backward. After several shoves, Kate returned the favor, pushing back hard and Max fell backwards onto the floor.
“It’s ionized air,” he laughed, getting up and brushing himself off. “Molecules with an electrical charge. They pull together like a gas, a connected mass instead of individual particles, but with a strength like a solid object. I generate enough electricity to charge the air around me. And I’ve learned how to manipulate it.”
He turned to Kate. “Hold your hands apart, open to each other. Do you feel a pull-a magnetism-between them?” I tried with mine but didn’t feel a thing. Kate looked doubtful too. “It’s not going to jump out and kiss you on the lips,” Max told her firmly. “You have to know what you know. Either you feel something or you don’t.”
“I feel something,” she said uncertainly. “But I don’t generate electricity-do I?”
“Enough, I’ll bet,” he answered. “They’re subatomic particles so it doesn’t take much. Just follow the hum between your hands, follow it like the thoughts of the guy in the van across the street. The longer you hold the feeling, the more fluid you’ll get with it.”
She worked her hands back and forth for a long moment, the fascination on her face competing with embarrassment-this was a typical combination when you were dealing with Max. All at once, he flicked his index finger out close to hers-a spark jumped, bright and sharp, from his fingertip to hers.
“You’ve got juice,” he smiled, an uncoiled smile for a change. She returned the smile and I immediately felt a bit queasy, like I was intruding or something.
“Opposites attract-you’ve heard that, of course.”
Her eyes widened, her breath quickened. “I’ve heard,” she answered. This was pretty juvenile banter as far as I was concerned but no one was asking my opinion.
“Positive attracts negative,” he said and if he’d held out his finger at that moment, they might have electrocuted each other. “Particles that have to join together to accomplish anything.”
“How do I know which I am?” she asked.
He laughed. “You’re both, depending on the moment. You don’t have to worry about it-you’ll automatically attract the opposite. There’s always power around you, once you know what to do with it.” Kate had her hands wide apart as she eagerly worked up a field, a charge, whatever the hell it was.
“It takes a while,” Max advised, close behind her shoulder, “to build and then all at once-you’ll feel it-it takes on a shape and consistency of its own, a wholeness. You’ve got to keep track of that; it’s the one tricky bit. When it actually takes shape, you have to hold your breath-the rest of us, too if we’re close by-because it sucks all the oxygen out of the air for about five seconds and all that’s left is ozone, which is poisonous. So stay sharp.”
He bent over and swept his hand out in front of him. You could see a kind of dusty glimmer forming ahead of him. “It works horizontally, too,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a handful of coins and tossing them out. The pile scattered, clinking and bouncing, two inches over the floor. Max grabbed Kate’s hand and she stepped up, eyes wide, onto the surface of the thing. He steadied her as she wobbled around, slipping back and forth like it was wet marble, grinning like a five-year-old on an ice rink. And then the glimmer vanished, the shell disappeared and Kate landed awkwardly, both feet firmly on the floor.
“Okay, it’s loads o’fun,” Tauber griped. “What good is it?” He was tightly-wrapped, like forty minutes before Happy Hour.
“Ever want to hit me?” Max asked.
“Right now, I’d box Jesus.”
“Go ahead.” He swiped the air between them. “Not too hard, okay?”
“I won’t hurt ya,” Tauber snarled, throwing a punch at Max’s midsection. It snapped through the air and stopped dead, muffled by a thick curtain about three inches deep. Tauber paused for just a second and slapped out another blow, this time at Max’s shoulder. The fist stopped fast this time and he almost fell from the deceleration.
“It’s an illusion,” Tauber protested. “You’ve put me under.”
“Try my knees-but lightly,” Max said. Tauber slid his own knee forward and hit Max’s-the two of them teetered away from each other. “I didn’t charge the air down there.”
“Okay, it stops girls and old men,” Tauber said. “Will it stop bullets?”
“It’ll deflect some and absorb others.”
“You control it?”
“No-it responds to the vibrations of the bullet. This is the stuff that drove the commisars crazy. The people that study this stuff will tell you that electrons are electrons. The electrons in me could just as easily be in a desk, a cloud, a peanut or a nuclear warhead. And-I know this for a fact but I’m not sure it’s exactly official science-the electrons in the desk become part of the peanuts and then the floor and then the cloud overhead. Matter is fluid- there’s a continual exchange process. Meanwhile, all that matter reacts to input. To put it simply, our environment-everything around us-reacts to everything else around us. And to us. So the field got thicker and grew when Kate approached it enthusiastically, and toughened up, got denser, when you decided to beat the shit out of it.”
“Ye’re saying everything’s alive?”
“That’s over my pay grade,” Max said. “But I can’t wait until scientists announce that grass has feelings.”
“Will it stop lightning bolts?” I asked.
“What?” All eyes on me. I hate that.
“Volkov’s guy-Marat-he can shoot lightning bolts from his fingers. He was shooting at me when I was trying to get down the hillside.”
“How far could he shoot? What kinda’ distance?”
“At least a couple yards.”
Max, who never really stood still, was still now. “I–I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a new one to me.”
“That’s no good,” Tauber said, staring at Max like he’d been betrayed. “I thought you were the big cheese.”
“I don’t know Marat-I don’t know where he got his training.” Max looked thrown. “Anyway, I bet the shield would stop it.”
“What do you mean, bet?” Tauber growled. “We’re four people against an army. They’ve got training, equipment, systems and backup. The cops and government are with them. I don’t wanna hear should.” He was livid. “We need offense. Hard offense, something that’ll scare ‘em back to their cribs. We have to even the odds a little bit here.”
“We’re trying to prevent an assassination,” Max said. “We’re not trying to start a war.”
“We’re trying to stay alive.” Tauber pulled a cigarette butt out of his pocket and held it to his mouth. “Light it!” he ordered.
Max stared at him uncertainly-he held out a finger and produced a couple of sparks until the cigarette lit.
Tauber pulled a couple of times, took a decent drag and exhaled a long plume of smoke.
“Okay,” he said, “now figure out how to do that to a man. At thirty feet.”
The plane wasn’t full. They seated us in one center row but we ended up sprawled across several. Max sat shielding Tauber from the attendants and their little booze bottles until the old guy sputtered to sleep. Kate stretched out across the row behind me, covered by four little airline blankets, but I could hear her toss and turn, showing no signs of really being sleepy. I drifted in and out myself, blessedly without bad dreams but also without sustaining any sort of rest. In the middle of the night, I came to, groggy and with voices over my shoulder, whispers out of a dream. The music of the voices came first and for a long interval before the meaning of the words began to kindle.
Kate’s voice first: “…but what kind of life? Where do you live?”
Max: “I have places to go.”
“Are they home? Nobody waiting for you someplace?”
“I’m difficult to get along with.”
Her laughter.“If that was the criteria, no man would ever get a date.”
Renn laughed(!). And then got over it. “Our gifts make normal ties difficult.”
“Shouldn’t it be the opposite? If you know what the other person wants-?”
