Kinetics: In Search of Willow (4 page)

Willow scrambled up and pulled me to
my feet.

The fire was gone and the school
looked like it did every other day. No fire or slime monsters
trawling every surface. The blue sky wasn't tainted with smoke, but
instead lazy white clouds passed overhead.

"Where'd it go?" I asked,
shocked.

"You can only see it from inside her
sphere."

Willow turned to look back at the
school.

"Um…Sphere?"

“
It’s the area she can
influence.”

I had more questions than answers, and
my whole perception of Willow was beginning to change.

She clutched at her hair, loosening it
from the braid that had come partially undone.

"I know this is all confusing, but I
promise I'll explain later. Come on." She took my hand and led me
quickly across the lawn.

"Who is she?" I asked, breathless, as
we ran.

"Her name is Laura," she replied. We
stopped on the side of the school where the gym was. "She's a
sophomore, just transferred in from a school in
Indianapolis."

“
How is she doing
this?”

“
Somehow she’s taking
people’s fears and nightmares and turning them into
hallucinations.”

"What do we do now?" I expected her to
say we should go for help, but I should have known
better.

Willow clung tighter to my
hand.

"We have to find the
source."

"The source?"

"Yes." She pulled and we plunged back
into what Willow called the sphere.

Fire surrounded us again, but it was
now even higher and louder. From somewhere above us, ash began to
fall and coat the ground in a fine, gray blanket.

"Laura made a decoy. That's what I was
facing in the hallway. She's actually somewhere else."

"I really don't get how you know all
this," I said as Willow let go of my hand to open the back door of
the gym.

My teammates inside had succumbed to
Laura's illusions and were screaming and shouting.

"Eugene, the second you feel her
trying to make you see illusions, tell me," she said.

We skirted around the edge of the gym
to get to the door. As we stepped out into the hallway, which now
stood eerily empty, she reached her hand out again and smiled at
me. I took it and nodded.

We ran hand-in-hand through the
school. Willow seemed to know where she was going, so I let her
lead me through each hallway. I didn't know what was going on or
why this was happening.

Willow was so focused on finding the
real version of Laura that I was sure any questions I had would go
unanswered.

We turned a corner, still running, and
collided with someone.

We fell to the floor, but I scrambled
to my feet and stared at the person we had run into.

"Harry." Willow smiled and got to her
feet.

Harry, the nerdy football player stood
in front of us.

CHAPTER 3

"I believe that we are at
a precipice. A middle ground of sorts. We are confronted with a
great leap into darkness from the relative safety of light and
familiarity. The question is: Are we truly ready to take the leap
that on one hand could lead us into a time of prosperity and
increased safety but on the other hand could herald the beginning
of our certain end?"

 
~ Former Chief Minister of the Anyan's Alliance Thomas
Reddinger in a speech to the Council of Six.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

She nodded.

I picked myself up and eyed
Harry.

"Have you seen Laura anywhere?" she
asked him, but he just shook his head.

"Not yet. I was coming to find you to
make sure you were safe."

Willow flicked some stray hair out of
her face.

"Thanks, Harry. But I can keep myself
out of trouble."

"Obviously." Harry quirked an eyebrow
and glanced behind us.

I glanced back and there
were about a dozen people with glazed-over eyes and dull
expressions on their faces walking toward us.

"They're sleepwalking," Willow said.
"We should go."

"I think she's in the
eighth-grade-English classroom," Harry said.

"How do you know that?" I asked
fueling every syllable with mistrust.

Why wasn't he affected by
the illusions?

"All the people under her influence
are collecting in the area," said Harry. "It's like there's
something drawing them there."

Willow turned on a heel and sprinted
down the hall. She didn't get far.

The double-doors in front of us
slammed open, and people writhing in pain and shouting incoherently
tumbled through.

They saw us and ran toward
us.

"Your fault! Your fault!" they shouted
as they ran.

The sleepwalking people collecting
behind us began shouting in unison with the people in front of
us.

Laura's nightmare monsters began
oozing out of the cracks again, joining the sleepwalkers in
tightening the circle around us.

A loud crash sounded behind us, and a
boy in a blue hoodie jumped through a broken window. Water pooled
at his feet, and then in a move that would resonate with me the
rest of the day, he lifted his arms in an arc and the water slammed
upwards and over the sleepwalkers.

The rushing water pushed them away
from us, but the water parted around us, not getting a drop of it
on Willow, Harry or myself.

The kid, hoodie pulled tight around
his head, didn't give us a second glance before jumping back
through the window, taking the majority of the sleepwalkers with
him.

The slime monsters were unaffected by
the water, though, and continued to close in.

"Who was that?" I asked.

"Not sure. But I'm not looking a gift
horse in the mouth," Willow replied, pushing forward.

The slime monsters didn't move out of
her way, but reacted like oil to water as she passed through
them.

I glanced at Harry, who merely
shrugged and followed after her.

"C'mon, Eugene. They can't hurt you,
they're just illusions," she said.

"So you keep saying," I muttered
before running through the clutch of nightmare monsters.

I looked over my shoulder and saw the
monsters re-form to continue following us. I tried to ignore the
fact that they were beginning to light up like candles around
me.

"Eugene!" Willow was now down the
hall. I jumped, not realizing that they had gotten so far ahead of
me already. I turned on a heel and ran after them.

But I was too late. They were gone.
The hallway stretched out in front of me, empty and dark. Behind me
the nightmare monsters came closer with their heatless flame. I
shuddered to look at them.

"Willow!" I shouted down the hall, but
Willow and the nerdy football player were gone. I was
alone.

Alone.

Alone with monsters on
fire.

I ran down the hall, repeatedly
screaming Willow's name.

They can't have gotten
far. They wouldn't leave me, would they?

The hallway seemed to stretch on and
on. Finally I burst through a set of double-doors only to see a
strange vision of myself bursting through another set of doors in
front of me and disappearing.

"What's happening?" I asked out loud.
My voice was small and muffled.

I ran through the double-doors again,
and again I saw myself burst through and disappear.

I gasped, suddenly realizing I had
been holding my breath. This was impossible. I tried again, but
with the same results. I was stuck.

"No, no, no," I whispered. I opened
the door behind me and went through and watched myself do the same
on the other side. I was in some kind of loop.

The monsters oozed through the cracks
in the door and began filling the small space. I stepped into the
center of the hallway, where I was furthest from the walls. But at
my feet, fire was growing. I sucked in a breath.

The fire was eating through my shoes.
It spread up my legs and over my stomach. It was taking over my
whole body. The monsters now fully on fire leapt from the walls and
joined the fire already taking over on my body. It was turning me
into fire itself.

I screamed as it reached my
face.

It's an
illusion…
 An echo of something Willow
had said resonated through my mind.

Oh…

Oh.

Oh!

It's not real, it's an
illusion!

I was losing myself. What had happened
to the teachers and students had begun to happen to me. I was
losing my grasp on reality. I looked around at the monsters
circling me and at my limbs on fire. How do you escape an
illusion?

I closed my eyes tightly.

"It's not real. It's not
real. It's not real." I made it a mantra and walked toward the
double-doors. I opened my eyes and pushed through, half expecting
to come out on the other side seeing another illusion of myself.
But instead I was in a
bedroom.

It was a room I could only remember
from pictures. My bedroom from when I was a baby.

I turned around to try opening the
door, but it was locked.

Everything was weird in this illusion.
I could see my hands moving before I moved them. It was like I was
seeing a ghost of myself moving before I did. And unlike before,
there was no sound. I couldn't even hear my own breath.

I turned back toward the room and
looked around.

It was nighttime in this illusion.
Through the window I could see a sliver of the moon between the
branches of a distant tree. A baby's crib sat in the middle of the
room, an orange glow emanating from inside.

I hesitated for only a moment before
walking over to the crib and looking inside. There was a baby
sitting in the middle of the crib, its blanket was pushed back and
little stuffed animals were scattered at its feet. The baby was me.
I was little more than a year old.

The baby me was on fire.

He looked at me and screamed a scream
that made no noise. He seemed frightened, but who wouldn't be if
they were on fire?

The door burst open and a young boy
ran in. I recognized this boy, too. He was my brother--a much, much
younger version of him, but unmistakably him. The illusion slowed
as my illusion-brother reached my crib. His mouth was shouting in
slow motion.

Then suddenly the world was spinning.
The illusion blurred, and we were back in the room I grew up in. It
was the same place but a different time. The decorations in the
room had changed and there was a small toddler bed in the corner.
And there I was, sitting on the floor playing with blocks, a couple
years older than the baby I had seen in the crib.

And then it happened again. Fire shot
from my small hand and set the blocks on fire. First the blocks,
then the floor, and soon the curtains and the walls themselves were
on fire.

The younger version of me was standing
in a ring of fire, crying and screaming. The illusion slowed again
as a woman, my mother, came through and grabbed me from the fire.
Her clothes and her hair caught the flame. I shut my eyes trying to
shut the illusion out, but there it was, under the darkness of my
eyelids, forcing me to watch my mother burn alive.

I screamed, trying to force the vision
from my mind. And then it was gone.

I could feel heat around me. I let my
eyes flicker open and saw flame again, but this time it was mere
embers on the fringes of papers, billboards and the walls around
me. It was dying out and I could feel the heat coming off it. I
looked around and saw that it had made a perfect charred circle
around me.