Kess should probably have cleaned up the broken glass. She realized that as she watched Marlie and Breanna doing it instead. The second those girls had seen the dangerous mess they had rushed off to find a trash can and broom. Kess should have thought to do it before the others got there, but apparently her instinct was never to do something useful.
Of course Lorraine didn’t have useful instincts either, apparently.
“What am I going to tell Mom and Dad?” asked Samuel, and Kess thought that maybe everyone who had ever said those exact words had sounded exactly the same when they said them.
“They don’t know we’ve been hanging out here, right?” asked Lorraine.
“No. When they ask I say I’m out somewhere with Bradley.”
“Then don’t tell them anything. They’ll find it when they come here themselves and it will be a mystery. Or ask permission to have another party and then tell them you found it this way.”
Samuel nodded, though he still looked uncomfortable.
Danny, who had been staring at the glass-edged gaping doorway and looking thoughtful, spoke up for the first time. “We’ll have to cover it up for now. Is there a tarp around here somewhere, Samuel?”
And so the boys had something useful to do as well. By the time the glass was cleared up and the open doorway was covered with an electric-blue camping tarp, everyone was there including Paul, the new guy who had shown up near the water tower the night before.
“So what are we going to do about this?” asked Bradley.
“I think we’re good now,” said Danny. “The tarp should keep out rain.”
“I mean about them.”
“You said, Danny,” said Samuel. “You said we can’t let them walk all over us or they’ll keep doing it. You said we’re not establishing that pattern.”
“You’re right,” said Danny. He didn’t look straight at Samuel or anyone else. Instead he was looking at the empty doorframe again, and seemed to be thinking very, very hard.
“They’re at Stephanie’s, right?” asked Marlie.
“Yeah,” said Greg. “Her parents are in Naples.”
“Who are ‘they’ exactly?” asked Paul, who everyone ignored.
“How many of them are there now?” (That was Samuel.) “I think we have two more.”
“We need to have ten more,” grumbled Breanna. “They can rip our faces off. Like chimpanzees.”
Kess was surprised Lorraine didn’t say anything. She’d been so furious before, but now she just watched everyone else.
Danny spoke up again. “How about we don’t do anything?”
“You said we had to do something.”
“That was before we were doing a headcount. Any plan that depends on us outnumbering them is a bad plan.”
“They attacked us.”
“They broke my parents’ door.”
“They could have killed Lorraine.”
“They came to our place. We agreed on territories, didn’t we?”
“They broke my parents’ door.”
Kess tried to decide if she was really as angry as the rest of them and was just burying it. She had more reason to be angry—the other Blues hadn’t been there when the rocks hit the wall. They hadn’t been scared. And when she looked for it there was a sort of shocked horror that the Reds had trespassed on their land, that they could have hurt her badly if they wanted to. But she wasn’t angry. Maybe she didn’t get angry at things that scared her. She hadn’t been mad at Silver when she attacked Elias or at Stone when he had threatened her and Priya with a gun.
“We don’t know which of them it was,” said Danny.
“So?” said Marlie. “Who cares which of them it was. It was them.”
“We can’t retaliate against all of them if it was only one or two of them.”
“If one of them did it, the rest of them know. Just like how it is with us.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“If we don’t do something, they’ll come back.”
“They’ll break all the windows.”
“We can go right now. There’s two more of us.”
“Stephanie never locks her back door.”
“Guys!” Danny raised his voice above the noise. “You have to calm down.”
“Did we hold an election?” asked Greg. “Is Danny president?”
Lorraine took Danny by the elbow and pulled him away from the circle. Kess lost track of the rest of the conversation as she tried to watch the two of them without looking like that was what she was doing. Lorraine whispered something to Danny. He said something back, but she shook her head.
“I know what we should do,” said Danny, returning to the circle. “They freaked out Lorraine and Kess and broke something. So we should freak them out and break something. An eye for an eye.”
“Really, Danny?” said Greg. “You’re not going to be all ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind’ at us?”
“An eye for an eye,” said Lorraine, “does not make the whole world blind. It makes the whole world have one eye, instead of us having no eyes and them having two. So what are we going to do?”
“Well,” said Kess, “if all we want is to scare them and do minor property damage, it’s easy.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. If you think about it, our powers are almost designed for this exact situation.”
She explained her idea, and the others agreed it made for appropriate retribution. Forty minutes of excited, hand-wavey brainstorming later, it had expanded into a detailed plan complete with escape routes and designated lookouts. They would do it once it was dark. Everyone sort-of awkwardly drifted apart to entertain themselves elsewhere.
Kess stopped Lorraine before she left the room. “What did you say to him? I thought he was going to go down fighting on principle.”
“I told him that if he didn’t let them retaliate in a way he could control, they would do it on their own and someone would end up electrocuted to death.” Lorraine pressed a hand to her chest, her ironic mood ring a probably-inaccurate happy blue. “I understand how angry people work.”
###
TEXT MESSAGE CONVERSATION BETWEEN ELIAS KAPLAN AND KSENYA CARPENTER:
Elias: When you turned, did music start to sound different?
Elias: Kess, you there?
Elias: Never mind. I’m probably just imagining it.
###
The Blues approached Red Base, also known as “Stephanie’s house,” under cover of darkness. They wore black, like spies, and Kess’s hair puffed out from beneath a black knit burglar hat. Marlie and Breanna had even painted thick black lines on their cheeks with mascara, and Kess sort of wished she’d done it too, just to complete the look. Lorraine and Samuel had surreptitious little pencil flashlights to show the way.
Even though Kess hadn’t been angry like the others after the Red attack, she had to admit that this—all the Blues together, sneaking around to enact vengeance or justice or whatever—felt really good. It felt sort of like when they had all sat on the floor holding hands and let electricity run through them in a line. It was like they were tied together, somehow, there in the dark.
Stephanie’s house was on a winding street lined with similarly spacious homes. Each house was set back far from the road surrounded by wide swathes of green grass and trees that, behind the houses, melted into the same woods that surrounded the Blues’ cabin twenty miles away. Paul—who despite being new had instantly become highly-valued member of the team when he revealed, during their earlier planning session, that he owned a van—was parked on the street with his headlights off, ready to come pick them up at a moment’s text.
They found the closest telephone pole, pointed their flashlights at the transformer high on the post, and followed dark cables down to an electrical box on the side of the house.
Without really talking about it, everyone understood that Kess, as the one who came up with the idea, had the honor of leading the assault. She stood beneath the electrical box and turned to the others. “We want a nice high voltage,” she said, “so we need to link up in series. Somebody hold my hand.”
#
Rod was bored.
He didn’t deal well with boredom, partly because he refused to watch TV, ever. At the moment he was slouched on the leather sofa in Stephanie’s living room (not to be confused with the sitting room or the den. Steph had a lot of rooms.) stewing in his own thoughts, which was almost as much a waste of blooded living minutes as watching television.
He was considering (in an admitting-defeat sort of way) going to find Stephanie and see if she wanted to fool around when the lights flickered.
Was it storming? He glanced at the window, but there was nothing out there but solid, boring darkness.
The lights flickered again, and Rod began to suspect that something really interesting was going on.
Connor and Harry and some of the others who’d been watching a movie in the next room came running in. “It’s them,” said Connor. “It has to be."
The lights were blinking on and off in an epileptic frenzy, and Rod couldn’t help it. He got to his feet, jumped onto the coffee table, threw up his hands and shouted in his best Mad Scientist boom: “IT BEGINS!”
#
With every strike to the electrical box, the lights in the windows flickered. Kess decided it was time for the climax. “Okay,” she said. “Now everyone grab on.” They linked hands in a chain, all of them, and Kess could feel the power available to her, a great force waiting to crash out like water behind a dam. She lifted her arm again and let the lightning fly. It hit the box, which exploded into sparks, and every light in every window of the house went out.
They let go of each other as Lorraine laughed. “Do you think we fried any computers?”
“Maybe,” said Kess.
“Aaaaaand let’s go,” said Danny. “Go go go go go.”
They ran, laughing and war-whooping and generally defeating the purpose of wearing dark clothing. Paul’s van came roaring up the long driveway. The yellow headlights revealed the Reds spilling out the front door of the dark house. One of them—in the dimness at the edge of the headlight glow, Kess couldn’t tell which—swung his arm with the weighty snap of a baseball pitcher and threw something.
The front right tire of Paul’s van popped audibly.
“Oh, crap,” said Breanna. “Crap crap crappetty—”
The Blues spun to face the Reds. Danny had been in the back when they were fleeing, making sure nobody slowed down, so now he was in the front. He positioned himself with legs apart, straight-backed and solid, ready for another tense confrontation.
But instead of stopping to argue, Rod punched Danny in the face.