I piled the pebbles into my hand in angry motions. “Then they’ll send another, and we’ll kill him too. Then we’ll track each and every Guardian down. And we’ll keep killing until every one of them is dead, or we are.”
Callista shook her head disdainfully.
“What is wrong with you?” she said with dismay. “Do you have any idea what you did earlier? Do you have any idea that every time you put yourself in danger, you put Thad and I in the same spot? We didn’t even have a choice.”
“Being out there is better than sitting here waiting for them,” I said.
“And if you go out, they will hunt you down!” Thad shouted suddenly from the other side, in an irate tone that I’d never heard him use before. I pushed myself up to my feet, throwing the rocks to the ground in fury.
“Then why the hell did he let me go?” I yelled back. “He had me and he could have killed me in a second.”
“Because he wants to come back and kill you with the Blade instead!” Thad’s voice roared into the trees above us. “He knows you’re giving up. You’ve gone weak.”
My jaw tightened, hands now fists to hold the claws in.
“Now you have nothing left,” he said. “That’s what they’ve wanted all along. To break you, just like they broke us. They want you reckless so they can calculate everything you do, until you’re theirs. Callista’s right—we need a new plan.”
“I don’t have a plan,” I said.
“Well you need to come up with one!” Thad waved an angry hand at me.
“Why?” I returned sharply.
Thad let a quick breath out but I refused to relent. He turned away, walking off as if he wasn’t going to stoop so low as to reply to me.
“Because you’re the one who got us into this mess,” he muttered over his shoulder.
He could have shot my knee with a bullet and it might have hurt less. All of a sudden, hot tears of rage brimmed in the corners of my eyes, and before I could stop myself, I was dashing toward Thad with my fists out.
He reacted faster, hearing me and spinning around. I hadn’t realized that my claws were out too, and our silver edges clashed together like swords. But he was far better than me, far more prepared, and in one swift motion his blades wrenched in a circle, catching against my scales and flipping me over onto my back.
“Stop!” Callista shouted, though the short-lived battle was already over. Thad breathed heavily, standing away from me at the ready. I coughed and rolled over, the impact having shaken my urge to attack, but not my rage.
Callista held out her hand, but I hit it away, getting to my feet on my own. I turned from both of them and started to run for the edge, and before anyone could stop me, I was in the air again. I heard Callista calling after me but I ignored her voice, and flew all the faster.
Being solitary was almost painful. As soon as there were no voices of the others, the sounds in my head bubbled up with memories of my mother’s screams, Wyck’s ghastly voice, and the laughs coming through the screen.
Had I really meant what I’d told Callista and Thad? I was such a mess that I couldn’t trust my thoughts anymore. I had never believed in capital punishment before. Who is a judge to say that someone doesn’t deserve to live? Life isn’t something that is given on loan by a government, a privilege they can recall if someone doesn’t follow their rules.
Sometimes, though, I would watch the news about death row prisoners and study the Glimpses in their eyes. Most would have a dazed, empty space inside, like they’d already died and were simply waiting for the formalities to wrap up. But the serial killers and the psychopaths were different. Their faces might be calm but inside their eyes was still a terrifying, uncontrollable urge to kill, like kleptomaniacs addicted to stealing lives.
When I put the pieces together, I saw the Guardians as genocidal psychopaths. How many disasters had been by their hand? How many more would they kill, if someone didn’t kill them first? Was that to be my grim responsibility—to kill the killers?
Who wept when Hitler died? Murder is good sometimes.
I wrestled with these heavy thoughts as I flew, until exhaustion sank in and I was forced to the ground with an ache of thirst. I walked the sidewalks of an unfamiliar part of the city. None of the people near me gave any hindrance or even a glance my way. I was like a ghost.
That association fit me far too well. I felt as empty as a ghost inside. Without my mother and sister, I had nothing to go back to. I had no hope, no reason to fight. There would never be a normal again. Everything I’d once known was now turned to ashes.
I wandered in this aimless state as the night darkened further and the sidewalks began to empty. My surroundings became lonely and decrepit, slovenly-kept shacks and buildings growing like fungus against the sides of the road. When I spotted an open door radiating light ahead, I turned to go in.
It was a messy bar that I was too young to enter, neon beer advertisements glowing on the walls and animal heads studying me with blank gazes. Even at that hour, the bar was nearly deserted, only two men talking in a corner booth with their voices masked by low rock music and the television. The bartender behind the counter turned to me.
“Can’t come in here, kid,” he said, eyeing me as he cleaned the inside of a glass with a towel. He had long dreadlocks and a black tattoo on the right side of his face like a half-skull. The inside smelled of old sweat and cheap alcohol.
“Do you have water?” I asked in a soft voice, because it was all I could muster. He glared at me.
“You’re too young to be here, man,” he said. “There’s an In-N-Out down the road.”
“I just watched my family die,” I replied. “Can I just have some water?”
The bartender didn’t have an answer. In my life’s study of eyes, I’d discovered that sometimes, even people who didn’t have my power could read the gaze of another person. This was simply part of being human—the ability to see fear in enemies, or pain in a friend, or affection in a lover. The bartender must have read such intense pain in my own eyes that he was forced to concede, and he filled the cup for me without any more objections.
I swallowed all he gave me, coughing smoke up. He poured more, then went to the other side of the building to clean a table.
The television was on, so I watched as it played rerun shots of a football game. The fat reporter spit his “S’s” and “P’s” so much that I expected the camera lens to get covered in saliva. Why did I hold so tightly to these tiny details now?
Unexpectedly, the report changed, and before my startled eyes, my own face appeared on the screen. I nearly choked.
The anchor turned to the camera with my photo hovering at his side: my school portrait, zoomed in so closely that it was pixilated and made me look far more sinister. The subtext beneath my photo read: TEENAGE TERRORIST MICHAEL ASHER MURDERS OWN FAMILY, DISAPPEARS.
My mouth hung open in shock but I immediately had the sense to shut it, to turn around in the stool so my back was to the booth of men and the bartender. There was another television across the room playing the same thing: TVs all around, so that any of the patrons could just look up and match my face to the one on the screen. My heart beat faster, but I didn’t move, fearful that anything would bring attention to myself.
It was hard to hear the anchor without straining, so I leaned in as best I could.
“…Asher displayed sociopathic tendencies as early as six years old…” the reporter said, emphasizing all the right words with a professional—but obviously uncaring—tone.