Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

And before I can blink, the dirt around us just… vaporises.

Every chunk of soil, every tentacle, every part of Matthew’s wall. It fragments into tiny particles, becoming a huge, billowing cloud of choking dust. Matthew vanishes. Annie and Burr vanish. I can’t see a goddamn thing.

Because of course, Matthew is smart. He might just be a kid, but he’s way smarter than normal.

What do you do if you’re going to lose a fight? You make it impossible for your attackers to find you.

I don’t have time to appreciate the tactical genius, because right then, I lose my balance on my little hoverboard. Coughing, choking, eyes squeezed shut against the stinging dust—

I fall.

They think they’re smarter than him.

That’s what really makes him mad. They thought he was just going to fight and fight and fight, and not see what they were doing. Like he wouldn’t realise they’d try sneak up on him.

Nobody’s smarter than me. Nobody .

He was smart enough to make the dust cloud when he saw what they were trying to do. They probably think he’s still there, instead of where he really is: in the forest, heading away from the camp. He stays low, ducking under ferns and weaving through the trees. They would have probably just kept sending people until he got too tired to fight – and it would have been smart, because he’s tired now, really tired. It would be awesome just to lie down and sleep, but he can’t. Not yet… not when he has a chance to set off the biggest earthquake the world has ever seen.

They’re not going to be ready for it, not even the lady who can do the same stuff he can. The thought makes Matthew angrier still – she shouldn’t have been able to get out the ground. She should have stayed buried .

If she’s still alive after Cascadia, he’ll make her really sorry.

He skids down a short slope on his ass, scraping his hands on a tree branch as he pulls himself up. He stops for a second at the bottom, listens for anyone coming after him. There’s plenty of noise, all right – mostly shouting, and all of it behind him. He’s a little too far away to have any real control over the dust cloud he made, but that’s OK. Dust hangs in the air for a while, and by the time they realise he isn’t there any more, he’ll be long gone.

A smirk worms its way onto his face. He should have buried himself . He could’ve put himself right under the ground with just the tip of his nose poking out. It would have been tricky, all right. He would have had to position the earth just right, so he could breathe, and so they wouldn’t see him. But it would have been awesome. Completely hidden, while they ran around trying to find him.

The ground is mostly flat now – a small clearing in the trees, with a steep drop maybe twenty feet away, on his left. He needs to get as far into the forest as he can. They won’t have read as much as he has, that’s for sure – they won’t know the right way to go. The whole way here, he was on the iPad, reading up on the Olympic National Park, looking at YouTube videos from hikers, browsing survival tips in case they got lost. The ETS zone is to the north-west of the camp, so all he has to do is keep heading in the right direction. He’ll sense it, sooner or later…

A rustle from above him, high in the trees. He spins round, craning his neck, expecting to see the woman who could fly. If anybody could figure out where he’s gone, it’d be her – she was high up, so she might have seen him pop out the cloud of dust and go behind what was left of the building. But there’s nobody – it’s just the wind, hissing through the leaves.

Matthew turns – and Amber is standing right there.

She looks awful. Haggard, exhausted, dirty. But she can help him – she can go find food and water for them, while he figures out the best spot to tap into the ETS zone.

“It’s this way,” he says, pointing at a gap in the trees.

Amber turns, very slightly. Raises the gun she’s holding, gripping it with two hands.

Points it right at him.

Amber has never been good at playing the long con.

Oh, she could make someone believe in her… for a little while. Enough to get a few bucks in her pocket. But she never quite knew how to string someone along, make them believe in her and keep believing her. She could never read those particular angles.

But then Matthew killed the trucker, the one who helped them get out of California. Jocelyn.

It wasn’t the people he might kill in a quake, who he would never meet. It wasn’t someone trying to stop them, like that government agent at the stadium. Jocelyn had been nothing but good to them, and Matthew killed her anyway.

It had broken something inside Amber. She was wrong to think of it as a branch, finally snapping against a hurricane wind. It was more like… like a stone, thrown at a window – one which doesn’t quite break through. The glass cracks and spiderwebs. The light passing through it bounces in strange directions, changing what’s on the other side.

And Amber had seen the angle.

She knew what she had to do.

She would never be able to control Matthew; she was a fool for trying. He was too powerful, too suspicious of her. But there was another way… and it needed every bit of skill she had.

That was what the soldiers hadn’t understood, and the woman, the one like Matthew – the one who’d lifted her into the air, dumped her on the other side of the camp building. You couldn’t take him down by force – not head on. You had to con him, make him believe you were on his side, until you reached the only time where he’d be completely focused – when he’d be utterly oblivious to the world around him.

Right before he caused an earthquake.

As they’d driven up to Washington, Amber had turned the thought over in her head. It had felt awful, poisonous, like holding a rotten fruit in her hands. She’d wondered if there was any other way she could do it – it felt insanely risky, waiting until he was on the verge of causing another quake – but she came to the conclusion that it was the only way.

To save the world, to save herself, Amber would need to pull off the con of her life.

She thought about waiting until he was asleep, but she had a sense that he wouldn’t sleep until it was done. And she wasn’t sure she could do it – stand over her sleeping son, in the dark, and murder him. And if she messed it up…

Driving them off the road was another option. She was in control of the car, after all. But that would kill her as well as him, and if she didn’t get it exactly right, he might survive. The consequences were too awful to contemplate.

Nobody else could do this. Only her. It was her responsibility. It made her feel sick, turning her stomach, but that didn’t stop it being true.

Things might have been different. If she hadn’t slept around like she had, if she’d never ended up at the School, if, if, if. Her whole life has been a series of missed chances, opportunities she didn’t take – or ones she took that she shouldn’t have. It was crazy to think this would be any different.

She’d take Matthew where he needed to go. She wouldn’t fight him. She’d wait until the moment he was locked in, focused on releasing the fault line, and then…

That had nearly made her throw up, right there in the driver’s seat of that hotwired car. The how .

A rock would be best, she supposed – there’d be some of them around, surely? It felt almost poetic – her earth-moving son killed by a rock to the head. That had been the most horrible thought of all. But she couldn’t think what else to do.