The sprinters each loosen the tie of a pouch that’s hanging around their necks. A Corrander girl pours out a handful of Variants, and the moonlight catches them in the crease of her palm.
And suddenly, watching Eliza crouch in the sand to ready herself, I understand.
The Tempests aren’t going to help them run beside the water.
They’re going to help them run on the water.
Chapter Nineteen
“Hey.” Will suddenly drops down behind me. “Quick. Would you want to race?”
He pushes his hand through his hair and then extends something out to me with a flattened palm.
It’s the pouch of his Tempests.
“I measured it again, and I think I’ve got just enough for two,” he says.
“Sixty seconds!” Nell calls.
“Do it,” George says, shoving me. “You can’t come to Sterling without a Tempest race.” I hesitate for half a moment. Then I leap to my feet and grab the pouch from Will’s hand. My heart immediately starts to ricochet.
I kick off my shoes and run barefoot to join the other girls on the beach. Feel the sand, wet and cool, under my toes. What are you doing? half of me screams. What if these run out in the middle of the lake and you sink like a stone?
When I reach the line, someone steps forward and wraps two bands around my arms. With shaking fingers I open the pouch of Tempests.
“Thirty seconds,” Nell calls.
I’m dusted with Glimmers, crimson on my left arm for Sterling, a greenish-blue on my right.
I haven’t even warmed up. I’m probably going to pull a muscle and promptly drown.
“Yes, A!” Beas says, shooting me a thumbs-up. “This is going to be such a blast.”
“Fifteen seconds,” Nell says. “You may ready your Tempests now.”
I pour the Variants into my hand. They are softer than I expected, finer even than grains of sand. I glance up at Will, and at his nod, I lift my arm and shower them over myself. They fall softly around me, like flakes of ash in my hair, dissolving on the tips of my lashes.
“Five,” Nell says. “Four.” The crowd joins in the countdown. I crouch down into the sand, feeling a tingle take hold along my skin, amping through my blood like a coil ready to spring.
“One,” Nell says. At her whistle, the girls around me take off like a shot.
And then I leap into a running step. The wind clutches my hair and unfurls it behind me, and my breath comes almost too quickly for me to catch it. I send up two sprays of sand before I reach the lake. The sound of my feet hitting the water is more like the splash of a shallow puddle than wading into the depths. For half a second I expect to sink, for my feet to give way to the water’s surface.
But the girls flanking me each become streaks of light as the water turns to road beneath them. It is like running in parallel with horizontal bolts of lightning. Though the lake stretches on for the length of at least two football fields, within a few breaths we are already almost a quarter of the way across it.
I’m flying as if the water itself were pushing me forward; as if running were the most natural thing I’ve ever done. It’s easier even than breathing. The dull sky spreads out overhead, void of stars, flat and polished like a stone. I can feel my hair, wild and cold, and my cheeks are warm and red. I feel more alive than I have for as long I can remember. Nothing matters—?not my fight with Miles, not my missing necklace. I can’t stop laughter from pouring out of me. I’m being too loud. I look like a fool. I don’t care at all.
When I reach the other side, I’m a half step behind everyone else, and I never do catch them. They are a rainbow of colors just beyond me as we turn back across the lake, and by the time I reach the starting line again, I feel nothing but euphoria, even though I’m dead last. I step onto the beach, grinning and perfectly dry. The crowd claps as Nell steps forward to declare the winner. I’m last, Beas is fourth, and Eliza comes in second, barely behind some girl from Corrander. Eliza glares in the way of someone summoning a death wish and straightens her hair, but then her attention is drawn to the water’s edge. I follow her gaze.
Something is brewing between two boys whose arms glow with competing bands of crimson and gold. They exchange words I can’t quite hear, and then a brief shout rings out as the Corrander boy slams into the racer from Sterling. I squint my eyes at the figure stumbling backward from the blow. Figures, I think. It looks like Chase.
He splashes thigh-deep into the lake but rights himself instead of falling.
“That’s for whatever disappears next,” the Corrander player growls. Someone near me responds with a low boo, and then a sense of unease passes through the crowd, as distinct as the wind rustling cornstalks around the burned shell of Mother’s house.
“You think I have something to do with it?” Chase’s voice catches somewhere between surprise and a sneer.
“One of you. Sterling’s got more possible Catalysts than us and Sheffield combined,” the Corrander player says. Eliza’s back suddenly stiffens. “And it sounds like that number keeps growing.”
