. But real people can’t take a bullet in the shoulder and keep on doing stuff.”
“Didn’t stop them from talking,” said Dad. “That one guy couldn’t keep his mouth shut. You need to teach Defense how to kick people harder so they really do stay shut up.”
“I’m not going to help Defense acquire any skill I don’t want to see used against people I care about, because Defense is an idiot.”
“He showed up to help you,” said Dad, “even though he doesn’t have a micropower.”
“One more proof of his idiocy.”
“A good friend,” Dad pointed out.
“Always has been,” said Ryan. “And an idiot.”
“Not mutually exclusive,” said Dad, grinning.
“Are you staying for dinner?” asked Ryan.
“Your mother didn’t ask me,” said Dad.
“Oh, come on,” said Ryan. “How much pride does she have to swallow?”
“All of it,” said Dad. “Every bit of it.” He rose to his feet.
“What about you?” asked Ryan. “Don’t you have to swallow some?”
Dad didn’t turn back as he walked to his truck.
So Ryan jumped up and ran to him. “Answer me,” he said to his father.
Dad climbed into the driver’s seat, but he didn’t close the door. “I’m still chewing hard and trying to gag it down,” he said. “But I’m the one with . . . I’m the one with the broken heart,” he said.
“Not the only one,” said Ryan. “I think Mom’s heart is broken too. I think she hates what she did as much as you do. I think she hates losing you. I think that scares her so much she can hardly breathe. And Dianne and I, we’ve had our hearts broken some this past six months, too. Not on a scale like the two of you. But, you know, just saying.”
Dad nodded. “I love you, Ryan. I’m proud of you. Now get out of the way so I can close the door and drive.”
Ryan rested his hand for a moment on Dad’s forearm as Dad reached out to pull the door closed. Father paused a moment. Then pulled the door closed as Ryan stepped back out of the way. Dad drove off.
As Ryan walked back toward the house, Dianne showed up, walking from the direction of her school. “Did you go to school today?” she asked him.
Ryan shook his head. “I had to get interrogated down at the police station.”
“Interrogated! Are they arresting you for something?”
“Maybe I was only being debriefed. But they had some penetrating questions, and they seemed to want to catch me in a contradiction.”
“Kind of cool,” said Dianne.
“Less cool than you might think,” said Ryan.
“Why?” asked Dianne. “It’s not like you were in any danger of getting arrested.”
Ryan sat down on the front porch step. Dianne set down her backpack with a thunk.
“It was self-defense, of course,” she said.
Ryan shook his head.
“Wasn’t it?” asked Dianne.
Ryan didn’t know what he meant by shaking his head.
“Weren’t they going to kill your girlfriend and her mother?” she demanded.
Ryan shrugged.
“Come on, you were saving lives,” she said.
Ryan suddenly found himself crying, and in a moment he knew why. “Dianne,” he said, “if it was all self-defense, if I was only saving people, why am I the only person in this whole thing who killed people? I killed two people and nobody else killed anybody.”
Dianne didn’t make any answer. Just sat there as Ryan kept crying into his hands.
“I hope you plan to wash all the snot off your hands before you pass any food to me at dinner,” Dianne finally said.
“I was thinking I could wipe it off on you,” said Ryan, “but you’d probably tell Mom.”
Dianne reached out and grabbed his hands and wiped them on his jeans. “Snot goes on your own clothes,” she said. “There are rules of civilized behavior.”
Ryan smiled. His crying was over.
But it didn’t change anything. He understood now what was bothering him all day. The cops gave him a pass, Dad gave him a pass, Dianne gave him a pass, but Ryan knew he was a killer. His micropower led to death. His move against Errol to save Defense, he was aiming right at Errol’s larynx. It would have killed him if Ryan hadn’t been able to make a tiny directional change at the last moment, and even then it might have caused permanent maiming damage.
The fake FBI guy in Hardesty’s class, Ryan had killed him with one bare hand right in the open doorway of the classroom. This was going to be all over the school: Ryan Burke is a killer. Some people would think it was cool, but those weren’t the kind of people Ryan wanted to have admire him. And that bullet hole in the one guy’s forehead—was there a moment in which Ryan could have aimed somewhere else? He couldn’t remember. Maybe. Everything had been so quick. Because the house was full of micropots?
If they hadn’t been here, could I have still saved the Horvats?
If they hadn’t been here, could I have maybe saved them without killing anybody?
24
When Ryan called Dr. Withunga and asked about the next local GRUT meeting, she said, “A lot of micropots laid themselves on the line for you the other day, Ryan. We owe them a big meeting where you tell everybody the outcome. Don’t you think?”
Ryan thought that sounded fair. If he had come along to a support group project where somebody was actually shot and killed, he’d want to know what happened. Not be left in the dark like he wasn’t really a participant.
Besides, Ryan wanted to know what they actually did. Besides Dahlia, because the yawning thing was obvious.
“I can’t bring Bizzy,” said Ryan.
“I can imagine she doesn’t want to go out in public,” said Dr. Withunga.
“She’s moved out,” said Ryan. “I don’t know where she is or how to contact her.”
“Oh,” said Dr. Withunga. “That must be hard on you.”
“Hard enough,” said Ryan. “So it’s just me.”
“Meet after school for the drive to Danville?�
� asked Dr. Withunga.
“Aaron going with us?” asked Ryan.
“Always best with a third party in the car,” said Dr. Withunga.
“Was he there at the, uh, home invasion thing?” asked Ryan.
“He had this crazy idea of watching out for me,” said Dr. Withunga. “As if anybody could sneak up on me.”
Ryan chuckled.
“But he reminded me that if someone kills me, it’ll probably be somebody with a navel, and knowing that his navel is there won’t save me.”
Ryan said, “Boy loves his mother.”
“Yes, he’ll be riding with us,” said Dr. Withunga. “Because you’re known to have a violent streak.”
Ryan knew she thought she was making a joke, but he couldn’t find any kind of laugh that he could give her right now over the phone.
It was a long, quiet ride to the meeting in Danville, because Aaron had never been chatty, and when anybody brought up anything the conversation petered out in a couple of minutes.
Since Dr. Withunga and Aaron were both in the front seats, with Ryan in back, Ryan thought that if he seemed to be asleep they might talk more readily with each other. But when he leaned against the door and closed his eyes, they didn’t start talking, though he heard Dr. Withunga ask quietly if he was asleep, and Aaron answered with “Maybe. Looks like.”
Then, when Ryan woke up, because pretending to sleep was a pretty good way to fall asleep, they still weren’t talking. So he assumed they hadn’t said anything the whole time he was sleeping. He couldn’t imagine being alone in a car with either of his parents and having complete silence reign for hours on end. Dad wasn’t as chatty as Mom, but neither of them could tolerate silence for very long.
Neither could Ryan. But now his heart was heavy and his mind was full and he had nothing to say. He was afraid of crying like he had with Dianne. He also knew that he simply didn’t want to talk about things.
No, he knew he had to talk about almost all those things in front of a fairly big group of micropots, but that would be different. And because he was going to do that, he wanted to do it only the once. Talk only one time about his day of killing.
Everybody was already in their chairs in the same room as before, when Ryan and the Withungas came in. Nobody milling about. The whole attitude of the room was different. These were the people who had already committed to helping. Who had already done it.
“The outcome was pretty clean,” Dr. Withunga said, to start the meeting. “These bad guys, whoever they were, came into the house with guns and there was shooting. All of you who came did so in the hope that your micropower might be useful, but we also know from our previous experiments that having several micropots in attendance increases the powers of all of them. So just by being there, even if things were out of the scope or range of your micropower, you were still helping. Thank you for that. Because it was a dangerous place, and you came anyway, and you stayed, and nobody freaked out, and everybody followed instructions, which included climbing down a ladder in the dark and crawling under a house.”
People laughed and groaned, either remembering or imagining what had happened.
One kid spoke up. “Wish I could have been there, but always knowing what time it is in any time zone on Earth didn’t seem to have any application.”
“We may find some way to extend its utility,” said Dr. Withunga. “But we know you would have helped.”
A girl spoke up. “I just wonder if my power actually worked. I thought I was causing one bad guy to grow hair really rapidly, and—”
Ryan stood up and went up beside Dr. Withunga. “I talked to the police, and when you say you can make hair grow—”
“On myself,” said the girl. “Just on my face. Not very practical, when I only wanted to stop it from growing. But with everybody there, it felt like I could cause it to happen on somebody else, so—”
“Eyebrows?” asked Ryan. “Were you growing his eyebrows?”
“Yes!” she said triumphantly.
“The police talked about—well, not the detective who was . . . debriefing me, but I overheard one talking about a guy with such long eyebrows that he didn’t know how the guy could see.”
The girl grinned and could hardly bring herself to sit down.
“So maybe one guy couldn’t see where he was going,” said Dr. Withunga. “And now you know you can make other people grow facial hair. Good work.”
A guy spoke up. “No way to know about my power, I guess,” he said. “I can bring my own eyes into really, really sharp focus. Without corrective lenses. But I was trying to take their eyes out of focus, and how will I know if it worked even at all?”
Ryan immediately said, “I didn’t hear any cops talking about it, no, but when people—like, home invaders—came in, they looked kind of confused. And now I think back on it, the last few guys through the door were squinting as if they were trying to focus their eyes. I know that doesn’t prove that it was you doing it, but it might have been, anyway.”
The guy nodded. “Good enough for now. Since it might actually work, I think I won’t try it on people who are operating heavy machinery.” A few laughs.
“I could use that,” said a girl. “Make guys’ eyes go bleary when they’re looking at things I don’t want them looking at.”
“They go bleary anyway when they do that,” said another girl, and several people laughed.
“I can’t see either of you from here,” said Ryan, “so apparently you’re blearing my eyes right now.” A little more laughter.
“What else did you try?” asked Dr. Withunga. “Ryan here is the only witness, since we were all in the attic and then finished up in the crawl space.”
“I only saw what happened inside the Horvat house,” said Ryan, “and because I was sometimes busy shooting people, I couldn’t see all of that, either. But I did hang out at the police station the next day, for obvious reasons.”
There was an outcry about that, along the lines of they have to know it was self-defense, those guys were attacking the house, how stupid are the cops.
But Ryan calmed them down with a gesture and then said, “They weren’t planning to charge me with anything, but come on, that was pretty crazy. Home invasions are usually a couple of guys bursting in and taking hostages, not a whole—what, not an army, but—”
“A squad,” suggested a guy.
“A tactical team,” said another.
Ryan shrugged. “They had some tactics. Pretty good Charlottesville police costumes, but not really up-to-date. They had some people who could talk like somebody from our part of Virginia, instead of sounding foreign. The cops think some of them were local recruits, or else maybe people with immigrant parents who already belonged to the group. But I hope that any military group of ours will have better training than those guys.”
Aaron Withunga spoke up for the first time. “I’m glad they weren’t particularly well trained.”
There was general assent to that.
“How do you know they weren’t?” asked a girl who looked college age. “It’s not like an ordinary fifteen-year-old beat them. It was a guy with a killer micropower, augmented by being in the same building with a slew of other micropots, plus the rest of us were doing our best to confuse them.”
“I had quite a few of them winking their brains out,” said a girl who looked too young for her parents to have let her take part.
“I wonder if the other guys thought the winkers were trying to tell them something,” said the college girl.
“It would have felt like their left eyelid was having spasms,” said Winking Girl. “I’ve never winkled so many people at one time.”
Another girl spoke up. “I know I can make people drop what they’re carrying in their dominant hand.”
“Did it work that night?” asked Dr. Withunga.
“I couldn’t
see. I just know that I kept making people let go of things.”
And Ryan thought: If you had made me drop the gun I was holding, that bullet hole wouldn’t have blossomed in the middle of that guy’s forehead.
And immediately the rational part of his brain answered, And Bizzy and Mrs. Horvat might be dead. Somebody would have been dead. All I did was pick who.
A guy raised his hand. “Um, Ryan?” he said.
Ryan pointed to him. It was weird, being in the teacher position, calling on people with raised hands.
“You see or hear anything about people falling down because their knees and elbows went all double-jointed on them?”
Ryan had to shake his head. “It was getting pretty dark when the main mass of them started attacking the house. A lot of them just fell down, the detective told me. Not shot or anything, just fell down and lay there moaning. So maybe when they interview everybody, they’ll find out about a bunch of them whose knees suddenly gave out in the wrong direction. Is that what your power is?”
“Well, I found I could go double-jointed myself, just the hinge joints, like fingers and knees and elbows. Not shoulders and ankles and necks. And jaws—I don’t know what a double-jointed jaw would even do.”
“But you were trying to do it to other people?”
“I kind of worked my way into it. It used to really hurt, but now my hinge joints are all used to going the other way, when I want them to. And I know I can do it to at least one other person, because my brother—”
“That is just sad,” said Aaron Withunga, “to think of that terrified little boy—”
“My older brother,” said Hinge Boy. “He had it coming. It was self-defense.”
And even though most people laughed or chuckled or at least smiled, Ryan couldn’t help but think, yeah, self-defense is also an excuse for tormenting other people. But is that what these powers are even for?
They’re not for anything, thought Ryan. Just like the ability to memorize things, or to draw recognizable portraits. It’s not like a person has such abilities because somebody bestowed them. They just got sprinkled randomly through the population. It’s an illusion to think they have a purpose. But it’s really depressing to think they don’t have a purpose.
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