Just four blocks down from the Tenor Building, the city dropped away – briefly, incompletely, but also definitely. People had perfected pretending not to see high-rises sneaking through the broad treetops, ignoring the bright honking of traffic, only semi-muffled by the bushes. At the deepest parts of the park, sure, it was totally a different world, but frankly those were a bit unsettling. What most people needed was just little bit of border between nature and city, just enough to submerge one in order to lift the other over it, like siblings in a pool.
Or so Decon said. Wes found parks themselves unsettling. As far he knew, there wasn’t a reason for this, and looking for reasons unguided by professional therapists seemed… bad. But maybe he was supposed to do that, now. It wasn’t clear.
He took his notebook out of his pocket and wrote it down, to ask next time he saw Dr. Hardwell, but that meant he almost lost Decon – who surged ahead with the barely contained glee of Dorothy skipping through Munchkin Land – and Firmament, who trailed behind him. If they weren’t careful he ran into bushes.
Wes ran up close enough to put an arm between Firmament and the shrubbery; without touching him, Firmament followed the curve until he was traveling up the path again. Falling into step beside him, Wes decided that was, indeed, Decon’s voice trying to reach them through the leaves.
“…anyway nobody’s here now, so it’s perfect,” Decon said, appearing like an elf from a solid wall of plants.
Firmament stopped when Wes stopped. They stood there. Stopped.
Grinning, Decon waved them forward. “Through here.”
It wasn’t as hard to push through as Wes was expecting; maybe that had once been the path in, or it had been worn down enough that it was now. Either way, there wasn’t another obvious path out, once he got in the clearing. At the back of an enormous stone, it seemed as if the space grew up accidentally, in the shadow of the rock. A good amount of grass stretched around the edges, fenced by different trees and plants, but most of it was a wide gravelly dirt patch.
Firmament had followed him through well enough. Wes beat some of the leaves off his clothes. Decon took Firmament’s arm, directed him to the center of the dirt patch, and faced him towards the rock. Then he swept his foot over the dirt, picking up any rocks big enough for it to catch on and pull up out of the ground. Once he had a handful, he walked to a shelf in the rock, and carefully lined them up, like bottles for target practice. Then he walked back to where Wes and Firmament stood, hands on his hips.
“Okay – so it’s like this,” he pointed out at the rocks. “My theory is that Firmament feels more like himself when he gets to use his powers.”
“Abilities,” Wes said.
“So we gotta encourage him to use his abilities,” Decon continued. “It’s like a part of him – like it’s like a part of all of us – and it’s a part he definitely hasn’t been using as much before as he is now, and, like, now he’s definitely more like himself, I guess, since I don’t really know what he was like before, but, I mean… like, moving and stuff, so…” but Decon seemed to run out of words. He shrugged, turning to Wes. “What do you think?”
Wes looked at the rocks on the ledge. He looked at Firmament, who appeared to be looking maybe two feet higher than the rocks on the ledge – so at the blank rock face. He looked at Decon, and tried to gauge what exactly it was Decon was asking.
“I’m not an Islander,” he said.
Decon squinted one eye, thinking, and then said, “Yeah, but you’re on the team. And you get what I’m saying?”
Looking at the ground, Wes reflected that he felt like he didn’t get what anyone was saying very often. That seemed more like a general complaint, and Decon was obviously interested in the issue at hand. Whatever that was. But also: he was on the team.
“You want him to use his abilities,” Wes guessed.
“Yeah!” Decon’s animation returned – he hopped once in place, clapping his hands together like he was getting ready to throw a baseball. “Yeah, we have to encourage him to use his abilities because it’ll make him feel more like himself.”
“Yes,” Wes said. He understood, and he wondered if Decon understood. Then again, was it Decon's job to understand? Firmament was Wes' responsibility. He desperately wanted to take his notebook out, but it seemed not the time. “How are we going to encourage him to use his abilities?”
Decon stopped, fist in palm held up against his chest, and looked at the rocks on the ledge for a long moment. “I don’t know.”
Decon turned back to Wes. “What does using his abilities even look like?”
“I don’t know,” Wes answered.
“I don’t even know if rocks are, like, the right thing,” Decon muttered. “Can it be rocks? Dang. I don’t know. I don’t know if it can even be rocks. Do you know what it can, like, be?”
Wes hesitated. “Well,” he said.
Decon’s head whipped back around to face him. He nodded.
“Concrete is rocks, sort of.”
Decon nodded again, but nothing in his expression changed. And then he didn’t say anything.
“His last team was crushed under concrete.”
“Oh, yeah,” Decon said. “I shoulda read the folder.”
We shook his head; he hadn’t read it – all of it, anyway – either, but he had paid attention to that particular incident. He was on the team, now, after all.
Decon shrugged. “Reading isn’t really my thing.”
“I can read,” Wes said, and then wondered why he said it – it was, maybe a remarkable thing to him, given how little he had been taught, but that came from his time with his Father and he spoke about that people got very uncomfortable – but Decon just smiled broadly at him. “I haven’t read that.”
“Yeah,” Decon said. “I should have thought about that before I came. And maybe brought it? Can you bring stuff like that with you? It’s probably not a good idea. Is it classified? Whatever – I should ask Seth, maybe?”
He pulled out his phone, but hesitated, looking at Wes. Wes could only look back, deeply unsure of what it was they were looking at one another for.
“Nah – but – do you think I should ask Seth?”
“Does Seth know the answer?”
“I mean – I didn’t want to get her involved – she’s got a lot of work. And I thought, you’re our Firmament guy, and you’re in charge of training and stuff, so I should definitely ask you to come, but she’s got like… meetings. And I think we need to be... I dunno, we need to be, like, independently responsible contributors or something, right?”
“I should know the answer,” Wes said, plunged in the sudden cold of having fallen short. It wasn’t a new reaction, it just didn’t make sense; failure didn’t matter as much now as it once had. This was already in his notebook.
“No! No, no, no, dude,” Decon put his hands up, stepping forward, only to backtrack as Wes drew away. “Sorry – I didn’t think you should know how to do this, but I thought you should know I was doing it – right? You see, like training – like I don’t want to mess up your regimen of training by adding in extra stuff. That’s all. It’s not all on you to know everything about him. I could have read the file, I just didn’t think about it.”
Wes was fairly certain Decon was trying to make him feel better, so he tried to feel better, regardless of his inarguable, complete, unfixable failure to do his only job.
“Well – I at least read up on what using his po- abilities looked like, and we know rocks should be okay,” Decon said. He put his hand out, again, towards the rocks on the ledge. “And we know he’s supposed to move… but I guess… like, how?”
Wes put his hand up, too. Decon looked at Firmament, then encouragingly at Wes. Wes plucked at his sleeve, and repeated the gesture of putting his hand up.
“Firmament.”
Without otherwise seeming to move – not even shifting his eyes – Firmament raised his right hand, much as Wes had.
They waited.
“I wish they had better descriptions,” Decon said. He glanced up at the sun, wiping sweat off his forehead.
“Okay, wait,” Decon said.
He walked to the rocks, picked one up, and – holding it extended as if it were going to bite him – walked over to them. When he got closer Wes realized he was making a kind of quiet jet-engine ‘flying’ noise with his mouth. He put the rock first under Firmament’s palm – but nothing happened – then against the tip of his fingers – still nothing – then, sort of, balanced it awkwardly on the web between his fingers on top of his hand. The rock rolled off.
“Dang,” Decon said.
Wes put his hand down. It was tiring. He wondered if it was tiring for Firmament; they never had, as far as he knew, tested his endurance in that way. Maybe they should know what his endurance was. Maybe that was inhumane.
Maybe that was a notebook question.
Decon bent to pick up the rock, and instead of just standing back up, glanced over his shoulder and tossed the rock towards Firmament’s hand. It glanced off, but then fell onto his head.
“Ow,” he said, laughing, though he could not possibly have been hurt by a rock that size. “I deserved it.”
This time he picked up the rock and started tossing it in the air, catching it as it fell. “How can we get him to think about it as something he should… react to?”
“We could… throw the rocks at him,” Wes said, though it seemed kind of obvious.
“Haha, no,” Decon said, slightly drawing out the ‘o’. “But that’s kinda what I was thinking about. But Seth would probably think it’s a bad idea – ‘cause it is. But it wouldn’t be, like, hard.” He tossed the rock up and caught it one last time. He glanced at Firmament, then sent the rock up in an easy, arcing lob. It bounced off his forehead.
“Okay, that still felt kinda bad,” Decon said, but he picked up the rock again.
Wes raised eyebrows at him, since Decon’s tongue was sticking out of his mouth as if he was still thinking about it.
“Yeah, but I mean,” Decon said, chuckling, “he doesn’t catch stuff, right?”
Wes was saying ‘no’ when Decon lobbed the rock again. His mouth was still ‘no’ shaped when Firmament caught it.
Decon threw his arms out like an umpire calling safe. Wes shut his mouth.
“Left hand,” Decon said, pointing eagerly. “Left hand…”
Nodding, Wes tugged at Firmament’s sleeve again, to get him to put his right hand down. The left, still holding the rock, he encouraged him to hold out.
“Dude,” Decon said, quietly. Carefully, his eyes on Firmement’s, he reached forward, and unfolded his fingers from around the stone. Equally gently, he held it against Firmament’s palm as he turned his hand outward, and repeated his walk (and the flying noise), slowly, to the ledge, where he replaced the rock. Waiting there a moment, hands on hips, he watched.
But nothing happened. With a visible sigh, Decon picked up a different rock from the set, and walked back to where they stood.
“I think it’s important it needs to be over distance,” he said. He tossed the rock up and caught it. “This seems automatic, you know – it’s good, but it’s not exactly powers – and it isn’t a great idea to just hit him with rocks until he responds. They always talked about ‘acting a distance’ and ‘force over distance’ when they’re talking about what he can do, so I think it’s important that it’s farther away than a little toss.”
Wes nodded. “What does that mean?”
“You know, I don’t know,” Decon said. “It just doesn’t seem super special – I mean, acting at a distance. I think a lot of stuff acts at a distance.” He tossed the rock and caught it. “Electricity.”
“Needs a conductor.”
“What, even, like, lightening?”
“Air.”
Decon pursed his lips, nodding. “I know that when I think about circuits and stuff. It’s weird. It’s weird that it only works one way, isn’t it?”
Wes shrugged. He had no idea what Decon was talking about. “I don’t know what is normal for thinking.” He was almost certain that wasn’t the right way to say it.
“Gravity?” Decon asked.
Wes shrugged again. “I don’t know how gravity works.”
“Aren’t you getting tutoring from Mr. Tenor’s people?”
Wes nodded; he was, again, completely lost in terms of the conversation, but, he realized, being lost was very comfortable. He expected to be lost. And Decon had a strangely comfortable way of losing him.
“Man, do you think I could get in on that?” Decon asked. He approached, but he was still watching the rock as he tossed it up in the air, so it seemed unlikely he was about to try anything. Plus Decon didn’t seem like the type to suddenly lash out. Which maybe meant he needed more watching. But again: strangely comfortable. Anyone was the type, but Decon didn’t seem the type.
“I know, I know,” Decon said, even though Wes had said nothing. “I already took a lot of courses and stuff, but,” he almost lost the rock, but ended up catching it, “you know, this is like, private tutoring with super qualified people. I feel like maybe it would help more? Like, I’m not really set up to prosper in a normal classroom environment. I’m pretty sure that’s the exact phrase one of the counselors used.”
He grinned at Wes, and missed the rock again, which bounced off his fingertips onto the ground. The ground made a very large scrunching noise. They turned towards the boulder – all the little rocks had fallen from their ledge. It was about four feet closer. A massive pile of sod now sat at its edge.
They turned to Firmament.
Wes had a fair amount of experience dealing with people with concussions, and if he had to make a call on what had changed in Firmament’s expression, he might say it went from coma to concussion. Maybe he was also thinking about whether he should give Firmament a concussion, and that’s why he thought of it. Because Firmament’s left hand, stretched out, palm turned upwards, fingers clawed into the empty air, tendons standing out like oak roots, yanked back just fractionally – maybe an inch – and the boulder groaned and cracked and moved maybe another six inches towards them.
Wes raised his fist, but Decon put a flat hand out as if pushing it down with his palm, so Wes relented.
“I think that’s enough,” Decon said, softly.
Firmament’s grip on the air eased. Sweat had broken out on his forehead – Wes was pretty sure he had never seen Firmament sweat, but maybe that was just existing in perpetual air conditioning. Some of the vagueness that had left his expression returned, but shallowly, unevenly. He squeezed his hand in the air one more time – this time nothing happened – and put it down.
“Noodles,” Firmament said.
Wes put his fist back down again.
“That’s…” Decon said, “…new.”
“There’s yelling,” Wes said, because there was yelling.
“What?” Decon asked, still staring at Firmament, who could only marginally be said to be looking back.
“There’s people on the other side of that rock,” Wes explained. “They are yelling. The rock moved.”
“Oh, shit,” Decon said. “Let’s go.”
Firmament’s hand clenched in the air, face drawing tight then releasing. “Noodles,” he said, more confidently.
“Screaming,” Wes said, to a still and gape-mouthed Decon.
“Yup,” Decon said, and grabbed Firmament’s arm and they dashed out of the clearing. Once on the path, he turned back to look at Wes, who had lagged behind in case of pursuit. He was grinning wildly, gave a little thumbs up, thumped Firmament once on the back and turned in a little circle before jogging ahead.
Firmament followed, some of his semi-shambolic gait returning, as if he his body was throwing off whatever limited consciousness he had just betrayed. A mob could have been forming behind Wes at that very moment, and he wouldn’t have noticed. Threats had to be reassessed.
Because, fuck. He was on the team.