Kei

  “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”

  --J.R.R. Tolkien

  Sitting there in the twilight, I am calm, and the world feels still. Distant crickets and birdcalls echo in the trees, but all I notice is my breath flowing in and out, smooth and unceasing, a perfect circle of inhalation and exhalation. Time passes unseen and unmarked save for these endless breaths.

  My body begins to tingle with energy. Empty of self, something is coming to fill the void.

  The electric tingle grows imperceptibly stronger until my entire body is quietly vibrating with power.

  I continue the meditation, imagining each inhalation flowing up from my feet through my legs, waste and chest, stirring up and sweeping away all the noise and toxins in my system like dead, dry leaves. And visualizing each exhalation igniting them into showers of bright sparks and blowing them out of my body like the flames of a dragon.

  The same meditation I do every night.

  I wait, letting my spirit empty itself until I am a hollow reed, an unseen wind whistling through me like music.

  I close my eyes and listen, and memory comes unbidden.

  ***

  I am sitting in a tiny chair, but I’m tiny also.

  A man with a gentle smile comes into the room, towering over me. He’s Japanese, too, I think, and I remember him by the only name I know besides my own – Dad.

  “Good morning, Kei.” He sits down cross-legged on the white carpet, and I notice the big wooden box in his hands. “Since you’re five, now, I thought I’d give you a gift.” He opens the box, and I peer over the edge, curious, and, honestly, hoping for a puppy. “We missed these at the party, yesterday, but we could play with them now.”

  He dumps out the box onto the carpet, and a jumble of children’s blocks spill out. Dad looks at me expectantly.

  “Oh.” I don’t want to disappoint him, the only person I care about, but I’ve seen plenty of children’s blocks before, and these don’t seem special in their big, messy pile.

  His smile flashes as he pulls one block out and sets it between us. Then, with a deft motion, he brings the corner of another block to the side of it, almost touching, and lets go.

  The block snaps into place like magic, one corner clinging to the side, pointing straight down, but resting on nothing.

  The pair of blocks slowly topple, but still cling together as though each other is all they have in the world.

  Without missing a beat, Dad stacks three more together, and then five, all of them jutting out at unnatural angles, defying logic and another word I’ve learned this week – Gravity.

  I get off my chair and sit down on the carpet. Clearly, there’s something wrong with these blocks.

  We spend an hour stacking them in different ways. Dad knows a lot of ways to stack, and keeps doing weird patterns with his which make it all seem that much more impossible. An arch appears in front of us, and then a reverse arch like a big U on top of that, then another U crossing over the first, forming a single claw pointing at the ceiling. Then Dad sets a final block in the center where the two Us crossed, where it floats in midair. He taps it with his ring finger as he lets it go, and it slowly spins in front of us.

  I can tell something pulls different sides and corners together, or pushes them apart. After a while, I have my own madhouse built with a tower on one side, and a spinning block above it. We watch it slowly spin to a halt.

  I look up at Dad.

  “How?”

  He shrugs. “Lesson for another time. Besides, I have another box.”

  He pulls another wooden box out from his alcove, which seemed to quiver in anticipation.

  “Next question.” He flips open the lid. “Who wants a puppy?” He tips the box in front of me.

  An excited bundle of fur and licking tongue scrambles out and hops in my lap with a tiny bark.

  ***

  I pull my mind back from the memory, and it recedes. Remembering Dad’s still hard.

  I sit in darkness, and I breathe.

  Every glimpse I have is beautiful, and I ache at the loss. Slowly I dredge up the pain as he taught, withered leaves of sorrow breathing and blowing out as bright fires of free energy.

  After an hour sitting there, breathing away my cold emptiness, the forces churning inside me calm, and I feel safe to be around others.

  It isn’t healing, but it is a balance.

  I let my last breath go with a sigh.

  I tap my shades, and the dark forest flares into brilliant life around me, every leaf and branch touched with a digital nimbus. Words and numbers scroll if I stare at anything too long, but I don’t. I’m here for the nightvision, and nothing else.

  At least shop class is good for something. Or whatever they call prototyping with the school’s 3D printers.

  Whisps of energy cling like fog above the ground and slither through the trees like angry serpents. They seem to be moving past my position, converging on a distant point that for once isn’t me.

  In the shadow of the great oak, I watch and wait.

  As most them slide out of sight, I tap my shades again, and the trees around me fade into faint silhouettes, while the crawling lines of light burn brighter. Augmented reality’s an amazing toy. Kirlian auras are trickier, but Anton and Emily both know a few tricks and a few downloads.

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  My shades, screening out everything but these odd energy trails, speak to the value of our teamwork.

  I keep watching. The energy tendrils are converging in the far glade near the old duckpond.

  As my shades’ focus strengthens, I realize they’re gathering around a single point, and then abruptly they all swarm over it. A great writhing ball of ghostly whisps forms and grows around that point, increasing in size and brilliance, until suddenly I no longer need the shades.

  I tap them a third time, this time to cut the AR and let the mirrorshades protect my eyes. With my right hand, I pull a short metal rod out of my shark backpack and shake it. The cylinder telescopes silently into a long metal bo staff. If things get interesting, I’ll be ready.

  Another advantage to shop class.

  In the illumination, I can see threads of shadow gathering around another point, forming an orb of shadow as a counterpoint to the gathering one of light. And I feel a lurch in my stomach. The kind I get when my gift dredges up more than I can put down, and I’ve just stumbled into the middle of it.

  I draw in a slow, calming breath.

  At least I’m good at running.

  Now to see about raising up more than I can put down. And how fast I can run from that.

  I take in another breath, a sharper one, and let the storm rise within me.

  My power uncoils slowly, barely a whisper within me before it slips free and rises into a murmur.

  A tingle of energy flares from my core and infuses my limbs. My vision and hearing sharpen. So does my mind.

  Staring out through the dark, I pull away my shades, needing neither their protection nor their nightvision. And my gaze sharpens further as my mind takes on a razor’s edge.

  The orbs of light and darkness are making no overtly dangerous moves, but I could feel the power rippling off them. Invisible to ordinary sight, I sense them almost like waves of heat distorting the air.

  So much power they’re dangerous to whatever’s near them, especially the tall black teen closest, but also his three companions just behind.

  This despite the fact that the light and darkness almost seem to be cancelling each other out. They aren’t fighting, per se. I have a sense that if they clash openly, with their full power, they can crack the world as just a side effect.

  But something’s reaching through each of them, finding its way into the world, and shaping the space around them in conflicting ways.

  I can sense how dangerous they are, and my soul gathers force as my concern grows.

  I have no idea what will happen to the people in the clearing, or even if whatever these things are will stop with the forest.

  Fortunately, if there’s one thing that doesn’t slow my Gift down at all, it’s more power.

  In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite.

  My Gift circles around me, defensively, or rather defensive in its offensive way, and the leaves and limbs around me sway in its presence. An immaterial wind reaches into everything, but finds its greatest influence in fluid energies, minds, matter.

  A physical breeze begins to circle me, as if in answer.

  Something stirs. A voice is speaking, not in my head, but its intent somehow reflecting there. As though some secret part of my mind knows this language, and is absent-mindedly repeating it where I can hear. One of yours?

  Not mine. The second voice seems amused. What? Did you think we were alone here? Our kind are not the only Powers in this world.

  The breeze becomes a wind, and the wind rises to a roar.

  I begin to move in what I consider slow, deliberate strides towards the conflict. But my sense of time is already accelerating, slowing the perceived time flowing around me, and as my Gift gathers force I gather speed.

  The winds are howling into a gale before I’m halfway there.

  White-silver and black-silver threads flow from the orbs into my approaching windstorm of both real and metaphysical windcurrents, and I have a sense of both intelligences behind them turning to observe me.

  I know I will not rush into the glade itself. With so much power in play, tearing it apart point blank will likely end explosively.

  But I don’t have to get on top of them. I’m likely close enough already.

  So with a few more racing steps to gain momentum, I abruptly turn and loop around, letting my power surge stronger than it has since the fire and the redwoods, drawing these foreign powers to me like iron filings to a supermagnet.

  Or poison from an open wound.

  The threads of light and darkness thicken into cords and then ethereal cables lashing through the air around me like striking whips or grasping tentacles. My storm welcomes their strength and their promise of violence.

  Such things only feed it.

  I run, not in fear of what’s behind me but of what might be around me. A glance at a mapping app earlier told me where I was geographically, and now I’m using that knowledge for its true value – an escape route.

  Fortunately, I’m already outside Waycross, and the forest breaks into scattered trees in the nearby mountains, only to fade away entirely as you descend the slopes into desert.

  If this grows as fierce as I fear, I’ll need that barren emptiness more than a drowning swimmer needs air.

  Light and darkness flow around me, coursing into a pattern I know better than my own mind. A circling storm. Always a storm, and with me at its heart. The storm’s eye.

  Tendrils of light-eating shadow and of darkness-rending light weave together into my eyewall, going from ghostly to flowing steel with each heartbeat.

  My feet pound – once again in a race less with my pursuers than my own power.

  My memories are still a broken void, but one thing I know. I’ve yet to find anything on Earth stronger than the storm. When it rages, we’re all its playthings.

  And I doubt I will ever live to find something to break the storm. Rather than be broken.

  But where it rages, that’s something I can still command, even when I lose every vestige of control.

  My footfalls tear through turf and tarmac, root and rock, sand and stone. In the distance, as if in anticipation, I hear thunder. A literal storm, waiting for me.

  I run, and the power courses through me, not just around me. I run, and I burn.

  A hundred paces and my storm’s eyewall becomes less substantial as I briefly outrun the growing forces around me. A sphere of unquenchable light and one of bottomless darkness spin around me, out beyond the eyewall. Their own power trails further and further behind each, until finally the orb of light sears its way through shadows and that of darkness devours its way through radiance.

  This happens also, I knew. Forces far greater than myself, driven into contact with their natural opposites – sometimes blunting the full impact of my gift as eternal enemies consume each other.

  This meeting of powers seems less desperate, though. I had the strangest sense that each sphere – or rather, something beyond them – is watching me. Curious.

  I catch my breath. A thousand paces, and I’m reaching a fraction of my old speed.

  Perhaps I’ll be clear of these trees before I burn them as well. One can plan. But mostly, one can hope.

  I keep running. And the trees sway in my winds – both my Gift itself, and the physical winds which rise in answer.

  Faster. And still I run. And I burn faster.

  I burst from the trees, cross rocky ground, and find my first descending slope. The way out of the mountains is not long. Not if you do not stumble.

  I throw myself forward with reckless speed, a race down rocky slopes in the dark, gravity now my dangerous friend. But while my world shrinks to the path ahead and the drumroll of my pounding feet, the run is something I could survive.

  My Gift, though… Whatever it is inside me that reaches out into the world has extended its power now. I can feel it in the back of my mind and all around me, touching everything for miles. And those fluid things it finds of interest, it moves.

  Ten thousand steps and I am a blur moving across the desert, light and darkness whirling around me, almost lost in the greater dust storm as my dry hurricane gathers around me.

  Further. I keep racing forward now, but given these miles of wasteland, I have a moment to breathe. A moment to gather myself, and to gather my power in.

  My memory is gone, but instinct remains. I know there is something I can do beyond flight and fury and falling in exhaustion.

  A voice spoke out of those lost memories.

  You’re the storm’s eye, Kei. Not the raging winds, not the thunder and lightning. You’re the serenity in its heart. And you can bring that stillness out, and quell the tempest. That’s your gift. Calm, not anger. Peace, not war.

  For a moment, I see my father’s face. And everything changes.

  I didn’t believe his words, then or now. But I believe him. And just the glimpse of him brings me to a halt, sand and stone scattering in my path as I grind to a stop.

  The winds howl around me, forgotten.

  Instinctively I fight back against the torrent of energies, but carefully. Taking in slow, steady breaths that feel like napalm laced with lightning, I seek a place of calm in my own living storm.

  And then, by dint of habit, I find one.

  Stillness sweeps through me, and I seek silence within. A distant eye, regarding the chaos set in motion all around me.

  Stillness fills every part of me, even my still-pounding heart slowing to the rhythm of an immense bass drum. And then the silence sweeps out of me, filling the world even as my desperation did so moments ago.

  Light gathers to the right of me, darkness to the left. Both watching me, curious. Intent.

  A silent voice echoes around me. It begins.

  Another answers. It does indeed.

  And then, without another word, both presences – light and dark – break away. My power quells.

  And the storm around me is just a storm.

  Wind keens and water falls and I stand in the cold desert as a month of rainfall descends around me.

  I stare out into the blackness, but see – and feel – nothing.

  I’ve outraced my pain, but little else. After a few more minutes in the cold rain, I turn, and began walking back.

  It’s a long path to Waycross. And to whatever waits for me there.

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