by A. L. Knorr
"Of course that was you," Georjie said on an exhale. "Tempest. Euroklydon."
"You're frightening," I said, my voice hoarse. The words sounded distant to my ears, like someone else had said them. And my eyes went from Petra to the skies, still searching, still waiting for the return of a certain avian creature. Any moment now, Akiko would phase into flesh on the beach and join us.
"Are you guys okay?" Petra bent and grabbed a torn yellow raincoat from the random garbage on the beach. She made a face of disgust as she pulled the wet plastic coat over her bare torso and zipped it up. "I don't know what happened. One second that thing was there and then, boom, it just vanished!"
The sound of alarms and sirens and shouting voices had only increased and carried on the breeze. But the beach was empty except for us.
Taking the idea from Petra, Georjie went and picked up a piece of canvas. She held it out to Targa. "Cover up, hon. There are people with cell phones around. I'm already freaked out about the attention we're going to get when the worst of this passes."
"You were recorded?" Petra asked.
I nodded. "Pretty sure Georjie was. When the storm first started."
"That was no storm." Petra's face grew thunderous. "It was pure evil. Nakesh made the proverbial deal with the devil, if you know what I mean."
Targa, Georjie, and I gaped at her in shock.
"How do you know that?" Targa asked, half-heartedly holding the shred of canvas around herself. "I mean, we know it was evil, but how do you know Mr. Nakesh made a deal with that thing?"
"Because I unleashed it by accident when I confronted him." Petra's mouth was a flat line. "There is no more Field Station Eleven, by the way. No more Project Expansion."
"I don't care about the project anymore. Today, there was almost no more Saltford," I said. "I need to find my family."
"I don't even know where to start. I need to call my mom." Targa looked around, bewildered. "I lost my cell in the water."
Georjie nodded. "You can use mine. I should call Mom, too. And then see if there’s anything left of our house."
"And you?" I asked Petra.
"There's someone I need to find, just down that way," Petra replied as we began moving across the wrecked beach toward the city. "Where's Akiko, by the way? Was she with you?"
Georjie, Targa, and I shared a look of worry.
"We don't know where she is, but there's a pretty good chance that she took down that thing all by herself."
Petra's eyebrows spiked upward. "Seriously? What is she? I've been dying to ask," Petra said. "TNC said they didn't want her and I've been confused by that ever since."
"Akuna Hanta," Targa said. "A hunter of demons."
Petra took this in and then started laughing.
Targa and I shared a bemused look.
"A demon hunter? Really?" Petra said through her laughter.
"Why is that funny?" Georjie asked as we skirted the mess of dirt and wreckage covering Atlantic Avenue.
"Nakesh made a deal with an ancient demonic force and then tried to hire three Elementals to help him execute his evil plan. Three Elementals, who happened to be best friends with a demon hunter." She continued laughing. "Now that is poetic justice."
The rest of us didn't find it quite so funny because our demon hunter was still missing.
"I don't get how building domes for people to live in is an evil plan," Georjie said. "It might have been a crackpot idea, but it still seemed like their hearts were in the right place."
Petra lost her smile. "I have a friend who I'm hoping will be able to explain it to me, too. But you'll have to trust me for now, TNC's intentions were not altruistic. That reminds me, Georjayna, the plants from the prototype may need your attention. I took the dome down."
Georjayna nodded distractedly. “Okay.”
We walked together in silence for a while, listening to a city in shock and ruminating.
Petra spoke up again. "How important is it to keep your identities a secret?"
"Very," I said. "Extremely."
I thought of how much Basil had impressed upon me that no one but my family, he, and the other students at Arcturus know what I was. I had already spilled the beans to my friends, which he wasn't going to be happy about. Now the world was going to know and probably have video evidence very shortly uploaded to the web once the people who took the recordings got their bearings. It might have been done already.
"It's imperative." Targa had an edge to her voice.
"Hey!" A voice pulled our attention down the beach to where a man was running toward us, waving. He had a cut on his forehead and part of one pantleg was burnt. The skin of his shin was red and blistered, but it seemed by his expression that he wasn't in any pain.
We stopped walking to watch him approach.
"I've been looking for you," he said to me, panting as he stopped just a few feet away. He bent over and gasped for air. "You're the fire lady. What you did…" He straightened, catching his breath. He shook his head in wonderment. "I always thought there had to be people like you out there. Pyromancers, you know."
I opened my mouth but didn't know what to say.
"She's not a pyromancer," said Targa, but the sound of her voice made me turn and gape at her. Her voice had become layered and musical, like violins that seemed to come from everywhere. "She's just a teenager who goes to Saltford High."
"Not a pyromancer…" The man's face went soft and expressionless, his eyes vacant, as he repeated after her.
"Saltford was hit by an earthquake and a freak storm today, nothing more." Targa continued speaking in that incredible voice.
Georjie, Petra, and I shared looks of amazement.
"There was nothing supernatural about what went on," she continued.
"Nothing supernatural…"
By the time she was done with him, the man seemed to be confused about why he was on the beach. He murmured something about needing to find his dog before wandering off at a stagger which then became a jog.
"Are you going to do that to everyone in Saltford who thinks they saw something cray-cray?" I asked Targa. "’Cause that could be tricky."
Targa shook her head and let out a defeated sigh. "I don't know. There's going to be fallout from this. My mom is going to freak out if anyone caught me on tape."
"They wouldn't have caught you in mermaid form, surely," I suggested, putting an arm around Targa's shoulders. "You were underwater where no one could see you."
"And what about stopping the wave?"
"Hey at least you didn't have fins while you're doing it." I gave her a reassuring squeeze but I understand how she felt. I had thrown a lot of fire around, and someone had almost certainly caught Georjie lacing vines through the school. Pretty much every student had a mobile phone with a video camera on them at all times.
"Would you like me to send out an EMP?" Petra asked.
"EM-" Georjie began, puzzled.
"Electromagnetic pulse," she explained.
"You can do that?"
"Of course she can," I added with a laugh. "Girl can turn into a sandstorm and make force-fields. An EMP is a cakewalk."
"What would an EMP do?" Targa stepped gingerly around a bunch of broken glass on the road.
"Fry all the electronics in the city, all the cell phones, laptops, computers…"
"Emergency vehicles, hospital machines," Georjie added. The sound of sirens from the city took over when no one said anything right away. "Maybe now isn't the best time to cut off communication and handicap the emergency teams."
"Tempting, though." Targa gave a nervous laugh.
"Listen," Petra said, stopping us at the intersection of Atlantic and Grace. "I have a friend who is an amazing hacker. He's the whole reason TNC's evil plan was stalled. If something turns up on the internet that you're not happy with, I'm sure he'll be able to take it down. Two things are going to work in your favor in this situation." She held up one finger. "First, do you have any idea how much fake video there is onlin
e claiming to have caught a superhuman on tape? Anyone who has access to a computer and some mediocre CG skills can make something that's pretty convincing. You can claim it was faked and most people would believe you."
"And the second thing?" I prompted, not overly comforted by the first.
Another finger joined the first. "People are going to be so freaked out by the storm itself, I can't imagine a handful of kids seeing your powers at work are going to trump it."
She put down her hand and let this all think in.
"Why don't you just wait and see what happens." Petra shifted inside her rain jacket again. "Between Jesse's skill and Targa's voice, I bet we can put it down well enough until it all blows over."
It was the only plan we had that didn't involve crippling the city at a time when it needed all the functioning electronics and communication lines that still worked, so we agreed.
Petra headed off in the direction of a residential area, while Targa, Georjie, and I agreed to stick together. We began to walk west, the direction of my home. We kept looking over our shoulders toward the ocean, expectant of Akiko's return.
29
Saxony
Saltford was brought to its knees, but it didn't lose its head. Schools were repurposed into temporary shelters for those who had lost their homes. Except for Saltford High, which would need to be completely rebuilt because that damage was permanent. Georjie had removed all of the vines holding up the rubble of the school once darkness had fallen, but not before news crews got photos of the incredible sight.
Amazingly, the death toll was only seven, and one petite Asian girl was still unaccounted for. Injuries, on the other hand, were in the thousands. It seemed almost everyone in Saltford had at least a cut or a scrape. There was a lot of smoke inhalation, a lot of broken bones, and the burn unit was almost full with victims of the fires. Remarkably, many of these injured people recovered fully and quickly subsequent to a visit from a certain blond volunteer.
Nothing had publicly surfaced about three superhuman girls working together to save Saltford, but I was sure it was only a matter of time.
The storm was being touted as Petra had suggested it would be—a freak occurrence of nature, and this was what my parents and RJ all believed as well. I didn't see much point in setting them straight. Jack, however, practically locked me in his room until I told him the whole story, including the offer from TNC, since I couldn't hide anything from him anyway.
I called Basil to let him know my trip to England to attend Arcturus would be delayed while I helped clean up my neighborhood and helped friends who were impacted by the quake to rebuild.
The Sutherland home and my home escaped unscathed, but Targa's trailer had been swallowed up along with many of the trailers in her park. She stayed with Georjie until Mira got home and the two of them checked into a hotel while they decided what to do. My money was on them going back to Poland right away rather than having Targa finish school in Saltford. Our high school was a pile of rubble, so she'd have to relocate anyway, and why stay in a place where people knew her face and someone might confront her about what had happened during the storm?
Liz came home right away to be with Georjie, and to her credit, she put all of her work on hold to help the clean-up efforts.
It was going to take a while to rebuild. There were entire neighborhoods with gorges running through them which would have to be cleaned up and stabilized and decisions made about what to do with the property.
As the days passed, though, my heart grew heavier and heavier. Akiko had still not turned up, and not having any idea what happened to her was weighing us down like rocks.
About a week after the attack, Georjie texted Targa and me with an SOS to meet at her place with a characteristically cryptic message: I received a package in the mail. You guys have to see this.
Georjie ushered us into her front foyer and closed the door. She had a fat envelope in her hand.
"Come on. I'll make you guys a coffee," she said, sprinting up the stairs.
Targa and I shared a look as we kicked off our shoes and followed her up to the kitchen. Georjie made us cappuccinos and we sat at the table together. Georjie slid the envelope across to me.
"Open it."
Georjie's address had been messily scrawled on the front of the envelope, but the handwriting was unfamiliar and barely readable.
"There's no return address."
Georjie shook her head. "No. But it's from Petra."
I took the envelope and pulled out a thick wad of folded paper. I opened it up and stared at the documents with confusion.
"How do you know?" Targa peered over my shoulder.
“Petra and I went to take care of the plants at the dome site,” Georjie explained. “She said she’d be sending something.”
It dawned on me after flipping through a few pages what I was looking at. "These are deeds!"
"Deeds to what?" Targa took some of the pages and read them, brows pinched.
I looked up at Georjie, my jaw slack. "To TNC's dome properties. Petra's friend must have dug these up."
Georjie was nodding. "Look at the names. Recognize any of them?"
I scanned over several before running into one I recognized, then another, and another. "They're all famous people. Rich people, politicians, movie stars."
"Only rich and famous people," Georjie emphasized. "You might not know all of those names, but I can guarantee you that if you start looking them up, you'll find they're all affluent and powerful. Elite families with old money. Relations of world leaders, including presidential families."
"So they never had any intention of offering property inside the domes to middle-class or poor people? They never earmarked anything for charity?"
"Nope. Petra's brilliant computer guy pulled up blueprints and zoning documents. There is nothing to support that they ever planned to give anything to poorer people, or even regular people. It was all offered only to rich and powerful people. And it gets worse."
"There is so much here," I said, sifting through the pages, "it'll take forever to make sense of it."
"Worse?" Targa asked, pushing her coffee aside and spreading out some of the documents. "How does it get worse?"
"The domes were never conceived as permanent places to live, the way TNC wanted us to think. They were conceived as more like the world's fanciest bomb shelters." Georjie nodded at the stack of paper. "There's a letter from Petra at the back. It's messy, looks like she wrote it in a hurry, but she explains what's inside and said that we need to destroy all of this evidence when we're done with it.”
"I'll say," I muttered.
"That thing, the creature, it wasn't the only one. It was just the closest one. TNC was planning a huge catastrophe for every major continent, and it was all to feed the Archons. She said that about every seventy-five years or so, the Archons need to feast. The small-time stuff that happens isn't enough for them. The last one was World War II and the Holocaust."
"It's been seventy-three years since World War II," Targa said. "So, what? It was time? And this was their plan?” She shuddered visibly. “It's beyond ghastly, it's incomprehensible."
"A plague for North America, a nuke for Asia, poisonous rain for Europe," Georjie listed them off on her fingers. "But they wanted to offer rich and important people a way to be protected while the outside world imploded. If their plan went so far as to decimate the planet, they'd have people to rebuild the population with. Hence, the domes."
"I can't even believe the plot was this big," I sputtered. "This is insane. This is a level of evil there are no words for."
"That's what Petra and Akiko stopped from happening," Georjie added, quietly.
"Where is Petra now?"
"Read for yourself." Georjie slid a handwritten page toward Targa and me.
I read aloud.
Dear Elementals,
I said I would try and explain the domes better, well, this is the best we can do at the moment. What I've sent you is a jumb
led mess of documents, and I'm sorry I'm not there to make better sense of it. But I have faith you'll see the full picture and I know you'll agree that the most urgent thing right now is to kill this monster while it’s crippled. Devin Nakesh is gone, so it's possible TNC's deal with the Archons is off, but we don't know for sure. We don't know if TNC is still trying to manufacture domes on other continents right now or not, but it doesn't matter. They won't succeed. TNC will not survive to execute another project, not as long as I have wind in my lungs. I promise you that.
"That's it?" I turned it over, looking for more.
"It's all she had time for, I guess."
"It's enough." Targa shuddered. "I don't know about you guys but I've had enough of sinister plots and freak demonic storms and big corporations with lots of money and power. I'm about ready to run and hide in the ocean."
"Or Poland," Georjie said with a smile. She began gathering the documents and shoving them back in the envelope. "If you guys don't object, I'm going to burn these."
We didn't.
Georjie went to a cupboard and got a large metal bowl. She beckoned us outside on the second level porch and set the bowl on the stone table. She put the papers in the bowl and looked at me.
I reached out a finger and touched the nearest page, igniting the whole thing. We each took a seat and watched the papers burn and the smoke drift up into a clean evening sky.
"Why us?" Targa murmured, her eyes on the flame as it began to die down.
"Why us what?" I asked, crossing my arms and leaning on the table.
"Why are we Elementals? In all the craziness that has taken place since the night of our sleepover, we haven’t had two seconds of peace to really talk about it."
Georjie chuckled. "It's true. I was about to speculate when Petra knocked on the door and interrupted us. Remember?"
It did come to my memory. "You said you had a theory about it."
"Feels wrong to share it without Akiko here, though,” Targa said.
“I had a kind of vision of the future when I was in Ireland,” Georjie said. “I didn’t tell you guys about it before because…” She paused. “Because I could see you,” she looked at me and her eyes cut to Targa, “and you. But…”