As it turned out, Natalie didn't have to say a word. Not the next day, or the day after that. In fact, Quinn didn't turn back up for a whole week. He was missing from every class. She didn't spot him at lunch, and without him there, she was too nervous to join his friends at their table. She retreated back to her spot in the girls' bathroom for lunch, and every time she heard the name 'Quinn Kincaid' called in roll, she felt a little bit worse.
It was a game of cat and mouse all week. Quinn's friends—apparently in the dark themselves—tried to find ways to run into her, but none of them were confrontational enough to manage it. Every time Natalie saw one of them coming, she found a reason to duck into a classroom or a side hall. At lunches, she hid out in the bathroom none of them could enter.
They tried to camp out the door once, but Natalie could hear them whispering outside. She unlatched the lock on the tiny frosted-glass window at the top of the wall with a spell and boosted herself up. She climbed outside, entering the school from another direction. When they saw her hurrying down the hallway, their jaws dropped.
She managed to make it through the week without ever talking to any of the Glasses Gang. The entire weekend was dedicated to trying to feel more like herself, after her near-breakdown in the library. Natalie went out into the woods surrounding their house, which was far away from the convenience store but still close enough that the spell to create the doorway wasn't too taxing for Kendra.
Natalie still wasn't sure where they lived exactly, but it was totally surrounded by forest. She could only see the city if she climbed up high enough in the trees to see the skyscrapers and the Space Needle in the distance. She took Percy with her, along with a pile of snacks and two full water bottles.
She didn't intend to come back for the whole day, and she ended up staying out all night too. With Percy keeping an eye out from the sky, and a pair of red foxes who wandered in from their den patrolling the forest nearby, Natalie found a nice quiet spot where she could sit down and read, or play on her phone, or do anything she wanted. If anyone got within earshot, her friends would let her know long before.
But she couldn't focus. She tried, but every time she found something she wanted to do, her mind wandered back to the memory of Quinn's body flying through the air propelled by her own hand. If she tried to drive it away, more memories surfaced alongside it, of blasts of lightning and men falling by the dozen in front of her.
Natalie kept trying anyway. She pulled out her earbuds and a pillow she'd managed to stuff inside her purse. It practically exploded the moment it emerged from the small opening, and she already dreaded trying to fit it back inside again, but she'd take anything to help her feel more comfortable. A fair-sized stack of her favorite books lay inside another pocket, but Natalie had way too much on her mind to read anything. She laid back on the grass and stared at the clouds drifting across the sky between the branches, letting her phone shuffle between anything it could come up with.
After the third depressing pop song in a row, she had to stop herself from throwing it at the nearest tree as hard as she could.
Percy still didn't really understand her questions, but he knew who Gwen was. They didn't get along. He bristled at her name.
He hesitated, but meekly nodded his assent.
If Natalie had to guess, it was something like the magic sharing Cinza always talked about—but Gwen wasn't awakened, was she? Was that even possible? Or was it just Natalie making her so much bigger and stronger, and also smarter somehow?
Natalie complained aloud.
Percy just started preening his feathers, apparently realizing he couldn't really contribute to the conversation and that Natalie was just talking to herself. He wasn't totally stupid, after all. Natalie briefly wondered if she could make him even smarter, just like Gwen, but she didn't want to risk it.
She'd already lost one friendship that week. She wasn't about to push her luck with Percy too.
Natalie fell asleep as the sun finally dropped below the horizon, light music humming in her ears, wrapped up in a blanket with a resolute owl taking up the watch above her in the trees.
When she woke up again, bright and early with the sun barely filtering through the trees in brilliant rays, she wasn't alone. She had Percy, and there were the two foxes as well. The owl, which had stood careful vigil throughout the night, gave Natalie what might have been a salute before it disappeared into its nest. They were all there for her, and only her.
Out here in the wilderness, away from the complicated and stressful world, Natalie finally felt like herself again. She wished she could stay out in the forest forever, but her grumbling stomach and her quickly diminishing supply of snacks put an end to those happy dreams.
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Still, for the brief time she could, Natalie intended to enjoy every minute of it. She pulled the clasp of her purse to keep it secure against her side, tightened her belt and made a beeline for the tallest tree she knew of. Percy glided along around her, occasionally diving away at the potential of a morning meal before returning empty-taloned.
Percy screeched indignantly, making a short dive for her arm and cuffing her with his wing. She ignored him, leaping for the tree and beginning to climb.
She was being careless, and one odd branch stuck out and tore her jeans, but she kept going heedlessly. She just wanted to see the top, no matter what it took. She climbed fast and easily, with only a little magic to help her breeze past the hard lifts.
As she reached for another branch, so close to the apex, it was too weak to hold her. It snapped off instantly as she grabbed hold.
For one brief, terrifying moment, Natalie thought she might fall. She was easily a hundred feet up or more. She was totally alone, no matter how she might feel about Percy and her other friends currently hovering around the tree anxiously. If she got hurt, or worse, they couldn't really help her. They'd be totally useless. Gwen could, but she was far, far away.
If Natalie fell, she might die.
I don't want to die.
The thought rang through her head like a trumpet from the school band. No matter how crazy or stressful her life might be, Natalie definitely didn't want it to end any time soon. She was being reckless and stupid out here. It needed to stop.
Suddenly divorced from her carefree attitude, Natalie looked down. The ground was so far away, and Natalie didn't see any easy way to climb down. Her arms were scratched up past her shirt sleeves, and the hole in her jeans was only getting wider. She was hungry and tired and there was a huge ache in her side from sleeping on the hard ground.
What do I do?
Natalie's first thought was to call for help again. Hailey could probably find her, even though she had no idea where she was. Phones knew how to do that. She reached into her bag, but came up with an empty battery. She'd used it too much, and letting it play music overnight while she slept on infinite shuffle had drained it completely.
There wasn't any help coming.
She took an experimental step back down the way she'd come. There was a branch just out of reach below her. She couldn't place her foot on it unless she let go of the one she was currently gripping.
Percy fluttered by, taking up a perch at the top of a nearby tree. Natalie looked out and realized she had gotten to the top of the tallest tree—or near enough for the important part, anyway. She was higher than the tip of every other tree in the forest, and she could see out across the sea of green that reached out for miles. There, far away, was the Seattle skyline. Her new home, with all its noise and mess.
That skyline was where she was supposed to be, but not where she belonged. The cool bark surrounding the tree, which she clung to for dear life, felt more like home than anything in the steel and concrete maze of the city. Natalie didn't want to go back, but she didn't have any choice.
She just had to figure out how to get down first.
Natalie couldn't fly like Hailey—no one could, really. Under their new 'share everything' policy, Hailey had explained the exact ritual they'd devised to Cinza's people, and one of them had tried it (the Japanese guy, if Natalie remembered right). He'd done it correctly, and he'd apparently felt the same 'wings' that Hailey described, but he couldn't get them to work. It seemed like it was just way too much energy to ever pull it off, unless you were one of the special few like Hailey and Natalie.
Natalie obviously hadn't ever done the ritual, but she had another trick she could try—one from Alden. She'd never actually done it, but she'd read his explanation and she figured she had a pretty good shot at pulling it off.
Carefully, Natalie reached for that part of her mind that dealt with movement. Telekinesis, if they wanted to use the big fancy word. Reaching out for objects was familiar, one of her favorite things to practice while bored in class. She knew how to throw things around if she needed to. This time though, she wasn't throwing around pencils or rocks.
She reversed it, focusing on herself instead of anything else. Her mental grasp enveloped her entire body. It gave her a curious sensation, as if she were actually holding every inch of clothing, holding her own arms and legs, everything. Like she were touching everything at once with her hands, instead of her mind. If she really focused, she could feel the warmth and the textures too, but as if it were someone else. She tried to ignore the weird feeling, focusing on the important element of the spell.
She began to push herself up against the pull of gravity. Very reluctantly, she released one arm wrapped around the branch. Natalie hung from the other arm, feeling no weight on it at all. Slowly, she lifted it away, while Percy shrieked in fear from across the gap.
Natalie hovered in midair for a moment, totally free. It wasn't exciting, like Hailey always said about flying. It was terrifying. She wasn't soaring gracefully through the air or gently floating around like the rocks they played with.
No, she was holding herself up against the force of the entire planet—and she was losing.
Even with her strength, Natalie could feel her grip fading fast. She didn't use this type of magic very often, and her inexperience was working against her. She tried to weaken her grip just a little, intending to sink slowly to the ground. Instead, her mental grasp simply snapped.
Natalie plunged down, the ground rushing up to meet her. She flung out her arms desperately.
Her right arm snagged a thick branch. It felt like she'd been punched in the gut, but Natalie managed to hang on, swinging wildly around on the branch.
She was still a good fifty feet off the ground, but she saw a path down. If she could get to the branch further around the thick trunk, there was practically a staircase down almost to the ground. She just had to cross a ten foot gap.
Natalie looked across the way at Percy. He eyed her back with a blank expression. He didn't understand what she was trying to do.
She focused as hard as she could, once again fighting against the impossibly large pull of gravity. She leapt for the branch. Instead of trying to pull herself up against gravity, she shifted her aim. She pulled herself forward, as hard as she could.
Natalie launched outward as if she'd been flung from a catapult. The arc was way further than she could possibly have jumped, especially without anything useful to push off of. She landed easily on top of the branch, even though it was higher than where she'd started.
She burst out laughing. Percy looked stunned, despite what he'd seen her regularly accomplish in other forms of magic.
Percy flew across to join her, landing on her shoulder. He used to dig in his talons whenever he did that, but she'd taught him how to land without actually hurting her. Now he could ride pretty easily with just enough grip to hang on, but not so much that she felt like she was getting stabbed in the shoulder.
She stroked his head gently.
He bumped his little hawk head against her ear, responding in kind.
Natalie made her way back down to the forest floor with relative ease, with only a short hop down from the final branch to the thick roots of the trunk before she was back on solid ground.
She wasn't Jennifer Heshire, even if she had to be for the real world. She wasn't really Natalie Hendricks either. She was someone else—something else, and she wasn't sure how she felt about that.