Sky Lands: The Gift Stones Read online

My apartment was right off campus. A single room no larger than my bedroom back in Southern California. It was furnished with a desk and chair, a television on top of my bookshelf, a dresser next to my bed, and a closet near a sink. Swimming posters plastered my walls, screaming things like ‘swim hard!’ in psychedelic colors. Pictures of family vacations to Australia scrolled across my laptop screen; a photo of me scuba diving was fading into an image of my sister holding a seashell. I stared at it, sitting on my bed. I could hear sounds from the street below, the hum of cars and the shouts of pedestrians. The streetlights were an orange-yellow that seeped past the window curtains and splayed their artificial warmth over the ceiling.

  Audrey flipped the light switch on. My backpack and umbrella sat on the floor, dripping and forming a wet smudge on the carpet. I must have dropped the umbrella outside the parking lot; I hadn’t even noticed. After the men ran off, Audrey had picked it up from the bushes and carried my backpack to my apartment while holding the umbrella over me. She sat on the bed, “You should rest.”

  I was still staring at my laptop. Now there was a photo of me and my friends playing beach volleyball. The picture looked foreign somehow. “I –” but nothing more came from me. I kept seeing the same images in my memory: the flash of silver, the sliced pistol. I saw her throwing a man twice her weight across the parking lot. I felt again the odd texture of the pavement and air – smooth, like a sheen of ice. “What happened?” I finally said. I stared at the scrolling photos, but all I saw were my strange memories of the night.

  “Kevin,” she said gently, “what you saw must have been shocking.”

  “He shot me. I should be dead.” I heard myself take a deep breath that shivered in my mouth. “This couldn’t have happened.”

  “Why not?”

  My backpack filled with a jingling sound, a swirling of notes – my cell phone. It was a moment before I crossed the room and answered it. “Hey.”

  “Kevin, you meeting us tonight? We’ve been waiting.” Brendon’s voice sounded distant, an artificial quality to it over the transmission, a crackle of static in the background.

  “No,” I said. “Sorry, guys. I – I don’t feel good.”

  “You alright?” The distant voice again. “You sound awful. Get some rest. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” I hung up. Audrey was sitting patiently on my bed, small and plain. The edges of her jeans were wet and there was dirt smeared across her cheek. She seemed harmless. But as I looked at her, a knot of fear tickled the inside of my stomach. The uneasiness grew when I saw the gash above her eyebrow was only a fraction of what it had been at the parking lot. The blood that had swollen the cut was almost completely gone; as I looked on, the cut diminished until it vanished entirely. Audrey touched the spot where I’d been gazing.

  “Kevin,” she said, bringing her hand down. “I’m sorry this happened.” She shifted her gaze to the floor, wondering over her next thought. “You must be – confused. Perhaps I should explain….” Her voice trailed off, but she said nothing further.

  “Well?” I demanded. When she still said nothing, I pressed, “Explain! How can you do… magic?”

  A slight exasperation creased the corner of her mouth. “Your kind always calls things magic when you can’t explain them.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Is magic real?”

  “No,” I replied instinctively. Then I thought about what I’d seen.

  She looked straight into my eyes. I felt the knot of fear again; this time it tickled up my spine. “It’s not magic,” she said. “You just don’t know why it happens.”

  For a while, there was silence. The tickle of fear began to subside; I relaxed as Audrey only looked at me. “If there’s no logical explanation, then it’s magic,” I said.

  “Really?” She stood and picked up a pencil from my desk. “Then tell me why, when I drop this pencil, it falls to the floor.” She dropped it to the ground.

  “Easy. Gravity.”

  “Why is there gravity?”

  I paused. “I don’t know.”

  “Magic?”

  “Well, it’s not magic just because I don’t know why… why it… happens…”

  “It’s not magic because you’re used to it,” she said. “Your world is filled with magic. But most of you never stop to notice because you are so accustomed to it that it becomes mundane, trivial, a boredom. Then the moment you see something you’re unfamiliar with,” she touched her forehead where her gash had healed seamlessly, “you call it magic.”

  I swallowed, staring hard above her brow. “But there’s no – no scientific explanation…”

  “Science is only your kind’s explanation for what goes on around you. Do you really think that humans have the intellectual ability to understand everything?”

  “But. But the laws – the laws of physics…”

  “Were invented by mankind – in an effort to define the world around them. But it cannot explain everything.”

  I looked at her, not knowing what I was seeing, unsure of what I was hearing. “I – I need to sit down.” I crossed my room and sat on my bed, tossing my cell phone onto my pillow. I thought about the magic of gravity pulling it to the pillow, of science being only an imperfect human invention. Quickly, I shoved the thoughts out of my mind. “So what –” It was hard to speak, as though my throat was dry and I was choking. At last, I managed, “So what are you?”

  Chapter 4