The 6th Power (20 page)

Very tempting.

I didn’t want to think about what had just happened, how close my own brother had come to killing me. So I thought about Hannah. I had to find out how she was. Chet had said she was just down the hall, but when I had gone looking before, there had been nothing there.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I’d found sadness and regret.

I drifted in and found Hannah’s mother sitting in an uncomfortable chair across the small room from her daughter’s hospital bed. I had to be careful entering into her mind. Her grief was so deep that I was sure that I would drown in it. I looked through her eyes and saw Hannah lying there.

There were tubes and wires and machines, including a machine that was breathing for Hannah. Her left arm and leg were covered in casts, suspended in the air on a bunch of wires and pulleys. As disturbing as all of that was, though, what freaked me out the most were the bandages around Hannah’s head. I found out from her mother’s memories that the doctors had operated and had tried to stop the bleeding in Hannah’s brain, but they weren’t sure whether they had been completely successful. She was just too weak for them to keep poking around, so they were waiting and seeing. Hannah’s mother knew that the doctors didn’t have a lot of hope.

She was on the edge of losing it. She blamed herself for what had happened. She’d brought Hannah to Coralberry when she’d gotten married. She’d known he was a bit of a creep, but
I needed the help and I thought Hannah needed a father but things have gotten so much worse over the last year and now…

I quickly pulled out of her mind. Had enough of my own guilt to deal with, thank you. If I hadn’t gotten Hannah mixed up in this, Chet wouldn’t have targeted her. Now, all I had were psychic powers and they wouldn’t do any good. But I supposed that the very least I could do was tell Hannah that I was sorry.

When I entered into Hannah’s mind, a long hallway stretched before me, a line of doors on each side. I knew instinctively that this wasn’t Hannah’s construct. This was just my way of dealing with the emptiness around me. Behind the doors would be rooms that led to memories, and I opened the first door to my left.

Wasn’t really surprised to find an empty room on the other side.

I headed down the hall, opening each door as I went. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Empty rooms. It wasn’t right. I knew that Hannah had called out to me, so there must still be a part of her in there somewhere.

I started to run, throwing open the doors as quickly as I could. There was no end to the hallway in sight, but as I went, it started getting darker and darker, so it was kind of a miracle when I noticed the writing on the door just ahead of me. A single word, written in crayon.

Nate.

I stopped in front of the door, breathing hard, even though I didn’t need to breathe. My name. Me. Did I really want to go in there? Did I really want to know what Hannah thought about me, after everything I’d put her through? No, not really, but it was the first sign of life I’d seen. I couldn’t ignore it.

I opened the door to a flash of light. Just a little one, no bigger than the glow of Kiki’s Winnie-the-Poo nightlight, but it was there. I reached for it and the memories opened to me.

We were flying.
High above Coralberry, just escaped Nate’s creepy brother and oh my gosh how is this possible? We are so going to die… and yet, here we are, not dying. Flying! We’re flying!

Up we went, higher and higher, Coralberry becoming just a gray speck below us. Nate’s talking to me, trying to tell me how all this works, but I can barely hear him. How is he doing this? He is so weird. But in a good way. I mean, he actually tried to talk to me, which was a nice change in this freak-show of a town. Been here for two years and everyone still calls me the “New Kid” behind my back, like I can’t hear them. Everyone’s still friends with the people they were friends with back in kindergarten. Nobody wants to be friends with the amazon from California.

But Nate… I wish I’d been nicer to him before. Let’s be honest, you’re annoyed at the girls in your class for ignoring you, but it’s a lot easier if you don’t have friends. Not like you can have them over for a slumber party, not with your step-dad there. I so miss California.

‘Course, I never got to fly in California. Nate. Thank you, Nate. As annoying as your brothers are, this makes it all worth it.

nate.

I was back in my own body, still flying, holding onto Hannah’s hand. It took me a moment to realize that the memory was over, that I was me again, that this was now, that I’d finally found…

“Hannah!”

hello
, she said.

“Hey! How are you? What are you doing here? Are you okay?” I knew that I was babbling, but I couldn’t stop.

Hannah frowned.
well
, she said,
it’s not right out there, so i came in here. it’s nice in here.

My grin fell. Hannah didn’t sound like herself. The left arm of her psychic form was dangling loosely at her side and her leg was bent at an odd angle. She was damaged, just like her real body, lying there on that hospital bed.

yeah
, Hannah said.
things are broken. i’m broken
.

Even though she was right, I shook my head. “No, you’re not. You’re just hurt. You’ve been in an accident.”

i don’t remember that
, she said,
but there’s lots i don’t remember. i remember flying, though. i like flying.

She sounded like a child. She used to be so strong and this… this was all that was left of her, the part that hadn’t been damaged by Chet. The anger wanted to rise up again, but sadness pushed it back down.

“I like flying, too,” I said.

Hannah grinned.
we’re birdies
.

I looked at her and, after a moment, managed to return her smile. “Yeah, we sure are. Let’s fly.”

And that’s what we did, enjoying the feel of the wind on our faces, watching Coralberry pass by below us. It was a perfect Coralberry, the Coralberry we remembered, untouched by the fire. In Hannah’s memory, the sun was shining and the sky was blue and people were out enjoying the day. Hannah and I flew over them, and I slowly felt some measure of peace returning.

But after a while, Hannah pointed towards the horizon and said,
it’s getting dark
.

She was right. Off to the west, the light was starting to fade. But that didn’t make any sense. The sun sets in the west, so it gets dark in the east first. I looked around and saw that the sun was still up in the sky, almost directly above us. What was going on?

i dunno. i hope the stars come out
.

The ground far below us was starting to shimmer and blur, like an photograph that’s out of focus. The people were gone. No more birds in the sky. No more wind. Coldness spread through me, along with a suspicion.

Hannah’s memory of our flight, maybe her last memory, was going.

i don’t feel so good
, she said.
i’m tired. i wanna take a nap
.

I hugged her and looked her in the eye, trying not to notice the indentation in the side of her head. “Hannah, listen to me. You need to stay awake. We’ve got to… we’ve got to get out of here before this memory disappears.” I didn’t say it, but was I nearly certain that when the memory did go, the last bit of Hannah would go with it.

Her eyes sagged shut.
i’m too tired
.

“I know, but you need to stay awake.” I’d gone through a door in the hallway to get here. Could we make our way back out? I looked around, but couldn’t see anything. The darkness was spreading. With Hannah in my arms, I flew up, trying to spot some way to get back into the hallway or somewhere that wasn’t about to disappear. Was there any place like that in Hannah’s brain anymore? Had to believe that there was. Maybe we could fly down to her house, find a stronger memory in there to hide in. Probably wouldn’t be a great memory, knowing how things were in her home, but it had to be better than to let her disappear…

nate
.

I stopped short and looked at her. Hannah’s voice was firmer than it had been before. She sounded more like her old self.

nate, i need to go to sleep now.

“No!” I shouted. “You need to wake up! You can’t do this!” I held her tight, willing her not to disappear. I was just an intruding thought in Hannah’s mind, so how could I be crying? How could it be getting so hard to breathe?

s’okay, nate
.

“No, this isn’t fair! You wouldn’t be like this if it wasn’t for me and Chet and these stupid powers!” If Mr. Magellan had been there at that moment, I would have punched him in the face, old man or not. How dare he do this to me! How dare he put a kid, put anyone, in this kind of situation. The cost of the powers was just too high. The sacrifice…

I stopped. Sacrifice. That’s what Mr. Magellan’s teacher had told him, that he’d had to make the last great sacrifice. That he’d had to sacrifice his illusions. I could tell from the memories that had swirled around their exchange that Mr. Magellan had used to think he was pretty big stuff. He’d used his discipline to defend his home and provide for his family, and then he’d lost it all. He’d learned… he’d learned that even with his powers, he couldn’t save everyone. He couldn’t save his family. I couldn’t save my family.

Chet. I’d wanted to get into his mind ever since I chose the psychic powers and I knew that it wasn’t because I was worried about him beating me up. Okay, it was mostly that, but it was also because I had been looking for a way to turn him off of the path he was on, the path of doing whatever he wanted without any thought to how he was hurting others. But I’d completely failed.

Did that mean I was going to fail Hannah? The psychic powers were incredible, but they couldn’t fix broken bones or brain damage. If I’d known that Hannah had been hurt, of course I would have used the last pill for a healing power. But I hadn’t and I didn’t and now I was stuck. One power per day. One power per pill.

But… why? Why was it just one power per day? In Mr. Magellan’s memory, hadn’t he and his teacher used more than one power when the hunter had attacked? Why was I limited to only one?

Because, to a comic book reader, one power per pill makes sense. Green Lantern doesn’t use heat vision. The Flash can’t talk to fish. They each have their own powers and they don’t change.

But what if that was just an illusion? And if I sacrificed that illusion, what would happen then? I suddenly wondered whether this was the choice that Mr. Magellan had been talking about, the choice that would change the path of the rest of my life. If so, considering all of the awfulness that had happened since I started taking the pills, did I really want to go any further?

My hesitation lasted exactly long enough for me to look at my friend, dying in my arms.

 “Hannah, I need you to hold on. I’m going to try something.”

Chapter 26

T
he trick was to think of it like a computer program. I needed to keep the psychic powers going in the background, because that kept me connected to Hannah, and then start up a new program. A new memory.

There were plenty of superheroes that could regenerate. Wolverine, Deadpool, even Superman, if you pulled the kryptonite away from him and got him into some sunlight. Not as many superheroes could heal other people. I guess that wasn’t as exciting. I remembered Raven and White Lantern. I remembered the girl in the Narnia books, with her bottle of cordial. I remembered the clerics in the roleplaying sourcebooks in the back of Mr. Magellan’s shop.

I also remembered every life science class and Discovery Channel special that I’d ever sat through where they’d talked about how a body gets healed. White blood cells, cell division, modern medicine, the whole of it. Through my link with Hannah, I compared the damage to her body with the parts of my body that still worked. I drew in all of this knowledge, but the warmth of understanding, the magic, wouldn’t come. Sure, I knew stories about miraculous healings, but to actually make it happen… it just didn’t seem possible.

Which was utterly ridiculous, considering everything else I’d done that week. I mean, I was literally a psychic ghost in Hannah’s fading memory of us flying over the town, for pity’s sake. Actually, the memory wasn’t fading anymore. It was gone. It was just me and her, floating there in the darkness, and her weight was diminishing by the moment. I was losing her. I was losing her because I couldn’t wrap my brain around what I needed to do!

I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t suddenly access any superpower I wanted. It was the pills. Sure, the disciples on Mr. Magellan’s world who used those herbs were eventually able to work the magic on their own, but that was probably after a lot of study and practice. I’d had just five days!

Five days. That was how long I’d known Hannah. Just five days, and more than half of that time, she probably hadn’t liked me very much. But now she was my best friend. Now I couldn’t imagine losing her.

I wasn’t going to lose her.

With that certainty, the warmth started to grow, just a tingle at first in the front of my brain, then intensifying as a pure and perfect knowledge of how to save my friend became a part of my being. The warmth spread through me to the point where I thought I must be glowing, and so I started to glow, the gold light pouring out of me, cutting through the darkness.

Faint, so faint that I thought for a moment that I must be imagining it, I heard Hannah whisper,
what’re you doing?

“Shh,” I said. “If I think about this too much, I won’t be able to do it.”

The glow intensified and I sent it into Hannah. She took a deep, ragged breath and stiffened in my arms. In my mind’s eyes, I imagined torn tissue and severed nerves being fused back together, molecules moving around and linking with each other, cells dividing to make up for the missing bits. As the glow spread through her, I realized that her memories weren’t missing so much as she was missing the pathways that led to those memories. There were miles of chewed-up roadway that reminded me of the Connecticut highway system in the summertime. I nudge the debris aside, laid down mental pavement, patched up the stray bleeding along the way, and watched the electrical impulses of her brain flow.