“Ella was obsessed with that old ghost town. She did drawings, made a photo album, did research. She did two different school papers on it.” Ruth sighed. “Ella was sad when they closed the outdoor school there a couple of years later. She’d dreamed of going back as a counselor when she was in high school.
It didn’t make sense. Mossville had been a bunch of moldy shacks from the 19th century. I remembered now, how Ella kept going on about it. She said, too, that the place was magical, that the moss glowed, and that that was why the settlers had built a town there. I hadn’t gone there, I’d gone to the coast for my outdoor school. I vaguely remembered her crying about the outdoor school closing. Something about Mossville being unsafe. Or maybe it was lack of funds. I couldn’t remember now, it had been years ago.
Mossville. Why would she go there now? Why would her cult go there? Maybe because no one would look for them there?
“It’s probably nothing,” Ruth said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Then why mention it?” I narrowed my eyes. Ruth didn’t seem right. I hated Thalik’s.
Were Keisha and I supposed to go to the Gorge just because Ruth thought Ella’s obsession meant something? The Song of Moss. I had no idea what that meant—I could hear plants, many sang, but not moss. Moss sort of whispered. I guessed it was metaphorical or something.
“What will you do if you find Ella?” Ruth asked. Her eyes were suddenly bright, locked on me.
“Save her.”
“How?’
“I’m going to keep her from winding up in Support, to stay safe.”
“How?” She repeated the question.
Damn it. I bit my lip to keep myself from snapping. “Find a place for her. For us.”
I couldn’t look at those bright eyes any more. I glanced down at my hands. I’d figure out a way.
“What if she’s already found that place?”
“It won’t last.”
She lifted her chin. “And you think you can do better?” For a moment, she was feisty again. That was what she was like when the medicine kept Thalik’s at arm’s length. Sure of herself.
It was like being grilled by Winterfield. I took a deep breath. “I have to.”
“Maybe the best thing is for you to bring her to the Hero Council, and you to continue working for Support.” She looked at me steadily. Her eyes gleamed. “You’re not on the run anymore.”
I almost blurted out that Support believed I was dead, and I wasn’t going back to work for them, but I kept my mouth shut.
She leaned forward, grabbed my hand, and squeezed. “I know you want to save her, but maybe that’s the only way.”
I’d tried finding a new home when I was sixteen and had just come into my super power. Hideaway hadn’t worked out so well for me; that was for sure. I’d been paroled at twenty one, and wound up being controlled by Support. Now that they thought I was dead, I had a chance to start things over again.
“You taking your medicine?”
She nodded. “Of course. It keeps me going, I’d be a fool not to.”
I wondered how long she’d keep getting it now that they thought I was dead. Guilt crawled up from deep inside me. If I had stayed in Support I wouldn’t be worrying about her super-expensive medication being cut off. Maybe they kept supplying the meds out of a sense of duty to what I’d done for them?
I barely kept from snorting. Not likely.
I’d keep checking in on Ruth. Maybe I’d caught a lucky break with Support.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t let Ella get killed.
The Song of Moss. Mossville. Guess Keisha and I were going there.
I pulled Ruth into a hug. “I love you, Grandma,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I’m thankful for that every day.”
I rubbed my eye again.
There was a knock on the door. I scrambled to my feet.
The door opened and Ava came in, followed by Keisha.
I frowned at Keisha.
She glared back for a second, then gave me a “hell-with-you” shrug.
Ava looked at Ruth and then nodded to Keisha. “Grandma, this is Mat’s friend Keisha. She wanted to meet you.”
Ruth smiled at Keisha. “You keeping my granddaughter out of trouble, young lady?” she asked.
“Trying, ma’am, but it’s pretty hard.” Keisha looked embarrassed. She should, since each of us tried half the time to keep the other out of trouble, and usually both of us screwed up.
“Well, I appreciate it, Keisha.” She coughed, waved us off when we both began to move to help her.
Keisha looked over at me. Guess I must have looked pretty worried, because Keisha’s expression was sympathetic. I swallowed.
“You going to help Mathilda find Ella?” Ruth asked when she could speak again.
Keisha nodded.
“Thank you,” Ruth said.
4
“I can see where you get your toughness from,” Keisha told me when we were back in the van.
“I’ll never be as tough as Ruth,” I said, “but I can try.”
Ava strode down the sidewalk toward the van, her chin up, face hard, back pack slung over her shoulder. She glared at me.
“She looks like you when you’re pissed off,” Keisha said.
“She doesn’t look anything like me.” Ava looked like she wanted to murder someone.
Keisha just laughed.
I rolled down the window.
“Sorry we can’t stay, sis,” I told her.
Her nostrils flared. “I’m coming with you.”
“The hell you are,” I said. I didn’t need my other sister getting hurt.
“She’s my sister, too,” Ava said. “My twin.”
There she went, throwing that twin stuff at me.
“You can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
Keisha fidgeted next to me. She didn’t want to be there.
“Because you might get hurt.”
“I can take care of myself.”
I bit back my first reply. “There might be Empowereds.”
“I have Ruth’s gun.”
I blinked. “I didn’t think Ruth still had one.”
“I can use it, too. Madison took me shooting with her family. I know how to handle firearms.”
This was all news to me.
“I’m not Empowered.” Ava looked at me defiantly. “So I can carry a gun. It isn’t illegal for me like it is for you.”
I wanted to flatten her right there for her stupidity. Little idiot. Okay, so she wasn’t that little, six feet tall, just a couple of inches shorter than me. But she was still an idiot. “You carry a gun around, you’ll end up trying to use it. Then you’ll get killed.” She might be a normal, but Support would still squash her if they couldn’t stun her. And if they stunned her while trying to stop her, she could still be charged with interfering with Support agents, or worse, sanctioned Empowereds of the Hero Council. Normals weren’t exempt from the law.
“You don’t know anything,” Ava snapped.
I shook my head. I started to turn the key in the ignition, but Keisha put a hand on my arm and leaned across me toward Ava.
“Who’s going to take care of Ruth if you aren’t there?” she asked Ava.
Ava looked away, chewed her lip, staring off into space. After a moment, her shoulders slumped. “Fine. I’ll take care of her.” She turned to leave, backpack dangling from her hand. She looked back at me. “You’d better find Ella,” she said. She turned away again and stomped off.
“Thanks,” I said to Keisha.
Her face went from calm to stubborn.
“You aren’t losing me that easily. Got that?”
I nodded. Nice to know Keisha was still Keisha underneath everything.
I drove us east on I-84 and into the Gorge. The sunny sky became cloudy, and the wind picked up, making the van shudder.
“I thought we were through with these damn storms,” I said. The paper at the greasy spoon had said so.
Rain started falling. I gripped the steering wheel. “You aren’t stopping me,” I told the rain, under my breath.
But the rain pounded harder, until the van started hydroplaning, and I had to pull off the road because the windshield wipers wouldn’t keep up.
“Damn it,” I said.
“Told you,” Keisha said.
“Shut up.” Anger filled me. The trees along the side of the road moaned in my head. They’d been roughed up the last couple of days from the mega-storm, and were afraid the wind was going to tear at them again. The trees across the Columbia River whimpered, and worried that the wind would topple them. My brain felt like it was going to explode. All around me the trees, and the sword ferns, the Scotch broom, everything that hadn’t been smashed flat by the storm all wailed, afraid. The trees loudest, the sword ferns echoing it, and the Scotch broom a whisper, not knowing anything more than the wind had picked up.
The trees across the river whimpered louder.
My power didn’t used to have that kind of range. Wearing the amplifier must have changed it. Thunder boomed. I could just see the hilltops in the rain storm.
I closed my eyes, throwing up a wall in my head between me and my power, trying to keep the freaking plant world’s screams out.
“Bad?” Keisha asked, her voice suddenly quiet.
I bit back an asshole remark. She was concerned. “Yeah. All the plants are screaming from the wind, those that weren’t flattened by that bitch of a storm.”
“You got the short end when it came to powers,” Keisha said.
I opened my eyes and looked at her. More sympathy again. She wasn’t giving me shit, she felt bad.
I shrugged. “It’s part of the deal.”
“Yeah, but it still sucks.”
I squirmed in my seat. Keisha and I didn’t usually play nice with each other. Felt weird to be getting so much sympathy from her.
We sat there in the van, not saying anything, as the rain pounded the rooftop and the van shook from the wind. Then, just like that, the wind stopped. The sun came out, and the water drops covering everything gleamed like diamonds.
I started the van and we drove off, heading further east along the highway. We passed a faded sign that said “Camp Jefferson” with a red line through it and “closed” slashed across the words. That had been the name of the outdoor school near Mossville that Ella had gone to. Closed now for years. I kept driving on I-84. A couple of miles later we rounded a curve and spotted a canyon.
Mossville was deep in a pine tree-filled canyon. At the far end of the canyon a waterfall spewed over a cliff. This had to be the place.
There was a gravel lot just off the highway, with a rutted-dirt road heading into the woods. I parked and we got out. I hefted my backpack over my shoulder. Keisha zipped up her leather coat, looked around at the moss-covered firs. “This is a sucky place for a town.”
She had that right.
I took the lead, and we entered the canyon. We kept having to step around mud puddles that covered the dirt road, and the old ruts filled with water. Brush had grown up between the trees.
“I hate the woods,” Keisha said. We walked for half a mile, reached a clearing and stopped.
Two hundred yards away we could see moss-covered, half-fallen wooden rooftops. The air was thick with the smell of green growing things, especially moss. I slowly lowered the wall in my mind and reached out with my sense.
It was like plunging into an ocean of electricity. Ripples spread across my skin. My blood tingled, like an electrical current shot through me.
“God,” I gasped. A mountain squatted on my head. I struggled to breathe, stumbled to my knees. The world, the crappy old falling down buildings, the moss covered trees, the sky above the cliff, all of it blurred. I tried to draw in another breath but the moss filled me, clogging my senses.
It was singing. Everywhere around me, filling all of me with an eerie melody like nothing I’d heard before.
I fought to wall my mind off but I couldn’t build it. The damn singing was too loud. I fell to my face as blackness smacked me right between the eyes.
Someone was swearing at me.
“Wake up, you asshole.” It sounded like it was far away. But getting closer.
“Damn it,” the angry voice growled. Angry enough to spit rocks, that kind of pissed off.
I coughed.
“Thank god,” Keisha said.
I sucked in air, and then gasped it out, coughing and blinking.
My face was wet. I tried to sit up, but it felt like some jerkwad had drained all my strength.
I brushed at my face. The rain was warm. Only it wasn’t rain. It was tears. Keisha was red-eyed.
“Don’t you ever do that again, bitch,” she said, her voice choked with tears.
“How long…” My voice was raw. “How long have I been out?” Keisha never cried.
She leaned down and pulled me into her arms, hugged me.
“Half an hour at least.”
I hugged her back. I’d been dead to the world for a half-hour?
Keisha helped me sit up.
My mind was quiet. No weird moss arias from heaven or hell or whatever that had been in my head. No rumbling from trees. No moaning of bushes or ferns. Silence. Had I managed to keep a wall between my power and me? Pretty incredible if I had, since I’d been out cold.
I took another breath, and my head cleared.
I got to my feet, Keisha stood alongside me, watching me like she thought I was going to fall over any second.
“I’m okay,” I said. I sounded annoyed even to my own ears.
She frowned. “Fine, Mat, be that way.” She crossed her arms and looked away, her jaw set.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Whatever.” She jerked her head at the ruined buildings. “We’re here at Mossville. Better get looking for Ella.”
I ground my teeth. I wanted to yell at her to cut me a break. I wanted to thank her for watching over me. I felt guilty as hell. I also was a bit scared, okay, more than a bit scared, over what had happened, but Keisha was right. We were here to look for Ella.
I strode down the trail until I reached the village, not looking back at Keisha. The trail ended and the remains of Mossville rotted in front of us.
It looked deserted. I walked up to what looked like an ancient general store. The slat boards were bone gray, and the flat roof had half fallen in.
The windows were boarded-up with plywood that had moss on it. Everything had moss on it, in fact.
My power was still silent. I didn’t try to summon it.
“What is it?” Keisha looked around, worried. “This place is creepy.”
I nodded. “But for some reason, I can’t sense any of the plants, the trees, not even the moss.”
Her eyes widened. “Fuck. What happened?”
My insides knotted up. “I don’t know. When I woke up, I couldn’t sense anything.”
“Have you tried?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Didn’t want to pass out again.”
She laughed suddenly, throwing her head back. “Yeah, I can see that.”
We walked around a big bush growing in a flat space between the bone-gray buildings. Past the bush stood a tiny, square-shaped building. Faded words above the windows and door said “Jail.”
“I don’t think you could fit in there,” Keisha said.
“And they couldn’t keep you in,” I quipped.
I rested my hand on the wood, felt the grain. Dead. My power didn’t let me feel dead wood, obviously, except for one time, when I’d been out of prison for just a few months, when I first was trying to infiltrate the Scourge, and staying in that house in North Portland. I think something about having to wear nullified cuffs for five years in Special Corrections had m
ade my power especially sensitive. Of course, that was before the two times I’d worn and used an amplifier.
Wearing the amplifier both times had been extremely dangerous, and so a stupid idea both times, but I hadn’t had any choice.
Or only bad ones, as Ruth might say.
The grain creaked in my head. The whorls in the wood hissed like a snake.
I yanked my hand back. I must be hallucinating. My hand trembled.
Keisha stepped back. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I think I’m still messed up from whatever knocked me out.”
She actually looked worried. “We’d better get this place searched and then get out.”
She was right, but I had to find out what Ella’s group had been doing here. I had to find them. Otherwise, the trail would be cold again, and those ruthless bastards in Support would find her. Or worse, some jerk in a blue jumpsuit who the world figured was a hero, but was just a chump following orders, who would do exactly what he or she was told, and if that meant killing a dangerous Rogue like my sister Ella, then they’d do it. It was only a matter of time.
We walked past two more buildings. Both roofs had collapsed. There was no sign anyone had lived here.
“Too bad your power can’t let you feel people who are near plants.”
“Funny,” I snarled. “Does yours let you feel people near steel?”
Keisha’s eyes narrowed, and her jaw tightened.
I closed my eyes. Why was I so pissed?
“Sorry,” I said.
Keisha shook her head. “You’re a rollercoaster, you know that?”
“Tell me about it. You’re right, it would be awesome if I could sense people near plants, through the trees or whatever.” When I could actually hear the plants, unlike now.
“I just figured that since the plants were living and the people were living.”
“It’s a good idea.”
“I don’t figure you,” Keisha said. “First you are pissed, as usual, and then you’re not.”
“Things have been weird lately.”
“And that’s different how?” There was a faint grin in her look.
Past Keisha, there was a tall building with a giant, rusting iron wheel inside and a wobbly wooden tower sticking up from it. A black hulk of iron, which looked like it had once been part of an old locomotive, sat next to the building.
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