by William Hawk
“You have to make a decision right now,” I said, nodding toward the line of cars. “I’m out of here.”
“I’m coming,” she said.
“Then get in the other side. Arthur, slide over.”
Julia came around to the passenger seat. A few seconds later, all four of us were squished into a single bench.
“Hi, Julia,” said Arthur. “I can’t believe you found us.”
“It was your big butt that made me notice this truck,” she said. “By the way, whose truck is this?”
“We’ll answer all your questions on the drive,” I said.
“I talked to your dad,” said Arthur. “He’s still looking for William.”
“The whole world is looking for William,” she said.
As we neared the exit lane to leave the school grounds, I managed to get my sunglasses on before we reached the security guard, who frowned as he stared into our truck. Julia waved and smiled, but as we passed, I saw him in the rearview mirror, peering at us.
I floored the accelerator and sped out of the parking lot.
The drive was incredibly tense, as we expected cops to surround us, guns out, at any minute. After taking a series of turns off the main roads, we found our way back to the highway.
We arrived at the cabin shortly before dusk. Everyone fell out of the truck and stretched their legs, and to my surprise a light turned on in the cabin. Cy came out onto the porch. He looked healthy and moved with more strength than before.
“I was waiting for you,” he said.
I introduced all the others. He ran a hand through the back of his hair. “I don’t know where all of you are going to sleep,” he said.
“I brought my own bag,” said Arthur.
“And William and I can share a bed,” said Julia, glancing smugly at Grace.
“We’ll figure this out,” he said.
Later, in the cabin, we built a fire, and Cy warmed several cans of pork and beans in a cast-iron pot over the flames. As the five of us sat around the hearth feeling the warmth driving away the high-altitude nighttime chill, we started talking and explaining to Julia and maybe to ourselves.
“Grace, how do you know William?” asked Julia.
I sensed a girl wanting to size up the competition, so I played damage control.
“She’s a Change Agent too,” I said.
“But how did you meet?”
“She spoke to me telepathically because she was in a coma, and I rescued her. Then she woke up.” I didn’t mention what occurred when I had kissed her.
Julia’s eyes grew alarmed. “No way.”
“But what’s the story of your life?” asked Julia, turning to Grace. “Like, how did you get this power?”
Grace finished her pork and beans, set the bowl on the floor, and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Well, there’s a lot that William doesn’t even know yet. Are you ready to hear it?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You were involved in a snap at a theater in Las Vegas. You, me and Jeremy. Remember?”
“No,” I admitted, “I’m not there yet.”
“Do you remember Jeremy?”
I shook my head.
“Do you remember what a snap is?”
“No.”
“They’re moments when members of our group inhabit someone else’s body, sometimes just for a few minutes, sometimes for days. It happens for individuals after they’re separated from their original parallax, they’re original viewpoint as people.”
“Is it like an out-of-body experience?” asked Arthur.
“Sort of,” she said, “and William and I knew each other in a previous iteration, as we were part of the same group.”
“I do not remember that,” I said.
“The other members were Jeremy and… Hunter.”
Grace put extra sauce on that name, and suddenly it all made sense. “The guy who visited me in my dream,” I said.
“Yes, and he’s always looking out for himself. He is very cold and calculating in everything he does,” she added. “He showed you the helmets because we’re going to need them for something. Anyway, back to the snap.”
“Yes, please,” said Julia. I could see from her face just how amazed she was. And I was able to process it better, since it was all finally starting to sink into my thick melon.
“During the snap, there was a line of people that were waiting to enter the theater. A car jumped the curb and was mowing down pedestrians. Jeremy somehow recognized the people standing behind him and pushed them out of the way. He died in the process. Because choices made in snaps impact both the earthly realm and the spiritual realm, Jeremy died that day in both realms.
“What we did not know was that Jeremy and I were supposed to be twins on earth. My new mother was devastated. There were no longer two heartbeats growing inside of her. The decision was made by the doctors to allow her to go full-term to complete the development of me, the little girl. My new Earth family are spiritual people, and my father is the pastor of a church, so they prayed continually for a miracle. Beyond all possible odds, something incredible happened.”
“What?” said Cy.
“Just before I was born, the medical team was able to pick up two heartbeats from inside the womb. They couldn’t understand how that could be possible. Complications set in, and since I seemed to be a breech birth anyway, it was a very delicate situation. That’s when my heart stopped beating. They decided to do an emergency C-section. As they pulled me out, to their surprise my new twin had his legs wrapped around my neck, trying to choke me. It took the medical team several minutes to get my heart and lungs working.
“My parents were amazed—it was two miracles in the same day. What was thought to be dead was now alive, and what was alive died and came back to life. Me and Roland.”
“Better known as Roivas.”
Cy spoke up. “We call him Little Horn.”
Everyone looked at the old native. He was calmly eating his beans, listening to our conversation like it was the most normal thing in the world.
“Did you make that up?” asked Arthur.
“Of course not, idiot,” Cy replied, “that’s our traditional name for this creature. He comes back in various iterations, but he’s always the same.”
“Absolutely evil,” said Grace.
“What did he do that was so bad?” said Julia.
“I think that he knew from birth that I would be the one who could reveal his true identity. Later, he was always doing things that were very evil and would blame me. He put a kitten through our family’s meat grinder and said that I had done it. He ran over my baby rabbits with our lawnmower and blamed that on me, too. He almost killed our grandfather by knocking out the hydraulic jack that was holding up the car in the garage. It came down on Grandpa, almost crushed him, and he ended up having to have both legs amputated. Later Roland set our house on fire.”
She paused. Cy and Arthur and I were speechless. “How many more stories like that do you want to hear?” she said. “‘Cause I have a hundred more.”
Cy made a gesture that said enough. “Do you feel very connected to him?”
“How can I not? Some of his evil essence trickled into my being. I have learned how to keep it at bay, but it allows him to have a connection with me.”
Grace explained that she had experienced a breakdown. She too had reached her sixteenth birthday and ignition point nine months prior to me. Her tormented mind coupled with in-depth memories pushed her over the edge, and her family decided to institutionalize her. She was hysterical about Roivas trying to kill her and her family, and so they put her on a regimen of therapy and medication in the hopes of stabilizing her so-called mental condition.
After she had spent several months in the mental-health facility, questions began to arise whether she would ever be able to function in society again. She talked constantly about how Roivas was trying to harm her and prevent her from revealing his identity. The staff was beginning to character
ize her as delusional with schizophrenic tendencies. Grace was coherent enough to realize that this treatment program wasn’t going to lead anywhere.
“Plus I kept saying another name,” she said.
“Whose?” I asked.
She looked at me. “Yours, William. I knew you were out there. Remember, we existed together, before our time in this realm.”
I started to respond, but Cy cut in. “So Roivas is still alive right now?”
“First let me finish my story,” she said. Grace continued describing the psych ward.
As I listened, I realized that I could have ended up in that kind of place. The people I had shared my story with were leery, but in the end they believed as best they could. I could see, though, that all these crazy thoughts and dreams and events might have led me over the edge, where I could have spent my life drugged up in some cold institution.
Inside the mental hospital, Grace wondered if they weren’t right, if she was crazy. She had grown up being tormented by Roivas, and that place was making it all worse, not better, and she was not sure what was real. Then she gathered her wits and began to formulate a plan to escape. Every evening she was given medication, sedatives. The staff made her open her mouth to make sure that all the pills were gone. She became quite adept at locating and moving one pill underneath her tongue. After a week, she had collected seven pills.
The attendant who issued the medication every night always flirted with her. She never responded to his advances until that last week. He always carried a stainless-steel coffee cup with a plastic lid. The night of her escape, she slipped the medication into his coffee cup. An hour later, he was passed out in a chair. She took his keys and found her way to the locker room where staff changed. She rummaged through some lockers, found some street clothes, and quickly walked out.
“Three days later,” she said, “I was outside that shopping mall. I had been drawn to it, and I saw you and Julia drive past and park in the lot. I watched you go into the sporting goods store. I could feel that you and I were close, that you were the Change Agent I was seeking. Then you had that burst of energy inside, and it was confirmed. So I followed you to the bus stop. I got on after you. I sat behind you and watched you. When you got off in the middle of nowhere, I slumped down so the driver couldn’t see me, and when I popped up a few minutes later he nearly had a cow! I got off, sat out in the desert, and contacted this guy. I could sense him. He was a Change Agent.”
She pointed at Cy.
I sat in shock, stupefied, slack-jawed. Then I turned to Cy. “You’ve met her before?”
The old Indian grinned. “She came to me in a vision, told me to drive out and pick you up.”
She smiled. Cy smiled. I shook my head and wondered how many times the world was going to pull the wool over my eyes and then laugh at me.
“Why didn’t you just talk to me when I got off the bus?” I asked.
“Looking back at it, I should have. But I was still unsure if you understood enough to help us or help yourself. And I knew I was close to the Hall. So I went to it.”
“Yes,” he said, “she helped us find the Hall of Knowledge.”
I had grown utterly silent, realizing just how much I didn’t know. How could I be a Change Agent? How could I affect change if the knowledge I had access to just came out in little drips and drabs? Was I an incompetent Change Agent, a failure who these others had put their misplaced trust in? Really, I wanted to go back to the way things were, back to being just a punk kid, stumbling around, clueless, griping about everything. This was my first lesson about being “careful what you wished for.” It was something the older folks had said over and over again but this was the first time I understood. Not that I had wished for anything quite like what was happening now, but I sure thought I hated high school and my parents telling me what do and being bored. Now I would have given anything to have all of that back.
Arthur and Julia sat, rapt as Grace described how she’d followed her intuition to the cave, listening telepathically for anybody who might be giving her hints.
“I think the L.Es—the first people to reach final ignition—were helping me. They’re always trying to help us reach final ignition.”
Cy looked at her admiringly. “That’s a true Change Agent right there, everybody. Messages from the L.E. Maybe that’s who gave me the vision of the helmets?”
Grace blushed, then continued. Once she’d located the cave, she was able to identify the rock and push it away from the entrance to the tunnel. She had very minimal supplies with her, so her experience there wasn’t nearly as thorough as mine. After locating the column of earth, she left a message for us.
“That was you?” Cy asked.
“The one thing that you didn’t learn in the Hall of Knowledge was the fact that a Change Agent can imprint an image on the stone face. And if another civilization inputs information in the Hall of Knowledge, it will be transmitted to all ten worlds.”
“I don’t have that ability,” I said.
“You will soon,” said Cy.
I turned to Cy again. “And you knew about this all along?”
Cy nodded again. “You needed to discover some of these things for yourself.” Then he addressed Grace again. “But you still haven’t answered the question. What happened to Roivas?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was institutionalized.”
“But he’s your brother.”
“My family stopped talking to me.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yes. I have no doubt that he killed William’s family. In any case, he’s so powerful that he’ll come back, in any form, to hunt down the person or persons who know his identity.” She paused. “That includes all of you.”
Silence. None of us liked hearing that our knowledge might kill us.
“How did you end up in the hospital?” asked Arthur. “Did you just put yourself in a coma?”
“No,” she said, “When I left the cave, I felt like I was being watched. I moved cautiously, and after a mile, I saw someone sitting on a large rock. It was an older man, and he motioned for me to come over. He said his name was Sonny.”
William and Cy exchanged looks. “Sonny’s a C.A. 2.”
“He said he knew that I had been to the Hall of Knowledge. He told me that Little Horn was after me—that’s the name he used, not Roivas—and that he wanted to know the location of the cave.”
“Sonny is also a seer,” said Cy.
“I could tell. He said he searches for evil, every morning and every night. He told me Little Horn was an evil manifestation from another realm, and that I was clearly a Change Agent.”
“He thinks of such things right on his porch,” said Cy, pointing across the valley.
“He told of the signs in the stars indicating the arrival of a powerful force. Then he told me to hide myself.”
“So you thunked yourself on the head?” I asked. I hadn’t meant for it to sound funny, but everybody laughed.
“No,” she said. “After I focused and contacted Cy about picking you up, Sonny prepared a special potion for me. I swallowed it and went into a coma. Then he poked a few little holes in my leg and took me to the hospital and said that he’d found me out near the edge of the desert, that I was the victim of a snakebite.”
“So that explains it,” I said.
“And even during this comatose state,” said Cy, “you found that you could communicate telepathically with William?”
“Yes. It was easy. We’re connected.”
Julia didn’t like hearing that, and I didn’t blame her, but hey, it’s not like we were married. We all looked at one another for a moment. The cabin was starting to feel colder, the heat from the fire fading. Cy stood up and shoved more logs into the fire.
“So now what do we do? Your twin brother is Little Horn, my ancestors’ traditional enemy, and we have to stop him. For the first time in history.”
“I know what to do,” I said. Their eyes turned toward me, a
nd I felt the words come tumbling out, as though the plan were preordained. “Tomorrow, we go to the Hall of Knowledge. We look at the walls for final clues.”
“There’s a lot to decipher,” said Cy.
“Maybe if we put all our heads together, we can learn something.”
Arthur hadn’t spoken in a while. I looked over and saw that he’d passed out with his head against the wall. Next to me, Julia looked scared and was probably wondering what in the world she was doing. Grace and I caught one another’s eyes, and she shrugged.
“Let’s talk more tomorrow.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
That night, Julia and I shared the one thin mattress that I’d used the previous month. It was exciting to be sleeping with this girl for the first time, feeling her against my body, even if nothing sexual was going to happen. There were too many other people in the cabin.
She turned to me, and I felt her lips on mine. We lay like that for a while, just making out. Then she pulled back and looked at me.
“So what did you do with that girl?” she said.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“You kissed her?”
“No.”
“Swear it.”
I gulped. “I swear it.”
She softened in my arms. “Tell me you still like me,” she said.
I didn’t know how to reply without sounding like a total jerk. “Look, I’ve been so busy.” Then something occurred to me. “Aren’t your parents going to worry?”
“My dad is always worrying.”
“He’s looking for you. And he has a lot of resources available.”
She sighed. “Can we not talk about him? I’m so over that right now.”
“All right,” I said.
We fell asleep in each other’s arms, and I fell into a deep—and for this night—dreamless sleep.
Ten o’clock the next morning, I was coming out of the privy when Arthur came running up to me. “Dude, he’s coming this way!”
“Who?”
“Julia’s dad. The sheriff!”
I felt the panic, and followed him over to where Cy was sitting on the porch. Next to him was Sonny. I didn’t realize that he could make it all the way over here.