Where Futures End (11 page)

I shrugged. “It warms me up.” But that was a lie. I was already warm—in the tips of my fingers and everywhere else.

I realized the woman at the next table had been watching everything. She saw the hole in Cole's shirt too, I think, because she kept looking at his hand after she came over and he clamped it on his elbow again. I recognized her from the Microsoft-Verizon interviews and went numb with surprise. What was she doing in Woodbury?

First she said to Cole, “Doesn't it feel terrible to be misunderstood?” I thought,
Cole's not exactly some big question mark—he's just moody as hell
. But I kept my mouth shut and Cole couldn't figure out what to say, so the woman added, “And a guy can't help wanting what he wants.” It was like a line from a play, so we didn't say anything to that either. “I'm looking forward to the concert,” she said to both of us and smiled at the rip Cole was still hiding.

I realized a girl at the counter had been watching us. Even before glimpsing the red tag that circled her wrist, I knew she was from the Other Place. She'd been watching Cole too.

Three years earlier, I had stood on the back staircase looking into our kitchen, where a much older boy drank straight from the tap. He was a farmhand Grandpop had hired for the season.

A creak on the stair gave me away. He turned, drew the back of his arm across his mouth. His face was exactly as I had imagined. Olive-green eyes and fine eyebrows that might knit together in interest over whatever a fourteen-year-old girl might have to say. A streak of dirt bronzed his jaw.

That afternoon, Grandpop took me to look at the collection of junkers he kept in the north pasture and while we were out there alone said, “The people from the Other Place usually stick to the big cities.” I knew. Mostly, people spotted them sitting in cafes and parks, or driving down the street, ordinary as you please. They lived in houses and apartments and hotels, usually hosted by government officials but sometimes by volunteer families. “But the best way to know a people,” Grandpop continued, “is by studying their food.”

I understood what he was trying to tell me—the farmhand was from the Other Place.

I had already guessed it. I knew about vorpals, and that so many people from the Other Place had especially strong ones. They could make you do things they wanted you to do. But they never used that ability. They only ever watched us.

“Why doesn't he wear the tag?” I asked. I had seen some of his kind on TV before, always with a red tag around their wrist that recorded their location and whether they came into physical contact with anyone. I never thought I'd meet one in person, not in a small town in the middle of the country. I couldn't guess how Grandpop had gotten one to come here.

Grandpop reached into the nearest junker and popped open the glove compartment. Inside lay a red metal bracelet twisted out of shape. I gaped at it. “Maybe the government doesn't need to know that a person like him is interfering with a sly fox like me,” Grandpop said.

“No interference, only observation,” I said automatically.

Grandpop's eyebrows lifted at my conviction.

“I mean—they never do interfere with anything, do they?” I said. “It's a rule. It's why they have to wear the bracelets that tell the government what they're up to. They only watch us, they only want to learn.”

“Oh, I suspect they've got bigger hopes than that, Epony,” Grandpop said, gazing out over the blond heads of cornstalks, endless and identical.

I saw something in his faraway gaze, the way it lighted on the distant row of trees that marked the creek where he and everyone else had first learned to swim. I saw his throat move as he swallowed the emotion that tree line brought up: equal parts pain and possessive joy.

That was the first time I got a hint it would all be gone someday.

“You've got bigger hopes too, don't you, Pop?” I said. “You think the people from the Other Place can help us somehow?”

“They can. They have ways of making people see things differently, making people agree. They could help us fix this country.” He shut the glove compartment, hiding the red bracelet from sight. “We live how we want to—use up resources like they'll last forever. But there's a price for everything. We'll have to pay it, one way or another. Maybe they can help us agree on how.”

The farmhand used the name Hayden, which was really just my mother's maiden name. They never gave their real names—I guess because we'd have a hard time pronouncing
them. His accent was subtle enough to prove our language didn't give him too much trouble, although I wondered if his vorpal helped him understand what people meant even when he didn't understand their words.

He stayed in the spare room, where a shelf held paper copies of the Girl Queen stories that my little sisters had gotten before the movie adaptation came out. Afternoons, I'd sit on the sacred bed where Hayden slept and I'd pull down volumes to read. I pretended if I read them enough times I could find a way there. Hayden would go too. In the Other Place, there would be no worry about interfering. No government fines, no stares or whispers. He could interfere with me all he wanted.

Once at dinner I watched in awe as he shoveled down creamed corn. Was it only an illusion or could aliens really eat solid food?

The newsfeed blared from the wall monitor, coverage on the latest climate conference. Dad was ready for the usual argument over carbon taxes.

“We make good money from corn, shipping it around the world,” he said. “But who's going to buy it with a carbon tax attached?”

I waited for Grandpop's usual response. My little sisters were pressed into the back of their chairs like they wished they could escape through the wooden slats. Mom passed around the bowl of blackberries like a peace offering.

“There's enough demand for corn right here in the U.S.,” Grandpop said, so that he and Dad sounded just like the politicians who always popped on the nightly
newsfeeds. “We can't keep shipping it. How much farmland will be left in this country in twenty years when it's too hot to grow anything? Taxing carbon's the only way to restrict people from using corn to ruin our country.”

“No point in arguing with you on this one.” Dad pointed his fork at the newsfeed playing on the screen. “They'll never agree on anything—carbon taxes included.”

But to everyone's surprise, the newsfeed wasn't going to address carbon taxes at all. The feed cut to an image of the delegates at the climate conference.
“The World Meteorological Organization has confirmed that allowing the Other Place to funnel energy from our sun's solar activity would stabilize global temperatures . . .”

“What does it mean?” I asked Grandpop while everyone else sat in stunned silence.

“It means the people from the Other Place are going to help us cool down this planet after all,” Grandpop said, and turned to Hayden as if waiting for him to confirm it.

On-screen, the report continued.
“Scientists
say a small amount of energy has been passing from our universe to the Other Place for decades, but world leaders will now work to find a way to increase that flow.”

I listened in awe. My little sisters tried to explain it to each other: “They're going to fix everything!”

But I noticed concern creeping into Grandpop's eyes.

“It'll take years to reverse the damage that's already been done to the planet,” he said. “Decades, maybe.”

“But it means no carbon taxes,” I said. “That's better for the country, right? For everyone.”

Grandpop looked to Hayden, who met Grandpop's gaze with steely stoicism. “They seem to have the delegates at the conference convinced, anyway,” Grandpop said. I knew, then, what was really going on: The aliens had finally used their vorpals to make us all agree on how to fix our problems.

During the next week, we kept the newsfeed on at all hours. The Energy Transfer Deal, as they were calling it, made everyone happy—world leaders, senators in slick suits, hosts of talk shows. There was only the matter of finding a way to open the floodgates and let the Other Place swallow the heat we'd been baking in for too long.

And then the answer came: We'd have to cross over into the Other Place. The more of us who did, the more channels would open to let solar energy slide through.

But that seemed impossible. You had to have a strong vorpal to cross over, and that was all a matter of genetics.

“How will we manage it?” I asked Grandpop one day while we watched the newsfeeds together. “How will people cross over into the Other Place?”

“I don't know if we will.” He kept his eyes glued on the screen, but his gaze was unfocused. “Or if we should.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You think it might be bad for us to go there?”

“Everything has its price.”

And he was lost again in thought.

“What will it be like for us, if we cross into the Other Place?” I asked Hayden later, when I found him alone in the kitchen marveling over a loaf of walnut cranberry bread. “Will it be like it was for Dylan? Forests and rivers
and palaces?”

He shoved the loaf of bread back onto the cutting board like he'd been caught stealing. “You will find what he found.”

I leaned on the counter and tried to read what was in his gaze. He was always so cryptic. He almost never said anything about the place he'd come from. He just referred us to Dylan's stories, as though a child's understanding was all we needed. Maybe he thought he couldn't explain it any better.

“And if we don't want to go in the end, will you make us?” I asked.

“We will only do what you want us to do.”

“But you can change what we want, can't you?”

He looked away. “No—we can't change you. Only influence you.”

The dim twilight made him beautiful in a blown-glass way that my seventeen-year-old self now knows could never rival Cole's rugged charm. I leaned closer, glad he didn't have a tag and I didn't have a flexi-screen, that no record would show if I reached out and touched him. But he still seemed impossibly far away. I had seen the old video of Brixney and Michael—I knew I could as easy as not put my hand right through him. It wasn't fair for him to be so beautiful and not beautiful at the same time.

I nudged the bread back toward him. “Is there anything solid in your world?”

“Much of it is solid. We just interact with things a little differently than you do.” And as he was talking, I saw in his
mouth a single star, resting in the entry to his throat. But it was not a star. It was a tiny globe of light he had drawn in with his breath, and now he pushed it out so that it floated away like a bubble.

I touched his shoulder. “This isn't who you really are.”

“A person can be many things.”

The Microsoft-Verizon rep found us after the competition, while Cole was still holed up in the sound booth because he hadn't placed and wasn't going to get any scholarship. I was camped outside the door, silently willing him to get over it—silent because there was nothing to say. The rep had another line for us, which Cole had to hear through the sound booth door: “Those levees can go to hell. How'd you like to live in a premier township?” It was followed by the
click
of the door unlocking.

She was going to make me and Cole high-concept. Our families and ten others in the floodplain would move into the best township in the country and wouldn't pay a cent for anything. She talked about our energy, about this tension she sensed between us. But I knew it wasn't really about energy or tension—it was about the coffee shop and how girls were drawn to Cole like moths to a flame.

Cole kept smirking at me on the drive home and asking, “What do you think she has in mind?” like he wasn't sure yet he wanted to do it, even though his eyes gleamed with triumph. At first, I cared only that he was happy again, that he leaned close to talk to me, put his chin on my shoulder as though he did it every day. But then I thought about that
new band that refused to leave Disneyworld and showed up at random places in the park to play impromptu concerts. It was dumb because everyone knew Disney had to be in on it or else the band would have gotten kicked out forever ago. I hoped Microsoft-Verizon had better ideas than that for our concept.

It turned out they did.

The rep stood in my kitchen the next day and told our parents she was going to take advantage of the fact that I'd hardly ever been on camera and would be relatively easy to scrub from the web. “Teen love is about wanting what you can't have,” she said. “What you
shouldn't
have.”

My dad adopted Grandpop's rumbling drawl. “Just what are you proposing?”

“Cole's a small-town charmer—any girl would want him,” the rep said, and Cole pressed himself into the kitchen wall so that I half expected he'd leave a dent. “But the only girl he wants is the one he can't have. His cousin.”

“But I'm not his cousin,” I said stupidly.

She had a stage smile to match all those lines. Broad and disarming. “Which is why there's no reason for you to object, Epony.”

It took a moment to sink in, and then the air went heavy as lead. I would pretend to be Cole's cousin and he would pretend to be in love with me. It seemed more gross than sexy. But she was right about forbidden love—the girls I knew couldn't get enough of it. That's why they all had those Warehouse Burn pyromaniacs plastered on their arms and T-shirts.

My parents exchanged grimaces across the table. Cole's parents started sputtering about small-town stereotypes while Cole himself looked like he'd just swallowed the world's bitterest medicine.

In the next room, my sisters had the wall monitor set to CelebriFeed. The male lead in the latest Girl Queen movie—the tenth movie in the series—was taking a ribbing from the host, who kept insisting he must be from the Other Place. “How else can one boy be every girl's dream? You're some kind of illusion—you're on another plane of existence.”