Pulse

by Patrick Carman

  Wade controlled himself after that, letting himself finish midfield in the rest of his events. The thought of losing when he could have so easily won pounded into his soul in a way that he’d never experienced before. Letting the win slip through his fingers when he could have annihilated every single one of his competitors with ease was almost too much to bear. And yet he knew his slipup in the 100-meter—the way he’d used his powers to force himself down the track without so much as barely thinking about it—had been a scary eye-opener. Had he imagined himself at the finish line instead of the halfway mark, he would have blown the existing record to smithereens in such grand fashion it would have almost certainly caused a wide and endless investigation. It was not the kind of situation that his father or Gretchen would have appreciated.

  As he walked off the track, defeated soundly in every event he had competed in, Wade pondered the fact that he’d almost let his sister get to him once again. She’d tried to poison him with thoughts of seizing the Field Games by the throat and choking the life out of every sickeningly normal competitor. Why should they stand by and do nothing? This was their time to shine. They’d earned it, living outside with Drifters and scum and garbage. They deserved to win! Wade had let these kinds of thoughts sink in. He’d held them deep inside and turned them over and over in his mind. He could see himself crossing every finish line first and jumping higher than anyone had ever seen. He could feel the heat coming off the crowd, the power of their adulation. These thoughts made him warm and happy inside. These were things he badly wanted. It was a miracle that he’d been able to stop himself when he did; and really, he didn’t completely understand how it had happened. Not until he saw Clara after, and she smirked at him on her way to the throwing area.

  “That was taking it a little far, don’t you think?” she asked him. He understood immediately that it had been she, not himself, who had dropped him to last in the race. Clara had used her own power against him, slowing him down when he’d gone so disastrously out of control.

  “Look, brother,” Clara said, wrapping her hand around the center of a javelin and pointing the tip at his chest. “You’re stronger than I am, always will be. But you’re reckless. You might have just shown the world something it’s not supposed to see. Not yet.”

  “You were the one who said we should crush these losers. What happened to that idea? Did you lose your nerve?” Wade asked. He hated the idea that she had intervened in the race. It felt like a violation of the rules, an unsaid thing they should never do to each other.

  “Your problem is that you have no control,” Clara said, touching the end of the javelin to his chest. A crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand was watching, wondering what the two of them were talking so intensely about and why Clara was pointing a javelin at her brother. “You don’t know anything about subtlety. You’re a loose cannon. And in the end, that’s exactly what might get us killed.”

  Clara walked away, but she smiled first for the cameras. She made it look like they had a harmless sibling rivalry going. Wade was totally confused, which tended to be the way his sister always made him feel.

  An hour later he would find himself more confused still. The memory of Wade’s brief and unexplainable move to the front of the pack was about to be pounded into the dirt by Clara Quinn.

  Clara didn’t think she was smarter than just her brother. That wasn’t saying much. She felt smarter than pretty much everyone on the planet. Her bravado, unlike Wade’s, had as much to do with outwitting people as it did with beating them physically. There was only one person who would later claim to understand all the reasons behind her decision making on the final day of the Field Games, and that was Gretchen. She alone knew the mind of Clara Quinn in ways that no one else did.

  Unlike her brother, Clara had no true illusions of grandeur when it came to something as meaningless as throwing a javelin or a hammer. Nothing about athletics had the allure of true power. In the events that followed, Clara Quinn threw an average javelin, raced an average heat in her finals, and threw a below-average hammer into the middle of the field. They were not stunningly bad results for a newcomer from the outside; in fact, they were still quite remarkable. She’d gotten what she had come for—respect—and that was enough for the time being.

  There was one woman, a particularly overinflated twenty-five-year-old, in whom Clara had taken a keen interest from the start of the games. She was the one woman in the field of competitors who was abnormally large. She was, as far as any normal human being would claim, something of a giant.

  “You’re huge,” Clara had said the moment she met Fleet Sanders. “No, seriously. You’re like a building.”

  Fleet was six feet six, and two hundred and twenty pounds of pure muscle. Rumors of synthetic steroids and blood doping swirled around Fleet like hornets at a picnic, but no one had ever been able to make anything stick. She held several world records, most notably in the hammer, which she threw like a Greek goddess. She was also alternately described, depending on the setting, as manly, homely, or “ogre-like.”

  “That supposed to be a compliment?” Fleet asked Clara.

  “In this place, yeah,” Clara conceded. “What are you, two forty?”

  Fleet couldn’t tell for sure if Clara was being nice or condescending, but it didn’t really matter. Clara was extremely beautiful, and that alone made Fleet hate her. Fleet was prone to random outbursts of rage, and there was something particularly irritating about a pretty girl competing against her in something as masculine as the hammer throw. She shoved Clara with both hands with the speed of a featherweight boxer, knocking Clara clean off her feet and onto her back.

  “You’re really fast for such a chunky girl,” Clara said, laughing and shaking her head. She knew she was being cruel, but she couldn’t help herself. As much as Fleet hated pretty girls, Clara hated bullies even more. Of course, Clara herself was one of the biggest bullies ever—it was a curious blind spot no one in her life understood.

  Fleet raised her huge leg in order to stomp on Clara’s chest; but when she went for the gusto, there was none to be had. Instead, against her will, she fell backward as if she’d slipped on a sheet of ice, crashing down on her back. Clara was up in a flash, standing over her, smiling sarcastically.

  “Enjoy yourself today, Bertha. It’s going to be a day to remember.”

  “I’m gonna kill you,” Fleet said, standing up with alarming speed and staring Clara in the face.

  “I’d love to see you try, but it looks like they’re calling your name. Why don’t you put all that rage to work on the hammer instead of wasting it on little old me?”

  Fleet was breathing out of her nose like a rodeo bull. She hadn’t been so angry in a long time; and sensing an opportunity to put her anger to good use, she marched straight to the hammer-throwing ring.

  “I’ll deal with you later,” Fleet said, pointing a massive finger in Clara’s direction.

  “Can I count on that?” Clara asked.

  Fleet Sanders looked across the field at the adoring fans. They didn’t care that she was a freak of nature, a girl of highly unusual size. They also didn’t know all the lengths to which her coaches had gone to train her into a machine. They didn’t know about the thousands of hours she’d spent alone in a gym, working every conceivable angle that might give her an edge. They would never know that she hadn’t taken any strength-enhancing drugs, not ever. If they could see what middle school had been like, they’d understand why later, when she was done throwing, she planned to do her almighty best to murder Clara Quinn with her bare hands.

  “Enjoy that throw,” Clara yelled from the sideline nearby. “Hope it’s not your last.”

  Fleet picked up the handle of the hammer, a thick metal rod that vanished inside her gorilla-sized fist. She took one more look at Clara Quinn, thought about throwing the hammer in her general direction, and began her initial turn. With the hammer throw, the athlete stands on a square of concrete that has a rounded lip on the inside edge.
The idea is to spin around in circles, holding the chain and the weight at the end like a tetherball on a rope. Fleet Sanders was known for a perfect rotation, one that made the distance of her hammer throws on a par with most men’s. When she came around for her last spin, the ball at the end of the chain was moving with tremendous speed and force. Letting it go with a scream, Fleet stumbled at the edge of falling out of bounds but held her ground. She knew by the way it had felt leaving her hands that it was going to be a massive throw, maybe even a new world record. She was thinking about how happy this would make her, how she would rub Clara’s face in it while she was simultaneously choking her to death, when she saw the hammer veer off course.

  “No, that’s not possible,” Fleet said, words that were barely audible to anyone else around her. The hammer was drifting dangerously out of bounds as if it had been picked up on a sharp wind. Later, people would testify to just that, though it had been a perfectly calm day.

  “Oh no, there was a big wind,” one attending fan would say. “You could feel it, up in the stands. A gust like you wouldn’t believe. Damn near blew me out of my seat. It was there and then gone. Poof! Just like that.”

  It was true about the wind; Clara was smart enough to throw in at least the hint of a reason why a hammer might change course so dramatically. Physics aside, the hand of God is always a good direction to place blame. Who could say for sure? The hammer spun on a chain in the air, maybe a big gust could send it flying like a Frisbee fifty yards off course. Either way, it had been the longest throw by any man or woman in the history of the Field Games. Not that it would matter, since, of course, it was way out of bounds.

  The people who sat close enough to the victim said that it sounded like a tree being broken in two when it hit. But then, the sound of an iron ball slamming into a skull was something that couldn’t adequately be described. And what it had done to the head was something out of a horror movie. There was only the one victim; no one else was hurt. But the one person was demolished. It was impossible to fix what had gone terribly wrong.

  The president of the Western State, who sat center stage at the events, looked on in horrified amazement just like everyone else. He was directly across the field from the carnage and had a pretty good view of what would later be described as the worst disaster in the history of the Field Games. The president would never have guessed the truth of the matter, that the hammer had been meant for him. It had long been planned that he would be the first of many State officials to fall. And it would have been completely untraceable. No one could have connected the flying hammer to the person who was really controlling it. If not for Clara’s growing hatred for Faith Daniels, she would have followed the plan. It was true she disliked being controlled by her stepmother, but it was Faith who had pushed her over the edge. She would have done what she was told; she would have killed the president with the power of a hammer. He was lucky to get off the field alive.

  Clara didn’t bother looking in the direction of the catastrophe. She just walked away in the opposite direction. She knew the news would never reach outside the State, nothing negative ever did. But she had a special plan for sharing the information out there. A plan she rolled over in her head as she came up short in front of her brother.

  “Welcome to the club,” Wade said. “Any reason why you decided to go rogue? That’s usually my job.”

  “Figured I’d take the lead there for once in my life,” Clara said. “Killing the president was Gretchen’s insane idea. It would have put the whole world on high alert. It would have been a mistake.”

  Wade looked off in the direction of the incident, then across the field, where the president was being evacuated.

  “She’s going to be pissed. You ready for that?”

  Clara’s lips curled into a half smile as she started walking away. She was still on board with the plan, but she was also a born leader. She was tired of following Gretchen’s orders.

  “I’ve been ready for a while.”

  PART THREE

  Second Pulse

  Chapter 17

  How Deep Does This Rabbit Hole Go?

  Faith felt off, like everything she’d learned from Dylan had found a way to escape into the open air and fly away. She’d been feeling that way all day, a tragic sadness welling up in her chest that made her want to cry. She didn’t know why this was so; but as she walked in the darkness toward the old mall, she tried to think of all the reasons for her depression.

  Life at Old Park Hill was finished. She’d left schools before, lots of times. But this was different, because she knew in her heart of hearts that whatever school had been, it was over now. There would be no more classrooms, no hallways, no teachers in the flesh. All the desperate feelings of wanting to belong and traveling through angst-filled passageways were behind her now. So that was one reason for feeling blue: the bloody death of what little childhood she’d had was officially over.

  She would never go back inside the abandoned, ivy-covered grade school again, either. She didn’t know why there was such certainty in this, only that it was so. It was pathetic, she knew, a weakness she couldn’t overcome and didn’t think she ever would, but she loved the old picture books. They were one of the only things in the world that made her feel happy. When she was with them, all the bad feelings went away. She had been able to escape for a few precious minutes at a time, but she would escape no more.

  As she approached the ladder leading up to the roof of the Nordstrom building, Faith knew there was something more that made her feel so sad. But what she really missed was a person she could tell her secrets to. The one person she could tell about her crazy Dylan dream, in which they were skinny-dipping, and her legs were wrapped around his lower back. She missed the person she could tell anything to and who wouldn’t judge her and she wouldn’t be nervous or afraid of. That person was Liz. Faith would catch herself holding her hand out to the side, searching for a hand to hold and finding only empty space. To her surprise, Faith eventually realized that it was she, not Liz, who needed that hand to hold on to. The fact that it was gone pierced her heart every time she reached out for it. Deep inside, in the part of her heart she tried to ignore, Faith knew she would only survive if she could continue telling herself that someday, even if it was way off in the future, they would find each other again.

  It was a warm night, so she set her backpack on the cracked pavement and sat down on a curb. Faith was on the back side of the building, staring into the empty space where trucks used to deliver crates of suits and ties, dresses and fancy shoes. Out of the darkness came a shadowy figure, moving slowly toward her. It was unexpected; but all the same, she understood what his arrival signaled.

  “Your timing is terrible,” Faith said, not ready to get up and start moving.

  “My apologies to the queen,” Clooger joked, bowing his head of dreadlocks. He could be sarcastic when he wanted to be, which wasn’t often. Faith had forgotten how huge he was and how pale his skin, which shone down on her like a small moon against a black sky.

  “I was supposed to meet someone else here,” Faith said. She had a hunch Clooger’s appearance was all part of a plan.

  “My instructions are to retrieve you. That’s what I know.”

  Typical Clooger, Faith thought.

  This was a moment she knew would arrive, but she still couldn’t be sure her connection with Dylan and the arrival of the Drifter in front of her were connected, so she kept probing.

  “Did my parents send you? They said they’d contact me when the school closed down.”

  Clooger looked in the direction of the school, which landed his gaze on the back of the Nordstrom building about four feet away. “School’s closed down. You’re being contacted.”

  “Do you have to be so cryptic? Can’t you just tell me what’s going on? Please, Clooger—throw a stray girl a bone.”

  Faith had known Clooger awhile, and she knew when she’d gotten to him. His massive shoulders would lower slightly, and he would
n’t look her in the eyes. He did this with no one but Faith, a rare letting down of his guard.

  “Come on, big guy,” Faith said, tapping the curb next to her. “Have a seat. Let’s talk it out.”

  Clooger smiled, which was even rarer than seeing his shoulders droop, but he had no intention of sitting down on the job.

  “All that stuff you’ve been doing up there,” Clooger said, raising his chin to the roof of the building. “I’m here to get you because of that, not because the school closed down.”

  “You know about that?” Faith was shocked, but she also realized there might not be a conflict of interest after all. Maybe Dylan and the Drifters were connected; but if they were, he’d never said anything about it.

  Clooger wouldn’t answer, but he was staring her straight in the eyes again, shoulders back like the soldier he was. She’d gotten all she was going to get out of him.

  “You left the Tablet behind?” Clooger asked as Faith got up and threw on her backpack. “It’s important. Can’t have that thing showing up where we’re going.”

  “I put it where Dylan told me to.”

  “Who’s Dylan?” Clooger asked, but Faith was having none of that.