Cornerstone 02 - Keystone

by Misty Provencher

  “But I don’t want you to show me that,” I say. I keep my eyes shut, so I don’t accidentally focus and lose my nerve. I wait for his lips to fall hard against mine.

  Instead, there’s a long pause. Too long. If stupid were a real thing, it’d be a brick. And every second that passes makes me feel like I’m being buried under a big, dirty heap of stupid. It’s another first kiss that wasn’t, all over again. Another second passes and I hear Garrett’s breathing return to normal. Another load of stupid piles up on top of me, crushing my throat and my lungs and my heart. The table wobbles as he moves away and I think I’m going to scream. Instead, I open my eyes. Garrett is looking away.

  “I was up here a few times, on watch, while you were Impressioning,” he says. “My mom sent me up because I was coming completely unglued.”

  “That makes two of us,” I whisper. I know he’s talking about how I died. It seems like the right time to tell him about the Memory and about being a Tralate. “Something happened to me when I...uh…when I…”

  I can’t say it. He turns back to me, his hand warm on mine. I wish it could be the only thing in the world I have to think about.

  “What happened?” he asks. His voice is deep and smooth.

  “I think something got screwed up in my head,” I say. My palms are suddenly sweaty and I drop his hand. “The message at the Memory…I saw something on Ms. Fisk’s paper. Addo said it’s a gift. There were just symbols on the paper, but letters kind of floated out of them. I don’t know how to explain it, but they just kind of floated up and I could read them.”

  “You’re a Tralate,” Garrett says with a nod, but I can see the worry he’s trying to hide. “What did it say?”

  “It was a message from my mom. She wants me to find my grandfather’s memory.”

  Garrett shakes his head. “No. That’s not going to happen, Nalena. That’s a suicide mission with everything going on right now.”

  My hands go dry. There’s no way I won’t do what my mother asked me to, no matter what’s happening. And it’s a crushing thing to hear Garrett, the only person in the world that I can trust to help me, say that he won’t.

  “It is going to happen,” I tell him. “I have to do it.”

  “Nalena.” His voice drops. “The Ianua have been searching for that memory for 17 years and they still haven’t found it. If you went looking for it now, by yourself and without even being trained first, The Fury would be climbing over each other to pick you off before you even got out the door. They’d think it was an honor to annihilate the last of your family tree. One less Contego in the Ianua’s blood line.”

  Anger rolls down into my stomach. It sits there like a hunk of granite, while I stare at Garrett’s shadowed cheeks. I take a step back as my adrenaline fires up and runs the circuit of my body, looking for an escape.

  “Then I better get trained fast,” I tell him. “My mother asked me to do this and I’m going to do it, Garrett. I’m a Contego now. I’m a warrior, just like you, and I’ve got to do what I know is right. You should know that.” I gulp a breath that goes down my throat like a bag full of hair, but I don’t let his eyes get away. “Especially you,” I say.

  I expect him to yell at me or laugh in my face or tell me I’m naive. I boil, waiting for him to tell me how stupid I am to go half-baked into some quest that I’m totally unprepared for. Or to ask me what we both know that I don’t know: where am I going to look when I don’t really understand what I’m even looking for? But instead of any of this, Garrett just presses his lips together and drops his chin.

  “Alright,” he says. “Then we need to get you trained, ASAP.”

  I wish I could be some awesome warrior girl that could grab his shirt and give him a movie star kiss, but I’m just me and I’d probably break his nose trying to do it.

  Garrett takes my hands in the dark and draws himself close to me again. I can feel his chest rise and fall as we tangle ourselves together. I want him to say everything will work out, but instead, his hair dusts my face. I want him to kiss me, but Garrett takes a deep breath and straightens out his arms, holding me at the ends of them. He groans.

  “We have to get you trained. And that means that I’ll have to stay my distance.”

  It throws my brakes on. “Why?”

  “We can’t have any physical contact during training. Contact with me will drain your energy and you need to keep it at a maximum so that you can learn how to use your senses and your field.”

  He lets go of my shoulders and his heat moves away. I might as well be in a rocket, racing away from the sun.

  “I won’t be able to see you?” I ask.

  “Oh no, we can see each other all we like,” he almost laughs. But not quite. “We just can’t have any physical contact.”

  “Can’t you just teach me what I need to know now?” I say and at the same time, I focus on seeing him. Like someone’s flipped a switch, he appears only a foot away, leaning against a shelf. The way he looks at me, he’s been focused for a while. I smile at him. “See? I’m learning. You’ve already taught me to do this.”

  “This.” He waves a hand between our gaze. “Is nothing compared to what you need to know. You need to learn how to work all your senses together…how to shut them down so they don’t drive you nuts and how to ramp them up when you need to win a fight. You’ll have to learn about protecting your Cavis and how to find your opponent’s...”

  “Cavis?” I giggle.

  “Exactly,” Garrett says. “There’s so much you need to know. Cavises are weakness that show up in your field. They can be physical, mental, spiritual or emotional. Don’t worry. It sounds complicated, but you’ll learn to find them in your opponent’s field. You’re going to learn all of this, but for now, it’d be a good idea for me to practice a little more distance so we can get you up and running a lot more quickly.”

  “Just you? Or I can’t touch anybody?”

  “No,” he says with a fading grin. “Just me.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does if you understand how it works.” He grins sheepishly. “I deplete your energy because…because I want to be with you. In ways you can’t even imagine.”

  My insides spin like a turbo-charged merry-go-round. Garrett underestimates me. I can imagine every way that I want to be with him. I start to and then it’s hard to concentrate on anything else he says, even though he keeps talking.

  “Learning how to use your energy is draining enough. Real combat fighting is as much about stamina as it is technique. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll figure out how to build up and save your energy, but in the beginning, you just have to work with what you have. I wouldn’t be doing you any good by syphoning it away...”

  I inch closer to him. “But maybe I want you to.”

  “Because you don’t realize what it’s costing you.” His voice is solid. He pushes away from the shelves with one shoulder. “Or what it’s going to cost the people you’ll be protecting. And the real point here is that I know better. It’s just that we have this little window right now, because things are so goofed up, that we don’t know when your training will happen. It’s got to be soon though.”

  A little spark of hope blows through me. “But it’s not now.”

  “No, it’s not now,” he agrees softly. I stop focusing as I walk toward him and he disappears.

  Before he can open his mouth again, my lips are on his. Garrett can’t be the one calling all the shots. I need to start thinking and acting like a confident warrior and Garrett is the safest place to start. His breath and mine twist into one breath and I forget where I am and what I am and how we should be practicing staying away from each other.

  I forget everything until someone outside the library pounds on the window like they want in.

  Now.

  Chapter 5

  GARRETT GRABS MY WRIST AND drags me down the aisle, away from our table. The sharp strikes on the glass come so rapid fire that the whole library echo
es with the wobbling vibration, and it doesn’t let up.

  Garrett stops short at the end of the aisle and I plow into his back. My bubble orbs around me, but I’m scared and instead of following my instincts, my head spins between holding Garrett back and jumping out to face the intruder myself. My field bursts and reforms, bursts and reforms, in the annoying, rotating door of my indecision.

  But Garrett’s breathing is so even, I barely feel the rise and fall of his lungs. And the second I let go of him, he steps out from behind the shelves.

  “Oh…you’ve gotta be kidding!” He laughs out loud. It doesn’t make sense and I want to yank him back, but he’s just out of reach. He rests his hands on his hips, too genuinely relaxed to be gearing up for a fight, so I peek out from around the shelf myself. I gaze toward the full-length glass, from where the sound is coming. In the bare moonlight, I see a paper-thin guy standing on the window ledge outside. He’s dressed in all black, but his hair is a shocking, white-blond.

  And he’s humping the glass.

  Garrett busts out in laughter again.

  “Who is that?” I ask.

  “Zane,” Garrett says. Then, as if it clarifies everything, he adds, “Middleditch.”

  I’ve heard that name at school. I remember Cora telling me that Zane Somebody was one of the Classics, like Garrett, which meant he was one of the popular guys who drove an otherwise unpopular, but immaculate, clunker. And as I keep trying to place the name, it comes to me, exactly where I’ve seen this guy in the library window before. Zane was at Jen’s year-end bash. He was trying to orchestrate a polar plunge into the ruthless cheerleader’s closed-up swimming pool. It happened only a few weeks ago, but it feels like years have passed since then. I follow Garrett to the window.

  My first impression was right.

  Zane is very much humping the glass.

  Garrett raps on the window and Zane stops pumping long enough to look down and laugh. He jumps backward off the ledge and even though his voice is muffled, I can hear him shouting at us to let him in. Garrett puts his finger over his lips and points toward the back of the library. Zane flashes a thumbs up and disappears.

  “You remember Zane, right?” Garrett asks. He steers me back through the aisles again and I try to focus, so I can see what’s coming at me, but I’m still too jumpy from Zane’s pounding. I can’t see a thing, so I end up tripping on Garrett’s heels and thumping along behind him.

  “Kind of,” I say as Garrett tugs me sideways so I don’t ram my head into the doorframe that leads into the back room. Beyond a million boxes and piles of books, Garrett punches numbers into an electronic keypad and the back door unlocks with a series of clicks and the sound of long, metal rods, sliding through the walls. I shift from bare foot to bare foot as the final lock releases and Garrett swings the door open.

  Zane stands outside, his thumbs hooked into the front pockets of his skinny jeans. And skinny jeans, when Zane Middleditch is the one wearing them, make them the skinniest jeans in the entire world. Zane is maybe an inch taller than me, but he’s probably about twenty pounds lighter. His hair is so pale, it reminds me of a faded lemon drop.

  Zane steps inside, shaking his hair out of his eyes. Even his eyelashes are blond. Garrett closes the door and latches it.

  “How’s it going, buddy?” Zane throws an arm around Garrett’s neck. The two of them clank heads and Zane lets go. “Sorry I couldn’t make it for the Memory.”

  “It’s all good,” Garrett says.

  “Yeah? So you’re back on top now? That circle…it’s amazing, isn’t it? I think of my mom all the time, but I don’t…well,” he kind of tips his head like he wants the words to just slide out and he grins. “I miss her, but it’s like she’s still here too. Weird, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Garrett says. He pulls me forward. “Zane, I want you to meet…”

  Garrett doesn’t get to finish before Zane sticks out his hand to shake mine.

  “Yeah, hey, Nalena. Zane.” He winks. “I bet I know more about you than you want me to.”

  I hesitate with my hand extended. The smile ripples on my lips.

  Of course he has to know my name from Simon Valley. The Waste was tattooed across my locker for three hours, until the school janitor was sent up with some off-color paint to hide it. It was written on the butt of my gym shorts and in the cover of my school books. Carved on desks. Shouted at me in the hallways. Garrett has never talked about it, but there’s no way that anyone at school didn’t know. Especially these two, former-Simon Valley jocks, since Jen, the head cheerleader, was the one who gave me the name to begin with. I wonder what kind of guy Zane really is and if, despite my being a Contego now, he will still try to haunt me with The Name.

  I want my words to come out stronger than they do, but I only manage to sound cranky when I say, “You know things? Like what?”

  Zane doesn’t miss a beat, but he looks confused.

  “Like what, what?” he asks. He grabs my fingertips and shakes them. I try not to pull my hand away too quick. “I mean, you’re Garrett’s Vieo, right? What else do you think he talks about?”

  “A Vi-what?”

  Zane drops my fingers with a guffaw. He tags Garrett’s shoulder and just keeps blabbing, “Oh, whoops…too much talky talky, huh buddy?”

  Garrett laughs but he says, “It’d be cool if you’d shut up now, yeah.”

  Zane does the zip-his-lip thing to Garrett and turns back to me, giggling. Lightening fast, he snakes out his hand and grabs mine again. It’s too fast for me to avoid him. He holds my hand firmly in his and tickles the new Impressioning mark in my palm with his fingertips.

  “Yup, yup, there it is,” he says as I yank my hand back. Zane doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, both his wink and grin seem genuinely warm. “So, you’re one of us all the way now. Don’t you worry, Nali girl...we’ll get you up to thunder.”

  “Thanks,” I say, but it twists up at the end like a question.

  “Spot on,” Zane says. And then, “So, Gare, who’s all in on the Totus?”

  “I’m guessing everybody in the city, now that you went and hammered on the window like that,” Garrett says.

  “So, you haven’t heard much since you’ve been down in the dungeon, have you?” Zane’s shoulders and mouth both drop into a serious line. “We took a pretty monumental hit, buddy, pretty dang monumental. You guys got a TV down there? I mean, brother...things are all Cusped-up.”

  “There’s no TV and nobody’s been out until now,” Garrett says, but he’s suddenly so tuned into Zane that it makes the bottoms of my feet itch like I should be running. “I figured it was pretty bad since it’s been so quiet.”

  “It’s quiet because they’ve had you in the mothballs, brother. Nobody even knew where you were until about ten minutes ago. Freddie wouldn’t say jack. Guess that’s the way we’re gonna slide, until we can figure out who’s putting The Fury onto us. Everybody’s a friggin’ suspect. Whose place is this anyway? I didn’t know we had any Alo camping out under the books.”

  “It’s not Alo.”

  “Contego? What Contego would hide under these bricks? Wait...it’s Carducci and Sasu isn’t it? Figures. They’ve been tunneling ever since they got bound.” Zane turns to me as if I’ve been included in the conversation all along. As if I even know what he’s talking about. “Whew...Sasu...wait till you meet her, Nal. Talk about your Vieo trolls!”

  Garrett ignores the comment.

  “It’s not a Contego house either,” he tells Zane. “It’s one of the Veritas. His name is Nok.”

  Zane lifts both eyebrows too high to make me feel like things are going to be okay.

  “A Veritas?” he says. “Buddy...this is some serious cane we’re raising up here.”

  “You’re just coming around to that now?”

  “Freddie didn’t say anything about it being a Veritas’ place. And the Totus is here too?” Zane’s eyes travel over the floor. “Oh ho! Is my dad ever gonna flip! I guess it kind of make
s sense…it’s not like we can use a regular cover.”

  I can’t help but look between the two of them, anxious to understand their conversation. Garrett catches sight of me and says, “It’s no big deal, everything’s fine.”

  Zane rubs his thumb and forefinger together. He traces the floor with his gaze.

  “True, nothing’s really wrong, per say,” he says. His sudden concentration makes me uneasy. I can already tell, in the minute and a half that I’ve known Zane Middleditch, that there are probably very few things that shut him up and make him concentrate this hard.

  “It’s just not exactly right,” Zane says. “We don’t expose the Veritas. Not unless there are no other choices. It’s too huge of a risk.”

  “We’re the only Cura left with an Addo,” Garrett says. “I’d say that limits our options pretty severely. How big of a hit were you talking about anyway? Who else is gone?”

  “Brother,” Zane snaps out of his focus and exhales in a way that make his lips flap. “For Contego? It’s easier to say who’s left. Pretty much the inner ring. There’s us, you guys, Freddie Marcourt, only Van now, Carducci and Sasu...but I think they’re too busy trying to repopulate the world to be worried about helping us out with the Cusp…Trig, Mrs. Neho. I think that’s everybody. Oh, and Larson. Lucky us. We still got Larsy.”

  “Wow.” Garrett says, rocking back on his heels.

  “Yeah, wow.”

  “I wonder how the Addo’s going to divide up the new Curas. He’s not going to be able to do it all on his own.”

  Zane shrugs. “How’s the old man doing anyway?” he asks.

  “The Memory healed him pretty well, but he’s still missing some teeth,” Garrett says.

  Zane lets out a low whistle. “You think we’re going to pull up stakes and circle the wagons?”

  “I can’t imagine all the Curas flocking here, but with only one Addo left, I can’t imagine them doing anything else.”

  “Everybody’s coming to guard the Addo?” I ask. Both boys look at me like they forgot I was standing between them.