The Indifferent Children of the Earth

  Chapter 23, Saturday 10 September

  The lights flickered like crazy and then went out, with a series of pops and clicks echoing throughout the house. And then everything was dark. Just me, blind, with a quickener.

  Mike was the quickener.

  “Alex,” my dad called from downstairs.

  Mike was the quickener. That was all I could think. And he was here, in the darkness. With me. Was he here to kill me?

  “Alex.” I could hear the worry in Dad’s voice.

  “I’m alright,” I shouted through the door. “Lights are out up here.”

  “I’ll go check the circuit breaker,” Dad said. And then there was nothing but the darkness.

  Except it wasn’t dark anymore. I realized I could see Mike now. With a flash of jealousy hotter than any quickening, I realized he was glowing. That’s one of the things quickening does to you, when you absorb energy. It ran under his skin in purple-white lines, outlining every muscle, blazing through the thin white wife-beater, sending long shadows towards me. I knew what it would feel like, too—warm, like the first sip of hot chocolate after a day spent in the snow, and painful on the edge of pleasant, or maybe the other way around. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out.

  “What do you want?” I said. I didn’t have any weapons up here, not that they’d be much use against a fully-charged quickener. Even one as unskilled as Mike. I edged to the side, though, reaching back to grab the door handle. I’d have to run, although outrunning a lightning bolt seemed a bit optimistic. “Why are you here?”

  “I could use some help,” Mike said. I realized he was hunched over slightly. “I didn’t take your advice about the cemetery.”

  I stopped moving. “You went back?”

  “Yeah, guess I got cocky. They’ve never been coordinated like that before, though. It was always pick ‘em off, easy stuff.”

  That sounded too familiar for comfort.

  “This was stupid,” Mike said. “I’ll go.”

  He stood up, moved toward the window, the purple-white glow dancing across the room as he moved. Right then, the lights flickered back on.

  Mike’s back was a mass of bloody slashes; the wife-beater was in shreds and stained red. He stumbled and grabbed the window sill to catch himself.

  “Stop,” I said. “You need to go to the hospital.”

  He flashed me a mocking smile, but I could see now how pale he was, even under his tan. “Sounds familiar.”

  I hesitated; I could let him go and wash my hands of quickening. Hell, I could even try to kill him, right now. I might even have a chance. But I was still angry at Grandfather, at how he’d raised us, at what he’d done to set me and Isaac on paths toward being serial killers, sociopaths. At how his stupid rules had ended my life.

  And so I made a decision that would have put my Grandfather into an early grave, if he hadn’t been dead already. I decided I was going to train Mike. If I couldn’t be a quickener anymore, if I couldn’t help people, I would do what I could to help him.

  I crossed the room in two quick steps and grabbed his arm, pulled him into the bathroom. I pulled the desk chair into the bathroom as well, turned it, and said, “Sit.”

  He sat down backward, his back facing out, but I could see the smile on his face in the bathroom mirror.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  In the hall closet, I found the first aid kit, and then I went back into the bedroom and shut and locked the door. Then I set to work. I just went ahead and cut off the wife-beater; pulling it over his head seemed likely just to aggravate the cuts, and it was already ruined. He still let out a hiss of pain as the cloth stuck to the wounds, and I threw it in the shower.

  The cuts were deep, but I couldn’t tell how serious they were. They had stopped bleeding, mostly, but I didn’t know if muscles or organs had been injured. How could I have known? I set to work as best I could, cleaning the wounds first with cold water, which made him flinch, and then with hydrogen peroxide. I had to give him credit; aside from a few grunts, Mike didn’t make a sound.

  “So why no hospital?” I said in as neutral a voice as I could manage. My hands were shaking though, being this close to him, and my heart jumped alternately back and forth between my throat and somewhere between my legs.

  “Kind of hard to explain how, after I won a football game, I went out and got my back slashed up by a bunch of undead monsters.”

  The first part of that sentence made me roll my eyes, and he must have seen me.

  “What?” he asked.

  “There are other people on the team too, you know.”

  “Right,” he said with a laugh. I didn’t know if he was agreeing with me or laughing at me, so I ignored him.

  “And my parents let you into my room looking like this?”

  “I was wearing the hoodie still; I’d taken it off after I rescued you, so it didn’t get slashed up.”

  “And that stunt with the fork?”

  “Best way to cut out the chatter,” Mike said. “Show you exactly what I am.”

  It didn’t really answer my question, but before I could follow up, he spoke again.

  “Time for you to start—ah!” He cut off with a small cry as I pulled away a thread leftover from his wife-beater.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Thanks. Time for you to start giving some answers. How the hell do you know about this stuff? And why in the world do you keep going to the cemetery, after I specifically told you not to go there anymore?”

  Telling him that I’d been hunting him, planning on killing him, didn’t seem like the best way to move forward. I kept silent, trying to figure out what to say. There wasn’t much left to do but bandage his back, so I went to the sink, washed the hands, and went into my room without answering him. I knelt and started to reach under the bed, and I could feel him watching me. It sent a nervous thrill through me. Then I had the chest.

  Inside sat the book, which I kept myself from looking at, and the rows of foci. And my ground. I grabbed the ground, then one of the foci. Gold. Like every focus, it was an incredibly complicated pattern of cast metal. The empty spaces were as important as the gold lines that directed the energy, and every focus’s shape was different. This one was old, older than my grandfather. It had been Isaac’s. It was heavy in my hand, heavier than a slim disc of gold should have weighed. Heavy with the past. I shut and locked the chest, and returned it to under the bed.

  I held out the silver ground first, slipped the focus in my pocket. Mike’s eyes widened.

  “No shit,” he said. He reached down and pulled up one leg of his shorts, revealing a surprisingly white thigh. And strapped to it with leather bands was a ground—easy to recognize, because all grounds have basically the same shape and design. But his wasn’t silver. It was a translucent yellow material.

  “Why are you wearing it there?” I said, unable to contain my surprise. “And what’s it made of?”

  “Amber, I think,” he said. He still held my ground, examining it as he spoke. “And if I wear it there, no one can see it.”

  “And you lose a ton of energy through interference.”

  “Huh?”

  It was so simple; a child should have known this stuff. “All that energy you take in—it’s not going to be converted until it reaches the ground. If it has to travel through most of your body before it reaches the ground, you’re losing a lot of it along the way.” I took my ground back, set it against the palm of my hand, and indicated the holes on the sides of the ground. “You wear it here, on your dominant hand, and tie it on with leather straps. Almost zero interference. That’s why we use silver, too. Better conductivity. Plus you won’t have to jam a fork into the electrical socket to get a charge.” He had the decency to look somewhat abashed. I continued, “Amber hasn’t been used in a couple hundred years. Where did you get that?”

  “Always had it; it was my grandfather’s, I guess, but he died before I knew him. He left it to me in his will. Must
have hoped I would be like him.”

  “A quickener. Yeah, blood relatives can usually tell. The way the body’s electromagnetic field interacts with other people. It’s harder with non-relatives, but it can happen too.” The way it had happened with Christopher. Like a shock at the base of my spine.

  “Quickener? That’s what it’s called.” He shifted, winced, and tried to examine his back in the mirror. “How bad does it look?”

  I went behind him, grabbed the gauze, and started wrapping it around his chest. If my hands had trembled before, I was shaking like a leaf in a storm now. Every time my hands passed his chest I could smell him—under the smell of blood, the clean-white smell of the gauze, the smell of sweat, the smell of him. Something like a hot summer afternoon, still waiting for rain. If a smell could be friendly, this one was. When I finished, only a few red spots appeared on the gauze. “Seems like the bleeding has mostly stopped,” I said. “But I imagine people will have a few questions when they see your back; it’ll take a while for these to heal.”

  “Damn it,” he said. “What am I going to do about practice? I can’t explain how this happened.”

  The gold focus in my pocket. “Where are your foci?” I asked.

  “What?”

  I moved back around in front of him, pulled out the gold focus. “Foci. You know, for using quickening.”

  “I have something like that,” he said. “Just one. In the pocket of my hoodie. It doesn’t do much, though—just makes it hard to recognize me.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s a pretty useful one, but not too complicated.” I fished it out of his hoodie, where it lay on the bed. I didn’t recognize the pattern. Gold, good for power but not for precision. A strange choice for the type of effect that it produced. “Where’d you get it from?”

  “Just found it in a box of my grandfather’s stuff.”

  “What about the other stuff I’ve seen you do?” I said. “Traveling, that wave of light that tore apart the sprawl. Where are those foci?”

  “I told you, I just have one. Right there.”

  “What? Are you telling me you’ve been doing all that with your ground?”

  “Yeah. What?”

  “God, you’re unbelievable. Most people would have burned themselves to ash doing that. And you just smile and act like it’s no big deal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The only thing a ground is really for is taking in energy, or forcing it out. Basic blasts of energy, sure, but what you’ve been doing—it’s so complicated, the feedback of it, the amount of energy you’re forcing through it . . . Well, let’s just say that a less talented quickener would not be alive to tell the story.”

  “That’s why you were so mad when I traveled with you,” Mike said.

  “No,” I said. “I was mad because it hurt like hell and you did it wrong. Now that I know you didn’t have a focus, it makes a lot more sense.”

  “Oh.” Mike said. I got the feeling that people didn’t usually talk to him like that; he looked slightly offended.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said.

  I dug out the box again and drew out a black cord. Then, fingers tingling, I set the gold focus against his upper arm, laced the cord through, and tied it tight. The energy running through him had faded, meaning his body had finished catalyzing it, and he would have plenty of strength to use the focus.

  “Push some energy through it,” I said. “The way you would with the other focus.”

  His face twisted for a moment, but then his eyes widened in surprise. “It’s like a sieve; energy just runs through it.”

  “That’s because it’s gold,” I said.

  “Man, that feels good. What is it?”

  “It’s taking that energy and using it to repair your body.”

  “So what? Am I like healed, or something?”

  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes again. “It’ll take time; it doesn’t work fast enough to save you in an emergency, but it’ll make the recovery time a lot shorter. By Monday, you should be able to go to practice. Tuesday at the latest.”

  “That’s incredible,” he said.

  “Well, you’ll need to stay charged.” I nodded to my ground he had set on his lap. “If you want . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to offer it; it was like offering someone my severed arm. Sure, I couldn’t use it anymore, but it still meant something to me.

  To my surprise, Mike seemed to sense my dismay. He handed the ground back to me and said, “No thanks, Asa; that doesn’t seem right. And I’ll give the focus back as soon as I’m better, I promise. These things must be pretty valuable to you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then, unable to stop myself, I added, “The focus was my brother’s.”

  I could see the question forming on his lips, so I stopped him.

  “And don’t call me Asa,” I said. “I told you I prefer Alex.”

  “And I prefer Asa,” he said, that easy smile coming back to his face.

  Suddenly I was blushing. I struggled for something to say. “Look,” I said. “You can’t just wander around like this, using the ground like that. You’re going to hurt yourself, no matter how talented you are.”

  “So what do we do?” Mike said. The smile still hadn’t left his face; no sign that he had noticed my discomfort—he still seemed relaxed, comfortable, confident.

  “You need training,” I said. “And you’ll need help if you’re going to deal with those sprawls. And with the grower who’s making them.”

  “What’s a grower?”

  Right then, a knock came at the door. “Alex,” my dad said. “Your friend needs to go home now.” He tested the handle.

  “Shit,” I said. I grabbed the sweatshirt, tossed it to Mike. “Put that on.”

  He struggled into the hoodie, and I could see the pain on his face, but I ignored him. As soon as the bandages were covered, I unlocked the door and let Dad in. My face was on fire now; I knew what he’d be thinking, what he suspected.

  Confirmation as Dad glanced at Mike, who sat backward in the chair with his athletic shorts still hiked up, the hoodie revealing part of his bare chest, and then looked at me.

  “I don’t think we were introduced,” Dad said.

  “Mike Park.”

  “I’m Josh León,” Dad said. “And it’s nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you too, sir.”

  “Sorry to ask you to leave, Mike,” he turned to face me, “but I’m afraid Alex is grounded for the next little bit.”

  Over Dad’s shoulder, Mike mouthed the word grounded with a mocking smile.

  “Not a problem, sir,” Mike said in a normal voice. “My mom will start wondering if I’m not home soon.”

  “Thank you, Mike. You can see yourself out?”

  “Yes sir.” Mike gave me a wink that, for whatever reason, only made me blush more. For a moment, I thought I saw a smile play around Dad’s mouth, but it faded when Mike shut the door behind him.

  “So I’m grounded now?” I said.

  Dad sighed, pulled around the chair Mike had been using, and sat down. “Alex, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Mike was just stopping by to tell me about the football game. They won.”

  I could read the surprise in Dad’s eyes; that’s not what he’d been expecting. “He plays football?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think he’s the team captain, or something like that.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “Can we talk about the motorcycle for a minute?”

  “I’m not driving his car, Dad. You can’t make me.”

  “God, Alex, just listen for a minute. I’m not trying to pick a fight with you.”

  For a moment, neither of us had words to fill the gap between us.

  “Look, we don’t like the idea of you having a motorcycle. If . . .” I could hear it in the pause, that other life they always imagined: watching Isaac graduate, instead of spending that weekend in the mortuary and the hospital; helping him settle into a d
orm room at Columbia; afternoon trips in the fall to visit him. Hell, how could I not see it? It’s what I saw half the time when I shut my eyes. The world that I had ended. And then he kept speaking, that space between words dribbling away. “If things had been different, though, then you’d be right. We would have let Isaac get a motorcycle. We’d already talked about it, for when he was in school.”

  I stared at him.

  “What I’m trying to say, Alex, is that your mom and I are trying to be ok with the fact that you’re going to keep the motorcycle. But it’s hard; things aren’t what they used to be. We . . . we don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “So why am I grounded?”

  Dad had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I just wanted to talk to you for a bit, and it’s time your friend went home anyway. And you shouldn’t have talked to me or your mother the way you did. So consider it the shortest grounding of your life.”

  He stood up, and I could feel the silence slipping in between us, like the waters of a swift-running stream, carrying away what I wanted to say: thank you; I love you; I’m sorry. The last one most of all.

  In one step, Dad was next to me, wrapping his arms around me, and I hugged him back. Even though I didn’t deserve it.