by Dima Zales
“Is she alive?”
Williams didn’t answer, so I nodded.
“Thank god. Move over.”
I glanced at Williams again for guidance, but he was still looking down.
I got up and stepped back. The woman took my place. She was young — in her late teens, maybe twenty, tops. She was quite a bit shorter than me, five-foot-one or -two. Her hair was shaved close on the sides and bleached almost white. Her skin was the color of coffee with cream. I wasn’t sure of her ethnicity. Latina, maybe. She had several facial piercings, and the edge of a tattoo showed above her collar. But for all the tough-chick fixings, she looked nervous.
She picked up Callie’s hand and closed her eyes. The ashen surface of Callie’s face and chest turned black, then dark brown. Her body seemed to inflate slightly, as though lost mass were returning. The browned skin became hamburger-red, then pink and blistered. New ears seemed to grow from the blackened nubs, like one of those time-lapse photos. Eyelids and lips formed as well. Her nose grew back, red skin and white cartilage pushing out the blackened edges of the ruin that had been there before.
Callie was recognizable again — definitely still burned, but recognizable.
The blond woman moaned and slumped back against the cabinets.
Callie began to stir and whimpered in pain.
The blond woman tried to say something. She was shockingly pale. A sheen of sweat stood out on her face. On the second try, she managed to say, “Bag.”
I noticed the small duffle in the kitchen doorway only when Williams stood up and fetched it. The woman must’ve dropped it there when she came in. Williams had to unzip it for her. It was full of medical supplies. Following her directions, he prepared a syringe and injected it into Callie’s arm. After a few seconds, Callie’s body relaxed, and her breathing slowed. She was unconscious.
She was also largely healed. I mean, she still had serious burns, but the difference was night and day.
If I’d needed further convincing that there was more to the world than I’d believed, I’d just gotten it.
The blond woman sat with her head between her knees, taking deep breaths, for about fifteen minutes. Then she looked up at Williams.
“Can you move her to a room where I can sleep too?”
Williams nodded and picked Callie up carefully. He took her down the hallway.
When he got back, the woman said, “Let’s take a look at those hands.”
Williams knelt in front of her and held out his arms. I noticed then that the backs of his hands and forearms were burned pretty badly. The woman examined the wounds, probing gently at bits of burned cloth that had stuck to the skin.
I watched, expecting to feel sick. It didn’t happen. I guess what I was seeing was small potatoes compared to Callie’s burns.
The scar I’d noticed before on the back of Williams’s left wrist caught my eye. As the woman turned his arm, I saw that it actually went all the way around. It looked like his hand had been cut off and reattached. Was that possible?
“These burns need healing, but it’ll have to wait ’til tomorrow. I’m shot.”
Williams grunted. When it came to languages, he sure had Thuggish down pat.
The woman directed him to a small aerosol can in her bag. She told him to spray his burns, which he did, then pointed to some pills he could take for the pain. He nodded, then thanked her in a serious tone for healing Callie. The blond woman looked a bit surprised. I was glad I wasn’t the only one. Then he got up and left the room. A few seconds later, I heard the front door close.
I felt myself relax marginally. I had no idea who the blond woman was, but at least she wasn’t him.
She looked up at me and said, “I’m Kara. Who’re you?”
“Beth. Beth Ryder.”
“Are you new?”
“Um. I guess.”
Kara grimaced. “Bummer. Well, we can talk about it tomorrow.” She struggled to her feet. “Right now, I need to sleep. That’s the biggest healing I’ve ever done.”
She shambled off down the hallway. I heard a bedroom door close.
I stood there, looking down at the floor, which was still smeared with ash and bits of char where Callie had lain.
The house was quiet. I felt alone. I’d been reborn into a world that looked like the one I knew, but wasn’t. Terror surged through me, dank and suffocating.
A two-attack day. Not good.
When I could move again, I crawled into bed and lay there shaking until sleep came.
5
I slept even later than I had the day before — well into the afternoon. The house was quiet. I lay in bed for a while. Very irrationally, I was hoping what I’d seen in the last twenty-four hours would somehow go away. My mind kept poking at this heap of impossible experiences, as though it might hop up and say in a funny accent, “Why, excuse me, I seem to have wandered into the wrong universe! I’ll be on my way now.”
Instead, the pile of impossible just sat there, refusing to leave or be integrated with the rest of my psyche.
I knew I couldn’t function that way. But deciding to tackle the situation might’ve been the hardest thing I’d ever done. Every cell in my body resisted the idea.
I understood why. It was in my nature to withdraw. Maybe my panic disorder had made me that way. In the past, new places and experiences had made it flare, so I tried to stick to routines as much as possible. And when something new and scary did happen, my impulse was to get the heck away from it.
It could have been worse — some people with panic disorder end up prisoners in their own homes, too afraid of triggering an attack to go out. That hadn’t happened to me, maybe because I had attacks at home, too. But I did try to avoid the new. I mean, photography was literally the only new thing I’d tried since I was eighteen.
But now “the new” was overrunning me, and I was going to have to confront it. If I didn’t start trying to make a place for myself in this new world, it would shred me.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. After all, what I’d seen the blond woman, Kara, do — that was miraculous. What if I could do something like that?
I showered, then went hunting for my clothes in Callie’s dryer. Someone’s snoring was audible in the hallway, even though all the bedroom doors were closed. I hoped it was Kara, not Williams.
When I got to the kitchen, there was someone new there. A man. He was drinking coffee. He looked up at me, and his face shifted into what appeared to be a friendly smile.
“Hi. You must be Elizabeth. I’m Graham Ryzik. I’m here to show you the ropes.”
This was it. I had to confront the new. I seized my courage in both hands and made a bold first move.
“Um. Hi.”
Good lord, I’m going to have to do better than that.
“Um. Coffee?”
He grinned and motioned toward a can of grounds and some filters on the counter.
I turned my back on the scary stranger and made myself a cup of coffee. Then I brought it over to the table and sat down with him to drink it. It was really good. I didn’t usually drink the caffeinated stuff.
“Well,” he said, “you seem to be handling all this pretty well.”
“Thanks.”
He smiled again. Big smiler, this guy.
“Want some breakfast?”
“Okay.”
He got up and made enough eggs and toast for two.
I watched him. He was good-looking — tall and slender, with brown eyes, blond hair, and a TV anchorman’s even, chiseled features. He was wearing khakis and a fitted pale green sweater made out of some fine material. He was maybe ten years older than me and carried himself with confidence. I wondered if he was a lawyer or a doctor. He seemed professional, sophisticated.
He brought me a plate, and I thanked him. We ate in silence.
When we were both finished, he pushed back and sat there looking at me, smiling a little.
I looked back at him. Confront the new, I reminded myself.
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br /> “Can you explain things to me?” I said.
He nodded. “That’s what I’m here for. I oversee the Upper Midwest. New talent is part of my responsibility.”
“Oversee? So this is an organization of some sort?”
“You could say that. Basically, we look out for things that shouldn’t be happening and try to fix them. We have a territory with different regions. Each region has an overseer.”
“What are you called?”
“What, like the ‘League of Justice,’ or something?” he said, laughing. “We don’t have a fancy name for the organization.”
“Oh. Okay.” I felt dumb.
He sat for a minute or so, drumming his fingers on the table softly.
I noticed he had a tattoo on the back of his right hand — a square geometric design. The ink was blurry, as though he’d gotten it a long time ago.
Maybe he was a rebellious teen, or something.
The thought made him seem more normal. I took a steadying breath. Normal was good.
“It’s always a bit hard to know where to start with newbies,” he finally said. “It’s particularly hard with you, since you’re so much older than most. You have the capacity to understand a great deal — you know, unlike a seven-year-old.”
This happens to little kids? God, how horrible.
“But if we get into too much detail right off the bat,” he continued, “it’s going to be overwhelming, and we also won’t get to working on your abilities. As I understand it, your development has been a bit unusual. Figuring that out should be our first priority.”
“Okay,” I said, “so give me what you think I need for now. I’ll ask questions if I need to.”
He nodded, looking a little impressed. I was sort of impressed with myself, actually.
“Well, the first thing to understand is that there’s more than one world,” he said, sounding like he’d rattled this stuff off before. “We call this one the First Emanation, but there’s also a Second Emanation. You can think of it as another world that grew out of this one.”
“Like a parallel universe?”
“Sort of. They’re not as separate as that phrase implies. People can travel from one to the other. And the geography there echoes the geography here, though it’s not all from the present time.”
I nodded and tried to look like I was getting it.
“Okay. So, the F-Em has a large population of creatures — animals and people.”
“FM?”
“As in ‘First Emanation.’ Big ‘E,’ little ‘M,’ as in ‘Emanation.’”
“Oh. Right.”
So much for getting it.
“The S-Em has a population as well. We call those beings ‘Seconds,’ for short. Some Seconds look just like you or me, and some look different. The essential distinction between Seconds and the beings of this world is that they can perceive and manipulate something we call essence. Working essence enables them to do things that aren’t possible for most human beings. They can reshape reality itself in different ways. Usually the effects are small, but they can be substantial.”
“Are you talking about magic?”
“Not really. It might seem magical to humans, but to Seconds it’s not mysterious or supernatural.” He stopped to think. “You know how we can use our eyes and hands to notice and manipulate stuff on the macro level?” He picked a piece of toast up from his plate and tore it in half. “Well, Seconds have this other ability that lets them sense and manipulate stuff on the ultra-micro level. To them, it’s all very normal and reasonable, just like hands.”
Ultra-micro. “So, essence is cells and molecules and other small stuff?”
“It’s more fundamental than that. It’s what lies under all matter and energy — the basis of existence itself.”
He must’ve seen my mystified expression.
“Human science can get you part of the way there. See all the things around you? They’re all different, right? This is cloth,” he said, pointing at a dish towel, “and the table is wood. This plate is ceramic. If you look at them, touch them, they seem different. But those differences are misleading. Actually these things are all made out of the tiny particles that make up atoms, right? Science tells us everything in this room — including us — is just particles and electromagnetic fields and space.”
I nodded, but that stuff wasn’t a big part of high school physics. Building a bridge out of spaghetti I remembered. The more theoretical stuff was foggier.
“Okay, well if you follow me that far, just imagine essence as what constitutes particles, space, and so forth.”
Right. Okay. I guess.
“Are you sure it’s not just magic?”
“Yep, I’m sure. Look, what if you went back in time and showed some stone-age people a TV with a remote control? It might seem to them that you were controlling the TV with magic, but to us it’s just a piece of technology.”
It occurred to me that I didn’t really know how a remote control worked. I felt myself blush.
Graham smiled. “Even if you can’t explain the details of how a remote works, you know there’s a scientist somewhere who could. You don’t think it’s magic.”
Okay, so people in this other world had some kind of amazingly advanced biotechnology, so advanced it seemed like magic. I could accept that. It was like a sci-fi movie.
But what Graham was saying didn’t seem to jibe with what Callie had told me.
“Callie described the other world in religious terms.”
“Ah.” Graham paused for a few seconds. “Callie has her own way of understanding these things. It’s what works for her, given her beliefs and experiences, but based on what I know, it’s not an accurate picture. What I’m telling you is what the rest of us understand to be true.”
For some reason, that was a big relief, maybe because all that judgment and hellfire stuff didn’t seem to be part of the equation.
“Given your potential,” Graham continued, “it would be better if you had a more precise and nuanced understanding of how the S-Em works.”
I nodded, but the thing about “potential” didn’t sound good. My feeling of relief dissipated. I didn’t want these people to have any more interest in me than was absolutely necessary.
I cleared my throat. “Potential to do what?”
“Be a cop, basically. Humans generally can’t travel to the S-Em, but some Seconds can travel here. That’s where people like us come in — we police the Seconds who come to the human world. If they break the rules, we take care of it.”
So, these people were basically a secret branch of law enforcement? Maybe Williams really was in the FBI — some secret X-Filesy part of it.
Then I thought about the place Williams had taken me.
“By ‘take care of it,’ do you mean you kill them?”
Graham looked a little uncomfortable. “Most Seconds don’t intend any harm to humans. If they come here, they don’t cause any problems. But a few of them are dangerous. Sometimes, the only solution is termination.”
What he was saying was rubbing me the wrong way. Or maybe it was the pile of decayed corpses I’d rolled around in a couple nights ago that had rubbed me the wrong way.
“Do they get a trial?”
“I’m sure there’s a process in place.”
Huh. That was pretty vague.
As though feeling the tension, Callie’s glass tea kettle cracked with a loud pop. We both jumped. I let out a nervous laugh, and Graham smiled. Steam billowed up from the hot burner as the water drained onto the range.
“I’ll get it,” he said, standing up and grabbing a dishtowel. “Weird. These things are supposed to be just about indestructible. Anyway, we’re able to deal with troublesome Seconds because we’re actually like them: some human beings are also born with the ability to sense and manipulate essence. Those of us with the right abilities can meet Seconds on a more level playing field, especially if we team up. And since a number of powerful Seconds support our activi
ties, they can back us up if we get in trouble.”
What kind of trouble? said an alarmed little voice in my head.
“What you said about being a cop … am I going to have to —”
Just then, Graham’s cell phone rang.
He pulled it out and looked at it. “I’m sorry, Elizabeth. Please excuse me.”
He headed into the living room and began a conversation I couldn’t quite hear. It lasted a while and seemed to prompt several other calls. Finally he wrapped it up and came back to the kitchen’s entrance, pocketing his phone.
“Sorry about that. Hey, why don’t we do a few tests to see exactly how your development is coming along?”
“Um, you don’t think I can ‘reshape reality itself,’ do you? ’Cause if so, I have some bad news.”
“Hold on,” he said, laughing. “Working essence can take a lot of different forms. Most of it isn’t so spectacular as that phrase makes it sound. Let’s just see what you might be able to do.”
I could’ve told him right then that I didn’t have any special abilities, other than possibly taking weird pictures. But I followed him to the living room. We settled on one of Callie’s comfortable white couches. Graham opened his mouth to say something, then froze, looking over my shoulder.
I turned to look. Kara was standing at the end of the hallway, looking as surprised to see Graham as he was to see her. He recovered first.
“Kara. It’s good to see you. What brings you here?”
Kara looked down at her hands, which were gripped together.
“Williams called me early this morning. Callie got hurt. I came to heal her.”
“Is she okay?” Graham said, sounding concerned.
“Yeah. I did some more work on her just now. She’ll be up and around soon.”
“Good, good. So, you’ll be heading back to the Twin Cities today?”
“I guess.”
“Best not to leave your area unguarded for too long.”
She nodded quickly and vanished into the kitchen.
Hm. Kara was afraid of Graham. I studied him a little more carefully as he began to explain the testing process to me. He didn’t seem scary. Maybe I was missing something.