I’ll know it’s Winter Break, because I’ll fight against the cop’s grip to raise my head and I’ll see Jamila standing there behind the counter, brown eyes wide with horror.
In that moment, I’ll feel a part of the universe split off, like a branch snapped off a tree trunk, and that piece of the universe has me in it with her. I’m standing in front of the counter, and Jamila’s back from Winter Break, and I’m on Winter Break too, because I’ve been busy at school learning things and building things, and we’ll talk about the things people talk about when they know already that they’re gonna fall in love and get married and raise beautiful, brilliant, peaceful fucking kids.
But right now, I just wish she didn’t fucking recognize me. I’d give anything for her not to have fucking recognized me.
One Christmas when we were kids, Mama, seeing what white families got their kids when she would clean their houses between hospital shifts, brought home a shiny train set. Miniature gears and pistons, no chips in the blue and red paint that coated the front car. I would make the chug-chug sounds when running them over the carpet and up the spiral tracks that circled the play-mountain at the end of the course. They’d get to the top, then roll back down, cars crashing into each other, jackknifing, until the whole thing was a tangled mess at the end, imaginary passengers all crying out for help before the whole thing would magically explode and there’d be no one left to cry out. But one time, Ella told me that the train was transporting dynamite to blow up some bridge that existed in some other train set, and she claimed there was a boy, maybe my age, who had been playing with a lit stick, and instead of metal and plastic, the train cars were made out of wood, and the kid had dropped his stick and was running back through the cars like in the movies, climbing a ladder to the top and daringly jumping from car to car. Movie trailer music thumped in our heads. And fire, real fire, broke out in one car as Ella moved the trains up the mountain with her Thing, the first car puffing into a ball of flames and the others blowing up too until there was nothing but a trail of fire winding its way up the mountain, imaginary wind blowing the flames back like a wave of orange-red hair. It was beautiful until Mama came in, smelling smoke, and ordered us both to put it out or Ella would burn the whole place down and it’d be us kids crying out.
Ella had spent the next year, under my watchful eye, trying to put it all back together, trying to un-char the mountain and re-form the train cars. She never did get it all back to how it’d been, not that either of us could see.
III
RIKERS
ELLA huffs as she hefts her bag deeper and deeper into the desert. She’s getting better at Traveling, but pinpointing locations far enough from people is still too high a bar to vault. Soon, though, she stops and tosses the bag to the ground. Dust erupts in a cloud around it. The flap of the bag opens on its own and out spin clear, lenticular discs containing ball bearings. They come out in an arc until they form a column she has to crane her neck to see. A shoulder-width circle etches itself into the dirt in front of her. She likes it out here, and if someone were to ask her why, she’d, half joking, tell them it’s because she can practice breaking things without hurting anyone. Out here with the rusted and abandoned military armament, the detached members and wings of aerial mobile suits and crabtanks and Guardians tall as apartment buildings lying like bones bleaching in the sun, she can pulverize and tear and shatter and not spill a drop of blood. But, really, it’s because of the contagion. She can’t stand to have their thoughts bleed into hers, to feel their insides and to hear their prejudice and their hate and their apathy pinball behind her eyes.
She raises her hand, grips a pinch of air between her fingers, then throws her hand down, as though she were pulling a cord under a trapdoor.
The bearings fly to the earth. The discs’ pieces scatter upon impact, darting toward the edge of the circle, where they freeze. For a second, Ella wonders if she froze not just the ball bearings but the whole world, too. A condor flaps its wings overhead. Dung beetles scuttle over rocks. The world still moves. She flicks her wrist, and the broken thing’s parts fly back together in a perfect reconstruction. After a beat, she steps back.
The column sweeps down to her eye level. She squints. The ball bearings rotate before her eyes. She frowns at the hairline fracture in one of the discs.
The bearings swim back into her pack.
A few bounding steps send her miles deeper into the desert, and she stops at the cliff’s edge. It overlooks the mesa, cracked clay, drained and baked, patches of desert floor covered in dust and rubblestone. The wind here whips her silver braids about her face. This is always her favorite part.
She spreads her arms out to be dramatic and leans forward and falls and falls and falls. Then, slowly, the wind shifts around her, twisted in invisible fingers, spins her, and spirals her up in a curve that shoots her back into the air, where she floats, legs bicycling, a giggle bubbling in her chest, before she arrow-darts forward, flying. And for the rest of the afternoon, she flies and flies and flies.
Something rings in her, and she stops, floating between canyon walls, and finds herself oriented eastward, and she knows, thousands of miles in front of her, at the end of her gaze, is a series of concrete buildings, a bundle of stone and metal and fluorescent light and blood and rust.
The first time she’d visited him, her brother had thought it was a dream. It’d been night after dinner and he’d been on the top bunk, unprotected from the too-bright light that buzzed loud enough to keep him awake, and he’d thought she was a hallucination, because what kind of person sees someone hovering at the end of their bed they haven’t seen in half a decade? But he’d known not to speak, otherwise his cellmate woulda started bothering him, and he remembered that Ella could do things, strange things, things that ate up her insides, but she looked healthy, even with her hair completely gray. And without moving her lips, she told him that she was getting a handle on it, figuring out her gift, and Kev had stared at her in mute wonder as Ella played her adventures in his head. Ella saw him imagine her throwing an armored personnel carrier into a battalion of cops tricked out in riot gear. She sees him wondering if this knowledge would be enough to get the COs to stop hassling him, to get other guys in Gen Pop to stop fucking with him. Like people who fight ugly people who don’t give a fuck about their face or how it’ll end up and so got nothing to lose by going to the mattresses as hard as possible. They’ll realize the girl who can throw an APC at a battalion of riot cops is his sister. That there’s no conceivable reason for Kev to still be behind bars if he’s got Ella on his team. And so it’s madness that Kev’s still here.
The first time she’d visited him, she’d seen that whole battle play across his face. You could get me out of here, but here is security and routine and a violence I already know too well. Then, at the end, a glimpse of old Kev as he throws a thought her way, more an aura of feeling and emotion and color than words. An admonition. Be careful, Ella. Don’t let them know what you can do.
Unspoken between them, what they’d do to Ella if they ever found out what she was. And Ella wanting desperately to tell Kev that, in time, it won’t matter. It won’t matter what they could do to her, because they won’t.