Elemental Power

by Rachel Morgan

  “So,” she said, turning to face him with a soup ladle in one hand. “You told me you need to leave Lumina City because it’s too dangerous for you to stay, even inside this apartment, but apparently it’s not too dangerous for you to go out in the bright light of day?”

  With an amused curve of his lips, Grandpa said, “It was the bright light of day that convinced me to go out. I didn’t want to miss the rare opportunity to spend some time in the sun.”

  Ridley pointed the ladle at him. “That, I’m pretty sure, is not true.”

  “It is true, although it’s only part of the truth.” Grandpa eased himself onto a chair at the kitchen table, then reached down to rub his left knee. “There was someone I needed to see. And I was very careful, don’t worry. I even wore a disguise. A hat and a fake mustache. Horrible bushy thing. Quite itchy.”

  “I have no idea now if you’re making this up.”

  He laughed. “Check the filing cupboards in the back room downstairs. You’ll find my dress-up kit hiding there. It probably wasn’t even necessary, considering no one’s actively looking for me anymore. But it’s always good to be careful.”

  “If no one’s actively looking for you, and it’s so easy to get around without anyone recognizing you, then why not stay longer?”

  Grandpa let out a heavy sigh and moved to rubbing his other knee. “I wish I could, but I can’t. I’m sorry, Ridley.”

  She nodded, saying nothing, then turned back to stir the contents of the pot on the stove. She told herself not to be upset that Grandpa had other things to do that were more important than getting to know his granddaughter. He had a life somewhere else that he needed to get back to. A life that didn’t include her.

  “It isn’t that I don’t want to spend time with you,” he said. Apparently he could read her body language as clearly as if she’d spoken her thoughts out loud. “I would love to stay longer. But there are things I need to get back to.”

  She nodded again and placed the ladle on a plate beside the stove. It’s fine, she told herself. This is fine. Don’t ruin the one evening you have with him. But it seemed her brain wouldn’t listen to her, and as she faced Grandpa again, she asked, “Do you think about us? Do you miss us?”

  “Every day,” he answered immediately. He rose from the chair. “I wonder every day what life would be like for our family if I’d never had to leave. I think about you every day. I wonder about the kind of person you’ve grown into, your hobbies, your friends, all the things you’re good at.”

  Ridley’s legs seemed to move without her permission, and then her arms were around Grandpa, and he was hugging her tightly, and she felt like a little girl again. “I’m so, so sorry I had to leave,” he murmured. “You understand why, don’t you?”

  “I do,” she whispered, because speaking any louder would probably make her voice crack beneath the emotion she was trying to hold back. She cleared her throat and stepped out of the embrace. “Is, um, is Dad coming up soon?”

  “He closed the store early and left at about the same time I got back. Said he needed to go visit an old friend who might know something about Shen.”

  Ridley crossed the kitchen to turn the stove off before turning to Grandpa again. “So he’s avoiding you.”

  Grandpa’s gaze slid away from Ridley, but he said nothing as he sat.

  “He hasn’t seen you in, what, almost twelve years?” Ridley continued as she leaned against the counter. “And he decides he has to go and see this friend of his tonight instead of some other night?”

  “Yes, well.” Grandpa sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “I had no idea you and Dad had such a dysfunctional relationship.”

  “We didn’t. Things were mostly fine until the whole …” He waved his hands as if trying to come up with the right words.

  “The whole faking-your-death-and-disappearing thing?” Ridley supplied.

  “Yes. That. We disagreed. And once we started arguing about that, all the other issues began to resurface. Things we probably should have spoken about years before.”

  “Things?”

  “Oh, you know. Just family stuff. People are people. We make mistakes, hurt each other, hold on to grudges, don’t communicate properly. All these things fester over time if you don’t deal with them. You think nothing’s wrong until one thing upsets the balance, and then everything implodes.”

  “Wow. You make it sound like some dramatic soap opera.”

  Grandpa chuckled. “It’s really not that bad. Just people being people.”

  “Okay. If you say so. But I still think Dad should be here tonight.”

  “So do I, but it’s his choice.” Grandpa leaned his elbows on the table. “Are you still angry with him because of all the secrets?”

  Ridley let out a long breath and reached back to twist the end of her ponytail around her finger. “Only a little. I understand why he kept everything from me, so that helps. I still wish he hadn’t, but we can’t go back and change that, so …” She trailed off, shrugging and lowering her hand.

  “That’s good,” Grandpa said. “Life is far too short to hold on to anger.”

  “See?” Ridley said. “Dad should be here. You should be telling him that, not me, because clearly he’s still mad at you.”

  “Yes. We have spoken about this, but, as I said, it’s complicated. Anyway.” He nodded to the pot on the stove and asked, “What are you making?”

  “Oh, uh …” Ridley glanced at the mushy contents of the pot. “A super spectacular gastronomic creation.” When Grandpa did nothing but peer at Ridley over the top of his glasses, she sighed. “It’s just three-bean and barley soup. Nothing fancy.”

  Grandpa nodded, a sad smile finding its way onto his lips. “A world away from the types of meals your parents used to enjoy making in their state-of-the-art kitchen in Aura Tower.”

  “I know, but you can’t get half the food Mom and Dad used to cook before the Cataclysm. We all survive on whatever’s available now. Well, unless you have buttloads of money to spend on rare ingredients.” Her mind flashed briefly to the fancy restaurants in the Opal Quarter where people like the Davenports were frequent patrons. “Uh, are you ready to eat now?”

  “Yes, definitely. I had to walk a lot further than I’d anticipated today. Somehow this city seems bigger than I remember.”

  “Probably just your old-man legs,” Ridley teased as she reached into a cupboard below the counter for two bowls.

  “Probably.” Grandpa chuckled. He pushed his chair back and stood again. “Can I get you a drink? I think the glasses are—yes, right where they’ve always been,” he said as he opened a cupboard above the sink.

  “Yes, thanks, I’ll just have water,” Ridley said. She ladled soup into the two bowls and carried them to the table. “I wanted to ask you something last night,” she said as she sat. “Who was it that came after you because of the conjurations you know? Not the Shadow Society, right? Because if so, then the rest of our family would have been on their radar ever since, and Dad would have made us leave Lumina City years ago to start over somewhere else.”

  “No, these weren’t Shadow Society members.” Grandpa placed a glass of water next to Ridley’s spoon before moving back to his seat. “Or if they were, I didn’t know about it. Our interactions weren’t related to elementals in any way. They were people from a government department, acting in a more official—albeit top-secret—capacity. Their research was in weapons development. Melding magic and technology. They wanted to use my knowledge, and I refused.”

  “And you didn’t think they would try to go after Dad once you were gone? Try to find out if you’d passed on your knowledge?”

  “They tried that before I was gone, actually. It’s part of what made me realize how serious they were about their threats. They took both your parents, interrogated them, and satisfied themselves that neither knew anything about the relevant conjurations.”

  “Wow, seriously?”

  “That was the start of
our …” Grandpa sighed and picked up his spoon. “Well, the erosion of our relationship, I suppose. Your dad was furious that I’d brought this on us. That it led to your mother being snatched off the street in broad daylight while shopping and taken to a secret government facility for questioning. That it led the authorities so close to you, even though they had no idea what you were. So they turned their attention back to me. When the real threats began—the threats to harm you and your parents if I didn’t cooperate—that’s when I knew we had to resort to drastic measures. I know it seems extreme, but it worked. No one ever came back to bother your family once I was gone.”

  “Holy crap, that’s completely crazy.” Ridley’s spoon was in her hand, frozen over her soup. She’d forgotten about her food entirely while Grandpa spoke. “I had no idea any of that was happening.”

  “Good. Your parents didn’t want you to know. You were so young, you would have been terrified.”

  “Thank goodness it wasn’t the Shadow Society,” she said. “It might have been the end for our family if they’d been the ones who wanted to know those conjurations.”

  “Probably.” Grandpa leaned over his bowl and started eating, but Ridley’s next questions were already on the tip of her tongue.

  “So what do you know about them? The Shadow Society? Do you know any of the people in it?”

  “I don’t know any of the members—although I think we can now safely assume the mayor’s family is involved, given everything you discovered over the past few days—but I do know a little about their structure. The society has chapters all around the world. Probably at least one in every remaining city. Each chapter has its own chairperson, and then there’s a director who oversees the society as a whole.”

  “So they really are everywhere.” Ridley tapped her spoon lightly against the edge of her bowl. “I wonder if the mayor is the chairperson for the chapter here in Lumina City.” She was about to expand on her theory when her commscreen, sitting on the other side of the table, buzzed. It was rude to look, but she glanced at it out of habit anyway. The screen displayed a message from Archer.

  Archer: Free tomorrow night? We can start with MH.

  MH, Ridley repeated in her head as she mentally went through the list of names. Malachi Hollings. That was the only one that fit. She reached for the device and turned it over. “Sorry about that,” she said to Grandpa.

  “That’s okay. I assume you have many other questions,” he added, “but perhaps we should eat first. Your food’s going to end up ice-cold otherwise. Then we can talk while we wash dishes. I’m guessing you don’t use magic for that?”

  Ridley’s eyebrows jumped. “You know Dad would have a heart attack, right? He didn’t know I’ve been using magic at all until yesterday, and he was not happy to discover that.”

  Grandpa chuckled. “I can imagine.”

  Ridley ate quickly, managing to keep most of her questions to herself until she and Grandpa were done. As she began clearing the table and the rest of the kitchen, piling dirty dishes beside the sink, Grandpa told her how, long ago before he was married, his work as a historian had led him to discover a very old text that mentioned elementals. It had been studied before by others, but he’d interpreted the text in a different way. He thought there might be some truth to the story, and so he went searching for elementals—and eventually found a group of them living in a secluded farm area.

  “I learned so much from them,” Grandpa told her as he picked up a dishcloth and began drying the dishes as Ridley washed them. “It’s truly fascinating, the way things used to be. The way people used to live so in harmony with nature. They didn’t need to pull magic because it existed within them, but if they ever did pull it, it was easy. An instinct, rather than something that had to be learned. They lived so in tune with the elements, traveling on the wind or in water, moving through mountains as earth, or creating fire in an instant by simply becoming it.”

  “That sounds both amazing and scary,” Ridley murmured, her hands going still in the hot, soapy water as she imagined what that kind of life must have been like.

  “It is amazing,” Grandpa said. “You’re capable of incredible things, Ridley. Have you experimented?”

  “Well, sort of.” She picked up the pot and lowered it into the water. “I can become the air. I’ve traveled on the wind. I even spun into a mini tornado recently. Like, very mini. But it’s scary if I get too high and the natural currents in the air happen to be too strong. I end up out of control.”

  “Out of control?” Ridley sensed Grandpa staring at her, and she turned her head to meet his eyes. “This isn’t about control,” he said. “That’s the beauty of being an elemental. You shouldn’t ever be working against the elements. You’re working with them. Your magic, nature’s magic, the two work together. And you may feel small compared to the vastness of what’s around you, but the magic within your body is so much stronger—so much more concentrated—than you think it is. If you just let go of it instead of trying to control it, you’ll see how powerful you can truly be. Hurricane winds. Infernos that cleanse lands. Floods that bring new life.”

  Ridley turned fully to face Grandpa, the dishes forgotten for now. “Okay, firstly, infernos and floods sound really destructive and I’m not interested in that kind of thing. And secondly, what do you mean I need to let go? I already let go. I’m not consciously holding anything back when I use magic. My skin turns blue and magic rises away from my body and then … I use it.”

  “But if you’re trying to control what happens, then you’re not fully letting go.”

  “Um … I don’t know.” Ridley leaned her hip against the side of the sink. “It sure feels to me like I’m letting go when I use it. Maybe I’m just not the type of elemental who can start hurricanes and move mountains.”

  Grandpa’s piercing eyes smiled at her from behind his glasses. “All elementals are that kind of elemental.”

  “So it’s not like some have more power than others?”

  “Well, yes, some definitely do have more power, but—”

  “Okay, so I’m obviously on the other end of the scale then.”

  Grandpa shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Besides,” she added, “I get really tired and headachy—like migraine headachy—after using my magic too much. That wouldn’t be the case if I had all this power you’re talking about.”

  “Headaches. Ah, okay. You’re definitely trying too hard to exert control instead of giving yourself over to the elements.”

  “But I’m not!”

  He smiled in a knowing way that only frustrated Ridley more. “I imagine this is tough for you to hear, being a straight-A student and all that. You’re not used to the feeling of being slow to learn something.”

  If Ridley were a few years younger, she might have petulantly moaned, “You don’t know me!” Instead, because she was a tiny bit more mature than that, she took a calming breath and turned back to the dishes. “Okay. Maybe you’re right. Next time, I’ll try to do this letting-go thing properly.”

  “Don’t try. Just—”

  “Don’t try? Seriously?” Her hands tightened around the pot.

  “Don’t do anything,” Grandpa said gently. “Just … let go and fall into it.”

  “Fall into it? Really? I’m going to end up flat on my face.”

  “Not if you trust the magic around you.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Ridley said with a sigh. “I’ll … not try next time.” She fished around in the water for the sponge and began scrubbing the inside of the pot. “So … tell me something else. How does one end up born as an elemental? Clearly it isn’t something that’s passed on genetically. Or maybe it is genetic, but it isn’t always passed on. Because neither Mom or Dad were elementals.” She moved the pot to the rinse water. “It’s a weird coincidence, don’t you think? That you discovered elementals, then one day my parents decided to go live with them, and then when they had me, I turned out to be one. Or did they only go and
live with the elementals after I was born because they realized I was one of them?” She looked at Grandpa as she handed him the pot.

  “You were born amongst the elementals,” he told her, focusing on the pot as he made sure to dry every inch of it. “After your mom and dad decided to live with them. They had friends in that community—because your dad grew up knowing about elementals, and we visited fairly regularly—and in the end they decided they wanted to live there.”

  “Okay. So it is just a weird coincidence that I ended up being—Oh, wait.” She paused as an idea clicked in her brain. “Maybe that’s how the ability is passed on. Maybe it’s something to do with being around others who have magic within them. Could that be possible?”

  “I, uh, I’m not sure about that.” Grandpa picked up a stack of dry dishes and carried them across the kitchen. “It could be possible.” He opened cupboards and drawers and began putting items away. “People have studied this, of course. There is definitely a genetic component. For most elementals I’ve met, it’s something that runs in their family.” He pushed a drawer shut and returned to her side. “But I have met a few who didn’t know of any of their ancestors having magic, so perhaps it is influenced by environmental factors, like being exposed to the specific kind of magic that exists within other people.” He pointed at the sink and added, “Are you going to wash those last few things?”

  “Oh, right, yes.” She reached for the sponge again. “Sorry, I keep getting distracted. There’s so much to ask you about.”

  They continued chatting late into the evening. Grandpa told Ridley the story of how he’d ended up buying the antique store, and how he continued to hunt down any ancient texts he could locate that had to do with elementals. He also told her where he’d traveled to after pulling off his fake death—pretty much everywhere on the continent—before finally settling in a small seaside town. The town itself had no arxium protection, but Grandpa and several others managed to get to a bunker someone had built beneath their house, and so they survived the Cataclysm that way. They’d all left the town after that, but while the others had set off for one of the surviving cities, Grandpa had made his way to a small elemental community he knew of.