The Girl at the Center of the World

  The presence recoils. Fear. Good.

  Release her! Why won’t you release her?!

  If you’ve seen the Morse code, then you know—

  I’m falling, stretching through a funnel. I’m back in my own body. It’s dark. But someone is actually in my room. I hear the shuffle of feet. I hold my breath.

  A whispered question: “Lei?”

  Tami. “You crazy?” I spit. “You woke me!”

  “I’ve changed my mind. I think you should know.”

  “Know what?”

  “What Keali`i told me.”

  “Tami. Not now!”

  She withdraws in a huff. “Wow. Fine.”

  I don’t care. I need to get my door back open, climb the rope ladder to the stars. It’s not her fault; she couldn’t have known. But there’s no time to explain.

  When I finally relax enough to return to the Emerald Orchid, though, the other mind is long gone. I have her all to myself.

  The way it should be.

  CHAPTER 15

  Buzz arrives on Thursday afternoon, in high spirits and full of urgent plans. “Have you made contact with the baby?” he asks.

  “No. Why?”

  “Haven’t you seen? Maybe not, I guess. You’re always”—he points to the ceiling—“up there. Anyway, on the horizon at about three this morning, the baby was flashing.”

  “What?” Mom, Dad, and I say together. “Is it Morse code?” I ask. Did the other person get in? Do they control her now?

  “No,” Buzz reassures us. “There’s no pattern. It’s just copying Mom. Monkey see, monkey do. It’s babbling!”

  “Babbling?” Tami says. “Oh, my God. That’s adorable.”

  “Cute, yes,” Buzz agrees, then grows serious. “It may be ready for contact. We should act fast.”

  We make a plan. Dad, Grandpa, and I agree to drop everything and join Buzz tomorrow up at the observatories. We’ll stay there as long as it takes for me to explore a possible connection with the baby and try to figure out this other presence. When I’m done at the radio dish array, we’ll visit the pearl impact site. “Are you finally going to tell us what you found up there?” I ask Buzz.

  “I’ll do you one better. I’ll show you. Go pack a bag while the light’s still good, and I’ll set up my…presentation. It’s chilly up there; pack warm.”

  I race to my task, and when I come back downstairs, I see that Buzz has returned my birthday present to me. The 8mm projector is assembled on the coffee table. My family and Tami and Keali`i stand around it expectantly. I study it reverently, running my fingers along the cool metal casing, not sure what I’m supposed to do now.

  “It’s not a paperweight,” Buzz says. “Go on. Flip the switch.”

  “What?”

  Buzz leans forward and turns the projector on with a flick of his finger. White light illuminates the wall. A motor spins, and the empty reels rotate. Buzz turns it back off. The room fills with chatter. “Planet of the Apes tonight!” Dad cheers, holding aloft the film’s 8mm canister. “Whaddya say?”

  Kai leaps and thrusts a fist in the air. My heart skips a beat. Movie night. It’s back! Just like that. “How?” I marvel. I search for a car battery, anything that looks like a power source. Nothing obvious.

  “Ah, well, that’s where you’ve given us a gift, Lei.” He lifts a small canister off the buffet with a great deal of effort, tells Dad to put the film reel in the other room just to be safe. As if he’s handling a bowling ball, he slides a shard of gray-black rock the size of a matchbox from the canister onto his palm. He closes his fingers around it. “Put your hand down on the table,” he tells me. “All the way down.”

  I do what he says.

  “Kai, grab a piece of metal.” Kai darts away, returns with a crescent wrench. “Okay, hold on to it tightly. Place it under the table,” instructs Buzz.

  When he lets go of the wrench, it shoots upward and slams into the coffee table. “Whoa!” Kai says. “It’s stuck to the bottom!”

  Buzz nods. “It’s attracted to what I have in my hand.” He turns to me. “I’m going to place this on your palm. You’re not going to be prepared for its weight—or what it does—no matter what I say, so just be ready. And keep your hand above the table.”

  He lugs his hand over to mine and slides the shard of rock onto my palm. I try to flinch away, but I can’t. It’s so heavy, as if Kai is standing on my hand. The smooth shard flips over. The wrench clanks to the floor at the same time. I flinch away, still pinned to the table. I laugh, exhilarated. The room is murmuring. “What is this?”

  “That,” says Buzz with wonder, “is a sliver of the pearl.”

  It flips of its own accord in my fist again. There’s a sudden knock under the table. The wrench has struck it from below and is stuck to the underside again.

  “It’s dense. That little block probably weighs twenty pounds.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say, almost breathless. “Why is it moving?” Keali`i’s backpack against the wall falls over, as if kicked. He strides over to investigate it.

  “The pearl, Lei. It’s incredible. The size of a Sherman tank. But it must weigh as much as a football stadium. It has an electromagnetic field beyond comprehension.”

  “Huh?” It tumbles over in my hand again. The wrench falls to the ground.

  “Don’t worry,” he announces proudly. “You’ll see for yourself soon.”

  “Can I see?” Kai asks. He goes to grab the little shard of dark gray material, but he can’t lift it from my pinned hand. “Holy crap,” he says.

  “But what does this have to do with the projector?”

  “It’s thrumming with inexhaustible power. Somehow the material is both energy and matter. I mean, all matter is energy, right? But this stuff is like fluid matter-energy. It’s both at once. I don’t know how else to say it. You know, Einstein searched his whole adult life for a Grand Unified Theory and failed. The merger of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. This may be proof of what he was looking for.”

  “Oh,” I say, not understanding a thing. The shard continues to flip in my hand as Buzz talks. With each flip, the wrench below the coffee table smacks to a stop against the underside or falls to the carpet.

  “It’s an electromagnet that turns itself on and off every few seconds. The frequency depends on size. This little guy reverses exactly every seven-point-four seconds. The pearl as a whole toggles every twenty-one minutes and thirteen seconds.”

  “I was supposed to take physics my junior year,” I tell Buzz with a pang—I might have been in class this very moment. “What’s an electromagnet?”

  “Most metals will magnetize when you send a current through them. That’s how most motors work. The reason this little shard is flipping so much is that the current reverses and stops on its own. It’s…throbbing, like a heart—sort of. Whenever it’s on, it’s powerful. The wrench’s attraction to it overcomes the force of gravity. But this defies convention, Lei. Don’t ask me to explain. It’s like nothing known.”

  “Remember watching birds migrate east to west back when the Orchid was ejecting these things left and right in the initial days?” Dad asks me. “Remember trying to use our compass on Maui? These pearls have strong magnetic fields.”

  “This could change a lot of things, Lei,” Buzz continues. “I haven’t begun to scratch the surface. It somehow creates its own magnetic on-off switch. Motors usually need an electric current to flip the polarity to propel the motor around its axis. That’s how I got the projector to work without electricity. Just pinned two small shards down opposite each other so they can’t flip. They toggle very quickly in alternating states. I put metal along the motor’s axis and, voilà, the motor turns! And if you can turn a motor, you can generate a current, in this case for the lightbulb and the speakers. I encased it all in a ferromagnetic cobalt housing to shield the field from the rest of the projector.”

  Keali`i drops his backpack behind the couch, returns his
focus to us. He pries the shard out of my hand. Once again, very much like clockwork, the shard turns over in his palm. The coffee table jolts. “Ho! That’s nuts!”

  “Careful! Stay above the table. The wrench will bullet up and crush your hand.”

  “Is it radioactive?” Tami asks.

  “No. Not at all.”

  “If this is like a battery,” Keali`i asks, “then why don’t we fire up the TV?”

  “Well,” Buzz explains, “the TV is still broken, the integrated circuitry fried. The Orchid still affects the flow of electricity, doesn’t matter how much juice we have at the ready. For example, the projector’s bulb is still finicky. Flickers and dims a lot.”

  “What about cars?” asks Keali`i. “Could we fire pistons with this instead of gas?”

  Buzz grins. “Yes. But we’d have to entirely redesign the motors first.”

  “Really?” Mom asks. “No more gas?”

  “Yeah, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’ll be months or years before we even have a prototype. And we’d have to find a way to mine the material.”

  Buzz looks at me. “Whatever the Orchid does to our world’s electricity, and however it soaks up radiation, whether from stars or blown reactors, I see the connection. It draws in that radiation, consumes it as food somehow, and converts it to this.”

  “Star Flower poop,” Kai says.

  Buzz laughs. “Precisely. Matter and energy consumed, converted, and…ejected. Lei, you thought of it as propellant to glide through space. The Orchid’s way around Newton’s Second Law. I’m beginning to think this stuff may even be dark matter. The mysterious unseen glue of the cosmos that we were never able to account for.”

  We all look at one another.

  “Once the Star Flowers are gone,” Buzz concludes, “this material, if we can mine it, harness it, could power the globe. Forever.”

  * * *

  Tami and Keali`i pull me aside when the excitement has settled. I suddenly remember how Tami woke me and I turned her away. Keali`i lifts his backpack, and we head outside. Tami walks tenderly with a cane that Mom made for her out of an old koa branch. Around the corner of the garage, they stop me.

  “Lei,” Keali`i begins, “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What is it?” They’re both acting…guilty.

  He takes off his backpack and pulls out a container. He hands it to me. It’s heavy.

  “I know your…feelings. But I want you to be safe. When I’m not around.”

  I lift the lid. It’s a small pistol. “Keali`i. No.”

  “I’ll teach you to use it responsibly. I gave Tami one, too. Two Dog…the heat down the road…I really think you’re not thinking straight. We all need to be covered better.”

  “No, Keali`i. Please. Take it away.” I thrust it in his chest, let go of it. He fumbles and catches it, stunned at my rejection.

  “Lei—” Tami begins.

  “Please, it’s not about you,” I say. “I hate guns. I…can’t.”

  “Lei, I don’t care if you hate it,” Keali`i says. “You need it. This was expensive. You shouldn’t just toss it back at me like that.”

  “They DON’T MAKE US SAFER. Don’t you get it? Guns ATTRACT problems, they don’t solve them. Haven’t you learned anything this year? This island is a death trap for so many people. Everyone hoarded weapons—like Hank—so that they’d be safer in the end. But what really happened? NOW EVERYONE HAS GUNS! And we’re all shooting at each other all the time. IT’S COMPLETELY LŌLŌ!”

  “Lei!” Tami’s voice rises, incredulous. “Snap out of it. You’re—”

  “No! YOU snap out of it. You haven’t seen the things I have. All the freaking preppers out there…they self-fulfilled their own apocalypse! We could all be working together here. Instead we just defend what’s ours. Where’d you get it, anyway? What do you mean, expensive? What’d you pay for it?”

  Keali`i peers up at the sky, clearly exasperated. “You don’t…you don’t go asking that about a gift. It’s rude.”

  “No. Answer me. This is like the billionth time you show up with wild things that no one else can get. What’d you do? More favors?”

  “Lei.” He and Tami look to each other.

  “I won’t even consider taking that gun unless you tell me where it came from.”

  His jaw tightens. “You want to know?”

  I nod impatiently.

  “Will you take the gun if I tell you?”

  I nod. It’s a lie. I have no intention of keeping his gift. But I want to know what he’s going to say.

  “I’m Manō,” he says.

  Manō. I search for that word, watching his sober eyes.

  One of the major Tribes. The one centered in Papaikou.

  My voice fumbles. “What?”

  “I’m Manō.”

  I lean against the wall of the garage. “You…For how long?”

  Keali`i looks away. “Since before your mom offered me help,” he says.

  “The whole time I’ve known you?”

  He’s still averting his eyes. “Yeah, Lei. The whole time. I never said anything because I knew I’d be kicked out of the Tribe, or your house. I wanted to have both. I love your family, Lei. I love you and Tami. I—”

  “You’re Tribe,” I say.

  It all clicks. His intense anger at the Hanamen on the breakwater. He had that dive light that worked, the batteries. Items probably confiscated from someone else. The closed doors in his house—hiding loot. Ghosts. Tami. The meds. I turn to her. “And how long have you known?”

  She shakes her head defensively. “Lei…He told me when we started dating…that night we were playing cards.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “I tried! I was going to. I woke you up. I was shocked at first, too, Lei. Just calm down, okay?”

  He got the meds from his own Tribe. That’s why he biked toward my home—he was going to Papaikou! Was it the Manō who stormed the hospital, killing guards to hoard the antibiotics, so that patients died?

  I lunge forward, push Keali`i. “Get out!”

  “Lei,” he gasps.

  “Take your present with you. Who’d you steal that from?”

  “Lei, I don’t rob people! I’d never do that.”

  “Lei, stop!” Tami says. “He saved my life.”

  “You’re Tribe! Do you know how many honest people have been screwed, killed by you people? The Tribes are a nightmare for everyone.”

  “Unless you’re in one. Don’t you get it? We’re just looking out for what’s best—”

  “No. You don’t get it!”

  “It doesn’t matter to you that he saved my life?” Tami’s eyes are filling with tears. “Lei, you have a family. Keali`i had no one! I have no one.”

  “We’re good people, Lei. We take care of each other. `Ohana. Would you rather that sheriff run everything? We’re the only check against his power. Would you rather Tami had died? Would you have refused that gift if you knew how I got it? We watch this road, Lei. Guard it from below. My Tribe’s been protecting your family.”

  My knees go weak. I glance between them, unseeing. “There would have been no need for a gift if you hadn’t stolen the meds to begin with!”

  “That’s not true. If we didn’t take it, one of the other Tribes would have. Those meds would have been used on someone else’s friend.”

  “But the Manō let innocent patients die!” I crumple into the grasses beside the garage, shaking. “We fed Two Dog’s body to you sharks. Fed your war.”

  Tami is in tears. Keali`i’s words tumble in my mind. I remember only that he admitted to…his Tribe was responsible for raiding a hospital. “Go. GO! Both of you!”

  Keali`i frowns. “Where are we supposed to—?”

  “Go to Papaikou, why don’t you? Just…leave me alone.”

  “Lei, please!” Tami says.

  “GO!”

  Keali`i’s anger is masking shame. Deep shame. He snatches up his bag but lea
ves the gun behind. “Come on,” he tells Tami. They turn toward the house, Tami hobbling with her cane.

  “Take your stupid pistol, too!”

  He shakes his head, not turning. “It’s yours, Lei.”

  “I’m never touching it!” I shout.

  I watch them disappear into the house. I’m racked with waves of fury and shame. How could I treat them like that? But then I see Dad’s head again, the tip of the sheriff ’s gun at his skull, and I want to puke.

  My blood cools. I cry. Are they right? Isn’t Keali`i just doing the best he can, the best way he knows how? He lost his parents…he had no one. Like Tami—no one. And I sent them packing like mongrel dogs.

  Why aren’t there any rules anymore? Nothing—nothing—makes sense anymore.

  I rise, round the corner, stop on the lanai steps. I can’t leave that gun lying in the grass. What if Kai finds it? I don’t know if it’s loaded, but…the thought of Kai discovering it and tinkering with it makes me ill. I run over, pick it up between my thumb and forefinger, and toss it into the thick, thorny brambles that line our yard. He’ll never go crawling in there and find it, and it’ll rust shut. Time and decay are the only rules left.

  “It’s getting dark!” Dad calls through the screen door. “Who’s ready for some movie magic? Before it gets too late?”

  Grandpa complains, “Put that crazy ape movie on and make us all forget what a crazy ape world we live in, eh?”

  I laugh silently in spite of myself. Popcorn springs to life on the propane stove. I go inside. Dad’s beaming. “You good to go? Where’s Keali`i and Tami?”

  “They’re…” I shake my head. “Having a fight. Went to bed early.”

  Dad shrugs. “Their loss.”

  Grandpa heads upstairs, and Dad says, “You gonna watch with us?”

  “No, thanks. I prefer science fiction. Not really into documentaries.”

  We all laugh, but it dies off as we realize that Grandpa’s not joking.

  I’m really not in the mood, but Dad is looking glum, so I stay. Watching Buzz fire up the projector and seeing moving images on the blank wall and hearing sound proves to be an undeniable thrill. I could be watching the Wright Brothers pedal their first plane into the air. But as the slow film crawls on with lots of empty scenery and creepy music, I grow sleepy.