The Indifferent Children of the Earth

  Chapter 14, Thursday 25 August

  I stepped out of the shower, grateful for the rush of air conditioning after the heat of the day and the hot water. Mottled dark brown and yellow covered my ribs, and it still hurt to draw a deep breath sometimes, but working forced me to move and stretch, and so the stiffness wasn’t as bad as it should have been. I dried myself off quickly, dressed in dark jeans, fished out my torn t-shirt from the first time I had gone to the cemetery. I had tried to make myself go last night, the night I had decided on my plan, but I had chickened out at the last minute. The thought of facing a sprawl again, well, it was enough that sleeping, even with my dreams, seemed preferable.

  This morning, waking up on that razor-blade edge of despair, I realized I had been wrong. Facing a sprawl was nothing compared to facing those dreams again. So now, after another day of school and work, I tied my tennis shoes and grabbed the jug of herbicide that I had purchased from Forest at Home. That had been almost as frightening as facing a sprawl; when Mr. Wood had asked me why I needed so much, I told him about my mom’s interest in gardening. It had put him at ease, it seemed, although it was hard to tell. He had just grunted, rung me up with my employee discount, and I had left with the taste of fertilizer in the back of my mouth.

  Jug heavy in one hand, I made my way downstairs. This time I made no effort to avoid the squeaking stairs; let them announce me, the sound of a death march. All it would take was one sprawl, recently awakened. If the stairs were my death march, then the incessant crack of typewriter keys breaking the silence predicted my obituary. There was something comforting about that. A life summed up in two hundred words of black and white.

  If Dad heard me, he said nothing. Outside, Mom was working in one of the flower beds out front, but with her back to me. There she was, a shadow crouched against growing darkness, as if she could tear life from the earth with nothing but a spade and determination. There was something funereal about her, too. Perhaps she was digging my grave. Perhaps she was digging up Isaac. I couldn’t tell from the distance.

  In the garage, I grabbed my bike, ignoring the heat of Isaac’s keys digging into my thigh. And then, after a moment, I grabbed the baseball bat. Also Isaac’s, and though it was a betrayal to take it now, to use it, with him being dead and all, it was nothing close to the treason that using his car would be. Bat under one arm, jug dangling slightly off-center from the handlebars, I started down the hill, toward the river, where a grower’s tree plunged its roots deep into the heart of the cemetery.

  This time, I went around the cemetery, took my time getting to the gate. It was locked; I had thought maybe I wouldn’t have to climb the fence, but no such luck. In West Marshall, the town where no one locked their front door, they still locked up the cemetery at night. Considering the possibility of sprawls, it really wasn’t a bad idea, but I don’t think that’s why they did it. I dropped my bike near the fence. The jug and bat went over first, and I heard a slosh and a thud. I pulled myself over next, shoulders and bruises protesting. One of the holes in my shirt caught, of course, ripping free a large triangle of cloth. The shirt was definitely going in the trash now.

  No flashes to identify a quickener approaching. Nothing moving, not even the trees, their branches bowed down by the hot, humid night air. I grabbed the jug of herbicide; it had cracked, but the leak wasn’t too bad. Jug and bat in hand, I trotted toward the center of the cemetery. The gravel crunched under my feet, but everything else was silent.

  The tree loomed up above me when I reached it, and I could feel it under the ground, its roots twisted and burrowing deep. A span of wood that clawed at sky and earth in equal measure. I dumped the herbicide around the trunk of the tree, and there was barely enough in the jug to make it all the way. It wasn’t likely the herbicide would kill the tree; it was too big, too old, and a grower would not let it go that easily. But I would know tomorrow if Mr. Wood was sick that this really was his tree. And then I could come burn it down. That would be enough to stop him, I hoped.

  And that was it. I set the bat and the jug together at the edge of the gravel path. There was something inside me, a cluster of nervous energy that responded to the vast expanse of dark sky and dying stars above me, and so I started to walk. Not anywhere in particular. Down one of the gravel paths, at random, then breaking off between the trees. Row after row of night-bleached stone markers, some worn and faded, others with all the sharp edges of fresh grief.

  Somehow, I found myself stopped in front of one. The grass under my feet had wilted edges and the faint lines of recently placed sod. I was standing over someone who had just died, a guy almost my age. Eli Green. Seventeen years old. There was something written under his name, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Instead, I just stood there, feeling the give of the thin, dried-out sod beneath my tennis shoes, the strange affinity I felt for someone I had never heard of, never known. Just a guy, my age, but dead, and recently. That could have been me, and I couldn’t bring myself to step away from that plot.

  Because it should have been me in that grave, or in another like it. That night, when Christopher had shown me the new focus he had created, what it could do to people. That was one of the things I loved about Christopher, his ingenuity. Most quickeners saw the lightning that we used to power our magic, and that was all they understood. Oh sure, there were clever uses of light and energy, but always the same sorts of things. A slightly more efficient way to shoot a blast of energy. A more effective form of disrupting light.

  Not Christopher; he understood, he taught me, that it wasn’t electricity any more. Our bodies changed it into something else, a form of energy that was purer, more refined. More versatile. He’d helped me figure out new foci. He and Isaac developed a focus that absorbed kinetic energy, not just other quickening blasts. And on his own, Christopher figured out something else. A focus that caused terrible pain. Beyond anything I can describe. And I can still hear Isaac’s screams, from when Christopher turned it on him. Worse, the silence that came after. And more than that, the focus that he had invented at the end. The one that had made me kill him.

  Silence resonated within me, in time with some distant pulse of the universe that swept galaxies and stars and planets and men along merciless paths. I headed back to the tree; it was time to go. Somewhere. Anywhere but here.

  It was a footstep, I think. Or the rustle of leaves in the still air. Caught up in my thoughts, I’m not sure what caught my attention. Whatever it was, something told me I was not alone.