Chasing Before (28 page)

Keegan is new onstage, his small frame dwarfed by an enormous drum set. He grips his drumsticks with such force that his knuckles are white. Neil probably put him up here to build up his confidence, but the panic in Keegan’s eyes tells me it’s going to backfire. I don’t protest. It might humiliate him even more to kick him out at this point.

Libby waits behind my piano bench. Neil plays the opening notes of a song, and I slide into place, running my fingertips over the keys. I steady myself and turn my head to take in our audience. It’s like viewing a giant, undulating patchwork quilt, with all the career groups sticking together in vast swatches of color. There’s a tiny speck of red right up at the front—the superfans that Neil has recruited to be healers—and black around the edges of the crowd, where the security team stands just in case.

Normally when you play with a drummer, the drummer sets the tempo for the rest of the band. But Keegan is inexperienced, so he follows the beat put down by Moby on the bass. Keegan is a fraction of a second off, playing rolls on the snare drum that lag behind the rest of us. The music feels heavy, like playing in a sea of molasses.

Moby tries to adjust for Keegan’s ineptitude by slowing to his speed, but Keegan gets frustrated and bangs on the high hat, snare, and bass drum willy-nilly. A pressure builds
in my head every time he hits the cymbals, which is at least every four beats. I throttle my floor pedal, and my teeth grind together as I pound out the notes. Libby’s hand on my back digs into my spine, and the energy she pumps into me congeals and clogs in my veins.

Dark thoughts gather at the base of my skull. I want to scream at Keegan to stop his god-awful racket. I want to rage at Neil for misjudging putting Keegan onstage as a kindness. I want Libby to back off, to stop breathing down my neck. The darkness presses up against the energy within me, pushing it slowly down the length of my arms.

Keegan kicks over the cymbal, and it lands with a crash between Moby and Neil. The dark energy surges into my fingertips and into my piano keys. Libby backs away from me, and Moby and Neil stop playing. I continue like a woman possessed, and the music hovers over the crowd like a black cloud. The purple spirit trappers punch the yellow demon hunters, and the white guardian angels hurl insults at the green caretakers.

My hands are jerked off the keys, and the music stops on a high, keening note that echoes over Assembly Hill. The crowd stands frozen in place, their mouths gaping open as they stare up at me. I’m a public menace, and now everyone knows it.

Neil lets go of my arms, and they drop to my thighs. Keegan huddles behind his drum set, and Moby tries to coax him out.

Libby directs Neil to play a ballad, something to calm
the crowd. “What were you thinking?” she whispers harshly into my ear.

Neil begins to sing, his rich, warm voice soaring over the crowd, filling their ears with promises of safety, love, and happiness. I can almost believe the message is for me. But it’s not, and it never will be.

I bolt, tripping over my bench as I go. Without looking back at the stage, I run.

Sometime later there’s a soft knock on my door. I lie facedown on my bed. My foot throbs to the rhythm of the memory globe underneath the bed.

The door creaks open.

“There’s glass in your foot,” Neil says. I stepped on a shard of his picture frame when I tore off my shoes and threw them at the wall. I thought I’d cleaned up all the pieces when I’d hung the photo of him back up, but apparently I didn’t do a very good job of it.

“Don’t I deserve the pain?” I mumble into my bedspread. “Isn’t it clear enough now that I’m a horrible person?”

“You didn’t mean to agitate the crowd like that.” The bed shifts as Neil sits down. He takes my foot into his lap and extracts the shard. The throbbing recedes into a dull ache. Did I mean it, though? Deep down? Because if I didn’t, why did it happen?

I turn over onto my side to face Neil. He recoils with a gasp. “What happened to your eyes?” he asks.

I’m sure my eyes are puffy and red, but do I really look
that bad? “I’m sorry,” I moan. I’ve been saying that a lot lately.

“It’s okay. We calmed everyone down. But, Felicia . . .” He pauses. “We took a vote, and you’re out of the band. I mean, for the time being. Maybe once things have settled down, in a few weeks, Libby will reconsider.”

As if the fallout from tonight’s concert weren’t bad enough already, now I’ve lost my last real link to Neil. We don’t room together, we don’t train together, and now we won’t play music together. I’ll never see him. He’s slipping away, and there’s nothing I can do. I want to ask him if he voted in favor of me, but I’m too scared of the answer. At least he hasn’t broken up with me, but can that be far behind?

I reach out my hand to him, but he backs away. “Keegan’s waiting for me. He needs more practice, so I gotta go. But I’ll pick you up for class tomorrow?” He gives me a half wave and scrambles out the door, like he’s afraid of me. Like he knows what is festering inside me.

I turn, and twin black smudges shimmer up at me from the bedspread. It looks like makeup. I materialize a mirror, and it’s immediately clear why Neil freaked out. My eyes are painted with black eye shadow nearly up to my eyebrows, and my eyelashes are coated with heavy mascara. I don’t know how it got there, but I want it gone.

Frantically I wipe at the eye shadow with the edge of my sheet, but no matter how much I rub, I only succeed in dirtying my sheet. The eye shadow doesn’t come off. It’s like a physical manifestation of the Morati—a permanent reminder written on my eyelids that my soul is stained with black.

thirty-one

WHEN I ENTER THE GYM the next day, I’m frustrated and angry and ready to knock someone over. Neil left without me. He’s avoiding me after my meltdown onstage. Not that I blame him. I’d avoid me too, if I could.

Moby approaches me, his balled-up fists gripping the frayed sleeves of his black shirt. “I dig the eyes. Totally badass.”

“Thanks.” I tilt up my chin. If I can’t remove the eye shadow, I’ll have to own it.

“I voted to keep you in the band. Keegan’s the problem, not you.” Musically speaking, Moby’s right. But if the main purpose of the band is to enhance people’s moods, then I’m the problem.

“That’s sweet of you. But maybe this a good thing. Now I won’t have any distractions from training.”

Moby nods, even though it’s a weak attempt to look on the bright side. “Let’s spar?”

As an answer I throw a punch from my right shoulder, keeping my arm straight and aiming for his ear. He blocks it with his left forearm, bringing his right arm in at a diagonal to push it down with his hand. He then throws a punch from his right shoulder, and my left arm comes up to block it. We continue this chain of punches and blocks, faster and faster, until both of us are panting.

He spins out of my reach, doubles over, and rests his hands on his knees. “Damn, girl, what has gotten into you?”

If only he knew.

I switch to training roundhouse kicks and arm blocks with Emilia. Furukama comes over to demonstrate how it is done, helping me position my arms so that the right one is turned and reaching toward my left hip, while the left one is bent toward my shoulder with the knuckles facing out. When Emilia’s leg comes up, I launch my knuckle toward her neck to block and then bring up my right fist in an overhead punch that glances off her cheek. Then I kick and she blocks. She’s more flexible, so her kicks go higher, but I’m laser focused, landing all my kicks and punches until she, too, bows out.

For the remainder of the training, Furukama demonstrates a new fighting technique, and we alternate partners. By the end of the session, my legs and arms groan. I don’t
know how I’ll lift them tomorrow. But even more concerning is how I’ll face Julian in our private training.

I have no doubt he’ll be turning on the charm. What scares me is that he’ll eventually wear me down. And if that happens, I can’t be alone with him. If I give in to Julian, I’ll kill my last shred of a chance with Neil, and maybe the last shred of my humanity too. I can’t risk it. I need someone to train with us.

The most likely candidate is Brady. First because he genuinely seems to enjoy my company, and second because he often spends nights guarding the brimstone jail, which strongly suggests he can’t be Morati.

I corner him as he’s leaving.

“Howdy, Twitchy.” He still hasn’t dropped his nickname for me. “Fixin’ to go back to the dorms?” Neither he nor the other recruits in my class are aware that I’m training with Julian on the side.

We step over the rubber duck—Furukama’s ridiculous rubber duck—as we exit, and head toward Eastern Avenue. Once we’re out of hearing range of our classmates, I stop him. “You’re ambitious.” He’s one of the best in our class, and he’s determined to get selected this rotation. “Why is the seraphim guard so important to you?”

“Cancer took over my life. I couldn’t escape the treatments, the hospital visits, the looks of pity.” Brady faces me, conviction lighting up his face. “But in Level Two I joined the fight against the Morati, and for the first time in forever, I felt strong. Seraphim guards are the toughest, and I don’t ever want to be weak again.”

I hug him. I can’t take away what he went through, but I can offer my support. “Do you want to improve your odds for Ascension Day?”

Brady runs a hand through his wavy hair. “How?”

“Julian. I train with him after class.”

“I reckon that’s why you were on fire today?” That was less about training with Julian than it was about me being part of Julian.

“We could train with him together.”

Brady answers with a loud whoop and then covers his mouth when he sees people staring at him. He whispers, “Let’s do it.”

We go to Julian’s new room in the administration building. When I enter with Brady, Julian scowls and says nothing.

“When you met Brady, it wasn’t under the best circumstances. But I trust him, and it would be good to have someone on my side. Are you willing to train Brady, too?”

Julian stares at me and then at Brady. He shrugs. “Sure, why not?” He rises slowly, holding his lower back like an invalid, and pushes his tray table to the side with his foot. “Sit,” he instructs. I materialize my trusty wooden chair and set it in front of Julian’s sofa. Brady sits next to Julian.

We explain to Julian what Furukama has taught us so far, including the mind stuns, mind blocks, and the physical drills. Julian proposes that we concentrate on two critical skills: sifting through memories to uncover ones more deeply hidden, and distress calls.

Both Brady and I have practiced memory extraction before, of course, so we start with distress calls.

“Felicia, you know how you always find me by searching for my brain waves?” Julian asks. “Distress calls start out the same way. Once you find their signature, you open up a channel to them, and then you can communicate telepathically. It’s how I kept in touch with the other rebels in Level Two.”

“I’ve never even tried something like that before,” Brady says.

“It’s not easy. The other person has to be open to it. Most people block access to themselves by default, as a privacy measure.” Julian stands, now more steady on his feet, and offers me his seat. “It’s better if you face each other to start.”

Brady and I arrange ourselves so that we’re sitting cross-legged on the sofa, with our knees loosely touching. Julian instructs us to examine each other carefully and then note three remarkable features of the other out loud.

By now I’m pretty familiar with Brady, but I’ve never stopped and openly stared at him before. He has brown wavy hair, wide-set amber eyes, a strong jaw lined with stubble, and a friendly face. His skin is the color of caramel, like he’s been in the sun a lot, and he has a mole right above his left eyebrow. He wears a black button-down shirt with pearl snaps, black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a bronco belt buckle. He doesn’t have his sword with him, since he wears it only when he’s on jail duty. “Silver belt buckle, beer-colored eyes, and pearl snaps,” I say.

“Nose twitch, elegant fingers, and too much eye makeup,” Brady says about me.

Julian snorts. “These are the things you’ll picture when seeking out the other. Hold them in your mind, get a good picture of the person, and then reach out. Once you find them, concentrate on opening a dialogue and send your message.”

Brady goes first. I close my eyes and focus on letting him in, but I don’t feel a thing.

After a few attempts Brady gives up. “I can’t find you, and you’re right in front of me.”

When I try, I can faintly make out the shape of him. I send out a signal and wait.

“It tickles,” Brady says. “In the back of my head.”

It’s something. Not enough, but with steady practice I might be able to call for him one day.