Authors: Misty Provencher
Keystone
KEYSTONE
by Misty Provencher
Copyright © 2012 by Misty Provencher. All rights reserved.
First Smashwords Edition: August 2012
Cover Design and Formatting:
Streetlight Graphics
LICENSE
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
This is for Mom & Dad
Noli nothis permittere te terere
IT’S EASY TO PICK UP the Cornerstone.
It’s easy to be brave.
Easy to be sure that I want to be an
us.
Really, it’s easy to be anything, since I’m numb.
At least it seems easy until the first white-hot streak of pain blazes up my arm and all the numb goes up in flames.
The stone gives one massive throb in my palm, like a heartbeat or a drum beat or the last beat right before blast off—and then the pain shoots up to my shoulder, like my skin is being hollowed out with a poker. I stop the scream by snapping my jaw shut on the edge of my tongue. I taste blood.
Garrett’s face floats above me like a beautiful, worried balloon.
“All you have to do is hang on,” he says. His voice is calm as I struggle to keep my own mouth clamped shut. I don’t want to scream in his face. I swallow the blood. “Just hang on, like Addo told you.”
I try to rifle back through what the Addo had said hours ago. Once I’d picked up the stone, Addo had eased himself back down onto the edge of the bed to explain what would happen during re-Impressioning. He groaned as he adjusted the sling on his arm and I gripped the stone tighter. It was easier to be brave looking at him. The broken teeth and the bruises that splashed across his face, beneath his eye bandage, made his smile excruciating for both of us.
“Not gonna lie, kiddo. Re-Impressioning is miserable stuff,” he’d said. I should’ve paid attention to how Garrett squeezed my hand a little then, but I was too busy looking at how the bruises swirled around the Addo’s lips. I was trying to imagine the people that had put them there. The same people who had killed Garrett’s father. The same ones that my father had probably called friends.
“The stone always wipes the slate clean,” the Addo had continued. Every word made him wince a little. “No matter what’s there, the stone is going to start fresh. Since the ground work of your enhanced nervous system is already there from your first attempt, the pain this time around will be enhanced too. And by pain, I mean it’ll be like swallowing tacks. The only thing I can tell you is to just hang in there. At least, you’ve got the odds going in your favor.”
“Odds?” I’d asked. The Addo closed his mouth then and his voice popped into the back of my head.
Everything comes with risks, kiddo.
You mean I could die.
I didn’t know how much I cared if it happened, but I wanted to know if that’s what was coming. I projected my question back to him as carefully as I could, but he still flinched from it.
Sure, sure…
he hedged. B
ut you could just as easily go belly up choking on half a peanut, couldn’t you? I mean, there’s always odds to everything, isn’t there? What’s the odds that you’d be attacked by, say, a pack of rabid dingoes?
Ok.
I’d shrugged.
So what are my odds?
Oh, percentages…bah! You can figure percentages any which way, really…
But if we were talking about a whole cookie,
I squared my gaze and his blue-and-purple eyelids drooped a little more.
How much of it would be the chance I have of not dying?
I saw the sad sigh escape him and then he groaned and clutched a rib.
A few bites, I suppose.
His voice whispered in my skull.
But don’t go underestimating the bites. It’s still way better odds than no cookie at all.
I stopped thinking of questions and just nodded. The Cornerstone wasn’t even warm in my hand at that point. It seemed like nothing could penetrate the numbness, so I stacked up the Addo’s words, tied them in bundles, and pushed them right to the back of my head. There wasn’t much room for anything else inside me anyway, besides:
My mom died.
Garrett is here.
My mom is gone.
I am here
.
I left myself on cruise control as Addo kept murmuring reassurances in my head. Yes, I was full up on courage a couple of hours ago, but now, as Garrett lays his hands on me, I can’t even feel one spark of his healing ability leaking from his touch. All I feel are my muscles melting and my body spreading like a boneless puddle across the bed.
“All you have to do is hang on.” His voice is steady, but his reassuring grin quivers and he ducks his head so I don’t have to watch it fall off his face. Holding onto the last shreds of my bravery, I watch the light dance across the curtain of his jet-black hair. When he looks up this time, he’s got his best look of encouragement cemented in place.
I answer his grin with an even bigger, lying smile.
“I’m going to get through it,” I tell him, but the truth is that I don’t have any clue how I’m going to make that happen any more. Or if I’ve even got the kind of grasp that this takes.
“My turn,” Mrs. Reese says from the doorway. She sounds cheerful as she walks in, like we’re having a party. Not like she’s grieving her own husband’s murder. And not like she notices that I’m lying in a pool of my own skin. Instead, she sounds like she has since I met her…like Garrett’s mom. “I’ll take her from here, Garrett. You go look after Iris for me, okay?”
But Garrett doesn’t lift his eyes off mine.
“I can help,” he says, but his mom just shakes her head.
“No,” she says softly, “You can’t.”
“Yes I can…”
“Your healing won’t work on this, Garrett. Nalena has to do this on her own.” Mrs. Reese turns and gives me a genuine smile. “And you will.”
I nod and grin at them, trying to be metal on the outside, even though the terror is beating against my ribs like an enormous bird. Garrett’s eyes remain fastened on mine for a beat more, like he’s trying to leave something inside me, but then he’s gone.
And as if the Cornerstone was just waiting for him to leave, the first white-hot throb explodes in my palm and disintegrates the numbness. My body seizes up with it. All my muscles knot in one massive cramp, but the wave disappears as fast as it came.
I spread out again, like jelly, when it’s over. It was only the first little wave and my muscles are already deep-fried. Whatever’s left of my bravery leaks away. The thought of dying has gone from being as small and simple as a pocket mirror to a concept as huge and complex as eternity. I wonder how much it will hurt to die, what it will be like to be with my mom but without Garrett, and if there’s any justice in the Afterlife that will keep my dad out. I wonder who Garrett will end up being without me.
Mrs. Reese fills the spot over my head that her son left behind.
“I’m going to be right here with you the whole time, Nalena,” she says. She smiles and pulls the sheet up over my shoulders, tucking me in like I’m as little as Iris, Garrett’s baby sister. “People have had to be re-Impressioned before. I’m going to make sure you get through this just fine.”
But I see her smile twitch. She must know what the odds are and how few cookie bites I actually have. I want to grab Mrs. Reese’s hand and tell her I already know that it’s going to be too much. There’s no way I’m going to be able to hang on, not even for Garrett. I want to thank her for being with me while I die.
I’m ready to tell her everything, but when I open my mouth, my tongue won’t work. All I do is gurgle.
“Oh, that’s an excellent sign,” Mrs. Reese chirps. “You’re going numb. That’s really, really good, Nalena. It means that your body is embracing the re-Impressioning. It means you won’t go into shock when those nerves are removed.”
But my numb disappeared long ago and I can’t tell her anything because my mouth won’t work. What I am is paralyzed. The spit bubbles up as I try to speak. I gurgle frantically and Mrs. Reese just smiles, wiping away the gurgle juice. I blink at her madly, hoping she understands Morse code for
I’m Freaking Out
.
Instead, she pats my arm—which I see, but don’t feel—and says, “You’re doing fine.”
Then she disappears and I can’t turn my head to see where she went. One more blink and my eyes are stuck wide open. I try to force the lids shut, but those stop working too. I feel my eyeballs drying out like a couple of hard-boiled eggs on black top.
The stone broils up in my palm again.
Mrs. Reese is back, hovering over my head.
“Okay, Nalena,” she says cheerfully, “here we go. Just exhale if it hurts and that will relieve it.”
I exhale like a racehorse, pulling in another breath and blowing it out hard again. Mrs. Reese crinkles up her brow.
“It’s that bad?” she asks. My vocal cords suddenly let loose and I scream so loud that my lungs ripple. My eyelids finally slam shut.
A whirling blast of razor blades explodes up my arm. I want to pry the stone out of my palm, but I can’t move and I can’t let go. Mrs. Reese tells me to breathe, but it’s impossible to do. The razors tumble through me. I feel their sharp edges shaving my nerves loose from my muscles. Tears drizzle down my cheeks. I scream again with my eyes clamped shut.
“She’s coming, Nali,” Mrs. Reese’s voice trembles in between my screams. “Just hang on, honey. I swear she’s coming.”
I can’t even ask who. I can’t make my tongue move. I’m dying in pieces.
