Of Delicate Pieces (13 page)

Chase Lasalle shared a look with Alex.

Yes, I can see your secret
, Duvall answered. Appearance was not the only thing Alex and Sephi shared. They both shared their minds with their respective soul mates. Another rarity. Sephi claimed history would repeat itself, but Duvall hadn’t realized how much.

The boy took a step forward, and she was then able to read his emotions. He carried his caution where most people carried their secrets, in his eyes. It wasn’t because of her. Was it Rae? She inspected his projection, especially his baby blues.

Yes
, her intuition answered for her. He wasn’t scared of Rae herself but the effect Rae had on his Alex. He worried for her. He loved her.

Love
. Duvall exhaled so heavily the vials rippled overhead. Love rarely turned out well when it was so strong. Mild emotions were much easier to control.

Chase must be the one who tried to read the letters. Duvall entranced that box too well. She attempted to keep a few letters last spring, separate them from the box to see if it would weaken their allegiance, but it did no good. Only the people who were meant to read the words on the page could see them. The stubborn, self-righteous box kept the words to itself because Alex hadn’t known the rules. Duvall should have known better than to tamper with the emotions of things, even inanimate objects.

“I found something today about my family.” Alex’s tone lowered, buckling under a weight of importance. “Actually the Darwins found it.”

Duvall perked up. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

“I didn’t really know what to say. But Rae kept waving around that sketch of your classroom.” Alex snatched a handful of her hair and twisted it into a coil. “I
am
connected to a Legacy family. You were right about that.”

Duvall had to reach out a hand to steady the vibrating waves of energy around her. “Which one?”

“Pax said a founding family. The Darwins even showed me the tree.”

Where had this information been hiding? She drained every single one of her resources trying to find a link to Sephi and … “The Kindalls?”

Alex shook her head. “The Havilahs.”

The name struck a horrific chord, a triad of three notes: anger, confusion, and disappointment. The chord floated throughout the room, traveling toward her, stretching into a horizontal line before tightening itself around Duvall’s neck.

“ … you know them, right?”

Duvall clawed at her neck but found no release. How could this girl be related to the hunters who made it their mission to eradicate the gifted? When Alex said she was from Parrish, Duvall assumed she was a prisoner there.

Duvall bent at the waist, nose to nose with Rae.
Answers
! she demanded, but the child offered none. Blank. After mention of the Havilahs! The reason Rae was dead!

Duvall tried to scream, but only a choking noise escaped her throat. She scurried over to the wall shelves and tipped over a large brown vase. Mullein leaves fluttered to the floor. She snatched up a few and rubbed them on her neck.

This explained the mystery of the letters. Alex had not studied her family tree very well or she wouldn’t be smiling about it. Perhaps certain names had been removed considering the events of the past. Family ties could be severed as easily as sawing off the branch of a tree.

“Yes,” Duvall finally croaked, sinking her nails into her own arm to keep from shrieking. “I know that family.”

She didn’t dare say the name again.

Her mind couldn’t focus enough to telekinetically extract what she wanted from the topmost shelf of her wall. Her trembling hands reached for the rolling ladder. When she grabbed the spray bottle and crawled down, she moved about the room like a tornado, cleansing her sacred space.

Chase watched the air around her as she moved.

Rae held her gaze and shook her head, lifting a shoulder as if to say,
It is what it is.

The aragonite stone shattered.

Alex felt stupid. She should have wondered why the other legacies—in particular, the Darwins, who were so fond of ABC—hadn’t already told Duvall about the Havilah family tree. No one wanted to detonate a bomb. After Duvall spritzed the entire classroom with foul-smelling drops of green goo, she overturned the bottle to douse herself. She whimpered as she escaped into her office and slammed the door without another word. The misshapen doorway trembled long after her departure. Rae took Alex’s arm, patted it, and led her away with a look that read,
I expected this
.

Since death, Alex never had trouble sleeping, but that night she tossed and turned, sweating under the blanket of her own anguish. It made her feel feverishly ill, which, of course, made her feel distorted. Alice in Wonderland syndrome. She worried that she would break her bed.

When she woke to find darkness, she wondered if she even slept at all. Her fatigue continued to pound its fists against the walls of her aching mind. The whispers returned. This time, they merged into one single voice and began to sing. The harmony smiled, curling its edges into recognition like seeing an old friend, and it eased the heat in her head. It was the kind of sound Alex wanted to reach out and grab because she knew each cool, somber note would not last long. The singing faded, replaced by the sound of staccato
whishing
.

She turned to find Chase asleep on top of the blankets. He faced her with one of his arms draped over the comforter and still wore the jeans and T-shirt from earlier that day.

The brusque strokes of pencil to paper changed tempo. Alex sat up, holding Chase’s arm in place so he wouldn’t move, and leaned over the edge of her bed. She found Rae sprawled on the floor, knees bent and the soles of her tiny feet upward, dancing on air. Rae’s distraught face hovered above her drawing, which was emitting a cloud of frenetic distress. Or it’s possible she sketched quickly enough to produce an exhaust. No picture popped from the mess of shadows she created on the page, but undeclared meaning hid in the chaos like innuendos, none of which felt positive.

Alex observed Rae long enough for the day to announce itself, and the world began to lighten. And as Rae continued her frenzy, the shadows on the paper took the shape of two downturned eyes. The impact of the image grew until Alex could physically feel the pain resonating from them. It was sadness and loss. The hairs on her arms stood on end, or at least her mind made it seem that way.

Rae sighed and flicked the pencil to the floor, finished with her latest masterpiece. She collapsed into a sudden slumber, her white hair fanning out as her head lobbed to the floor. Despondence rose from the page next to her in rings, polluting the room.

Chase scrunched his face in his sleep, and Alex slid down to face him, pressing her lips to the lines on his forehead. Chase tilted his chin upward and brushed her mouth. A current of light waved around them. It killed the air of despondency Rae created. Grief couldn’t withstand happiness; Alex knew this all too well.

He opened his eyes, two jewels that could see so many colors. Did he realize that they were the most incredible color of all? Was that why he could see so much?

She lifted the blankets. A silent offer. He slipped in next to her, reaching for her waist. She couldn’t get close enough. The more she pressed herself against him, the more the energy buzzed, and the more alive she felt. He said something that sounded like “you,” but it was lost as she pulled his lips to hers. She no longer remembered skin-on-skin contact. She was too aware that their bodies no longer existed, but it was so much better to be blanketed in the electricity they created. Chase cradled his hand around the back of Alex’s head, turning it to move perfectly with the cadence of the kiss. She pressed her hands into his back and felt the light surrounding them like their own personal sun. He kissed her harder, and the light brightened. Every piece of her reenergized.

She never wanted it to end, so she gripped him even harder. She rolled on top of him to keep it going, and they fell to the floor without breaking the kiss. They climbed back up, heads still turning, mouths smiling into one another.

When Alex couldn’t take the brightening of the light any longer, she pulled back. And the room was free of negative emotions.

Chase lifted her up to adjust the pillow under her head.

“When did you come in last night?”

“I don’t know. I hate clocks.” He rested on his elbows and admired the sketches. “Did you see the new one?”

Rae had sketched Alex’s bedroom in Parrish, but how did she know what it looked like? Alex touched the drawing and felt the smooth lacquer of the wood on the sketched bedframe. It made her feel cold and empty like her room had during life. At the drawn window, snow fell thick as sugar cubes, sticking to the eyelashes of the boy crouched on the tree branch outside. A ten-year-old Chase held out a cinnamon bun, dripping with icing.

The sketch was as clear as her memory of a snow day filled with sleds, snowballs, forts, and cocoa. She loved that day, even the part when Chase carried her home because she dislocated her shoulder.

“How did Rae see that?”

“When I came in, she was sitting on the floor next to your bed, holding your hand.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I almost left, but she jumped up and waved me over. I kind of felt like she was waiting for me so she could hurry over to the corner and begin drawing.”

“You think she saw my dreams?”

“Were you dreaming about that?”

“Yes, actually,” she said, watching Rae. Alex decided to pick her up and put her on the bed, charcoal and all.

Chase got up and headed toward the French doors of the balcony. “See you downstairs.”

Alex gathered her things for the day, listening to Rae’s snores. She noticed that the eyes of the drawing—which now appeared more curious than sad—followed Rae to the bed, watching over her in a fiercely protective gaze.

She tried not to disturb Rae as she exited. Even so early, dozens of newburies already congested the vestibule. They gathered around the fountain and conversed by the blue flames, but most of them rested at the tables, poking the air with their pointer fingers, engrossed in the morning news. One would never guess they lived without the news tickers only months ago.

Alex fought the urge to glance upward, struggling to ignore the campus news, especially Sigorny L.’s large name over the popular editorial. She scoured the area, wondering if the others would consider her egotistical for obsessing over articles about herself. The harder she fought it, the more it antagonized her. She grabbed a seat and gave in, pulling the feed from the scroll with a rubber band
snap
. She promised herself she would only read a few lines.

By now you’ve seen them yourselves, but yes, the twenty-five supposedly brainwashed newburies have returned to your halls, your workshops, and (run for) your lives. No wonder The Dual Tower sent a representative from the Interactions Department to
spy on
teach us. Dr. Massin has a long history of exploring sociology, as she’s been employed in the department for over two hundred years. Only someone who specializes in social aspects would strive to remain so current in pop culture. Did anyone else notice her in the hallway the other day when the lyrics of the top forty songs of the week were spilling into the air from her thoughts? Who knew someone so old would like so many boy bands?

In life, I always considered sociology to be one of those Easy-A subjects. In death, if you break a sociology rule, you might find yourself in one of the underground facilities we are too proper to call ‘prisons.’ In fact, one of Dr. Massin’s great, great uncles ran off and pretended to be one of the bodied at the beginning of the twentieth century. Scandalous. And illegal. He was later found and sent away. He nearly soiled the family name. Perhaps the Interactions Department itself is cursed.

Underground facilities, like the prison she’d learned about last year from Raive’s letters. Paradise. The term tugged at her whenever she thought of it. The ink on the paper of the letters flooded her mind. Paradise. Paradise. Paradise.

“Hey, gorgeous.”

She snapped back to reality.

Chase kissed her forehead, slipping into the seat beside her. “Sorry it took me so long. My brothers wanted me to meet with them to talk.”

“About what?”

“What else?” He huffed. “Jonas.”

His name created a veil of angst between them. Alex swatted at it, but it stuck to her hand like a spider web.

“Anything new?”

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” Chase muttered, rubbing his forehead. “So, my dreams were rather loud last night.”

“Are you talking about Rae?”

“No. I mean all the singing. I assume it was coming from your mind, not mine.”

Definitely not.

“Do you recognize the voice?”

Alex assumed the voice belonged to Danya, his mother. Chase was the one who had grown up with a mom to soothe him, but Alex knew better than to mention Danya’s name. Chase would never admit to it for the sake of tact; after all, he had seventeen years longer with his mother than Alex had with hers, but he missed Danya, and Alex knew it. She felt it.

“Never heard that voice before last night,” Chase said. “Couldn’t be Rae, could it?”

“Rae doesn’t talk.”

“That you know of.” He intertwined his fingers with hers.

Alex shook her head. “That voice didn’t belong to a child.”

Besides, Rae wasn’t calm enough to sing in such a soft voice. Alex was beginning to wonder if Rae woke so frequently because of night terrors. She’d seen it happen several times. Rae would leap up, flailing and scrounging around for her charcoal. She’d panic until snatching a sheet of paper and delving into her own little world.

Rae only left the room to venture through the woods inside the city. She didn’t allow many other spirits to see her. Skipping through the trees, she could have been any other happy toddler, and afterward, Rae sat with paper on her lap and created something beautiful. Her way of saying thanks.