~~~
The War to Save the Earth began with running.
As I've said, I'd been slipping out of my bedroom at night and running around the Purchase. Now that I needed scant sleep, I began to run farther afield. On nights when I had no sleepovers or other late activities, I'd cross the Tennessee and the Cumberland, and run as far out I-24 or the Western Kentucky Turnpike as I could in an hour. The distance got longer each night.
Sometimes, too, I did off-road running. Those of you who've tried this know that it can be an adventure.
One night, at full speed, I entered a patch of black fog and ran into a tree full tilt. The tree was a pine, about twenty feet tall; I took it down. It did a number on me, too. I lay on the ground and wept for my pain and my stupidity, and especially for how much the dead Tani would hate me for ruining myself for the Work. After a while, though, my skin and my bones crawled back into place, and I was able to rise and run home. When I got there, I looked just fine.
One night, as I was running across a field, I crested a rise to find a stock pond in my path. Ignorantly, I tried to slow down, but I took several strides across the pond's surface before I ditched. As I crawled from the pond, I felt a fool. I ran from the scene of my shame as quickly as possible. As I ran, my clothes dried, and my mind began to work. I figured that, if I didn't break stride, I could run on water...
The Ohio, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Mississippi became my highways. By land or by sea, as the saying goes, I could now reach St. Louis, Louisville, Nashville, or Memphis in under an hour. I could explore them a couple of hours and still make it home in time to get all of the sleep that I needed before my clock-radio went off, and Mom called me to breakfast.
In the cities, I practiced special-forces skills. I climbed up buildings, ran across rooftops, jumped from rooftop to rooftop, peered through skylights and windows, and climbed down buildings. Kuma and Un-Thor, who've done their own share of night-time prowling, can tell the rest of you what a sense of power it gives you.
One night in Louisville, while I was in a part of town where maybe a thirteen-year-old girl shouldn't have been just then, I was crossing a rooftop when I heard blows and screams in an alley below me. Stopping to look there, I saw that a man had a woman shoved up against a brick wall. As I watched, he pressed his left forearm against her throat while with his right hand he yanked up her skirt.
Tan speech has no word for rape, but, even in sheltered Paducah, I'd learned the word on the earth. Halos flared around everything as I leaped from the rooftop. The woman saw me, and her eyes got big as I fell; then her assailant looked up at me.
As I landed, he pulled out a knife, but, before he could use it, I slapped him across the face. His eyes got big, his face went slack, and the knife clattered on concrete. I picked him up and shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. "When someone says no, it means no!" I screamed in his face.
I flung him against the brick wall, and he oozed down it to the concrete. Turning to the woman, I said, "Can you run?" When she nodded, I said, "Go get help!"
As she ran off, I began to shake. What if I killed that man? I thought. Kneeling, I felt his neck and found a pulse there. My crystal-shaping gift had turned on. It gave me a strange sense of being able to feel all of his internal organs. I gathered that his spine was intact -- amazingly so; I could easily have snapped his neck while I was shaking him -- but his right humerus was broken where I'd squeezed his arm, and I'd broken several ribs on his left side where he struck the wall.
I stood, debating whether to carry him to an emergency room, till I heard a siren coming. I clambered back to the rooftop, from which I saw the erstwhile assault victim guiding a police car into the alley.
I ran then, not stopping till I reached my own bed. There, I lay shivering till the clock-radio came on.
Dour, brooding Un-Thor laughs harshly. "You must've gotten over the shivering fits. As I've heard things, you did a lot of night-time rescues before you got caught."
"I'm getting there," I say crossly.