Chapter 38: Terra

Kahn’s brow furrows.

Talk about mixed signals. Poor guy. One day I’m screaming at him to stay away from me, and the next I’m practically flirting with him. “I’m sorry. I may have excellent balance on top of those wires, but I’m still struggling to find equilibrium here. This exordium thing is confusing, and it’s messing with my brain.” I think about the redhead. “You didn’t really break off your engagement after meeting me, did you?”

“Of course I did.” He blinks. “Vanessa’s only upset about the loss of the status marriage to me would have provided.”

Looking at him, I doubt it was only the loss of status, but I don’t bother arguing the point.

“Now that I’ve met you.” He shrugs. “I could never marry anyone else.”

Anyone else. I’m unprepared for the longing that pulses through me at the thought of marrying Kahn. “What would you do if I proposed to you right now?”

“I would accept, with great joy.” Kahn’s smile is confident. He must know how handsome he is. “Are you proposing marriage?”

I snort. “No, nothing like that. I still can’t—won’t—allow fate or anything else to make my decisions for me.”

“Hear me out.” Kahn steps closer. “That’s all I’m asking.”

My heart accelerates. My fingers itch to reach for him, to touch his jaw and feel the place where his hairline meets his temple.

“What if you hadn’t had this shoved upon you, as you feel it was? What if you’d simply met me? Do you find me unattractive?”

I laugh.

“You do.”

“Oh, come on. Of course not. No one finds you unattractive, as I presume you know.”

He grins. “So if you didn’t have these artificial feelings, or whatever they are, shoved upon you, you might have liked me.”

I shrug.

“And you would have interacted with me without this anger and irritation.”

I frown.

“I am here training you, after all.”

“You challenged my father over my very existence.”

He groans. “I knew that would come up. I did what none of the other men were brave enough to do and voiced concerns shared by many.”

“Concerns about the propriety of going to war over the life of one woman.”

“People are going to die, Alora. A lot of people.”

I gulp.

“But I didn’t know you then, not at all. None of us did. We didn’t understand who you were, or what was at stake.”

“Would you have come around without the exordium?”

“The other men have, nearly every one of them.” Kahn begins to walk toward the boxes.

I follow.

“There have been two wars against Amun during my lifetime, although one of them was quite small. We would surely fight more with or without your existence. You feel guilt over this, over causing this war, but honestly, we’ve been arrayed against each other for a very long time. Maybe since the very beginning.”

The beginning of Terra. I wish I knew what that meant, when that was, and what this ‘end’ that I’m supposed to cause might be. I bite my lip.

Kahn’s eyes follow the movement and stop. His pupils dilate. His hands clench at his sides, working the muscles in his forearms. A pulse in his temple throbs.

And I want to touch it.

My hand lifts on its own. . .until I force it back down to my side. I have too much to learn to be this distracted.

“Give me a chance, give us a chance,” Kahn says. “I’m not saying that you should do whatever the universe wants.” He smirks. “But maybe don’t not do something because it wants you to do it either.”

That almost makes sense.

Kahn walks toward the area with the black boxes. There are also several tables near each box. Kahn leans toward the box with sand and scoops out a handful. He takes a step toward a table and dumps his handful onto the top. “Now, I know you can Lift this, but I'm more interested in what you can do with it once you have.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

His eyes flood with light, and I gasp. I've seen plenty of people whose eyes fill with a soft yellow or brown or bluish glow, but I've never seen a blue so bright that it’s nearly white, not like this. He Lifts the pile of sand and spreads it out, each grain hanging suspended in front of us. He shifts the grains around in bunches until they spell out letters, clearly. The edges are completely smooth and readable. The letters say, “Alora.” Then he lowers the sand into a neat pile and the light winks out of his eyes. “Can you do that?”

I focus on the sand for a moment, feeling each grain. As I do, I also feel the boxes around me. The water, the sand, the feathers. I feel each shred of wood, each metal ball. I close my eyes and pull.

“Why are you closing your eyes?” Kahn asks.

I open them. “Sorry, it’s an old habit. Sometimes I have trouble focusing. Closing my eyes helps me feel instead of being distracted by what I see.” I Lift the sand in front of me and form it into his name, “Kahn,” just as he did with mine, but I feel like I can do more. I want to impress him, but I'm also aware that I’m not the teacher here. I release the sand into a neat pile, just as he did.

“Good. Now let's see what you can do with a larger quantity.”

He stands, but before he can reach the box, I Lift every grain of sand. It flies into the air and the grains form into the words, “Kahn,” “Alora,” “Terra,” “Jesse,” and “Duncan.”

He stumbles backward, his eyes wide. “Okay.” He braces his hands against the table he bumped into. “Uh, good. Now drop all of that. I want to show you the point of this exercise.”

I do as he asks.

“Right.” His eyes brighten again, bathing me in cool light, while he Lifts a small metal ball. “This is just a tiny piece of metal. Inconsequential, right?”

I nod.

His eyes flare again and the ball flies through the air and slams into one of the tables. It doesn't go all the way through the wood, but it lodges pretty deep. “There's a rack of weapons over on the wall, but in reality, for someone who can Lift, everything around you can be a weapon.”

I look at the piles of things in a new way. I Lift a dozen of the balls and fling them as fast as I can at the same table. They fly right through the wood and sink deep into the mat below. Whoops.

“Show off,” Kahn says, but I can tell by his amazed smile that he's not angry. “Now, to use things like this, you need to have good control. It's downright amazing that you could Lift all that sand, but I want you to Lift it again, and we'll test your limits and control. Lifting something heavy is hard, but holding small things like this, without Binding them, requires a lot of concentration. Most members of the Unit can't even manage more than a handful of sand, so we're already deep into uncharted territory here.”

I Lift the sand again and form it into hundreds of small flowers all around us.

He points at the metal balls. “These are the second hardest to manage, so add them next.”

I close my eyes, but he doesn't bug me about it this time. I want to Bind the sand, but I can't do that, not if we're testing limits. I feel for the balls. There are thousands of them. I Lift them en masse and raise them over my head. I form them into giant words, “This is easy.”

Which it isn't, not really.

Kahn laughs, but there’s a nervous edge to it. He reaches over and grabs my arm. He tugs me gently toward the center of the room. “Why don't you stand over here. I'd hate to have to explain to your father how those landed on your head, if anything terrible were to happen.”

“You mean, if I were to lose control?”

He glances at the sand and the balls and shudders. “I guess we keep going until you can't hold any more.”

I close my eyes and sense the feathers, the wood pieces, and the fabric strips. I Lift them all, forming the pieces into decorative shapes around the pictures and words I've already created. My eyes shine so brightly that the room looks like the sun at noonday. People's faces appear in windows, their eyes wide, and almost all are fearful.

I try not to think about that.

Once I have everything in the air, I start to shift things, like a juggler. The balls leave the word formations and I wind them around and around in circles, with the fabric strips, feathers, and wood chips following through and around. I may be untrained, but I've been Lifting and hauling lots of items for years and years with Martin’s troupe. I Bound fabric strips into clothing for years. Manipulating a lot of items isn't as hard as I thought it would be.

Kahn touches my arm. “Maybe we should put everything away. If you drop all of that, it'll take forever to clean up.”

“But what do you do with the water?” I ask, eying the huge black box full of it.

“Water's the hardest thing to Lift. It takes time and a lot of practice because it breaks into such small droplets.”

Interesting.

I carefully separate each item—starting by dumping the feathers back in their box. Next I deposit the wood chips, the metal balls, and the sand. I drop the fabric strips into their bin last.

Kahn sighs in relief.

“I'd like to try the water, now,” I say.

He nods, which I take as approval.

I close my eyes and feel for the water, but I don't feel individual droplets. It feels like one big entity. I Lift it and as soon as it reaches the top of the box, it starts to slide, water pouring all over the floor.

“It's okay,” Kahn says. “I'll call someone to clean it up.”

“Wait.” Water runs in rivulets across the floor, down under the wires, into the mats on the ground, and all over. I reach for it and suddenly I can feel the water. It wants to be together, and it wants to be alone. It wants to be separate and combined, a feeling that, thanks to being near Kahn, I also understand.

When I pull on the water as an entity, it draws back to the other droplets easily. I pull each droplet in and then Lift it all, shifting all of the moving, flowing chunks of it, and dumping them back into the box. Acceptance and individuality in the same place, for the same movement.

“That's great for today,” Kahn says. “I think maybe we'd better move on to the weights.”