“this is why we call people exes, i guess - because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. it's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. it's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. the X is a diagram of two paths.” -David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
[ C H A P T E R T W E N T Y – T H R E E ]
_________________
The sun is setting when I awaken several hours later. Propping myself up on my side, I see that Logan and Tempest are stirring as well. Owen and Talon are lounging in the white plastic chairs with their eyes closed, but I highly doubt that they are actually sleeping.
Offhandedly, I notice that I am still wearing a black beanie. I take it off and scowl at the greasiness of my hair. What I really want is a shower, but I doubt there is any running water in this building.
Logan groans loudly and sits up, no doubt wondering how the hell she landed herself in a grimy basement. And I thought my hair was bad – hers is a flaming ball of puff. “I am so hungover,” she moans, massaging her temples. “Is there any water in this joint? I’m parched.”
I reach for a canteen and toss it across the room. Logan deftly snatches it out of the air despite her weariness and chugs the whole container.
Tempest crawls over to her backpack and finds her own canister. “Bottoms up,” she jokes. Water dribbles down her chin and onto her shirt as she drinks.
“Jeez, you two are awfully thirsty,” I mutter, snuggling back under my covers.
“Well, yeah,” Logan says between gulps. “Whatever they drugged us with… I dunno. I could drain Lake Erie.”
“I could drain Lake Superior,” Tempest counters.
“I could drain Lake Baikal,” Logan snaps. “World’s largest freshwater lake. Also the deepest lake on Earth. Beat that.”
“Yeah?” replies Tempest, set on besting her rival. “I could drain the Caspian Sea! World’s largest lake. Period.”
“And I could drain the Pacific Ocean. World’s largest body of water. Period.”
“The Caspian Sea and Pacific Ocean are salty, so you couldn’t actually drink them,” Owen mumbles, butting into the discussion.
“No one asked you, Pierce,” Logan snarls, swiping Tempest’s canister and finishing off what little water remains.
“HEY!” Tempest lunges for the canister, but Logan holds it just out of her reach before bopping her over the head with it.
Talon leans forward in his chair, propping his elbows up on his knees and resting his head on clasped hands. “I’m glad to see you kids are back to normal, but—”
Logan pauses in her assault to point an accusatory finger at the spiky-haired boy. “I’m older than you, buster.”
“As I was saying,” he continues, rolling his eyes, “I’m happy that you’re safe, but I would like to know exactly what happened.”
“We got caught, they drugged us, you saved us,” Logan says, attempting to appear nonchalant. “End of story.” Her efforts are spoiled by the telltale blush spotting her cheeks, betraying her shame.
“No, not end of story,” Owen insists, glancing suspiciously in my direction. “When we found you, all the Blackwings were either dead or unconscious. We would’ve checked, but there was a bit of a time crunch. Anyhow, it looked like there had been an explosion. Does anyone want to guess where the epicenter was?”
No one wants to guess where the epicenter was.
Owen sighs dramatically and narrows his eyes. “Aislinn. The center of the explosion was Aislinn, who also happened to be the only person who wasn’t drugged or tied up. Can someone explain this to me? Because I’m having a difficult time understanding.”
Every head swivels to stare at me expectantly.
“Um…”
“She didn’t do anything wrong, bro,” Talon says, giving Owen an affectionate nudge. “You’ll have to cut this dunce some slack,” he apologizes to me. “Always quick to suspect a conspiracy. But really, what did we miss?”
“Seriously,” Owen blurts, “some blue-haired guy flew at a metal pole so fast that it bent! …At least, that’s what I assume happened. There were bodies everywhere, lying under cracked walls and windows and—”
Talon jabs his brother in the side with a well-aimed elbow. “Shush. Let the girl talk.”
I exhale slowly and explain how Celsius kept me awake for questioning. “…and I told him I didn’t know how I circumvented the Neg tech, so he ordered one of his goons to go all trigger-happy on Tempest and I snapped. The ‘explosion’ Owen keeps referring to was a blast of telekinesis.”
Tempest whistles and regards me with appreciation. “You saved my life.”
“It’s in the job description,” I say, brushing off her amazement with a halfhearted wink.
“So let me get this straight,” Owen interjects. “Ash is strong enough to sense Blackwings and use her power through Negation technology?”
“Sometimes. It depends—”
“She can levitate, too,” Logan pipes up.
The black-haired boy throws his hands in the air, defeated. “Stick a fork in me. I’m done. The girl is a freak of nature.”
“Not necessarily,” Talon conjectures, scratching patches of microscopic orange stubble. “As the only person here to have been properly raised in a colony, I’ve heard more Winged lore than all of you kids put together.”
“I’m not a kid,” Logan grumbles.
He ignores the comment. “I trust that everyone has heard about the Champions?”
We all nod in unison, eager to hear what he’s getting at.
“Great, then you know how the existing Champion typically takes on the most promising youngster as an apprentice. Basic stuff. But this is a special case, seeing as the Winged Champion, Serafina, got herself captured. There’s even speculation that she did something really stupid – for love, supposedly – and the whole abduction was her fault… but that’s beside the point. You should never trust rumors.
“Anyway, the Silver Lady was her apprentice at the time, and she was a stubborn woman. Still is. Everyone told her that Serafina was dead, but did she listen? Nope. She claimed that if her teacher was killed, she would know. She never really said how she would know, but I surmise that there’s some kind of… I dunno… bond that forms between Champion and apprentice. As the colony’s most powerful prodigy, her astral projection could bypass Neg tech to a certain extent. She located Serafina within the month. This is the only reason we have to suspect that she was kidnapped instead of murdered.”
Tempest’s brow furrows. “If they knew where Serafina was, why didn’t they rescue her?”
“The Lady found Serafina, not the prison,” Talon clarifies. “She was able to latch onto the Champion’s life force, but the Negation field around it was too strong to discern any details. All we know is that she’s alive.”
“And what exactly are we supposed to get out of this story?” Logan inquires.
My eyes widen ever so slightly, but Talon notices right away. “Ash’s got it figured out,” he announces with a good-natured smirk.
“Her astral projection could bypass the Neg tech,” I whisper, repeating his words. “That’s… What are you saying?”
“You know.”
“He’s saying that you could be next in line for the Champion’s power,” Owen jabbers, earning an irritated glare from his elder sibling. “…What? Did I say something wrong?”
Talon just shakes his head. “You have no tact.”
“But you said that the Silver Lady was already an apprentice,” Tempest says. “How could Aislinn be the next one?”
“Think about it,” says Owen, closing his eyes as he works through the predicament in his own head. “The Lady is what, sixty years old? Had she inherited the power, she would’ve chosen an apprentice by now. Ash is probably the kid she would’ve picked.”
“But she didn’t inherit the power, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe, but Mother Nature doesn’t give a crap. The cycle would keep going.”
Absently, I rub a gray feather between my index finger and thumb. “Okay,” I say, “I’m supposed to be the Champion. Is that why the Lady wants to get me to the colony so badly?”
Owen nods once. “I assume so…”
“…but it makes no sense,” Talon finishes. “There’s no way to complete the transfer of power without Serafina being physically present.”
“She might just want to keep Ash under her thumb,” Logan sneers. “Lady Goodie-Two-Shoes always wants to save people, but I think she’s a control freak. I mean, she insists that Serafina is alive, so why not lock up the cute little prodigy until she returns?”
“Thanks,” I grouse, “that makes me feel so much better.”
“I wasn’t thinking about your feelings,” Logan snips. “I was thinking about reality. I don’t think you should go to the colony.”
“You’re only saying that so you don’t have to go with us,” I retort. “Why? What’s the all-important revenge you keep referring to? I’d be thrilled to hear your agenda.”
“I don’t answer to you, blondie,” Logan growls, gathering her things and heading for the door. “Meet me in outside when you’ve finished chatting.” She curls her lip around the last word like it’s something vile and stalks away.
Talon stares into the empty doorway, wrapped up in his own thoughts.
“I can’t believe you like her,” Owen says, giving his brother a shove. “She’s a moody bitch.”
Talon looks down at his lap and rubs the back of his neck, unresponsive.
“Dude,” Owen asserts. “She. Is. A. Bitch.”
I roll up my sleeping bag and strap it to the top of my backpack. “I think we’ve spent enough time underground,” I proclaim, slinging the load over my shoulder. “We’ll all feel better once we’re up in the air.”
~ * ~
It doesn’t take more than three minutes to pack and catch up with Logan. The sky sucks the tension from our bodies and we are content to just… sail. Rotating my primaries, I set a course that will carry us straight across both Missouri and Kansas. Literally. We can just fly in a straight line until we reach Colorado.
The sunset is really pretty, Tempest thinks aloud.
Well, I don’t like it, Logan murmurs. It gets in my eyes.
Close your eyes, then, Tempest replies. I think it’s beautiful.
She isn’t lying. The brilliant orange sphere is mesmerizing as it steadily slips below the horizon, pinkening the undersides of clouds and drawing a purple curtain to end the day. Even so, I have to squint against its rays. I fish out my sunglasses – which I haven’t used since found out I could bend wind away from my face – and reluctantly slide them on.
Didn’t you say you used to live here? I ask Tempest.
Missouri? Yeah.
Tell us about it, I insist. I want to hear a story. Something nice.
She wears a faraway expression as she sifts through memories, searching for something good to share. We came to the state when I was nine, she begins, finally deciding on an anecdote. The move was really hard on me, since I had to leave my best friend, Virginia, behind in Iowa. Our new house was in a rural area. By rural, I mean a village. There probably weren’t more than two hundred people living there, and the total amount of land was, like, four square miles. It was kind of pathetic, really.
Did you get to live in a farmhouse? I ask.
Pfft! No way. I got stuck in a little one-story house with a bathroom so small, it could’ve passed as a closet. And we had well water, so it turned the bathtub brown. And it stank.
But anyhoo, the good part was that we had a sizable yard with a cute little orchard in the back. It was just a small cluster of trees, but they grew apples, so it counted. I would lie in the grass a lot and stare at the clouds through the branches and think of how much I missed Virginia. A few days after we’d finished unpacking, I was spacing out like I usually did when someone snuck up behind me and poked my arm with a stick. I screamed and vaulted five feet up onto a branch.
It turned out that the stick-wielder was not a Blackwing, but a ten-year-old boy. He introduced himself as Lukas and begged me to teach him how to climb trees like that. After I’d relaxed enough to sidle to the ground, the kid told me that he lived a few houses down the road and had stopped by to welcome us. Then he left and promised to visit me again soon.
Sounds like someone had a crush on you, I chant, grinning.
She shrugs and gazes off into the sinking sun. It wasn’t like that. We were just friends.
That’s what they all say.
No, really! We ended up becoming besties. He would’ve told me if he liked me that way.
Unless he thought you’d friend-zoned him, Logan interjects, wagging her eyebrows.
Tempest pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs. We were in elementary school, you pervs. The relationship was completely platonic. God.
…That’s just background information, anyway, she says, continuing the tale. This story is about one specific episode: the Tape. It began on a particularly hot afternoon in July. I was sitting on my bed, surrounded by plastic fans, when someone knocked on the window behind me. It was Lukas, of course. He had a habit of entering through windows instead of doors. So I opened it and he heaved himself through the frame and onto my mattress. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in my room, but I’ll never forget the first thing he said to me that day.
Which was…?
‘It’s sweatier than a gorilla’s armpit out there.’
A bubble of laughter explodes from behind Tempest. I jerk my head around just in time to catch Owen snapping his mouth shut. He was listening. He scowls, as if daring me to make something out of it, before averting his eyes.
Tempest smiles and resumes her storytelling. After that clever remark, he plopped a portable recorder and cassette player onto the blankets. He called it a ‘shoebox’. I asked him why he didn’t get a digital recorder or, I don’t know, a video camera, like a normal person. He said that he loved the sound the shoebox made when he pushed the eject button and slid a tape into the deck. ‘Also,’ he said, ‘audio tapes are cool.’ Then he ejected a blank tape and popped it back into the machine so I could hear the sound he loved so much. I wasn’t as fascinated as he was, but I had to admit that it had more personality than a camera.
The next two hours were spent chattering away into the microphone. We started out by interviewing each other. Then we told jokes. Then we wrote skits. Then we just recorded random nonsense until we heard the snick indicating that the tape had run out. Lukas flipped it over and suggested that we do something really special for Side B. The temperature had dropped significantly, so we decided to take it outside.
After a few minutes of heated debate, we opted to make Side B a show instead of a collection of unrelated snippets. I distinctly remember snatching the shoebox from his hands, jamming the record button with my thumb, and shouting as dramatically as possible: ‘AND NOW IT’S TIME FOR BACKYARD HAPPENINGS!’ That’s what we ended up naming the show, ‘Backyard Happenings’. The first thing we did was document a ‘seven-day forecast’, which pretty much translated to us talking about shapes the clouds made. Then we went on for a bit about how ‘magnificently forest green’ the leaves were. Stuff like that.
Logan snickers from her position at the front of the flock. You’re such a dork.
It was five years ago! Tempest exclaims, getting defensive. Jeez! That’s not all we did, though. We walked around town, interviewing Lukas’s friends and asking what their favorite colors were, which people they found the most annoying, etcetera. We eventually ran out of kids to irritate, but we discovered that one of our elderly neighbors was having some people over that evening. Naturally, we snuck up their driveway and hid behind a car, describing every last detail of the ‘party’ and trying to get close enough to record what was actually being said. Not even five minutes passed before an old lady spotted us and we had to run.
That wasn’t the end, though. We stayed up all night, prowling the neighborhood and spying on adults. I’d never had so much fun, not even with Virginia. When my parents finally ordered me to come back home, I hit the record button and hollered, ‘THANK YOU for tuning in to Backyard Happenings, presented by yours truly! Also, Lukas. He helped too.’ Lukas opened his mouth to yell something, but the tape ran out at that very moment and cut him off. I laughed so hard…
How do you remember that day so vividly? I question.
Tempest’s hand flits to the pocket of her jeans, guided by remnants of some distant muscle memory. I only lived in the village for a year and a half before we had to move again. Lukas gave me that first Tape as a parting gift. It was a huge deal; even though he had stacks upon stacks of other tapes we’d made together cluttering his bedroom floor. It was so, so special. Special enough that we had decided to refer to it as the Tape, with a capital T. And he gave it to me. I made my parents buy me a Walkman just so I could listen to it. I made a habit of carrying it with me everywhere I went.
Owen is staring at Tempest, utterly absorbed. What happened to it? he asks. Going by his sheepish expression, he didn’t intend for the question to slip out.
Tempest’s hand falls away from her pants when she realizes what she’s unconsciously doing: reaching for a Walkman that’s no longer there. A Blackwing destroyed it about a year ago, she says at last.
Owen shuts his eyes. I’m sorry.
It’s okay. The hollowness in her voice is replaced by optimism. Ash wanted to hear a happy story, and it is a happy story. The Tape wasn’t what mattered. The adventure mattered. Lukas mattered. And I’d be willing to bet that there are still half a million of our tapes collecting dust in his room.
You should find him, Logan advises. The seriousness in her tone catches us off guard. My parents are dead. Owen’s parents are gone. Ash’s dad disappeared. And since Talon is out here in the wild, I’d be willing to bet that his parents – Talon flinches at this – are unavailable as well. But Tem, you have someone you care about, and we’re soaring over his home state right now. Tie up your loose ends or they’ll haunt you forever.
Tempest ducks her head. No. I’ve moved on. Besides, the dude won’t even remember me.
Are you sure?
Yes.
We continue flying, mainly in silence, for two more hours. I sneak glances at Tempest from time to time, watching her scan the patchwork of land below. I can’t tell if she’s lost in her thoughts or looking for Lukas. Perhaps both. She eventually announces that she has to go to the bathroom and we begin our usual downward spiral, canvassing the area for a suitable place to set up camp. We touch down in the middle of a small wood, adjacent to a tiny town.
“Toss me the PTP,” Tempest says, catching the package when Logan lobs it her way. Then she strolls past Owen, darts her hand into his backpack, and dashes away into the foliage with a small object in tow.
“Hey!” Owen yelps, spinning around a moment too late. “Did anyone see what she took?”
“I think it was… a pen,” Logan answers, straining to see Tempest’s fleeing form through the trees.
Talon snaps his fingers. “Your marker, Owen,” he says. “She swiped your black marker.”
“What on Earth would she need that for?” he grumbles. “Or do I not want to know?”
I shrug off my pack and let it fall to the dirt with a dull thud. “I’ll see what she’s up to,” I volunteer, trailing her into the darkness.
I’m running for a full minute, deliberately keeping my speed down so as not to alarm Tempest, before emerging near a modest one-story house. I retreat into the shadows when I see her rounding the corner of the home and, with a final look over her shoulder, returning to the shelter of the woods. She must be heading back to camp, I think to myself, not risking a single breath until the girl is well out of range. What was she up to?
I slink across the yard and retrace her steps, turning the corner and pressing my face against the only window on that side. I trace the outline of a teenager snoring in his bed, swathed in blankets. I can tell that he’s male because of the chaotic brown hair and man-sized feet peeking out from under the covers. Was Tempest watching him sleep? It is then that I notice several rectangular items spilling out of the bottom drawer of his nightstand.
Tapes.
I look down and see that a small square of toilet paper, marked with black ink, has been left on the desk in front of the window. I immediately recognize the elegant, yet hurried, handwriting.
Seven-day forecast: The leaves are green and the clouds look like bacon strips. –T
==========
The pictures to the right are of Lukas’s “shoebox” and a Walkman.
This book is in a near-constant state of revision, so I’m warning you in advance: If something seems inconsistent, I probably changed a few things in an earlier chapter. For example, I’ve inserted several sentences throughout the story where Tempest unknowingly reaches for her pocket. ;)
Sorry it took me 3 months to update. I was working on Crystal Hearts (my comic, for the few of you who don't know) and it's really difficult for my brain to cycle between writing and drawing. Writing requires a lot of focus; drawing is more of a zone-out-and-listen-to-music experience. I'm not sure how to juggle the two stories while keeping both my Wattpad and Hatena fanbases happy. ;_;