by W. J. May
The two boys locked eyes, and the message that passed between them was clear as day.
Simon Kerrigan knew better.
Chapter 4
“FOR BLOODY SAKE, SIMON!” Tristan slammed the door of his car and stormed back up the grass bordering the Guilder parking lot. “Why the hell did you even take me there?”
Simon jumped out of the car as well and raced to catch up. The entire drive back from London had been one big passive-aggressive silence, and it took him a second to change course now that the two of them were talking. “I brought you there because I wanted your—”
“My what?” Tristan whirled around. “My blessing?”
Strangely enough, the paleness to his skin and the bruises beneath his eyes from sleeplessness made him look even more intimidating than usual. Also strange—and most unfortunately timed—the deadening weakness and fatigue that had accompanied his recovery thus far seemed to have momentarily lifted in the midst of all the adrenaline.
Simon took a deep breath and tried to rein in his own anger. “I wanted your advice,” he finished, glancing around to make sure the two of them were alone. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, Tris. I don’t know what the next step is.”
Tristan gave him a long look, betraying not a hint of emotion. “You want my advice?” he finally said. “Go to Jason.”
Go to Jason.
Those same three words had looped in Simon’s head more times than he could count. All he wanted to do was tell Jason. From the first time that Beth and he had stood in the empty living room and she’d shot blue sparks from her hands, he’d wanted to tell Jason.
There was just one little problem.
“I can’t.”
Tristan threw up his hands. “Come on, Simon—”
“I can’t!” he said again, louder this time. “He’ll take her away from me. We can’t hide the fact that we’re together. Not indefinitely. Not from everyone.”
Tristan’s face grew cold. “You shouldn’t be together at all.”
Simon resisted the urge to hit him. He had just woken up from a coma after all. But just a few feet away, Tristan seemed to be trying to resist the same thing.
“There are rules in place for a reason, Simon,” he continued forcibly. “You know them—she doesn’t. This is on you. And now she’s sitting in that empty apartment, waiting on some life and some future that the two of you are never going to have.”
“And who says we can’t have it?” Simon cried. The sudden escalation stunned them both to silence, though neither one gave up an inch of ground. “Who says it—them?!” He pointed up towards the school with a look of the deepest loathing. “I LOVE her, Tristan. Who the hell are they to tell me who I can and can’t love?”
Tristan gritted his teeth, reining in his frustration as thoughts of little Davey and his heartbroken parents flashed behind his eyes. “They don’t say it arbitrarily, Simon! The rules are in place for a reason. Mixing ink is dangerous, and never for anyone more than the child. To do it on some kind of a whim—”
“What if it was Mary?” Simon asked suddenly, silencing his friend where he stood. “What if Mary turned sixteen and found out she had a tatù? Would you stop loving her?”
Tristan froze dead still, and for the first time his face softened the slightest degree. Then he bowed his head, spilling his hair in front of his eyes. “I could never stop loving her,” he said softly. Simon’s muscles began to relax, but then he looked back up with feeling. “But I wouldn’t stay with her either. I wouldn’t take away her future.”
Simon’s jaw fell open, and for a split second he was too stunned to speak. “Take away her future,” he finally repeated, the words sounding strange in his ears. “All I want to do is give Beth a future.”
It seemed so simple. And yet...
“Come on, Simon. You’re smarter than this!” Tristan paced a few steps away in anger before whirling back around. “So you two stay together—what then? You get married? Decide one day that you want to have kids?”
Simon clenched his jaw, glaring as his best friend ripped apart his illusions one by one, right in front of his eyes.
“Except that you can’t,” Tristan hissed. “You could never have children with her! Just imagine the weight of both your tatùs mixed together! You would put that on a child? You would risk your own child like that?!”
Simon had never heard him so angry. And somehow, so rehearsed. This was a speech he had either heard, or considered for himself many times.
“And even if somehow you did, and somehow the child was okay, that child could most certainly never risk having children for themselves! You’d be taking away their future as well!” His face turned dark as his eyes flashed in the setting sun. “People are meant to have families. That’s the whole freaking point. You stay with Beth now—you take that away from her. And that’s not love.”
Simon took a step back. It felt as though something had died inside him. He looked Tristan up and down as a horrific feeling of dread rose up deep in his chest. “You think so badly of hybrids?” His voice barely carried over the grass. “Like they’re some kind of abomination? That they shouldn’t even be born?”
“Give me a break! Of course not.” Tristan ran his fingers back through his hair, looking suddenly tired. “Hybrids happen; it’s by no fault of their own. I don’t hold it against them. But they do.” He lifted a hand and pointed up at the school. “Because they know how dangerous they can be, to themselves and to others. And they’re right about that, Simon. Hybrids are volatile. The ink is unstable, and most of the time the person they end up hurting is themselves. The only abomination is putting a kid in that kind of danger in the first place.”
It grew suddenly very quiet between them. Only the sound of their heavy breathing filling the air. When Simon finally looked back up, there was a dark anger brewing deep in his eyes. “You’re wrong about Beth,” he said quietly. “And you’re wrong about the hybrids. I wouldn’t be taking away her future by staying with her. I’d be giving her one. With me.” Another swell of anger rose up inside him. “Just look at Paul and Kate. Do you think they regret having Davey? Do you think they wish he’d never been born?”
There was a slight pause, as the very air between them seemed to cool.
“No, I don’t think they regret him.” There was a fractured sigh, and Tristan’s face grew suddenly very sad. “But look at where he ended up.”
It was that sadness that broke down Simon’s rage. The pure, protective intentions behind everything Tristan had said melted away any disagreement they might be having, and Simon was suddenly hyper-aware of the fact that he’d dragged his best friend all over London and sucked him into a wild conspiracy, all while he was in a dangerously precarious state. “Come on,” he said softly, gesturing up to the school. “Let’s get you back up those stairs.”
It was an olive branch he wasn’t used to extending, but Tristan was not the enemy here. In fact, when this whole thing was over, Tristan might turn out to be his only remaining friend.
There was a brief pause, then Tristan nodded.
With a painful grimace he threw his arm around Simon’s shoulder, and together the two boys began climbing the grassy hill that led back to Guilder. They had almost made it all the way to the third floor when he suddenly stopped Simon in his tracks.
“Talk to Jason,” he urged, lowering his voice so their conversation wouldn’t be heard. “He can help you. Whatever it is you decide...he can help.”
A nervous tremor ran through Simon’s entire body, and he shook his head, looking pale. “I can’t risk it.”
“Simon...” Tristan paused a moment until a group of students passing them made it to the other side of the hall. “I don’t think you can risk not to. That’s some powerful ink she has.”
An image of Beth flashed behind Simon’s eyes, those icy blue flames spreading slowly over her entire body until they consumed her where she stood.
But with the taste of her goodbye kiss still
fresh on his lips, he shook his head again. “No. I can help her work through it. We’ll be fine just the two of us. Together.”
He had the ability to copy her. He had the schooling and been taught the steps to master one’s ability. He had enough. He had to.
If only wishing made it so...
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, Simon suffered more second-degree burns than most circus performers did in a lifetime. It got to the point where he had to invent some ridiculous excuse, like, ‘I’ve taken up welding’ just to satisfy the constant stream of questions coming to him from Dr. Stein. While Beth’s control over her fire was showing little sign of improvement, the fire itself was getting stronger and stronger every day. When he copied her tatù, it stopped the burning of his own fire, which he could barely get started, but it didn’t stop Beth’s. He refused to use it then, in case he hurt her. So they kept working on her ability. They even had to pry off the smoke alarm stuck to the wall of the apartment and stuff it in the sock drawer for safe keeping.
But it wasn’t just Simon’s training sessions with Beth that were getting out of control. It was his feelings for her as well.
Aside from the excruciating burns, the last few weeks had been...well, heaven.
Simon had never known he could feel so completely, blissfully happy. Never knew that a person like him could abandon all pent-up frustration and aggression, and allow himself to simply breathe. One look at her sparkling blue eyes, one touch of her porcelain skin, and all the raging darkness inside him gentled to a troublesome cloud. Easy to ignore. Easy to forget entirely.
She was a balm to soothe even his deepest fears. A ray of light shining through the fog.
And he wasn’t the only one to feel it.
A few days after his and Tristan’s stand-off in the parking lot, they seem to come to an unofficial sort of truce. The problems that divided them were years away in the future, so with a little prompting it was actually relatively easy to put them aside for the present.
By the end of the first week, Tristan returned with him to the apartment in London. This was partly because Beth was lonely and dying for outside friends. And partly because both of Simon’s hands were bandaged with a soothing balm to ease any lingering scorches beneath the surface. Needless to say, he was a bit useless around the house.
It had been meant to be only a simple dinner, a tense ‘break the ice’ sort of thing. But much to everyone’s surprise, Tristan began training with Beth after dinner.
It was actually quite impressive, the difference between his and Simon’s styles. While Simon was all positive encouragement, breaking every few minutes to pull her into his arms, Tristan was a tough teacher. Fair, but tough. At times Simon thought he was a bit too tough, and didn’t hesitate to loudly tell him so, but Beth didn’t seem to mind. Quite the contrary, she rose to the occasion.
Of course, her ‘rising to the occasion’ meant that her unstoppable fire ‘rose to the occasion’ as well. By the next morning, Tristan had ‘taken up welding’, too.
It was a hectic balance splitting his time between the apartment in London, his training with Jason, and his time as a student back at school, but all in all Simon welcomed the challenge. It kept him from thinking about other things. Things that were weighing heavily on his mind.
First and foremost was his other best friend, the one who had vanished to the farthest reaches of Scotland.
Argyle had written Simon a letter almost every day that he had been away—all demanding the same thing: Look out for my sister (I know she’s with you), and leave her alone. While the two instructions might have seemed counterintuitive, Simon knew exactly what he meant. But while he would respect the first of them with his life...he couldn’t bring himself to manage the second.
The letters were stacked in an empty suitcase beneath his bed. Growing in size every day. No response had ever been sent.
The next thing troubling him was the discreet, but steady, disappearance of his friends.
One by one, the students he’d befriended at Guilder stopped showing up for school. They were nearing their final year, the year of PC recruitment, so no one else thought this was at all strange. However, Simon couldn’t help but notice that the bulk of the kids leaving had been members of a certain study group. One which had continued to meet in secret every week.
But instead of being a welcome release, the HOC thing had become yet another thing weighing heavy upon Simon.
Membership had swelled despite the fact that they were slowly hemorrhaging members, and it was getting harder and harder to keep the whole thing under wraps. Perhaps more importantly, Simon was feeling increasingly less inclined to keep the secret himself.
His secret double life with Beth had brought forth in him a new boldness. A defiant confidence that surpassed anything he’d felt before. Instead of lowering his voice in the hall when he talked about his ‘study group,’ he now loudly flaunted it. By now, most everyone at the school knew that he hosted some sort of secret society, although none of them were sure what exactly it was. As if that wasn’t enough, he’d begun speaking out in class. Brazenly voicing his opinions, though all his more cautious instincts warned him not to. Just last week, he had interrupted a lecture of Professor Lanford’s—arguably his favorite teacher—with a dissenting proclamation to the text.
Today looked to be more of the same...
“And it’s for that reason that the Council instituted the age limit back in the late forties in the time after the Second World War,” Lanford had been explaining, gracing the students with an impromptu history lesson. “It was thought that, due to the risk of exposure, they should...” He paused suddenly in his speech, peering at Simon over the top of his glasses. “Yes, I’m sorry Simon, I didn’t see you there. Was there something you’d like to add?”
As one, the class swiveled around in their chairs to where Simon had stood up suddenly in the center of the room. His chest swelled with importance as he pulled in a deep breath. “Pardon the interruption, Professor,” he began, “but I just couldn’t help but notice that your entire lecture is predicated upon the fact that there is indeed a risk to exposure.”
The sea of faces around him blanked in confusion, and even Lanford shook his head with a slight frown. “I’m sorry, Simon, I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
Simon smiled. A strange, humorless smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I was wondering at what point the Council decided that exposure was something to be avoided at all. Why not embrace these powers? We’re clearly given them for a reason.”
This time, the response that followed his proclamation was much more pronounced. A wave of hushed conversations splintered across the room as Lanford continued to stare in amazement.
“You would suggest that we live publicly?” he asked incredulously, looking as though his new comb-over was about to blow right off his head in surprise. “Out in the open, for all to know?”
Simon grinned coldly. “I’m not suggesting anything, Professor. Merely asking why it’s never been discussed.”
The buzzing around him grew louder, and Lanford actually had to slap his hand down on the desk in an attempt to reclaim the attention of the class. “Quiet!” he shouted. “Quiet down!”
They did quiet, but only slightly. By now, Lanford’s face was a stunning shade of scarlet. Simon almost felt sorry for him. “I believe what Mr. Kerrigan was trying to say, was simply that—”
But at that moment, there was a sudden knock on the door.
The room quieted down at once, and there was an irritable ‘come in’ from Lanford. But when the door swung open, Simon was the only one surprised to see Tristan standing on the other side.
He knew at once that something was wrong.
Despite his seemingly calm façade, Tristan’s clothes were singed and dusted with ash, there was a small burn running up the side of his face into his hairline, and no matter how hard he tried to keep still one of his hands kept twitching against his leg like it was
trying to regain feeling.
“Mr. Wardell,” Lanford looked just as shocked as Simon, and just as concerned. “Whatever is the matter—”
“I’m sorry, Professor,” Tristan interrupted as politely as he could, the hand twitching even faster, “but could I borrow Simon for a moment?”
Lanford took a step back in surprise as Tristan and Simon locked eyes. Yes, something was very wrong indeed. It took quite a bit to make Tristan look scared, but he looked that way now. And his pointed, panicked stare told Simon that he was coming along whether or not he got permission to do so.
Simon pushed tentatively to his feet. “Professor?” he asked in a far demurer voice than the one he’d just been using to argue.
The poor teacher looked twice between them before throwing up his hands. “Fine, as you wish. But Mr. Kerrigan, you’ll be making up the remaining time with me after class tomorrow.”
Simon waved over his head, already out the door. “Yes, sir!”
He and Tristan took off at a sprint, Simon automatically following his lead until they came to a stop at the base of Joist Hall. It was here that he grabbed Tristan’s arm—half to stop him, and half to steal his tatù in case there was any more sprinting involved.
“Damnit, Simon.” Tristan flinched away, caught off guard by the burn. “I told you, tell me before you do that!”
“Whatever.” Simon was in no mood to be distracted. “What’s going on?”
At once, Tristan’s face grew abruptly grave. “Okay, first of all...you need to know that everyone’s okay. So there’s no need to freak out, alright?”
Just hearing the words freaked Simon out more than he’d been in his entire life.
“Tell me what’s going—”
“There was a little accident with Beth’s fire today.”
Simon blinked, mind racing at the speed of light. “Little accident like...she set fire to the drapes again? Or little accident like...she burned down the entire apartment complex.”
Tristan bit his lip.