Pulse (20 page)
“How long are you going to hold my hand down?” she asked.
Dylan leaned forward.
“Throw it as hard as you can, right at my forehead.”
“You’re crazy.”
Dylan moved the ball so it clocked Faith on the side of the head. Not too hard, but hard enough that she definitely felt it.
“Do it. Hit me with the ball. Use everything you’ve got.”
Faith’s face turned angry: her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. The eight ball flew behind her, then back toward Dylan like it had been shot out of a cannon. When it arrived at his forehead he didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t care. It seemed to hit him, but he didn’t react. The ball appeared to bounce off his forehead. As it ricocheted forward it found Faith’s shoulder. The impact hurt worse than the shots to the chest and hand put together.
“Ouch! Okay, that one really hurt. That’s gonna leave a bruise.”
“Probably so. Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen. But it makes my point. Accidents happen when you do this stuff.
Bad
accidents.”
He stood up and came around to Faith’s side of the table, leaning back and sitting down on its edge, tossing the eight ball between his two hands.
“How’s your head?” Faith asked. It felt like they’d had a small war in which they’d inflicted minor wounds on each other for no reason.
“I have a second pulse, Faith,” Dylan said. “You don’t.”
Faith seemed to finally understand that there was something fundamentally different about the power in Dylan’s hands than in her own.
“Wait, you mean you didn’t feel that at all?”
“It didn’t actually hit me. Came pretty close though.”
Faith ran out of words and looked up into his eyes, confused.
“The first pulse for a carrier is what gives us our ability to move things, but the second pulse is just as important. It senses everything around it. It knows when something is going to hurt and deflects it.”
“Use the force, Luke,” Faith said in a monotone voice, only half joking.
“You’re not too far from the truth. Watch.”
Dylan was gone in a flash, flying straight up in the air.
“Dylan?” she called, staring into the starry sky above, but it returned only cold silence. Another ten seconds went by, and Faith stood up, wondering if this was a test she was supposed to understand but didn’t. At least Dylan had freed her hand from the table.
“Dylan?” she called again, then more to herself than to him added, “You are one mysterious dude, Dylan Gilmore.”
And then she saw him. He was diving headfirst at shotgun speed, like he wanted to drive his head into the roof of the Nordstrom building and split his entire body wide-open. She tried to scream, but nothing would come out. Her head tilted down, watching the tucked arms and the rigid body. When his head hit the roof, it was like something out of a movie, an asteroid hitting pavement, dust and debris clouding up around the impact. Faith fell to her knees, then flopped over onto her left hip and put her bare hands on the roof. A state of shock pulled at her insides and drawing each breath was a struggle. Her mind told her he was gone, that he’d made a calculated error. Dylan was dead, and she was alone with endless questions she could never answer for herself.
The dust settled quickly, leaving the soft light of the stars and a few candles that had been set around the foot of the table. Dylan wasn’t there. His body had gone through the roof, leaving a tattered opening about the size of a manhole cover. She crept a little closer, until she was surprised by the black eight ball, which popped out of the hole and rolled toward her, stopping just shy of her knee. She picked it up, examined its smooth surface, feeling the slick marble against her fingers.
“I might have gone a little overboard there,” Dylan said. He was shaking the plaster and dust out of his mop of dark hair and brushing off his shoulders as he drifted up and out of the hole he’d just made in a building.
“Ya think?” Faith asked, but then she was up on her feet, running to him, hugging him tightly. When she pulled away, Dylan looked a little stunned, which she didn’t quite know how to respond to. Being Faith, she resorted to cleverness in the face of confusion.
“You smell like building. New cologne?”
Dylan smiled as she brushed the dust off his V-neck T-shirt, black this time, which she had liked from the moment he showed up.
Dylan looked deeply into her eyes, like he was searching for something he couldn’t find but wanted to very badly. “That’s the second pulse. You could drop a car on my head, but it knows. I’d be fine. What you have is only half of what you need.”
“You mean I’m no good to you, no help, unless I can have a car dropped on my head?”
It was a funny way of putting things, but Dylan basically agreed, nodding with a half smile on his face.
“But why would anyone want to hurt me?”
Faith asked the question, but she also suddenly understood something that had only been a whisper of a thought—until Dylan had used his head to drive a hole into the roof of a Nordstrom building.
“You’re recruiting me,” she said. “For something more than just fun and games.”
Dylan didn’t answer. He didn’t betray any feeling about what she was suggesting as he returned to the table and sat down. “Let’s get back to work, see if we can’t get you lifting heavier stuff.”
Faith was starting to realize that the only way to the answers she needed was to keep going. If Dylan wanted to be difficult, fine; he could be difficult. But soon enough she’d be too powerful for him to control. Then she’d get her answers whether he liked it or not.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
They spent the rest of that night and many nights after working on Faith’s first-pulse abilities. Within a few more days she was lifting bowling balls and fifty-pound weights. And she was flying and carefully landing on her own. She was so immersed in the building up of her own powers that the answers to her questions started to matter less and less. She felt stronger than she’d ever felt in her life, and yet there was a growing fear taking up more and more of the space in her heart. Seeing a bowling ball fly through the air started to have the unnerving effect of making her duck even when it was nowhere near her. The mere thought of having it clobber her before she could move would take over, and she’d lose concentration. It was one thing to move objects that couldn’t do any harm if they went astray, such as foam blocks and plastic cups. It was something else entirely when things got heavy enough to kill her.
But more than that, Faith was starting to feel things for Dylan she couldn’t deny. She kept telling herself, over and over, not to let her feelings get involved. And the longer she spent time with Dylan, the more she was intrigued by the idea that he had something she didn’t. Between the two of them, he alone had a second pulse.
“I don’t see why I can’t come, too,” Hawk said. It was the last day of school, and he was angling for an invitation to wherever Faith had been disappearing to every night. “Especially tonight. It’s the end!”
“I told you already; it’s not my call. Dylan says no. I even asked him.”
That wasn’t exactly true. Faith had asked if Hawk could know about carriers, and Dylan had said absolutely not. She’d never asked if Hawk could come up to the roof.
“Dylan, Dylan, Dylan,” Hawk repeated. “When you fall, you fall hard.”
“Oh, come on, I’m not that bad. And we’re just talking, taking it very slowly.”
“Mmmm-hmmmm,” Hawk said.
The hall had seemed empty as they entered the school, heading for their last day of class at Old Park Hill. But they’d walked past Clara Quinn, who was standing off to one side, staring into her Tablet. She snapped the screen small, placed it in her hip pocket, and advanced on the pair.
“Taking what slowly?” she asked Faith. Faith tried to move around Clara, but Clara was a tall, strong girl, and she kept stepping in front of Faith as she tried to get by.
“Aren’t you supposed to be leaving for the games or something?” Faith asked. What she really wanted to do was throw Clara through a door. Just knowing she was capable of doing it gave Faith more confidence than normal.
“We’re leaving in a couple of hours,” Clara answered. “Have to stay for Wade’s blowout, right? Can’t miss that.”
“I’m in charge of music,” Hawk said. “DJing is my new thing. I think you’ll find I’m pretty good at it.”
Clara completely ignored Hawk and bore down on Faith with her piercing eyes. Faith took a step forward, glaring at Clara’s face, and asked her to please step aside.
“You and Dylan seem to be getting along fine,” Clara said.
“Why do you care about anything around here anyway? You’re in the Field Games. After today we’ll never see you again. Just
leave
.”
“Whoa, Faith, take ’er down a notch.” Hawk pulled gently on her shirtsleeve, but she jerked free.
“I think I’ll stand over here,” Hawk responded, backing away. “By these lockers. In case I’m needed.”
As usual, Amy showed up just in time—she could see a fight about to start and, loving the idea of Faith getting clobbered, hung back to watch.
“Amy,” Clara said. “Get the hell out of here. Now. You, too, squirt.”
Hawk was about to toss off a retort, but he thought finding Dylan might be a better idea. He and Amy double-timed it down the hall as Clara took half a step toward Faith.
“I’m only going to say this once,” Clara fumed. Her voice was quiet but oh-so-confident, like a girl who could knock out a gorilla with one punch. “I’ve had my eye on Dylan Gilmore since we showed up at this godforsaken shit hole. Stay away from him. ’Cause I’m coming back, and when I do, I’ll be wearing some new gold around my neck. I think that’s going to impress him a little more than your clever banter.”
“I have a better idea,” Faith said, and then she lost it. She knew it was wrong. She knew it would make Dylan mad and might get her kicked out of the Nordstrom Rooftop Club for good, but she’d had enough of Amazon Woman. Faith imagined throwing Clara Quinn into a wall of lockers, then throwing her to the other side of the hall, where she’d hit more lockers. A flash of a memory appeared in her mind, of seeing Drifters doing the same thing, and then it was gone. When she shook her head clear of the memory, Clara Quinn was slumped on the floor to her right. Faith’s first thought was to run, but she was seized by a sharp pain in her neck that nearly doubled her over. She looked to her right, expecting to see Clara, but the space she’d occupied was empty. Somehow Clara had gotten up and moved in the flash of an instant. She was standing behind Faith, whispering in her ear with a menacing voice.
“I see we have a player,” she seethed. “Interesting.
Very
interesting.”
Faith’s throat started to tighten like someone was wrapping a pair of cold hands around her neck and slowly adding pressure.
“Can you take it as good as you dish it out?” Clara asked. Her voice was soft in Faith’s ear. All at once Faith felt herself being thrown against the wall of lockers. Her shoulder hit first, then her head jerked sideways and slammed into metal. Faith blinked her eyes hard, trying to clear the ringing in her ears. Clara’s voice was back.
“Let’s keep this our little secret, okay? You’re a freak, just like me. Only I see you’re just half the package.”
Faith felt a quick jolt to her side and thought she’d been kicked, but when she looked up, doubled over in pain, Clara was halfway down the hall calling back, “Stay away from him. I mean it.”
Faith flew across the floor, slammed into the lockers she’d just thrown Clara into, and slid to the floor. She stayed there for only a few seconds, regaining her strength and standing as she wiped the tears from her eyes. She thought of three things then; nothing else mattered.
First, Dylan couldn’t know what had happened. He’d never forgive her.
Second, and this was huge: Clara Quinn had a pulse. She could move things with her mind.
And third, she had to find a second pulse so she could kill Clara Quinn if she ever came back.
Everyone, including the few remaining souls on the outside, watched the games. They were a slimmed-down summer Olympics, streamlined to include only the individual events. The games were all about the one man or the one woman who was better than all the rest. There was no traveling from State to State, not domestically nor internationally; but world records were still set and broken at just about every game. All the States across the globe held the games during the same seven-day period, with twenty-four-hour live coverage on dozens of Tablet channels.
There were twenty core events in which men and women competed separately:
- 100–, 200–, 400–, 800–, and 1,600–meter footraces
- javelin, discus, shot put, and hammer throws
- high jump, long jump, triple jump, and pole vault
- 100 hurdles, 200 hurdles, 400 hurdles
- three fighting events: wrestling, boxing, and judo.
The twentieth event was a modernized decathlon blending all sixteen core events into a three-day competition. It was the decathlon that Wade and Clara had been training for in the gym and on the field at Old Park High. It wouldn’t have been practical, given their unusual skills, to practice within a State training center. There were cameras everywhere and thousands of athletes. And besides, competing in the Field Games was not about winning for the people who funded Clara’s and Wade’s training. It was about much more than that.
The twins arrived with no fanfare whatsoever, virtually unseen as they crossed under the wall in an unmarked white van. Automobiles were rare inside the States, where there were very few roads for driving. Mass transportation, with thousands of miles of high-speed light-rail, carried millions of people from place to place.
No one spoke as they drove. Wade and Clara made little attempt to take in the view of the world outside for, really, there wasn’t much of anything to see. Roads were covered by circular, white tubes; oncoming vans were infrequent. The road was flat and straight, the white tube oppressively low over their heads.
