The Dysasters

by P. C. Cast

  “Look, Foster! Look around us!”

  Foster whistled the melody in time with the air orchestra as she danced in his arms. She tilted her head back and together they stared at the amazing currents of twirling, trilling air that glowed wisps of music in all the colors of a rainbow.

  “It’s unbelievable!” Foster said, and when she began singing the last stanza the world was her accompaniment.

  “Pretty little raven at the bird-band stand

  Told them how to do the bob and it was grand

  They started going steady and bless my soul

  He out-bopped the buzzard and the oriole!”

  Tate guided Foster through one of his favorite swing moves, the pretzel. Her grin blazed as they sang the chorus together again,

  “Rockin’ robin, rock rock

  Rockin’ robin

  Blow rockin’ robin

  ’Cause we’re really gonna rock tonight!”

  And then he tried to do a classic hip lift with her, which failed epically as he tripped over an unfortunately placed rock and fell on his butt with Foster flopped over his legs, giggling hysterically as the wind around them stilled and then faded to the normal sound of swishing through willow leaves.

  Wiping her eyes, she stood and held out a hand to help him up, which he took, brushing grass and dirt off his butt.

  “How in the hell do you know that old song?” she said between giggles.

  He grinned back at her. “Who doesn’t know Motown?”

  “Um, lots of people. Well, young people. The same people who don’t know how to dance like that.”

  “Well, I have a grandpa who insisted I learn how to really dance.”

  “Your grandpa made you take dance lessons?”

  “Not just any dance lessons—swing dance. And, yep, twice a week for years. I used to love/hate it. A lot.”

  “And now?” she asked, her eyes still shining with humor.

  “I got to dance you around and make you laugh, so I’d say I’m feeling pretty good about G-pa’s weird obsession. Who got you into Motown?”

  “Cora, of course. She loved Motown. And the Rat Pack. And what she called real deal blues. I don’t think she liked anything that wasn’t recorded last century. She was pretty stuck up when it came to music.”

  “You can really sing,” Tate said.

  “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  When the silence threatened to get awkward, Tate shook himself mentally and reminded himself to do more than stare at her eyes, because for some reason he suddenly remembered how he’d felt the first time he’d looked into them—totally shell-shocked by their deep green beauty.

  “Hey, that thing you were doing with the air and the trees—it was awesome.”

  “Oh, thanks. I did it by accident. You heard it and saw it, too, didn’t you? The air music?”

  “Yeah, I did. It was—it was incredible. Like the earth was playing music for us.”

  “Not the earth—the air. It started before you joined me, but then when we were dancing and singing, and I was, well, distracted.” She paused and he saw her cheeks go very pink. “Anyway, I think I just figured something important out. The less I think about trying to get air to do what I want it to do, and just relax and let the feelings sweep through me, the easier it is. I’m realizing that it’s the feel part that’s most important.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, like the time you almost maimed yourself by bailing out of the truck, and the time I smacked you with my hand air cannons—I was feeling negative things. First I was pissed. Then I was scared by the dinosaur.”

  “Percheron,” Tate corrected.

  “Whatever. The point is when my feelings are negative I invoke the bad qualities of air. But when I’m relaxed, or happy, I invoke good things. Like, today it was just so pretty out here, and sunny without being too hot or cold—and amazingly enough it wasn’t raining—and for a second I thought I heard music in the wind, so I started playing around with it. Then you were here, too, twirling me around and singing with me, and I was having fun—not thinking, just feeling happy—and you see what happened, my tree music.” She shrugged her shoulders, obviously struggling with whether she should be embarrassed or not. “I guess it’s not very helpful to be able to make trees accompany me like a band. I mean, it’s not like that’ll stop the next tornado or protect us from the Core Four or anything like that.”

  “Don’t be so sure. It’s about control, and you were showing great control. Way more than me, that’s for sure. Foster, you’re getting better and better with air. All I’m getting better and better with is grocery shopping,” he said.

  “That’s an excellent skill, and one I do not have. I hate grocery shopping. I’ve, uh, been meaning to tell you how much I appreciate you going to the store as often as you do. It’s giving me time to feel at home. So, thanks.”

  Tate had to force himself not to hang his head in shame. He knew the dirty truth. He didn’t do the grocery shopping to help Foster. He did it so that he was free to call his g-pa. Feeling awful, he heard himself blurt, “Hey, I think I figured out what some of Stewart’s equations might mean.”

  Foster’s happy, open look flattened and then closed off. “Riiiiight. The jock deciphered the brilliant mad scientist’s equations.”

  Tate felt his cheeks flush. “That’s a real bitchy thing to say.”

  “Bitchy or true? Why do men always assume when a woman tells it like it is that she’s being a bitch? Can’t she just be telling the truth?”

  “Not when it’s not the truth. I’m not a dumb jock, and I’m tired of you stereotyping me. I thought we’d gotten past that.”

  Foster sighed dramatically. “Not if the stereotype is true.”

  “It’s not!”

  “Really? Let me remind you that your answer to my question, What is your favorite book, was Sports Illustrated. Sports Illustrated, Tate. You actually said that. And that is a classic dudebro dumb jock answer.”

  “I only said that because I thought you were so beautiful that I blurted stupid shit. I turn into a moron around a pretty girl,” he said, glaring at her.

  “Wait. Back up. You said thought and were.” Foster’s green eyes skewered him.

  “Huh?” Why were girls so damn difficult to understand, and what the hell was she talking about?

  “You said it in past tense. Like you used to think I’m pretty. What? I’m not so pretty now?”

  Tate grinned, finally getting it. “Hum … I guess not because I can answer you for real now.” Ignoring her frown, he rolled on. “Choosing my favorite book is tough because there are so many of them, but if you want my top five I’ll try to narrow it down for you. Gotta give a shout out to my favorite horror writer, Ray Bradbury, and Fahrenheit 451. Man, that book is like a song. Bradbury’s figurative language is unbelievable. ‘The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us,’” Tate quoted. “Fantastic, right? And then there’s Richard Preston. I love science, biology, physics, chemistry—all those things. Preston’s books are super gross, but great. I liked The Hot Zone, but Demon in the Freezer is even better.”

  “Uh…” Foster began, but Tate was on a roll and he kept on rolling.

  “But just so you don’t think I’m one of those guys who only reads ‘guy books,’” Tate air quoted, “I’ll round out my top five with three women authors. I don’t like genre labels, but YA authors are killing it right now with their awesomeness. Last year I read Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy. Damn, those books rocked! But I’m not counting them as three. So…” he tapped his chin, thinking. “I know! S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders is a classic. I even made my dad take me to Tulsa one spring break so I could check it out.” He paused again and gave the very silent Foster a raised-brow look. “The city wasn’t anything like the book, but I did visit the center of the universe there. Anyway, one more. It’s gotta be Renee Ahdieh’s retelling of the Shahrzad st
ory, The Wrath and the Dawn, and its sequel, The Rose and the Dagger. My mom turned me on to them, and they were just flat-out cool. So, there you have it. My real top five favorite books. For right now. I’ve been checking out those thrillers in Cora’s library, though. Would you mind if I borrowed some of them?”

  When he stopped talking he realized Foster was staring at him as if she’d never really seen him before.

  “Yeah, you can borrow any book you want.” Foster cleared her throat. “Well, I admit it when I’m wrong, and I was wrong. You’re not a dumb jock cliché.” Foster’s lips twitched again as the beginnings of a smile formed on her surprised face. “You do a great impression of one, though.”

  He felt himself relax. She actually admitted she was wrong! And she was almost smiling at him. Tate shrugged. “Yeah, well, I am planning on using a football scholarship as well as an academic scholarship to get me through college so I won’t be stuck in debt forever. It takes a lot of education to become a doctor.”

  “A doctor?”

  Tate nodded and tried not to sound too gleeful. “I’m good at science. Really good, as in scholarship-level good. I want to be a neurologist. My g-ma died of Alzheimer’s. It was awful. I’m going to find the cure.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Why in the hell have you let me believe you’re just a dumb pigskin thrower?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I guess I didn’t want to tell you who I am. I wanted you to get to know me and find out for yourself. Like, when I first saw you I thought you were probably a cheerleader.”

  Foster looked like she’d bitten into a lemon. “A cheerleader!”

  “Well, yeah, until you opened your mouth,” he said with a totally straight face.

  “What!”

  “Yeah,” he went on nonchalantly, pretending that she wasn’t giving him her “I’m going to knock you on your ass with my air cannon hands” look. “Then I got to know you better and I decided that if you were a cheerleader by day, by night you’d for sure run some kind of underground political school paper where you’d probably uncover a major human trafficking ring and were on your way to being the youngest journalist to win a Pulitzer in the history of Pulitzers.”

  Foster just kept staring and staring at him, until finally she started to giggle, and the giggle turned into honest-to-god laughter. “I thought you were a dumb, can’t grow hair and chew gum at the same time, football guy,” she gasped, still giggling. “And you were making up the coolest story ever about me. Tate, I owe you a major apology. I absolutely misjudged you. You’re not a douche. You’re an onion.”

  “Is that better than being a douche?”

  “Of course it’s better! You look like one thing, but if your surface is scratched just a little, there are layers and layers of stuff waiting to be discovered. You’re an onion, Tate. Embrace the onion.”

  Then, Foster Stewart Fields smiled at Tate—really smiled—and in that moment a wonderful, terrible feeling sizzled through his body.

  When she looks at me like that she makes me feel as if I could do anything. And I can do anything; I will do anything, to keep her looking at me like that.

  Suddenly Foster’s green eyes widened in shock, and that beautiful smile that radiated from them somehow, impossibly, grew brighter.

  “Tate, I just found my story for you, and you’re not just an onion. You’re The Hawk. By day you’re the star quarterback leading his team to victory, but by night … by night you’re a superhero.”

  Tate’s stomach felt filled with the light of her smile and he laughed. “Okay, Hawk is better than being an onion, but a superhero? You’re only saying that because I call this place our Fortress of Sauvietude.”

  “Nope, I’m only saying that because it’s true. Tate, look down.”

  He did.

  He was floating about five feet off the ground.

  “Fuck!” he shouted.

  Then he dropped from the sky like a stone—or, as his g-pa would say—like a good ol’ dog turd.

  “Tate! Shit! Foster! What the hell is going on here?” From behind them came the sound of Finn’s panicked voice as he and a young woman sprinted across the pasture toward them.

  16

  FOSTER

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Just everyone shut up!” Foster shouted over Finn’s questions, Tate’s stammering, and the constant you can’t be serious coming from the young woman standing too close to Finn to simply be a casual acquaintance.

  “What the hell is going on?” Finn asked for the zillionth time.

  “I said shut up!” Foster barked.

  “Don’t yell at him like that.” Purple-streaked braids sliced the sky as the young woman whipped her attention from Tate to Foster. “He’s freaked out. We’re both freaked out. We just saw someone—”

  “I just need it to be quiet!” Foster ran her hands through her hair. “For, like, two seconds. This won’t work if I can’t focus.” She could fix this. She had to fix this or … or what? There was no alternative. To save Tate and herself, Foster would erase this moment from existence.

  Tate eyed her suspiciously. “You’re not going to—”

  “Yes,” Foster surprised herself with her calm collectedness. “Yes, I am.”

  “Not going to what?” Finn’s panicked gaze bounced from Tate to Foster and back again.

  “Oh, god, Finn. I’m not going to hurt you.” Foster let out a grunt of annoyance. She had passed panic and was well on her way to frustration—at Tate for Superman-ing all out in the open, at Finn and the beautiful girl standing next to him for showing up when they did, and at herself for not using her Jedi mind trick the second she heard Finn’s voice. “Just look at me.”

  “Look at you?” Finn’s dark eyes were completely rimmed in white. “I haven’t been able to look anywhere else since I saw,” his motion took in Tate and a few feet of air above him. “Whatever that was.”

  “Flying! A human being flying in the air!” Finn’s counterpart added emphatically.

  “Yeah, but … well, it was just … I didn’t really…” Tate scratched the top of his head and cast his gaze up to the sky.

  Foster totally got it. It had to be rough—flying, falling, and then immediately being confronted by the only friend he’d made since losing his family. So Foster wouldn’t erase their memories only because Finn and his lady friend might run away screaming to anyone who would listen about the flying science experiment living out at Strawberry Fields, which would be like waving a giant Hello! Here we are! flag at Doctor Rick and the Core Four. She would erase their memories for Tate, so that he could keep his friend.

  Foster cleared her throat, took a deep breath, and focused on channeling her ability with far more concentration than she ever had before. “You didn’t see Tate fly.” She paused. She expected something—the prickling heat she’d felt at the Quickie Mart or even a gentle sigh of acknowledgment from her element. But she felt … nothing. She squinted, intensifying her level of concentration, and tried again. “Nothing out of the ordinary happened here. You only saw Tate and me standing with our feet on the ground looking at the trees.”

  The young woman looped her rich Tiger Moth–brown arm around Finn’s and drew him against her protectively. “You just tried to Men in Black him.”

  “What? Like with that flashy memory wiping thing?” Tate inched closer to Foster, waves of nervous heat thickening the air around her. “No. No way. That’s not real.”

  “Well, neither are flying white boys,” she countered.

  Foster would have commended her on her levelheaded retort had she not been caught off guard by the fact that nothing had happened. Finn still had the same shocked, wide-eyed expression and was still staring at the air above Tate’s head like a pulley system would appear if he just waited long enough.

  Maybe she’d focused too hard. Since her birthday, her Jedi mind trick had worked each time she’d used it, but she hadn’t been trying very hard. She’d just said what sh
e needed and it sort of happened.

  “Sabine’s right. You tried to wipe my memory.”

  Foster opened her mouth to attempt a more casual approach to erasing what Finn had seen, but stopped at the genuine sadness woven through his words.

  “But it didn’t work,” he continued with a bit more grimness. “I know what I saw.”

  “What we saw,” Sabine added.

  Tate’s gaze was a weight against Foster’s profile, and she turned to face him, wincing in apology at the steam practically shooting from his bright red ears.

  “So whatever you want to call it, it didn’t work,” Finn said. “And I’m a little pissed you even made the attempt. I can keep a secret.”

  “Cora didn’t hire him simply because he’s good at feeding livestock.” Sabine’s round cheeks were ruddy with frustration. “If the cats had thumbs, they could do that.”

  “Well, my job is a bit more involved than only feeding animals, and certain ones need certain things, so…”

  “I know, babe. Sorry,” Sabine said through clenched teeth. “Just trying to make a point.”

  Cora? Foster thought with a shake of her head. What does any of this have to do with Cora?

  “Wait. What was that about being able to keep a secret?” Tate asked the question perched on Foster’s tongue.

  “She said some things,” Finn said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “That one day there might be people who come out here looking for the two of you and that we couldn’t ever say anything about anyone who lived here. Not the truth, anyway.”

  “We made up a story and I buried this place and your real identities. If anyone looks, everything will lead exactly where we want it to,” Sabine said.

  “You told her?” Foster clenched her jaw so tightly she could feel her pulse in her teeth.

  “No, Cora did.” Sabine balled her hands on her hips. “She trusted us. Both of us.”

  “And it wasn’t easy. It was a long process, getting this job, Cora’s trust.” Finn wrapped his arm around Sabine’s shoulders. “But Sabine and I, we’d do anything for Cora. She helped us…” Eyes misting, he bit his lower lip and inhaled shakily before continuing. “She’s a good woman, and we’ll keep her secrets to the grave.”