Freakling (6 page)

Taemon exhaled. “Exactly.”

He slid in between the teacher and the lock. He couldn’t afford to have her scrutinize it any further.

With a gentle nudge of psi, she turned Taemon around to face the locker. “All right. Let’s see you unlock it.”

“The thing is . . .” He leaned forward and whispered, “I can do it better if I turn my back to the lock.”

He knew this was risky. It didn’t make sense to turn your back on the object you were manipulating with psi. But he felt sure he could do a better job diverting the teacher’s attention if he could face her, make eye contact with her.

“What is your name again? Tymon?”

“TAY-mon.”

“Well, Taemon, using psi means influencing an object’s spatial positioning. To do that, we must make mental contact with the object. And mental contact begins with visual contact.”

“Right. I know that’s how most people do it. I don’t know why, but it’s easier for me if I turn my back.”

“Try it my way first.” The teacher pressed her lips into a tight line.

“Okay.” Taemon faced the locker and pretended to concentrate. He stared at the lock for a few seconds. Predictably, nothing happened.

“Please,” said Taemon. “If I could just turn around.”

The teacher sniffed again. “Most unorthodox. No visual contact? People have to train years for that kind of psi.”

Taemon’s heart pounded. Unorthodox wasn’t good, but it was flaming better than the truth. He held his breath.

“Well, I suppose there’s nothing in the assignment that requires visual contact.” The teacher sighed. “Go ahead: give it a try.”

Taemon exhaled. He turned around so his back was to the locker. Now came the tricky part. He needed her to look away from the lock. He stretched one hand forward and curled his fingers as if holding an invisible ball. Holding that pose, he made his hand tremble slightly.

It seemed to work. The teacher looked confused. More important, she was staring at his shaking hand. With his other hand, Taemon reached behind his back.

He fixed a look of concentration on his face and cocked his head, just as he’d seen weak kids do many times. An experienced psi wielder never contorted his face at all. Any grimace, gesture, or grunt was the clumsy sign of a novice.

Taemon’s act seemed to be working. The teacher was observing his facial expressions, his hand movement. She wasn’t looking at the lock at all.

Staring straight ahead, Taemon kept up the trembling hand act. With his hidden hand, he turned his wrist until a small metal rod slipped out of his sleeve and into his hand. He forced the metal rod into the slot in the lock, just as he’d practiced.

Click!

In one smooth motion, he turned sideways and slipped the metal rod into his pocket — on the side hidden from the teacher. He relaxed. “There.”

“Indeed.” The teacher stepped forward and checked the lock. She looked up and glared at Taemon. “Well, young man, I’m not sure what to make of you. Do I put you in the advanced group because you didn’t need visual contact? Or in the beginner group because of the hand movement?”

Taemon smiled. He didn’t care which group he was in; he was just glad to be in.

Once the teacher turned and walked away, Taemon glanced around to be sure no one was looking, then quickly closed the lock again and headed toward his classroom.

In the hall, people stared at him and whispered.

“Did you see the way his hand trembled?”

“What a freakling.”

“Isn’t that Yens Houser’s brother?”

“How can a psiball champion have a weak freak for a brother?”

Taemon kept his head down and picked up his pace. He’d heard all that before. It didn’t bother him. Much.

“A psiless lock. Pure genius!”

He stopped cold, then turned around to see who had caught him cheating.

Taemon searched the faces in the hallway for the one who’d spoken. A boy with black hair that flopped partly over his eyes stepped forward. Taemon looked closely at those eyes. Was there menace there, or only morbid curiosity?

The boy stared back at Taemon. “I’m not sure if I want you around me. Now I can’t be the resident weak freak anymore.” He smiled wryly.

Weak freak. Taemon winced at the term, but that’s exactly what he needed people to think he was. Weaklings were teased, ridiculed, bullied, but they weren’t sent away. What better way to appear weak than to sling around with the weaklings?

“Cha. I’ve got you beat, all right. I’m Taemon. Birth sign’s Quake.”

“Moke,” said the boy. “Serpent.”

The sign of the serpent could mean deception, or it could mean protection. So this Moke was either hiding something or providing a safeguard. Taemon shifted his weight. Maybe making friends wasn’t such a good idea. He might get too comfortable around friends, too careless.

“You don’t know what to make of me.” Moke nodded. “That’s okay: you’re a Quake after all. Quakes are supposed to question. Here’s what you need to know before you decide: My parents run the crematorium. I study weasel droppings. I create sculptures from cat hair. And I stink at psiball.”

Taemon laughed. “I stink at psiball, too.”

“Excellent,” the boy said. “We can be partners. We’ll stink the pants off everybody.”

Two days later, Taemon was in Moke’s backyard, sitting on the edge of a half-sphere. At fifteen feet in diameter, the metal half-sphere glinted in the autumn afternoon sunlight like a giant silver bowl. Real psiball matches were played in a full sphere made of lead crystal, but those were expensive and running the crematorium didn’t exactly make Moke’s family rich. Families like Taemon’s and Moke’s could never afford a crystal psiball sphere, but a metal half-sphere at least gave them something to practice on.

The half-sphere had four holes evenly spaced around its equator. A full sphere had a hole at the very top as well. Four players, two teams of two, stood inside the sphere, where they used their psi to direct the ball into one of the holes. To score a point, a team had to get control of the ball, turn the edge of the hole the color of their team, and send the ball through the hole, all done with psi.

“So what’s your plan for stinking the pants off everybody?” Taemon asked.

“The way I figure it,” Moke said, “we have to turn our weakness into strength.”

Taemon rolled his eyes. “You sound like my da. ‘The way to deal with weakness is to get stronger.’”

“Did I say anything about getting stronger? I’m talking about using our weakness.”

Taemon frowned. “I don’t get it.”

Moke pushed off the edge of the half-sphere and landed at the bottom of the bowl. “Okay. Let’s pretend we don’t have any psi at all.”

Taemon stiffened. Sometimes Moke seemed to know that Taemon was powerless. Or maybe it was just the guilty feeling that made it seem like people knew.

“I know. It sounds stupid, right? I mean, how could you play psiball without any psi at all?” Moke said. “But just think about it. How
would
you play without psi?”

“Well, I guess you’d have to —”

Moke beckoned with a toss of his head. “Show me.”

Taemon jumped into the half-sphere beside Moke, the ball resting at the bottom. It was about the size of a person’s head and covered with black leather, heavy and soft enough that it didn’t roll or bounce on its own. Moke had painted his birth sign, Serpent, on the ball.

“You’d have to push it with your foot or something.”

Moke nodded. “Let’s see you try.”

With the side of his foot, Taemon kicked the ball up along the inside curve of the half-sphere. They took turns until both of them had found the right amount of force to send the ball through one of the holes.

“What about changing the hole’s color?” Taemon asked. “We can’t do that without psi.” Because the ball is moved with psi, the spectators and referees couldn’t tell who was controlling the ball. In order to score a point, the players had to use psi to turn the perimeter of the hole their team’s color.

“Yeah, we’ll have to use a little psi for the colors. No getting around that, I suppose.” Moke rubbed his chin. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Coloring the hole is the easy part.”

“Maybe for you,” Taemon said. “I’m color-blind.” It was another lie, of course. Add it to the list.

“Powerless and color-blind. You take weakling to a new level, my friend.” Moke kicked the ball into the east hole.

Taemon tried to laugh it off. “If you’re going to be a weakling, be the best. That’s my motto.”

Moke used a squinch of psi to clap Taemon on the shoulder. “We’re doing this for all the weaklings out there. We’re going to show them that weaklings can have fun and be clever, too.”

“I guess,” Taemon mumbled. He wondered how weak Moke really was or if he just enjoyed being different.

“Spoken like a true weakling,” said Moke. “Now let’s get back to work.”

“Absolutely not,” Da said. “I forbid it.”

Mam looked up from her embroidery. “Maybe we should hear him out.”

The bright yellow embroidery floss kept looping and pulling, looping and pulling, as a bird took shape on the red cloth.

The house was quiet in the dusky hours before sleep. Yens was out in Da’s workshop, practicing his music. Taemon had decided this was as good a time as any to bring up psiball. He’d closed the shutters tight so no one could overhear.

Da drew a sip of coffee from his mug on the table. Like a dark thread, it disappeared into his mouth. He nodded for Taemon to continue.

“I have a psiball partner. His name is Moke. We’ve been practicing and —”

Da shook his head. “You can’t play psiball without psi. Your partner will know you’re not using psi.”

“No. I mean, yes, he does, but . . . see, he doesn’t have much psi, either,” he said, glossing over the fact that he, himself, had
none.
“So we decided to try this really weird thing where we only use a little psi to color the holes. It’s pretty klonky, but it works. Sort of.”

“Psiball without psi?” Mam looked baffled. “What’s the point of that?”

“The point is to show that we can do it. That you don’t need psi to be good at something. Besides, nothing in the rules actually says you have to use psi. With no psi, the strategies are completely different. We’re counting on the element of surprise. Because the other team will have no idea what we’re doing.” Taemon shrugged. “And it’s fun.”

“Ridiculous,” Da said. “Safer to stay out of the psiball leagues altogether.” He drew another sip of coffee.

Mam stopped her embroidery. “We should think carefully about this. On one hand, playing psiball will help you seem normal.”

The unspoken statement was impossible to miss — he wasn’t normal. It pained him to hear his own mother say it, but he couldn’t argue. He would never be normal again.

Da shook his head. “But playing psiball without psi
isn’t
normal. It’ll cause a stir, draw attention. You’d do better to —”

A knock at the door ended the discussion.

“Who . . . ?” Mam’s embroidery dropped to the table. “Good Earth, did they hear anything?”

Da used psi to open the shutter just enough to look through the window. His face turned white. He looked at Mam with apology in his eyes as he opened the door.

A man stood on the porch.

Taemon knew exactly who he was.

Elder Naseph, the high priest.

“May I enter?” asked Elder Naseph. His tone made it clear there was only one way to answer that question.

Mam lifted a trembling hand toward her neck.

Da stepped aside silently, allowing the high priest to walk in, his chin lifted, eyes half closed, shoulders pulled back. He wore robes embroidered with intricate patterns and colors so bright Taemon had to squint to look at him. Woven into the fabric were hundreds of ornaments — beads, medallions, gems, pendants — tokens of religious status. Even his long beard jangled with trinkets.

Taemon thought of all the times Da had warned of a haughty countenance. Here, standing in their living room, was haughtiness personified.

Da turned to Taemon. “Excuse us please, son?”

Taemon left the room. The door closed behind him, likely by Mam. He hurried to the furnace room in the basement. With any luck, he’d be able to hear something through the air vents. He stood under the large duct, where he knew the voices from the living room would carry.