Night Sky (29 page)

“And?”

“I mastered Japanese.”

“You're kidding me.”

Dana shook her head. “Nope.” She played with her straw. “I'm not trying to…fluff my feathers, either. But I know that there's something about the way that you and I can use a greater percentage of our brains that makes us…unique. Different. Special.”

“Greater than?”

“You can call it that if you want. But my point is that you can't take any of this”
—
she waved the napkin
—
“lightly. And you can't take it for granted. But you also can't start thinking you're better than anyone else, just because you got lucky and you won the genetic crapshoot that allows you to integrate more of your brain than the average normie can. Because thinking that you won is just one way of looking at it. The other way says that you lost. Big time.”

I knew exactly what she meant and I rubbed a hand over my face. “It's tiring sometimes.”

“I know,” Dana said almost tenderly. “It's a gift, but it's also a frickin' heavy burden.” She smiled, and I smiled ruefully back at her.

Of course, Mike the waiter interrupted the moment. “Pizza time, ladies!” he exclaimed, sliding the ludicrously enormous tray of piping hot pizza onto the table between us.

“Thanks?” I was skeptical because the thing wasn't cut. But then Mike put an enormous pizza cutter with a huge, round, dangerous-looking blade onto the table, along with the bread baskets and a huge pile of napkins.

Dana looked at Mike, her gaze deliberate.

Mike's head tilted to the side. “I would love to bring you some red pepper,” he said, his automaton voice back again.

I coughed a little into my sleeve, watching as Mike quickly scurried toward the kitchen, but then stopped and grabbed a container of red pepper from another table. He ran back and handed it to Dana, before his head returned to an upright position and he waltzed away.

“Man,” I said, picking up the pizza cutter. “You really are a pro at the Jedi mind-screw.”

Dana shrugged. “Practice makes perfect,” she said nonchalantly. “Here. Let me help you with that.”

The pizza cutter was pretty dull, despite its horror-movie, implement-of-torture look, and I was having a hard time getting the pie to slice. Dana tried to yank the thing away from me, but I was holding on too tightly. Somehow, the circular blade grazed the side of Dana's palm, proving it to be sharper than I'd thought.

“Shit!” she hissed, and I looked up, wide-eyed, as she started to bleed.

“Oh my gosh! Are you okay?” I asked.

“I'm fine,” she replied. She took an extra napkin and applied pressure to the cut. It didn't look like it was terribly deep—but there was a lot of blood. The napkin quickly turned red and soggy.

“I'm so sorry!” I managed.

“Don't be. Let's use this as… Well, just watch.” Dana pressed the napkin firmly against the wound.

“What am I watching for?” I asked. But Dana quickly quieted me with a stern glance as she removed the napkin.

At first I thought it was my imagination. It looked like the cut was a lot smaller than I'd originally perceived it to be.

But then a few more seconds passed, and I realized that the cut was getting smaller—in front of my very disbelieving eyes.

“Whoa,” I whispered.

And then, it was gone. Just like that.

No scar. No nothin'.

“Access to the self-healing centers of your brain is a pretty standard and basic G-T skill,” Dana told me. “A small cut like that is pretty easy to disappear. Bigger injuries take more time. But you have to be very specific and focused when you use this talent, or all your tats'll vanish. Your body'll read 'em as something that needs to be healed and…” She looked at me and came to the correct conclusion. “No tats. Of course. Still, you should try it on your knee, while we're eating.”

She paused as Mike came running out of the kitchen, his head tilted to the side. “I would love to cut your pizza for you!” he announced, and we sat back as he did just that.

“Thanks, Mikey,” Dana said.

“It's a new thing that isn't going over very well. But our manager thinks it's a way to get our customers more involved with the Pizza Extravaganza experience, whatever that means,” he told us cheerfully. His head tilted again. “I would love to tell my manager that you ladies think it's kinda stupid.”

“You go do that, Mike,” Dana said, and he rushed off. She grabbed a slice and took a bite and told me, with her mouth full, “Focus on your knee, and as you breathe, send each inhale toward your injury and picture it healing.”

I did just that, and two slices later, I took off my bandage and found a scrape that looked like it had happened two weeks ago, instead of two hours.

“Dana, this is freakishly awesome.” I gingerly touched my knee, but it no longer hurt. At all. I looked up and smiled at her. “Seriously, if they could bottle and sell this, people would be very rich.”

“They can, and they are,” Dana replied. “Don't you see now?”

I actually did. “So
that's
the reason people take Destiny.”

“That's
one
of the reasons why people take it.” Dana grabbed another slice of pizza. “But not everyone has the patience to learn how to control the healing centers of their brain. You can't just take the drug, and presto, you're cured of the cancer that's eating your lungs or your prostate or whatever. You have to take the time to learn to harness the power it gives you—and it gives you way more than just self-healing abilities.” She waved the napkin at me again. “Anyone who takes Destiny could find themselves saddled with a variety of skills, which makes them dangerous when they have adverse reactions to the drug. And it's definitely a
when
, not an
if
.

“But whoever is in charge of making and distributing this stuff doesn't really care about that.” She put her recently healed hand up and rubbed two fingers against her thumb. “It's about money. That's all they care about. If they had even half a conscience, they wouldn't be harvesting little girls for the product, for Christ's sake.”

I thought about Sasha—who was out there, still alive. I believed this more and more with every moment that passed, with every breath I took. But I kept my opinion to myself as Dana slid another slice of pizza onto my plate.

I took a large bite as she waved the napkin at me again and said, “Not to freak you out, but my experience has been that G-Ts are more like me. I have a few things that I can do really well. But this list? This is crazy. Without any training? Plus, you're only sixteen.”

“Seventeen tomorrow,” I corrected her through my massive mouthful.

“Seventeen, sixteen, whatever,” she dismissed it. But then what she said nearly made me choke. “I don't think there's ever been a girl with as much raw talent as you, Skylar. If I'm a so-called Greater-Than, you're a holy-shit-what-the-hell. So eat up. You need your strength, because I'm going to train you. Together we are going to sharpen and hone your skills, so you can totally kick ass and defend yourself. Because until you can? There are some badass mofos out there who would like nothing better than to strap you to a table and bleed you dry.”

—

Dana and I took the bus as far as we could, then walked the last quarter mile to the former public facility known as Coconut Key Memorial Park. It used to be a huge, tree-dotted mix of lush gardens, playgrounds, and sports fields, before the city had shut it down this year.

It had another one of those chain-link behemoths around it, but Dana knew exactly where that fence had a hole.

As we went in, pushing past the overgrown plants and shrubs, I breathed in the humid air, which was salt-filled despite the fact that we were miles from the beach. It was almost six o'clock. Mom was probably wondering where I was.

Luckily, my cell slash GPS tag was still at Calvin's house.

“So what are we doing?” I asked, already exhausted from my emotional day.

“I want you to move something large today,” Dana replied as she led me to the toddlers' playground. “The beach would have been tricky, because there really isn't a whole lot to manipulate. But here”—she waved her arms in a grand
ta-da
gesture—“we've got options.”

“Large,” I repeated as I looked around. Once lovely, this part of the park had large rope-like trees that created a canopy overhead. Sunlight flirted through the intertwining branches, the bark peeling off in curlicues. But the playground had been thoroughly vandalized in the months since it had closed. The statues of two little kids running with a dog had been knocked over, and the poor girl was broken in half. The swing sets were twisted and bent, and what had once been whimsical rocking animals now listed crazily on their springs. A flagpole had been broken off about a dozen feet up. It was splintered and split, as if a giant had come along and snapped off the top to use as a toothpick.

That top part of the pole, stripped of its ropes or rigging, lay near a pair of forlorn portapotties that had been left behind.

“How large?” I asked.

But Dana had already gone over to kick at the top of the flagpole. She looked up at me. “This'll do.”

“Please,” I scoffed. “There's no way I could—”

“Yes, you can,” Dana interrupted me. “And you can start by losing the negative attitude.”

“But that thing is huge!”

“Yup,” Dana said. “So get ready to use a serious amount of your mojo.”

She was dead serious.

I blew a breath of air upward. My hair caught the breeze, and the bangs I'd been trying to grow out stood up on end, fluttering around my face.

“Come on,” Dana said. “Concentrate.”

With another heavy sigh of exasperation, I closed my eyes. Remembering what Dana had told me the last time we'd trained together, I began to review the instructions out loud. “I am now going to…think about an experience I had which raised my heart rate.” I wracked my brain. At first, I couldn't come up with an especially good example, which was absurd, considering what I'd been through the last few weeks. But then, just as quickly, an image of Milo popped into my head. It was from last night's dream. And, yes, it was the part where he was kissing me.

My heart started to pound, and I tried to push it away, but I couldn't.

Somehow Dana knew that my pulse rate was up, because she said, “Good. Whatever you're doing, it's good.”

I wanted to stop her, but I didn't know what to say, what to do.

She kept coaching me. “Think about the details. Bring yourself to that moment again. Soak in what you can see, hear, smell, touch. Take a moment and bring yourself back to that place.”

Milo's chest, rising and falling so close to mine, and those lips—those
lips
… They had taken my breath away…

Thump, thump, thump.

…and the way his tongue had touched mine, the way shivers had run all the way down my entire body…

Thump-THUMP, thump-THUMP, thump-THUMP.

…and he smelled like vanilla, oh God, it was happening, it was happening…

Thum-thump-thum-thump-thum-thump.

…and my heart was beating so fast, it was pounding a hole through my chest, and I thought briefly about that stupid flagpole, and then I thought about Milo, and I thought about how I wanted—desperately—for that moment between us to be real, but God, I didn't want to hurt Dana, and I was so afraid, not just that I would, but that I'd stop caring about hurting her, because the truth was that I wanted, I wanted, I
wanted
…

And
CRRRRAAAACCCKK! Pss-pss-pss-pss-pss-pss-pss
…

God, what was that smell?

I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw was Dana, dancing to get out of the way of the sprinklers from the park's irrigation system. Somehow I'd activated them, and they were spraying out muddy-looking water. But they quickly fizzled, as if there hadn't been all that much in the pipes to begin with.

She didn't mince words. “Wow, that went
really
wrong!”

The top of the flagpole was exactly where it was when I'd started. But I saw that the portapotties—both of them—had been split in two. They lay there like cracked eggs, with the nasty blue liquid from their holding tanks oozing out.

“Oh, gross!”

And that wasn't my shame at total failure that I was smelling, because Dana was covering her nose too.

Together we backed away from the awfulness.

“It's okay,” Dana reassured me. “In fact, I'd be a little freaked if you got it right the very first time. Tell me what you were thinking about.”

I froze.

She didn't notice. “Or maybe I should ask what you were
feeling
. When I was first starting, fear was a biggie. If fear was involved, I could get completely blocked.”

“I was afraid,” I admitted, and it wasn't a lie.

She continued to deconstruct the exercise as we hiked back to the hole in the fence. “Of course, it's possible that telekinesis is just not your thing—and I mean major TK, not the parlor trick move-a-pencil crap.”

That didn't make sense. Yes, I'd mostly moved small things—the hairbrush, my radio, the cat poster, my backpack. “But I'm pretty sure I used it to save Garrett.”

“Hmm, I forgot about that. Well, maybe you need life-or-death stimulation,” she theorized. “Or maybe your telekinesis is like my psychic powers. Sporadic. It happens when it happens, and you just got lucky that day.”

That made me unhappy. “Out of all the G-T powers,” I admitted, “that's the one I want when we catch up with Sasha's kidnappers.” Suddenly I was back to attempting to defend myself—and Calvin and Milo—with a clarinet sonata or maybe a little forced psychic dreaming. Yeah,
that
would hurt those hardened criminals
real
bad.