It was as if space shifted to put the gun at its center. It was as if the black gun glittered with invisible light. It was as if it was the most important thing Kess had ever seen.
The man snapped his hand up and fired once over the roof of the car, the sharp thunder of the gunshot slamming into Kess’s ears, and then lowered the gun to point at Kess again. The whole thing took less than a second. “I’ve made you afraid,” said the man. “Fear is only useful in so far as it tells you what to do. In this case, it tells you to do what I say. Now that you know what to do, fear is no longer useful. Do you agree?”
Kess nodded.
“Are you still afraid?”
Kess shook her head.
“Why would you lie to someone you’re afraid of? My name is Stone. Does it make you less afraid to know my name?”
Kess shook her head.
“I’m glad you’re not lying anymore. Give me the car keys and your cell phone. Yours as well. And then you—” He indicated Kess with a slight gesture of the gun. “—get out and lie on the ground and you—” (Priya) “—come with me.”
They did what he said. Kess lowered herself stomach-down onto the grainy asphalt. Her thoughts were hot, fast, sharp, short. What do I do? What I do? He has a gun. Gun. Gun. I have to do something. Gun. What do I do?
She craned her neck to see Stone leading Priya down the road at the point of the gun. Where were they going? She couldn’t see a car. They were about twenty feet away now, and Stone wasn’t looking back.
Kess climbed to her feet. If she tried to run to them and grab him and tase him like she had Elias, he might turn around and see her and shoot her. She held out her hand with the star on her palm facing Stone.
“Lightning bolt,” she whispered. “Lightning bolt. Lightning bolt.”
Nothing happened, and her palms didn’t even tingle. She imagined a tidal wave, an avalanche, and all of their energy crashing through her hands. Nothing.
She had to she had to she had to she had to. “Lightning bolt.”
And then it happened. Like in a dream, it happened. Crackling blue-white electricity burst from her hand. But it didn’t shoot out in straight line to crash into Stone’s back like in a video game. Instead, it appeared all at once in an arc between her hand and the ground a few feet in front of her. It was gone in a split second, like real lightning, but it buzzed in the air. Stone and Priya both turned to look at the sound.
She had to get him before he shot her. She had to get him before he shot her.
Kess took three steps forward and shot another lightning bolt. This one curved down to the pavement only a foot or so from Stone. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. He turned the gun on Kess.
Priya spun and slapped him down. She hit him across the face with one open hand and he slammed to his knees. The gun went off and Kess screeched and the bullet smashed into the pavement inches from her foot. When Stone looked up, half his face was red. And wet.
Had Priya scraped the skin off his cheek?
He started to raise the gun again, but Priya stomped on it and ripped it from his hand. She only hesitated a moment before kicking him in the head. He snapped back violently and fell flat on his back. His eyes were closed.
Priya’s hand hung at her side, the palm bright with blood. She held it up and stared at it.
A wave of exhaustion hit Kess. She was so bone-and-muscle tired she had to close her eyes and concentrate to keep from falling down.
When she opened her eyes, Priya’s head was glowing with faint red light. It filtered weakly through her skin and hair and glittered through her eyes. She looked like an old religious icon, but with a halo in devil-red instead of gold. She was a strange and terrifying creature. Kess blinked and the vision was gone.
She took a deep breath and approached her sister.
“Come on,” she said, reaching for Priya’s arm, “we have to get—”
Priya snapped her head around to face Kess, snarling. “Don’t touch me, you—”
And she raised her hand, her bloody hand, the one she’d just used to knock a man to the ground and scrape the skin off his face. Kess shrank back and threw up her own hand, the one she’d just used to send electricity burning through the air. They froze there with mysteriously dangerous hands raised to each other.
“We need to get the keys,” said Kess after a long moment. “And our phones. That’s all I wanted to say.”
Priya’s face was so tight and strained she was almost un-pretty for once. But she nodded and crouched beside the man on the ground. She wiped her bloody hand off on his suit jacket before reaching into his pockets. She tossed Kess her phone and had barely pulled out her own phone and the car key when Stone groaned and stirred on the ground.
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The two girls scrambled back to the car, Priya to the driver’s seat and Kess to the back seat, and they roared away. Turning in the seat to look behind her, Kess saw Stone climbing to his feet. She stared at him standing in the middle of the road until the car careened around the corner and he was lost to view.
#
“We should call the cops,” said Kess. “Shouldn’t we?”
“Yes.” Priya gripped the steering wheel with cold hands. “Or maybe no. I don’t know.” The inside of her head was cold too. She flashed back to Stone and his gun, but the sharp new memory had already been chilled, dulled, wrapped in cotton. Her hands trembled against the steering wheel, but that was the only part of her that felt like moving. The rest of her body was still as an ice sculpture.
“I don’t want to, though,” said Kess. “We’d have to tell them about… You know… Whatever’s happening to us. They’d take us in to study us or something.”
That was a disturbing thought. Priya was certain she didn’t want the authorities knowing about her strange new strength. “We don’t have to tell them about anything except Stone.”
“If we tell them someone tried to kidnap you, we’ll have to go in and give a report or something. We’ll have to explain how we fought him off, and they’ll see our hands.”
“Say he stopped us in the road, and he had a gun, and we drove off. That’s enough to get them looking for him. Say his face was already bleeding. Except if they find him he’ll tell them what I did.”
Kess took out her phone and held it in her lap. “So you’re, um, strong”.
“Yeah.” Even though Kess had seen Priya take down Stone, talking about her strength felt like betraying a secret. “And you have lightning.”
“Yeah.”
“No cops,” said Priya. “But what about Mom and Dad?”
“They’d call the cops.”
When they got home, Priya slipped past her parents and up to her room. She opened the window over her desk and climbed out onto the roof. Sitting there, she could look out into the soft darkness of the woods behind the house. She took out her phone and called Danny.
“Something strange happened today,” she told him.
“Okay,” he said after a pause. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Haha.” That was Danny’s good-guy laugh. It actually sounded like “ha-ha,” with a clear “h” sound.
She really should be more upset about what happened. With everything, with Stone marching her off into the woods and she didn’t know what he was going to do to her. Danny would be a great person to share your trauma with. But Priya didn’t feel traumatized. She felt cold. “Did I ever tell you about when I first met Kess?”
“No.”
“We were four years old. I’d been in the U.S. for a while already, but she was straight off the plane. I can’t remember not knowing some English, but she didn’t know a word. And she had this huge yellow rat’s nest of hair like I’d never seen on a person before… I remember thinking maybe she wasn’t a person. I thought she was a goblin. And I mean that literally. I thought she was some kind of creature.”
Danny laughed again. “That’s intense, Priya.”
“The day Mom and Dad brought Kess home she pulled my hair and then ran off to hide in a closet. She was always hiding in closets or under tables, and if I found her and tried to talk to her she would hiss at me. Like seriously hiss at me like a cat.
“But then we got older and she learned English and we became sisters. I can’t even remember how it happened. I’m sure it was gradual. But a year or so later she’d come into my room when she had nightmares—Kess has always had terrible nightmares—and she’d sleep in my bed with me.
“Kess and I started out as strangers. More than strangers. Aliens. She was a monster to me, but now we’re each the person who loves the other one the most in the entire world. And that’s why I always thought it was possible. That someday we could make it happen like the cheesiest song you ever heard or those pictures of children around the world.”
“Um, what do you mean?”
“You know those pictures. Like, there’s a globe, and there’s multiracial children in a ring around the edge holding hands, and maybe one’s a Dutch girl in wooden shoes and one’s an Inuit boy…”
“No, I was asking what your point is.”
“I mean world peace. I thought that if two people so different could become sisters, then maybe we can really all get along someday. Brotherhood of man. Sisterhood of man. Someday we’ll all get over hating each other and stop fighting and maybe die less stupidly.”
“I like that,” said Danny. “I like that you believe that.”
“But you don’t buy it.”
“That’s just not how people work. Everyone can’t love everyone. That’s not part of our equipment.”
Priya was surprised, almost shocked, to hear him say that. “I didn’t think you were cynical, Danny.”
“I’m really not. But to me, it’s about what you do, not how you feel. You do the right thing by people, love or no love.”
Something soft and furry brushed up against Priya’s arm—Giant. Giant slid into her lap, and he was warm and humming-purring and good to hold even if his fur was studded with crusty leaf-crud from the woods. Talking to Danny, together with Giant’s pleasant cat-presence, was beginning to warm away Priya’s cold mood.
“The strange thing that happened today… Well, it happened, and at the same time something strange happened inside my head. I looked up, and I saw Kess, and I have no idea why but…”
“What happened, Priya?”
Priya rubbed Giant’s neck and chin and felt the tiny tremor of the cat’s pulse. “She was suddenly different. I looked at Kess and the goblin was back.”
###
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