Authors: Elle Hill
Quina raised her eyebrows. “But they know you—or at least all they think they need to know.”
“Man, this is . . .” Reed’s voice trailed off. He turned his back to them both and stared at the brightly lit room that spread below them.
“It’s a lot, I know,” Quina sympathized. She placed her hand on his shoulder blade, making his back twitch. “But think about staying with us for a while and learning more about who you are, who
we
are. Meanwhile, you can consider this a resting spot while you consider your future.”
Reed heard what she so carefully avoided saying:
We know you’re jobless, homeless, alone in the world. You’re also Public Enemy Number One for these superhuman, super-psychotic Clan freaks. We’re the solution to the problems you know you have and a bunch you didn’t even know existed.
He didn’t know them. He sure as hell didn’t trust him. But how many options did a penniless, Southern Californian victim of the Great Recession have? And besides, Quina had been smart enough to frame this as a temporary situation, a trial period for him.
“I refuse to take any handouts,” he said without looking at them. “If you have work to do around the house, I’ll do it.”
Berto laughed, a joyful and excited sound. It was suspiciously hearty. Reed turned toward him but found Quina standing directly behind him, her hand still on his back.
“We’ll discuss that later,” she said. “For now, do as I asked before and look down at the floor. Tell me what you see.”
Reed turned back. “Someone just waxed the floor.”
Quina sighed. “Look right below you, where the wall meets the floor.”
Reed leaned forward, upper body wrapping around the waist-high railing. He was about to tell Quina he spied with his little eye a lovely ninety-degree angle when she gave a superhuman push and he tumbled over the railing and toward the ground below.
Her body spread throughout space, stretching outward as far as the mind could fathom. Round and lush, the curves of her torso exploded, sky-like, against the heavens. Her long, curly brown hair swirled in storm clouds around her head. The whites of her eyes gleamed like suns.
Below her, the world spun in answer to her breaths. Patchworks of green and brown earth speckled the distant landscape. Mountains lay pinched together. Gigantic, majestic, and distant, she could distinguish no sign of humanity. Silence and peace stroked her ears, spinning through their enormous dips and whorls. She sighed in relief, the sound rumbling like thunder throughout the skies.
I’m safe
, she thought. Who, or what, could possibly hurt her up here? She wasn’t as big as the sky; she
was
the sky. One laugh, and the ground would tremble and crumple like tissue paper. One tear, and rivers would flood.
She closed her eyes and floated, dreaming of peace and safety.
“Goddess of the sword, keep us safe.”
Her eyes fluttered open. She turned her massive head, sending her hair tumbling and hissing around her shoulders. No one near. She was alone, blissfully safe.
A distant scream pierced the massive expanse of her skin, a mosquito bite of sound and touch. She started, and the heavens trembled angrily.
“Help us, goddess!” The voice—feminine, she thought, and young—cried this time. Her massive brown eyes stared downward, looking for the distressed human.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, and the ripples from her behemoth voice puffed up giant clouds of dust below. She stirred, anxious to find the humans who called out; the ground rumbled below before cracking like over-boiled eggs.
“Why do you punish us?” the voice shrieked.
“I want to help you,” she tried to say, but stopped after the breath propelling the first word blew crops into ruin.
More voices joined the first, weeping, screeching, appealing, threatening. The woman remained silent, trembling with the need to rescue these people who raged and blasphemed in the face of her power. She tried whispering to them, and the screams increased. Babies howled.
“What did we do to earn your wrath, goddess?” the first voice, thick with tears and disillusionment, whispered.
But I love you
, she thought.
I love each and every one of you
. She held herself as still as death as she floated impotently above their devastated heads.
The too-bright world twisted before Reed’s eyes as his legs flew over his head. A loud, grating sound —maybe his own shout, maybe someone else’s—slammed through his head. He felt his body arching through space and struggled to right himself. Instead, a sharp yank on his wrist abruptly halted his body’s movement.
Jolted, Reed looked upward—and into Quina’s smiling face. With one hand around his wrist, she held him suspended several inches from the safety of the railing.
“Pull me up,” he snarled. In his overexposed view of the world, her bright green outfit flared like a malicious witch’s flame. Her dull gray eyes, two tiny mirrors, gleamed with amusement.
“Lesson Number One,” she said matter-of-factly. “You have talents even you don’t know.”
“Fucking profound,” he snapped. “Now either pull me up or let me go.”
“Broschi have a skill not even the Clan has mastered. Look to your right.”
Hanging twenty feet above a hard—and freshly waxed!—floor, Reed bared his teeth but snapped his head to the right. Directly to his right, and not teen feet from him, Alberto’s face beamed a mischievous grin. Reed jerked in surprise, and his body swung ominously from Quina’s manacled grip. No one held Berto’s wrist, no rope suspended him from the railing. Somehow, he adhered to the vertical face of the wall.
Watching him carefully, Berto lifted a hand from the wall and waved his fingers.
Alberto clung like a goddamn bug to the wall.
“You can do it, too!” Berto called cheerfully. “Keep your feet bare, and you’ll be able to climb walls. Just like Spiderman, bro!”
“Try it,” Quina ordered. Reed shot her a tight-jawed glare. “Try it or I’ll let you fall.” She leaned over, lowering him, and brought him closer to the wall.
As much as Reed hated her in that moment, he disliked the idea of falling even more. When he came close to the wall, he placed his free hand and both bare feet against it. It didn’t feel any different; he hadn’t suddenly sprouted microciliae or developed sticky soles.
“Concentrate on connecting to the wall,” Quina lectured. He concentrated instead on clever methods of assassination. “Imagine yourself as a feather that landed on the wall’s surface. So easy to hang on when you’re so light. Your hands and feet—”
“Nothing’s happening,” he grated. “Pull me up.”
“On the count of three, I’m letting go of your wrist,” Quina said. “Either learn to hold on or else fall.”
Reed ground his teeth and cursed. Undaunted, Quina said, “One.” Reed started thinking feathery thoughts. Light, he was light, like a feathery Spiderman . . . wait . . . “Two.” Light as a feather, stiff as a fucking board. He was a feather, a goddamn hollow-quilled writing implement. “Three.”
Quina let go. Reed dropped a few inches. And then he didn’t. His newly freed hand flew to the wall, and tried to dig into the plaster for purchase. But he didn’t need it. He was stuck on the wall like some kind of six-foot-four, 270-pound spider.
“What the hell?” he muttered. And suddenly, he slid downward a few more inches. His fingers scrabbled on the wall, and he slid down a few more. “A feather, a feather,” he murmured. He tried to envision a hawk soaring through the skies but found himself imagining a baby bird falling out of a nest.
Nice
.
A hand slid free of the wall. “Hey!” he shouted. His feet slid down a few more inches. He rocked his head forward in an attempt to regain some balance and cracked his skull against its cool length.
Finally, he fell.
“Everyone falls their first time,” Maricruz sympathized a half-hour later as the trio walked or limped into the living room. Scowling, Alberto dropped into one of the oversized chairs.
“Everyone is four years old and falls three feet,” Berto muttered, flashing Reed a venomous look and rubbing his swollen jaw.
Reed stood in the middle of the room, teeth clenched and face flushed. “You mean you do this to all your kids?”
“Of course,” Quina said. “The fastest way to learn is through necessity. You did well, Reed.”
“So this wasn’t some kind of hazing ritual, like ‘Welcome to the club’?” Reed growled. “You actually let your kids fall to the ground to teach them how to walk on walls?”
“Bro, if we wanted to haze you, you wouldn’t have any doubt you were being hazed,” Berto snapped.
Quina silenced him with a sharp look. “Our children learn quickly thanks to these methods. And they don’t get hurt. We have a higher—”
“Higher pain tolerance, better healing, all flavors of superhuman mojo rolled into each flesh wrap. Yeah, I got it,” Reed said. He rubbed his left wrist, which he was pretty sure he’d fractured in the fall. Luckily, he’d had full use of his other fist.
“You understand, Reed, we did this not only to show you what you’re capable of but to make perfectly certain you’re Broschi.” He could hear in Quina’s cool voice how much his impertinence had stretched her patience. Not used to having people question her, this one.
“Another test,” he said flatly. “I thought we established I’m some kind of mutant yesterday. You said you could sense it.”
“We proved it to ourselves. We needed something more to convince our regional ‘Arch.” She pronounced the word “arc”; Reed considered asking what an upward curve needed convincing but decided not to bother right now.
He looked around the spacious room, meeting everyone’s eyes.
“You’ve proven yourself to us.” Maricruz’s voice reminded him of wind brushing through aspen leaves. “We welcome you, Reed Jayvyn.”
That sounded uncomfortably formal. “You haven’t asked if I accept your welcome,” he reminded her and everyone else in the room.
Maricruz nodded and tried to squelch her smile. “Will you stay here with us?” she asked politely.
“How can I pay my way?”
“We have a lot of grounds. We could do with a landscaper and groundskeeper,” Quina responded.
His lips twisted upward. “You already checked me out, huh?”
“Of course.”
He looked at Alberto, still sullen; Quina, sternly shuttered; and Maricruz, reclining in her oversized chair, smiling with her usual, lush warmth. Finally, he shrugged. “For now.”
Reed spent a good portion of the day outside, familiarizing himself with the greeneries surrounding the house and the shed used to contain the tools necessary to maintain them. He wasn’t a social person; he felt more comfortable, less constrained, working with nonverbal living beings. He walked the house’s perimeter, taking stock of his arboreal neighbors, mentally plotting a new herb garden. The entire place needed pruning, watering, and just plain ol’ attention and appreciation.
Mina kept him company, dancing around his feet and running around the yard, all the while grinning her Pit Bull grin. She really would be the worst guard dog, he thought while scratching the short, shiny fur on the top of her head.
Meanwhile, his thoughts spun dizzily through his head. He had a lot to consider, to digest and reconcile. By the time Maricruz announced dinner, he had dozens of questions. Sitting down to a sumptuous, southwestern-themed dinner, staring at his four new housemates, he voiced the most important ones.
“So what kind of life do you all live?”
“A good one,” Mari said, smiling. He noticed she had the tiniest of dimples in her right cheek.
“Good lives don’t pay the bills,” he pointed out. “Do you work, or does some Broschi trust fund pay for everything?”
“Both, actually,” Paul, the perpetually smiling White guy, boomed. “Quina and me have jobs and the kids here will once they complete their schooling.”
“He means college and our fighting training,” Alberto muttered, tucking into his spiced rice. He seemed to be feeling slightly more charitable toward Reed. “Mari is a Bio-Chem major at LAU, and I’m going to San Gabriel Community College till I have good enough grades to transfer.”
It was all so—normal.
“What do these . . . Clan people do to pay the bills?” he asked.
“Who cares?” Alberto snorted.
“They tend to live in larger communities and have more group resources,” Quina said. She took a delicate sip of her lemonade. “Sometimes they’re home-schooled, sometimes they attend public schooling. Many have jobs, pay taxes. Just like us. It’s hard to tell by looking at someone that they’re Clan and would kill us without thinking twice.”
“So, what? I go to the store for gardening supplies and have to worry about the clerk stabbing me with pruning shears?”
Maricruz smiled at him once again. “Let’s hope not. For the most part, they tend to keep a low profile, same as us. I’d keep an eye out while you’re walking down a deserted street at night to shop for gardening supplies.” Her teeth were white as she bit down on the fork.
“I don’t suppose you have a brochure or owner’s manual with all the info I’ll need,” he said dryly.
Paul laughed. “Patience, boy.” At the “boy,” Reed leveled a straight-edged look at the older man. Paul smiled and winked at him. “We’ll teach you what you need to know. Training begins tomorrow.”
“Actually, it began today with one of our most basic lessons,” Quina said.
“Don’t feel bad, Reed. Everyone falls,” Paul said automatically and stabbed his fork through a mound of cheese.
Reed sat back in his chair. He shelved his remaining questions and let the waves of conversation flow around him.
The marble felt cool under feet as she scuffed forward. Some kind of loose, white shift slapped her ankles. She had an impression of tall, white walls, but the edges of her vision remained blurred. Before her stretched an expanse of gray-veined white marble that melted into shadow in the periphery of her vision.
“Kitty, kitty, kitty,” she murmured, and then wondered what the stars that was about. She quickly closed her mouth.