The Light of Redemption

by Natalie Damschroder

  “Hold on.” I didn’t tell him what I was planning, because there was every chance it wouldn’t work.

  “To what?” He flattened himself and turned his head to face me.

  “Good enough.” I shoved against the ground to move the light upward. And, um, kind of overdid it. We shot out of the pit and about ten feet over it, shocking me enough to lose my grip on the light. It tilted, and we plummeted to the ground. Luckily, far enough from the pit not to send us back into it. Unluckily, from high enough to wrench my knee when we landed.

  I quickly sucked the light back into myself. I needed to release it to its source, wherever that was, but not yet. I might still need it. The next thing I did was frantically search the area around us to make sure no one had seen that. Now, more than ever, I didn’t want my identity blown, though logically it didn’t matter. Someone already knew.

  And that someone had tried to kill us.

  Chapter 8

  “Are you all right?” Conn rolled to one knee next to me and touched my leg.

  “I’m fine. Are you?”

  “You saved my life. So yeah, I’m doing okay.” He pushed to his feet and went to the edge of the pit, moving quickly but testing each step to make sure the ground wasn’t going to crumble more.

  I knew he’d need light, so I eased to my feet and tried not to limp as I joined him. After checking around one more time to make sure no one was in sight, I dropped a small ball into the pit so we could see the bottom, my breath lodged tight in my chest until the whole space was visible.

  No one was down there. My lungs expanded in a whoosh and I had to bend over to brace my hands on my thighs. It had all happened so fast, I hadn’t been sure. Those spikes would definitely have caused the kinds of screams we’d heard.

  Beside me, Conn blew out a breath, too, and rubbed his forehead. “Do you think there’s another pit?”

  My stomach went sour. I hadn’t thought of that. “Wouldn’t we—or someone else searching—have found it?”

  “We didn’t find this one until now.”

  True. Dammit.

  But . . . “Are you talking about a pit that someone fell into, and that’s why we heard screams? Or another pit to trap us? A strategic redundancy.”

  He shook his head. “Why do you say trap us? How could they have had any idea who would wind up in here?”

  Oh, I knew exactly how. But the back of my neck was prickling, and it was getting seriously dark now. I didn’t want to be stuck in these woods, unable to patrol, on one of the crazier nights of the year. Especially because this could have been a diversion. Something to keep us occupied while something happened elsewhere in town.

  “It doesn’t matter right now. I don’t think there’s another open pit or we’d have found it. But we can’t leave this one like this, and we can’t assume there aren’t any more. Too many people come through here. Kids.” I rotated in place, casting light out along the ground. “I just don’t know how to find out, without walking on every inch of ground and hoping I can stop us from falling again.”

  The air around us grew heavier, and I turned, knowing it was because of Conn.

  “I can do it.”

  “Do what?” Being super strong wasn’t going to help us. But he had something in mind. Something he didn’t want to do, judging by the slump of his shoulders and the pained way he’d closed his eyes.

  “Just . . .” He scanned the trees, then pointed to a pair joined at the base. “Go prop yourself in there and hold on.”

  Puzzled, I did as he’d asked. Back where we’d been before the screams, the sounds of the festival had changed. Vendors were starting to pack up, and the crowds had moved to the center of the park to watch the fireworks. I wrapped one arm around each tree trunk and kept my weight on my left leg. My right knee throbbed when I eased off of it.

  Most of the surrounding area was too dark to see now. I raised my small light ball out of the pit and left it about hip height, where a flashlight would be.

  “This is going to look stupid,” Conn muttered. Then he shook his head, backed away from the pit about ten feet, and jumped. Not, like, jumped a great distance, or high in the air. He jumped up and down. Balled his hands into fists, crouched, pushed off, and landed with both feet flat, knees bent, right where he’d started.

  A visible shockwave swept past him. The light around my ball rippled, and the ground shuddered. The trees quaked under my hands, nearly shaking me out of my perch, and a cacophony of sound erupted. Birds and mammals chirped and chattered, and I heard a few thuds. There were startled cries from out on the grass, but nothing truly fearful. To them, it had probably felt like a mild tremor from an earthquake far away.

  A smaller ripple reversed through my light, back to Conn, who straightened, his eyes aimed at the ground and fists still clenched. “This is the only one.”

  I didn’t move, my tongue and my muscles both paralyzed with recognition. He glanced over at me, and I swallowed and struggled to climb gracefully out of the tree.

  “How do you know?” I managed to ask, my bad knee buckling as I hit the ground but more out of weakness in the rest of my body than the injury itself.

  I knew who Conn was. And what he was hiding.

  “I can tell,” he told me, and it took me several seconds to refocus and realize he was answering my question.

  What would I say next if I weren’t distracted by a flood of answers and even more questions? My brain buzzed, but I had to push it aside. At least until we finished dealing with this.

  “Like echolocation, but with the ground?”

  His eyebrows went up, and he stopped trying to avoid meeting my eyes. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “Okay. Good.” I set my hands on my hips to hide their trembling and studied the pit, which had crumbled a little more around the edges.

  My new knowledge felt like an earth-shaking revelation, probably because actual earth shaking had been the clue that cleared everything up for me. Except it was just one more puzzle piece, with a great deal of the picture still unfinished.

  I cleared my throat. “Then what do we do about this? She must have hauled the dirt away.”

  “She?”

  I pressed my lips together and shook my head. That could wait, too.

  “I’ll get Ralph to come over and help. We’ve got clean fill.” Conn got his phone and started tapping on the screen.

  The prickle on my neck had turned into a burn. “Tell him to bring big lights. I have to return mine.” My phone pinged. When I checked the text, it was an alert from the power company about a nearby outage. I’d pulled enough light to cause people to report an outage? They must be really confused, because other things using electricity wouldn’t have been affected. Their clocks would still be on, for example.

  But that would be a lot of damage if I didn’t return the light, and everyone would eventually figure out it was my fault. I gathered all of the light, then released everything except a very small portion to keep while we were still in the woods.

  “Whoa.” Conn stared along with me as dozens of balls of light—far too many to count—zipped toward the housing development. A few moments later, windows glowed with the restored light in at least a dozen houses. And again, I felt sick to my stomach. I should have been excited. This was far beyond anything I’d ever done before. But it was too frightening to excite me. If I could do that out of desperation, what else could I do? And what if it had hurt someone when I did it?

  Conn could tell I wasn’t happy, and he rubbed a hand across my shoulders. I almost leaned into him, but my revelation stopped me. Not because I was scared of him, though someone like Olive would tell me I should be. It was because I didn’t know who I’d be leaning into. Since we met, we’d each been two different people together. The flirtation between Harmony and Conn had grown today into someth
ing with potential. But every time I became Eclipse and he became—I winced—The Brute, a wall went up. He withdrew and treated me like a novice. And now I knew the truth was even more complex than that.

  “Ralph will be here in five minutes,” he said. “I’ll help him fill this in. Why don’t you go?”

  “Go where?” I bristled.

  “Go wrap your knee. Elevate it, with ice. When we’re done here—”

  I shook my head. “No freaking way. Don’t let the tame family crowd fool you. There will be an increase in domestic disturbances and drunk-and-disorderlies tonight. I need to get on patrol.”

  “You can’t walk all over town with your knee borked up. I can tell how much it’s bothering you.”

  “I have to walk a mile to my house, anyway.”

  “Oh. I thought you probably had your car nearby.” He pinched his nose between his eyes. “I walked, too. Maybe Ralph—”

  “No.” I put up a hand. “Forget it. I’ll go. I want to see if anyone is talking about the screams. Then I’m going home to change and get to work. If you want to help, text me. Otherwise, I’ll be at your house tomorrow night at six.” My day at the library would end at five. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  His entire demeanor had changed as I talked. Posture stiffened, jaw hardened, eyes went cold, and he’d even shifted back out of the light, the way he always hid as Mr. Clothesline and The Brute. But I expected him to say there wasn’t anything to discuss, and he surprised me.

  “You’re right. More than you think. But sooner is better than later. I’ll find you tonight.”

  “Good.”

  An engine rumbled toward us, and Ralph’s battered truck came into view outside the trees. He’d driven along the back edge of the residential properties. I hope no one called the police on him. Not that we were trying to keep this quiet or anything. There was just no point taking the authorities away from where they were really needed.

  As soon as Ralph got a portable standing light set up, I let go of the little I’d held back. It floated toward a nearby house, and soon a bedroom light on the second floor came on. I followed and walked the trail Ralph had left in the grass. This was a longer way home than going back to the park, but I was more likely to trip or stumble in the darker woods and hurt my knee worse. The evening fireworks lit my path over the tops of the trees.

  It wasn’t too bad of an injury. I could walk without limping, as long as I didn’t bend it too far or hyperextend it. Running probably wasn’t much of an option. But my slow progress gave me time to think, to dredge up the little I knew about Conn Parsons, a.k.a. Rafe Karlsson. Semi-famous superhero with the common power of strength . . . and the completely unique ability to create shockwaves.

  He’d been a superhero in Chicago, part of a highly regarded team. A rescue mission went bad, and the victim was critically injured, two of the superheroes were killed, and the whole organization ended up disbanding. Since then, CASE had been blamed for the incident, but only anecdotally. No agencies had any real evidence against any members. They didn’t even know who most of the members were.

  I wasn’t sure, but Conn must have joined the San Diego team after that, based on his phone number and his reaction when I asked if he was from San Diego. And, God, no wonder he was so resistant to helping me or even admitting who he was.

  “Hi, Harmony!”

  I jerked my head up and smiled automatically at the couple passing on the sidewalk. On autopilot, I hadn’t realized I’d rejoined civilization. The couple hesitated, as if about to ask if I was okay, but I waved breezily and kept going. After that, I tried to look normal and not lost in a dark reverie.

  Because I really was. In San Diego, someone had released animals from the zoo, and the local superhero team had been called in. It was, to put it mildly, a clusterfuck. Civilian injuries and another superhero death. After the Washington, DC fight at the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Post did an in-depth series about the beleaguered superheroes across the country. It lifted a lot of the suspicion and blame, revealing that CASE was believed to have actively worked against the efforts in both Chicago and San Diego. But if Conn—Rafe—had been there, too, had lived through another disaster, it explained a lot.

  When I got back to my house, I flipped on the police radio and listened while I wrapped my knee. They’d already called out an ambulance for a firecracker injury, and the police were reporting to the municipal parking lot about a fight between two dads. Nothing about the woods, though, so it looked like no one had reported the screams. If they had, nothing had come of it. Anyone who hadn’t heard them could easily dismiss them as kids fooling around.

  After wrapping my knee with an Ace bandage, I dressed in my patrolling clothes, gathered my phones, and opened my back door.

  Conn stood there.

  Light leaped to my hands and burst from my fingers like flames before I realized it was him and sucked it back.

  He pushed his hood off his head and smiled ruefully. “You’re getting very instinctive about this, aren’t you?”

  I’d never used light that way before, and yeah, it had happened as thoughtlessly as the draw back in the woods, when I saved us from the spikes. But how did he know that?

  “And you’re creating more questions every time you open your mouth. Rafe.”

  He jerked slightly, his body twisting away as if dodging a blow. I closed the door behind me and tested the lock. “Come on. I go through here to avoid being seen.” I led him down the steps from my tiny, covered back porch into my fenced-in yard and then to the entrance of a long arbor covered in honeysuckle. I returned the light to my back porch and the bulb glowed again. The arbor was dark, of course, but I didn’t need to see to go through it. At the end, I carefully eased through the overgrowth of plants into an alley behind the houses.

  Conn emerged behind me, also careful despite his bulk not to dislodge my cover. He turned back to survey where we’d come from. Thanks to a long row of privacy fence along several pieces of property, you couldn’t even tell this spot led to mine. Of course, someone looking hard enough could figure it out. But my neighborhood was one-story houses, so no one’s windows were high enough to see into my yard. The alley was too narrow for vehicle traffic, and as a shortcut it didn’t offer much, so no one really came back here. At least, in my five years of sneaking out, I’d never seen anyone.

  Conn gave a small nod but didn’t comment on my precautions. “About the name thing . . .”

  I shook my head and started walking down the alley. “Not here.”

  “All right.” He flipped up his hood and shoved his hands into his pockets. “What’s the plan?”

  A little embarrassed, I shrugged. “Tonight, it’s just walking around the trouble spots. Following up on alerts on my phone.”

  “The big drug bust didn’t happen because you were walking around trouble spots.”

  “No, that was watching people, finding patterns. And I got lucky. I didn’t realize it was a major transaction at the time.” And, I grumped to myself, I’d screwed it up. The only reason it ended the way it did was because Conn showed up and stopped that guy from getting away.

  “How did you know I was there that night?” Apparently, my curiosity outweighed my shame.

  “I didn’t. Just happened along.”

  “Right,” I scoffed.

  “Seriously. I didn’t even know about Eclipse then. Did my research afterward, of course.” He rubbed the side of his nose, the movement a bit sheepish. “By then, it was too late.”

  I stopped walking. “Too late for what?”

  “To choose somewhere else.”

  “To live?”

  He nodded.

  “Why did you choose here?”

  “Childhood memories. I only visited my grandmother here a few times, but it was enough to give me a r
eason to look into it.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Europe. My father works for the European Union, and my mother is a liaison for the superhero agencies over there.”

  Wow. I’d expected him to say his parents were dead. I was glad they weren’t, but I understood why, if he was escaping the whole superhero culture—or trying to, anyway—he hadn’t gone where they were.

  A burst of light overhead was accompanied by a shrill whistle, and sparks cascaded in a willow pattern toward the homes around us. The light danced over Conn’s upturned face before they all fizzled out, luckily before landing on anything.

  “Those don’t look legal,” he said.

  “They’re not.” I flashed him a grin. “This is my favorite part. Come on.” I ran over to the fence surrounding the yard where a large group of people was laughing and cheering. Now that I was listening for it, I heard the telltale pop and hiss of a lit rocket. I leaped at the fence, grabbing the top and swinging up one leg. In seconds, I was perched on the edge, clenching my teeth because I’d forgotten about my knee and pain pierced through it from one side to another. Ignore it, I ordered, and do your job.

  Conn hauled himself up beside me just in time to watch me suck the light from the Roman candle they’d set up on—God help us—the top of a closed grill. It went ftt and there was a general “awww-ww-www” from the group, who hadn’t noticed where the light went.

  “Dud,” said the guy holding a butane stick lighter. He stepped closer, picked up the candle, shook it, and chucked it at a trash bin. “Dave, toss me another.”