by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 13, Wednesday 24 August
From shade to sun. Just a step, but all the difference in the world. I dragged the hand truck behind me, keeping the heavy bags of fertilizer balanced, and feeling a fresh layer of sweat break out on my sunburned neck. At the pallet near the fence, I let the hand truck go and grabbed the first bag, grunting as I shifted it no forward. The whole no muscle thing was catching up to me here; the sand had been bad enough, but each bag of fertilizer felt like it weighed a ton. I half-carried, half-dragged it to the pallet and let it fall. When I turned, there was Mr. Wood, staring at me.
The line of dirt leading from the hand truck to the pallet convicted me. Accusation: dragging and tearing the fertilizer bags. Verdict: Guilty. Mr. Wood didn’t say anything, but I could see the anger in his eyes. We just stared at each other, and I struggled to resist the urge to scratch—the dirt and sweat and sun made my arms itch.
“Sorry,” was just being born on my tongue when a middle-aged man stepped onto the lot, distracting both me and Mr. Wood from our staring match.
Middle-aged, paunch, the inside of his arms were pasty-white like store-bought biscuit dough. He looked like a painfully out of place accountant.
“Keith,” Mr. Wood said, his voice that strange register that all adults seem to learn how to use—you know the one, where they’re clearly angry about something, but trying to be pleasant to another adult. “Already back to the garden? Not a day of rest, it seems.”
“Not if I’m going to get my flowers ready in time for the Garden Society’s autumn competition.”
“You’re entering again? Keith, you have a great garden, but every year the same thing happens.”
The pudgy man gave a smile. “It doesn’t hurt to enter, does it? Besides, it gives me something to think about.”
Mr. Wood straightened up, his face a mixture of sorrow and discomfort. “Of course, come on in. What are you looking for?” Side by side, the two men walked into the store, but Mr. Wood shot me a glance that promised a continuation of our earlier encounter.
I didn’t care; I recognized that voice. The accountant named Keith was the same man I’d heard talking to Mr. Wood the other day. The man who had, if not exactly stood up for me, at least urged Wood to let the past go. The closest thing I’d heard to someone saying something nice about my family. Strange, how that made me feel some sort of friendship toward him.
With awkward steps, I hauled the next bag to the pallet, every bruise throbbing. Back and forth with the hand truck, then back and forth with the bags of fertilizer, my hands stained black from loose dirt, covering the scar on my wrist for a little while. No thought. Just stack the hand truck. Wheel the hand truck. Drag-lift the bag. Let out a breath as I straighten my cramping back. And then again. Hot and sweaty and, for a time, numb.
But thoughts crept in as my work slowed. Grandfather and the grower. I tried to break it down as logically as I could. Either the grower had survived, or he hadn’t. If he had survived, either he had defeated Grandfather, or he had tricked him. Either way, he was still practicing growing here, which meant, from the little I knew, bad business for West Marshall. Things like blood sacrifice. Things like sprawls, tearing up the graveyard. If the grower had survived, it explained at least the graveyard. And a part of me wanted to think that it explained the whole thing with Olivia’s brother and the accident. Maybe Olivia’s brother wasn’t responsible. I knew my mind was racing ahead of itself here, but I wanted to do something for her. To help her, somehow. If it hadn’t been her brother’s fault, well, that would change everything. But how could you figure something out like that? I would have to catch the grower. That was the only way. And they were far too dangerous to leave alive.
And if he hadn’t survived—well, I had less of an answer here. If Grandfather had fled town because of the police, after killing the grower, well, that made things more difficult. What could explain all those sprawls? Back to logic, or at least my attempt at it: either there was a grower here, or there wasn’t. If there was, it was either the one Grandfather had fought, or it was a new one. But if there wasn’t one—then what was causing the sprawls?
I tried to think through what I knew about growers. Grandfather’s obscure descriptions. Their association with pagan worship. With blood sacrifice. So they would need an altar, or a holy space, somewhere to shed blood. And that blood was somehow linked to their magic. They pour it into the land, Grandfather had said, and the land brings forth fruit.
And what the hell did that mean?
Quickening was straightforward, natural. It ran in my blood, in my genes. It was who I was. Who I used to be. The way it worked was simple: a quickener wore a ground, usually silver, that he used to absorb energy; electricity was the most conveniently available. Lightning was traditional. Fires, no matter how big, had too much chaos built into their energy; a quickener could draw from them, but it was slow and ineffective. That’s why, in the past, we called lightning. Today, every electrical outlet is like a lightning bolt waiting to be used.
The energy passes through the quickener, refined by the body, changing, becoming something else. Purer. And then it’s released through a focus, and here the metal changed—silver, gold, or copper were traditional, each with its own purpose. Depending on the focus, the way the energy manifested itself differed. A bolt of energy, like what I had seen destroy the sprawl. Electromagnetic fields. Those were basic, child’s play. The more precise the focus, the more complicated the effect. Projecting fields of light, kind of like a movie. Or dampening light. Invisibility. Transportation, of course. Moving in bursts of energy. All sorts of things.
So what did that tell me? Aside from the ache at the bottom of my gut that I felt every time I thought about what I had lost, nothing. I dropped the last bag of fertilizer on the pallet, my shoulders burning, and dropped to sit on the stack. With my upper arm, I wiped the sweat from my forehead.
And then I realized that both Mr. Wood and his customer, Keith, were standing at the counter inside, watching me.
I don’t know what Keith was thinking, but Mr. Wood’s thoughts were all too obvious. Anger written in broad lines across his face, his big arms crossed over his chest. Mr. Wood was a jerk, and he certainly hated my Grandfather (a hate that I had apparently inherited). He ran a garden supply store, which fit, as best I could tell, with Grandfather’s obscure comments about growing. But how to be sure?
They turned back to their conversation, and I started cleaning up the lot, getting ready to go home. Three things you needed for quickening: a source of power, a ground, and a focus. What if growing was similar? A source of power was easy: the blood sacrifice. What about a ground? Or a focus? What would a grower use?
And then it hit me. Their power is rooted in the earth, Grandfather had said. Could it really be that simple? Was Grandfather’s maddeningly obscure description perhaps more literal than I had realized? Could it be a plant, or something like that? I shivered as I looked around the lot, at all the plants and flowers and potted trees that surrounded me. Was one of them the ground or the focus for Mr. Wood’s growing?
But that wouldn’t make sense—it would have to be really rooted in the ground, for my theory to be correct. And large, old, if my theories about Grandfather and the grower were correct. Something that no one would ever suspect, because it was part of the town’s history, the town’s legacy. Something that was close to the cemetery, for that much power to bleed off and awaken sprawls.
The tree. That great tree with its twisted branches, right at the center of the cemetery. Where the bleed off of power would be enough to stir even West Marshall’s most distant ancestors. And where the grower could work in relative privacy. Or, if the grower really was gone, the tree was still close enough that it could be awakening a few sprawls with residual energy.
I walked back into the store, put the work gloves back, and started toward the front. Mr. Wood was alone now, working on the computer again. I swallowed against my nervousness; I had no quickening to p
rotect me, and the bruises and split lip that Chad and his friends had left me were a good reminder of that. But I wasn’t going to sit back and let a grower live, especially not when that grower might already be hunting my family. I eyed Mr. Wood’s back as I approached him.
There was only one way to be sure.