James Patterson - The Gift

Like, for instance, in this cramped pitch-black space we’ve landed in. For all I know, we might be locked in The One’s shoe closet. The air feels close, stale. My shoulder’s on fire and my head is pounding.

“Whit? Are you here?” I hear a whisper. There’s a gentle shifting around about a dozen feet away.

“Yeah.” I grunt, half dazed by pain. The sweet female voice is warm, soothing.

“You okay?” the voice asks with concern. Celia? I imagine my long-lost girlfriend, kidnapped and killed by the New Order a lifetime ago. Coming closer, leaning over me, about to touch me, heal me, save me…

“Mmmmmm…” I trail off, waiting for Celia’s scent, her arms around me.

“You sound… hungover. ”

Oh. It’s Wisty. Of course.

I groan. “It’s my shoulder. Got dislocated in the portal, I think.”

“Seriously? I slipped right through that one like butter.”

I roll my eyes even though she probably can’t see them. “Guess it was just the right size for your runty witch butt,” I croak out-affectionately, I swear. “So where d’you think we are?”

“How about… a prison? Seems like our favorite crib these days.”

I wasn’t so sure. “No. This smell-it’s not the smell of a prison. It’s something… good. Something that reminds me of…”

“Home,” we both say in unison.

Wisty releases a small flame from her fingertip to give us some light. I’m impressed at how she’s learning to control her hot little temper and putting her talent to good use. In the old days, I used to be the accomplished star around town-MVP varsity football player, plus a top-ranked runner and swimmer-while Wisty was mostly cutting class. Now she’s this hotshot witch who can glow, morph, zap, and do other cool stuff. Just not necessarily on command.

In the dim light I see just enough to make out my sister’s shape and stacks of cardboard boxes labeled INCINERATE. “Books,” Wisty says reverently, paging through a few volumes from unsealed boxes. With my good arm I gingerly poke into a crate and spy titles by all kinds of famous authors, from B. B. White to Roy Royce.

“Looks like a book-burning shipment,” I guess. The New Order is in the process of destroying just about every known book in the occupied Overworld written before the takeover.

A stabbing pain rips through my bad shoulder, and I wince. “Speaking of burning… you gonna help me pop my shoulder back in, Wist?”

“That’s positively revolting,” she says, but makes her way over to me anyway. “You need to learn a spell for that, Brother. You wizard types are supposed to be good at that kind of stuff, right?”

“It’s worth a shot, I guess. Just give me a hand with my journal, okay?” Dad gave me this blank book before we were taken away that awful night so many months ago, and I carry it with me everywhere. (Wisty carts around an old drumstick/wand that Mom gave her.) Most of the time my book’s blank and I use it to write in-usually sad love poems for Celia. But sometimes it fills with magazines, maps, whole works of literature… or, if we’re lucky, spells. I think wizards are supposed to be able to control what comes when, but so far it’s basically a crapshoot.

Wisty takes it out of my pack and helps me flip through the pages for any sort of injury-healing spell, and we finally come up with this mouthful: Voron klaktu scapulati.

“Sounds like devilspeak to me!” Wisty quips, impersonating a crotchety old lady talking about rock music. But the most amazing warmth spreads through my shoulder when I say it, and suddenly-just like that-it’s back in its socket. I raise my arm without a twinge of pain.

“Guess we’ve sold our souls,” I say. “Now let’s figure out where the heck we are and how to get back to Freeland.”

As we make our way to the rear of the cramped space, we figure out we’re inside a shipping container. I grab a few books for the kids back at Resistance headquarters- The Blueprints of Bruno Genet and The Thirst Tournament, among others.

“You ready to face what’s out there?” I ask as we reach the door.

“Or who’s out there,” Wisty echoes warily. “Lemme get focused, in case I have to light up or something.”

On the count of three, we roll up the container door.

And there, staring right at us, are… our parents.

Whit

WELL, AT LEAST it’s their heads anyway.

Our parents’ photos are on a twenty-foot billboard, their faces looking lost and lonely in this abandoned rail yard. And below their mug shots are words that never cease to chill our bones:

THREE MILLION B.N. REWARD

For Information Leading to

the Apprehension and Arrest of

BENJAMIN ALLGOOD and ELIZA ALLGOOD

for Heinous Crimes Against Humanity

and the New Order

Text messages to “Informant2020”

or visit your local N.O. Intelligence Office

Sure, we know our parents are wanted criminals-for the same bogus reasons we are. But having it in black and white for all the world to see-and slapping the pathetic price of three million beans on their heads!-is a cruel reminder that this nightmare may never come to a happy end.

Wisty, as usual, reads my mind and throws me a semihopeful bone. “They’re still free,” she points out quietly.

“At least they were, ” I say, “whenever this poster was put up.” The paper does look a little weathered-faded, frayed, and even torn at the edges. We both fall silent as the powerful smell of aging books’ brittle pages-full of dreams, stories, tragedies, laughter, and imagination-seems to swirl out from the open door of the trailer and smother us with the bittersweet memory of home.

How can you make peace with something when you don’t even know what that “something” is? We can’t know whether our parents are alive or dead or being interrogated in a New Order prison or… banished to the Shadowland like Celia. Are they suffering? Is there anything we can do about it? Or are we as helpless and useless as I feel right now?

I punch the billboard so hard my fist goes right through the pressboard backing.

Then I pull my hand out and try to pretend it didn’t happen. Wisty gives me a concerned look, and I shrug. I’m sure my knuckles are bleeding, but I don’t feel a thing.

I glance at her worried, grief-strained face and quickly look away. I have an urge to hug her, but I need to show her that I’m not letting my emotions take over. I swallow a golf ball-size lump in my throat and take Wisty’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

There are no people on the outskirts of this eerie town. Just broken windows in warehouses. Streets strewn with rubble. The only new construction appears to be enormous video billboards and loudspeaker towers.

As we make our way to the town center, I imagine what it might have once been like here. Quaint. I see a redbrick high school, jungle gyms, a park with a gazebo, an overturned tricycle. A pang of sadness grips me. It reminds me of our old town-church steeples, neighborhood grocery stores, and actual trees.

Now I’m even more homesick. For Mom, Dad, home-even school. A little.

“I wonder where everybody is,” Wisty whispers.

“I don’t,” I answer, maybe a little too quickly. “I mean… I don’t really want to know.”

And then I hear this: “You don’t?… don’t?… don’t?… don’t?… Why, Whit?”

I whirl my head around. Wisty stares at me.

There was definitely a voice. And it wasn’t Wisty’s. Or mine.