Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“Absolutely not.”

“We need your help.”

“I am needed here.”

“We need you.”

“I am needed here.”

“By your mayor or your mother?”

“I am needed here.” He feels something rising inside him — boiling, spilling over. If it was a taste, it would be bile. If it had a color, it would be red. “Don’t make me upset. I’m getting upset.”

The ceiling seems to lower and the stone pillars to crowd around him like bars. The masked figures sneak closer, knot around him. His breath is whistling through his bared teeth. He is blinking back tears. He imagines that beneath their clothes are bones, that they are a horde of skeletons beckoning him into an open grave.

“Or what?” the voice says. “You’ll call for help? No one can hear you. We are asking you nicely. But we don’t have to ask you at all. We can make you—”

He tries not to let happen what happens next, but he cannot stop himself. His hands rise, unbidden, as if separate from him. Something takes form on his mouth, not words but sounds no one else would recognize, long vowels and flat, hard consonants uttered with speed and volume unlike him.

He feels a woof inside him, as fire makes when it finds a pocket of oxygen, and he can feel a heat in his hands. He hurls it — he does not know a better way to describe it than this, as if the heat were a heavy ball — at the figure across from him. The room brightens. The figure flies backward, as if dragged by an invisible wire, until stopped by a stone pillar. He cannot be sure over the thunder of his own voice, but he believes he hears a woman screaming.

She — yes, it is a she — writhes against the column and cries out, tells him to stop, calls him by name. “No, Lewis! Stop!” But he does not. He is outside himself, taken over by some current he only moderately understands. When he breathes, it is with a concussion of heat, and when he sees, it is through a scrim of hot, floating sparks, as if he is burning up inside. Her feet rise off the ground — she is suspended in the air — her arms lashing as if she might cast off whatever grips her. Her mask peels away from her face, and he sees then the copper-colored hair, sees the face twisted in pain. Clark.

He goes silent and drops his hands, and in doing so releases her. She falls heavily to the floor, a knot of limbs. She coughs and gasps for air.

Lewis feels a sudden exhaustion, as if all the energy in his body is spiraling down some pipe, and he knows he must escape this place before he collapses himself.

He looks at the masked figures around him to see if they will test him. But they are retreating, clutching and tripping over each other, falling back onto the bikes, bringing down a shelf of stuffed animals, and so he brushes past them contemptuously.

THERE HAS ALWAYS been something different about Lewis.

When they were children, playing the drum game, Thomas could not understand how Lewis so expertly pursued him, despite his blindfold, always stepping around holes or over piles of excrement, climbing ladders, navigating alleyways, so that sometimes he was accused of cheating, peeking. But he wasn’t. He just had a way, if he concentrated deeply, of seeing without his eyes.

There were other things, too. The way he occasionally dreamed things before they happened — a conversation, a dropped dish, an illness. The way he sometimes saw colors around people, like windblown shawls, green, red, purple, the occasional black. When he told his mother this, she would silence him, put a finger to his lips, telling him the fevers were to blame, telling him not to say anything to anyone else. Especially his father.

His father did not have time for him, but when he did — when his eyes seemed by accident to settle on him — they inevitably narrowed. If crying, Lewis needed to toughen up. If struggling with a stuck door, he needed to thicken out. If reading books, he needed to get outside and express interest in the things other boys his age cared about — fistfights, slingshots, hunting rats, chasing girls, building things. Lewis wasn’t leadership material, his father said. He wasn’t someone others wished to be.

Lewis could endure his teasing and scolding, but not the hate, not the biting spittle-flecked words when his father discovered what he was capable of. There was the time, when he was seven, he could turn the pages of a book or nudge a bird off a high ledge or roll a ball by merely sweeping his hand through the air, for which his father kept him locked in his room for days. There was the time, when he was nine, he built a mechanical beetle that helicoptered its wings and flew a fifteen-foot circle before returning to his hand, after which his father crushed it beneath his heel. There was the time, when he was twelve, that he told his father not to ride in a parade because something bad would happen; and then something bad did happen when an assassin’s arrow took him in the shoulder: his father came home not to thank Lewis but to slap him so hard he left a red and then purple and then yellow slash across his face.

Lewis spent so much of his time in the Dome’s library, climbing ladders, pulling books off shelves to study. He loved novels like Peter Pan, Lord of the Flies, The Wizard of Oz , stories about escape, about worlds within worlds. And he loved histories as well, pretending himself back in time, learning the mechanics of how people and their countries had risen and fallen so many times before. But he favored science, especially physics, the motion and energy of the world.

He likes things that are quantifiable, that can be labeled and understood logically. This is why he was drawn to a book called The Evolutionary Ladder . He found it in the Dome’s library and it concerned the next big step, what might happen to humans in the coming centuries. It spoke at length about a film and comic book character named Tony Stark, who developed a robotic suit that made him into the hero Iron Man. The suit was the equivalent of an exoskeleton, something that offered a shell of defense while also enhancing strength and speed, allowing Stark to hurl cars or punch through walls or blast through the sky with rocket boosters. For years, the army had been chasing something similar, an enhancing armor. Though their version — at the time only a prototype in a lab — did not make a soldier super . It made him more efficient, able to do better the things he already did, like carry gear weighing more than one hundred pounds and decrease musculoskeletal injuries. It wasn’t about rocket boosters. It was about basic augmentation. As if hurrying along evolution to suit the soldiers’ tasks. There were other examples. Such as a hundred-thousand-dollar battery-powered exoskeleton that helped a man, paralyzed below the waist, walk again — and even finish a marathon, though it took him twenty hours. And a technology — called electroencephalography, built into a pair of goggles — that could sense signals in the brain associated with the unconscious recognition of danger, a threat-warning system that would blend mind with machine to enhance defensive response.

“You don’t need much of an imagination,” the author wrote, “to see that humans will continue to adapt to these technologies by developing ever-more sophisticated means of neurological control. The day will then inevitably come when some people have the ability to control such machinery with only their thoughts. The mind becomes a muscle, able to wirelessly interface with objects separate from the body. This is our next leap as humans,” the book concluded, “so that several centuries from now the seeming magic of telekinetics will be reality.”

Sometimes that made a kind of sense to him. When he felt a headache coming on and a crack reached suddenly across a window. When he took a breath and a candle across the room snuffed out. When he snapped his fingers and a pencil rolled off a desk. Maybe his mind was like the world: sometimes certain things came together by chance and by fate — like the sparking of electrons, the merging of species, the mutation of a virus — and modified the rules.