Page 48 of Ash Fall

Briar takes a step back, looking at Reid like he has two heads. "Are you mental? What are you talking about?" She looks over at her brother, "Julian...What is Reid talking about?"

Jules snorts, and Reid opens one eye to glare at both of them and then focuses on Jules. "You didn’t tell her? You didn’t tell her about the…you know." He asks motioning toward his head.

Julian sighs and shakes his head before turning to Briar. "About that." Jules turns toward the stock tank near the fence line with the expression he wears right before he ruins somebody's afternoon. He lifts one hand, and a rope of water rises out of the tank and hangs there in the air, twisting slowly.

Briar makes a sound I've never heard a human make before.

"Julian." Her voice climbs an entire octave. "Julian, what is that."

"Water."

"WHAT IS IT DOING?"

"Floating." He flicks two fingers, and the rope of water arcs lazily toward Reid, who yelps and ducks behind Anders.

The arc never gets there. Kara lifts her chin, and the whole thing freezes solid in midair, a curved icicle hanging above the gravel for one perfect second before gravity notices and it drops, shattering into pieces at Jules's feet with a sound like a dropped chandelier.

Nobody moves at all. Then Gigi starts clapping.

"Was that necessary?" Jules asks, looking down at his ice crusted shoes.

"You started it," Kara says. "I ended it. You don't get to play the victim now."

Briar stares at her brother, then at Kara, then at the ice melting into the gravel. "Since when. Since WHEN?"

"Since the moon broke," Jules tells her with a shrug. "There's a lot to catch up on. We all have some form of…magic now."

Her eyes are impossibly wide as she stares at all of us and then they drop to stare at her lifted hands with a frown. Anders takes all of it in with the calm of a man who has spent seventy years watching weather do whatever it wants. "Well," he says. "That'll be useful."

The group gathers near the trailer while Penny races off toward the barn with enough excitement to power a small town. Gage whistles sharply. She stops, looks back, considers her options, and then comes running back, because Gage's commands still outrank curiosity by a very small margin.

"I heard the news and felt the shock wave," Anders says. "You were right, Elle."

Gigi pulls her glasses off and shakes her head. "One of the few times in my life I wish I hadn't been. We've come up with a destination, though, to get us through what's coming."

Gage fills him in on the Harlow Mine and why we think it will work to shelter us. Anders takes it in with a thoughtful expression, then nods. "Alright. That'll do the job better than anything I could have come up with."

"I'm sorry," Briar steps into the middle of the group. "A mine?"

Jules pinches the bridge of his nose. "Briar."

"A mine. Like…underground in the dirt?" Her arms cross hard over her chest. "You had me pack for that? Due to personal reasons, absolutely fucking no."

"Language," Anders says mildly.

"Is there plumbing? Where does a person shower? Julian, where does a person SHOWER?"

"We'll build something."

"You'll BUILD something? You don’t know how to BUILD anything!"

Kara examines her nails. "We have neither the time nor the crayons to explain this to you, Briar. It will get worked out."

"Nobody asked you."

"And yet here I am, improving your life by letting you come with us so you don’t DIE."

"You said we were going somewhere sa-fe." Briar rounds on her brother, and her voice cracks on the last word. "You didn't say we were going to live in a hole."