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“—there’s a blast from history lectures past,” Cruz interrupted, vaguely hoping to head off another round of WikiShade. But it was too late.
“—to the present day is not even ten thousand years, just five percent of that 200,000 years. Ninety-five percent of human history was small bands, tribes living hand to mouth, hunting, picking berries, eating bugs. Longer, really, since earlier hominids . . . But, anyway, little-known fact: in primitive societies women actually provided most of the food. But they also got pregnant, and it’s hard to chase wildebeest when you’re pregnant, or nursing. It’s hard to fight off the hyenas when you’ve got a baby in your arms. So that’s what the men did: they had the larger muscles and they kept the predators at bay and killed the occasional wildebeest for protein.”
“That’s why I was probably never going to be a very good boy,” Cruz said, teeth chattering from a combination of cold and nerves. “I never wanted to kill wildebeest.”
“Might be very tasty,” Shade suggested. “Anyway, hunting and fighting are what the men did, and they learned that they had to suppress their emotions, especially fear, in order to do it.”
“So . . . you’re trying to be male?” This was said with a tone of irony, though Shade must have missed it.
“No. I’m just trying to . . . to . . .”
“Win?”
“Slap me. Hard.”
“What? No! What are you talking about?”
“Pain,” Shade said. “It creates emotion.”
“You can’t come up with a better way?”
“Slap me. Do it!”
“I do not want to—”
“Oh, stop being such a wimp!” Shade snarled. “Pretend I’m one of those football players.”
Cruz realized Shade was provoking her, but even knowing that, her blood started to boil, just a little. The rage at her father that she had suppressed, but that did not wish to stay suppressed, was too raw, too recent, too near the surface.
“Come on, you wimpy, weak—”
Whap!
Shade’s head snapped sideways. She gasped in pain and surprise; Cruz gasped in horror at what she’d done.
Part of me meant that slap, Cruz thought.
“Ow-uh!” Shade said, holding a palm to her face.
“You made me!”
Shade held up her hand, calling for silence. She was trying to channel the pain of the slap into . . . well, into doing whatever it was her sleeping mind had done the night before.
For the next ten minutes they tried everything. Cruz twisted Shade’s ear painfully. There was more slapping. There were hurled insults, which had the frustrating effect of giving them both the giggles. Cruz even launched into a sort of improvised ghost story. Anything to push Shade’s emotional buttons, to cause a purely emotional reaction and hopefully get her to act without thinking, to access the power the way—according to Astrid Ellison’s book—Sam Temple, the original PBA power, had done.
But Shade was simply not a person out of control. Shade was the living avatar of self-control.
“It’s me,” Shade said after endless attempts that had left her a bit bruised and very frustrated. “I don’t . . .” She formed her hands into claws that seemed to scratch at the air, as if she was reaching for something, like she was trying to grab hold of something: human feelings? “I don’t get emotional easily,” she concluded lamely.
“You think?” But Cruz was thinking that she knew how to evoke a reaction from Shade. But would it be too cruel? “You blame yourself for your mother’s death,” Cruz blurted.
Shade’s eyes glittered in the dark.
“That’s it, right?” Cruz demanded. “That’s what this is all about?”
Shade had gone very still.
The shark has doll’s eyes.
