What does it feel like? she was going to ask, but he nodded and let her ask it anyway.
“It feels…like all I have to do is concentrate on something, and I can do it. It’s getting easier, but I wouldn’t say it’s really easy. I just have to want to do it…in a way I can’t explain. Like…life or death. You know?”
“I guess.”
“Let me ask you a question. When I killed those spider things, and the Cypher soldiers, did you see anything come out of me? Like come out of my hand, I mean. Where it was aimed at those things. Did you see anything?”
“No, there was nothing.”
“To me it looked like bolts of lightning or…I don’t know…burning bullets is how I would describe them, I guess. Thousands of them. They just come out of me when I need them. And the air does something funny too. It seems like it twists between me and what I’m aiming at. It’s like my whole body’s a gun, or an energy weapon…and everything comes out here.” He showed her his right palm, which looked like the ordinary palm of any teenaged boy. “I’m thinking I’m the only one who can see that?”
“I couldn’t see it,” she said. “I was right there, and I couldn’t.”
Ethan figured what he was seeing might be beyond the range of normal human vision. Maybe that had something to do with the change in his eye, and his visual spectrum was also changing. “That dude who caught fire and started flinging it,” he said. “If he hadn’t done that…I’m not sure I would’ve been able to handle them all. His name was Ratcoff. I just found that out. He was a human—mostly—but the Gorgons got to him and made him like that.” Ethan took a sip of water and put the cup aside. He looked into her good eye. He asked quietly, “How come you’re not afraid of me? Really.” He thought her eye was the color of a chocolate brownie, which made him hungry for something sweet. “Everybody else is, except for my friends. How come you’re not?”
Because I’m your friend, she said.
But Ethan did not reply until Nikki actually spoke it: “Because I’m your friend.”
I am, right?
“Sure you are,” he said, before the words came out. “It’s just…you know…how I’m changing. It’s way beyond weird. And now, with this eye…”
He knew what she was getting ready to say, the words were there in her mind, and he made himself focus just on her face and her mouth because it wasn’t right to be there in her head, but he couldn’t help it, it was too easy, it was becoming so natural for him…
“You want to see mine?” she asked, in a small voice.
He knew she wanted him to, so he answered, “Yes.”
She took a long deep breath of courage, and then she started to lift up her eyepatch, but then she stopped and there was a lopsided grin on her mouth but a terrible sadness in her good eye, and she said…
“I’m sure,” Ethan told her.
“It’s not very pretty,” Nikki said.
He shrugged. “Do you think mine is pretty? When I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror I almost fell down. Hey, I don’t even know how I can see through it!”
She nearly laughed at his inflection of helplessness, but a laugh was hard to come by. She still felt dazed by what had happened in the mall, and by the attack of the Gray Men and Gary Roosa’s death last night, and sometimes she thought she had to go numb to deal with all the horrors of life now, and with all the bad and sad memories, all the people she knew who had died. But what happened when you went too numb, and you lost all your feeling, and you couldn’t find your way back from that dark and empty place?
She wanted him to see what the eyepatch hid, because she needed a connection with someone. She needed someone to know the pain she had gone through…not that it was any worse than what most had experienced…but she needed Ethan to see it, maybe as a way to keep the numbness from taking over more and more of her until she was just a mindless, soulless cinder on this burned and wrecked earth. She needed a human touch, from this boy who was no longer truly human…or maybe, more human than most because he had an aim and a purpose, and she needed that too.
“Go ahead,” he told her.
She lifted the eyepatch and showed him the crimped socket where the destroyed orb had been removed by Dr. Douglas before infection set in. The scar began just below the socket and continued up almost to her eyebrow. “A piece of glass got me, is what the doctor says. I don’t remember that. I just remember fire and houses blowing up on Westview Avenue.
“It was at night and they were fighting in the sky. I was cut up pretty bad in other places—my face a little bit—but most of the worst are under my clothes. Some of my hair was burned off, they told me, but it grew back. I guess I was lucky, huh? Not to be all burned up.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said.
Nikki let the eyepatch down again. The little rhinestone star sparkled. “Some people came in to the apartments, early on, who were really burned. They didn’t last very long. A family came in with two little boys who were twins, and they were both burned really bad on their arms and legs. One died during the day, and the other one died almost exactly twelve hours later. I heard Olivia and Dr. Douglas talking about it. It was like…when one twin died, the other one quit wanting to live. The mother and father didn’t live very long after that, either. A lot of people killed themselves. I almost did, too, but Olivia stopped me. Twice.”
“I’m glad she did,” said Ethan.
“Hm,” the girl answered, in a way that told Ethan she wasn’t sure if she was glad or not. “Olivia brought these rhinestones for me, for my patch. Know who had them? The mother of those twins. Where she got them from, I don’t know. A Dollar General, maybe. Just picked up a pack of something she thought was pretty. People do crazy things when they need to hold on to something, I guess.”
Ethan nodded. It was the truth, and what was there to say? He knew what Nikki needed: a listener, and so he waited for her to go on without reading the scenes of her story before she could tell them.
“My sister’s name was Nina,” Nikki said. “She was a year older. Wow, could she ride a horse! Well, we both could…but she was way better than me. She was a junior at the high school. Was going to go to Colorado State and major in fun, is what she told me. But she really wanted to be a vet and work with horses. Maybe she would’ve gotten there, she was good at math and chemistry and stuff. I was a dud at those things, ’cause I was the real partier.” Nikki stared off into space for a moment, and Ethan let her take her time.
“Sometimes,” Nikki said, “I see my sister in my dreams. She’s always pretty and smiling and happy…not burned up or hurt at all, and she says, Nikki-tick, you can make it out of this. You’re not one to be wanting to give up, so tell Olivia about those sleeping pills you found after Mr. and Mrs. Estevez passed on. And tell her about the knife with the serrated blade in the bottom drawer of your dresser, under the red blanket. And I say back, Quit bossin’ me, you always liked to do that and who made you the queen of me? But she just grins a big queenly grin and she answers, Put a cork in it, ’cause you’re the last of our family…the Stanwick family of 1733 Westview Avenue, and Dad always said he didn’t raise quitters. So, she says, find your way. And I didn’t know what she meant, until now.”
Ethan was silent; he allowed himself not a peek into her thoughts, but he had an idea of where she was headed.
“If a person doesn’t have hope,” she said, “they die. Inside, first. If they don’t find a way, they’re finished.” Her chocolate-brown eye focused on him. “I don’t want to stay here and wait to die, Ethan. If I’m going out, I want to go trying to find my way. I know you need to get to this mountain in Utah. I know it’s important.” She paused, maybe readying herself if he denied her this path. “Will you let me go with you?”