“What do we have here?” Wade said, staring at the bird’s nest with a prowling, catlike smile on his face. A chunk of metal from a snowplow that had been ripped apart slammed into Wade’s head and he reeled back. But this was Wade Quinn. He was a second pulse; he could take it. The only thing that could end Wade Quinn was a barrage of things that grew out of the earth. Dylan uprooted a fir tree, which took a lot out of him because the root systems were so tangled and difficult to rip out of the ground. He threw the tree like an arrow, bringing it down on Wade as he approached the duck blind, bullets flying.
Wade slammed into the ground, but seconds later the tree burst into the air, blowing a hole into the side of the lodge.
Faith had Clara momentarily pinned to a tree with her hand around Clara’s neck. Two deep scars ran from Clara’s forehead all the way down her left cheek and beyond her chin.
“See what you did to me?” Clara said as her voice shook with a weird laughter. Faith had stolen Clara’s astounding beauty, driving two long gashes into her face that would always leave scars.
“My pleasure,” Faith said. She saw a flit of movement behind her in the trees and knew Jade was close by, hiding in the trees. Dammit, Jade. Run! she thought.
Clara flew into the sky overhead, dragging Faith along when she wouldn’t let go.
“You know how I hate all these trees,” Clara said. “But I hate you even more.”
Clara punched her knee upward and simultaneously brought an elbow across the side of Faith’s head. Faith careened head over heels in the air and Clara kept pushing with her mind, making Faith gain more speed until she reached the roof of the lodge and hit back-first. The roof caved in and Faith found herself lying on the floor of the lodge staring up into a shaft of light.
She was up in a flash, back into the sky. But in that few seconds the tide had turned against her. Clara and Wade were hovering in front of the bird’s nest, staring at easy prey as bullets bounced off their chests and faces.
“Why do they always think bullets are going to do anything?” Clara asked.
“You’d think they’d learn,” Wade agreed.
“Leave them alone!” Faith screamed.
Dylan was uprooting two trees, putting everything he had into it, as Faith picked up everything that wasn’t nailed down and sent it all in a maelstrom up into the air, dropping it all on top of Wade and Clara.
They stayed under the pile of rubble for no more than a few seconds, then burst free and shook like two dogs jumping out of a bathtub.
Dylan had the trees uprooted and moved fast toward the milieu as Wade turned calmly toward the duck blind. Faith couldn’t see his face, but she was sure he was smiling.
“Don’t do it, Wade! You can take me!” Faith screamed.
Wade didn’t turn, but Clara did. She stared at Faith for a long beat.
“Payback time.”
Wade’s hand flitted ever so slightly, and Carl rose out of the blind. He kept firing, growling under all that muscle and gritting his white teeth. The gun he was holding was suddenly ripped from his hands. It turned in his direction in midair.
“Wade, no!” Clooger tried to fly directly into Wade, but Wade set the gun to firing before Clooger could cut the distance between them. A barrage of bullets sprayed the air back and forth, tearing through Carl and Clooger. Their chests burst with blood as they shook in the air.
When the firing stopped, both men fell to the ground and the two brothers stared at each other, surprised beyond words that death had finally cornered them.
Faith was in a total state of shock as Dylan turned the trees roots-first and pounded them down on top of Wade and Clara. He held them under fresh, live roots, twisting the trees in a circle and boring them into the earth.
“Faith, you need to help me!” Dylan said. “I can’t hold them both down by myself.” Faith shook her head and put the power of her mind to work on the task at hand: snuff the life out of the monster that had just gunned down Carl and Clooger in cold blood.
She watched as the trees swirled, tangling around Clara and Wade, their heads rolling around in dirt as they spun and spun under the weight of one of the few things that could destroy them both. Faith looked across at Dylan and reached in his direction without thinking. The intensity of what was happening all around her fell into the background as she felt the force of her feelings for him. Faith felt an immense power building inside her, not from the hate she felt for these two demons, but from what she shared with Dylan. She felt the mountain moving underneath her, a quake of activity.
Did I make that happen?
She looked up at the ragged peak and thought she saw pieces of rock breaking free.
Wade let fly his own powers and the trees that were piled on top of him stopped, rising slowly and then slamming back down in front of him. Faith shook her head and refocused. They were at a standstill when Wade spoke.
“Let us go and we won’t kill the girl,” Wade said.
Jade had come running out of the forest, and now she was kneeling over Carl and Clooger, sobbing and trying to hold back the flow of blood from both men.
“I’m sorry,” Jade kept saying. And in their dying breaths, both Carl and Clooger kept repeating the same words: Run, run, run!
“Let them go,” Faith said, but Dylan kept pushing. “Please, Dylan. Let them go! We can’t let them kill Jade, too.”
Dylan let up just enough to give Wade and Clara the chance they needed. With incredible speed the trees were blown away and the two of them were gone, like a flash of lightning, off and away from the lodge. At the same moment they picked up everything but the lodge itself, filling the sky with a tornado of objects big and small that trailed behind them for a hundred yards.
When the dust cleared, it wasn’t just Wade and Clara who were gone.
Jade was gone, too.
They’d kept their promise not to kill her, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t take her as a bargaining chip.
Faith and Dylan knelt down next to Clooger and Carl. Both men were barely holding on to their last breaths. Carl lifted his massive arm and grabbed Dylan’s shirt, pulling him close. He spoke in a garbled whisper.
“You gotta get her back, D. Don’t fail me on this one.”
“If it’s the last thing we do,” Dylan said as he looked at all the bullet marks in Carl’s shirt. There was no plugging all the holes that were pumping blood into the dirt. “We’ll get her back.”
Clooger was smiling as he gazed up at Faith. He wasn’t aware that Jade was gone, and it was better that way.
“Carl’s wrong,” Clooger said, coughing up a crimson stain of blood. “War doesn’t have to go on forever. You can end this thing, Faith. You can do it.”
Faith nodded as she cried and held Clooger’s head in her hands. She didn’t know if she believed him, but she knew she was going to try. Both men died at the same time, in what would later be remembered as the Timberline Massacre. But they didn’t die before looking at each other one last time.
“You did good, brother,” Clooger said. “You raised her right.”
“You too, Cloog. You’re a hell of a fighter.”
They drifted into the great unknown, leaving Dylan and Faith to figure out what to do next all by themselves.
“I felt the earth move,” Dylan said as he looked at Faith, confused and heartbroken. “Could they be that powerful? Could they move something that big?”
“I don’t think it was them,” Faith said through her tears. “I think it was us.”
A deep silence covered the grounds of the lodge and the clouds rolled in as Faith and Dylan fell into each other’s arms, exhausted and emotionally destroyed.
Chapter 6
Airwalk at Stalefish
Faith was sitting on a pinewood porch swing enveloped in an old familiar feeling, thinking about how fast things had come unglued. She had arrived at a lodge on top of a mountain to find a few weeks of peace, to rest her weary bones and tender emotions. She had let herself feel
calm, happy even.
And here she sat, everything in her life blown apart all over again.
Hawk was gone, unprotected, without a sound ring. He was totally on his own, rogue, making choices that could get him killed. For all Faith knew, he was already dead. She shook her head at the thought of it. A world without Hawk in it didn’t seem possible. The world needed people like Hawk, people with optimism and energy who could wipe away the darkness just by walking into a room.
Clooger and Carl were dead, the only card-carrying adults they had, gone in a few seconds of gunfire. It reminded her that life was a delicate situation for most people. They could go at any moment, cut short by an approaching bus or a knife-wielding madman. It had become all too easy for Faith to think as if she and everyone else close to her were immortals, or damn close.
What she really wanted was a tattoo; the sting of a needle to numb the pain. A tattoo so big it would cover her entire body and make her forget that Clooger was gone. Carl she’d barely known, but Clooger? The heaviness of his loss felt as if it had enough weight to crush her bones into dust. She could think of it for only a second or two at a time without feeling her chest fill with a sob that would last forever. She had to back away from the information, fill her mind with better memories. The problem was how many bad memories already existed inside her, stacked like cordwood, safely locked away beyond feeling. Faith was starting to feel as if she might burst into flames at any moment, every searing memory rushing forward at once.
Even though Clooger had been a single pulse, unable to protect himself from bullets or bombs or anything else, she’d still seen him as more than just a partner; he was their leader. He had experience Faith didn’t have and a wellspring of courage she sometimes lacked. Clooger and Dylan—these two had her back and the power to help her destroy whatever evil approached. And now one of them was gone.
I’m sorry, Clooger, she thought as she looked through the trees and felt the tears pooling. Sorry we couldn’t get you on the other side of this thing before it was too late.
She looked up at the top of the mountain, the peak that so intrigued her, and thought about how she’d made the whole mountain shake under her feet. It scared her to think about so much power. Her thoughts turned to Jade just as Dylan stepped through the screen door and let it fall back on its rusted spring, clanging against the jamb. He sat down beside Faith and the porch swing wobbled forward.
“We should have known. How did we miss it?”
There was no doubt what he was referring to: Jade’s power.
“I can understand why she chose to hide it,” Faith admitted. She rocked back on the porch swing and stared out into the forest, her eyes narrowing against the light coming through the trees. “Everyone else was keeping secrets from her. I think she knew that. This was her secret. I just wish she’d have known how dangerous it was.”
“As soon as we understood she was my half sister we should have all been like, ‘So yeah, maybe she’s got the pulse running through her veins. She’s Meredith and Clooger’s daughter.’ They both had single pulses. It was possible Jade would be a carrier.”
“But no one would have guessed she’d been secretly messing around with it. That’s what I don’t understand. To have that kind of power, she had to be at it awhile.”
“Maybe not,” Dylan said. He glanced around nervously. “Remember how I told you it took me some time to get my power under control?”
Faith nodded. She did remember.
“It was especially bad when I was angry. Meredith always said kids were the most unpredictable once they knew the power they had. I remember I didn’t understand how dangerous it was. How people could get hurt.”
“But how did she unlock it without help?” Faith asked. “You had to bring out my pulse. Hers just showed up out of nowhere?”
Dylan breathed a heavy sigh. He didn’t want to say what might have been true, but he did.
“My mom used to disappear for weeks on end. No one knew where she went.”
Faith started putting two and two together.
“You think she came up here.”
Dylan shrugged. “If she did, she might have trained Jade in her sleep. Maybe they talked, maybe Jade didn’t even know her mother was there. You didn’t know I was outside your window all those months. You were asleep.”
Faith thought about it a moment, her eyes narrowing as she tried to remember what it had been like moving an object with her mind for the first time. It had been a heady experience.
“Maybe my mom just wanted to make sure Jade could defend herself if trouble ever showed up on the mountain.”
“But why wouldn’t she have told Carl or Clooger?”
Dylan shook his head. He didn’t seem to know.
“She’s an orphan now, like us,” Faith said, and that was enough to simmer down her feelings toward Jade and remind her that while they were all orphaned on the face of the earth, Jade was the youngest.
Faith turned to Dylan and saw that he was holding a letter in his hand. He looked at it, half smiling and shaking his head.
“It’s from Hawk.”
“Have you read it? I’m not sure how much more bad news I can take right now.”
“I found it in his room, but I haven’t opened it yet. I wanted us to hear it together.”
Faith nodded, pulling her feet up on the porch swing and turning to face Dylan. She leaned her side onto the back of the swing, wrapping her arms around her knees. It was as if she was preparing herself for a body blow.
“Here goes,” Dylan said. He tore open the envelope and began reading.
I hope you read this before anyone came looking for me, because I’d hate to think anyone got hurt or our position was compromised because of me. Either way, chances are I was way too far gone before you started out, and I’m a tricky navigator. You have no idea which way I went and you’re not going to know. Me and the HumGee are doing this alone. End of story. Also, sorry for taking the cool car, but I needed it.
Everyone has a role to play here, and you heard what Meredith said. Mine is to figure out what Hotspur Chance built into the foundation of the power grid. No one else can do that but me, and I can do it only from inside one of the States. That information will be hard enough to get ahold of inside, but outside, it’s a total nonstarter. Hopefully I can find Neal Gordon and he can help me, but I have a feeling this is going to require an Intel level of intelligence to figure out. Accessing a hidden layer of technology running under a city with hundreds of millions of people is a tall order. From a deductive-reasoning point of view, it was an easy problem to solve: I had to leave without telling you.
“He’s been watching too many action movies,” Faith said.
“You might be right.”
“What else does it say?”
Dylan continued:
We need a relay station. There’s not one up there where you guys are now, but if you can get down into Portland without being detected, we can send messages back and forth from a relay station there. Take the Burnside Bridge over the river. Follow it until you get into the old downtown. Then look for the Koin Building. Can’t miss it, shaped like a rocket and the angles look like they were made out of Legos. Go to apartment number 1106. That one used to belong to Paul Allen. That guy was a billionaire; he helped start Microsoft about a hundred years ago.
“I read about him in American Technical History,” Faith said.
“Me too,” Dylan said. “He owned pro sports teams and had a passion for Jimi Hendrix music.”
Faith raised her eyebrows up and down: Keep reading, Professor.
Dylan read on:
One of Allen’s obsessions before he died was classic computers and console games. He had some really rare stuff, including a 2018 model that used radio waves to send messages across any network. The product bombed, never made it out of beta. But Allen had three of them, since his company, Vulcan, helped fund the development. I’m betting he kept at least one on display in his apartment, and
if we’re lucky it’s still there. It’ll be a Tablet, black casing. Should have the solar powering built in, but it will be dead when you find it. Get it into the sunlight and we should be able to send messages back and forth without being traceable. Write this down:
Relay one: 342459
Relay two: PPd23ed (case sensitive)
Relay three: WS404.12.7.8
Enter those into the network settings. That should jump between three totally independent systems: radio waves, abandoned Wi-Fi, and Western State digital. If we use that pathway, no one will trace and we should be able to send and retrieve messages. Use the app mail resident on the device, log in as:
[email protected] password: if6was9
You’ll get a message from me—
[email protected] “Airwalk at Stalefish?” Faith asked. “What’s gotten into him?”
Dylan offered a half smile, the most he could muster given the dire circumstances.
“He never told you about his Tony Hawk obsession?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Must have been guy stuff. He named himself after Tony Hawk, that’s how much he wished he could skateboard like this guy. Tony Hawk was this badass skateboarder before the equipment went all hovercraft in 2030. He invented the Airwalk and the Stalefish.”
Faith didn’t have any idea what Dylan was talking about.
“They’re classic skateboarding tricks.”
“And ‘If 6 Was 9’ is a Jimi Hendrix song,” Faith said. She was more into classic rock than most. “How much more did he write?”
Dylan scanned the page. “Couple more paragraphs.”
I can do this, you guys, but you have to trust me. And if this means I’m stuck in the Western State for the rest of my life, then that’s what it means. People are giving up their lives for this shit. A madman is on the loose who wants to kill a few hundred million people in cold blood. This is worth it. And I know you two. You wouldn’t have let me go or you’d be trying to keep tabs on me constantly or I’d be doing the same to you. We all need to focus on our part. You two are equipped to face Chance and Wade and Clara. You can kick ass against them in a fight. I can do the most good behind enemy lines, not in the line of fire. I wouldn’t last five minutes with those a-holes.