“Are you afraid of me?” I demanded, blind with anger.
“No. I’m afraid for Rose.”
I ran along the corridor, following the sound of Marin’s crying. Rose and Dennis lay side by side in the same small, sweltering cabin as Griffin and Nyla. Dennis drummed his fingers against the floor impatiently, still feeling too well to understand how serious this was. Even Rose appeared more comfortable than she had the previous evening. Seeing the four of them together was heartbreaking, as if the Plague had already claimed them all.
Rose greeted me with a wan smile. “You came,” she said, like I was the first person she’d seen all day. Maybe that’s how it felt to her, as if her mother weren’t there at all, or only there for Dennis.
Sure enough, Marin was kneeling beside her son. She ran the backs of her fingers across his forehead comfortingly. But what Rose couldn’t see was how Marin’s eyes constantly drifted to her daughter too. Maybe, like me, Marin was comparing the girl before her to the Rose we’d known back on Hatteras. If so, she must have been as disturbed as I was to see Rose’s swollen right leg, and the angry red bite mark.
I wanted to tell Rose that there was still hope. I wanted to hold her hand. Instead I remained disconnected, unwilling to lie and unable to touch her without causing pain. The future was as clear to me as if I were a seer: Rose growing sicker, and dying. Rose must have seen it too—her cheeks twitched from the effort of pretending that everything was all right.
“We need to find the rats. Need to destroy them,” I said. But the truth was, I just needed to get out of there before I broke down.
“I’ll help,” said Alice.
Jerren and Ananias were waiting outside the cabin. They knew what was going on, and were as helpless as me to do anything about it.
“How many do you think there are?” I asked.
“More than one,” said Ananias. He lowered his voice. “Rose and Dennis were bitten at the same time. They woke up together. Neither of them saw anything, though, so it’s hard to believe there’s an entire pack of rats. Plus, we would’ve heard something before now, right?”
I strode along the corridor and pushed open the door to the cabin where I’d seen Rose the previous evening. It was so different from the cabins on the other ship—here the walls were perfectly straight, and there were no gaps between the floorboards. Unless the rats were tiny, it was hard to imagine how they might have gotten into the cabin at all.
Jerren moved a small wooden chest to one side, revealing a rectangular hole in the wall. It was about the size of a hand, easily big enough for a rat to crawl through. “Vents,” he explained. “The ship would have had a system for circulating warm and cold air.”
“So these vents are in every cabin?” I asked.
“Probably, yes.”
Alice pressed her ear to the hole and raised a finger to her lips, demanding silence. For several moments she listened for the telltale sounds of rats, but heard nothing.
As she pulled away, Jerren joined her. “Let’s combine,” he said. “If there’s a sound in there, I’ll draw it toward us.”
They could have settled for touching arms, but held hands instead, fingers twined. It was only a moment before Alice’s eyes grew wide. She’d heard rats, all right.
“They’re that way,” she whispered, pointing to the front of the ship.
Ananias peered around the cabin door and along the corridor. “How far? There’s only one more cabin between here and the galley in the ship’s bow.”
Alice and Jerren exchanged glances. “If I had to guess, I’d say they’re hiding out between the galley and the other cabin,” she said.
“So how do we trap them?”
“We don’t. Jerren and I will go to the galley and block the ductwork. You and Thom head to the cabin next door and combine. One big flame in such a small space will kill them for sure.”
“What if that’s not all of the rats?” I asked.
She passed by me and began walking along the corridor, eager to begin. “They move in packs, remember? I think they’ll be together.”
Ananias and I slipped into the neighboring cabin and located the vent in the wall. This one had a cover, but it was easy to remove. We stared at the dark space behind, and waited for Alice’s signal.
Jerren joined us almost immediately. “We’ve jammed a piece of wood into the duct. They won’t be able to escape.”
As he spoke, the sound of skittering paws echoed faintly along the duct. Frightened by activity in the galley, the rats were heading our way. Ananias stood before the hole, palm raised, poised to unleash fire. I held my hand just above his.
A moment passed. Then another. “Is Alice giving us a signal?” he asked, turning to face Jerren. “Can she hear—”
With his back to the hole, Ananias didn’t see the rats appear. They were side by side, frozen in the sliver of light that penetrated the darkness. There wasn’t time to warn him either. I grabbed his hand and poured my element through him.
What happened next was a blur. A giant flame shot out from his fingers and incinerated the rats. The metal duct melted instantly. And from next door came an ear-splitting scream.
Jerren sprinted back to the galley as Ananias pushed me away. My brother staggered back against the wall, petrified, both hands raised as if he was fending off an attack. “What did you do to me?” he yelled.
I shook my head uselessly. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
Footsteps pounded in the galley. “Help!” shouted Jerren.
Ananias kept a wide berth as he slid around me and out of the cabin. I had to follow, but hesitated as I recalled the expression on Ananias’s face. It showed more than just anger. Ananias had been frightened.
Ananias’s was the next voice I heard. “Oh no,” he cried. “Get her water. Now!”
I could barely make my legs move, let alone carry me to the galley. I hadn’t even made it to the door before Tarn rushed by. “What’s going on?”
Step by agonizingly slow step, I made it into the galley. Alice was trying to touch her face, but Ananias was holding her hands back. “Check her eyes,” he shouted.
Tarn leaned over her daughter and stared into Alice’s eyes. Alice blinked several times and gave a slow nod.
“What can we do for the burns?” asked Jerren.
“Cold damp cloths,” said Tarn. “Then ointment, if there’s any left.”
Alice’s face was red and blotchy. There was a long cut across her cheekbone where an object must have hit her—probably the charred piece of wood beside her.
“I thought it would hold,” said Jerren, pointing to the wood. He looked at Alice. “How can she be burned? She’s got the element of fire.”
“It’s lucky she does. Otherwise she might not have any face at all,” said Ananias. He breathed in and out through his teeth. “What just happened, Thomas?”
Again, I had no answer. “We . . . combined?”
Alice coughed gently. “Thom did it to me too, when we were changing ships. He took out the four Sumter men. I wasn’t ready to combine, but the fire came anyway.”
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Just tell me what I did!”
Maybe Ananias was swayed by seeing that Alice was going to be all right, or by the fact that I had no clue what was happening. Either way, he grew calmer. “You took over my element.”
“That’s impossible.”
He wouldn’t even look at me. “Clearly not.”
I scanned the room for any sign of support. Only Tarn was watching me, and as our eyes met, she looked away quickly. “Did you already know?” I asked her.
She licked her dry lips. “You should speak to your father, Thomas.” It was as close to yes as I would get.
I wanted to get out of that room, and I wanted answers, so I ran to the stairs and went up on deck. Father was at the wheel again.
br /> My entire body was shaking, but not from fear or confusion. I was furious. “They say I can take over their elements. What are they talking about?”
He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, probably so that he wouldn’t have to look at me. “This isn’t the right time, Thom—”
“It’s never the right time. You’ve had sixteen years, Father. So tell me, when do I get to know who I am?”
There were several sets of footsteps on the stairs. We were about to have witnesses. That suited me fine—why shouldn’t everyone else discover that I’d been lied to yet again?
“Right now you’re too angry,” Father said. “You need to—”
I didn’t let him finish. Just grabbed his arm and gave him a taste of that anger. He whipped his head around, eyes wide. We shared the same element and I could feel him pushing back against me. But he was weak. He was swimming against a riptide, and the current favored me.
There was a flash of blinding fire. I choked on the hot air and collapsed to the deck. Ananias towered over me, tears welling in his eyes. “I can’t let you hurt him, Thomas.”
Father was on the deck too. Wheezing, he clasped his hand to his chest. With the anger shocked out of me, I couldn’t believe what I’d done to him.
Ananias crouched down between us. “Tell Thomas what’s going on, Father.”
“You already know as much as me,” Father said.
“He took over our elements, don’t you get that? He possessed us.” Ananias was fuming again. “Why didn’t you warn him about it? Why didn’t you warn us?”
Alice emerged at the top of the stairs, a cloth pressed against the left side of her face. She stomped over and glared at us. “Why do you think?” she snarled. “With his element, Thomas doesn’t just control machines and instruments. He controls us.” She let the words sink in. “He can take over any element he likes. And there’s nothing we can do to stop him.”
CHAPTER 12
Father led me to an empty cabin and closed the door behind us. He rested his forehead against the door, his fingers around the handle. “I didn’t know,” he said.
“Sure you didn’t.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“So what? If you hadn’t lied to me about my element, hadn’t kept it from me all these years, I would’ve found out what I can do. All of it.”
“And if we’d told you the truth, you’d have faced this moment even sooner. Do you really believe everyone would have treated you better when they didn’t even need you around? Or is it possible they’d have stayed away from you completely?”
He had a point, but I didn’t want to admit it. He didn’t deserve a moral victory, especially one he hadn’t earned.
“Can you do it too?” I asked. “Take over other people’s elements?”
“I used to be able to, a little—if they were tired, or didn’t know what was happening. But not like you. Sounds like you can take whatever element you want, and no one can stop you.”
“I don’t want to take anything. Don’t you get it? I’m not trying to frighten people off. This element has controlled my life. Even before I knew about it, it kept people away from me. Now I want to get control of it. I want to practice combining, so that we can work together.”
He barked an angry laugh. “Who’s going to combine with you? Not me—you can repel me without breaking a sweat. You could destroy me with a touch, if you wanted.”
“Stop it! You’re not the victim here.”
“We’re all victims, Thomas. Some of us are just more deserving of sympathy than others.” He ran a hand through his straggly hair. He had the face of an old man—wrinkled and tired and worn. It wasn’t the image of my father I remembered from a few weeks ago. I wondered how I appeared to him now. “I just discovered that your mother might still be alive, remember?” he continued softly. “You’re not the only person who has been lied to.”
Back to the wall, he slumped down to the floor and folded his arms across his knees. “I used to imagine she was still with me, your mother. I’d talk to her every day. Ask her what I should say to you. You were so full of questions when you were young. Would’ve stayed that way, I think, but we wore you down with silence.”
I sat across from him. “What did Mother tell you? When you talked to her, I mean.”
He closed his eyes. “Nothing. I felt like she was leaving me to decide. And look how that turned out—I couldn’t have been more wrong about how I handled everything.”
It was a confession and apology rolled into one, but I had nothing to say. Learning the truth about myself, my element, and the history of our colony hadn’t made sense of everything. I was still in the dark, just a different kind than before.
“Tell me how to control the echo, Father.”
“It takes time—”
“Well, I don’t have time! Griffin could be dead in a couple days. Nyla too, and Dennis, and . . . Rose.”
He made a little sound at the back of his throat. “I’m sorry, son. I know you like her.”
He was trying to be sympathetic, but like was a hopelessly inadequate word—offensive and thoughtless. It was as if he was undoing everything that had happened over the past few weeks. In his eyes, I was once again that boy standing alone on the beach on Hatteras Island, watching Rose from a distance, wondering if there would ever come a time that she’d know how I felt about her. And return those feelings.
Well, if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that.
“I know how it feels to have this element,” he said finally. “The things you’re going through, they aren’t unique. As hard as your childhood has been, mine was hard too, in ways you can’t imagine.”
“How so?”
“I grew up with non-elementals, remember? Before the Exodus, we all coexisted. They didn’t know my secret, of course, but the only way to preserve it was for me to stay away from everyone. I had to make sure that I didn’t touch anyone, and I also had to be careful that no one accidentally touched me. When things were busy, and there were lots of people around, I had to focus on keeping space between me and others, so I wouldn’t shock them.”
“Did you used to hurt people?”
“Accidentally, yes. Lots of times. But if it was a one-time thing, they blew it off—called it static electricity, or something. But it would make me so nervous. It got to the point that I avoided crowds. I wouldn’t play in groups. People thought I was weird. Anti-social. I wasn’t weird; I was petrified. And I needed to be to survive the echo.”
“But you got control of it,” I pressed.
“I’ll get to that, I promise.” He gave a deep sigh. “There was a girl I knew—quiet, like me. Kept to herself. We became friends. We were both sixteen, and even though I knew I should keep away, I liked her. Really liked her. We began spending all our time together. And then, one day, she tried to kiss me. I knew what she was going to do a moment before it happened, and I panicked. I lost all control of my pulse. She didn’t even get in a kiss before I pushed her away. She felt the echo, the pain. I think she wanted an explanation. And then, she didn’t—she just gathered up her stuff and left. Never spoke to me again. Three years later, I fell in love with your mother. And my only regret is that I didn’t have the strength to stay away from that girl when I knew it was the right thing for both of us.”
“So you’re saying I should stay away from Rose?”
“No! Not at all. I’m saying that you’re lucky in one respect: Rose knows who you are. She knows what you’ll do to her, and she likes you anyway. She’ll work with you, Thomas. You’ll deal with it together.”
“I don’t want to deal with it. I want the echo to stop.”
“It won’t st—”
“That’s a lie. You and Mother had three children, so don’t pretend you never touched.”
“Of course we touched. And we tried every trick we coul
d to make it all right. At first, we’d combine elements, so that my echo passed right through her. But touching someone isn’t the same when your mind is on something else.” I didn’t tell him that I was already well aware of that. “After a while, I’d try to focus on my pulse, keeping it slow. That’s when things began to change for us. Everything got better.”
“So I should focus on slowing down my pulse?”
He hesitated. “I guess it would help, yes.”
“But you’re not sure.”
When he spoke again, he looked defeated. “Your element is so much more powerful than mine, Thomas. I’ve never experienced what you can do . . . the power you produce, the way you completely take over other people’s elements. I’ve never had to suppress that power either. And I won’t lie to you—I’m not sure I ever could.”
He closed his eyes and turned away. I played his words over and over in my mind, searching for another meaning, a conclusion I could bear to face. But I knew precisely what he was saying: If Rose had been exposed to the Plague, which seemed almost certain, I’d spend the next few days watching her grow sicker and die, unable to hold and comfort her.
“Hey,” he said, watching me. “You saved us all, Thomas. I need you to remember that. Saved us from Dare, and saved us from Sumter. For sixteen years, we broke you down, and look at you now—strongest of all of us. I’m so proud of you. None of us deserve for you to be the boy you are.”
He wanted a smile from me, or at least an acknowledgment of what I’d done. But in my mind, I was still focused on Rose. My time with her was going to be over before it had even truly begun.
CHAPTER 13
I hadn’t meant to hurt Alice, and I needed to apologize to her. Plus, she knew better than anyone what it was like to exist on the edges of our colony, and was more likely to let me combine with her. We’d be reaching Roanoke soon, probably by the following morning, and I still had no idea how to control the flow of my element. What use was our greatest power when it was as likely to destroy us as the pirates we’d be fighting?