The Athena Effect, Page 2

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  She moved silently through the dense forest, springing over a small stream effortlessly despite her chunky hiking boots and the bulky satchel she had slung over her shoulder. She stopped to tighten a sisal rope cinched around her waist that served as a makeshift belt; it was the only thing that held up the ill-fitting pants that threatened to slip right off her slender hips.

  Her quarry preferred the disturbed earth at the edge of the woods, and she scanned the ground with a practiced eye, swooping down with swift grace to scoop up one cluster after another. She hunted along abandoned logging roads that were little more than dirt trails, pathways only rarely frequented by marijuana growers, game wardens, or the occasional dirt-bike rider.

  Careful never to be seen, she was skilled at blending into the background when she needed to disappear. The machines were easy to hear coming, unlike the stealthy cats that could be all around her without making a sound. She shivered a little, fingering the parallel lines of scar tissue that ran down the length of her forearm.

  She followed the trail a little ways, finally veering off onto a narrow path that led deeper into the woods. She stooped to gather the first tender leaves of spring, picking fleshy pads of miner’s lettuce, tart purslane and bright tangy sorrel. It would be nice to have some fresh greens for a change, she thought, looking up at the clear blue sky with a smile.

  Her father used to always joke about “Living off the fatta’ the land,” but she never knew what he was referencing until she got hold of a collection of Steinbeck books that were packed away in a dusty box from the local swap meet. She’d read ten of them back to back before she reached “Of Mice and Men.” From that point on, she teasingly referred to her father as Lennie, whereupon he’d call her George, reciting lines from the novel until Mama had enough of listening to the two of them and begged them to stop.

  She smiled when she thought about how pleased Papa would be with her latest haul, guessing that she must have gathered nearly an entire pound of the valuable mushrooms. She shifted her burden, careful not to crush the spongy little treasures.

  She finally reached her favorite spot, a small clearing in the dense woods that concealed a glorious hidden meadow. It was a magical place in the spring, filled with blue lupine and orange poppies that were almost too bright to look at. The edge of the grove was ringed by coiled ferns stretching up from the shadows, poised to spring open at the first touch of warm sunlight.

  Sunlight was precious to her too, and she carefully set down her burden, reaching into a side pocket to pull out a small yellowed paperback. She took a seat on the smooth side of a fallen tree, tucking a loose curl back into the careless braid that reached most of the way down her back. She cracked open the book and lost herself in the story.

  A movement caught her eye, and she drew her knife in a flash, glancing up to see spring’s first rattlesnake sunning itself on a nearby rock. It glowed pale peach with contentment, and she knew that it meant her no harm. Rattlesnake was pretty tasty, but she decided to return the favor and leave it in peace.

  The knife hung from her makeshift belt, its sharp edge facing outwards on her dominant side. She could pull it from its sheath in an instant, clenching it tightly with a lethal ready-to-slash underhand grip. She kept it honed sharp, unable to forget the day that she’d received the twin scars on her arm.

  She’d been slow then, caught unprepared, and it was something she vowed to never let happen again.

  When the afternoon shadows lengthened and darkened her spot on the log, she closed her book and gathered her things to head home. Her parents would be back soon, and she should get the fire stoked and the kettle on. She was feeling a little uneasy, because when Mama got up this morning her color was bad, and she suspected that a flashback might be coming on.

  “Cal, stop that right now!” Mama had scolded her when she caught her daughter staring intently. Cal had perfected changing any animal’s color with ease, but making her mother feel better hovered frustratingly just beyond her reach. Now that her parents were aware of her talents, they’d become self-conscious, uneasy about the prospect of being manipulated by their daughter.

  Shocking attacks had plagued her parents as far back as she could remember, and Cal had endured years of watching them helplessly as they suffered through their terrifying hallucinations. Her parents shared a dark secret that they rarely spoke of, something terrible that had happened before Cal was born. Something that kept them all hidden away, scratching out a living on land tucked in the foothills where the redwood and oak forests met.

  They only visited the nearest small town in order to pick up things they couldn’t grow or gather. People around these parts valued their freedom and minded their own business. Ranchers, loggers and orchardists had populated the area for well over a hundred years, and they were a self-sufficient lot; the only strangers they saw were the tourists that passed through town infrequently, taking the scenic route on their way west to the sea.

  Over the years hippies fleeing the city had come to build their geodesic domes and yurts in these woods, earnestly eager to get back to nature. The locals tolerated them, as they were generally harmless, and they usually didn’t stick around for very long. Their romantic notions of going back to nature always collided with the harsh reality of living completely off the grid.

  Cal’s parents were different. They clung tenaciously to a plot of land with a seasonal creek running through it. They impressed the natives with their stubborn refusal to give up their homestead, and eventually they became a thread in the fabric of the place. They were friendly, but they kept to themselves; no one from town had ever been invited into the snug little cabin they’d erected on their remote acreage.

  Nobody even knew they had a child until Cal was nearly ten years old, and after a few half-hearted attempts to enroll her in a distant school, the locals forgot all about it. The parents insisted they were within their rights to educate her themselves, and from what the sheriff could see, the child was as smart and happy as could be. Cal’s parents were better educated than the entire town combined, so who were they to argue?

  So Cal grew up wild and free, tall and strong. Her little family lived a peaceful life in nearly complete isolation, in tune with the untamed land and the changing seasons.

  A voracious reader, Cal mowed through books as fast as her father could bring them home from the junk bins and thrift shops he’d scavenge for supplies. When he pulled up on his precariously overloaded motorcycle she’d come running, delighted to see the heavy boxes tied down with bungee cords.

  By the time she was twelve she’d read most of the classics, as well as stacks of nonfiction on everything from botany to motorcycle repair. At the bottom of one box she came across a cache of books about astral projection, crystal healing and reincarnation. She was entranced by the tales of mysterious crop circles, alien abductions and spirit channeling.

  Cal’s parents were scientifically minded and only believed in things that could be measured subjectively, recorded and proven. They made fun of the books, scoffing at what they called “New Age mumbo jumbo.” They tore out the pages, using them as kindling to start the morning fire.

  They didn’t realize that their daughter had found something in one of the books–something that changed her entire world view. In one earth-shaking moment she was confronted by the painful truth that her parents were wrong … unquestionably wrong.

  She knew it because one of the books finally put a name to a phenomenon she’d experienced her entire life, and she got the impression it was something to be ashamed of. The book told about people who were able to perceive the visible spirit of living things. It described people who could see colorful auras.

  She realized that she was one of them.

  Cal had always seen and tasted the colors, glowing clouds of feelings and emotions that surrounded everyone. When she was little, she’d assumed that everyone else could too, but she gradually came to realize that her parents didn’t kn
ow how she was feeling simply by looking at her. She’d tried to explain it to them, but at first they’d laughed it off, believing her stories to be the fantasies of an overly imaginative child.

  The colors came in all hues, some saturated and some merely the faintest whisper of pastel. A joyful, excited red was sweet, while an angry red tasted bitter, with a bloody metallic edge. Every person’s range of tones was different, but somehow she could tell exactly what they meant. It was like hearing a sad or happy song–she simply knew what people were feeling without being able to explain exactly how she knew.

  Every color had a variety of flavors, and Cal was acutely sensitive to the meaning of them all. Each hue had a negative and a positive side, and she guessed that they were like magnets, or maybe electric currents.

  She started to play with it, learning how to change her colors at will and push them outside of herself. So far she’d only mastered projecting them onto animals, making the rooster stop crowing with a sudden burst of bright yellow confusion, or sending a hungry rabbit running away from the vegetable garden in a blind silvery panic.

  Cal found that she much preferred the company of animals, because they were true to every color they displayed. There was no confusion with them, because their body language was always perfectly in sync with their emotional states. Only people were false; nearly everyone she saw acted in ways that were contrary to their true feelings.

  As Cal grew older, her parents realized that there was something unusual about their only child. She knew their every mood no matter how hard they tried to mask it, and they were afraid when they realized how truly different she was. They warned her to never mention it to anyone, telling her that there were bad people in the world who would come after her if the word ever got out.

  She tried to use her ability to soothe her parents when their horrific visions threatened to consume them, but the force of their flashbacks was too powerful, overcoming her fledgling attempts to help. Still, she found that if she made eye contact and concentrated, she could turn them a bit with a soft color, taking the edge off an angry red outburst or transforming her mother’s pale green irritation into wry turquoise amusement.

  On the rare occasions that she accompanied Papa to town on the back of his motorbike, she was surprised at the lengths strangers went to hide what they were truly feeling. The face that most people displayed in public had very little to do with their actual state of mind. Cal tentatively experimented with trying to change their colors, but found adults to be resistant. For some reason the townspeople were unwilling to look her in the eyes, closing off her attempts to alter their moods.

  Nobody seemed to notice that babies never cried around her.

  Cal was always happy to return to her country cabin; she saw nothing unusual about the way they lived. Hidden away as surely as Rapunzel in her tower, she read about the things she’d never do or see because of her parents’ all-consuming fears. As curious as she was about the outside world, Cal was content to live inside the pages of a book, roaming the woods like one of the wild creatures she was increasingly able to manipulate.

  They grew most of their own food, and Cal’s father did odd jobs in town that earned them just enough money for fuel and incidentals. Cal hunted and foraged in the woods that surrounded them, and her mother kept a small flock of chickens. In the fall, Papa would take her by motorbike to glean the surrounding orchards, and Mama would spend days putting up enough jars of pears and applesauce to last them the entire year.

  Cal knew every inch of the forest and was an expert in edible and medicinal plants. She liked to trek up to the most remote location on the property, a hilltop graced with the ruins of what was once a sizeable house. She harvested rose hips from ancient overgrown bushes that surrounded crumbling foundation stones, fantasizing about the people that had once lived there.

  It was a romantic spot, and she would read sitting by the remnants of a brick chimney, watching the lizards scurry on charred timbers that stood as mute evidence of a massive fire that had raged long ago.

  Cal had one secret friend, a bearded recluse named Jesse, whose sparse camp she’d stumbled upon while foraging beyond the boundaries her parents had set for her. He lived an even more solitary life than she did, and she would stop by for a visit occasionally, sometimes trading mushrooms and game for the peppermint candies that he always had on hand. She kept their friendship to herself, realizing that her parents would not approve.

  Jesse tended a marijuana plot for someone she never saw, an arrangement that suited his laid-back nature perfectly. “It’s medicinal,” he explained, filling his pipe and waxing poetic about Henry David Thoreau, eastern philosophy and mysticism. He claimed to have traveled to India, Morocco and New York City, but his stories grew increasingly circular and convoluted the more he smoked.

  Still, he was friendly, and always happy to see her. She never had to worry about troubling flashbacks with Jesse, because his mind was as calm and tranquil as still water. He called her “Artemis” or “Diana,” proclaiming her protector of all the plants and animals. Usually, he just made her laugh, trying to sort out the differences between Greek and Roman mythology in his fanciful stories.

  Sometimes Cal wondered about the people living in town, their mysterious lives illuminated by electric lights blazing through curtained windows. They kept tidy houses with neatly mowed lawns, but they all seemed to be masking inner turbulence, and it was always a relief to turn up the unmarked road that led to her quiet little cabin.

  The random seizures and night terrors her parents experienced only served as a testament to the dangers of straying too far from home. She realized that there was evil out there that she couldn’t even begin to fathom, and she adopted her parents’ fears as her own.

  But today Cal glowed pink with happiness as she trotted home with a great haul of fresh morels–more than enough to feast on and still take the extra into town to sell. There might even be enough money left over for some chocolate, she realized, picking up the pace with a little thrill of excitement.

  She rounded the corner and her heart leapt with joy to see Sheriff Brown’s truck parked on the rutted dirt road leading to her door. The sheriff was a kind man who worried about her parents, checking in on them a few times a year. His initial suspicion about their isolated lifestyle had turned to grudging respect, and on his visits he always brought along a tool or some spare item he claimed to have no more use for.

  He knew how much Cal loved her books, and was always sure to include something new for her to read as well. One Christmas he’d even hauled over an almost complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica–over twenty-nine thick and heavy tomes. Cal read them cover to cover that cold winter, huddled by the warmth and dim light of their wood-burning stove.

  She hustled up the driveway to find the sheriff leaning against the hood of his truck, reeling to a stop when she saw his color. He was vibrating with a deep purple sorrow, surrounded by an intensely worried yellow-green anxiety. He shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot.