Category Archives: Fire and Water

Enya Royston has hidden from herself and her abilities, fearing the destruction that always comes with using them.

Author’s Note: So I thought about not sharing this, I’m not sure it’s staying in the story, and its subject matter is a bit off-putting, and I don’t know why Cress and Oceana’s parents turned out the way they did. They were supposed to be different.

Right now, I’ve got it stuck after Cress passes out in the car, not a bad place for a flashback, but I’m not sure I’ll leave it there.

Anyway, this seemed to go a long way toward explaining why Cress was the way he was and did what he did.

Trouble in the House of Water

“We need to talk.”

“I’m meeting Hannah in a few minutes, so it had better be quick,” Cress said, ignoring his mother as he started toward his room. The blast of cold hit him first, and he stopped against his will. Damn it, he hated when she did this. He felt as helpless as he had when that rogue had him, and he still had nightmares about that guy coming back even though his parents said he was not a threat.

Not a threat. Funny way of saying “dead,” wasn’t it?

Nothing was ever as direct as it should be around here. If he wanted answers, he had to find them for himself, and when he got them, he didn’t like them.

“You will stay as long as you need to stay.”

“Okay, I know I didn’t do anything that I should be in trouble for,” Cress began, using everything he had to force the freeze off, letting it dissipate instead of going back on his mother or his father. “Why are you ganging up on me? This isn’t about my grades. They’re fine. I’m going to graduate on schedule, and I haven’t done anything crazy with the water at school. Well… I did, but that was just to filter out the nastiness. I swear that’s it. No major crisis.”

“Stop trying to use your abilities to calm us.”

“I… You know I can’t control that.” He was doing it for himself, anyway. They had him worried now, and he didn’t like the feeling he got from them. “What is it? I’m going to be late meeting Hannah, and I don’t—”

“You’re not going to see her again.”

“What?” He frowned. “Look, if this is one of those too young conversations, should only be dating if I intend to make a real commitment, I don’t need it. I figure our lives are short enough for me to get married right after high school. Hannah and I have even talked about it a little.”

“You cannot marry a normal.”

Cress looked at each of his parents in turn. “You’re kidding, right? It has to happen all the time. Not all of us are purebreds, that would just be… wrong.”

“A normal will never understand you, never balance you. You will be forced apart by your abilities.”

He shook his head. “Hannah knows what I can do. Everyone at that school does. They still talk about what I did to the bullies in the bathroom. It’s not an issue.”

“It is. You’re too young to see it now, but you would understand later. Still, you don’t have time to wait for later. You will not marry a normal. You have to marry an elemental.”

He leaned back against the wall, unable to believe this. “What about all that talk about us being free to do incredible things? That we had talents and should use them? I told you I didn’t want this damn water thing, and now you’re going to tell me because of something I didn’t even want in the first place, I have to give up everything I want and planned on?”

“You’ll get over this normal girl.”

“Right. So now I get to pick between Moira, Terra, and Enya?” He didn’t understand that. He’d always been a bit too close to one of them, and his parents hadn’t liked that, either. “I think you know who I’d pick, but you hate her, so why would you—”

“You are marrying a girl attuned to water. It is already arranged. We’re taking you to meet her tomorrow.”

Cress stared at them. “No. You can’t do this—you can’t make me do this. I won’t. I’m not going with you, and I’m not marrying anyone. Or getting engaged. I don’t even want to meet that girl. I have a girlfriend. Hannah loves me and I—”

“You will not see her again.”

He looked behind him to see the door frozen shut, and he knew all the windows were as well. He wouldn’t be getting out of there any time soon. He still wasn’t very good with frozen things. For some reason, that still eluded him. He’d used up what control he had over that getting himself free, and it would be hours before he could manage a window, and a door was out of the question.

“Go to your room and do your homework. We’ll be gone all weekend.”

Cress nodded, walking down to his door, shutting it behind him with relief. He didn’t understand. Sometimes his parents were the best in the world, and other times, he couldn’t help thinking that the rest of it was an act, that they were somehow faking the love and care so that they could get him and Occie to do what they wanted.

“I guess we’re lucky it would be too inbred for them to do that to us. You know, pair you and me up and create the next generation.”

“Occie, please, I don’t want to think about that. I might hurl all over you.”

She nodded, lying back on his bed. She was quiet while he dumped his bag on the floor and kicked it, unwilling to take his books out and do what they’d ordered him to do. He looked back at her when she spoke. “I assume they have someone for me to meet there.”

“Run. Go elope with Stone while you still have the chance. I’ll be here; I can distract them.”

“Funny. We’re seventeen, remember? Even if I loved him like he says he loves me, we couldn’t do that. We’re still too young to marry without our parents’ consent, and you know Mom and Dad won’t give it.”

“Yeah.”

“You have to go find Enya. I swear she was about to kill herself at school today.”

“What?”

Oceana sat up, rising and coming over to his side. “You may have held her for a week after her family died, and you kept her calm, but even you can’t take away the guilt. Everyone says she set that fire on purpose and killed her whole family. The school can’t stop whispering about it. I think Terra sees her as a monster, and I’m not sure she’s alone in that. Even Sherwin’s avoiding her, and you know him.”

Cress grimaced. “Even if she was the one who started it, she didn’t do it to hurt anyone. She can’t control it. She’s never been able to.”

“Yeah. Go tell her that again. She’ll listen to you. I’ll defrost the window and cover for you. Just don’t let them catch you.”

He sighed. “Enya needs to get out of here. This is going to destroy her.”

“As long as our parents are in charge, that won’t happen.”

“Then maybe they shouldn’t be in charge.”

Occie shook her head. “Don’t. You and I both know you could overcome them if you wanted to, you’ve got more talent and more control, but don’t you dare give in to that darkness. You’re not a killer, Cress. I don’t care how easy it would be for you to use the water and free us all from them, how tempting it might be with this trip they’ve got planned. Don’t.”

“I’d better go see Enya.”

“Yeah,” Occie said, touching a hand to the window and pulling away the ice. “Try not to be out too late. You miss this trip, and they’ll kill you.”

“The sad part is, that last part’s not an exaggeration.”

Author’s Note: Action sequences have never been my strong suit. I did try, and I doubt that I did much justice to the kinds of things they can do with the elements, but here goes…

Elemental Defense

“I think I can make out four cars, and they’re blocking the road. At least Cress always insists on us driving an SUV even if the gas mileage sucks,” Terra said, frowning as she let the curtain fall back into place. “I can barricade them, but with this much water around us and the kind of vehicles they have, it won’t last for long.”

“Do it,” Moira ordered. She sounded a lot more confident than she felt. Damn Cress for always making this look easy. She had thought she was ready for it, but now she wasn’t sure. “We’ll deal with them breaking out of it after it happens. There’s still a few things we can do on the road if we have to. Enya, you’re still driving. Sherwin, we’re going to need an air shield.”

“Done,” he said, looking at the storm. “We have any idea if there’s more than a water elemental out there? That is one hell of a storm.”

“Thank you.”

Moira turned around, swallowing as she did. Rogues had stopped scaring them years ago, but this one was worse than most. That one had terrorized Cress when he was younger, had sent an army after them, kept sending them. That man had Stone, didn’t he?

Still, the most unsettling part of the whole thing was that he didn’t seem afraid to come up against all of them, that he thought he could take them all on. What made him so damn confident?

“Go,” Cress whispered, his voice strained and almost impossible to hear. “I can’t hold off what he’s doing forever. Get in the car.”

The rogue’s lips curved into a smile. “Yes, you have learned, haven’t you? Still, even you know you have limits.”

“Oh, hell, no wonder it’s so damn cold in here. He’s trying to freeze us.”

“Get in the car,” Moira told her brother, shoving him toward the door. He had to keep up the air shield in case any of the others had been outside of the barricade Terra had created, and the longer they stayed, the more of a chance they gave Cress to falter. He didn’t have the strength to hold off a water elemental that powerful for long.

“One thing you overlooked,” Occie said, her voice cold. She put her hand on her brother and closed her eyes, funneling her energy into his. The ice spread over the man across the room, turning him into an ice sculpture. “My brother’s not the only one who can handle water.”

Cress managed a smile before he stumbled, held up by his sister and Enya. “That won’t hold him for long.”

“It bought us time. Come on,” Moira said, taking hold of him so that Enya could get to the car first. She needed to be behind the wheel. “Drive down to the road. Terra will do her best to even it out for us.”

“Is it me or is that storm getting worse?”

“Just because he’s frozen doesn’t mean he can’t think,” Cress said. “Occie, can you do anything about that?”

“I might be able to shift it out of our path so that Enya can see better. You just rest. You should have grabbed me sooner—none of us would have allowed you to sacrifice yourself even if you blame yourself for us leaving Stone behind and who knows what else.”

Moira pulled herself into the passenger seat, having a bad feeling about what she’d have to do to keep the other cars from reaching them. The barricade wasn’t going to hold for much longer. She’d seen part of it crumbling even as Enya drove away.

Too much water. The whole place would go to mud soon enough. Even if Stone was here, they couldn’t have held off the mudslide for long. She felt Sherwin’s hand on her shoulder even as the car bumped them all, lurching back onto the pavement. She looked back at him and then the road.

The first SUV was closing in on them. Great. “That was fast.”

“Sorry. I was fighting against what that rogue was doing, and the barricade wasn’t good enough—”

“I’m not blaming you,” Moira said, closing her eyes and letting her abilities mingle with Sherwin’s, gusting the air up under one of the other vehicles and knocking it on its side, taking it out of commission. She leaned back against her chair. “Okay, not sure I have another of those in me.”

“Me, either,” Sherwin grunted. “I hate doing that. It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have the memories.”

Unless they had that memory on purpose. Moira shifted in her seat, looking at Cress. How much more was there to his theory? What else hadn’t he told them about what his parents had done or given him? Was there more to him sending Enya away than Moira had thought? She’d always had her suspicions, but she’d just assumed that Cress was playing favorites. Maybe it was more than that.

Terra slumped back against her seat. “I didn’t want to break the road, but those potholes might not be enough to stop them.”

Enya looked in the rear view mirror. “You call those potholes?”

Terra grinned. “I do.”

Moira laughed. Sometimes, this could almost pass for fun. “Keep driving ’til we’re out of the storm, Enya. We’ll know we’re safe to make a plan after that.”

Author’s Note: All that time in Cress’ past… Like navigating a minefield, and not just for me, but for everyone else as well.

Sins of the Parents

“Cress?”

He pulled his knees up to his chest and put his head on them. “I should have known I was water long before those bullies cornered me in the bathroom. He told me that was what I was. He said a lot of things that I didn’t understand until later. I thought… I was convinced he was just some kind of… pervert, and I did my best to forget about it.”

“The swim lessons,” Oceana said. She felt sick, uncertain how much her brother had suffered at that man’s hands. “That’s why you quit, why you freaked out when they tried to take you back there. He was there?”

“Yeah.”

“None of the rest of us knew anything about this, though.” Moira shook her head. “Cress, why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“There was nothing to tell. The first time was too weird for me to explain since none of us were aware of that kind of thing, and I couldn’t say I’d been frozen, that some strange guy had held me in place while he babbled on about water. My parents later said he was a rogue, that he had been dealt with, that I shouldn’t worry about him.”

Sherwin frowned. “All this time, though, we all assumed the first anyone knew about the kind of stuff we could do was when those bullies cornered you. You knew before, though.”

“No. My parents didn’t explain what he was to me until after I could manipulate water. When I broke the mirror and gave those bullies the swirly they planned on giving me, the bathroom was flooded, wrecked, and I got suspended… Everyone thought it was weird how calm Mom and Dad were about the whole thing, but they weren’t calm. They were… excited. They started telling me all about what I could do and what I should not do. They told me about the rogues, and when I told them about that man, they said that was one of them, and they left, like the parents used to do back then. When they got back, they told me they’d dealt with him. That was the end of the discussion.”

Moira rubbed her forehead, looking like she had a headache. Oceana didn’t blame her. No one wanted to hear this. “Why would they lie?”

“I don’t know. I trusted them, but I don’t know that I should have. None of us should have. They knew before we were born what we might be capable of, but they never warned us or trained us. I learned all I could because I didn’t want to be helpless, ever again, didn’t want to do what I did before and cause so much damage, have so little control…” He ran a hand through his hair. “They may have betrayed us all, and I think I helped them do it.”

“Cress, you’re jumping to conclusions here,” Sherwin said, trying his best to be optimistic, the only one of them that was most of the time. “Maybe they did think they’d dealt with him, but he survived. We all thought Stone was dead, so why couldn’t your parents have been fooled?”

Oceana swallowed, putting her hand on her brother’s shoulder. Her stomach’s disquiet was getting worse as her mind ran through her memories, and she shook her head. “I hate to say this, but I think I agree with Cress. So many little things seem to make a horrible sort of sense now that always bothered me before. I mean, the way they reacted when Cress dated a normal…”

He grimaced, but like everything that had hurt him, he pushed it aside. “We all know water can alter moods. Our parents were attuned to it, and maybe they manipulated a lot more than we knew back then. Maybe I did the same thing. I… They did their best to make sure I ended up in charge, and we all had a bad feeling about where the money might have come from…”

“You really didn’t have a choice, did you?”

Cress shook his head, not looking at the woman who’d spoken. “No, Enya, I might not have seen it, but we all could have walked away. I was the one that led us down the path my parents started me on. Maybe it’s the clarity of hindsight, but I know how wrong I was. I can see what I overlooked and what it cost and—Damn it.”

“What?”

“We have to go. We didn’t use that money often, not if we could help it—”

“But they know about it and they’re watching that account. They know we used it, and they’re coming.” Moira reached for the keys and passed them to Oceana. “Here. You’ve had more rest than most of us. You drive.”

She shook her head. “Enya’d better do it. I’d be too distracted by Cress, even if I wasn’t draining myself like the rest of you.”

“It’s too late. They’re here.”

Oceana frowned at her brother. “How do you know that?”

Cress pointed to the window. Rain pelted against the glass. “I didn’t start that. I also can’t stop it.”

Author’s Note: So… Cress’ introduction to the elements was traumatic. Both of them were, but this was the first.

Frozen

Cress had a feeling it would rain today. He always seemed to know when it was going to rain—or when it would snow—he didn’t know why. He just had a bit of a sense for these things. His parents would look at each other and smile, and he didn’t know why they thought it was so funny. Oceana said they were water nuts, so why wouldn’t they like it? He didn’t know, but he didn’t find it as amusing as she did. She called him a wet blanket, and he’d shoved her off the side of the bed.

He was still apologizing for that one.

He sighed. They were late. They should know the schedule by now. He hadn’t asked to take swim lessons, and he did not like how they kept forgetting about him. This was their idea, so why couldn’t they pick him up on time at least once?

He felt a sudden chill, and he frowned, rubbing his hands over his arms. The sun was still out, and he wasn’t in the shade. He knew that rain was coming, but this didn’t feel like rain. He stepped back into the building as a shadow loomed over him. “You’re water, aren’t you?”

Funny, the man didn’t have an accent, but he was talking more like the family at the end of the block, the ones everyone called immigrants, like he didn’t know the right words. Cress didn’t know if he was trying to be friendly, but the guy gave him the creeps.

“The water’s inside. It’s a pool.”

The man reached for him, and Cress tried to pull away, but he caught his arm. He started to struggle, but the chill got worse. He couldn’t move. It was like he was frozen, but that didn’t make sense. He wasn’t too afraid to run, but he couldn’t. The man had him trapped, and he swore he was freezing to death in the middle of September.

The man smiled. “There. That’s better. You can hold still, and I’ll get a good look at you. I like knowing my competition.”

Cress tried to struggle, but everything was so cold, and he couldn’t seem to make his body respond. He should be terrified, but a part of him wanted to believe this was nothing more than a nightmare. People couldn’t freeze other people. That wasn’t possible.

“You’re different. I’ve never seen one of you so fearless before, even the ones who are water. Water keeps you calmer, but not this calm.”

He couldn’t answer. The man had him paralyzed, and a part of him was terrified, but he couldn’t react, so nothing would show, or so he assumed. He stared at the hand on his cheek, feeling sick to his stomach, wondering if this was one of those people that they warned about at school and everything—someone who qualified for stranger-danger, and he didn’t know what he’d do if that was what was going to happen to him.

Why couldn’t he move?

“I bet you can feel the rain, too.”

He was dreaming. This was some kind of twisted nightmare, and when he opened his eyes, Occie would be laughing at him and shoving him out of the bed for being such a coward and screaming in his sleep.

“You’re going to be one to watch, aren’t you? I bet you’ll be almost unstoppable when you get older. I can’t wait to see what you do with it. You think you can make it rain? Can you make it flood? What does it feel like in that pool? A violation or like home? I find the chlorine is like an invasion, but others don’t care.”

Cress wanted him to let go. He didn’t want to think about his man watching him swim. He felt like throwing up, but if he was frozen, he couldn’t vomit. He managed to swallow, choked out a couple words. “Let… go…”

“Oh, yes, of course. You and I will meet again. I look forward to seeing what you’re capable of. We’ll have to see who’s better at it. I can do impressive things with water, but I bet you’ll find ways to use it that I haven’t.”

The man let go, stepping back with a smile. He laughed as Cress shivered and tried to get warm, walking away like what he’d done was nothing. Cress glared after him. The man was a lunatic, but if he could control water, he’d make it rain all right. He’d make it rain so much that it drowned that man.

He curled up against the building. He would never take another swimming lesson again. He was not coming back here. He wouldn’t ever come back. He couldn’t explain what happened, but he didn’t know that he wanted to know.

He just wanted to go home.

Author’s Note: Theories, twists, and lots of unpleasantness.

Unsettling Thoughts

“Any progress in here?”

“Not much,” Terra said. She shook her head. “It should have been me. It should have been me that got taken because Stone could find me. I can’t find him.”

“Take a break, then,” Oceana said. “Enya thinks she’s found something, and she wants everyone in to hear what she has to say before we go any further.”

Moira was tempted to laugh. “So the internet is more powerful than the elements.”

Sherwin frowned. “Imagine if there was internet on the other side of the barrier. If there was…”

Terra gave him a shove. “We don’t know that there isn’t. All we know is that it bleeds through into our world and because of it, we can manipulate the elements. We still don’t know how that works. Cress knows more than any of us about what he can do, but even he admits he doesn’t understand it.”

Cress pulled himself up from the bed, walking down the hall. “I don’t think we should understand it. I think we were never meant to know what’s on the other side of it, and I don’t think we should have the abilities that we do. If you think about it, we might have been engineered to do it.”

“What?”

He stopped, leaning against the wall. Moira grimaced, knowing that Occie would have something to say about his condition later. “Two elemental parents, attuned to the same element, just happen to meet, marry, and produce two children attuned to that element. The perfect set, all four elements, all in one place. Seems a bit convenient, doesn’t it?”

Sherwin shook his head. “Cress, I know you’re a bit messed up right now, but don’t you dare start implying things about our parents. That’s too far, and you know it.”

“Is it?” Oceana asked, crossing into the dining room. “Not long before Mom and Dad died, they set him down and gave him a long talk, told him all about the money they’d ‘saved,’ the things they expected of him, dumped all that on him when he wasn’t even eighteen, and a couple months later, they died, and we were all so dependent on him…”

Enya frowned, looking up from the computer. “What are we talking about?”

“Ignore it. You don’t want to know.”

Moira looked at her brother, shaking her head. “Sherwin would like to bury his head in the sand, but I don’t know that we can afford to ignore Cress’ theory, even as unsettling and unpleasant as it might be to acknowledge the reality of it.”

“What reality?”

“That it was no accident that our parents were together, that they were the same element, that they had two kids that were also that same element, and then stopped,” Moira said, taking a seat at the table, exhausted. Their search was useless. She hoped that Enya’s was more successful. “Please tell me we have something better than that to go on with the agency.”

“We do,” Enya said, though she gave Cress a long look. He shrugged, leaning against the back wall. Occie went to his side and dragged him to the chair. She sat him down next to Enya. “Occie told me these men here were a part of the team that you met before. I don’t have advanced facial recognition programs that a law enforcement agency would be able to use, so I just did my best with as many news articles and pictures as I could get a hold of and look at, but I got something off the id.”

“We’re up against the government?”

She shook her head. “No. This is a private organization, which is what I figured after Cress told me about it. I can’t imagine a small government agency would have the resources to track you—or the budget—not when you have pretty much no digital footprints—but a private corporation would have the money to pursue this kind of… agenda. They could hire mercenaries—there are so many of those companies out there thanks to the war on terrorism—and maybe those mercenaries know what they’re up against, maybe not, but they were just hired guns.”

“Great.”

“Well, the id badge that was clipped to that man’s belt said he belonged to this corporation. I like the irony of it. Aether Industries. Some call aether the fifth element.”

“Some call that a movie.”

Enya rolled her eyes. “Shut up, Sherwin. I’m trying to keep this simple. You had former military or paramilitary officers after you, impersonating a government agency. This is not something to laugh about. We’re all in trouble, and we have no way of knowing what they might do to someone like us—to Stone. We assume that they’re after the barrier, but we don’t know that. They might be after something we can’t begin to comprehend.”

“No, they’re after us.”

“Cress?”

He swallowed, pointing to the screen. “That’s the owner of the company?”

“Yeah, but Oceana said he’d never been there when you crossed paths with the ‘agency.’”

“That’s not how I know him. The name isn’t ironic, Enya. He’s one of us.”

Author’s Note: Changes are coming. The balance of power has shifted. Probably for the best, though it’s hard to say right now.

Changes and Plans

“Terra’s still sleeping.”

“Then we should wait for her. We don’t make decisions without consulting the whole team.”

Cress snorted. “That’s not true. I do it all the time, and while you might argue with them for a while, you always accept it in the end, even when I’m wrong. Every time I’m wrong, you let my mistakes pass. Is it the water? I lure you into a false sense of calm?”

“Cress, what are you doing?”

“Thinking. Reasoning, trying to gauge how much damage I’ve done over the years.”

“Just because I told you it was time to stand down does not mean that you can start second guessing every decision you’ve ever made,” Oceana told him, but he did not look at her. Sherwin frowned. Occie had told Cress to step down? When did that happen? And why?

“I think we need more information on the agency that’s been chasing you,” Enya said. “If we knew who they were, where they were based, that might give us a better idea of where to look.”

“Look?” Sherwin frowned. “I thought we were going to discuss how to help Terra deal with her grief because it’s really becoming an issue. Why are we discussing the agency? Who cares about that right now?”

“We all do—if Terra is right and Stone is still alive.”

Moira stiffened. “Alive? We left him behind? How could we do that? That’s not… We’re not… We all saw him go down, we heard Terra scream that he was gone, but now he’s… alive?”

Oceana nodded. “According to the earth after Cress gave her the clarity to listen to it. I don’t know what to think, but if there’s even a chance that we can get him back, we’re going to do it.”

Cress moved toward the door. “Or we could just hand me over to them because I’m probably what they want and the one that got us all into this.”

“We are not giving anyone to them,” Moira said. Sherwin nodded, not liking the idea of handing their most talented member over to the bastards chasing them. “If those idiots are interested in bringing down the barriers, they won’t get any help from us. We have to focus on the fact that Stone might be alive. We need to know what we’re going to do to find him. If Terra can sense that, then we have to find a way to amplify her ability and get him back.”

Enya cleared her throat. “I still think that we’d do better if we could pin down where and who these people are. We get some of the news coverage about what happened at my house, we find the men from the agency, we determine if it’s legitimate or some kind of private organization that’s hounding you and what they’re after. If Stone’s still alive, there’s a good chance they would have him.”

“We haven’t arranged a trip to town for a laptop yet, and chances are, that mobile broadband you’d want wouldn’t work up here.”

“So I’ll use it in town. That has to be better than following Cress’ suggestion.”

“Yeah, I think we’re done following my suggestions,” he said, reaching for the door handle. “You were never the monster, Enya. I was. I just hide it a lot better than anyone thinks.”

Oceana frowned, rushing to grab her brother’s arm. “Where do you think you’re going? You better not be about to do anything stupid.”

“That depends on your definition. So far, from what I can judge, everything I did was wrong and therefore stupid.”

“Like hell it was,” Enya said, getting everyone to look at her. “If anyone has a right to be mad at you, it’s me, isn’t it? And I’m not.”

“You should be. You’re not because you have the worst guilt complex on the planet. Everything’s your fault. Even the things that are mine.”

Sherwin knew he wasn’t the only one who was confused. “Okay, one, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Two, I don’t know why we’re fighting right now. We have to work together to get Stone back. That is the only thing that matters.”

Oceana touched her brother’s face. “Look at me. There we go, that’s it. When I said you should go, I meant you should leave for your own health. You gave Enya that option years ago when you should have been the one to take it. This is destroying you.”

“It should.”

Moira held up a hand. “Enough. If Cress is stepping down, then I guess I’m in charge, and that means we’re going to focus on what we can do to get Stone back. Occie, you and Enya will go get the laptop and everything else she needs. Dip into some of the old accounts if you have to. I know none of us like doing it because we have no idea where our parents got that money, but do it anyway. Sherwin and I will work with Terra. Cress… you get the unpleasant job of keeping us all stable while we do it.”

He nodded. Oceana shook her head. “No. He’s not up to that. Even if he spent the next week in the water, he wouldn’t be up to that. He can’t.”

“Occie, I have to make up for my mistakes somehow. Don’t take that from me.”

She sighed. “I don’t like this. You are allowed to be as human as the rest of us, to make mistakes, and I know you have, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be punished for them.”

He pulled free of her. “I’ll be down at the lake when you need me, Moira.”

Sherwin rubbed at his ear. “I suppose I have to wake Terra, don’t I?”

Author’s Note: A bit of a wake up call, a bit of recrimination, a start of something…

Troubled Waters

“Why weren’t we born fish?”

“Because we’re humans, silly,” Oceana said, tempted to shove her brother’s head under the water. He was being ridiculous again, but she almost preferred it over his usual mood. This was good for him, this time in the lake, but she knew nothing would be enough, not after the way he’d been pushing himself. He needed to stop. “Is that what you think is on the other side of the barrier? Fish? Enya said she saw a woman in the mirror before it broke, remember?”

“Enya is different.”

Oceana looked at him, sending a splash of water his way. “You always say that. The others always assume you’re making excuses for her.”

“I don’t make excuses for anyone. I do see her as different. It’s unfair to expect her to conform to our rules and our lifestyle and embrace her attunement. Hers is dangerous, and we’ve all seen what happens when she uses it. She’s not like her parents. As far as I can tell, they were exceptions. Almost every other fire elemental we’ve run into has been insane and destructive. They’re usually caught as pyromaniacs and locked away.” Cress scooped up some water and let it drip onto his head and down his back. He sighed, closing his eyes. “You ever think one of these days we’ll just… become our elements? We just fade away, lose all of what we are, and succumb to it…”

“Cress, this is one of those moments where you’re scaring me.”

“Terra seems to believe that Stone is alive, and I have to wonder if that’s what happened to him. If he somehow became part of the earth. Maybe he hid. Maybe we were wrong. I may have made the biggest mistake of my life back there. I made us leave him behind.”

Oceana stiffened, and then she remembered where she was. She walked out onto the shore and sat down, feeling sick. “No. Cress, tell me you are wrong. She’s wrong. You’re both wrong.”

Cress ducked under the water and then came back out, letting the water drain off of him. “I did my best to filter out her emotional confusion so that she could focus on what the earth was telling her. It says he’s alive. I’m sorry, Occie.”

“No.”

Cress came over to her, sitting down at her side. He put his hand on her shoulder, but she shoved him off, shaking her head. She wouldn’t let him do this.

“Don’t. Don’t try and calm me. I don’t want to be comforted by you, not now. I can feel how drained you are, and you don’t get to appease whatever guilt is eating at you by helping me. Go back in the water. You know you need it.”

“Occie—”

“If Stone is alive, if we can find him, that’s what I care about. I don’t want you killing yourself before that happens. You’re still human. You will make mistakes, everyone does, but you have led us for a long time, always protecting us and taking care of us…” She let out a breath. “I was going to say it before, and I’ll say it now—it’s time for you to step down. You’ve been doing this for too long.”

Cress frowned. “You… I know, if Stone is alive, that I—”

“You are stepping down, and it’s not because of Stone.” She rose, looking back at the cabin. She didn’t know how the others would react to this, but as far as she was concerned, Cress was done. He had to stop. “I love you too much to let you keep doing this. It’s your turn to leave.”

He shook his head. “I’m fine. I don’t need to do that. All of this just hit at once, but you know it’s not always like this.”

“You are. You’ve never known when to stop.”

Cress looked at the ground. “You know I’d be doing similar things no matter where I am. You know I can’t turn it off. Don’t ask me to leave the people I care about to do this for strangers. It’s not the same for me as it is for Enya. She’s better off if she doesn’t have to use her abilities. I don’t have any choice about some of mine.”

Oceana sighed. She reached over to touch her brother’s shoulder, kneeling down next to him. “Something has to change, and you know it.”

“Yes.”

She kissed his forehead. “Go back to your swim. I’ll talk to the others.”

“I’m coming with you.”

Author’s Note: This wasn’t supposed to be even a bit humorous, but the dynamics of the family got in the way, so it’s maybe a little funny.

Things Overheard

“Not good.”

“What?” Moira looked at her brother, tempted to smack him for his constant interruptions. All she wanted to do was eat her food in peace. He couldn’t stand to sit still for one moment. He couldn’t resist stirring up the pot, could he? If he could just once let things go, if he didn’t need to show off in front of everyone, if he wasn’t trying to impress Enya, maybe they could have had a decent meal.

“Occie, tell me that I’m wrong,” Sherwin said, and Moira frowned. She set her drink down and closed her eyes, listening to the wind. She could hear Terra crying. She shook her head, not wanting to intrude. She didn’t need to hear that, no one needed to stick their noses right into Terra’s grief. That was private. If Cress was helping her with it, he was a fool, that same generous fool that he always was, but that didn’t mean anything.

“Are you spying on them?” Enya shook her head, setting down her sandwich. “Whatever Terra told Cress is private, and you had no right to listen into it. Were you listening to me and him first? What is wrong with you, Sherwin?”

He held up his hand. “Before you go jumping down my throat, I can’t always help what I hear on the wind, okay? It’s like Cress’ thing with washing away our bad moods. I hear things I shouldn’t all the time. I don’t know how to shut that off.”

“Cress is going to get himself killed at this rate,” Oceana said, walking toward the window. She sighed as she looked out, closing her eyes. “I swear, all I get from him lately is this sense of… emptiness. He’s worn so thin, like a glass with a leak…”

“He said he’d go skinny-dipping later to change that.”

Sherwin frowned. “He goes skinny-dipping? That is not something I’d ever believe of Cress.”

“I could.”

“Moira! You’re not seriously thinking of him… naked, are you?”

She gave her brother a look and then smiled, knowing just how much it would annoy him. Cress was not the best looking man in the world, rather ordinary, in fact, and with his watery personality, he didn’t inspire passion in anyone, but she knew just how much the idea of her being interested in Cress would annoy Sherwin, so she stuck with it. She couldn’t remember when the last time she’d given a man a real thought, not since the agency came into their lives, and she didn’t expect that to change. They got to have incredible abilities because of the elements, but in exchange, they lost the things normals took for granted.

“That is so… disgusting.”

She gave Sherwin a dirty look. “Like your flirting with everything female isn’t.”

Enya cleared her throat. “I think someone may have to intervene with Cress and Terra. Sherwin, you’d better carry her inside so she can rest, and Occie, you’d better get your brother.”

“Yeah, I think I’m going swimming. Don’t get any ideas, Sherwin. I’ll drown you if you so much as peek at me.”

“Like I’d want to see your brother even in swim trunks,” he said with a shudder. “No, I’ll just go grab Terra. I’d do it the fun way, but I don’t want to attract extra attention to us with the levitation act.”

“You two still do that for money?”

“Sometimes. When we’re desperate. Why?”

Enya let out a breath. “I thought I’d use a few things I’ve learned over the past few years to help, since I can’t control the other part, but maybe I can still be useful. I just… need money, and I know I can’t access my accounts. They’d have to be watching them.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Moira told her. “Tell me how much you need, what you need, and we’ll find a way to get you it. You and I can handle that while the others are busy.”

“I want to get a computer—a laptop—and some mobile broadband. The power of the elements is impressive, but I think you might just be outdone by the internet.”

Moira laughed. “Maybe.”

Author’s Note: An important interruption.

Necessary Clarity

“They’ve got food inside, set out and waiting. If you’re hungry, you can go get some,” Terra said, walking up to Cress and Enya. She should have known she was interrupting something—they’d been talking when she started over, but now they were quiet and awkward. That was her doing. She cleared her throat. “If… If you don’t mind, Cress, I could use—I need to talk to you.”

He nodded. “I’m not hungry. I was going to stay out here for a while. Come sit with me. I might even take a swim later, but I don’t think you want to join me.”

“I’m not completely anti-water just because I’m attuned to earth. I’m not likely to put on a swimsuit unless Sherwin’s nowhere around to see it, but that’s different.”

“Agreed.”

Enya forced a smile. “I think I might have an appetite this time. I’ll go see if there’s something I want.”

“If there’s a fish sandwich and you eat it, I might just be offended.”

She laughed as she walked away. Cress shook his head, turning his eyes back to the water. He kicked his shoes off and removed his socks, putting them in the shoes before rolling up his pants and walking to the edge of the shore. “I can tell you’re upset, but I’m still not a mind reader. You have to tell me what’s wrong.”

Terra slipped out of her shoes, joining him by the water. “I want to ask you, with all the things you can do, to make the earth stop telling me Stone’s still alive.”

Cress frowned. “What?”

She sighed. “Every time I reach out to the earth, every time I take a step or someone stirs up the breeze… I sense those things. I can shut out a lot of the little things, but if I’m trying to be useful, then all I get is… interference. I can’t deal with this. My brother is dead, and I know what grief is—a huge part of is denial—but I can’t live like this. He’s dead, but try telling that to the earth.”

Cress picked up a rock, running his fingers over it as he studied it, not looking at her. “Water has never spoken to me in the same way that earth speaks to you or the way that Moira and Sherwin can listen to the air. I can feel moisture all around me, can follow that sense, but I don’t get the same warnings or anything from it. I don’t know that I’m the right one to help you, for all that I can soothe you and keep you calm.”

Terra closed her eyes. “I want it gone. I want to stop being such a… well, a bitch to everyone. I can be annoying, I can be irresponsible, but when did I become so—Stone used to make us all laugh, and we were more of the concept of ‘down to earth’ rather than the other clichés we might have used.”

“Even in your grief, I trust you to know what the earth is telling you,” Cress said, and she opened her eyes to see his hand on her shoulder. “If you tell me that Stone is alive, I will believe you.”

“Why? Cress, it’s crazy. We all saw him die. I felt… I swear I felt it… He’s dead.”

Cress turned her around, nudging her onto the sand of the shore, out of the water. He kept his hands on her. “I’ll give you what clarity I can. Tell me what it’s really saying.”

She didn’t want to do this, but she knew that he was right. The only way to know what she was really feeling was to go ahead, using his help to clear her conflicting emotions. With them out of the way, she might know what was real and what wasn’t.

She picked up a handful of sand, letting it run through her fingers, and when it had fallen from her palm, she started to sob. “No, no, no. Damn it, no.”

Cress held onto her, but she wanted to shove him away. If she’d had the strength, she would have, but as it was, all she could do was cry.

Author’s Note: This isn’t really the choice that Enya and Cress should discuss, but they went into it anyway.

Skimming the Surface

“I would have thought you’d say mountains.”

Cress shook his head, leaning back against the cabin. “The higher the altitude, the thinner the atmosphere. Less air for Moira and Sherwin, and he needs to heal. Mountains weren’t an option. This should forest is a better compromise. They get their air, Occie and I get the lake, and Terra gets everything else. I suppose I could even say you get the local campfires.”

“Not funny,” Enya said, giving him a shove, and he ignored it since his comment had warranted some kind of reciprocation. “Do you always think like that? Talk like that? Sherwin needs air and you have to find a compromise—”

“I’ve been leading them for a long time now. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I always tried to do my best. That means factoring the needs of everyone into the decisions, weighing the risks and the consequences and—”

“And never one minute for yourself?”

He shook his head. He was not that selfless, and she, of all people, should know better than to assume that. She’d been the one that had to deal with the worst of his choices. “No, if I want time alone, I know how to get it. I just lull them all to sleep and wander off to do as I please. It annoys them, but I find it very useful and enjoyable.”

“Do I want to know where you get your money?”

“I can’t tell you where all of it came from,” he said, pushing away from the cabin. He walked down to the shore and picked up a rock, skipping it across the lake, letting it land on the other shore.

“Cheater.”

He laughed. He was. He was also a lot worse than that. “I take pleasure in small things. Occie’s smile. Moira’s frustration with her brother’s latest antic. Hearing Terra sing to her plants when she thinks none of us are listening. Stone used to make models. Wood carvings, stone ones… We could sell those for money. Terra can grow us anything we need if we’re settled in for a while. That kept some of our expenses down. We camp a lot, since the we have the advantage of always being able to shower or have clean water. Not ideal, but not terrible.”

“It’s still the life you told me to avoid.”

He picked up another rock, throwing it in and letting it sink this time. “Those men went into your house. They threatened your life. The fire came out and destroyed them—and that wants to destroy you, just as it always has. That is our life nine days out of ten. Moira, Sherwin, Terra, or Stone would find some trace of a rogue—though lately it’s been that damned agency—and we’d go to the source. Not every rogue abuses what they can do, but a lot of those encounters are unpleasant. Power corrupts.”

“Not you.”

“Honestly, Enya, is there anything left of me anymore? I let in so much of that other place, let that dimension change me. I can do impossible things, but I lost track of who I was in the process. I don’t remember ever just being a boy. I remember being that boy who played with water. I am defined more and more by my element and not by my name or personality—hell, even my name is an indication of what I am.”

“Yeah. Nice of our parents to pick names according to the attunement, huh? I wonder what would have happened if any of them had managed to have a child without an element.”

“I always figured ‘little fire’ suited you and would even if you weren’t attuned to it.”

She looked away. “I don’t think that’s a good thing.”

“We all need a bit of spirit, strength enough to fight for what matters, to stand up for what’s right. That’s all I meant. Don’t start down the road of guilt and pain. I’ll have to shove you in the water to snap you out of it. I don’t have another emotional cleanse in me at the moment.”

“You need to stop running yourself so far into the ground.”

“Actually, I need to go skinny-dipping.”

She stared at him. “You… You’re kidding, right? You don’t joke that often, so it’s hard to tell with you, but you are kidding, aren’t you?”

He shook his head. “I find I do better after long baths or time in a pool or lake, and the more of me I can get in contact with the water, the better. That’s generally when I lull them all into sleep—I’d rather not have any witnesses to that.”

“Are you turning part fish on me?”

He didn’t need any reminders of that day, either. “You would say that.”