Chasing Power by Sarah Beth Durst

Author:Sarah Beth Durst
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

The rain had stopped. Sort of. It had quit falling from the sky, but it still dripped hard from the canopy of leaves overhead. Shaking off the drops, Daniel walked onto an outcropping. Kayla watched him check the view, then check his compass, then check the view again.

As she waited for him, she knocked drops of water out of the sky. If she concentrated hard enough, she could flick them aside seconds before they hit her skin. It was tricky to hit objects in motion, and it required pinpoint accuracy, like with the mosquitoes. But the more she practiced, the better she got. Soon, she was able to deflect several dozen drops at the same time. She played with flicking them away faster and faster until the rain spattered sideways.

She felt Daniel looking at her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Releasing the drops, Kayla let gravity grab the rain. It spattered onto her face and shoulders. She wiped her face with her hands. “Ready?”

He held out his hand, and she took it. He hesitated, as if he wanted to say something profound, or at least difficult to pronounce. “What?” she asked.

“Do you think … Will you ever be able to forgive me?” The expression in his eyes was so intense and so sad that she had to look away.

“Probably not.” She tried to sound cold. What he did was unforgivable. It was the honest answer.

He was still holding her hand. His hand was damp but warm and covered hers almost entirely. “Can you tell me, if you were in my shoes, would you have done any different?”

She opened her mouth to list the thousand ways she would have acted differently. But if she was going to be honest, then she’d be honest all the way. “In details, yes. In essence …”

“But you still won’t forgive me?”

“Probably not.”

He laid his hand on her shoulder.

The wet green vanished and was replaced by a house with a chain link fence. Kids were playing in the yard in the middle of a mud puddle, stacking goopy mud cakes on top of a toy truck. Mud streaked their shirts. Clean clothes waved like flags on a line strung between the house and the fence. One of the boys jumped to his feet, shouted in Spanish, and pointed at Kayla and Daniel.

Glancing at his compass, Daniel jumped again. Now, they were in the middle of a street outside an abandoned gas station. Rusted cars littered the cracked pavement, and half of the station roof had collapsed. And then they jumped again. And again.

Rain forest. Fields. More rain forest. A road.

“Halfway there.” His jaw was clenched tight.

“Are you—” she began. He jumped them again, and her words were left miles behind. Again. And again. And again. Over and over, until her head buzzed and he started to shake. She grabbed his shoulders. “You need to rest.” She forced him to sit on a graffiti-covered rock at the side of a road. A bus rumbled past. It was crowded with people and released a cloud of exhaust that made Kayla’s eyes sting.

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