Dead End

  Finally, he said, "I shouldn't have said that about you not understanding."

  Cindy swiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. I thought I saw tears in her eyes, but they were gone before I could be sure. "Maria is my friend. I won't let you use her."

  Samuel stood statue-still for a full minute. He let out the long, deep-lung breath he'd apparently been holding. "Fair enough." His gaze shifted to me. "If you still want me to teach you, I will. But what Cindy said is true. It's dangerous. I would have told you, but I wanted you to help me. I was wrong."

  "Thank you." I reached for Cindy's hand, gave it a quick squeeze, released it. "You're a good friend."

  She smiled and the red blotches on her cheeks lightened. "So are you."

  I picked up a handful of sand, let it filter out through my fingers. "Despite what you've done, Samuel, I still want to learn. But you have to promise to be straight with me. If something is dangerous, I deserve a warning."

  "What level of danger merits a warning?" he asked.

  "How about you err to the side of caution and tell me everything."

  "Fine. Can we get started?"

  "We probably should. I told my grandpas I was studying at the library with Cindy. It closes at eight and I have to stop by for at least a few minutes so it's not a total lie." I didn't like lying to my grandfathers, even if it was for what I thought was a good reason.

  "I have a book on ancient herbal remedies to pick up, too." Cindy slid down the hill, landing on her feet. She kicked the worm bits away from the Divide, dug a hole in the sand with her shoe, and nudged the bits inside.

  "Why is she burying that thing?" I asked.

  Samuel glanced back over his shoulder. I had no idea what he was looking for, as there wasn't anything behind us save for the distant mountain range.

  "It's food," he said.

  "For who?"

  "Not who. What," he said. "Now let's get started."

  He scooted down the dune, leaving me standing alone with visions of worm-gobbling chupacabras dancing in my head.

  16

  Most people my age got to spend Fridays after school making questionable decisions about alcohol and drugs and birth control. I was way luckier than that. I got to get yelled at by Samuel.

  "Call your ability. Bring it to just below the surface. Keep it at a gentle simmer."

  I tightened my muscles, tried to force it to the surface.

  "Relax. Let it flow into you."

  This time I inhaled through my nose, exhaled through my mouth, then tried to force it to the surface.

  "You're forcing it."

  "How else am I supposed to make it work?"

  Samuel paced ten steps away from me, then ten steps back. "This is unreal. How do you not know anything about your own ability?"

  Offended, I said, "I know how destructive it is and I know how to suppress it. Don't tell me I don't know anything about my ability."

  His expression grim, Samuel nodded. "Fine. Do it again. This time, slide beneath it, ease it up the way you'd help a baby bird to fly."

  Cindy grinned. She'd plopped in the sand beside the ATVs and was quietly watching us.

  I shook my body the way I'd seen boxers do before a match. Rolled my neck, bounced on my toes, took another deep breath and reached.

  The earth trembled.

  "Slow down. Easy."

  "I'm trying. My ability is either off or on. There is no simmer setting."

  "You can control it. Cradle the energy in your palms, ease it upward."

  The ground shook beneath me and I dropped into sand up to my kneecaps.

  I tried again. Dropped to my thighs.

  Samuel waited for the trembling to stop, then edged close, toeing the line between solid ground and quicksand. I waded as close as I could to him and accepted his outstretched hand, letting him slowly pull me out and slide me over to hard-packed earth.

  "Again. Slowly."

  "Tell me why you want to get to my world so badly you're willing to risk going through a ripper," I said, "because I'd like to know exactly how far you plan to push me."

  "That's my business."

  "You were right before. It's his sister," Cindy yelled.

  "How do you know so much about me?" Samuel yelled back.

  The red blotches sprang to her cheeks again. "It's a small town."

  It was the truth. Dead End was a small town. But I had the feeling there was more to Cindy's knowledge of Samuel than town gossip. I wasn't telling him that, though. Girlfriends stick together.

  "What happened to your sister?"

  "She went through a ripper. I want to get her back. Now concentrate."

  "Had a feeling it was something like that." I did the body-shake thing again. "You could have just told me. I understand what it's like to be separated from the person you love most in the world."

  He scowled at me. "Concentrate."

  "So we're not bonding?" I gave him an over-the-top sad face. "Aww, I was so hoping for a hug."

  Cindy snickered.

  "Maria…"

  I reached for my ability again. This time I didn't close my eyes. This time I stared right at a ripper and let loose.

  Not my greatest idea, seeing as how the ripper immediately doubled in size and let out a sonic boom sort of crack that I felt in my chest.

  "Be careful," Cindy said. But she might as well have been in another universe with Samuel and the animal bones and the cattle carcasses. My entire focus was on that glimmering rip in the fabric of the world.

  I pushed a little harder, and the ripper quadrupled in size. In the upper right corner, the mirror image surface swirled. It reminded me of a whirlpool on a calm lake.

  A whip-whooshing noise, like the sound of the silty wind during a dust storm, made it hard to hear anything but the beating of my own heart.

  "Maria, reel it in. You aren't ready for this." Samuel's voice was a mouse whisper from a mile away. I could barely make out the words.

  Another push, and the whirlpool cleared. Through it I spied a sliver of the night sky, which was odd, since it was the middle of the day. I wanted to see more, so I gave another push.

  And another.

  The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back. The ground was shaking so hard I'd sunk several inches into the sand.

  "Look." Samuel pointed to the corner where the sky was still visible. A large bird with a red featherless head and two-toned black-brown wings flew toward the opening.

  I cringed, recalling what had happened to the thing Cindy had thrown at the ripper, but the bird didn't disintegrate or slice in half. It soared through the ripper with no resistance, and landed on the pile of dead bones.

  Cindy jogged up to us. "What the goddess is that?"

  The bird glared at me through shiny brown eyes. Hissed.

  "Looks like a buzzard," I said.

  "That's not a Sanctum buzzard." Samuel couldn't seem to take his eyes off the thing.

  "Vulture, then." I made a note to find out what a Sanctum buzzard was.

  The bird flapped its wings, hopped off the bones, and stomped toward us.

  "He looks angry," Cindy said.

  I shrugged. "He just looks like a vulture to me."

  "No, Cindy is right. He looks mad." Samuel glanced up at Cindy. "You wouldn't happen to have brought two limpid worm larvae, would you?"

  With a proud smile, she produced another fat, wriggling larva from her sweatshirt pocket. A string of mucus extended from the worm to her shirt. "I was worried the first one wouldn't work."

  I frowned at her. "We are bleaching that sweatshirt, Cindy."

  Samuel took the thing from her and chucked it at the buzzard. The bird snatched it up, then flew toward the mountains outside Dead End with its prize dangling out of its mouth.

  "Nice throw," I said, "now help me up."

  Cindy peered at the shallow hole I was lying in. "Maria, the ground is still shaking."

  I'd noticed, seeing as how I was now lying in a two-foot-deep hole with
a blanket of sand over me.

  Samuel said, "Relax your hold on the power inside you. Let it spin out until there's nothing left."

  I did as he said. By the time I regained control—Had I ever actually had it? —the hole was four feet deep.

  Samuel did an army crawl to the edge of the hole. "Where did all the sand go?"

  "Below the surface," I said, dusting myself off. "Help me up."

  He went flat on his belly and reached over the edge. I grabbed his extended hand. With him pulling and me using my legs and free hand to climb, I made it out. I didn't know what his ability was, but I wouldn't have been surprised if it was some supernatural weightlifting power. The guy was athletic and very strong.

  We climbed to the top of the dune where Cindy was waiting, and squinted at the ripper.

  Samuel grinned. "It's closed now. You did it."

  "It's still there," I said.

  "Yes, but it's closed. That's the important thing."

  "It's also bigger." About four times as big as it had been when I started messing with it. "Should we be worried?"

  There was a rumbling and a trembling beneath us, and then the short dune we were standing on collapsed in on itself, dumping all three of us on our butts in the sand.

  "Yes." Cindy stood and dusted off her shorts. "I think we should."

  Every day for the next week, I went to Samuel's house after school and practiced in his backyard. Cindy came, too. She said she wanted to be sure he didn't try to deceive me again, and I believed her. But I also thought she might like being near Samuel. It was pretty obvious he liked being near her.

  "Concentrate."

  "Sam, if you say that one more time, I'm going to open up a hole in the ground and drop you in it."

  "I'll stop saying it if you start doing it. And my name is Samuel. My dad's name was Sam."

  "I'm trying. Shut your face and let me focus, Sammy."

  This exercise was about control. Samuel's idea was to have me "dig" holes with my ability and cover them back up. So far, I was able to make a hole long enough to lie down in, six feet deep, and cover it back up. A grave. I was pretty proud of that.

  Samuel was less proud. He was impatient and pushy, and getting on my last nerve. "Get moving."

  Cindy's, too. "We've been at this for three hours. Give her a break."

  "Take a break at home. We only have another half-hour before the first of my neighbors gets home from work, and she needs to double the size of that hole without losing control and pulling someone's tool shed underground."

  "Double it, why?" Cindy asked.

  "I told you I was sorry about that," I said.

  He glared at me. "It's about control, Cindy."

  Wincing, I continued, "I pushed the shed back up. Sure, it's a little caved in, but—"

  "Concentrate," he snapped.

  I did, and this time the hole was bigger, though not double the size. My head hurt and my nose was running. I was so done.

  I sniffed. "I think I'm allergic to something in your backyard, Samuel."

  Cindy handed me a tissue she pulled from her front pocket. "You have a bloody nose." She rounded on Samuel. "We're done for the day."

  "Cindy…" I began.

  "Abilities don't come without a price," Samuel said.

  "Push her too hard and you'll lose your tool to get through the Divide." Cindy was like a wolverine when she felt I was threatened. I don't think I'd ever had a friend who defended me so passionately.

  I slung my arm around her shoulders. "I'm okay. We'll do another ten minutes and then head home. Grandpa Holli's making paella. Want to stay for dinner?"

  "Oh, my goddess, yes. We're having kale again. Kale. I will walk through the first ripper you stabilize if you tell me there's no kale on the other side."

  "Sorry."

  "Ugh. I should have known a stubborn vegetable like that wouldn't be content to be only on one plane of existence."

  I had just closed another not-big-enough hole, when Samuel's head shot up. He cocked it to one side, looking a lot like Toby when he hears the mail carrier on the street outside.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  He held his finger to his lips to shush me. Closed his eyes. Tipped his head from side to side.

  Cindy and I looked at each other. Shrugged.

  Samuel's eyelids popped open and he ran for the gate. "Need to alert emergency services. We've got a horde coming our way."

  "Horde?" I looked at Cindy. "Horde of what?"

  "Worms."

  17

  "Can't you just call an exterminator?"

  "No, because the phones have been non-functional since the last full moon." Cindy was clearly a better runner than I was, because I was huffing out every word between desperate gasps of oxygen.

  "So what … do you do, write … letters?" Strangely, that idea horrified me almost as much as the worm horde. Dad used to make me write thank you notes for birthday gifts, and by the time I got them all written it was practically my birthday again.

  "Or telegrams. The telegraph in the basement at City Hall works most of the time."

  Telegraph? Guess I could kiss my cell phone goodbye. I pumped my arms and sprinted to keep up with her.

  "How did he—" I pointed to Samuel, who was way ahead of us. Or, I should say, pointed to the dust cloud he'd left in his wake, because I sure couldn't see him. "—know the worm horde was coming?"

  "Samuel is a Seismo."

  "Which means?"

  "Long story short, he hears really well. He can track vibrations above and beneath the earth, and pinpoint the location of a disturbance with near-perfect accuracy."

  I slowed down a little. "Guess I know … how he figured out I was … an earthmover."

  "That or he just assumed. Everyone knows your grandpa is one."

  "So, how do you know all this … about Samuel?"

  "Everyone knows. Samuel is a legacy talent. He comes from a long line of Seismos. When an ability is passed through families in its purest form, it gets stronger for every successive generation. I've heard rumors that Samuel is a seventh generation Seismo. That makes him very strong."

  "Wonder how many of us have had earthmover abilities. I'm sure of three, at least."

  "It's probably more. You're also strong."

  We jogged a little slower. I suspected it was because Cindy felt sorry for my lack of athleticism. It had been three years since the swim-team tryouts, and it showed.

  "Hey, Cindy?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Do you think Samuel's hot?"

  "Hot?"

  "You know, good-looking. Cute."

  "Wow, what a great way to put it. He's definitely hot." She clamped her teeth together on the last T. Every time I used a word in a way she wasn't familiar with, she latched onto it with the tenacity Toby reserved for his favorite chewy.

  "You like him?" I waggled my brows at her. "You know, like him, like him?"

  "Even if I did, it wouldn't matter. He's an Elite and I'm a lesser."

  "That shouldn't matter if you like some—"

  "Holy Beyond." Cindy's eyes were wide and unblinking, her voice hushed. "I've never seen so many at once."

  We skidded to a halt in the middle of the street in front of Chuck's Exotic BBQ, across from McCarty & Martin's Grocery, and catty-corner from Planke's Metallurgy & Energetics. Dr. Pacifico's dental office was on the corner of Dead End Avenue and Main Street, and City Hall was a block away toward the middle of town. There were a couple of other storefronts on the short street, but they either had no sign or the business name was written in symbols I didn't understand.

  "This isn't normal?"

  "No."

  There was a part of me that was glad of that there might not be any emergency measures in place to deal with it. That it wasn't a normal Dead End occurrence.

  I grabbed Cindy's arm, pulling her into the narrow alley between the grocery and a shop that sold what appeared to be some sort of incense. When I was sure the creature couldn't see us,
I let go of her and shook my head it to clear it.

  "Dang, that thing has a loud hiss."

  Cindy did the same. "Yeah, well, look at the size of it."

  The hissing limpid worm was coiled like a fat bedspring in the middle of the street. It was twice the size of the one that had tried to eat Toby, and there were four of them.

  Five. No, seven.

  Seven ten-foot-tall, five-foot-wide, clear-skinned worms.

  The hisser dragged its large body into a half circle and lurched down the street behind the others. Now all seven were undulating in the direction of the high school. Unfortunately, Sunshine Elementary was a block closer.

  As if on cue, three of the worms banked right and slithered toward the elementary school.

  "Isn't school out?" I asked.

  "Yes, but there are afterschool programs. Mr. Skip teaches chess."

  We followed the worms that had diverted toward the school, keeping our distance. A group of five elementary students huddled beneath a tree that looked like a palm—but one could never be certain in Dead End. Mr. Skip, a mostly human-looking male with a bird-like face, was doing his best to shield the kids, his winged arms spread wide.

  "Why don't they run?" I asked Cindy.

  "They can't. Look."

  The three worms halted in front of the group. One of the worms let out a pulsating sound I'd only heard in documentaries about killer whales.

  "What the heck? It's using echolocation to find them."

  "How do you know about echolocation?" Cindy asked.

  "Some animals from my side of the Divide use it instead of sight. Bats, dolphins…"

  "You're right. The worms are blind, so they respond to the reflection of the sound to identify objects. People. The tree is helping to confuse the sound reflection. It's hiding the children, but it won't last long." Cindy let out a whoosh of breath as the noisy worm thumped the ground in front of the tree with its head. "Oh no. It found them."

  My feet started moving almost before I made the decision to run. A wailing alarm rang out over the city. Samuel had finally reached Emergency Services. Problem was, even if he showed up now, he'd be too far from the children to do anything.