Fallout

by S D Wasley

  I couldn’t speak, far too flummoxed by what she was saying. “Your father wasn’t the one, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she went on. “It was Thomas. He saw my face. I was pretty scared at first, but then I found it exciting. Exhilarating. There were four of us. I’d never belonged anywhere before and it was wonderful to feel that sense of being needed, part of something special. I had the best year of my life but your father didn’t like it. He could see what was happening to me. I didn’t tell him outright but he caught wind of some of it. He prayed for understanding, tried to get us four to come to church to meet with the priest and find a way to channel our gifts into God’s work. I went along with him for a while, although Thomas wasn’t happy about it. But after a time it felt like I was being torn in two. I loved your father. I loved you and Nessa more than anything. But I loved Thomas, too. And they wanted different things from me. They forced me to make a choice.”

  I barely breathed, waiting. She watched the stars avidly, as though trying to find a way to continue, and then gave me an uneasy sideways glance.

  “I chose your father. I promised to come back to church, not to meet with Thomas and the others anymore. But before long I felt like my heart was ... drying up, had cracks in it that were getting bigger every day. I just wanted to be with Thomas again. I stopped seeing things. My resentment got bigger and bigger and it squeezed out all the love I had for your father. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I tried to reconcile with Thomas and discovered my place had been taken. My gift was gone, dried up, and there was another person in my place in the group. I ... I’d squandered my gift and lost it all. That’s when I left your father and went back to Land’s End.”

  “Why didn’t you take us with you?” The words burst from me plaintively, the hurt little girl I’d repressed for years surfacing without warning.

  “I wanted to but your father told me you’d be happier and more settled with him. I’d lost all my confidence at that stage. I didn’t feel I had any purpose or use in this world. I didn’t want that kind of person raising you two girls. All I knew was I had to get away from here.”

  My head spun. “Are you saying it’s this place? Augur’s Well? It gives people powers?”

  “No, I don’t think that’s how it works. I think they’re drawn here though. Born or brought or drawn here.” She turned her eyes on me but I couldn’t see her expression clearly in the late evening dim. “You’re a little different, I think, aren’t you Frankie? You don’t seem quite like I was.”

  “I’m not like the others in Cain’s group,” I said, knowing in a heartbeat that I could be honest with her. “The protector who saw my face, he’s not from here. He came to town recently, found me, wanted me to go and help him at his home. But he was too ... intense. Not healthy. He almost got a lot of people hurt. I had to cut him off.” I wasn’t sure if she knew exactly what I meant by that. It could be taken a couple of ways so I let it slide without expanding.

  Mum nodded. The glow of the garden lights dotted around Uncle Max’s pool reflected off her creased forehead. “Still ... you’re different.”

  “I think so. I’m not really sure how or why. I don’t seem to work the same way as the others do.”

  “Do you have visions?”

  “I’ve seen some things. Not like they do.”

  “You’re more like a link between them all? Yes?”

  “How do you know that?” I said sharply.

  Mum faltered. “I ... I’m not sure, actually. It’s as though I can feel it, which is odd. I suppose it will become clearer as time goes on.” She paused. “You’re a little more powerful than the others, I think.”

  I gave a doubtful shrug. She opened her mouth and then closed it again.

  “What?”

  Mum gave a short laugh. “I was about to do that thing parents do, where we tell you not to make the same mistakes we did. But telling you what I chose won’t make any difference to what you choose to do.”

  A rush of fierce love for my mother hit me, wholly unexpected. I’d thought that was long buried.

  “No, but if I know what happened to you then I’m better equipped to make the choices that work for me, right?”

  She acknowledged that with a tip of her head. “All I’ll say is that choosing to stay where it was safe meant the walls closed in around me. I lost my ability. If I’d known it would happen, I would never have left Thomas. I made the safe decision and it was the wrong one.” She looked at the stars again and gave a slight shrug. “I guess you can make what you will of that, Frankie.”

  Chapter 18: Conprensio

  Having my mother in town for the week meant time away from Cain and the other four was forced upon me. I messaged him on my new phone a few times to give my excuses and he sent back replies saying he understood. I kept trying to work out what Mum had meant by ‘staying where it was safe.’ Honestly I wasn’t sure how it applied to me but I had a nagging feeling that Léon represented my ‘not safe.’ Was it possible I’d made the wrong choice? I certainly didn’t want to be Henri’s mama, no matter how sweet a child he was. More importantly, Léon wasn’t someone I could trust―and no way would I leave Cain. I didn’t see how I’d had any choice other than the one I’d made but still the worry followed me around.

  While shopping in town with my mother one afternoon I spotted Helen across the street, holding Patrick by the hand. She caught sight of me and waved.

  “Oh, there’s my friend,” I said. “I’ll just go and say a quick hello.”

  Mum glanced at Helen, nodded and resumed looking at sunhats.

  Helen hugged me when I reached them. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You, too,” I said. “Hey Patrick.” He stared at me from behind the dark glasses.

  “We’re missing you. Are you coming back?”

  Amazing how one well-turned phrase from this oblivious girl could still undermine all my confidence that I belonged with Cain.

  “Yes. Didn’t Cain explain about my mum being in town? I’ve been in touch with him.”

  “Oh, cool. I’m doing food shopping. Gran and I are spending the afternoon baking at home. It’s Mum’s funeral tomorrow and we’re holding a wake afterwards. Cain’s coming to support me.” The way her face lit up when she said his name shot me through with hollow loneliness, even while Helen described her mother’s funeral arrangements. Grow a freaking heart, Frankie, I berated myself.

  “Cows,” said Patrick.

  Helen shot him a puzzled frown then turned her attention back to me. “It’s amazing what you did,” she said, dropping her voice. “Cain told me all about it. Incredible. You saved so many people.”

  I flushed. “Your visions helped. The trucks, the clipboard with chromium six written on there, the women workers. It all built up the picture.”

  Her face glowed. “I can’t wait till I transform.”

  “Cows,” Patrick said again.

  He was holding up his game device to show me. I shaded the screen from the sunlight and squinted down at it.

  “Oh, hey! You’re playing Cow Train!” I looked closer. “Level 12! You cracked the impossible level nine. Nice cow jumpin’, Patrick.”

  He nodded solemnly. Helen laughed.

  I wished them well for the funeral and took the name of the charity where we could donate in Mrs. Niven’s name, and then I left them to their shopping. I crossed back to Mum.

  “Sweet-looking girl,” she commented.

  “Yeah, she’s super sweet,” I said.

  “She reminds me of a girl I knew in town. She had the same hair.” She lifted a hat and tried it on. “What do you think? For the beach?”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Hmm.” She replaced it. “She was sweet, like your friend, but obsessed with a boy to the point where she became quite toxic. She was one of our group.”

  “Really? What do you mean, toxic?”

  Mum checked the price tag on an orange straw hat and replaced it on the rack. “There’s a link between ..
. how can I explain it? Emotional output and strength, I suppose you could say. You know the tiredness?” She looked at me and I nodded. “It was always the same when we worked together to try and help someone. It was taxing, made us hungry and exhausted, though not crippled with tiredness. But if certain things were dragging us down, like jealousy, fear, or insecurity, then we were more vulnerable. Much more easily tired and drained. Sapped of energy, in a way. This girl really suffered. Her possessiveness over Thomas and the way she didn’t give a damn about anything but securing his affection―at any cost―it was like that used up her energy, too.”

  “I don’t get that.”

  Mum paused in her hat searching and gazed at an invisible point on the street. “Acting on corrupt motives drains and weakens the powers.”

  I turned it over in my head. “Are you saying her obsession with this guy affected her abilities or the energy levels?”

  “Yes. It’s as though negative emotions burn fuel faster than positive ones, or possibly that corrupt motives burn through the energy while pure motives only tap into it and even refresh it.”

  I frowned. “Mum, that sounds really new age and hippie.”

  Her face relaxed into a smile. “It does, yes. It was just something I noticed. An observation.”

  But her words ignited an idea in my mind and I set off in its pursuit. My exhaustion while I was all tangled up with the Léon problem, it had been excessive. Had he been drawing on my power without me realising? Using the energy spill from my gift for his purposes ... vampiring my energy? Maybe that was why he’d felt a surge in power while I’d felt drained.

  Or maybe it was Helen’s crush on Cain that had burned through my energy. The power of her fascination could be like that of the girl Mum had described, bordering on obsessive and sapping the strength of those around her. But Helen was so mild. For someone like her, even a powerful attraction could only be a sweet crush. And we’d had more than one negative influence to contend with in recent weeks. Léon really was the most obvious. He’d manipulated me all along, trying to earn my trust so he could get me to do what he wanted, stirring up my insecurities about Cain and Helen. And then he’d presented me with his bizarre version of love, which was really an attempt to break what I had with Cain in order to make me more controllable.

  Léon used his power to push and force people to do as he wished, driving wedges between those in Cain’s group. He deliberately brought me to the brink of death so he could use whatever power that might unleash in me. And he lied to me. The whole time I’d been with Cain he’d never been capable of deceiving me. Nor had any of the others once they’d transformed. Yet Léon had tricked me into getting in the van with a bald-faced lie about Owen needing our help. He must have known I believed transformed ones couldn’t lie. That would have been useful information he could use against me. Léon’s gift was utterly twisted and corrupted. He had failed me as a protector, continually abusing his one real and unshakeable power over me: he saw my face. In the end it was much more likely he’d been draining my energy than Helen.

  But another negative force among us had been Nadine. She’d been so easily seduced by what she perceived as the benefits of Léon’s corrupt power, siding with him in the name of wanting to be more effective. She abandoned Cain’s guidance and pursued Léon’s leadership as soon as the opportunity arose. To her, other people’s lives were trivial, unimportant. Maybe her corruption had bled me of energy, too. It was a little like when my mother chose my father over Thomas all those years ago. Would Nadine’s decision affect her power in the same way? Maybe she would lose it now she was away from her protector, like Mum did.

  A thought occurred to me, giving me a stab of fear. What if I lost my power now I had renounced my protector?

  Or maybe this was all wrong. For all I knew, Mum’s theory was screwed. Who knew why using my power had left me so severely drained? Perhaps it was simply that helping others was more tiring than using our gifts for selfish purposes. Corruption, self-interest, they were easier. Selflessness required effort and sacrifice.

  As I sat in my room after our shopping trip, attempting to focus on my English study notes, my mind kept returning to these places. A message buzzed through on my phone. Cain.

  Not sure I can let this drag on any longer. Can we talk?

  I told Mum I had something I needed to do and she nodded, no questions. While I drove to the mobile home park, I willed everything between Cain and me to be fine. He was probably experiencing some of my confusion. It would be spilling into that psychic channel between us. When I parked it was like I’d travelled back in time. The same shearers sat sprawled around a makeshift fire pit, open beer bottles in their hands. They ogled me. This time, I stared back.

  “Afternoon, young lady,” one called.

  “Hello,” I responded, my voice cool.

  “Visiting your young man?”

  His leer made me angry.

  “Yes.”

  Another smirked. “Drop by my cabin after, if y’don’t get what you want from him,” he said in a half-mutter. “Number fourteen.” His buddies laughed.

  Hot power roared up inside me and I knew all of a sudden I could flatten any or all of them if I wanted to. I stopped and faced them.

  “Go suck a dick,” I told the man who’d spoken.

  Their lewd laughter faded. One shearer spluttered like he was going to retort but I caught his eye and he stopped short. Their bawdy faces went rapidly from relaxed and entitled to confused, nervous. I imagined myself glowing white hot and luminous; Francesca the powerful, fierce light searing from my eyes. Maybe I looked like normal Frankie but the expressions on those shearers faces told me otherwise.

  I strode on, followed only by utter silence. I smiled to myself.

  Cain opened the trailer door to my knock. I’d expected some happiness in his response to me, even a little, but he wore a peculiar expression, something like carefully-constructed distance. I waited on the doorstep and chewed my bottom lip.

  “Coming in?” he asked.

  I went in and found a seat. Cain seemed undecided about sitting next to me and hovered before asking, “Do you want anything? A drink, or whatever?”

  “No, I’m fine. What have you been doing?”

  “I’m waiting for Owen. We’re going to do some work on his van. He’s just finishing up at a meeting with his study supervisor.” He sat beside me, but not close. “Is your mum still staying with you?”

  “Yeah.” I examined him, sitting with his eyes turned down onto the vinyl floor as though he couldn’t face me.

  “Something’s happened,” he said flatly, when the silence had become horribly thick.

  I waited, a cold hand closing around my heart and digging in its nails.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  I frowned. “Tell you?”

  “Tell me what’s happened.”

  “Uh ... nothing’s happened for me. I thought you meant something had happened for you.”

  He caught my eye. “Nothing’s happened?”

  “No.” The cold hand eased its grasp. “And nothing for you?”

  “No!” A spectacular smile broke on Cain’s face. “You don’t have any ... problems?”

  I laughed. “I need to replace Albion’s whisky stash thanks to my mum, but apart from that, no. What did you think had happened?”

  He hesitated. “I wondered if you were having second thoughts about Léon leaving without you,” he admitted.

  “I broke that tie,” I said.

  Cain grabbed me and pulled me in so tight I expected the crushing feeling but it didn’t come. Okay. I guess he couldn’t do that to me anymore. We were equals.

  Something shifted in my head, like the cogs and wheels in clockwork force a minute hand to tick across to a new number. Pieces of my mind and heart slid together with my mother’s words about the loss of energy. Dear God, it wasn’t Nadine looking for something more gratifying that had been draining me. It wasn’t Helen’s interest in Cain wearin
g me down. It was me, fretting over what she represented: that inexorable connection with Cain she had―that they all had. It was my jealousy and paranoia that I wasn’t enough for Cain. Léon had rubbed at the sore point of my envy, manipulating and tricking me, but in the end it was me who’d been toxic to myself. And Cain, always fearful I would leave him, he’d been poisoning himself as well. Our own insecurities, injecting their venom, were what corroded my energy. I gasped a breath as the understanding hit me.

  “Stop, Cain,” I said. “Just stop. We can’t be like this.”

  He let me go. “Like?”

  “Like always doubting. I’ve been freaking out about not being enough for you and you’ve been freaking out about me not coming back―”

  “About not being enough?” he repeated, his face blank.

  “Yeah.” It seemed ridiculous now but I said it anyway. “I never felt like I was enough. I was even jealous of Helen, of how you knew her face, and she was one of your found ones, which was all I wanted to be. I saw how you knew each other and just ... longed for that. I envied her.”

  “Francesca, she’s one of us but I love you.”

  “Yes. Yes, I realise that now.” I tried to steady my voice. “That’s what I mean, though. We can’t be like this. I was always thinking I wasn’t enough for you and you were always thinking I was going to disappear. Even today, after all that’s happened, we still doubted one another. It’s bad for us, I know it is.”

  His eyes were wary. “Okay, so what do you suggest?”

  “Fact is, I don’t share your gift and I’m not one of your found. I never will be, no matter how much I want it.”

  “It doesn’t mean any―” he tried but I shushed him.

  “And the other fact is that Léon was my protector and that will always mean something to me. I cut him off but I’m not afraid of him. I’ve already contacted him to tell him I will help his son if I can. I may even decide to see him again someday.” Cain’s face darkened. “Stop.” I gave him a gentle shove. “You don’t need to do that.”

  He swallowed his reaction. “So what do we do about these facts?”