C.E. Murphy: Thunderbird Falls

Once more, thanks are due to both my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, and my agent, Jennifer Jackson, for making this a better book; and to cover artist Hugh Syme, whose artwork I am still delighted to have my book judged by.

They are further due to Silkie, for research above and beyond the call of duty (especially since there was no call of duty at all!); to Trip, for making me think harder than is my natural inclination; and to Anna, who is responsible for any geography I got right in Seattle.

As for the rest of it, if I started listing my support structure in detail, there wouldn’t be room for the book. Still, to my family, especially Ted and Shaun, who respectively keep me fed and keep the kitchen clean, thank you.

Thursday, June 16, 6:19 a.m.

Two words I never thought would go together: Joanne Walker and 6:00 a.m.

Never mind that that’s actually four words, five if you spell out ante meridiem. If you’re going to get technical, you’re going to lose all your friends. The point is, it was Oh God Early and I was not only up, but at work. Not even at work. I was volunteering . Volunteering my own precious sleeping time, five hours before I was supposed to be at work. I was so noble I could kill myself.

While I was busy admiring my nobility, a bunch of protesters linked arms and waded toward the police line I was a part of. There were considerably more of them than there were of us—hence me being there at all—and the power of authority as granted to us by the city of Seattle wasn’t pulling a lot of weight with them. They weren’t violent, just determined. I spread my arms wide and leaned into the oncoming mass, blowing a whistle that was more noisome than effective. The protesters stopped close enough that I could count the individual silver hairs on the head of the man in front of me, who stood there, Right In My Personal Space.

People have gotten shot for less.

Not, however, by me, and besides, as one of the city’s finest, I wasn’t in a position to be shooting people just for getting in my personal space. Instead, I took a step forward, trusting my own presence to be enough to cow them. It was; the silver-haired guy in front of me shifted back, making a bow in his line. I pressed my advantage, arms still spread wide, and they all fell back a step.

I let go a sigh of relief that I couldn’t let them see, herding them back several more steps before I let up, and backed up again myself. They watched me, silent, sullen, and short.

I was working on a theory that said all environmentalists were short. I knew it was wrong—Al Gore is a tall man—but it gave me something to do while I played push-me-pull-you with the protesters. Of course, most people are short compared to me: I stood a smidge under six feet in socks, and the sturdy black walking shoes I wore put me an inch over.

Behind me lay the summertime glory of the Seattle Center, where a symposium on global warming was being held. Representatives from every oil company, every car manufacturer, every corporation that had ever been fined for too many dirty emissions being pumped out into the air were gathered there to argue their case against the bleeding-heart liberals who thought a little clean air wasn’t asking too much.

Sarcasm aside, the greenies were losing major ground and had been since the symposium had opened two days earlier. The federal administration favored big money and big companies, and those companies were taking as much advantage as they could.

My own sympathies lay a whole lot more with the protesters and their concerns about details like global warming. It was already in the high seventies and it wasn’t yet seven in the morning, which was just wrong for mid-June.

But it wasn’t my job to have an opinion about who was right and who was wrong. It was my job to keep the several thousand men and women who were gathered at the Center from breaking through and rending the Armani suits from the bodies of the corpulent pigs managing the slaughter.

“Officer?” A woman’s voice, high-pitched with worry, broke me out of my cheerfully spiraling cynicism. I turned toward her, one hand still lifted in warning against the crowd. I suspected a trick: distract the cop for a minute while everybody surges forward, therefore losing the law a few precious feet of land. There were more physical barriers than just the police officers keeping people off the Center grounds—bright orange, cordoned sawhorses surrounded the entire place—but it was its own sort of psychological warfare.

The woman held a pale-cheeked sleeping girl in her arms. “She fainted,” the woman said. Her voice was thready with concern and fear. “Please, I think she needs a doctor.”

Right behind the bottom of my breastbone, centered in the diaphragm, a coil of energy flared up, making a cool fluttering space inside me. It demanded attention, making my hands cramp and my stomach churn. I rubbed my sternum, swallowing back the wave of nausea. I’d gotten good at ignoring that sensation in the past several months, pretending I couldn’t feel it wrapped around my insides, waiting for me to give in and use it again. Having it crop up so sharply made me feel as pale as the girl. My hand, without any conscious order from my brain, reached out to touch her forehead. Her skin was cold and sticky with sweat.

For the first time since I’d nearly burned out in March, I lost the battle with the energy within me. It shot through me, making silver-tinted rainbows beneath my skin, and strained at my fingertips, trying to pass from me into the chilly-skinned child. Had she been an adult, I might have been able to pull back and refuse yet again to acknowledge its existence.

But she was a kid, and whether I wanted the power and responsibility I’d unintentionally taken on a six-year-old didn’t deserve to suffer for my stubbornness. Silver-sheened magic told me in the most simple, nonmedical terms possible, that the girl was suffering from near heatstroke.

To me—a mechanic by trade, even if I was a cop by day—that meant her engine had overheated.

Fixing an overheated engine’s not a hard thing. You pop the hood, pour new water into the radiator and try not to get burned by the steam, then do it again until the radiator’s full and the engine’s cooled down.

Translating that to a child sick with heat was surprisingly easy. The energy inside me boiled with eagerness to flow out of me and into the girl, but I made it drip instead of pour, afraid of what might happen if her system cooled down too rapidly. I could actually envision the steam hissing off her as heat gradually was replaced by my cool silver strength. It seemed a wonder that no one else could see it.

I was glad she was asleep. At her age she probably had very few perceptions about how health and illness worked, but it was a whole lot easier to heal somebody who couldn’t consciously disbelieve that what you were doing was possible.

The bitter truth of the matter was that I had to believe it was possible, too, and I didn’t want to. What I wanted and what was, however, were two very different things. Right through the core of me, I knew that cooling down an overheated little kid was only the bare edge of what I was capable of I let my hand fall off the girl’s forehead. There was a little color in her cheeks now, her breathing somehow more steady and less shallow. She was going to be all right, though an IV drip to help get her fluids back up would probably be a good idea. From the outside, it looked as if I’d touched the girl’s forehead as an assessment, then said, “I’ll escort you out.” I was the only one who knew better, and I was grateful for that. Headlines blaring Cop Turns Faith Healer ! would not endear me to my boss.