Call Forth the Waves

by L. J. Hatton

  “Klok, can you pick up any signals?” Jermay held up his hands to be scanned. He wasn’t letting this go.

  “I register no outgoing signals that would be consistent with homing technology,” Klok rat-tatted across his screen.

  “Any other theories?” Jermay asked. “Or do we go with Occam’s razor and assume I’m right?”

  “Actually, you could both be right.” Nola stepped in. “It’s possible that someone tipped off the Commission, even if it wasn’t one of you.”

  “Community first,” Winnie said bitterly.

  Nola nodded. Both of them glanced at Ollie, who was busy helping his wife with their brood.

  “The rule of the Mile. It’s not inconceivable that someone turned you in, thinking they were saving the rest of us,” Nola said. “None of us would go looking for the Commission on a regular basis, but they’re not hard to get to if you’ve got information to pass along.”

  It didn’t have to be Ollie or Esther. They had hundreds of neighbors who’d kept their opinions of us to themselves. Any of them could have dropped the Commission a line.

  “It definitely wouldn’t be the first time,” Winnie said. “Can we at least call a cease-fire until we figure out what happened?”

  “I swear it wasn’t me,” Birch said.

  “And I still don’t trust him, but I’ll steer clear,” Jermay promised.

  “Good,” Klok beeped. “I would rather direct my attention to Anise without distraction. You are being immature and can choose to grow up.”

  I think that was the first time I’d ever heard him attempt an insult.

  Klok sunk back to his knees and put his hands back under Anise’s head.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “Injured,” he said simply.

  His voice screen flashed, deleting the word and replacing it with charted information about her injuries and vital signs. Multiple broken bones and swelling that had messed up her blood pressure and heart rate. Technical terms I didn’t understand. He’d even managed a blood sample that showed she needed more oxygen.

  “You saved her life,” he beeped.

  “She saved herself.”

  “The increase in air pressure directly surrounding her body decelerated her enough to prevent fatal injury. Even with the softened point of impact, she would have died. You saved her life.”

  “Thanks, Klok,” I said. “I needed to hear that.”

  “I can bind up some of the breaks,” Birch said. “But she’ll need a real doctor as soon as possible.”

  “Great idea. We just take her to a hospital and explain that she fell off a flying city while evading capture by a zombie warden. That’ll end well,” Jermay said.

  “At least I’m trying to help.”

  “Boys!” Baba raised his voice uncharacteristically.

  Jermay and Birch shut their mouths and huffed away.

  Klok beeped but kept his head down so his screen was out of sight, no doubt covering another insulting grumble.

  “Our best course would be to allow those of us equipped for medical intervention to do what they can while the rest of us seek suitable shelter until morning,” Baba said.

  “What good will that do?” Jermay asked. He’d taken most of the edge out of his voice, leaving behind the disbelief that a few hours would improve our lot.

  I took my first real look at where we’d landed. There wasn’t much to be seen.

  Hills in the distance, fifty to a hundred miles away and partially obscured by a foggy haze in shades of brown and yellow that suggested pollution. Closer than the hills, but still within the cloud, were outlines of buildings in all sizes and shapes—definitely a city. Between them and us was a well-maintained road with little traffic in any of its lanes, and a long stretch of empty. Likely a precautionary measure for the Mile. They’d parked it over nothing so there would be no one to discover it. At least any debris from the Mile that didn’t break up wouldn’t hit anything important.

  There would be medical facilities and support in any decent-sized city, but Jermay was right; there was no way to explain Anise’s injuries without the authorities getting involved.

  “Dev should be recovered by tomorrow,” Baba said. “Most of our neighbors took flight before the warden docked. They’ll go to the beta site if they follow protocol. Stragglers like us have an assigned safe house in case the pods weren’t an option.”

  “Is there any way to check if anyone made it?” Winnie asked.

  “No. For security purposes, we don’t know more than the location of our assigned house. That way if one is lost, the others can’t be compromised.”

  “And you’re sure these houses exist?” I asked.

  “I’ve been to one of them, years ago, and I’ve no reason to believe it’s not there. The houses are often used by the ground network when hiding refugees before bringing them to the Mile. Your sister is welcome to come with us, as are you all.”

  “And you expect Dev to move all these people after the trouble he had today?” I asked.

  “Ground-to-ground moves are easier for him, and he’s tested himself with passengers. It’s also smoother than what you experienced in the air. Keep your sister still until we’re able to go. Find something to stabilize her back and neck.”

  “I can help with that,” Birch offered. “Stand clear.”

  We backed away from Anise’s body, which rose slightly to make room for the mat of reeds and bamboo braiding itself together underneath her. Thick vines wrapped around her feet, immobilizing them. Others lashed around her middle, at her wrists, and over her forehead.

  “We can move her to get her out of sight. Even if she tries to shift, the vines should keep her in place,” Birch said.

  “We’ll need a shelter,” Ollie said. He hadn’t interacted with the group except to help us extricate Anise, which was fine by me. I didn’t want to deal with his overbearing bluster on top of everything else. “Can you make more than a stretcher?” he asked Birch. It wasn’t so much a request as it was an order. He was trying to put himself in charge again.

  “I can build us a hut pretty quick, but it wouldn’t be safe,” Birch said. “It’s too noticeable out here.”

  Whatever we built needed to match the terrain flawlessly. We’d been on the ground for several minutes already, which meant we were several minutes closer to the inevitable search parties that would be dispatched in the area.

  “Kudzu,” Ollie’s wife said.

  She approached from behind her husband, leaving her younger children in the care of the older ones. Near as I could tell, they had sets of multiples. Three preteens and alternating twins and triplets whose ages descended from there. Ollie’s wife was as tall as he was and reed thin, with knotted black hair—a dancer in a basketball player’s body. She spoke quietly and quickly, moving her eyes from one of us to the next, searching for someone to acknowledge what she’d said. She hadn’t even told us her name, and neither had Ollie.

  “I mean, you could use kudzu as camouflage,” she said, then launched into an explanation to qualify her suggestion. “It’s a weed. It grows like a blanket in all directions, and it grows just about everywhere, so it wouldn’t be out of place. Build up a shelter, and cover it in kudzu. It’s a nightmare to try to clear; they won’t even bother.”

  “Will it work?” I asked Birch.

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  I’d seen Birch do some impressive things before—make trees grow or shrink on command, or fill a room with deadly blooms and thorns as thick as my arm because something scared him. He’d even done the insta-hut trick before to hide me from Warden Nye’s security at the Center. And I’d always believed that the Commission’s biggest mistake with him was underestimating the extent of his power. They didn’t see any significant tactical use in someone who could grow potatoes on command, so they—and Arsenic, especially—treated Birch like a joke. Anyone who saw him recontouring the surface of the Earth with the ease of a maestro’s baton directing a symphony wouldn
’t have been laughing.

  Birch had an unparalleled sense of spatial acuity. He could tell what would fit where by sight alone. He knew how deep a trench to have me open so that, when he added walls and a roof, the whole structure was the same height as the gentle slopes surrounding it.

  Bright-green kudzu vines bubbled out of the ground and spread like drops of food coloring in a bowl of water. Darker here, lighter there, changing depth and dimension, all dotted through with conical purple flowers.

  “They smell like grape soda!” Birdie squealed. Watching Birch work had calmed her down with the promise of a safe place to hide, and she delighted in pulling the flowers off to crush them in her fingers.

  Ollie and his wife (whose name turned out to be Clementine) moved their kids inside. We put Anise’s stretcher in the very back beside a second one that held Dev, and left them under the watchful eyes of Nola and a once-again-shrunken pair of golems, while Birdie and Wren helped Baba navigate the unfamiliar space.

  Klok opened his bag, releasing the mini–creeper lights he’d saved from Baba’s house. They skittered through our hovel, playing chase with the kids, who were still young enough not to question how machines made solely for light could want to play.

  I lifted our freshly grown door and joined Birch and Winnie outside. He was still adjusting the top layer, trying to balance the levels of color so that no spots stood out enough to make someone curious. What he’d accomplished was nothing short of Photoshopped reality.

  “It’s perfect,” I said.

  Birch frowned.

  “Perfection doesn’t exist in nature. Perfection gets noticed.”

  He switched the configuration of the clump of kudzu crowning our shelter. It looked like it had been there for years.

  He would have kept fussing for the rest of the day and through the night if Winnie and I hadn’t pulled him back inside with reminders that Anise needed all the help he and Klok could give her. Letting him stay out in the open would have defeated the purpose of the shelter he’d made for us.

  “How is it?” Ollie was waiting right inside the door.

  “You can’t see anything from outside,” I told him. “You can’t hear anything, either.”

  The shrill laughter of his children filled the hut from end to end. To them, we were on an adventure and playing games.

  “I wouldn’t get too close to the walls,” Birch said. “We’re close to the road, and if any large trucks come through, the sides could be compromised.” He’d shored them up with mats like the ones Anise and Dev were sleeping on, but it was best not to take chances. “Other than that, we should be good until tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” Jermay said. “As long as no one comes after us with a bottle of weed killer, we’re golden.”

  He’d been sitting alone on one side of the hut, pulling flowers off the wall like Birdie. A pile of them sat at his feet, dismembered and bleeding deep purple when he crushed them under his heel.

  Thankfully, Birch didn’t take the bait.

  “What are we going to do about them?” Winnie asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Do you think Jermay’s jealous?”

  “I’ve told him not to be. Birch doesn’t spend more than twenty seconds looking at anyone other than you.”

  He’d been attached to me at the Center, but that was desperation. He’d known Winnie for years before we ever met. They’d bonded in the Ground Center where they’d been confined, and that kind of bond didn’t break easily.

  “Not that kind of jealous,” Winnie said quietly. “It’s hard for Jermay to see all of us with abilities while he has none. We’re not in The Show anymore. He can’t pretend it’s all smoke and mirrors. Out here, we’re different.”

  I’d never thought about it that way. I’d always been the Celestine, and Jermay had always been the boy with magic in his eyes. Now that magic was dying off the further we strayed into the dark realities of life.

  “We may feel powerless,” Winnie said. “But he actually is.”

  “Gee, thanks, Winnie. It’s nice to know you think I’m useless.”

  She hadn’t been quiet enough. And Jermay’s reaction proved her right. How could I have missed something so painfully obvious about him when I’d known him forever? I could finish his sentences, but I had no idea what was going on inside his head.

  “I didn’t say you were useless,” Winnie protested. “And I didn’t mean—”

  “I need some air.”

  Jermay stomped toward the curtain door, blowing past Ollie, who decided not to try to stand in his way—or mine.

  “Jermay! Stop,” I said. “Use your head. They’re going to be looking for you.”

  “I guess that makes me stupid on top of powerless. I’ll just go mingle with the rest of the mundanes where I belong. No one will give me a second look.”

  The kudzu curtain dropped behind him.

  What I should have said was that he was one of the most resourceful people I’d ever known. That he never failed to have my back or stand beside me if I needed him. His power wasn’t something given to him by an off-world entity; it was deeper than that. He was relentless when it came to his family and friends. His power was tenacity, and I loved him for it.

  But I kept my mouth shut and let him leave. “Protect the group” was our rule, too. I couldn’t compromise everyone for a single person, even when that person was Jermay and he’d left the hut with my bleeding, beating heart in his hands.

  Birdie crawled into my lap and laid her head on my shoulder while she cried. Her tears made her look even younger than she was. She’d taken in so much grief and loss that it finally spilled over. She couldn’t be the brave little girl she knew everyone wanted her to be.

  I was getting closer to that point myself. How was I supposed to comfort her or make it better when all I wanted was for someone to tell me everything would be okay so I could pretend to believe them?

  CHAPTER 19

  A few hours after we took shelter, rain moved in, pattering on the top of our hut. I couldn’t say for certain that I wasn’t the cause, calling the water down with my mood. I’d run out of tears, so the clouds lent me theirs.

  Carefully, I lifted the corner of our curtain to watch the rainfall. If this wasn’t me, it was fortuitous. Wet ground would make the area mushy and marshy and much more difficult to search. It muffled the sound of each piece of the Mile that fell. I summoned a low-rolling fog to match the gray clouds above. A few inches was all it took.

  Jermay was still gone, and Dev was still asleep. Anise drifted in and out, plagued by the fever her injuries had caused. Baba said we needed to get her temperature down, and he seemed to think I’d be able to make it happen. Pyrokinetics didn’t just add heat; they could remove it, he said. I could pull the heat out of my sister’s body and let it drift harmlessly into the air around us, but I didn’t know how.

  All these things people kept expecting me to do, but no one had prepared me for them. I couldn’t be everything to everyone, and I was tired of the expectation.

  Birch did what he could, poring through Klok’s databases and summoning every healing herb he could find, but there was only so much we could manage without real medical help.

  Things had gone so wrong. One sister dead, another almost there. Two sisters missing. I was no closer to finding my father, and starting to believe all I’d find was his grave. This was not the way it was supposed to go.

  If I was as powerful as everyone said I was, then how had I failed so miserably at everything?

  “Penn?” Winnie approached cautiously. “You’d better get in here.”

  My first thought, of course, was that Anise was gone. She’d met Evie on the other side and left me spiraling without a way to ever ground myself again. But if that had been the case, Birdie would have been in tears again. Instead, I could see her in the middle of the hut, facing off with Ollie. Her hands were wrapped securely around something that he had the other side of. The two of them were pl
aying tug-of-war, but it was hardly a friendly game.

  “Let go!” she ordered.

  “I’m not going to keep it,” he said in the most reasonable tone I’d ever heard him use.

  “It’s not yours!”

  “I just want to check the local news, assuming I can get a signal in here with this weather.”

  He had my father’s computer. He’d taken it out of the briefcase, and Birdie had caught him.

  “Honey, I promise I’m not going to break it or steal it. If there’s been any official movement nearby, someone will have seen it and put it online.”

  “Don’t call me honey!”

  Very few people could get away with using endearments for Birdie. She pulled back hard on the computer, but Ollie was way too big for her to move. Unfortunately for Ollie, Birdie wasn’t the type to give up. She couldn’t save Anise, so she’d decided to save the computer—and she had backup.

  “You heard her. Let go!”

  Wren wrapped his arms around Birdie’s middle and pulled with her.

  I tapped my toe against the ground, a signal for my lynx to make an appearance. It sprang up between them, grabbed the computer in its mouth and yanked it free of both their hands, then brought it to me. Birdie blew a raspberry in Ollie’s direction and retreated to our makeshift hospital to help Birch and Klok.

  “You shouldn’t go snooping in bags that don’t belong to you,” I told Ollie. I wanted to be mad at him. I even tried. He deserved it after all the trouble he’d put us through, but without the crowd behind him, he was nothing more than a guy in a hut trying to keep his family safe, the same as the rest of us.

  “It wasn’t locked,” he said. “I was trying to help.”

  “It wasn’t a bad idea, but this thing is password protected. You could have burned the hard drive.”

  I didn’t like him; he didn’t like me. Civility was the best we could hope for.