Zero Power Signature

by Olivette Devaux

  ZERO POWER SIGNATURE

  DISORDERLY ELEMENTS SHORT STORY

  Prequel to Like a Rock (Book 1 of Disorderly Elements Series)

  Olivette Devaux

  Mugen Press

  Pittsburgh, PA

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  Published by

  Mugen Press

  www.mugenpress.com

  Zero Power Signature

  Copyright © Olivette Devaux 2017

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events are the products of the author’s imaginations and any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law, or for the purporse of a brief quotation in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Mugen Press.

  First Edition

  July 2017

  The sun stood high in the sky, turning the wrap-around porch of the old farm house into a shady retreat. Annabelle Anneveinen reached for another of her mother’s oatmeal raisin cookies. They were the apple kind, with barely ripe apples from the orchard grated into the batter, making them fluffy and moist. The bite of acid underscored their cinnamon sweetness – and nothing her mother baked could do without cinnamon, because Olga Sorensen baked the way they did in the old country.

  “Anna, have some iced tea with that,” her mother said in a voice that still enounced all the syllables a bit much, and made the consonants just a bit more guttural than those of their neighbors. She wasn’t being bossy, but Anna saw through the thinly veiled effort to distract her from her motherly frettings.

  “I’m fine,” she said, more sharply than she had intended. “I just, I worry, Mutti. Just look at him, playing, not paying any attention to anything! Out here, we’re between the lakes! There is wind, there is water.” She put the cookie down untasted. “Close your eyes and feel him, Mutti. Feel for Cooper. I challenge you to try again!”

  Her mother leaned back in her rocking chair. She didn’t bother to spare even a glance for her grandson, out under a shady tree, digging in the fertile dirt with sticks, playing with rocks. She didn’t need her eyes to see most people, especially not the members of her family. Her daughter couln’t see her own son with her mind’s eye. Maybe she could – but then again, Cooper had always been different.

  Her eyes drifted shut. She breathed in, then out. The slight tension in her brow told Annabelle that she was counting down to a trance state, her chair rocking ever so slightly with every heartbeat.

  Annabelle wanted to say something. Was he really not there? Did she feel anything? Anything at all? She bit the inside of her cheek as she observed her mother, and pressed her lips into a firm line. She wouldn’t disturb, not now. Not when the whole long trek from Minnesota to her parents’ farm, nestled on the east shore of upstate New York’s Cayuga Lake, culminated in this moment.

  Hundreds of miles in the old minivan with Cooper sitting in the back sullenly, knowing he was a failure at something he didn’t even understand. Nikko, her husband, driving on with a grim expression in his ordinarily cheerful face.

  Hundreds of miles of stony silence and internal repercussions. Had she done something wrong when Cooper had been just a speck of energy in her womb? Was Cooper’s apparent blindness to what their family could so clearly see a birth defect – much the same as when a child from a “normal” family was born blind, or deaf? And if so... could it be fixed? She’d have done anything to heal her son, to make him whole. She wanted him to rule the waters, or the air, like she and her husband so often did. She wanted the elments to be his allies, whispering in his ear of things far away, and yielding to his wishes when need arose. Annabelle leaned forward slightly, trying to see what her mother was seeing, yet knowing that the twisted skein of Time would never obey her as completely as it did her mother.

  Olga Sorensen didn’t look old her sixty-seven, but even so, the lines that gave her face character have deepened as she drew a sharp inhale.

  “Mutti?” A whisper. An anxious sound that contained every ounce of worry for Cooper’s health. His well-being. His very identity.

  Moments passed, flowing like the river Annabelle felt passing around her, and when she permitted it, also through her. Her mother still sat straight, strong yet relaxed, letting the rocking chair shift in a rhythm that was ancient and endless. Like blood. Like their magic was – or was supposed to be.

  “Well.” Olga opened her eyes, and only then she turned her head and peered over the porch railing at Cooper. His little figure was hunched in the shade, covered in dirt, where he was undoubtedly building something.

  “Well, what?” Annabelle stood up, set her barely-touched glass of tea on the glass-top rattan table, and walked over to lean on the railing. The breeze picked up, air flowing toward the lake this time of the day, pouring off the hills as though it was a liquid. She couldn’t see it, not with her eyesight, but her time-sense informed her of its passing.

  And of the position of the sun, and the stars, and the way the time flowed slower near a gravity well.

  “He is an interesting child,” her mother said, weighing every word. “I see what you mean.”

  “Zero power signature,” Annabelle whispered. “As though nobody was there.”

  “Zero power signature, as though a human was there,” Olga corrected her gently. “I disagree with you. I don’t think he’d been accidentally switched at birth. First of all, look at his features – even now, he looks a lot like you did as a child. And also...” she drifted off, hesitating.

  “Also what, Mutti?”

  “There is nothing particular I can tell you, my dear,” her mother said with something suspiciously close to pity. “All I can say is, stay the course. Don’t change anything.” She fixed her with a commanding glare. “Don’t do a single thing to help him.”

  Frustration tore through Annabelle like a riptide, painful and distracting. The time flow she’d been misdirecting grasped its chance and seeped through her, testing her boundaries, her control.

  And that would never do.

  She stood straight, feet wide apart, and breathed in, then out.

  Ground, and center. How could such an elementary exercise be so hard all of a sudden? Thwarted. She felt thwarted and undone by her own mother, and all for the sake of her old-country principles.

  “I could help him,” she whispered, once she felt steady and her grasp on the quantum strands that permeated everything was, once again, within her control. “I can go back and see what went wrong. See if I can fix it.”

  “And do more harm than good, surely.” Her mother stood up, anchored her hands on the waistband of her worn jeans, and arched her back until it cracked. “There is nothing wrong with that boy. Love him the way he is, Anna. Love him, and be happy that he is curious and healthy and smart.”

  Annabelle stumbled back two steps, her bare feet slapping against the green-painted planks of the porch. “I do love him. Even had he been exchanged at birth, I’d still love him! Just... I just want to know, Mutti. It’s ... it’s unnatural for his father to be a Dowser, and for me, well... and you! And Da!”

  Her mother peered across the distance at Cooper, squinting with a fond smile on her face. “I wonder what he’s doing,” she said. “I think I’ll go spend some quality time with him. He should get to play with his grandmother.”

  “So you did see something!” Annabelle cried out. She knew the signs. The lightening of her mother’s shoulders, the spark of hidden knowledge in her eyes. The suspici
ous silence.

  “Ah, well,” her mother said. “Nobody’s perfect.” She gathered two cookies on a napkin, poured a plastic cup of iced tea, and headed down the wooden steps, slowly as not to spill, and also maybe to favor her right knee.

  Annabelle watched her cross the vast expanse of the front lawn, which soon became an old apple orchard. The placid surface of the lake reflected the sun that had moved during her mother meditation. To her shock, Annabelle realized that, for the first time in years, she had lost track of time.

  OLGA APPROACHED HER grandson quietly. His back was turned to her as he was on his hands and knees, dirty and sweaty and utterly absorbed in a task of paramount importance. She paused, watching.

  Not a shred of that distinctive, elemental frisson some families shared. She truly didn’t feel it. The child came across as plain as any of her ordinary neighbors, equipped with the usual assortment of senses. Her daughter had asked her to See into the past, but on a whim, she had done that one thing she had sworn she would never do again, not unless the reason was dire and compelling: she would never See into the future.

  Or the possible futures, because the many iterations always emerged from the miasma of possibilities, and indicated at least two strong probabilities.

  Cooper’s life could go either way. He could remain as he was and never have to worry about anything out of the ordinary, or... or his gift would explode fully developed, and do so without the benefit of the kind of training the family always imposed upon the children.

  A bird landed on a branch near the boy. He lifted his head, then sat up on his knees to see, scaring it away in the process. As he turned, his warm, brown eyes widened in pleased surprise. “Grandma!”

  “Hello, Cooper,” she said, taking a few steps forward while making sure she didn’t step on his creations. “I brought you cookies and tea.”

  He scrambled all the way up, and wiped the dirt off his hands on his already filthy shorts. “Oops,” he said. He tried the shirt, with equally poor result. “Mom will be mad at me.”

  “No, she won’t.” Olga inclined her head. “We could go to the lake and wash up, and you could have your snack on the dock.”

  Cooper’s eyes widened again, and fear replaced the childish glee that had been there only minutes ago. “I... uh. I’ll just go to the mud room,” he said. “I... uh... that way you won’t have to carry everything!”

  Interesting. Every child in the family, with the possible exception of her Fire-born cousin, loved the lake. Not Cooper, though. Cooper had not acted averse – he appeared to be downright scared. “All right,” she said. “I’ll sit here under the tree and wait for you.”

  As he ran off to clean up, Olga eyed the trenches he had dug into her lawn, and the stones he had arranged in long lines, or had stacked into precarious piles.

  Was there a pattern yet? She had seen some of the possibilities. A regular, ordinary man with a bright future was the strongest one. This happened at times.

  Or a latent affinity toward fire. The second most common of elements was the hardest to control, that was for certain. This future was coming up as a distant second, though, and as Olga sat in the shade and enjoyed the apple-scented breeze, she kept tossing around the factors that might help Cooper develop his fire gift.

  Or a fire curse.

  The sort of meditation exercises which the other kids did every day, might strengthen not only his focus and and awareness, but also the tendency toward an unplanned conflagration.

  Olga shuddered.

  If Cooper sprang into a Fire-born existence as an untrained teen, he’d be in for a rough ride, and Gods help the house he’d be sleeping in that night, and all the living beings in it.

  The other possibilities wound in the background of her mind, fuzzy and uncertain. She didn’t see any of her own Foresight, and none of his father’s Water. No Wind. The roiling mass of darkness could’ve been anything, and the heavy and portentous shifting defied explanation. It felt like Earth –except it’s been established that Earth elementalists didn’t exist. Or, didn’t exist as such.

  The combination of Foresight and a bit of Telekinesis did allow, on occasion, for a bit of rock and soil manipulation, but that wasn’t really Earth control. The Earth was too vast, to varied in her structure and composition, too different from one location to another. Cooper’s father came from Finland, and in a land of bogs and snow, a Water-whisperer (or a Dowser, as some people called him), came across as having a measure of control over that which was underfoot.

  Her foresight showed her another possible future as well. One where Annabelle twisted the strands of time and traveled to the past in a misguided effort to salvage Cooper’s future. She had always liked to meddle, that girl. Olga grimaced, knowing that her daughter came by her inclination honestly. Why, it had taken a death of a friend and two close calls before Olga had come to realize that no, she was not exempt, and meddling came at a heavy price indeed.

  No wonder Seers used to be blinded in the olden days.

  The only way to protect Cooper’s future – if not his very life – was to keep his mother in the dark. Keep him ignorant, too, innocent of his family’s doings.

  “Grandma, I’m back!” His cheerful voice yanked her back to the here and now, and within moments he made himself at home in her lap. “Thank you for the cookies. Would you like one?”

  Always such a considerate child. “No, thank you. I had some earlier.” She grinned. “Bakers have to taste a lot, you know. Just to make sure it’s good.”

  He bit of a piece, then another, and soon both cookies were history. Only when he was halfway done with his tea, Olga squeezed him in a hug, and asked: “So what would you like to do?”

  Cooper sighed, and slumped against her chest. The sun had shifted, and a beam lit up his light brown hair, turning it coppery, like his father’s. His weight against her hummed with repressed tension.

  “Is something bothering you?” she asked in a quiet, soothing voice. A voice that could calm bees, a tone that conveyed that the question wasn’t important, and the answer was even less so.

  No pressure, just sunshine and grandma and cookies.

  He exhaled again. “Grandma, is Mom mad at me?”

  Since he didn’t sit up, she didn’t have the benefit of seeing his face, but she didn’t need to. His tone made his mood self-explanatory.

  “Not exactly dear. Not upset, just concerned.”

  “Oh.” He stirred against her. “Does she think there’s something wrong with me? That I’m bad?”

  How did one read a question like that? Her Calvinist upbringing – which had nothing to do with the gift she kept secret from her teachers and the priest – saw all people as flawed. She happened to disagree with the fear-driven mentality of her ancestors. “I don’t think so,” she said after a moment. “Why do you ask?”

  Cooper was almost too tall to twist and burrow his face into her shoulder the way she had never seen him do before. Even though they all lived so far apart and she didn’t see him often enough, she was pretty sure he wasn’t used to hiding his face in the embrace of other relatives. “My Mom thinks I’m... I’m bad. I’m trying, though! And I dont’ know what to do to be better!”

  Interesting. “And do you think you’re bad?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I think you’re supposed to tell me. That’s why we’re here. I heard Mom and Dad say so when they were arguing.”

  She pulled him into a tight hug. “Oh, honey. Cooper, you are just as good, and just as bad as any other person on the face of this Earth. Did you know your Mom used to be bad? And her brother used to be bad, too. But only sometimes. They were mostly good.”

  He detached himself, straightened up, and met her eyes with a spark of interest in his concerned gaze. “Really? What kind of bad?”

  “Well,” she thought back. “There was a time, when she was three years old, she sneaked downstairs and got into my acrylic paints.” She proceeded to tell him the whole tale, describing t
he layers of paint on Annabelle’s little body in vivid detail. The porcelain bathroom sink that had been painted over, and the walls all black and purple and green as far as her little arms could reach, and the reek of rose-scented powder than had covered it all.

  He laughed like a bubbling brook, eyes sparkling. “Really? Now that’s bad!”

  Olga shook her head, and smiled. “It’s not that bad, you know. All kids do things like that. It’s because they’re curious, not because they’re bad. You are curious, and I like that.”

  “Oh.” She could see those gears turning in his little head “So maybe she’s mad because I’m too curious.”

  “But you’re supposed to be curious. If you weren’t curious, how would you learn new things?”

  They went on like that for a while, and when Cooper stirred restlessly and began to pull away, she squeezed his arm gently. “Look at me, Cooper.” Her voice was serious.

  His earnest expression just about broke her heart.

  “I want you to know that you are just right. You’re fine just the way you are. And as long as you are kind, and as long as you keep being curious and learning things and you keep helping other people, you’ll be fine.”

  Cooper’s hair fell to the side in an overgrown waterfall as he tilted his head. “Really? And what if I mess up?”

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” Olga said. “Even I do. And when we make a mistake, we apologize, and try to fix it.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said with a solemn sigh, as though he was no stranger to having to apologize. Olga wished she dared address this with Annabelle, but if she did, she might inadvertently tip her hand, and Annabelle might go and interfere. No, she would interfere, trying to fix things, but making an even bigger mess than Cooper would have to deal with otherwise.