Bright Star (3 page)

“Why do you call me that?” she asked. He didn’t answer. She wished he would say something else, wished he would offer her something to make everything real and normal again. But he offered her nothing.

Bright Star leaned closer to him and began to listen. She listened for his heartbeat, and then she listened to the very flow of his blood. Like a strong river, it sounded, strong enough for rapids. He was tense. And then, slowly, it came:
I don’t know why you are as you are today, but I know you are mine, and whether I like it or not I am yours. Do you hear me, Bright Star?
Her eyes snapped upward, glistening, she watched him. He was angry, very angry.

“Jacob,” Bright Star pleaded, “What are
you
?”

“Better question,” his gaze was accusing. In that moment, Bright Star knew he hated her. “What are you?”

It was then that Jacob stood and clutched his hands to either side of her head. For a moment, there was a ringing in her ears so powerful that it snapped to silence as she felt hot blood trickling down either side of her neck. Her knees buckled and her body became weightless, nothing. The word
curse
repeated as an accusation in her mind. And then nothing. She was gone.

The Precocial

On the morning before Jackson Rush met Bright Star, the two occupants of the small apartment on Kolter Avenue found themselves in the same room. That was a rare occurrence. Unsurprisingly, the silence between the brothers was at once intimate and awkward. Jackson, the always-favored son, leaned on one arm against the counter watching his brother Jacob eat and grunt messages. “Ronald called five million times last night.”

“Randall?” Jackson corrected his brother, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, Ronald. I was surprised you didn’t answer. Oh, and once this morning.”

“Huh,” was all Jackson said. He pressed a button on his cell phone. He’d had it on silent all night.

His brother glanced up at him, then back down. “Glad you can be so nonchalant about it. I didn’t get you up this morning because I heard you up and walking around all night. I know you didn’t sleep.”

“No.” Jackson sighed. He closed his eyes and subtly shook his head.

Rush pushed back in his seat. “What the hell is it, Jacks?”

For a moment, there was silence. Jackson smiled. Or grimaced. Either way, he was biting the inside of his lips and flexing his hands into fists.

“What do you think?” Jackson asked into the quiet.

Jacob Rush, called Rush by all who knew him, didn’t answer. Instead, he continued to eat. His shoulders were hunched over a bowl at the kitchen table. His fist was wrapped around a large spoon. He shoveled cereal into his mouth. His jaws seemed to snap, his teeth clicking on the metal spoon. Milk dribbled down his chin. Jackson watched the play in the skinny forearms protecting the bowl. His brother looked like a starved animal.

Jackson grabbed a peach from a basket on the table and flexed his fingers around it. He looked at his brother again. Rush’s forearms circled the bowl as if he were guarding it. “Rush, can I ask you something?”

Rush, the brother who had a different father, the brother with dark skin and dark haunting eyes turned his attention to the golden one. He sat back, pushing the bowl away. He waited as if patience was a gift rarely granted.

“If you could… you know… do what I do, would you feel compelled to go into the Service? Or maybe not go in to the Service,” he amended quickly, “but at least do something to help other people. You know, to save them.”

The dark eyes that blinked at Jackson were flat, the expression blank. His brother went completely still. His chest didn’t even rise and fall with breath. Jackson faltered. What had he said? Jackson swallowed. His brother frightened him. There was no explanation for it, but there was no avoiding it. When Jackson was younger, he told himself that he had just been intimidated by Rush’s silence. But no, he’d gotten older, a little wiser, and now knew the only truth. Rush scared him shitless.

Physically, it made little sense. They were night and day, to Jackson’s favor. Jackson knew he was handsome with his golden skin, dark blond hair, and light brown eyes. But beyond good looks, he was physically impressive, to say the least. Just shy of six feet tall and thickly muscled, he was built like the athlete and current Serviceman he was. It was part of his regimen to keep in rigorous shape through an aggressive cardio and weight-training schedule. He’d won the endurance trial each year for the past three at the Service. His body possessed an obvious strength.

Rush, on the other hand, was a sallow, sickly caramel with dark, kinky hair. That same dark hair perpetually accented his jaw, neck, forearms and legs. Even though he wore layer upon layer of clothing, Rush’s tall frame appeared almost slight. Any muscle he possessed seemed to be of the lean, naturally occurring kind. Shirtless, his skin was pale and jaundiced with smudges defining each of his ribs. Similar smudges were found beneath his cheekbones. Jackson found himself urging his brother to eat more all the time, but it didn’t matter. Rush ate voraciously, relentlessly, rapaciously but never seemed to gain weight. Still, instead of appearing frail or weak, Rush was like a starved leopard. Gaunt yet dangerous. Somehow, someway he gave one the impression that he was waiting to pounce, waiting to make a kill. Where Jackson eyes were soft and brown, Rush’s almond-shaped eyes appeared black and absorbing. They were only made more so by the darker-tinted skin beneath them.

But even their physical differences—which were strong enough to warrant no one believing that they were even half-brothers—were the least significant reasons why Jackson should not have feared his older sibling. There was also the fact that Rush truly cared about his little brother more than anything else in the world. Jackson knew it. Rush admitted it freely and without shame. Before their parents died, Rush had still been closest to Jackson. After Janie and Everett Rush died, he had made it part and parcel of his brotherly duty to care for Jackson as a parent would, and to support him as a best friend.

The other—perhaps most important—reason Jackson’s fear of Rush should have been groundless was this: Jackson was nearly impervious to physical harm.

Jackson Anthony Rush had been the only Precocial Shifter born… ever. Since the beginning of time, they had been born one in one hundred million. Called Shifters for their ability to bend known physics laws and known reality, they had only been discovered, secreted away, categorized, honed and marshaled for a couple of centuries. The Service had come to be their destiny. But never in all recorded history had there been a Precocial, a person who possessed and could command his paranormal Talents from birth. It was taught as fact that Shifters had limitations to their powers and that Shifting could only be accomplished after the onset of puberty, making human beings completely altricial, not precocial. Shifting Talent then improved by age with no apparent peak. These were the Parameters of Shift. They governed the gifted the same way the laws of physics governed the “normal” world.

A Precocial child had been nothing more than a supposition, a complex and improbable equation endlessly disproved. It was a point to be debated amongst geniuses. It was fodder for confidential government tracts and PhD candidate theses alike. Over many years, the Precocial was—finally—a myth. Few had truly believed in a Precocial as more than a fairy tale until Jackson’s birth.

Even though they tried every method known to man, Janie and Everett were unable to conceive for four years after she gave birth to her first son Jacob. Everett Rush had married her during that pregnancy. They met shortly after Janie had been deserted in her second trimester. Everett had been a customer at the market she worked. He’d been awed by her wholesome and ethereal beauty, even in her condition. He’d loved her instantaneously and planned to raise her child as his own. At least until Jacob had come along with his dark and exotic looks, and his persistently plaintive wail. Rush came with eyes the color of tar that followed Everett around the room. Rush nearly killed his mother when he pushed his way out of her womb.

Janie started trying to give Everett the baby he wanted as soon as she was healthy again. In the second year, she became pregnant, yet was devastated when the baby was lost in her third month. Janie was hospitalized for months after that tragically terminated pregnancy. Everett was forever at her side, but she knew it was only duty that kept him there. Though he tried valiantly, Everett couldn’t help feeling that she was to blame. It didn’t matter that she had already had one healthy son. She had not been able to have a son for
him
. And he needed that, needed it more than anything else. He needed a son that did not stare intently at him from the corner of the hospital room with those unseeing, black eyes. A son who needed a father, because it was clear that Jacob Rush—most ironically called “Rush” for short—did not. Jackson’s mother had told him many times before she died how much she’d wanted him and his father had wanted him. Many times she had told him this. A year after that miscarriage, miraculously, she conceived again.

Janie and Everett struggled desperately trying not to put too much hope in this child because the pregnancy was plagued from the start with complications. She suffered gestational diabetes and hypertension, immobilizing sciatica, and bouts of severe, debilitating depression. When the time came, they’d believed this baby to be dead. But he’d breathed and cried, and as he cried, he’d called down rain that fell only on that hospital for thirteen days in a row. Immediately the phenomenon had been recorded and baby Jackson had been tested and put into a classification of his own. Precocial. Talented from birth. His power had been significant. His entire life had been spent breaking and setting Shift records. He was the most powerful Shifter on record.

Jackson fumbled for words and remembered his question. “I mean… maybe that’s not the right question. If you were me, would you feel like you had to go into the Service?” Still, his older brother Rush merely peered at him. Rush said nothing. “You know… Well, I mean, I know you would have to go into the Service, really, but…”

Jackson did not press. Rush would answer in his own time as he considered the question.

But as it were, the phone was ringing and Jackson leaned over to answer it. “Hello?”

“Jackson, damn man, glad you answered.”

“What is it?”

“We need you down here, like pronto. man.”

We need you down here
. They always needed him. That was the burden of being the Precocial.

Then he heard a voice from the table.

*

“Yes.” It was a lie that Rush tested on his tongue, then slipped out into the cosmos. Smaller than atoms, they floated undetectable out of his mouth. The words were of him, yet somehow did not belong to him. Rush had learned long ago how to lie and experience the serenity of removal. There was a science or art to the lack of culpability. He had perfected this science and art in the last ten years of his life as he watched the skills of his younger brother develop, as he watched his mother’s love shift to Jackson the Extraordinary, while Rush longed for and achieved obscurity. “Yeah, sure.” He nodded briefly. “I would help people if I could. What you’re able to do is amazing, Jacks. And I totally recognize your need to put it to good use. Guess that’s why you got all the power.”

“Yeah.” Jackson slightly furrowed his eyebrows. Then, as Rush expected, the lines smoothed, and Jackson was again at peace. “It is the right thing to do. Civil… social responsibility and everything.”

Rush nodded. He watched as Jackson went into the living room. Then he pushed from the table and walked into the bathroom. He smiled into the mirror, stretching his lips as wide as he could, baring his teeth and straining muscles until even his neck tensed with the effort. He held the smile and wondered what others would feel if they were to see him smile. A smile on that face was an unnatural occurrence. He continued to hold the expression, wondering how long he could stand there that way. He had done the right thing, too. Now, Jackson wouldn’t worry that he had made the wrong decisions or that he, somehow, had a monster for a brother.

*

Rush fully expected his brother to leave the house then. Jackson took his responsibilities to the Service very seriously. And Rush had seen firsthand the way they revered Jackson there, the way they watched his brother in awe and with a respect that one gave to a prophet… or a rock star. That near-worship unsettled Rush.