Pulse (16 page)
“Now what?” she asked, nervous but excited. She imagined feeling his lips on hers as he leaned over the table and kissed her, but instead she heard his voice.
“Now seriously, you have to keep your eyes closed for me no matter what I say. Can you do that?”
“I guess so,” Faith said.
“Think about the glass on the table, the one you were drinking out of. Remember it?”
“Yeah, I remember. It had water in it.”
“Okay, good—now imagine it, in your mind, doing something other than what it’s doing right now.”
“You mean, instead of just sitting there on the table? This is weird.”
“I know, I know—just do it for me, please. Keep your eyes shut, think of the glass. Think of it doing something besides sitting there.”
If Faith had opened her eyes, she would have watched the glass tip over on its own, spilling water across the white tablecloth. She heard the clank of the glass as it happened and, opening her eyes, started to get more worried. She had imagined the glass tipping over, and the fact that it was lying on its side, all the water poured out, could mean many things. Maybe Dylan had somehow read her mind and pushed the glass over in order to surprise her. Or possibly he did this trick with girls all the time and knew that most of the time people who closed their eyes and thought about what would happen to a glass of water thought of it tipping over. And there was another option, the one that scared Faith the most. Dylan could have given her a Wire Code that she couldn’t remember, and the entire evening was being filled with hallucinations she would eventually forget she’d ever experienced.
Faith thought of these many alternatives as she watched Dylan peel off his leather jacket and hang it on the back of his chair. His arms were powerful looking, with wisps of soft hair along their surfaces.
“Okay,” Dylan said. “Now put it back the way it was.”
“Pardon me?” Faith said. “You don’t have to close your eyes this time. Just think of the glass. Think about setting it back up again. Don’t worry about putting the water back in.”
Don’t put the water back in?
Faith thought.
Is he crazy or am I?
Faith pushed her chair away from the table but didn’t stand up.
“Did you know Wade gave me a Wire Code—no wait,
two
Wire Codes—without telling me?”
Dylan didn’t speak, only nodded. A silence ensued, then he spoke, just above a whisper. “Put the glass back where it was, Faith. I need to see you do it.”
“Either I’m crazy or you drugged me. Which is it?”
“Neither. No one’s crazy, and I don’t give people Wire Codes. And Wade Quinn is a huge jerk for about a million other reasons.” Dylan took a deep breath and tried one last time. “Please, just put the glass back where it was. You can do it.”
“Maybe it’s you that’s crazy,” Faith said. She stood up and turned in the direction of the ladder leading down to the fire escape.
“Faith, listen to me—”
“NO,” Faith yelled, thinking of the few sips of water she’d taken when it was still in the glass. “You put something in my drink, didn’t you? Were you going to take advantage of me? Is that it?”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re just like Wade Quinn, only worse. And your burgers suck.”
Faith was angry and confused as she looked at the glass where it lay on the table. Thinking of the glass, she swished her arm fast in front of her. The table was five feet away; but as she moved her arm, the glass flew with lightning speed, as if a blistering wind had picked it up. It flew ten feet through the air, then smashed violently onto the roof, shattering into a thousand pieces.
“We’re going to need to get that under control,” Dylan said. It wasn’t clear whether or not he was pleased or merely logging the event in his mind.
Faith was shaking her head, on the verge of tears as she backed up.
“Why are you doing this to me? Do you get some kind of sick pleasure out of it?”
“Faith, listen to me—it’s not what you think.”
“I bet it’s not.”
Faith turned on her heels, hoping she could escape whatever was happening to her before it was too late.
“You’re going to remember this tomorrow,” Faith heard Dylan say. She was almost to the retaining wall that wound its way around the roof of the building when Dylan appeared out of nowhere in front of her. He was standing on the ledge looking down at her. Had he appeared all at once, out of thin air, or had he somehow moved there before Faith could see him do it? It was dark enough that she couldn’t be sure.
“What’s it going to take to get you to stay with me?” Dylan asked.
Faith was so angry and scared that she wanted to scream. Dylan had slipped something into her water glass or who knew what he’d done. All she knew was that none of it could be real, and it would only get worse. She was so mad, all she could think about was shoving Dylan off the roof. And as she had this thought, Dylan reeled back, lost his balance, and fell out of view.
“Dylan!” Faith yelled. The nightmare was going deeper inside her, and for a flash of a second she saw bodies flying into lockers in the abandoned high school building—a flashback of a lost memory with Wade—and then it was gone. She was going crazy; that’s what it was. She felt this with more certainty when Dylan’s voice rose up from behind her.
“I don’t think you’re going to believe me, are you?” he said.
She wheeled around, putting her hands against the low wall around the roof.
“Please, Dylan. Just take me home. You’re
really
scaring me.”
Dylan looked visibly wounded, like he’d made a horrible mistake he wished he could take back.
“You’re special, Faith,” he said. “And important. More important than you know.”
“Stop lying to me!”
Faith climbed up onto the ledge and carefully stood up. There was a breeze that made her wobble, and Dylan reached his hand out toward her.
“If you jump, I’ll make sure you don’t land badly. You can count on it.”
She wasn’t thinking about leaping off a building; she’d only wanted to get as far away from Dylan as she could. She wanted to run away, but couldn’t. Looking back and forth as her hair tangled in the breeze, she began to cry. Glancing down, Faith realized she wasn’t standing over the ladder, which would have put her fall only ten feet away to the first landing on the fire escape. What she saw instead was a long drop into darkness. The wind kicked up without warning, and she leaned in toward it, losing her balance as she tried to correct.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Dylan said as he watched her arms flail, and she disappeared over the edge, screaming her head off. He closed his eyes and lowered his head, then he returned to the table and sat down. He could hear her screaming as she rose up in the air, far over his head. Faith flew across the expanse of the building some twenty feet up into the darkness, then she stopped directly over her chair and hung in the air.
“Let me know when you’re ready to come down,” Dylan said.
Faith kicked and screamed in the air, which made her flip and pitch in different directions. When she finally stopped, she was breathing heavily, a soft wind blowing through her blond hair. She looked like a ghost.
“I’m going to lower you slowly now. If you start kicking you might hurt yourself, so please, stay calm until you’re sitting again. You can still run away if you want to.”
Faith didn’t move a muscle or say a word. She was still afraid, but she was starting to feel Dylan’s calm confidence in the air all around her. She felt, in a strange way, as if he was holding her in the air, like he had his arms wrapped around her. “Dylan,” she said as she slowly lowered toward the chair she’d sat in.
“Yeah?”
Faith didn’t speak again until her feet were on the ground and she was sitting in the chair. She breathed a sigh of relief at not being dead, then looked directly into Dylan’s eyes.
“I believe you. Now tell me what the hell is going on.”
Dylan couldn’t help but smile at her. Faith’s hair was all over the place, and her shirt had twisted around just enough to look like she’d been sleeping in it all night. Faith reached across the table and took his hand. She wanted to be sure this wasn’t a dream or a nightmare she was trapped in; and feeling the soft skin of his palm, she felt a little bit more certain that it was all going to be okay.
“Promise not to freak out anymore?” Dylan asked.
“I do. Or I mean I’ll try. Let’s not have me flying around anymore. That’ll help.”
“Done,” Dylan said.
And then he told her some, but not nearly all, of what she needed to know.
Once Dylan had established the minimum-required trust, he told Faith the first of many secrets.
“You can move things with your mind. Not with any kind of precision or skill, but you can do it.”
Dylan let this information sink in while he tried to fashion a way in which to explain everything to her. He’d thought about this moment through long, endless nights standing outside her room in the cold, but somehow the words were harder to find than he’d expected. Behind the bedroom window she’d always looked so soft and warm, all limbs and wild hair, a sleeping beauty waiting to be woken up. But now she was awake and turning out to be more complicated then he’d imagined.
Faith stared at her fork, her brow narrowing and her full lips tightening as she concentrated.
“Make sure you know where you’re sending that thing before you think too much about it,” Dylan said, intuitively sensing what she was up to. “You don’t want to find that thing sticking out of your forehead. Or mine.”
Faith didn’t heed his warning, and the fork was gone from the table in a flash, over the side of the roof and off to places unknown.
“Headed for Wade’s ass,” she said.
Dylan laughed softly. “You’d have to run that errand the old-fashioned way. If you don’t know where he is, it’s not going to know where to go.”
“So where did the fork go?”
Dylan shrugged. “It’ll stop when it hits something, which could be another human being. Better call it back.”
Dylan made a slight motion with his hand, and a moment later the fork was on the table. The tongs were bent backward.
“Guess it hit something hard,” Dylan said. “Bummer.”
“I didn’t know you were so fond of forks.”
“You’re funny when you’re not screaming.”
Faith was starting to settle down. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair, trying to tame it as best she could, then gave up and put it in a loose ponytail that wouldn’t reveal her two small tattoos. She looked at the broken glass on the roof of the Nordstrom building.
“You do realize this is completely ridiculous,” Faith said.
Dylan nodded, gathered his thoughts, and tried to explain.
“Do you remember the lessons about the early stages of the States? You learn that stuff pretty young, like second grade.”
“And they keep teaching it,” Faith added. “Not that you’d know. It doesn’t seem like you’re really into taking classes on your Tablet.”
“I’m flattered you noticed. Humor me and tell me what you learned in school all these years.”
“What does any of that have to do with the fact that I just made a fork fly off the edge of a building
with my mind
?”
“So you don’t remember anything about history? I guess the rumors are false. I heard you were pretty smart.”
“Better watch it. I can put a fork in your eye without even moving my hand.”
“No, you can’t. But that’s not important at the moment. Tell me what they’ve been teaching you. Best to start with what you think you know.”
Faith was annoyed with Dylan’s confidence, but he knew a lot more than she did. She was smart enough to play along, at least for the moment.
“In 2025 the California coast slid into the ocean, killing three million people. That about where you want me to start?”
“It’s the right marker, yeah. Let’s take it from there.”
Faith leaned back in her chair and put her arms across her chest, looking at Dylan like he were a substitute teacher.
“You already know all this stuff. Why do I have to repeat it?”
Dylan was silent. He picked up his glass of water and took a drink, waiting patiently.
“Hotspur Chance,” Faith said, nodding to Dylan as if to say
Why would I go into detail about this guy? You know this already.
“What about him?” Dylan asked.
That was it for Faith. She decided to get it all out in one long explanation instead of waiting any longer for Dylan to let her off the hook.
“California slides into the ocean, setting off alarm bells all over the world about global warming. So they get the smartest people they can find from all over the place and stick them all in the same building for three years. No one talks to them; no one hears from them. They’re just working in isolation like they’re on the moon or something. When they come out, they’ve appointed a leader, Hotspur Chance, a scientist from Oklahoma, of all places. Guy isn’t autistic, but he’s got some personality issues, so he doesn’t talk much. What he does do is prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the world is totally screwed, and it’s going to happen way faster than anyone would have imagined. There are a lot of charts and computer simulations that ninety-five percent of the scientists worldwide agree with. The five percent who don’t are idiots, which apparently means that five times out of a hundred even dumb people can attain a degree in the sciences. Not long after Hotspur Chance shares the findings, New Orleans is gone and so are another million people. That pretty much shut the last five percent up.”
“Then what?” Dylan asked. He’d turned attentive instead of condescending. He was looking at her with those big, dark eyes, hanging on every word.
“Uh . . . ,” she stammered, looking down at the table and spinning her plate in little turns with her fingers. “Hotspur Chance and the rest of the group went back underground or whatever. They’d proved that global warming was going to destroy vast areas of the world in under a hundred years. That was the big news. A couple of coastlines were one thing; but according to Hotspur Chance’s report, it was going to get a lot worse, and fast. There would be no way to stop it entirely—the world was going to get tougher to live in no matter what—but there was a way, if we were fast enough, to stop the damage.”