Chapter Nineteen
Marley
The sound of the raindrops against my window overpowered most of what I’d managed to hear. Words were muffled and the splashes of water and crackles of electricity sent chills through my blood and tingles down my spine.
Really, the only thing I managed to glean from my hiding place was that other enlil had shown up. Enlil who didn’t seem friendly in the least.
When the rain finally cleared, I felt brave enough to raise my head and peek through the window.
The first thing I noticed was the street was practically flooded—and empty. Then I caught sight of Brae kneeling on the ground, drenched, and breathing hard. With shaking hands, I managed to unlock my door and stumble out of my Jeep.
My tennis shoes landed in the thick stream of water running down the street and I splashed my way over to him. “Brae! Are you—”
Two steps away, he threw up a hand to stop me from getting any closer. “Stay there,” he growled. “Just…stay there for a second.”
I obeyed and tugged my cold and damp shirt away from my wet skin. The storm drains were working hard to take in the water. Already the late afternoon sun was out, drying the droplets on my windshield.
Finally, Brae stood, his chest still rising and falling as if he just ran a marathon. He pushed wet hair off his forehead and wiped water off his face with the back of his arm. I kept my gaze trained upward, refusing to let it wander below his neck where his wet shirt clung to every muscle in his chest and abs.
“Who were they? What did they do to you?” I asked.
His gaze shot to me, then quickly looked away. “Did you see them?”
“Not really. Just a girl’s black hair when she got close to the Jeep. Or I think it was a girl.”
“Two other enlil that belong to the Wind Clan. Their names are Tifa and Cade and they’re a gigantic pain in my ass.”
“Why’s that?” I was somewhat frustrated that I missed seeing the fight. What had Brae done to get rid of them? Had he used his powers?
“Their boss and I…we have very different views.”
Instantly I remembered what Alessi had said about other enlil not being as nice to humans. I had a feeling that these enlil, and their boss, were exactly whom Alessi had been referring to.
“Do these…fights…happen often?” I asked, hugging my arms that had now sprouted goose bumps.
“Lately it’s been happening more often than I’d like,” Brae muttered, then he glared at me. “Which is why it’s important I get the oculus back.”
I frowned and took a step backward. If he’d had the oculus, what would that scuffle have turned into? Lightning hitting a nearby telephone pole or setting a house on fire?
“You’re proving my point, Brae, not helping yours,” I said.
Brae closed his eyes and ran a hand down his face. His shoulders moved up and down with a deep sigh. “You don’t get it. If they find out you have the oculus, Marley, it’ll be bad.”
I would not let that scare me into giving in. From my perspective, they were all dangerous. Even Brae. Though, to his credit, he’d done exactly as he’d promised. Kept me safe.
I swallowed. “How bad?”
He forced a fake laugh and walked back into the street, shaking his head. “Let’s just say weather will be really bad that day.”
“Is that what happened in that storm the day before? Were you fighting Cade and Tifa?”
“No.” Brae stepped onto the curb as an oncoming car turned down the street. “It wasn’t them.”
I pressed myself against my Jeep as the car rolled by. It was a pair of students searching for a parking spot near the coffee shop.
We stood on opposite sides of the street, and neither of us made a move to cross to the other side.
“But it was a fight, wasn’t it?” I called back.
Brae tilted his head to the sky. It was wide and blue, and clear. The beginnings of sundown were coming in from the west.
“You should go home,” he said after a few moments. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow.”
In other words, yes.
I turned back to my Jeep, then stopped. I glanced back over at my shoulder. “What’s going to happen tomorrow?”
He stared back at me, with all the worry, stress, and sadness that I’d come to expect when meeting his handsome, soulful gaze.
“We’re each going to hold up our end of the deal.”
…
In my life, I’d never taken so long to get dressed. Not a first day of school, not my first date, not even getting ready for the one and only school dance I’d ever been to.
But that morning I literally lay on the floor of my closet for an hour staring at my clothes and wishing, for the first time ever, that I shopped more. Finally, I’d gotten so irritated at myself that I’d grabbed an old NASA T-shirt that Patrick got me the one time he went to Houston and pulled it on over my head.
So it didn’t surprise me at all when Carter leaned against the doorway to my bedroom and asked, “You’re not going to wear something…nicer?”
He should be one to talk. When he wasn’t wearing scrubs, or didn’t have to go to any medical seminars, Carter dressed like a rocker from the nineties. Ripped jeans and Radiohead T-shirts galore.
I looked away from my reflection where I’d been applying the only makeup I knew—mascara—to meet his gaze. “This is fine.”
“It’s fine if you two are going to the gym.”
I dug my fists into my temples. “Carterrrrr.”
Last night before dinner I’d gotten a text from a new number. This is Brae. Alessi gave me your number. I’ll pick you up at ten a.m. The time didn’t seem to be up for discussion, so I’d just texted back: Okay.
But today was Saturday and every Saturday, Patrick, Carter, and I would go on a bike ride through the KU campus. To get out of our little “family” tradition, I needed either to be bleeding profusely, or…going on a date.
“It’s your first date with Brae, Marley. You need to leave an impression,” Carter said, walking into my closet and switching on the light.
I groaned, leaning over my dresser to bury my head in my arms. The excuse that we were dating just popped out. The conversation with my brother and Carter at dinner last night had gone something like this:
While Patrick and Carter were basically perfect for each other, I was pretty sure the thing they agreed most on was how to watch out for me. Clearly they thought that a guy who “saved my life” was worth a date or two.
“Falling eighty feet into his arms isn’t enough of a first impression?” Patrick asked as he took Carter’s place in my doorway and chomped on a strip of bacon. Patrick dressed only slightly better than Carter. His aesthetic was subtle nerd T-shirts and a denim hoodie that he’d had for the last four years and never took off. Basically, he looked like he walked right off the set of The Big Bang Theory.
Carter leaned out of the closet, fixing my brother with a frown. “Pat, if you’d walked into the restaurant on our first date wearing a Marvel T-shirt, I would’ve dumped your ass.”
Patrick looked genuinely confused. “But you love Marvel.”
“I do, but it’s the effort that counts. We respected each other enough to have our friends dress us, didn’t we? So that’s what we’re doing for Marley right now.”
“Right. See, sis? This is a tradition for all first dates.”
I knocked my forehead gently on my desk, counting to ten.
Carter started pulling out tops and laying them on the back of my desk chair. He let out a series of tsks before he stepped out of my closet and held up the pencil skirt and blazer I’d worn during my physical geography presentation to the STEM board of my school. “How is this the nicest thing you own?”
Patrick shook his head and headed for my closet. “No, I swear I bought her a dress for my dissertation reading. Remember? It was white with little blue flowers.”
“Pat, that was three years ago,” Carter pointed out. “Her breasts probably don’t fit in it anymore.”
I slammed my hands on my dresser. “If you guys don’t get out of my room right now, I’m going to change all your streaming passwords. Disney Plus will become a distant memory for you both.”
The doorbell rang downstairs and we all froze. I lunged for my phone.
Sure enough, it was ten o’clock, right on the freaking dot. I grabbed my shoulder bag and took off downstairs, my brother and Carter literally three steps behind me. But they were too slow. I wrenched open the front door, slipped outside, and slammed it closed. Two thumps on the other side told me they’d just ran into the door.
I didn’t even look at Brae as I grabbed his wrist and hurried down the driveway toward Alessi’s car. Guess he borrowed it again.
“Open it, open it, open it,” I rushed him, swerving to the passenger side just as Patrick and Carter barreled out the front door.
“Hey!” Patrick called across the lawn. “She needs to be home by eight! And I swear to God if she gets another hickey—”
“Pat, come on, you’re disturbing the neighbors.” Carter attempted to drag my brother back inside our townhome.
Face burning, I jumped into the passenger seat as Brae kindly waved back, not nearly in the same rush as I was. When he got into the car, I could feel his gaze turn on me while I had my face buried behind my hands. Mortified.
“A hickey?” he asked.
I sighed, making a shooing gesture at Patrick before he finally disappeared into the house. “Your friend Kai left a bruise on my neck, remember? My brother assumed…”
Brae was so quiet, I finally glanced over at him. He wore jeans and a simple gray shirt with a zip-up navy blue hoodie. On that note, I was kinda relieved I’d dressed down appropriately. But his expression was more than a little bit troubled. His gaze honed in on my neck.
“Show me,” he said, flicking his finger toward my neck.
“It’s faded,” I lied.
“No, it’s not. Show me.”
Dropping my gaze to my lap—because for whatever reason I couldn’t look him in the eye—I moved my curls to my right shoulder.
There was a slight brush of his knuckles against my skin before he pulled his hand away. It was so fast I thought I might’ve imagined it. But the heat there told me I hadn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I knew he meant it. Regret was in every syllable, but somehow that made me feel worse. And I wasn’t exactly sure why.
“Kai should never have touched you.”
“He was worried about you,” I repeated the same excuse he’d given me. I thought about Patrick and Carter and how if anything happened to one of them, I’d want to tear the person responsible apart limb from limb. Separated by time, I could empathize with Kai’s reaction.
“Still.” Brae took a deep breath and started the car, backing out of the driveway with the practiced grace of one who’d been driving awhile. It struck me how weird it seemed that they were so…so humanlike. They came from a different planet, but did that planet have things like cars and the internet and smart phones? What kind of technology did they have?
I swallowed the thousand-and-one questions and focused my gaze on the road. “Where are we going?”
“Out of town,” he said simply.
“To do what?”
“In a word? Experiment.”
“You’re being frustratingly cryptic, you know that?”
Brae shrugged as he turned at a light that would take us to the highway. “You could try being patient. It’s going to be easier to show you than explain anything.”
“Okay, fine. What’s your hypothesis?”
“My what?”
“Your hypothesis. Every experiment needs a hypothesis to prove or disprove, otherwise it’s not a true experiment.”
He gave me a sideways look filled with amusement. “Fair point. I think your elemental makeup allows for a better conduit for the oculus than an enelia crystal. For example, usually whenever I use the oculus through the crystal, it needs some time to recharge, but that’s not the case with you.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, the oculus feels more powerful inside your body. More accessible. Without limits. The power I got from you when I first grabbed your arm was much more than should’ve been available to me after using so much the day before.”
Well, that sounded wholly frightening, but I tried not to show it. It was surprising that he was admitting to me how strong his weapon was inside me. He was being honest, even though it could backfire on him. I turned my gaze to the flat Kansas plains and cleared my throat. “And how do you plan to prove that?”
“I want to see how you fair with other materials from our planet.”
I stared at him, tempted to start searching his car for them. “You have other materials from your planet?”
“Not very many. We pretty much left with the clothes on our back. But we managed to save a few things.”
“Save from what?” I asked, before I really thought about it.
Brae went silent, his jaw clenching tight, and I knew I’d crossed into painful territory.
“Sorry, you…you don’t have to answer that,” I said quickly, and looked back out the window.
The car fell into an uncomfortable silence, with only the sound of the wind outside the windows and the tires against the road.
He cleared his throat. “What else do you want to know?”
If the tension in the car hadn’t been so thick, I would’ve laughed. “What don’t I want to know? Okay, how about…you said our elemental makeup is different, but in what way?”
Brae nodded as if he expected this question. “Well, for one, we don’t need oxygen to survive.”
“What?”
“We consume nitrogen instead.”
I leaned over the console, my seat belt straining against my chest. “Nitrogen, nitrogen? Like, atomic number 7 and N symbol, found in ammonia and explosives?”
A hint of a tiny smile touched his lips. “Wow, you really are a nerd. It’s not that strange. It’s still a gas like oxygen.”
“It’s also seventy-eight percent of the atmosphere and is one of the top ten elements that make up the solar system. Oh God, that’s right. You’re not even from our solar system. So what does nitrogen do to your bodies? How do your lungs work?”
“Okay, that was two different questions. Pick one.”
I gestured to all of him. “How does…how do you work?”
He rolled his eyes and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “That’s a loaded question, but I’ll do my best.” He took a deep breath. “Earth’s atmosphere is similar, but still very different from Enos. It’s younger and more stable, which makes it easier to use our abilities. Controlling the weather on Enos was practically impossible for the majority of our kind. Only oculus holders were able to send and control storms, but that’s partly because there were storms all the time.”
I frowned. “All the time?”
“On Earth, you have a season for hurricanes, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that was all year for us. Everywhere. All the time.”
“All year? How…how did you survive there? What about flooding and power outages and winds tearing apart buildings? Your insurance rates must’ve been off the charts.”
At that, he full-on grinned, and I couldn’t help but stare. Granted, I hardly knew him, but it felt like I was seeing something rare. Like a double rainbow.
“Uh, we didn’t exactly have insurance. And our buildings weren’t easily destroyed.”
“What, were they like stone castles?”
“Even stone castles could be blasted apart by high winds. We carved our homes into the rock faces of the mountains and crystal caverns. The only way to make sure our homes were safe was to live within Enos itself.”
I tried to imagine it, but it wasn’t like he’d painted a very detailed picture and I assumed that was on purpose. Either he was still intent on keeping me in the dark about certain things, or maybe it was too painful to dredge up memories of a home he could never return to.
Either way, we fell into another awkward silence after that. I wasn’t sure what to say. I couldn’t reply, “Sounds lovely,” because his home kinda sounded like a nightmare.
Finally, Brae took an exit off the interstate. It was to a state park that I’d been to a few times. It was fairly secluded, but at least it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere.
“Look,” he began, pulling into one of the large parking lots, “storms aren’t something we just put up with, Marley. They’re our lifeblood. They’re a part of our…species.”
“But I thought you said you need nitrogen to survive.”
“It’s what keeps our bodies going, not our spirits.”
“I’m sorry, you’re losing me,” I said, shaking my head. “Nitrogen is there with or without storms.”
“And theoretically if there was just oxygen on a planet, you could survive without the sun or a blue sky. But would you still feel alive?”
“We sent people to space,” I pointed out as we got out of the car. “And that doesn’t have a blue sky and we’ve never been prouder to be human.”
“All right, then let me put it to you this way…” He came around the car and leaned his elbows against the hood, fixing me with that intense stare. “Take away space exploration. Technology. Innovation. Social change. I’ve studied you humans and if you’re not moving forward, then you’re going backward. If you take away the pursuit of something greater…would you be human?”
For a moment, I was stunned into silence. I hadn’t expected that kind of comparison, much less an analysis of the human race from an alien one.
What was more…the longer I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. Collectively, we evolved. If we stopped evolving, in doing things like trying to reach Mars, or change the world for the better…then what would we be? It felt like an identity that I’d never given any real thought to before.
And wasn’t that what I was doing? Pursuing meteorology?
It was both annoying and impressive that Brae had been astute enough to know that was what would pull my strings.
He tapped the hood of the car. “That’s what storms are to us. Without them, I’m not sure we’d have the will to live.”
I couldn’t help but take the cheap shot. “So…you’re saying you need to create deadly storms to feel alive. Got it.”
His brows turned down in what first looked like anger, and then something else flickered across his face. Pain? Regret? I wasn’t entirely sure, but it lingered there in his eyes.
It almost made me take back what I said. But I thought about my parents’ bodies under a pile of wreckage and bit my tongue.
“Let’s go,” he said, turning away from the car and setting off down a path that led deeper into the state park.
I followed behind him, gripping the straps of my bag as a kind of safety harness. I wasn’t climbing a wall this time, but I still had a feeling that I could fall.