The Power(24)

Thinking this, she feels very far from the table, where Daniel’s mouth is still flapping open and closed like a goldfish. She is in a high and lofty realm, a place where the lungs fill with ice crystals and everything is very clear and clean. It scarcely matters what is actually happening. She could kill them. That is the profound truth of it. She lets the power tickle at her fingers, scorching the varnish on the underside of the table. She can smell its sweet chemical aroma. Nothing that either of these men says is really of any great significance, because she could kill them in three moves before they stirred in their comfortably padded chairs.

It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

She speaks quite suddenly, across Daniel, sharp like the knock at a door. ‘Don’t waste my time with this, Daniel,’ she says.

He’s not her superior. They are equals. He can’t fire her. He’s talking as if he could.

She says, ‘You and I both know that no one has an answer yet. If you’ve got a great idea, let’s hear it. Otherwise …’

She lets it dangle. Daniel opens his mouth as if to say something and then closes it again. Under her fingertips, on the underside of the table, the varnish is softening, curling, crumbling to fall in soft flakes on to the thick-pile carpet.

‘I didn’t think so,’ she says. ‘Let’s work together on this one, OK, buddy? No sense throwing each other to the wolves.’

Margot is thinking about her future. You’re gonna pump my gas someday, Daniel. I’ve got big plans.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah.’

She thinks, That is how a man speaks. And that is why.





Rudimentary weapon, approximately one thousand years old. The wires are intended to conduct the power. Possibly used in battle or for punishment. Discovered in a gravesite in old Westchester.





EIGHT YEARS TO GO





* * *





Allie



Not very many miracles are required. Not for the Vatican, not for a group of highly strung teenage girls cooped up together for months and in fear of their lives. You don’t need so many miracles. Two is plenty. Three’s an abundance.

There is a girl, Luanne. She’s very pale, with red hair and a dusting of freckles across her cheeks. She’s only fourteen. She arrived three months before and she’s a particular friend of Gordy’s. They share a bed in the dorm room. For warmth. ‘It gets awful cold at nights,’ says Gordy, and Luanne smiles, and the other girls laugh and nudge each other in the ribs.

She’s not well, hasn’t been since before her power came in. And no doctor can help her. There is a thing that happens to her when she gets excited, or scared, or laughs too much; her eyes roll back in her head and she falls to the ground wherever she is and starts to shake like she’ll crack her own back. ‘You have to just hold her,’ Gordy says. ‘Just put your arms around her shoulders and hold her until she wakes. She’ll wake by herself, you just have to wait.’ She often sleeps for an hour or more. Gordy has sat with her, arm around Luanne’s shoulders, in the refectory at midnight or in the gardens at 6 a.m., waiting for her.

Allie has a feeling about Luanne. A tingling sense of something.

She says: Is it this one?

The voice says: I’m thinking so.

One night, there’s a lightning storm. It starts way out at sea. The girls watch it with the nuns, standing on the deck at the back of the convent. The clouds are blue-purple, the light is hazy, the lightning strikes one, two, three times on the face of the ocean.

It gives you an itchy feeling in your skein to watch a lightning storm. All the girls are feeling it. Savannah can’t help herself. After a few minutes, she lets go an arc into the wood of the deck.

‘Stop that,’ says Sister Veronica. ‘Stop that at once.’

‘Veronica,’ says Sister Maria Ignacia, ‘she didn’t do any harm.’

Savannah giggles, lets off another little jolt. It’s not that she couldn’t stop it if she really tried. It’s just that there’s something exciting about the storm, something that makes you want to join in.

‘No meals for you tomorrow, Savannah,’ says Sister Veronica. ‘If you cannot control yourself in the slightest, our charity does not extend to you.’

Sister Veronica has already had one girl thrown out who would not stop fighting on the convent grounds. The other nuns have ceded this to her; she can pick and choose those in whom she detects the Devil working.

But ‘no meals tomorrow’ is a harsh sentence. Saturday is meatloaf night.

Luanne tugs on Sister Veronica’s sleeve. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘She didn’t mean it.’

‘Don’t touch me, girl.’

Sister Veronica pulls her arm away, gives Luanne a little shove back.

But the storm has already done something to Luanne. Her head jerks back and to the side in the way they all know. Her mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out. She falls backwards, smack on to the deck. Gordy runs forward, and Sister Veronica blocks the way with her cane.

‘Leave her,’ says Sister Veronica.

‘But, Sister …’

‘We have done quite enough pandering to this girl. She should not have welcomed the thing into her body and, as she has done, she will have to deal with the consequences.’