Yes... the ending needs to die a slow and painful death. I know and acknowledge this. Now help me figure out exactly how to kill it/cure it.
The vibrations transmitted through the vinyl of the steering wheel eased as Michael let the pressure off the brake, sliding past the last traffic light and onto the highway. This far out it was all but abandoned; a lone sedan pushed resolutely through the July heat of Nevada far ahead, and he could see the sooty belch of a semi still chugging through the small town in his rearview mirror. But despite the isolation, his hands shook as he pushed them back into the standard ten-and-two positions.
The collar of his shirt wilted against his neck as a hot wind sifted through the open windows, and the sweaty proximity gave him a feeling of claustrophobia, of restless discontent—like an itch just out of reach. He swallowed hard against another surge of bile, releasing one grip long enough to move a bottle of water to his lips and back to the cup holder again. The water was blood-warm, and his fingers were freezing.
He had learned, in some long distant first aid class, the symptoms of shock. Dimly, he recognized them now. With a shaky laugh, Michael chastised himself for that moment of surprise. Of course he was in shock. Just about anyone would be after seeing his roommate arbitrarily combust.
Gritting his teeth, he tried not to hear Declan’s screams in the protest of tires as he swung too fast around a sharp bend in the road. The best of intentions, however, failed him wholly; he couldn’t clear his nostrils of the smell of burning flesh. The bitter, slightly acidic flavor of yesterday’s supper filled his mouth, and with rising panic Michael steered his car off the road.
The sandy topsoil grated against his palms like sandpaper as he emptied his stomach again and again, until dry retches shook his frame. When his body was once more under conscious control, Michael crawled back to the car on his hands and knees and pushed his back against the hot metal body. The deepening shadows of late afternoon obscured the scorch-marks on his jeans. He stared at them until the sting of rising tears forced him to blink, and then dug his knuckles into the inner corners of his eyes. “God, Dec,” he choked, lips convulsing between a stoic line and a moue of grief. For a few minute he just repeated his friend’s name like a mantra, interspersed with inarticulate pleas for divine leniency.
But when the tears passed something blistering was left in their place. Michael lunged to his feet and kicked at the ground, sending up impotent sprays of dry earth. “Why Declan?” he screamed out at the arid waste. “Why couldn’t you just be content to screw with my mind? What did he do to deserve it? Why— why—”
“You know, I don’t think she’s listening, mate.”
Michael froze, chest heaving and fists sporadically clenching and unclenching at his sides. He didn’t look once at the speaker, only stared out at the harsh landscape, drained of all ability to act on his rage.
“The world, I mean,” the other man explained. “But then, she rarely does.”
The ragged, brown-gray hills looked like an uneven rip, like someone had taken the sky and torn it in two, and this was what had lain underneath. Raw, hard. Pure, not adulterated like the smog-stained expanse above. His breathing evened out as he gazed at the untried earth.
Then he turned, and looked in the direction the interruption had come from. A young man lounged easily against Michael’s expensive car, one heel crossed over the other sandaled foot, thumbs tucked in his pockets as his fingers drummed against khaki-clad thighs. The stranger offered Michael a crooked, diffident grin, and lurched forward into a proper standing position, holding one hand out. “Charlie Kettle, rolling stone and diviner,” he said by way of introduction.
Blinking, Michael grasped the offered hand; Kettle squeezed it once, then let go. “Michael Desforges... student.”
“Of law, if I’m not incorrect,” Kettle said, nodding. At Michael’s look of surprise, he spread his hands helplessly. “Diviner, remember?”
“Yeah... right.” Michael swallowed, and grimaced at the sour taste of his mouth. Moving past the younger man, he opened the passenger side door and grabbed for the bottle of warm water; anything would be an improvement.
“And as a diviner, I predict that you’re going to be the sporting fellow I put you down for at the first, and offer me a ride back to the Enclave.”
The bottle fell from his hands, and Michael watched blankly as the water seeped into the earth at his feet. Images flashed in his memory, snatches of news commentaries, headlines—threats of U.S. hostility against the radicals—
“What are you saying?” he asked slowly, unable to shift his eyes away from the wet earth.
Kettle’s eyebrows shifted upwards innocently. “I’m saying that you’re going to offer me a ride to the Enclave. The Enclave?” he queried. “You do know of it, Michael. Big warded place about three hundred kilometers north of here, lots of people like us, has this miraculous ability to attract negative attention....” His hands rotated slowly one around the other, as though he were trying to conjure recognition in Michael’s mind. The thought unnerved Michael to no end, and he backed away a few steps.
“Yeah, I know the Enclave.”
“Of course you do. Now, in you go; I’ve no idea how to drive standard, and haven’t had a meal since last night. But then, neither have you. The Enclave’s chefs... they’re the stuff of legend, mate. Literally!” he added with a laugh.
Michael hesitated. “But why would I offer to take you there?”
“Oh, Michael.” His lips tightened, and his eyebrows met as if magnetically attracted. “You know why you’ve got to come.”
And he did.
---
Kettle’s gaze slid from the shifting landscape beyond the steel frame towards Michael. His back was so stiff it was as if he were sitting against a cement wall, not in a posh leather seat. The diviner’s quick eyes noted the posture, the burns on his jeans, the tension in the line of his jaw, and before he could part his lips to ask, he knew. He saw.
The telephone rings. Sophie. No, not Declan; I want to talk to Michael. Soft tones, laughter in the other room as he takes the call—the young man on the sofa, Smirnoff in hand, glares at the television screen. Then click, and shouting, and fists, and flames—
Kettle shuddered as the hiss of fire died in his mind; a solemn woman’s voice spoke over the radio, discoursing upon the moral issues behind allowing magickers to retain their U.S. citizenship. He leaned forward and turned it off.
“It’s going to be a long drive without something to listen to,” Michael commented, never taking his eyes off the road.
“There are many things I’d rather listen to than that propaganda.”
“Do you mind music?” Michael turned the radio back on and changed to another preset channel.
Kettle watched him, eyes narrowed and brow furrowed. “Distracting yourself won’t help as much as you think, mate.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’ve only got two hundred some kilometers left, Michael. We don’t have time to indulge in your denial.”
When he was upset, Kettle observed, Michael’s nostrils flared. “What are you, some sort of itinerant psychiatrist?”
“I’m a diviner. I already told you that.”
“Well, stop magicking me,” Michael barked, his hands tightening on the wheel so that his knuckles showed white. “Get out of my head! I need a diviner even less than I need a psychiatrist.”
“Did you even notice yourself nodding while that thrice-damned woman was talking on the radio?” Kettle asked, frowning. Michael shifted in his seat, but didn’t reply. “You didn’t. Look, I swear I won’t divine you again—magicker’s honor. But when I found you, you were sicking up and screaming like a madman.”
“I’ve had a... bad day.”
“I’ll say.”
“Stop magicking me.”
“I didn’t do it again, I swear! But that doesn’t mean I can just forget what I already know,” Kettle said, his tone a pleading whine.
He decided to take Michael’s silence as absolution.
“Two hundred kilometers,” he murmured, turning to look out at the passing vistas.
---
Kettle woke up to the sound of Michael’s voice, acidic with curses, and the sound of flesh hitting vinyl. The sky outside had blossomed into waves of carmine and bisque, cleft by violet furrows, and the failing light steeped the land orange.
The creosote and sagebrush that pockmarked the scene, he noted, were passing with increasing sluggishness.
He sat up, rubbing his neck, as Michael guided the car to the side of the road for the second time that day. “Something wrong?”
“Out of gas,” was the only reply, along with a sour look as though Michael thought this was all Kettle’s fault.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Less than an hour.”
Kettle nodded slowly; they were still a hefty distance away from the Enclave, then, and though he was very skilled at divining, any gifts that might have been useful at getting the attention of the right people were notably lacking.
With another obscenity, Michael climbed out of the car and kicked the front tire.
“I think,” Kettle said as he pushed his own door open, “I remember seeing a petrol station a few minutes before I fell asleep.”
“Forty minutes is still less than an hour, Kettle,” Michael muttered, holding his hand up to protect his eyes from the glare of the wilting sun. He looked back in the direction they had come from, and then in the direction they were going. Kettle already knew there was no one within his immediate divining distance.
After a moment, Michael sighed. “We’ll wait.”
Kettle watched as his companion sagged against the hot metal body of the car, forehead against forearms. The line between singularity and duality blurred again: can’t, can’t, can’t, he can’t—what would they say? Can’t go back, can’t go forward, can’t get rid of this damned meddlesome magicker—
The diviner jerked himself out of the stream of thoughts, his gaze sharpening as he dragged it away from Michael and up to the darkening sky. “There’s no point in getting angry at me, you know,” he muttered.
Michael stiffened. “I told you,” came the muffled reply, “not to magick me!”
“I’m not trying to!” Kettle ground out. “You’re the one shoving your consciousness at me! It’s not that simple, blocking someone out of your head when they’re apparently supposed to be there!”
“And what exactly is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that whether you like it or not—and I know, not—I was supposed to find you, you were supposed to give me a ride, and we were supposed to break down.”
“Oh, God. I really don’t have the energy for a ‘fate versus free will’ debate right now, Kettle, so if you could just—”
“Stuff it, Mikey. This has nothing to do with fate.”
“Don’t call me that,” Michael interjected, lifting his head and glaring at the diviner, who held his hands palm out; the gesture was belied by an embittered moue.
“It doesn’t,” Kettle persisted. “I was given orders.”
The warm night wind tugged at the buttoned cuffs of Michael’s sleeves and the limp collar, and rattled in the desiccated creosote bush nearby. “Orders.”
Kettle nodded.
Michael turned away.
---
Michael frowned his disapproval as Kettle announced that he would go into a trance to search for any settlements in the vicinity; his divining distance was extended by the disconnection from the physical world. The diviner sat cross-legged a few yards away from the car, hands palm down on his knees, and closed his eyes after warning Michael not to disturb him. It was the last Michael heard until after the sun had set.
For a few minutes, he lingered near the magicker, scuffing his shoes and humming with increasing volume, testing the limits of Kettle’s concentration. When he received no response, he wandered away from the car and further down the highway, arms folded across his complaining stomach. His head was buoyant with hunger and he felt strangely detached from everything he saw, even his own hands.
He examined them closer; ebon traces lingered beneath the carefully trimmed nails of his left hand. It could have been soot, but he reminded himself that the evening was deepening, and he was in no condition to be coming to such incriminating conclusions. He dug the stygian flakes out and flicked them off his fingertips, lips compressed. Orders, he thought. [/i]Whose?[/i]
And then, as the stars wheeled into position above his head, he knew.
Michael staggered back towards the car, and sat down in the dirt in front of Kettle, arms around his knees and ankles crossed. He stared at the diviner until it wasn’t a young man—barely a boy—that he saw, but one of the faces he’d seen on the news. As the evening deepened, darkness seemed to swathe the lower half of Kettle’s face; they always wore black scarves at the rallies. They claimed it was for their protection, but Michael—Michael knew. It wasn’t for protection, it was for intimidation. A mass of faceless, anonymous youths with anger rolling off them in tangible waves, quoting extremists and harnessing powers that mortal men and women weren’t meant to have, threatening to undermine the authority of those who kept the country in some semblance of order—was there anything more frightening?
Yes, Michael thought as his eyes dropped to the hands clasped in front of his knees. Yes, there was.
He looked up and met Kettle’s pale, placid eyes. The diviner gazed at him absently for a moment; coming to himself again, he blinked repeatedly and rolled his head on his neck with a grimace.
“I found someone, but they’re far. Forty, forty-two kilos away.”
Michael did not reply.
“A rancher, I think.” Kettle waited again. “Are you fit to walk that far? You look a little peaky.”
“It’s dark.”
“Well, if you’re not well now, I think you’ll be far less capable by morning,” Kettle pointed out.
Michael shook his head. “It’s dark,” he repeated. “How could you tell if I was peaky or not?”
A sigh. “Diviner, mate. You’re projecting again.”
That, Michael knew, was a lie. If he was projecting, Kettle would have already jumped to defend his innocence. Unless, of course, he was beyond such petty misdirection.
“Can you kill people? I mean, with your—your divining.”
The redhead frowned. “It doesn’t really work that way, actually.”
“But can you?”
“I... I suppose I could. If I put enough energy behind it.” Kettle seemed to consider the question, dropping his gaze to the dirt, where he drew absentminded circles in the dirt. “It wouldn’t be physical death, but more of a permanent vegetative state.”
“That’s just as good,” Michael affirmed.
As a cloud flowed ponderously across the moon, blotting what little light they had, Kettle shuddered. The air, still retaining much of the day’s heat, seemed to have grown very cold, and even Michael felt it. The breath he pulled in a heartbeat later was fresh and icy and shocked his mind out of its daze.
“I killed him.”
Kettle nodded slowly. “I know. I know you did, Michael.”
The twenty-three year old licked his rough lips and closed his eyes. “The police would put me on death row if you turned me in. I’d spend years and years there, watching cable and surfing the net, answering mail and eating balanced meals.” He opened his eyes now and looked at Kettle. “It’s not enough.”
The diviner looked at the air beyond Michael’s left shoulder, and sluggishly brought it back to the right in vacuous denial.
Salt pricked Michael’s nose and eyes, and he gritted his teeth. “Do it!” he screamed.
Do it do it do it it it it; his voice echoed back at them.
Kettle lurched forward, and for a brief, brilliant moment Michael thought he would comply. He tipped his face towards the sky as moonlight spilled out from beyond the cumbersome scud; flesh struck flesh, and he couldn’t help but think how warm Kettle was—
But instead of sapping the student of his essence, he was wrapping his arms around the older man, his knees digging into Michael’s right thigh. “No, Mikey,” Kettle whispered, his voice bogged by tears. “It’s to the Enclave with us. You and me, mate.”
“I killed him.”
“I know.”
“The scarves...”
“No. Just you and me, my brother. I’ll show you the way.”
When they separated, Michael saw only freckles and red hair and arms goose-pimpled with the night’s cold. He smiled at the diviner and held up one hand; white light burst from it and lit an avenue across the barrens, and with the light came the sensation of flannel blankets in winter. “And I’ll keep us warm.”
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