Chasing Power (21 page)

She followed. There was dust on the handrail, and she realized that no one lived here right now. Her life might have been turned upside down by this, but so had Daniel’s. At least she knew her mother was okay and would be okay, even if Kayla got herself killed.

That was not as comforting as it should have been.

Upstairs, the hall was filled with antiques and knickknacks from around the world: an African mask on the wall, an Indian
elephant statue on a delicate European end table in one corner, a Greek-looking sculpture of a horse. There were four doors: two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a closed door that could have been another bedroom or maybe an office. The first bedroom had a four-poster bed with a bedspread that looked like silk with tassels on the edge. The bathroom had a shelf with a replica of an Egyptian boat. She didn’t see anything in the house that looked like Daniel lived here too until she reached his bedroom. His door was open and he was rummaging through a dresser. She stepped inside.

Daniel’s room was covered in maps. They wallpapered every wall from floor to ceiling. He had photographs pinned everywhere. She walked up to one, a waterfall that cascaded from black lava-like rocks. “You’ve been to all these places?”

He tossed clothes onto his bed. “Not all. But a lot. I keep them for reference—you know, for future jumps. I like knowing I can go anyplace I want. All I need is a picture.”

She walked along the wall. There were photos of cafés, of dirt streets and colorful houses, of children with wide eyes, of icebergs, of jungles, of lava-filled volcanoes. “Is there anywhere you haven’t been?”

“Wyoming.”

“Really? Why not?”

He blushed. And then he shrugged. “I like to keep one place that I’ve never been.”

“Why?”

“That way it can’t ever disappoint me.”

“Oh, dude, you have issues,” Kayla said.

He tossed her a plain black T-shirt. “You can wear this. And whatever else you want. Bathroom’s down to the left. You can
borrow my mom’s underwear, which is a weird sentence that no guy should ever have to say.”

“Why not choose someplace more, I don’t know, exotic for your ‘one place’?”

“Because my mother and I didn’t go there.” There was pain in his voice, raw and clear, as he mentioned his mother. “Years ago, she planned a road trip for us, across the whole United States. Said she wanted me to see how the pieces connected to each other, instead of jumping from point to point all the time. I would have seen Wyoming then. But she was invited to speak at a conference so she canceled. Never mentioned it again.”

“I’m sorry.” Dammit, she was sympathizing with him again.

“It’s stupid. It wasn’t like I was excited about Wyoming itself. It’s just … She didn’t seem disappointed when she had to cancel, you know? Forgot about it instantly, even though it was the only trip we’d ever planned that didn’t involve her work or my jumping.” He frowned at the photos, as if they’d failed him. “Work always comes first with her. She’d say it has to. Publish or perish. If she wants tenure … She likes to talk about how much better it will be once she has tenure. They can’t fire her after that, so we’ll be secure. It’s a guaranteed future. She doesn’t get that I’d rather have had that road trip.”

Kayla wanted to cross to him and put her arms around him so badly that she took a step toward him before she stopped herself. “I’ll … get ready to go.” She fled down the hall. Cranking the water to hot, she let the steam fill the bathroom before she stepped into the shower. When she came out again, she felt like a thawed Popsicle. Pulling on a mix of his clothes and his mother’s, she emerged, wringing her hair, and she dumped her clothes in the dryer in the hallway.

“Your turn,” she told Daniel.

He headed for the bathroom, and she sat in his room, listening to the shower and looking at the walls. He had maps of everywhere in the world. On his neat-as-a-pin desk were more maps, street maps, and atlases. The bookshelves were stuffed with travel guides and, oddly, dozens of photo albums. Kayla didn’t have any albums from her childhood. Moonbeam had deliberately left those behind. So Kayla didn’t have any cute baby photos or anything. Or any pictures of Amanda. She wished she had at least one of those. It was too easy to forget what her sister looked like. Sometimes she wasn’t sure that she remembered at all. It had been eight years. Kayla felt her eyes heat up. To distract herself, she pulled one of the albums off the shelf and opened it. But there were no cute baby pictures of Daniel inside. Just more photos of places. She flipped through. There were no people in any of the shots, except for what appeared to be casual passersby. She looked through more albums, and it was more of the same.

She checked his desk. There had to be a photo of someone—ahh, there. A photo lay on top of an old album. It was of Daniel and a woman. His mother. It had to be. She had the same black hair and stormy eyes as he did. She was wearing a pantsuit, and she stood stiffly, her arm awkwardly around her son’s shoulders. Kayla guessed he was about three years younger than he was now. He had that gangly new-to-being-tall look. His mother was smiling stiffly. Kayla wondered if they’d been having a bad day or an ordinary day.

The old album was battered leather. She opened it, expecting more landscapes. And saw a photo of Moonbeam.

Kayla sat down hard on Daniel’s bed and stared at it.

Moonbeam looked to be about sixteen. Her hair was short, curled around her ears, and had zero gray in it. She was laughing, and her face was unlined. Her arm was around a younger version of Daniel’s mother, who was also laughing. Both were holding ice cream cones. Ice cream was dripping onto her mother’s wrist.

She turned the page and there he was too. Her father. He was sitting at a picnic table with corn on the cob in front of him, as well as a bottle of ketchup. There was a lake behind him. Another photo had her mother and father. Her mother’s arms were around his waist. He was looking directly at the camera and smiling.

“They were friends,” Daniel said from the doorway. He was wearing jeans and no shirt. He wiped his hair with a towel. “The three of them. Inseparable, from what I can tell.” He sat on the bed next to her. He flipped a few pages and pointed to a photo of two kids, about six or seven years old—his mom and her dad. Her dad looked very serious and very thin. His mother, also too thin, had a bruise on her cheek. “My mom and your dad were best friends since pretty much nursery school. My mom met yours in middle school and roped her in to make a trio. Your parents started going out in high school, but near as I can tell, there were never any jealousy issues. My mom was best friends with both of them.” He turned to a set of high school photos.

“What happened?” Kayla asked. “Did my father just, snap, become a psychotic killer one day, or what?” She pulled a photo of all three of them out of the album. They were seated on bleachers. They had sodas and sunburns and were smiling at the camera. Other people’s legs were in the shot, so they weren’t alone, but they might as well have been. They were sandwiched together, their arms draped around one another—a clear trio.
She flipped the photo over. Someone had written their names in blue ink:
Evelyn, Jack, and Lorelei
.

“My mom never talks about the past. Yours?”

“Only time we talk about my dad is when we discuss how to hide from him. There aren’t any happy stories about him.” Kayla gently touched her mother’s face in the photograph.
Lorelei
, she thought. Young Lorelei’s thigh rested on top of Dad’s. Her head leaned against his shoulder. “Looks like they were happy once.” She took a breath. She knew they must have been. They’d married and had two kids. She couldn’t imagine that her mother would have married him if she’d had any inkling as to what would happen.

From the hallway, the dryer dinged. Leaving the album on the bed, she fetched her clothes and dressed in the bathroom, being careful to transfer everything from her pockets. By the time she returned to the bedroom, Daniel had finished dressing.

“I should call her,” Kayla said. She picked up the photo of the three of them. Her mother looked so happy. “I should make some kind of excuse so she doesn’t have to worry. She must be so—”

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. They both froze.

“I shouldn’t have turned on the lights,” Daniel said. “Neighbors must have noticed. Let’s go.” He put his hand on Kayla’s shoulder, and his bedroom vanished. The photo was still in Kayla’s hand.

The rain had stopped. Sort of. It had quit falling from the sky, but it still dripped hard from the canopy of leaves overhead. Shaking off the drops, Daniel walked onto an outcropping. Kayla watched him check the view, then check his compass, then check the view again.

As she waited for him, she knocked drops of water out of the sky. If she concentrated hard enough, she could flick them aside seconds before they hit her skin. It was tricky to hit objects in motion, and it required pinpoint accuracy, like with the mosquitoes. But the more she practiced, the better she got. Soon, she was able to deflect several dozen drops at the same time. She played with flicking them away faster and faster until the rain spattered sideways.

She felt Daniel looking at her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Releasing the drops, Kayla let gravity grab the rain. It spattered onto her face and shoulders. She wiped her face with her hands. “Ready?”

He held out his hand, and she took it. He hesitated, as if he
wanted to say something profound, or at least difficult to pronounce. “What?” she asked.

“Do you think … Will you ever be able to forgive me?” The expression in his eyes was so intense and so sad that she had to look away.

“Probably not.” She tried to sound cold. What he did was unforgivable. It was the honest answer.

He was still holding her hand. His hand was damp but warm and covered hers almost entirely. “Can you tell me, if you were in my shoes, would you have done any different?”

She opened her mouth to list the thousand ways she would have acted differently. But if she was going to be honest, then she’d be honest all the way. “In details, yes. In essence …”

“But you still won’t forgive me?”

“Probably not.”

He laid his hand on her shoulder.

The wet green vanished and was replaced by a house with a chain link fence. Kids were playing in the yard in the middle of a mud puddle, stacking goopy mud cakes on top of a toy truck. Mud streaked their shirts. Clean clothes waved like flags on a line strung between the house and the fence. One of the boys jumped to his feet, shouted in Spanish, and pointed at Kayla and Daniel.

Glancing at his compass, Daniel jumped again. Now, they were in the middle of a street outside an abandoned gas station. Rusted cars littered the cracked pavement, and half of the station roof had collapsed. And then they jumped again. And again.

Rain forest. Fields. More rain forest. A road.

“Halfway there.” His jaw was clenched tight.

“Are you—” she began. He jumped them again, and her words were left miles behind. Again. And again. And again. Over and over, until her head buzzed and he started to shake. She grabbed his shoulders. “You need to rest.” She forced him to sit on a graffiti-covered rock at the side of a road. A bus rumbled past. It was crowded with people and released a cloud of exhaust that made Kayla’s eyes sting. “Memorize this place and then take us home to sleep,” she ordered.

Gulping in air, he hung his head between his knees.

“Really? Again? Can’t you stop
before
you drain yourself? We aren’t going to get there faster if we get ourselves killed sleeping out in the open.” She felt his head. Hot.
Idiot
, she thought.

It started to rain again. Hard.

She swore, not quietly, and scanned the area for any kind of shelter. Closest was a house, a rundown prefab white house with a neat little garden, cement steps, and a dirt yard that was rapidly dissolving into mud. It had a rusted swing that hung from a tree and a beat-up pickup truck on the side. “All right. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to ask the people in that house if we can crash at their place, and we’re going to hope they’re not murderers, rapists, or drug dealers who think we’d make excellent hostages.”

In the yard, a dog barked. It was tied to a stake in the ground.

“Come on. Let’s get away from the road.” She helped Daniel to his feet. He swayed. “Oh, no, you don’t. No falling down.” She put his arm over her shoulder and half carried, half walked with him toward the house. He stumbled once, slamming down on his knee and nearly knocking her to the muddy ground.
Bracing herself, she pulled him back up. His knees were coated in mud.

Rain fell faster and faster. She blinked, trying to see. Using her mind, she knocked the drops away from her face. The house, which she’d sworn was close, looked like a smudge, and Daniel leaned heavily on her, slowing her even more.

At last, she got him to the gate.

Yapping, the dog was turning itself in circles by the time they reached the door. Batting away the rain, she saw the door swing open and a man without a shirt come out, holding a rifle.

Kayla froze and let the rain crash down on her like normal. Oh, God, maybe they should have stayed by the road. Spending the night in a ditch didn’t seem so bad now. She tried to retreat, but Daniel slumped to the ground, unconscious.

“Come on, wake up.” She pulled at his arm. “Danny-boy, we have to get out of here.”

Leaving his gun on the porch, the man jogged through the rain toward them. He kicked the dog out of the way, hard enough to scoot the animal away from the gate but not hard enough to hurt it. Snarling, the dog cracked its jaws together but didn’t move.

Opening the gate, the man said something in Spanish.

“I’m sorry,” Kayla said. “
No hablo español. ¿Habla inglés?
” She wished Selena were here. Selena was fluent, at her mother’s insistence—she had to be able to talk with her grandparents. Kayla only knew bits and pieces of what she’d learned in school. She could ask where the bathroom was and how to find a shoe-store, but she didn’t know the word for “help.” She did remember “please.” “
¿Por favor?
”