Call Forth the Waves (20 page)

I’d seen Birch do some impressive things before—make trees grow or shrink on command, or fill a room with deadly blooms and thorns as thick as my arm because something scared him. He’d even done the insta-hut trick before to hide me from Warden Nye’s security at the Center. And I’d always believed that the Commission’s biggest mistake with him was underestimating the extent of his power. They didn’t see any significant tactical use in someone who could grow potatoes on command, so they—and Arsenic, especially—treated Birch like a joke. Anyone who saw him recontouring the surface of the Earth with the ease of a maestro’s baton directing a symphony wouldn’t have been laughing.

Birch had an unparalleled sense of spatial acuity. He could tell what would fit where by sight alone. He knew how deep a trench to have me open so that, when he added walls and a roof, the whole structure was the same height as the gentle slopes surrounding it.

Bright-green kudzu vines bubbled out of the ground and spread like drops of food coloring in a bowl of water. Darker here, lighter there, changing depth and dimension, all dotted through with conical purple flowers.

“They smell like grape soda!” Birdie squealed. Watching Birch work had calmed her down with the promise of a safe place to hide, and she delighted in pulling the flowers off to crush them in her fingers.

Ollie and his wife (whose name turned out to be Clementine) moved their kids inside. We put Anise’s stretcher in the very back beside a second one that held Dev, and left them under the watchful eyes of Nola and a once-again-shrunken pair of golems, while Birdie and Wren helped Baba navigate the unfamiliar space.

Klok opened his bag, releasing the mini–creeper lights he’d saved from Baba’s house. They skittered through our hovel, playing chase with the kids, who were still young enough not to question how machines made solely for light could want to play.

I lifted our freshly grown door and joined Birch and Winnie outside. He was still adjusting the top layer, trying to balance the levels of color so that no spots stood out enough to make someone curious. What he’d accomplished was nothing short of Photoshopped reality.

“It’s perfect,” I said.

Birch frowned.

“Perfection doesn’t exist in nature. Perfection gets noticed.”

He switched the configuration of the clump of kudzu crowning our shelter. It looked like it had been there for years.

He would have kept fussing for the rest of the day and through the night if Winnie and I hadn’t pulled him back inside with reminders that Anise needed all the help he and Klok could give her. Letting him stay out in the open would have defeated the purpose of the shelter he’d made for us.

“How is it?” Ollie was waiting right inside the door.

“You can’t see anything from outside,” I told him. “You can’t hear anything, either.”

The shrill laughter of his children filled the hut from end to end. To them, we were on an adventure and playing games.

“I wouldn’t get too close to the walls,” Birch said. “We’re close to the road, and if any large trucks come through, the sides could be compromised.” He’d shored them up with mats like the ones Anise and Dev were sleeping on, but it was best not to take chances. “Other than that, we should be good until tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Jermay said. “As long as no one comes after us with a bottle of weed killer, we’re golden.”

He’d been sitting alone on one side of the hut, pulling flowers off the wall like Birdie. A pile of them sat at his feet, dismembered and bleeding deep purple when he crushed them under his heel.

Thankfully, Birch didn’t take the bait.

“What are we going to do about them?” Winnie asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you think Jermay’s jealous?”

“I’ve told him not to be. Birch doesn’t spend more than twenty seconds looking at anyone other than you.”

He’d been attached to me at the Center, but that was desperation. He’d known Winnie for years before we ever met. They’d bonded in the Ground Center where they’d been confined, and that kind of bond didn’t break easily.

“Not that kind of jealous,” Winnie said quietly. “It’s hard for Jermay to see all of us with abilities while he has none. We’re not in The Show anymore. He can’t pretend it’s all smoke and mirrors. Out here, we’re different.”

I’d never thought about it that way. I’d always been the Celestine, and Jermay had always been the boy with magic in his eyes. Now that magic was dying off the further we strayed into the dark realities of life.

“We may feel powerless,” Winnie said. “But he actually is.”

“Gee, thanks, Winnie. It’s nice to know you think I’m useless.”

She hadn’t been quiet enough. And Jermay’s reaction proved her right. How could I have missed something so painfully obvious about him when I’d known him forever? I could finish his sentences, but I had no idea what was going on inside his head.

“I didn’t say you were useless,” Winnie protested. “And I didn’t mean—”

“I need some air.”

Jermay stomped toward the curtain door, blowing past Ollie, who decided not to try to stand in his way—or mine.

“Jermay! Stop,” I said. “Use your head. They’re going to be looking for you.”

“I guess that makes me stupid on top of powerless. I’ll just go mingle with the rest of the mundanes where I belong. No one will give me a second look.”

The kudzu curtain dropped behind him.

What I should have said was that he was one of the most resourceful people I’d ever known. That he never failed to have my back or stand beside me if I needed him. His power wasn’t something given to him by an off-world entity; it was deeper than that. He was relentless when it came to his family and friends. His power was tenacity, and I loved him for it.

But I kept my mouth shut and let him leave. “Protect the group” was our rule, too. I couldn’t compromise everyone for a single person, even when that person was Jermay and he’d left the hut with my bleeding, beating heart in his hands.

Birdie crawled into my lap and laid her head on my shoulder while she cried. Her tears made her look even younger than she was. She’d taken in so much grief and loss that it finally spilled over. She couldn’t be the brave little girl she knew everyone wanted her to be.

I was getting closer to that point myself. How was I supposed to comfort her or make it better when all I wanted was for someone to tell me everything would be okay so I could pretend to believe them?

CHAPTER 19

A few hours after we took shelter, rain moved in, pattering on the top of our hut. I couldn’t say for certain that I wasn’t the cause, calling the water down with my mood. I’d run out of tears, so the clouds lent me theirs.

Carefully, I lifted the corner of our curtain to watch the rainfall. If this wasn’t me, it was fortuitous. Wet ground would make the area mushy and marshy and much more difficult to search. It muffled the sound of each piece of the Mile that fell. I summoned a low-rolling fog to match the gray clouds above. A few inches was all it took.

Jermay was still gone, and Dev was still asleep. Anise drifted in and out, plagued by the fever her injuries had caused. Baba said we needed to get her temperature down, and he seemed to think I’d be able to make it happen. Pyrokinetics didn’t just add heat; they could remove it, he said. I could pull the heat out of my sister’s body and let it drift harmlessly into the air around us, but I didn’t know how.

All these things people kept expecting me to do, but no one had prepared me for them. I couldn’t be everything to everyone, and I was tired of the expectation.

Birch did what he could, poring through Klok’s databases and summoning every healing herb he could find, but there was only so much we could manage without real medical help.

Things had gone so wrong. One sister dead, another almost there. Two sisters missing. I was no closer to finding my father, and starting to believe all I’d find was his grave. This was not the way it was supposed to go.

If I was as powerful as everyone said I was, then how had I failed so miserably at everything?

“Penn?” Winnie approached cautiously. “You’d better get in here.”

My first thought, of course, was that Anise was gone. She’d met Evie on the other side and left me spiraling without a way to ever ground myself again. But if that had been the case, Birdie would have been in tears again. Instead, I could see her in the middle of the hut, facing off with Ollie. Her hands were wrapped securely around something that he had the other side of. The two of them were playing tug-of-war, but it was hardly a friendly game.

“Let go!” she ordered.

“I’m not going to keep it,” he said in the most reasonable tone I’d ever heard him use.

“It’s not yours!”

“I just want to check the local news, assuming I can get a signal in here with this weather.”

He had my father’s computer. He’d taken it out of the briefcase, and Birdie had caught him.

“Honey, I promise I’m not going to break it or steal it. If there’s been any official movement nearby, someone will have seen it and put it online.”

“Don’t call me honey!”

Very few people could get away with using endearments for Birdie. She pulled back hard on the computer, but Ollie was way too big for her to move. Unfortunately for Ollie, Birdie wasn’t the type to give up. She couldn’t save Anise, so she’d decided to save the computer—and she had backup.

“You heard her. Let go!”

Wren wrapped his arms around Birdie’s middle and pulled with her.

I tapped my toe against the ground, a signal for my lynx to make an appearance. It sprang up between them, grabbed the computer in its mouth and yanked it free of both their hands, then brought it to me. Birdie blew a raspberry in Ollie’s direction and retreated to our makeshift hospital to help Birch and Klok.

“You shouldn’t go snooping in bags that don’t belong to you,” I told Ollie. I wanted to be mad at him. I even tried. He deserved it after all the trouble he’d put us through, but without the crowd behind him, he was nothing more than a guy in a hut trying to keep his family safe, the same as the rest of us.

“It wasn’t locked,” he said. “I was trying to help.”

“It wasn’t a bad idea, but this thing is password protected. You could have burned the hard drive.”

I didn’t like him; he didn’t like me. Civility was the best we could hope for.

“You can’t make it work?” he asked.

“I may be able to do the things my father could do, but I can’t do them as well. He encrypted it, and unfortunately, for all the things Nafiza saw, a thirty-three character alpha-numeric sequence wasn’t one of them.”

I opened the computer and turned it on, so he could see the lock screen.

“He’s your father. You don’t know what he would have chosen?”

“He liked puzzles. Riddles. Secrets.”

Things he never shared with anybody, and I doubted if the Magnus Roma I knew was the same man who had locked that computer beyond use. I didn’t know much about him at all.

“I
am
sorry,” Ollie said. He let the words hang, so they could be an apology for this moment or for previous things.

I sat down with my back to the wall and the computer in my lap. There were no clues to my father’s password. None of those helpful questions you’re allowed to install in case you forget your log-in. Just the counter and thirty-three dash lines, each a reminder that when it counted, I knew nothing.

I tried fitting famous riddles and tongue twisters into the spaces, but there were too many letters. I tried pi, but couldn’t remember more than seven digits. Klok would’ve known the rest, but it would’ve been a waste of a try. Pi was too simple and too well known.

One more time, I put my hands on either side of the computer and focused every thought on my father. Current ran from my right hand first, then my left. It outlined the pathways between different keys and the processor, pinging letters and numbers into place as if I was shooting for the jackpot in a slot machine.
S
appeared in three slots, then
R
in one and
L
, forming lines of gibberish with numbers where there should have been spaces between words. A
Y
slipped into the last available slot. I took a breath and pushed “Enter,” picturing the sequence as a key I could fit into a lock.

The screen flashed failure-red, filling every blank with an
X
. The counter now read “3 of 5.” Only two tries left.

I slammed the computer shut and threw it, nearly hitting Jermay in the shin as he returned to us.

“I don’t think that’ll help with the password.” He picked the computer up with one hand. “Can I come in?”

“Do you know the code?” I stayed sitting and made him come to me.

“Jermay’s a jackass?”

He winced when he saw Clementine scowl because her children were in earshot. Somehow I doubted that was the worst word they’d ever heard, considering their father’s temperament.

“That’s only half of it,” I said.

“He’s very, very sorry and will never let the crazy leak out of his head again?” he guessed.

“Close enough. Get in here.”

He was dripping from the rain, soaked through so that the flannel shirt Nafiza had given him had turned nearly black and his jeans stuck tight to his skin. He squeaked when he walked.

He started to hug me but thought better of it when he saw the puddles forming under his feet. Xerxes ambled over, sized him up, and chomped down on his shoe.

“Hey! I said I was sorry!”

Xerxes squawked an answer that would have translated into something far worse for Clementine’s kids to hear.

“Where have you been?” Winnie slapped Jermay on the arm.

“I walked to the city—and it’s a big one. It’s also crawling with Commission. The third transport set down at a private landing strip an hour or so after we ended up here. It’s all anyone’s talking about.”

“Are they looking for survivors?” Ollie asked.

“I couldn’t tell. Too many people with too many versions of what’s happening. I think the official cover story is that a high-altitude equipment platform crashed and burned.”

“What about Arsenic?” Birch asked.

“I didn’t see any warden, and nobody mentioned one,” Jermay said. “But I can tell you this much, people are scared, and they don’t buy the excuses they’ve heard. They’ve never seen a Commission transport file out armed troops in broad daylight. It’s mostly exaggeration, but people over there are thinking they’re about to institute martial law. It’s bad. The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

No snipes and no snark. It looked like the cease-fire was holding between the two of them.

“I brought this back for Anise.” Jermay handed me a bottle filled with red liquid.

“Cough syrup?”

“It’s got fever medicine in it,” he said. “I got the cough kind because I thought she might cough and hurt herself worse. It’s also supposed to make you sleep. Maybe it’ll help.”

I threw my arms around him and hugged him tight. The water and the chill soaked through my ugly purple sweatshirt, but I didn’t care. We didn’t have any money, and he didn’t have anything to sell, so he’d either begged for the medicine or stolen it—two things he loathed, mainly because they both fit the worst ideas people had about our life traveling with the circus.

“Thank you.”

“I tried to get us some food, but all I could manage were granola bars. I couldn’t risk moving anything big.”

Stolen it was, then. Doing magic had given him light fingers, and he’d had a lifetime of practice with sleight of hand. All he had to worry about was his conscience.

“Here you go, Little Bird.” He handed Birdie a pair of wrapped snacks. “I found you one with raisins.”

“Thanks.” She sat cross-legged on the floor, nibbling the bar. “I’m still mad at you, though.”

We sat in a huddle for the rest of the day and into the night, holding our breath at every sound louder than the wind swirling past. The creeper lights put on a show. Cars came. Trucks and people, but no one found the hovel. Slowly, each of us succumbed to sleep, and when I woke up, I was still holding hands with Jermay and Winnie, one on each side, with Birch behind her. The kids were in a puppy-style pile, and Klok sat vigil with my sister, ready to fight the Reaper if he came calling while the rest of us were sleeping.

No dreams had come for me. I liked to think that there was purpose in the nightmares, that they showed me clues or things I’d seen while awake, but overlooked. That night, they were silent.

Dev woke hours later, startled because he didn’t realize time had passed and he thought we were still in the air. He gasped and flailed, tipping himself off his stretcher onto the ground.

“We need to get as many of us to the safe house as possible,” his grandfather told him. “Can you do it?”

“Yes,” Dev said certainly. To prove it, he took his grandfather’s hand and disappeared.

When he returned, we’d find out if there was actually anywhere to go.

I was faced with the same surety I always had. I was the target; they were collateral damage. If I wasn’t with them, then no one would chase them. They could go back to their lives in peace and rebuild. There were kids. I couldn’t put kids in danger to make it easier on myself. I couldn’t risk compromising the safe house or the network that used it.

Dev came back for Clementine and her two youngest. I approached Nola.

“I’m not going with you,” I said.

“I kind of figured you’d say that.”

“It’s safer if I’m not with you, and—”

“You don’t have to explain. I’ll make sure your sister is taken care of.”

She glanced back at Anise the way people do when they’re talking about someone in the same room. My sister’s olive skin was paler than I’d ever seen it, and she was freakishly still, even for someone who personified the quiet contemplation of the mountains. Now, Anise seemed etched out of them, Pygmalion’s creation waiting to be imbued with life.

When he wasn’t quoting Shakespeare, Nagendra told us Greek myths. I’d never realized so many of them had sunk in.

“I’m not going either,” Jermay said. “I stick with Penn.”

Klok beeped his agreement.

“We all do,” Winnie said.

“No!” Dev grabbed at her like he was going to drag her into the safe house whether she wanted to go or not. “I want you to come with me.”

“Not yet, but someday,” Winnie promised.

“Baba won’t like it.”

“I’ll tell you a secret about Baba, kid. He says a lot of things that he doesn’t mean. He’d do the same thing I’m doing, even if he claims otherwise. I found you once. I can do it again.”

“Don’t leave until I get back.”

“And give you a chance to bring Baba back here to strong-arm me with his superpowered sad face? I don’t think so.” She gave him a quick squeeze around the shoulders. “You’ve got a job to do. Mine’s different. Go on. Get out of here and make me proud.”

Dev’s eyes filled up with tears, but he wasn’t the type to cry in front of people. He straightened his back, lifted his head, and left us in a cloud of burnt cinnamon.

Birdie watched her first real friend go up in smoke.

“I need to ask you a favor,” I told Nola. “When he gets back, I want you to take Birdie with you.”

Who better to watch over her than someone who could actually see her when she vanished?

“No!” Birdie protested. “Don’t send me away. I’m sorry Anise got hurt, but I can help.”

“Listen to me, Little Bird. You haven’t done anything wrong; this isn’t a punishment. I promised to find Bruno and Mother for you, and I will. But until I do, they’d rather have you safe than on the run. Nola will take care of you, and when Anise is better, she will, too. You’ll have Dev, and Wren, and Ollie’s kids for friends. You can have family and a home, and right now that’s more than I can promise you.”