Pulse (27 page)

The idea of going anywhere without a Tablet was so alien to Hawk that he couldn’t wrap his brain around it.

“Found the Tablet,” Clooger said. “But no Faith. She left it here.”

Dylan had a bad feeling. He never should have let her out alone in the state she’d been in. More than anyone else—even more than Faith herself—Dylan understood the wild power of her emotions. With only one pulse to rely on, she could get herself killed in a million different ways.

“Check the messages,” Hawk said. “She had activity about eleven minutes ago.”

Clooger tapped the screen, but Faith had set the security to her thumbprint. There was no getting inside without Faith. “It’s locked, set to thumbprint. You want me to bring it back or keep looking for her?”

“Keep looking, I’ll be there in less than thirty seconds,” Dylan said. He turned to Hawk. “How long?”

Hawk was typing furiously, working his way through a string of commands that would bypass Faith’s security. “Three minutes, maybe less.”

“Call me when you have something.”

Dylan was gone in a flash, out the door and flying across the parking lot. He tried to imagine who would have sent her a message. Who was he not thinking of? Did she have some other friends on the outside?

When he arrived on the roof next to Clooger, his heart sank.

“Left this, too,” Clooger said, holding out the spine of the book with all its pages missing. Both of them looked out over the empty sky and tried not to imagine the worst.

“She’s probably just walking around,” Clooger said. “Clearing her head. It was a lot to deal with all at once.”

“Where would she go?” Dylan asked, though he knew Clooger would have no idea. Then he had an intuition that seemed to make some sense. “Stay here in case she comes back.”

Dylan ran for the other side of the building, his final step hitting the ledge, and leaped up in the air on his way to the old grade school. She’d destroyed one book; maybe she’d find some comfort in being surrounded by more of them. A minute passed before Dylan found himself standing in front of the ivy-covered building. There were large boulders next to the playground where kids used to climb, and picking up one of them with his mind, he hurled it into the front door, blowing it clean off its hinges. Dylan was already through the open door and into the abandoned library before the boulder came to stop in the principal’s office.

“Faith?” he called out. It was dark in the library, so he set his Tablet to act as a light and held it out. Faith wasn’t there, and this so frustrated Dylan that he yelled her name again, sending every book flying off every shelf with the power of his emotions. “Faith! Where are you?”

The room was alive with the sound of pages ripping and spines crashing into one another. Dylan stood in the middle of the storm of books, arms out wide, taking out his frustrations on the useless artifacts of the past.

“Dylan, where are you?”

Hawk was back, a small voice coming from the Tablet in the din of violence. Every book dropped to the floor at once, a carpet of pages surrounding Dylan as he answered. “The old grade school. Anything?”

“She’s back, Dylan. It’s my fault. I didn’t even think—”

“Hold on, who’s back? What are you talking about?”

There was a short pause, then a breath of frustration on the other end. “Clara Quinn. She’s back. And I think she might know about Faith.”

Dylan’s blood turned to ice. If Clara knew, Faith didn’t have a chance.

“Where is she?”

“Old Park Hill, at least that’s what the message said.”

Dylan was moving fast, but even at his fastest, it would take a few minutes to reach the school. “Don’t go anywhere; hold on.”

Dylan switched frequencies to Clooger. “Old Park Hill, bring everyone.”

Clooger didn’t hesitate, not even for a second. “I’ll gather the crew. We’ll get there as fast as we can.”

“Hawk,” Dylan yelled, switching frequencies again. “What’s the inventory?”

All the Drifters who’d been packing to leave were suddenly moving for the door, which left Hawk sitting all alone in a corner. He messaged Meredith in the basement, telling her to stay as still as a statue, and began reeling off worthwhile items near Old Park Hill.

“Lots of desks and chairs. You can use those to distract her, but they won’t do much damage.”

“What do we have that’s got some weight?” Dylan asked. He was watching the ground as he flew, searching for heavy objects he could bring with him. There was a limit to what he could carry while he was using so much of his mental energy to fly and talk to Hawk, but he thought he could grab at least one thing.

“Four large trees, but it’ll take some work to uproot them,” Hawk said. “Wait . . .” He paused, not sure he should mention an idea he had.

“Hawk, if there’s something we can use, spill it,” Dylan said. “This is no time to play it safe.”

Hawk received an incoming message from Meredith as he continued scanning the area around the school for items that could be used as weapons:

Protect her at all cost.

That was all Hawk needed to hear.

“I’ve located six State vans, all within three miles of the school. Four are idle for the night; the other two are on autopilot.”

Dylan was getting close, maybe thirty seconds from Old Park Hill, and Hawk’s idea sounded promising but risky.

“All hell is going to break loose if the States find out,” Dylan said. They would discover the truth about first and second pulses soon enough, but the longer that could be put off the better.

“I bet I can disable the connection,” said Hawk. “They’ll look like software rogues that crashed out. It’ll raise some eyebrows, but I’m not seeing anything else as good as these vans. They’re the perfect weight and size. You can really throw those mothers.”

Dylan made up his mind as he landed among the trees at the edge of Old Park Hill. “Tell Clooger to carry them over on his way in. Have him leave them on the football field. One on the fifty-yard line, space the rest ten yards apart, right down the middle of the field. Got it?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

Hawk didn’t bother to message Clooger about the State vans. If he could disable their monitoring, he’d be able to control them from his Tablet. He could drive them onto the football field with less risk than Clooger and his gang of Drifters could carry them.

As Dylan approached the front doors of Old Park Hill, there was a surprising silence in the air. The whole world had gone quiet. And then, like the crack of a starting gun in the race of his life, he heard the sound of a tree falling.

At least Faith pulled the first punch, as it were. She had leaped to the roof of the school, which was long and flat, walking with purpose and rage. When she reached the edge of the open courtyard, she’d looked down and seen Clara Quinn sitting on a bench, facing the other way as if she didn’t have a care in the world. There were three large trees in the courtyard, their canopies higher than the roof, along with some scattered benches and concrete pathways running like an
X
through the space. The walls of the school rose up around the courtyard, and Faith thought it created the appearance of a giant boxing ring.

Faith knew this would be her only chance to inflict some early damage and hopefully even the odds. She had an idea of how to accomplish this when she took a good look at the largest tree. Its base was four feet wide, plenty of weight to hold down a teenage girl long enough to scream in her face.

Faith thought about the tree and all the unseen roots beneath the ground. She put every ounce of her being into that tree, told it to move much faster than it would if it were simply falling. It would need to move faster than Clara could react to it. There was something like the trigger of a gun in Faith’s mind, a method for moving things that Dylan had taught her. She could load up her mind with an idea of what she wanted to do, then hold it there until she pulled the trigger and made it happen.

Bang.

Clara looked up just in time to see the side of a tree hit her in the face. She tried to move out of the way, but natural objects, things that were still alive, had a surprisingly strong effect on her. Faith had chosen her weapon well without even knowing it. The tree wouldn’t harm Clara—that was very nearly impossible—but it would present a slight problem. By the time the tree was all the way on the ground, Clara was good and pinned, her top half on one side and her lower on the other. It was gruesome, like everything in between had been crushed into the earth and only the head and feet remained. When she looked up, Faith was standing on the tree, staring down at her.

“Did you kill Liz?” Faith asked. She wanted to hear Clara say it before ripping one of the sharpest limbs from the tree and driving it through her head.

“I never miss what I’m aiming for,” Clara said, smiling despite her compromised position. She was not happy about being talked down to, but she was patient. This would be more fun if she drew it out a little bit. “And I was definitely aiming for Liz. You should have seen the blood. Wow.”

Faith was so angry it made her head feel dizzy. There was a plateglass window running along the far wall of the courtyard; and thinking it through, Faith cocked the gun once more.

Bang.

The window blew apart, not into small shards but into long, jagged sections of glass. They flew high up in the air, then down in Clara’s direction. When they were within a few inches of Clara’s face, they stopped. Ten shards of glass, four feet long and as sharp as razors, turned in sideways and pointed at Faith Daniels.

“You really do want to murder me, don’t you?” Clara said, a cold calmness in her voice. “The problem with an idea like that is that it’s stupid.
You,
Faith, are stupid. You have no idea what you’re doing. I could end you right now—does that frighten you?”

Faith didn’t know what it would feel like to have shards of glass slice through her body, her face, her legs; but she had a pretty good idea that she would feel the pain before she came to an end. A small piece of her felt like she deserved it; another part was horrified at the idea of dying at the hands of Clara Quinn. She pushed her mind to the outer limits of its strength, trying to force the glass away.

“You’re stronger than I expected,” Clara said. She’d wriggled free one of her arms, which she held up in the air, letting it sway back and forth. The glass swayed ominously to the rhythm of her movements. “Who showed you how to do these things?”

Faith began to realize something that hadn’t occurred to her up until that moment. If Dylan, Meredith, Clooger, and Hawk were on one side, who was on the other side?

“Tell me!” Clara bellowed. She liked to navigate between slippery sweet and raging diva. It tended to disarm her enemies. “Who told you to use the tree?” she said quietly.

Faith had chosen a living thing as a weapon, and it had pinned the most powerful girl on Earth. If she had chosen something else—a giant rock or a pile of desks—Clara would have blown it apart like matchsticks. It had been a complete accident, this choosing of the tree. Or had it? Maybe she had some insight into Clara’s mind neither of them yet understood. Maybe the tree had known it could be of use in a world of good and evil unleashed. However, she knew it was true: every second pulse had a weakness in battle. For Clara, it was living things used as weapons against her. It was the same for her twin, Wade. A bullet would do nothing against the Quinns, but a freshly fallen tree, still alive and pulsing water through its knotty veins, had the power to do some damage.

The glass shards began to shake and crack into smaller pieces in the air. Before Clara could grasp what was happening, they were turned to dust particles and blown away like a great wind had swept through and carried them off. Dylan landed on the tree next to Faith, picked her up, and carried her to the roof.

“Stay here; Clooger should arrive anytime.”

“NO! I won’t just stand by while you save me. I can do this.”

Dylan put one hand on each of her shoulders. “No, you can’t. Right now our only chance is to get rid of her before she kills you. Just stay here. I mean it.”

Dylan took a step backward, then flew off the building and landed where Faith had stood on the tree, over Clara. She smiled sadly.

“So you’re one, too,” Clara said. She assumed he was a first pulse, a mere nuisance like Faith, and this complicated things. “No wonder I liked you from the start. You put off a certain energy. I should have known.”

Dylan was surprised she hadn’t moved the tree. It wasn’t like her to stay down.

“I’ve got no reason to fight you,” Dylan said. “We’ll leave, and we won’t come back.”

“I think we both know it’s too late for that. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I really did like you, Dylan Gilmore.”

Clooger landed on the building overhead with nine other Drifters, and they all stood in a circle around Faith, awaiting instructions.

“Faith, just go!” Dylan shouted. “Let us handle this.”

But she wouldn’t stop making herself stay right where she was.

“I brought backup, too,” Clara said. “Mine’s better.”

In a flash of sound and fury, the tree broke in two, sending shards of wood flying in every direction as Dylan leaped for the ground. Wade Quinn advanced along one of the pathways, lifting the concrete slabs in front of him. Each slab was three feet wide, five feet long, six inches thick. They rose like a snake, chasing Dylan up in the air and onto the roof as he ducked and dodged for cover.

“It sure is hell finding a man under these circumstances,” Clara said, brushing herself off as she walked over to her brother. Wade was looking up on the roof where Clooger was standing with his men.

“Let’s kill some Drifters.”

Clooger unpinned three grenades and tossed them into the courtyard. The explosions created a diversion he needed, in which Dylan freed himself from the concrete slabs and slammed into Wade’s midsection with a brutal kick. Wade sailed through a sheet of plate glass and landed on the floor inside the school. Dylan needed to get Clara and Wade away from Faith, so he picked up Clara before she could wrap her mind around what was happening and threw her into the same corridor with her brother.