One (One Universe) Page 10

  Leni’s arm shakes and her voice along with it. “Daniel?” she says, and Daniel has a smile playing at his lips, and then the flames fully engulf his hand and snake up his arm, licking through the knit of his sweater.

  Leni gives a gasp, breaks contact, jumps back, and stares at her hand. It’s not red, not raw, not burned. She touches it to her own face and doesn’t pull it away immediately. It’s not even hot. Leni pitches forward and grabs Daniel’s forearm, inspecting it for sizzling skin.

  “Oh, man,” Daniel says, shaking his head at Elias, the same smile on his lips. “Oh, man. How did you…”

  Elias takes a long breath, in and out, and then answers, “I have a theory. I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” he says.

  Of course he has. While I’ve been basking in sunlight, eating brownies, and having dreams of flying. Without him.

  “I don’t think Ones are just Ones. I think there’s, like, this hole. In the code maybe. There’s a hole because there’s something we could fill it with.”

  Daniel nods. “Keep going.”

  I listen just as attentively as he does. This reminds me of the talk with Mom.

  “The genetic code. And the hole sends out signals to someone whose code is close to what is supposed to be filling it. Compatible Ones. Normal people — or normal Supers, I mean — would have both the powers needed. But we’re not normal Supers. So our bodies are looking for another body that it can adapt to. Combine powers with, I guess.”

  “So she completes you? You’ve gone all soft, man,” Daniel teases, even though his voice sounds uncertain.

  Leni shuffles her feet and smiles at the ground, biting her bottom lip. I’m pretty sure that if it wasn’t so dark I could see her cheeks turning bright red.

  My heart rushes, but it’s not from excitement. It’s more panicked this time. I’ve known Elias for a week and a half. I am sixteen years old, and he is handsome and kind, but if someone told me that for sure he was my other half, I would throw up.

  “I don’t know. I suspect that another One who could make herself weightless might have this effect on me. Just like another One who pushes air or can create a pressure vortex might make Merrin fly, or another indestructible could make our girl Len into a human blowtorch.”

  I don’t say a word. I’m trying to decide if I want to be the only One who affects him in that way. And whether I want him to be the only One who does the same for me.

  Thankfully, Leni breaks the silence with a sniffle, then a short laugh. She’s smiling and crying.

  “Leni? Helen. You okay?” Daniel’s voice is soft, concerned. He pulls the arm she’s been inspecting from her hands and loops it around her neck, hugging her to him. She covers her laughing mouth with her other hand, then hiccups. She falls into him and throws her arms around his neck. His grin is so wide, probably a bigger smile than I’ve ever seen from him, and then he closes his eyes and turns his face into her neck.

  Suddenly, I feel like I’m intruding on something. I know Elias feels the same way because he looks down at the ground and grabs my hand at the same time. For a second, the warmth of his skin distracts me, and I don’t care one bit about Leni and Daniel, and then I hear Daniel say, in such a low voice, “Let’s try it again.”

  Leni pulls back, arms still around his neck, like they’re slow dancing or something. She steps back and holds both his hands in both of hers.

  For the first few seconds, it’s a low burn, orange-red flames snaking up their arms again. Then the flames start to get lighter and brighter and jump out from their elbows. Bright yellow flames tinged with white and blue heat shoot up three, four, five feet above them, forming wide columns in the air.

  The fire roars, but above it I can hear Leni’s laugh, taking on a new tone from deep in her belly. Daniel’s laughing, too, and they look at each other like nothing and no one else exists in the whole world.

  Elias squeezes my hand and says in my ear, “Let’s get out of here.”

  I can’t tell whether it’s his warm breath or the way he says the words, but either way, I totally melt with his lips that close to my ear, especially when we’re not flying, when they don’t need to be.

  All I can think about is how I want to take this straight to the Hub, to see if they could make it stick. Then I remind myself that my fantasies about the Hub could be just that — fantasies, stories I’ve been telling myself even though Mom’s told me a million times they’re impossible. I don’t even know if the Hub has thought about Ones combining.

  What I do know is that the space where my arm touches Elias’s still feels charged, and the buzz that made us fly is only a small part of that. The rest is warmth, excitement. Wanting to be nearer to him.

  Hundreds of bright white stars pin a black velvet curtain to the great arching dome of sky. All of a sudden, my eye catches a ripple of emerald green at the corner of the horizon.

  “Elias!” I gasp, tugging at his hand. When he sees it, the biggest grin spreads across his face, and his hand wraps around mine, warm and steady.

  The Northern Lights stretch and twist upward, like lazy coral, jade, and crimson flames from an impossible fire somewhere below the horizon. I clear my throat.

  “It’s that geomagnetic storm thing,” I say. “A big solar wind — when a stream of charged particles breaks away from the Sun’s gravity. When they run into the Earth’s thermosphere…”

  “The oxygen and nitrogen atoms de-excite at different frequencies. The unique combinations make unique colors.”

  “Yeah.” I grin. “You’re a sky geek too, huh?”

  “You could say that.” He laughs. We watch for a while, smiling stupidly at the Lights. “I really don’t know anything more about this whole Ones combining thing than you do,” he says. “But I do like you. I mean, I like being with you.”

  I fight to keep the corners of my mouth from turning up. I count five breaths in and out, then say, “I’ve wanted to fly my whole life. Dreamed about it.”

  “Me too. And also about being not so alone at Nelson High. So this has been a pretty good week, personally.”

  I start laughing, full-on laughing, even though it brings the headache back and makes my ribs ache. Before I can even think about what I’m doing, I turn and smile at him.

  When our eyes meet, it’s like I’m looking into his soul. I’m a goner. I reach out and grab his waist, which feels so natural now I can hardly believe it, and pull myself toward him. We alternately press our lips together and smile at each other, cheeks pushing against cheeks, until our headaches are gone, or at least forgotten.

  TWELVE

  The next couple of weeks fly by in a haze. Go to school. Rush through homework at lunch. Suffer through every other art class, sitting close to Elias but never close enough. Skip one every other week to fly. And kiss. And fly some more. Skip study hall every day to do the same.

  The afterpain of flight is brutal at first. It’s a slicing feeling, like a knife shimmying beneath the skin on my back, all the way up through my arms and neck, then a pounding in my head, and an aching heaviness. The first few days, we have to lie down to recover. After that, we just stagger a bit or have to bend over to catch our breath. After a couple of weeks, it’s like shaking off a trip and a skinned knee. Elias thinks that whatever makes the powers of Ones work together forces our bodies to grow and stretch — maybe even all the way down to the genes. I’ve studied some stuff on epigenetics, the adaptability of existing genes for in-generation evolution, and that makes sense to me. The fact that the pain lessens each time is proof, at least in my head.

  I can’t remember the last time I’ve been pissed off. I haven’t slammed a door in weeks. I shuttle Michael and Max to soccer practice without complaining because most of the time Elias sits in the front seat next to me. I play the drums sometimes — the ones in my garage, if I don’t mind Elias standing there looking at me. If I want him to play, we hang out in the VanDyne concert hall, but when we do that I normally play slower, softer, so I can hear him
play, too. Now it’s happiness driving the sticks instead of anger.

  Over the next few weeks, I scan the news feed every morning for any information about what they’re doing at the Hub. When nothing about Fisk shows up for a while, my eyes perk up at anything that could refer to the internship — an experiment, a new hire, the gap program…anything.

  But after so many weeks of him showing up on the front page at the beginning of the year, nothing does now.

  I meet with Mr. Hoffman twice a week during lunch. I never hear him enter the library, and he always slips out again without anyone else noticing.

  All this time, I never get an official communication from the Hub. Not one. I ask questions, try to clarify things. Mr. Hoffman tells me that everything is under wraps, that what we’re doing still isn’t official. That even exactly what they’re doing at the gap program, for the Supers only, isn’t public, and that the board barely approved that.

  The exercises seem pointless, at first — more organic chem problems to work, more models to build, more theoretical situations to run each molecule through. What would its characteristics be in the various spectra: Mass spectrometry? UV? IR? NMR? I jot down the answers faster than Mr. Hoffman can get new questions to me, with such intense concentration my fingers ache from holding the stylus so tightly.

  Late summer turns into fall, and by early October, we’re solidly into hot chocolate and hayride season.

  When I finally get sick of flying over fields, now mostly harvested, we go to Lincoln Park and fly there after closing hours. It’s small, but the blur of red and orange and yellow and green from the trees takes my breath away. When the sky dims to a dark enough blue for twinkling pinholes to cover it, I tilt my head back and try to count the stars, knowing I never can, reveling in how luxurious it feels.

  I let Mom take me shopping and buy lots of cute sweaters and fitted jeans, swinging skirts and tights. I can tell she wants to ask if this is about a boy. I know she knows it’s about Elias. Mom and Dad tell each other everything. But she never does ask about him, and because of that, it’s not annoying to be around her, because I’m happy and she’s not meddling. For the first time in my life, I can just be with Mom.

  I still practice my One. Now, instead of imagining only weightlessness, I also think of Elias, of being with him, when the buzz is strongest. It’s when there’s tension between us — the delicious kind of tension, like when he’s going to kiss me, which is amazing, or when he’s going to grab me and shoot off into the sky, tugging and lifting me until I catch the buzz and fly along with him.

  Now, instead of just floating, I drift a little, so slightly that it might be the wind.

  One night, we walk from my car in his driveway to the edge of our cornfield, silently, like we always do when we know we’re about to fly.

  “What’s the backpack for?” I ask.

  “Surprise.” Elias bends down to kiss the top of my head, breathing in deeply.

  “Why are you always doing that?” My voice sounds annoyed, but I lean into him. In the couple weeks Elias and I have been together, he’s learned to read my body language instead of my voice. Thankfully. It means he understands me. I’m getting a little better at it, too — understanding myself.

  “Um. I like how you smell?” He stands up, looks to the side, and smirks.

  I stick my elbow straight out to the side and hit his ribs. “Weird.”

  “I mean, your shampoo. Your hair always smells so good. And since your head is, like, pretty much at my smell level…”

  “Shut up,” I say softly, floating up to his height and grabbing his face in my hands, slamming a kiss on his mouth. Even my One is good for something with Elias around.

  He wraps his arms around my waist without having to bend down, and the noise he makes leaves my lips tingly. Then he pulls back so his lips move against mine when he talks. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  When he buries his face in my neck, I catch the buzz, and we shoot up into the sky, toward Historic Superior. He pushes the air much more strongly than I can, and he almost always controls the trajectory.

  When I realize how close we’re getting to town, I yell, “Are you crazy?”

  He grins. “Everyone’s at Homecoming,” he reminds me.

  “Go Raiders,” I say, smiling.

  Everyone’s at the big football game, including Leni, who’s cheering, and Daniel, who will go to watch Leni cheer even though he hates football and revelry and painted faces and general high school happiness of any kind. No one will notice us soaring around old town Superior. We’re supposed to be at the game, too, actually. Lying to my parents about what we’re doing is second nature now, but I rationalize that on any given night we’re not doing anything that regular teenagers wouldn’t do — calculus homework, sharing an ice cream cone, making out in a cornfield.

  Except for the flying. The flying is not normal.

  If Mr. Hoffman hadn’t already brought the Hub to me in the Nelson High library, my first reaction would have been to bring this straight to them. But Elias doesn’t suggest that we tell anyone, and his dad works there. I don’t know who’s supposed to know what — all I know is that I want to keep flying with Elias, I want to keep my application for the internship intact, and I don’t know if anyone finding out about the flying would ruin that. So, even though we never talk about it, neither of us tells anyone about the flying either.

  It’s weird, a bit laborious, to haul the backpack with us. Unexpectedly so, but as I think about it, we’re just a couple of floating, air-pushing kids. So it’s basically like we’ve run three miles holding that pack, with only Elias’s muscle to back it up.

  My mind puts it all together — backpack, Homecoming night, not telling me where we’re flying. He’s been planning this for a while. A vague sensation scuttles along my shoulders, setting the hairs at the back of my neck on end. It’s worry, something I haven’t felt with Elias since that night at his house when he wanted to give me the tour. I had to figure out what he really wanted, whether it was really okay to be alone with him. For the first time since then, I feel it again. It kills me. I don’t want to feel that way about Elias.

  We land on the roof of one of the historic houses. If we look out to one side we can see old Superior, but if we turn around we see the fields, the sky above them dripping with colors, so bright they’re almost unreal. The silhouettes of some old phone poles reach, spindly and graceful, into the watercolor backdrop.

  “Which way to do you want to sit?” Elias asks.

  “Do you have to ask?” I grin as I fight to still the trembling in my knees. This time it’s not from the aftereffects of flying. I place my hands gingerly on the shingles below me and settle down, sitting Indian-style, tucking my skirt around my legs. “Away from Superior.”

  Elias smiles, a little sadly, I think, though I can’t understand why. “Of course.” He unzips the backpack and sits down next to me.

  Then he snakes his hand up along my shoulders and down the back of my neck, all the way to the base of my spine. His long fingers clutch at my waist, and his lips press against the sensitive skin just below my ear, then my collarbone. Electricity skitters through me and ties my stomach into knots. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working under the assumption that Elias is different from other boys. But when a boy takes you on a mystery date and the two of you are all alone, it means something, doesn’t it? Means he wants something, the thought of which still reminds me of Sean Cooper, standing over me in the hallway last year.

  Being with Elias, really being with him, would be just as close as flying but wholly different. My stomach twists. I honestly can’t tell whether it’s from anticipation or apprehension. I try to remind myself how much I love being with him, how he makes my heart race when I so much as see him walking toward me in the hallway. I close my eyes and try to lose myself in the breathtaking burnt orange of the sky and the warmth of this boy. I try to tamp down the fear rising in my chest. I want, more than anything, to remember how
he’s always made me feel — like I am absolutely perfect and exactly what he wants, just the way I am.

  I want to because I know he wants me, and I know I want him, and I don’t know what the big deal is. I want to, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t.

  I do know one thing for sure — I’ve never felt afraid with Elias, and I don’t want to start now.

  He holds my face in his hands, and his fingers push through my hair. When the wind blows against my face, I breathe in, trying to center myself.

  This is okay. This is perfect. This is Elias. He would never hurt me.

  His lips part mine, and I deepen the kiss, pushing my chest against his. I try to concentrate on how sweet he tastes and how he makes me feel — like I’m the only person in the whole world.

  But a second later, he moves his hand down my side and under my shirt, his palm hot against my skin, his thumb pressing into my ribs. He leans us back against the slope of the roof. There’s no breeze now; there’s only heat, engulfing my whole body.

  Completely overwhelming me.

  When his fingers move just under the waistband of my skirt and he kisses the hollow of my throat with insistent lips, I push my palms against his chest, just hard enough to get him to stop.

  “What — what are we doing?”

  He pulls back and crinkles his eyebrows, a slight smile on his face. “We’re watching the sunset.”

  “No, I mean…” I sit up. Now that I’m looking down at him, I feel stronger. “What do you want us to be doing?”

  My lip starts to tremble, and tears threaten to spill from my eyes. His expression softens, and he cradles my face in his hand, reaching up to wipe a single escaping tear with his thumb.

  “This is okay, right?” he asks and sits up next to me when more tears roll down my cheeks. “Mer? What’s up?”