No, not on one another. On a gun. It looks like it might be Jack’s, and both men have a death grip on it as they wrestle for control of it, battering one another around it as they struggle to force the other to let go.
Jack spots me then, and looks over. “Celes, stay back. Get away.”
It’s only a moment of distraction, but it’s enough. The man in the black clothing brings his head forward in a brutal strike, then twists the gun around. I hear the dull crack of a shot.
“Jack!”
Jack stumbles back, slumping against the car as he clutches his shoulder. Blood is already starting to come from the wound, spreading out around it in a darker stain on his suit. The man who now holds the gun raises it for a second shot.
It feels like the moment when Grayson was in trouble, back at the school. It’s like I know exactly what I need to do. I reach out, take hold of the gun, and twist it back towards the man. It hardly feels like I’m doing anything, but the gun turns easily, and a second later, I’m holding it. I guess the sensible thing would be to use it, but I don’t. I throw it, as hard and as far as I can, so that it sails out over the nearest field and lands somewhere in that golden spread of wheat.
The man turns to me then, and I should be afraid. I know I should. Just from the short section I saw of the fight with Jack, I know that this man knows far more than I do about hurting people. He’s bigger than me, almost certainly stronger than me, and he clearly has no compunction when it comes to hurting people. Yet I’m not as scared as I should be. At that moment, in fact, I’m not scared at all. I’m just angry.
If either of us looks scared, it’s the man in the black clothes. It’s like he can see something about me that I can’t, and what he can see terrifies him. He moves forward anyway, swinging a hasty punch at me. I bat it aside easily. My hand snakes out in the moment afterward, fastening around the man’s throat. For a second, he looks absolutely frantic, but then it’s too late.
Heat pours up through my hand, and light flares from it, pure and white. It’s so bright that it ought to be blinding, yet I find that I can look straight through it with no problems. I almost wish I couldn’t. The man’s features are a mask of agony as the light burns through him. He doesn’t scream, but I can see that he wants to, as this flame flashes its way down his body as quick as a forest fire so that it seems he’s burning from the inside out.
The whole process takes maybe a couple of seconds, but in that time I’m able to see every detail of it. Not that I want to. This is the kind of thing that I know will haunt me. The kind of thing that will show up in my dreams even after I’ve thought I’ve forgotten it. Yet even as I think that, I also find a small part of me thinking that it’s a good thing. That the man in front of me deserves it if anyone does.
And then it’s done. The light is finished, leaving me holding nothing more than a blackened husk that used to be a man. A few flakes drop from it in the breeze as I let go. I turn away. Grayson is a little way away, fighting with another man just like the first. I’m not sure where he’s come from, but I don’t have time to think about it anyway. For all that Grayson is fit and strong, he doesn’t have any special training when it comes to fighting, and he’s getting hurt. Even as I watch, the man he’s fighting hits him hard with a series of punches. I can’t allow that. I
won’t
allow that.
I walk over, and they stop. They just stop, and turn, and stare at me. I can’t work out what they’re staring at for a moment, until I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the windshield of the sedan. My eyes… they’re glowing. Glowing like miniature suns, with that same eerie white light that consumed a man just seconds ago. I guess I should be frightened by that, but again, I’m not. It’s like one of those moments you get in dreams, when you know exactly what is going to happen next, without ever knowing how you know it. Only I’m not in a dream, and what I’m about to do ought to terrify me.
It certainly seems to terrify Grayson as I walk forward. He steps back, out of my path, looking as though he simply doesn’t know me. He must know that I would never hurt him, yet he still steps back. The man he was fighting, meanwhile, seems rooted to the spot. He obviously wants to turn and run, but it’s like he’s simply too scared. Even when I reach out to grab his throat, he doesn’t fight.
Not that it would have done him much good if he had, I think, and I can’t help noticing the small twinge of satisfaction that comes with that. I wrap my fingers around his neck, and the light flares out from me to engulf him, consuming him as fully as it consumed his partner. He dies without a sound.
And then I blink, look round, and realize that I’m holding the charred remains of a human being. I drop them with a shudder. Grayson’s looking at me like he can’t believe what has just happened, and like he isn’t sure whether to talk to me or run from me.
“What…?” I begin, but then I look at Jack, and what I see there worries me almost more than anything else. Jack looks proud.
TWELVE
I
just stare at Jack for several seconds, trying to work out what to think. Trying to work out what I should say. He looks so impressed at what I’ve done, and the idea that anyone could be impressed by my burning two men from the inside out is just so horrific that for a moment, there just doesn’t seem to be any way of talking about it. There’s one point though that seems obvious.
“You knew,” I say. “You knew that this would happen, Jack.”
Jack doesn’t reply. With anyone else, I might think that’s due to shock from the bullet wound in his shoulder, yet I know that isn’t it. Jack isn’t talking because he doesn’t want to give me answers. He’s keeping secrets from me.
“Is this why people are chasing me?” I demand, moving closer to where he sits against the front wheel of the car. “Is it because they know what I can do? Is it because they know I can do this to people? Answer me, Jack!”
Jack shakes his head. “You should be proud of what you’re becoming, Celes, not afraid.”
I turned around on him. “I didn’t say that I was afraid.”
“You are though, aren’t you? I know you, Celes. You’re afraid of what you might do to people.”
I look at the charred remains of the men I’ve just killed. They were hurting people I care about, but they didn’t deserve that. No one deserves that. “Wouldn’t you be afraid?”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Jack insists, forcing himself to his feet. “You’re still you. You have a certain amount of power, but that’s all. The way you choose to use it is entirely up to you, Celes.”
I wish I could believe that. I wish I could believe that this was as straightforward as that, and that I was in complete control. Yet I can remember all too clearly what it felt like in the moments when I killed those men. It felt good. It felt right. How could it feel right to burn somebody alive? That wasn’t me. At least, it wasn’t any part of me that I recognized.
“I’m not sure it
was
me, Jack.”
“Celes,” he begins, “you have to trust me.”
“Why?” I demand, moving away from him. Moving towards Grayson. “Why should I trust you, Jack? Do you know what I’m becoming? If you did, then that means you knew this was a possibility and you didn’t warn me. If you didn’t, then it means that you don’t know enough to tell me that I don’t need to worry. So which is it, Jack? How much did you know?”
“We knew about you being able to move faster than most people,” Jack said. “We’ve observed that before.”
“What?” that’s enough to shock me into looking at Jack again. I haven’t run like that before. I’m sure of it. “When?”
“Shortly before you had to Fade,” Jack says.
“That’s a lie,” Grayson says. “I’m the one who has been running with her. I would have known if Celes could run that fast. I would have
known
.”
“This wasn’t on the track, boy.” There’s only a few years between them, so that’s calculated to insult. I decide to step in.
“When?” I demand. “When have I ever run as fast as this before?”
“You had just argued with Grayson,” Jack says. “About Georgetown. Do you remember?”
I do remember, then. It’s like the memory is waiting just under the surface, looking for an excuse to come up. Grayson and I had both wanted the same scholarship, and for the most part, the rivalry was friendly. But once, just once, it spilled over into an argument. Grayson told me how selfish I was being, going for it when he was the better athlete. I told him he was being an idiot, and that some of us needed the scholarship more than others.
We made up the day after, telling each other how much we cared, and how stupid we were to argue like that. We promised not to fight over the scholarship anymore, and we even tried to help one another do better. Yet until now, my memory of that argument has glossed over what happened straight after it.
I remember it now. I remember going out to the track, with nobody around. I remember thinking that I would show Grayson. That I would run faster than he ever had. And I remember running. I remember running normally at first, but then it was like something else took over. Something that made it easy to go faster, and faster. Something that made it simple to smash Grayson’s time, along with any record I wanted to. With the memory so fresh now, it’s easy to compare it to the way I felt when I was trying to get to Jack, and I realize that the feelings are identical. Jack’s right. I have run like that before.
“How…” I half shut my eyes. “How did I just forget something like that? You didn’t… do something to me, did you?”
Jack shakes his head. “You know that doesn’t work on you, Celes. Things would be a lot simpler if it did.”
I nod. Jack’s right. Things
would
be simpler if the Underground could have adjusted my memory. I wouldn’t have come after Grayson, and then this whole situation would never have happened. I wouldn’t have to ask questions about being able to do the impossible, because I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have been here, putting myself in danger, putting Grayson in danger.
Putting Jack in danger. He isn’t complaining about the wound to his shoulder, but it has to be hurting him. After all, you don’t just ignore getting shot, do you? And Jack wouldn’t have been shot if he hadn’t had to come after me to try to save me. The Others wouldn’t have found me, so Jack wouldn’t have needed to fight them at all. I wouldn’t have needed to fight them, or to do what I did to them in the end.
“How do you know about some argument Celes and I had back before you met her?” Grayson asks, distracting me from my thoughts for a moment with his hostility towards Jack. I decide that I should be the one to explain, because I guess that if Jack is the one to give the answers, it will only make things worse between them.
“The organization Jack works for was watching me for a while before I Faded,” I say.
“A while?”
I swallow, suddenly not wanting to hold this part back from Grayson. “My whole life. They’ve been watching me my whole life.”
“You know why, Celes,” Jack says. “The Underground had to investigate the signals it was getting, though what Sebastian Cook is going to make of today’s events, I don’t know.”
I haven’t thought up to then about what the rest of the Underground might think. Until then, I’ve been mostly worried by Jack and Grayson’s reactions. It hits me that what I’ve done here today will almost certainly have consequences. Jack might even be replaced as the one looking after me for this.
“Will my running off really cause trouble for you?” I ask him, and I catch Grayson looking at me as I say it. He seems confused, as though he can’t work out why I might care what happens to Jack.
Jack gives a kind of one shouldered shrug, meanwhile. It’s obviously the best he can manage with his injured arm. “It might, but I guess he’ll probably think that was unavoidable. A consequence of the situation. The part he’ll be interested in is the new ability you’ve demonstrated today.”