“Jeff . . .” She pulled away from him with a look of bewilderment.
“What?” Jeff instinctively acted baffled, but he knew it wasn’t the right approach. “I’m sorry . . . I just thought that—”
Carlee stood up and brushed off her uniform. It lacked the traditional amount of body armor, but she still looked intimidating.
“Well, don’t.” She started to walk away, and Jeff almost let her leave the conversation like that.
“Carlee, wait.” He climbed to his feet and followed after her. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Really, I’m sorry.”
She looked back at him and shook her head. He saw tears once again in the corner of her eyes. He hated himself for causing them.
“I still love him. And I always will.”
She stalked off, but her tear-filled eyes lingered in his mind. He dared not move. Guilt, regret, and embarrassment swirled around inside of him as he remained in place on the trail back to their small camp. He wanted to laugh at himself for trying to make a move on Carlee while she was talking about her dead husband. In retrospect, it sounded so horribly conceived that it was laughable.
And he wanted to punch himself for being so blind. She had never given him any sort of sign that she was interested in him. He had mistaken her kindness for interest. It was a mistake that he had chided Dane for over and over again, and now he had done the same thing. Stefani had told him not to try for her, but he had done it anyway.
At least she hadn’t let him get far in his attempt. It was the only redeeming factor of the situation. He turned away from the camp and headed back to the ocean, determined to practice on his own for the afternoon. Everyone needed the space, and Carlee’s supervision hadn’t helped him learn to press consistently.
He took a seat on a rock, pulled his boots off, and set his feet in the cool ocean water that lapped at his toes. Jeff selected a rock and stared at it, trying to force an energy cell to take its place. It was no use, so he picked up a boulder with his metal arm and hurled it out into the water, causing a satisfying splash.
Jeff started rethinking what he wanted out of his future now that his thoughts of having a relationship with Carlee had been summarily crushed. The problem was that of his ideas, it had been the one he considered Carlee most likely to go along with.
Instead of thinking about Carlee and his ideas for the future, he refocused on pressing. He replayed his memories of killing Sean again, going over every detail, trying to remember how he had felt and what he had done. He was certain the answer was there. If he could just figure it out, he knew he could press again.
It seemed like a dream. He had known the knife was going to be there—he didn’t even have to look for it. The two realities had blended together in his mind without much effort; in fact, it almost felt like it had happened without him at all. It was a stark contrast to the past week of trying to use his willpower to force realities to collide. Confidence rushed through him as the epiphany hit him.
Instead of concentrating on his desires, Jeff pictured a world where two warlords had battled over this area. It wasn’t hard to imagine—there was food, fresh water was not far away, and it wasn’t too close to any Apostle’s territory. One of the warlords had set an ambush for the other right where Jeff was sitting, lacing the area with explosives. It was a likely scenario; skirmishes happened all the time.
The longer he envisioned the scenario, the more small details came into view. The man who laid the trap only had two fingers on his right hand, having lost the others in his line of work. The attacking warlord had the greater force, but he was young and arrogant. The members of his raiding party had red circles on their clothing as their symbol, which was a horrible strategic decision when it came to sneaking up on people.
He felt his head spinning. He opened his eyes, and for a few seconds, he wasn’t sure where he was. The raiders who had been laying the explosives were nowhere to be seen. Carlee wasn’t here, but he wasn’t sure why she would be with the warlord around. Something rustled in the trees not far from him. He looked for a gun, fearing it was a raider, but he didn’t see any red circles approaching him. In fact, it looked to be a family of deer.
Deer. Not men with guns. He was still scared, though, and he wasn’t sure why. He looked around and found the explosives he was looking for. The ones he had pressed. The ones designed to kill the raiders from a different reality. They were strewn across a number of trees, and there were more of them then he had thought himself capable of pressing.
Another twig snapped as the deer approached slowly through the forest, coming toward him. Toward the bombs.
He started running too late. He could hear the deer moving behind him, and he tried to scream to scare them away, which caused them to pause for just a brief moment.
The explosions ripped through the forest, dismantling trees and echoing across the shore. The shockwave hit him in the back, sending him flying into the brush. Wood chips rained down on him as treetops tumbled to the ground. His ears rang—and not from pressing.
Despite his grogginess, he rolled over and cursed. The peaceful forest along the shore was gone, replaced with a burning landscape that looked more like the fields of Dallas than it did the Zen-like location where they had spent the last week. He groaned as another tree collapsed.
“Jeff!” Carlee’s screams cut through the buzz in his ear and pulled him up.
“I’m fine!” he shouted back before checking himself to make sure that was true. Even without his body armor, his uniform was tough. It didn’t show any signs of having been through an explosive situation.
A sonic boom blasted his ears a few seconds before a meteor hit the ground in a suit of flight armor. Stefani created a small crater, and the resulting tiny mushroom cloud of dust nearly caused him to choke. She detached her helmet immediately and pulled it free, revealing her worried face.
“I’m fine,” Jeff repeated for Stefani to hear.
“Jeff!” Carlee came running in behind. She was wearing her own set of flight armor, although this variation utilized force fields, not unlike the suit Talon had worn during the battle in Dallas.
“I’m fine,” Jeff said for the third time and chuckled. “I . . . was practicing my pressing, and I think I might have figured it out.”
“By pressing in a bomb?” Stefani half asked, half shouted at him.
“Uh . . . yeah. Not sure what was I thinking there. But, hey, it worked!”
“It’s a good thing you’re handsome.”
“We need to move,” Carlee said. “We already know there are leeches in the area, and this certainly has drawn their attention.”
“Agreed,” Stefani said. It was all the conversation she needed to hear. She put her helmet back on, and a moment later, Jeff found himself encased in a familiar flight suit.
As they rocketed off the ground, he felt invincible. He could fly, he could press in bombs, and if it weren’t for the Apostles, he might have been able to conquer the world. But he knew the world didn’t need more conquerors. It needed vagrants.
30 CHICAGO
THE UNEVEN SILHOUETTES OF WHAT was still standing of downtown Chicago looked weary in the light of the full moon. Below the peaks of the occasional stair tower, several spots of the old metropolis glowed with the light of humanity. From a distance, Jeff assumed they had a substantial number of energy cells powering the lights.
Jeff took a last look from the rotting porch of the home they had commandeered for the evening and went back inside. Carlee was reading a book that she had pressed in when they had stopped somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains to generate supplies. Flying with a pack of supplies was not nearly as enjoyable as doing it free of them. It made him feel less like an angel and more like a glorified pack mule.