6

Will stepped in front of me, which annoyed me, but when the Poth moaned a guttural grunt that made my blood run cold, I was suddenly grateful for my Anam Cara, or in this case, my human shield.

The Poth lifted a foot. I use the term ‘foot’ loosely. It took one step closer and dragged the other behind it. The scraping sound seared itself into my brain. We took a step back, so well-timed it was almost comical.

“Regan,” snapped Blue from thin air. “Firewall! Now!” His voice split atoms in me, and a firewall leapt around the French doors. “Expand it,” he ordered. I pictured the perimeter of the Peaceman home and expanded the firewall around it.

“Haaaaaiya!” The creepy kid from the passage burst into the room with karate chop hands. It would seem that conniptions were on the cards for me today too.

“Why are you sneaking around our house?” The eldest appeared right behind her. “Shireen does have a point.” She raised an expectant eyebrow.

The turquoise curtain fluttered in the breeze. I risked a glance towards it: no Blue, no eyeball, and most importantly, no Poth.

“I...” I didn’t know what to say.

“Why are the two of you being sneaky and weird?” The tallest girl demanded.

“And why are you so white?” A third red-haired harpy popped out and eyeballed us. This was rich coming from a Ginger!

“Biscuits,” chimed Mrs Peaceman, thankfully, breezing in. “Why are you interrogating Will’s friend?” She asked, resting her hands on the tallest girl's shoulders.

“Ammmmmberrrrr!" whined Will. His pink deepened into a cherry red as he swept the rivers of sweat from his brow.

“Darling Will, your deep embarrassment of your family will eventually lessen, but how long that takes is up to you,” said Mrs Peaceman. She drew me in, “You must be Regan.” Stepping past the interrogators, she calmed us all. “I’m Mother Hen in this house of mayhem, but you can call me Bev. This, is Shireen, our defence expert.” She gestured towards the youngest girl.

Shireen chopped the air and screamed, “Hai-yaaaaaa!” Mrs Peaceman ruffled her hair.

“So brave, dear, so brave. I think you have a table to set. And this,” she referred to the pot calling the kettle white, red-haired wildling, “is Sinead, our engineer. You were building a salad, I believe?” The girl tilted her head to one side, still curious about me. “And this,” said Mrs Peaceman referring to the tallest girl, whose gaze had not moved a millimetre, “is Amber.”

“What are you doing in here?” demanded Amber, her eyes darting between us.

“She might arrest you or sentence you to death one day.” Mrs Peaceman winked at me and kissed Amber on the forehead, breaking our line of sight.

I risked a glance back to the French doors. Amber, squinted suspiciously before turning on her heel and stalking out. Mrs Peaceman asked, “What’s your project on?”

“Extra Sensory Perception,” I said.

“The Combustion Engine,” said, Will.

She kept smiling as her gaze shifted casually between us. “Perhaps you should streamline your focus.” Will’s pits sprang another leak, and an icy stream carved down my back. She asked, “What were you looking for in here?" Noticing his dampness, she asked, “Are you alright, Will?”

“A book,” said Will. I was desperate to close the doors and took a tentative step towards them. Mrs Peaceman glanced over.

“Is it Mojo? He lies out there and farts in his sleep.”

I stammered, “I, uh, I... um, maybe?" The bloody dog chose that moment to bound into the room and lick my face. I tried to hide my disgust.

“Mojo, good grief, stop that,” said Mrs Peaceman.

“I guess it was just… The wind...” I faltered.

“Are you staying for dinner, Regan?” She caught me completely off guard.

“I’d love to,” I said, surprising Will and, more importantly, myself.

Mrs Peaceman strode over to the doors and closed them. “I’ll leave you to get your book.” She said with a broad smile.

The firewall I had thought into place glowed like an electric fence around the doors and windows, and she was oblivious. The Poth had reduced to a bubbling mess. It grinned back at me from its empty skull with half an arm. Blue, stood beside it, looking pleased, I think.

Why had Mrs Peaceman not seen what was plain to Will and me? Was this Schrodinger’s Poth?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

THWAK! The Poth slapped the windowpane with its remaining stumpy wrist, causing us to jump with fright. Conniption count: four?

We burst out laughing. Our mirth rose to a hysterical pitch, as Will wiped his brow for the fortieth time and said, “Holy flipping crap.”

“She's right,” I said. “We need to get our story straight.”

“Yup.” He ran his hands through his hair with worry. “Maybe we should go with mine,” he said, turning to leave. “With you being so... smart.”

“I'm not smart.” I blinked. “I'm exceptional.”

“And modest…”

I blinked again. “Okay, I see what you did there."

Will grinned suddenly and, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “Wanna see the treehouse?”

***

I waited on the porch, where the shrieking of little girls and the thundering of feet on wooden floors drifted out to meet me. Bright purple flowers hung low on one side, and intoxicating flowers rambled up a trellis on the other. It smelled amazing. I would later learn that it was Jasmine.

A skateboard stood next to the open front door, and a box of Lego lay tipped over. A hammock hung between two pillars, and a book lay open on the stump of a tree entitled, Premonition: the Sixth Sense? I picked it up but was startled by a sudden tinkling. Mobiles and wind chimes dotted the tin roof.

“Jumpy, much,” I mumbled to myself. “Conniption count: five.”

I suddenly longed to be in the sun. To be clear: that is not normal for me. I stepped off the porch and onto the grass, lifting my pale arms in a way that felt unfamiliar but also exactly right. I imagined my skin absorbing power from the sun. It was vitamin D absorption, but it felt like more than that. I lifted my face, closed my eyes, and breathed deeply. I’d never done this and wondered where the impulse came from, but it felt right and good.

I opened my eyes and noticed a drawing on one of the two pillars. A crude dragon with triangles down its long neck, back, and tail. Orange scoops flew out of its triangle teeth. Small, triangular wings would never carry it in full flight. I was calculating the wingspan versus the mass when I realized what I was looking at. The stick figure below the dragon stood in a boat surrounded by orange fire. My breath quickened. My heart raced.

The two youngest wildlings spilt out onto the porch, startling me again. I staggered back, tripped over the Lego and landed on my bottom, flattening Barbies in a shoe box.

“My LamBarbie-gini!” shrieked Sinead, the engineer. “You bum-olished it!” She guffawed at her joke.

“Did you draw this?” I questioned. She nodded, her green eyes twinkling. “When?” I asked.

“Yesterday morning,” she said, suddenly shy. “I dreamed it.” She darted back into the house, a wild red streak.

“To the treehouse,” announced Will, appearing and heading down the side of the house. I thought about the compression algorithm. I drifted off, allowing the code to take shape in my mind again.

“Wow, you have the attention span of a gnat,” said Will as I smacked into him. “I was halfway to the treehouse when I realized I'd lost you.” My skin prickled with goosebumps. I ran my fingers across my forearm, closing my eyes.

“Something weird is going on, Will.”

“I’m pretty sure we’ve established that,” he said. I missed the simplicity of talking to and through machines.

“Remember how we both felt like something was going to happen in the toilet?” Will blushed “And then it did.”

“Uh, yup, I remember that.” I knew he was worried that they had been able to find us twice now.

“Someone in your house is reading a book about premonitions.”

“That would be my dad. He's more ‘out there’ than my mom. She's more logical." He paused. "Like you. He's what my mom calls 'touchy feely'.” Will waved his hands around in the air vaguely when he said ‘touchy-feely'.

“And this?” I pointed to the drawing. It took him a second to realise what he was looking at. His eyes widened appropriately. “I wish I could get online to do some research!”

Will leaned back on the wall and folded his arms. “I guess you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

I stared back with an arched eyebrow.

“Books!” He rolled his eyes. “Come on Einstein, you need some fresh air!”

***

The lawn was plush, the flowers were bright, and a Brooke babbled somewhere nearby, but the next thing I knew, I was zigzagging unsteadily down a steep and wild embankment.

I raised an unsteady eyebrow, and Will grinned. "We live on the edge of a greenbelt. Cool, right?"

"Super cool," I said, feeling out of my zone. I knew every nook of the forest in Dragon's Dominion, and where to find every easter egg. But this? I glanced up, not wanting to lose my footing, to see Will race over a rickety wooden bridge. A rickety wooden bridge? I broke into a sweat.

It was no surprise when I slipped a second later and landed on my bottom for the third time today. I slid further down the embankment, grazing my hands and feeling my face getting hot.

“Come on!” Will sighed, pacing along the tree line and swiping a stick through the air. My nimble and pristine hands, used for slaying dragons, were in the damp, dank dirt, and I was pissed about it.

“You don’t spend much time outdoors, do you?” Will offered me a hand, but I waved him away. He shrugged and swiped his stick some more. I knew I was being stubborn.

I was on my hands and knees when I heard something. I listened to a rhythmic pulse, like a heartbeat. I had to hone in on it amongst the babble of the stream and the swooshing of the stick... It reminded me of feeling like I was the glass of water when Seth rescued us. It was faint, but it was there…

The thing with the air and light before something awful happened, happened. This time, the goosebumps travelled up my arms and neck, creeping into my hairline and scalp. I shivered with pleasure.

“What the?” Will stared at me with mild panic. I followed his confused eye line and looked down at myself. There was something on my skin. Code appeared in a faint silvery hue, pulsing with life, along every point where I felt the goosies. I recalled Seth’s tattoos, but this was different. This was a language I was more than familiar with: this was my jam.

I closed my eyes and focussed on the pulse. From my palms, it tickled up my forearms. I tried something: I wrote the code for a breeze. It blew through my mind and down my neck. It parted into two identical strings of code, each sliding along the shelf of my shoulder, over its curve, and down my arm. I suspected that my code was moving along the channels of my nervous system. Shooting over my wrists, down my hands, and through my middle finger, like Spiderman’s webs. Now this was starting to feel like fun!

The leaves lifted lightly and fluttered back down into a pile. Will, watched me with a mix of fear and fascination. He’d seen the code on my skin, but while I had experienced a cosmic rebirth, Will had merely seen some leaves rustle. I knew what I had done, and I would have to practice. I could do better.

“Is it possible for something weird not to be happening, literally, every five minutes?”

“You are using ‘literally’ incorrectly,” I said, smiling. Silver code flashed through my eyes.

Taking three inadvertent steps back and splashing into the stream, he said, “Oh, that's not creepy at all.” He took the same three steps back out of the stream. I hunkered down and dug my fingers into the dirt.

“What up?” said a familiar voice. I looked up into Seth’s dark eyes. His chainmail hoodie glinted in the late afternoon sun.

“Oh, hey,” said Will in a weird way. He turned and headed down the path, leaving me with Seth.

“I see your Manifestation has begun.” He said, helping me and nodding towards my hands. “No tattoos for you then,” he added. I rubbed them together to rid them of mud and leaves. I inspected the code buzzing from my fingertips in wispy veins. It was like x-ray vision, but instead of seeing blood and bones, I saw lines of code spiralling along my limbs and into the atmosphere around me. When I looked up, the whole world had changed.