Текст книги "Boundless"

Автор книги: Cynthia Hand

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

2

BAND RUN

That night I wake up at two in the morning to somebody pounding on my door.

“Hello?” I call out warily. There’s a jumble of noise from outside, music and people shouting and frantic footsteps in the hall. Wan Chen and I both sit up, exchange worried glances, and then I slide out of bed to answer the door.

“Rise and shine, dear freshmen,” says Stacy, our RA, in a chipper voice. She’s wearing a neon-green plastic circle around her neck and rainbow clown hair. She grins. “Put your shoes on and come out front.”

Outside we’re met by a scene that seems straight out of those bad acid trips you see in the movies: the Stanford marching band in what appears to be mostly their underwear and glow-in-the-dark necklaces and bracelets and stuff, rocking their respective instruments, trumpets blaring, drums beating, cymbals crashing, the school mascot in his big green pine tree costume zooming around like a crazy man, a bunch of half-dressed, partially glowing students jumping and bumping and whooping and laughing. It’s incredibly dark, like they’ve turned out the streetlights for the occasion, but I search for Angela and spot her looking supremely annoyed, standing next to two blond girls—her roommates, I assume. I weave my way over to them.

“Hi!” Angela yells. “You have bed hair.”

“This is insane!” I shout, combing through my hair with my fingers, with little success.

“What?” she screams.

“Insane!” I try again. It’s so unbelievably loud.

One of Angela’s roommates gapes and points behind me. I turn to see a guy wearing a Mexican-style wrestling mask that covers his entire face. A shiny gold wrestling mask. And nothing else.

“My eyes, my eyes!” Angela shrieks, and we all start giggling hysterically, and then the song is over, and we can hear again, and they’re telling us to run.

“Run, little freshmen, run!” they scream, and we do, like a herd of confused, stampeding cattle in the dark. When we finally stop, we’re at the next dorm over, and the band starts up again, and pretty soon another crowd of bleary and baffled freshmen begins to filter out of the doors.

I’ve lost Angela. I look around, but it’s too dark and the crowd is too big to find her. I make out one of her roommates standing a few feet away from me. I wave. She smiles and pushes her way over to me like she’s relieved to see a familiar face. We bob halfheartedly to the music for a few minutes before she leans over and yells next to my ear, “I’m Amy. You’re Angela’s friend from Wyoming?”

“Right. Clara. Where are you from?”

“Phoenix!” She hugs her sweatshirt tighter around her. “I’m cold!”

Suddenly we’re moving again. This time I make it a point to stay close to Amy. I try not to think about how this feels eerily similar to my vision in some ways, running around in the dark, not knowing where I’m going or what I’m going to end up doing. It’s supposed to be fun, I know, but I find this whole thing a bit creepy.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” I pant out to Amy the next time we stop.

“What?” She can’t hear me.

“Where are we?” I yell.

“Oh.” She shakes her head. “No clue. I’m guessing they’re going to make us run all the way across campus.”

I remember how on the tour they told us that Stanford has the largest campus of any university in the world aside from one in Russia.

It could be a long night.

There’s still no sign of Angela or the other roommate, who Amy tells me is named Robin, so Amy and I stick together and dance and laugh at Naked Guy and shout out a conversation the best we can. In the next half hour here’s what I find out about Amy: we were both raised with single mothers and little brothers, we’re both thrilled that tater tots are served at breakfast in the Roble dining hall every morning and horrified at how tiny and claustrophobic the shower stalls in the bathrooms are, and we both suffer from annoyingly unruly hair.

We could be friends, I realize. I could have made my first new friend at Stanford, just this easily. Maybe there’s something to this making-us-run thing.

“So what’s your major?” she asks as we’re jogging along.

“Undecided,” I answer.

She beams. “Me too!”

I’m liking her more and more. But then disaster strikes. As we come up on the next dorm, Amy stumbles and falls. Down to the pavement she goes, all flailing arms and legs. I do my best to make sure she doesn’t get trampled by the ever-growing stream of scrambling freshmen, then drop to the sidewalk next to her. It’s bad. I can tell just by looking at her white face and the way she’s clutching her ankle.

“I stepped wrong.” She groans. “God, this is embarrassing.”

“Can you stand up?” I ask.

She tries, and her face gets even whiter. She sits back down heavily.

“Okay, that’s a no,” I deduce. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

I mill around looking for someone who seems even a little bit helpful and miraculously spot Pierce at the edge of the crowd. Time to put his “dorm doctor” skills to good use. I run over to him and touch him on the arm to get his attention. He smiles when he sees me.

“Having fun?” he yells.

“I need your help,” I yell.

“What?” he yells.

I end up taking him by the hand and dragging him over to Amy and pointing at her ankle, which is starting to swell. He spends several minutes kneeling beside her, gently holding her ankle between his hands. Turns out that he’s premed.

“It’s probably a sprain,” he concludes. “I’ll call someone to give you a ride back to Roble, and we’ll get it elevated and put some ice on it. Then you should go to Vaden—the student clinic—in the morning, get an X-ray. Just hang in there, all right?”

He walks off to find somewhere quieter to use his phone. The band finishes its song and moves on, leading the crowd away from us in a rumble of feet. Finally I can hear myself think.

Amy starts to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, sitting down next to her.

“It doesn’t hurt that much,” she sniffles, wiping at her nose with the back of her sweatshirt. “I mean, it hurts—a lot, actually—but that’s not why I’m crying. I’m crying because I did something so totally stupid like wear flip-flops when they told us to put on shoes, and this is only the first week of school. I haven’t even started classes yet, and now I’m going to be hopping around on crutches, and everyone’s going to label me as that klutzy girl who hurt herself.”

“Nobody will think less of you. Seriously,” I say. “I bet there are plenty of injuries happening tonight. It’s all pretty crazy.”

She shakes her head, sending a tumble of wild blond curls over her shoulders. Her lip quivers. “This is not how I wanted to start things,” she chokes out, and buries her face in her hands.

I glance around. The group has moved far enough away that we can only faintly hear them. Pierce is standing next to the building with his back to us, talking into his cell. It’s dark. No one’s around.

I lay my hand gently on Amy’s ankle. She tenses, like even this light touch is hurting her, but doesn’t lift her head. Through my empathy I can feel the hurt in her, not only the way she’s mentally beating herself up over how she’s already ruined her reputation, but the physical part, too, the way the ligaments in her ankle are pulled away from the bone. It’s a bad injury, I know instantly. She could be on crutches all semester.

I could help her, I think.

I’ve healed people before. My mom after she was attacked by Samjeeza. Tucker after our post-prom car accident last year. But those times I had the full circle of glory around me, the whole shebang, light emanating from my hair, my body glowing like a lantern. I wonder if there’s a way to localize the glory to just, say, my hands, to channel it fast so that nobody will notice.

I clear my head, glad for the relative quiet, and focus my energy on my right hand. Just the fingers, I think. All I need is glory in my fingers. Just once. I concentrate on it so hard that a bead of sweat moves along my hairline and drips down onto the concrete, and after a few minutes the very tips of my fingers start to glow, dimly at first and then more brightly. I press my hand firmly to Amy’s ankle. Then I send the glory out of me like a trickle of light spreading from me to her, not too much or too fast but hopefully enough to do some good.

Amy sighs, then stops crying. I sit back, watching her. I can’t tell if what I did helped at all.

Pierce comes back over, looking apologetic. “I can’t find anyone to come get you. I’ll have to run and get my car, but it’s on the other side of campus, so it will take a while. How are you doing?”

“Better,” she says. “It doesn’t hurt as much as before.”

He kneels down next to her again and examines her ankle. “It looks better, actually, not as swollen. Maybe you just twisted it. Can you try to walk?”

She gets up and gingerly puts her weight on her injured foot. Pierce and I watch as she limps a few steps, then turns back to us. “It feels okay now,” she admits. “Oh my God, am I a drama queen or what?” She laughs, her voice full of relief.

“Let’s get you back to your room,” I stammer out quickly. “You still need to put some ice on that, right, Pierce?”

“Absolutely,” he says, and we get on either side of her and walk her slowly back to Roble.

“Thanks for helping me out tonight,” Amy says to me after she’s situated in her room with her foot wrapped tightly in an Ace bandage, propped on a stack of pillows with a bag of ice pressed to her ankle. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. You’re a lifesaver.”

“You’re welcome,” I say, and I can’t help a gloaty smile.

I did help her, I think later when I’ve gone back to my room. The sun is almost up, but Wan Chen isn’t back yet. I lie on my tiny twin bed and stare at the water damage on the ceiling panels. I want to sleep, but I’ve still got too much adrenaline in my system from using my power out in the open like that. But I did it. I did it, I keep thinking, over and over and over again. I healed that girl. And it felt amazing. It felt right.

Which gives me another crazy idea.

“I think I might want to go premed.”

Dr. Day, the academic adviser for Roble Hall, looks up from her computer. She has the grace not to look too surprised that I’ve burst into her office and informed her that I am contemplating becoming a doctor. She simply nods and takes a minute to pull up my schedule.

“If you’re considering premed, which is typically a straight biology or human biology major, we should get you enrolled in Chem 31X,” she says. “It’s a prerequisite for most of the other biology courses, and if you don’t take it this fall, you’ll have to wait until next fall to start the core classes you’ll need.”

“Okay,” I say. “I like chemistry. I took College Prep Chemistry last year.”

She looks at me from over the top of her glasses. “This course can be a little hard-core,” she warns me. “The class meets three times a week, and then there’s a biweekly discussion session led by a teaching assistant, plus another couple hours a week in the lab. The entire biology track can be fairly high intensity. Are you ready for that?”

“I can handle it,” I say, and an excited tremor passes through me, because I feel oddly sure about this. I think about how good it felt when Amy’s ankle was righting itself under my hand. Being a doctor would put me in contact with the people who need healing the most. I could help people. I could fix the broken things in this world.

I smile at Dr. Day, and she smiles back.

“This is what I want to do,” I tell her.

“All right, then,” she says. “Let’s get you started.”

Everybody takes the news that I’ve gone premed in a different way. Wan Chen, for instance, who’s premed herself, reacts like I’m suddenly competition. For a few days she doesn’t say more than two words to me, maneuvering around our tiny dorm room in chilled silence, until she realizes that we’re both in that insanely hard chemistry class and I’m pretty good at chemistry. Then she warms up to me fast. I hear her tell her mother on the phone in Mandarin that I’m a “nice girl, and very smart.” I make an effort not to smile when I hear her say it.

Angela instantly loves the idea of me as a doctor. “Very cool” are her exact words. “I believe we should use our gifts, you know, for good, not just sit on them unless we’re required to do some angel-related duty. If you can stomach all the blood and guts and gore—which I totally couldn’t, but kudos to you, if you can—then you should go for it.”

It’s Christian who doesn’t think it’s a good idea.

“A doctor,” he repeats when I tell him. “What brought this on?”

I explain about band run and Amy’s miraculously healed ankle and my subsequent aha moment. I expect him to be impressed. Excited for me. Approving. But he frowns.

“You don’t like it,” I observe. “Why?”

“It’s too risky.” He looks like he wants to say something else, but we’re standing on the crowded sidewalk outside the Stanford Bookstore, where I’ve bumped into him while coming out with my armload of poetry collections for my humanities class and a giant ten-pound textbook entitled Chemistry: Science of Change, which is what prompted this conversation. You could get caught using glory, he says in my head.

Relax, I reply. It’s not like I’m going to go around healing people right this minute. I’m looking into it as a possible career path, that’s all. No big deal.

But it feels like a big deal. It feels like my life finally has a—for lack of a better word—purpose, one that isn’t all about being an angel-blood but makes use of the angel-blood part of me, too. It feels right.

He sighs.

I get it, he says. I want to help people, too. But we have to lie low, Clara. You’re lucky that this girl you healed didn’t see what you did. How would you have explained that? What would you do if she was going around campus telling everybody about your magical glowing hands?

I don’t have an answer for him. My chin lifts. But she didn’t notice. I’ll be careful. I would only use glory when I thought it was safe, and the other times, I’d use regular medical stuff. Which is why I want to become a doctor. I have the power to heal people, Christian. How can I not use it?

We stand there for a minute, locked in a silent argument about whether or not it’s worth the risk, until it becomes clear that neither of us is going to change our mind. “I have to go,” I say finally, trying not to pout. “I have a set of problems on quantum mechanics to work through, if you think that’s not too dangerous for me to tackle.”

“Clara …,” Christian starts. “I think it’s great that you found a direction to go in, but …” All it would take is one slip, he says. The wrong person seeing you, one time, and then they could figure out what you are, and they’d come after you.

I shake my head. I can’t spend my entire life being afraid of the black-winged bogeymen. I have to live my life, Christian. I won’t be stupid about glory, but I won’t sit around and wait for my visions to happen in order to do something with it.

At the word visions a new worry springs up inside him, and I remember that there was something he promised to tell me. But I don’t want to hear about it now. I want to sulk.

I shift my heavy load of books to the other arm. “I’ve got to run. I’ll catch you later.”

“Okay,” he says stiffly. “See you around.”

I don’t like the feeling that’s hanging like a dark cloud over me as I walk back to my dorm.

That it doesn’t matter what I said about not wanting to be afraid. That I’m always, in some form or another, running away from something.

3

WHITE PICKET FENCE

This time someone else is with me in the blackness, another person’s breathing shuddering in and out somewhere behind me.

I still can’t see anything, can’t determine where I am, even though this is like the umpteenth time I’ve had the vision. It’s dark, as always. I am trying to keep quiet, trying not to move—not to breathe, even—so I can’t exactly explore my surroundings. The floor is slanted down. Carpeted. There’s the faint scent of sawdust in the air, new paint, and this: the hint of some distinctly masculine smell, like deodorant or aftershave, and now the breathing. Close, I think. If I turned and reached out, I could touch him.

There are footsteps above us: heavy and echoing, like people descending a set of wooden stairs. My body tenses. We’ll be found. Somehow I know this. I’ve seen it a hundred times in my visions. I’m seeing it right now. I want to get it over with, want to call the glory, but I don’t, on the off chance that it won’t happen this time. I still have hope.

There’s a noise from behind me, strange and high-pitched, like maybe a cat yowl or a birdcall. I turn toward the sound.

There’s a moment of silence.

Then comes a burst of light, blinding me. I flinch away from it.

“Clara, get down!” yells a voice, and in that wild, scuffling moment I instantly know who’s with me—I’d recognize his voice anywhere—and I find myself vaulting forward, upward, because some part of me knows that now I have to run.

I wake to a ray of sunshine on my face. It takes me a second to place where I am: dorm room, Roble Hall. Light pouring through the window. The bells of Memorial Church in the distance. The smell of laundry detergent and pencil shavings. I’ve been at Stanford for more than a week now, and this room still doesn’t feel like home.

My sheets are tangled up in my legs. I must have really been trying to run. I lie there for a minute taking deep breaths from the abdomen, trying to calm my racing heart.

Christian’s there. In the vision. With me.

Of course Christian’s there, I think, still peeved with him. He’s been in every other vision I’ve had, so why stop now?

But there’s some kind of comfort in that.

I sit up and glance over at Wan Chen, who’s asleep in the bed on the other side of the room, snoring in little puffs. I free myself from the sheets and pull on some jeans and a hoodie, fight my hair into a ponytail, trying to keep quiet so I don’t wake her.

When I get outside there’s a large bird sitting on a lamppost near the dorm, a dark shape against the dawn-gray sky. It swivels to look at me. I stop.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with birds. Even before I knew I was an angel-blood, I understood that there was something off about the way birds went quiet whenever I passed by, the way they followed me and sometimes, if I was oh-so-lucky, dive-bombed me, not in an unfriendly way, really, but in an I-want-to-see-you-closer sort of way. One of the hazards of having wings and feathers yourself, I suppose, even if they’re hidden most of the time: you attract the attention of other creatures with wings.

One time when I was having a picnic in the woods with Tucker, we looked up and our table was surrounded by birds—not just the common camp-robber jays that try to get the food you’re eating, but larks, swallows, wrens, even some kind of nuthatch Tucker said was extremely rare, all hanging out in the trees around our table.

“You’re like a Disney cartoon, Carrots,” Tucker teased me. “You should get them to make you a dress or something.”

But this bird feels different, somehow. It’s a crow, I think: jet-black, with a sharp, slightly hooked beak, perched on top of the post like a scene straight from Edgar Allan Poe. Watching me. Silent. Thoughtful. Deliberate.

Billy said once that Black Wings could turn into birds. That’s the only way they can fly; otherwise their sorrow weighs them down. So is this bird an ordinary crow?

I squint up at it. It cocks its head at me and stares right back with unblinking yellow eyes.

Dread, like a trickle of ice water, makes its way down my spine.

Come on, Clara, I think. It’s only a bird.

I scoff at myself and walk quickly past it, hugging my arms to my chest in the cold morning air. The bird squawks, a sharp, jarring warning that sends prickles to the back of my scalp. I keep walking. After a few steps I peer back over my shoulder at the lamppost.

The bird is gone.

I sigh. I tell myself that I’m being paranoid, that I’m just creeped out because of the vision. I try to put the bird out of my mind, and start walking again. Fast. Before I know it, I’m across campus, standing under Christian’s window, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk because I don’t actually know what I’m doing here.

I should have told him about the vision before, but I was too upset that he rejected my being-a-doctor idea. I should have told him before that, even. We’ve been here for almost two weeks, and neither one of us has talked about visions or purpose or any of the other angel-related stuff. We’ve been playing at being college freshmen, pretending that there’s nothing on our plates but learning people’s names and figuring out which rooms our classes are held in and trying not to look like complete morons at this school where everybody seems like a genius.

But I have to tell him now. I need to. Only it’s—I check my phone—seven fifteen in the morning. Too early for the guess-what-you’re-in-my-vision conversation.

Clara? His voice in my head is bleary.

Oh crap, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.

Where are you?

Outside. I—Here … I dial his number.

He answers on the first ring. “What’s up? Are you okay?”

“Do you want to hang out?” I ask. “I know it’s early….”

I can actually hear him smiling at the other end of the line. “Absolutely. Let’s hang out.”

“Oh, good.”

“But first let me put some pants on.”

“You do that,” I say, glad he can’t see me totally blushing at the idea of him in boxers. “I’ll be right here.”

He emerges a few minutes later in jeans and a brand-new Stanford sweatshirt, his hair rumpled. He restrains himself from hugging me. He’s relieved to see me after our argument at the bookstore a week ago. He wants to say he’s sorry. He wants to tell me that he’ll support me in whatever I decide to do.

He doesn’t have to say any of this out loud.

“Thanks,” I murmur. “That means a lot.”

“So what’s going on?” he asks.

It’s hard to know where to begin. “Do you want to get off campus for a while?”

“Sure,” he says, a spark of curiosity in his green eyes. “I don’t have class until eleven.”

I start walking back toward Roble. “Come on,” I call over my shoulder. He jogs to catch up with me. “Let’s take a drive.”

Twenty minutes later we’re cruising around Mountain View, my old hometown.

“Mercy Street,” Christian reads as we pass through downtown looking for this doughnut shop I used to go to where the maple bars are so good it makes you want to cry. “Church Street. Hope Street. I’m sensing a theme here….”

“They’re just names, Christian. I think someone had a laugh putting city hall on Castro between Church and Mercy. That’s all.” I check my mirrors and find myself unprepared for the glimpse of his gold-flecked eyes gazing at me steadily.

I glance away.

I don’t know what he expects of me now that I am officially single. I don’t know what I expect of myself. I don’t know what I’m doing.

“I’m not expecting anything, Clara,” he says, not looking at me. “If you want to hang with me, great. If you want some space, I get that too.”

I’m relieved. We can take this “we belong together” thing slow, figure out what that really means. We don’t have to rush. We can be friends.

“Thanks,” I say. “And look, I wouldn’t have asked you to hang out with me if I didn’t want to hang out with you.” You’re my best friend, I want to say, but for some reason I don’t.

He smiles. “Take me to your house,” he says impulsively. “I want to see where you lived.”

Awkward conversation officially over. Obediently I make a right toward my old neighborhood. But it’s not my house. Not anymore. It’s somebody else’s house now, and the thought makes me sad: someone else sleeping in my room, someone else at the kitchen window where Mom always used to stand watching the hummingbirds flit from flower to flower in the backyard. But that’s life, I guess. That’s being a grown-up. Leaving places. Moving on.

The sun is coming up behind the rows of houses when we get to my street. Sprinklers cast nets of white mist into the air. I roll the window down and drive with my right hand, let my left hand drag through the cool air outside. It smells so good here, like wet cement and fresh-cut grass, the aroma of bacon and pancakes wafting between the homes, garden roses and magnolia trees, the smells of my life before. It’s surreal, passing along these familiar tree-lined streets, seeing the same cars parked in the driveways, the same people headed off to work, the same kids walking to school, only a little bigger than the last time I saw them. It’s like time has stopped here, and these past two years and all the crazy stuff that went down in Wyoming never took place.

I park the car across the street from my old house.

“Nice,” Christian says, gazing out the open window at the big green two-story with blue shutters that was my home-sweet-home for the first sixteen years of my life. “White picket fence and everything.”

“Yeah, my mom was a traditionalist.”

The house, too, looks exactly the same. I can’t stop staring at the basketball hoop that’s set up over the garage. I can almost hear Jeffrey practicing, the cadence of the ball hitting the cement, his feet shuffling, his exhaled breath as he jumps and puts the ball through the hoop, the way the backboard thumps and the net swishes, and Jeffrey hissing, “Nice,” between his teeth. How many times did I do my homework with that sound in the background?

“He’ll turn up,” Christian says.

I turn to look at him. “He’s sixteen, Christian. He should be home. He should have someone taking care of him.”

“Jeffrey’s strong. He can handle himself. You really want him to come home and get arrested and all that?”

“No,” I admit. “I’m just … worried.”

“You’re a good sister,” he says.

I scoff. “I messed everything up for him.”

“You love him. You would have helped him if you’d known what he was going through.”

I don’t meet his eyes. “How do you know? Maybe I would have blown him off and kept on obsessing about my own thing. I’m good at that.”

Christian catches his breath, then says more firmly, “It’s not your fault, Clara.”

I wish I believed him.

Silence falls over us again, but this time it’s weightier.

I should tell him about the vision. I should stop stalling. I don’t even know why I’m stalling.

“So tell me,” he says, leaning his elbow on the edge of the window.

Thus I rattle off every detail I can remember, ending with my revelation that it’s him there with me, him in the dark room. Him yelling for me to get down.

He’s quiet for a while after I’m done. “Well. It’s not a very visual type of vision, is it?”

“No, it’s pretty much darkness and adrenaline, at this point. What do you think?”

He shakes his head, baffled. “What does Angela say?”

I shift uncomfortably. “We haven’t really talked about it.”

He looks at my face, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Have you told anybody else?” He reads my guilty expression. “Why not?”

I sigh. “I don’t know.”

“Why haven’t you told Billy? That’s the entire reason she became your guardian, you know, to help you through stuff like this.”

Because she’s not my mom, I think.

“Billy just got married,” I explain. “I didn’t want to spill my depressing guts all over her on her honeymoon, and Angela, well, she had her own thing going on in Italy.”

“What thing?” he asks, frowning.

I bite my lip. I wish I could tell him about Phen.

“Who’s Phen?” Christian asks with a hint of a smile, able to pick that much out of my head. “Wait, wasn’t he the angel who told Angela about the Black Wings all those years ago?” His eyes widen as they meet mine. “He’s the mysterious Italian boyfriend?”

It’s official. I suck at keeping secrets, especially from him.

“Hey! No mind reading! I can’t talk about it!” I sputter. “I promised.”

“Then stop thinking about it,” he says, which is like someone telling you not to think of an elephant, which of course is the first image that pops into your brain. “Whoa. Angela and an angel. What’s this about the gray wings?”

“Christian!”

“He’s not a Black Wing, is he?” Christian looks genuinely worried, the way he always does whenever the topic of Black Wings comes up. They killed his mother, after all.

“No, he’s not—” I stop myself. “I would have told you if—Christian!”

“Sorry,” he mutters, but he’s not very sorry at all. “So, uh … back to your vision. And why you kept it to yourself this long. Because that, I’m pretty sure, you are allowed to tell me.”

I’m relieved to be off the subject of Angela, although the vision stuff is not any easier to talk about. I sigh.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to be having a vision,” I confess. “Not right now.”

He nods like he understands, but I get a flicker of pain from him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say something about it earlier,” I say. “I should have.”

“I didn’t tell you mine, either,” he says. “For basically the same reason. I wanted to be a regular college student for a little while. Act like I have a normal life.” He gazes up through the windshield into the peach-colored sky. A vee of ducks is cutting its way across the horizon, heading south. We watch the birds ride the air. I wait for him to start talking again.

“It’s ironic,” he says. “You’ve been having a vision of dark, and I’ve been having a vision of light.”

“What do you mean?”

“All I can see is light. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Just light. It took me a few times to figure out what it is.”

I’m holding my breath. “What what is?”

“The light.” He looks over at me. “It’s a sword.”

My mouth drops open. “A sword?”

“A flaming sword.”

“Shut the front door,” I gasp.

He does his laugh/exhale thing. “At first all I could think was, How great is this? I’m wielding a flaming sword. A sword made of fire. Awesome, right?” His smile fades. “But then I started thinking about what it could mean, and when I told my uncle about it this summer, he completely freaked out. He started me doing push-ups on the spot.”

“But why?”

“Because obviously I’m going to have to fight.” He clasps his hands together behind his neck and sighs.

“Who?” I’m almost afraid to ask.

“I have no idea.” He drops his hands, his smile mournful as he looks at me. “But Walter is trying to make sure that I’m prepared for whoever it is.” He shrugs.