Of Delicate Pieces (3 page)

The only deterrent was a pair of cold blue eyes that snared her attention. Chase flinched every time the girl sobbed but didn’t divert his gaze. Alex gladly fell into those icy pools, and he must have liked her thoughts because the corner of his wide mouth curled. The lights began to flicker and buzz like an impending power outage. The other newburies in the circle looked upward nervously, but Ellington sighed. He was familiar with the source of the surge. The energy between Alex and Chase caused electricity to go haywire. A few weeks ago, they caused a blackout all the way down Lazuli Street simply because Chase kissed her in the middle of the road.

Ellington’s hair stood on end. He snapped his fingers at the lights, and they calmed. “Not to worry, my friends. Our emotions are difficult to control. After an event as traumatic as death, the intensity of our feelings makes the world around us react.”

What a crock. He knew sorrow couldn’t produce such energy—it devoured it—while the more powerful emotions, like anger or passion, fueled it.

“Moving on,” Ellington said, smoothing down his hair and straightening his bowtie. “Let’s continue where we left off last week.”

Alex lowered her head, brushing the floor with her stare, hoping to be overlooked.

“Behavior patterns. Physical reactions. Anything to share?”

Swish, swish, swish
. Alex swept the floor with her mind. She watched as the dust shifted under the strength of her concentration. She crisscrossed the pattern to make a tic-tac-toe board. Ellington really needed to clean his floors.

“Chase? How have your physical reactions been?”

Alex’s eyes snapped up, and the dust rose with them.
What reactions?
Her thoughts were louder than she intended because Chase looked at her and shrugged.

“You aren’t alone, you know,” Ellington pressed. “Hardly anyone here died of natural causes. It is normal following a traumatic event to experience flashbacks. We are haunted by our pasts more than anything else. Chase, what usually happens to you?”

Alex’s mind tingled as she felt Chase’s thoughts twirl nervously, like the race of a heartbeat. The memory of her pulse began to race.

“May I share?” Gabe spoke up.

Chase visibly relaxed.

“I, um,
we
died in a car accident.” Gabe cleared his throat, and Alex felt a lump develop in hers. They never spoke much about their deaths. This was why she hated this “therapy.” She did not consider reliving pain to be a form of treatment.

“I didn’t die right away.” Gabe waved his hand at the dust still rising into the air. “And sometimes if I’m bumped from the side or if I hear something shatter or crunch, it’s like I’m back there again. It’s intense, like being stuck in a nightmare.”

Ellington nodded. “Memories define us and destroy us. Trauma victims in life experience the same sorts of flashbacks but to a much lesser degree. Your minds are powerful now, and it intensifies your memories.”

Heads bobbed around the circle in agreement.

“What do you see when it happens, Gabe?”

He ran a hand through his blond curls. “I’m not sure, but when we crashed, I think the bottom half of my body was stuck under some part of the car. I could see everything. One of my brothers had been ejected. He was lying in the middle of the road, but I couldn’t tell who it was because he … whoever it was, they weren’t completely there. I think something else must have hit him after the initial crash.”

Stills of their funeral flashed through Alex’s mind like a series of snapshots. Each of the Lasalles had a closed casket. She felt herself collapsing. She remembered the blinding hatred she felt toward death and yet how much she wanted to crawl into those caskets with them. She heard herself screaming, her voice echoing through the church as though several people were screaming along with her. Everyone had covered their ears. Her mind flashed to an image of the field outside of the Eskers. Again, she was screaming. Again, they covered their ears. This time, she made the world freeze with the power of her despair. Like a banshee.

She studied the scars a banshee had lashed onto Gabe’s face. The half-moon along his cheek stretched as he spoke. “I remember letting go of my life. Part of me wonders if I could have fought harder, if I would have lived. I didn’t even try. And I feel guilty for that.”

“How long does the flashback last?” Ellington asked.

“A few seconds? A few minutes? When I snap out, I’m drained afterward.”

“Headache?”

Gabe nodded.

“It takes time, but it will get better. And we certainly do have time here. Simply by sharing it, you may have accelerated your healing process.”

“How does sharing it help?” Sobbing blond girl asked.

“If the quake of a trauma fails to maul your spirit, the aftershocks might attempt to eat you alive. I recommend accepting it as a part of you instead of denying its existence.”

“Will it ever go away?”

“Depends. Some allow it to consume them.”

“What happens then?”

“Some of you have witnessed what happens to a lost-minded spirit.”

A faint banshee wail shrieked from somewhere in the filing of Alex’s mind. Her own scream erupted along with it. They harmonized like a horror ballad.

“Treatment centers exist for that purpose.”

This got her attention. The screams ceased. “Treatment centers for banshees, too?”

Ellington nodded. “There are spirits who believe that broken minds can be pieced back together and that we should help them. But that’s a subject for another day and another workshop. Anyone else have similar experiences, flashbacks, or reactions?”

Alex saw Gabe’s comfort rise with the hands that rose into the air like flowers growing through the cracks of concrete. He wasn’t alone.

Blond girl hiccupped. “I can’t believe so many of us experience the same things. I thought it was only my friends.”

Friends? Alex mentally scolded herself for being so surprised that this crybaby had friends. Only the “chokers,” who wallowed over their deaths despite the inevitability of their situation, would allow someone so depressing into their circle.

Half the seats in the room shifted from rickety folding chairs to cushy armchairs. Alex’s didn’t. She never felt comfortable in therapy.

Ellington curled his feet under him, pleased. His chair was now a red, velvet loveseat with squishy arms and a throw blanket. “Once we accept that despite our differences we are all connected, weaved together in this blanket of civilization, we can truly be at peace.”

“That’s never happened,” Carr Cadman said. He’d told the group he dreamed his whole life—all eighteen years—of being a marine. During his first deployment, he died within the week. Sometimes, a gaping hole would appear in his chest, right where his heart had been. Perhaps that explained his cynicism.

Ellington shifted the pillow under his elbow. “Unfortunately, greed, selfishness, and stubbornness are also human traits. Think about how different your lives were, and yet you are all feeling the same things now. You would never have known it if you didn’t speak to one another.”

Chase’s chair was still as stiff and uncomfortable as Alex’s. But when Ellington had asked who in the group experienced the flashbacks, he raised his hand. It hurt Alex’s heart to think the memories might pain him.

She saw what he remembered: a lopsided world with shattered glass, yellow lines on the road, and a battered hand reaching forward. In a flash, it changed to the field at the Eskers, a sheer image like a hologram before her.

Sometimes I’m back in the car. Other times, I’m in the field, and I can’t save you. Both times I can’t move. I hate it.

She’d seen this before.
She couldn’t distinguish whose memories were whose anymore. Alex could be sitting in class and suddenly she’d feel like she was flying. Then, she’d feel herself hit the ground. Her body would shake with the impact even though she hadn’t left her seat. She felt what Chase was feeling during a game at the ball fields, a jolting and difficult sensation to conceal without seeming crazy.

Someone would discover their secret, eventually, if they hadn’t already. Every month since the attack, she and Chase were required to check in at Dianab Medical Center. Doctors stuck tubes to their heads and wrote on their clipboards, whispering to one another.

What’s the matter
? Chase asked. The strength of the invisible bridge between them reached across the circle and held her.

Nothing’s the matter
, she replied.
Nothing at all.

Chase made a lemon-sour face as though he could taste the lie.

Sigorny Liechtenstein had always been nosy. Her father called her inquisitive. Her mother called her a busybody. Her teachers called her obtrusive which she thought was a compliment until she was old enough to use a dictionary.

She was the eager girl who would tag along with the popular crowd even if they ridiculed her for it. Sure, she wanted to fit in, but her motivation was more so to appease her infatuation with the most intriguing people, to see what made these people tick. If she had discovered her love for journalism in life, she might have found an outlet. It might have saved her. She wouldn’t have been so willing to be cool, to drink so much of that pungent Southern Comfort before following the homecoming queen into the ocean for a late night swim. After Sigorny died, she used to dream every single night of drowning in those harsh, black waters. She would burn as the water filled her lungs. She hated the silence of her scream. The water became gentle far under the surface, rocking her to eternal sleep. That sleep turned out to be anything but restful.

Ellington suggested she should write a literal diary of the dead to escape her nightmares. The more she wrote, the better she felt. So when she first met the Darwins, who were practically Eidolon royalty, instead of hounding them and following them around like a bad odor, she researched them instead. She wrote a piece on them. It began a pattern. A wonderful pattern! She wasn’t so skilled at the writing itself, but she told newburies what they wanted to know. That mattered more. She mattered more! She practiced more and the better she became with the words. Her strength? She was great at pushing questions, at getting people to talk; she was great at being
obtrusive
.

Other newburies became interested in her writing because so many of them did not have the connections of the multigenerational, at least not the very old ones who called themselves the legacies. The dead considered knowledge to be a treasure, and like many objects of value, the knowledge often seemed to be kept secret, all to themselves. She wanted to change that. It wasn’t until she wrote the article featuring Sephi Anovark that her recognition extended further than the Brigitta campus.

Success!

She would write about Sephi until people stopped reading. She didn’t care if the Lasalles threatened her. Sticks and stones don’t matter when there are no bones to break. If the Lasalles took notice of her, she felt victorious. Attention swarmed them like desire, and she inhaled it like a pheromone.

Ahhh, lovely.

She stood looking up at Kaleb Lasalle, and she focused on her knees so they wouldn’t buckle. This was a difficult feat since she was also trying to win him over in wit, to persuade him to answer some of her prying questions. Kaleb was, in a word,
overwhelming
. He was exactly the type of boy she would have followed around in life to get a glimpse of him up close. She would have grazed him with her fingertips as she loaned him a spare pencil in school, to make sure he was real. Such a thing thrilled her. She would have made a great groupie.

“Sigorny L.?” a voice rang out, and she watched Kaleb’s head jerk upright. He looked past her and grinned upon seeing to whom it belonged. “The so-called voice of Brigitta?”

Sigorny looked back to see Gabriel and Chase Lasalle approaching. She felt an odd sensation, the way the drop of an elevator feels in the stomach. Her knees would certainly give out now. Would Kaleb catch her if she fell? Oh, the thought was delicious. That was a better word for Kaleb: delicious.

Alex Ash followed at the boys’ heels, tiny but formidable in her own way. Presence is stronger than size, especially when the mind rules the world.

Sigorny watched as Gabe opened his mouth, no doubt ready to object to this powwow, so she spoke calculatingly. “Perfect timing! I was just getting ready to ask your brother about the ‘Eskers kids’ as they have been nicknamed. How do you feel about their
release
?”

Her question warranted the desired effect. Each of their mouths flew open like toy nutcrackers. She absolutely loved the feeling of shocking people whose existence alone was usually shocking in itself. It made her think she could conquer the impossible.

She watched Chase’s arm swing around little Alex’s waist, a hook to a latch. As though the Eskers kids might spring from one of the bushes and try to attack her again. No one had ever cared for Sigorny like that. She wrapped her fingers even more tightly around her pen, clutching her livelihood.

“It’s true? The mob that tried to kill us is going to walk?” Chase was composed, but Sigorny could see his jaw moving, gnawing at the inside of his cheek.

“We were warned,” Kaleb reminded his brother.

“But it’s been months.”

Sigorny smiled. It felt like she was part of their conversation, their lives. She shook the welcome thought from her one-track mind. Back to business. “Alex, you little scream queen, did they diagnose you as a banshee yet?”

Everyone knew Alex fought off a banshee last year, but what everyone didn’t know was that she’d screamed like one during the Eskers attack. She’d momentarily paralyzed every spirit in a thirty-foot radius. Sigorny couldn’t scrounge enough proof to write an article about it because her witnesses, the Eskers kids, were detained. She could only drop hints.

“No comment,” Alex replied.

Sigorny went on to her next questions. “How was therapy? Any post-traumatic stress?”

Gabe stared at her. Glasses appeared over his hypnotic eyes. What was he trying to see? “Do you know anything else about the Eskers kids?”