Using this power, however, came at a great cost, and as soon as William loosed the ball of lightning he felt something inside himself rupture. Bright blood gushed in sudden torrents from his mouth and nostrils, and he stumbled backwards as consciousness crumbled into darkness. On crumpling legs, he tripped and lurched, and then, as his vision began to black out and his lungs collapsed, he stumbled backwards over the edge of the building and plummeted ten stories down, destroying a number of awnings on the way. With a ground-rumbling metallic crunch his tiger body obliterated a parked car, and then everything turned black.
4
CHLOE
17th September 2020. New York City
‘How do we achieve immortality?’ Paola González asked. Her big, dark eyes, drastically enlarged by the soda bottle spectacles she wore, shone with an earnest sincerity and the gasoline-fire keenness of youth. ‘I mean, like, how do we really, truly become immortal?’
The three teenagers contemplated this question, with just the echo of the Billie Eilish track staving off the silence, the tinny reverberations of the four-on-the-floor rhythm struggling for aural dominance against the tempest of warring sounds spilling in through the open window of the twenty-first floor apartment from the city below. From the top of a nearby bookshelf, sun-bleached and covered with two generations’ worth of peeling stickers, serene statues of the Virgin Mary and a gaudy portrait of a beatifically smiling crucified Christ watched over the teenagers.
Paola waited in silence, twirling a strand of her shoulder-length hair, kinky and ink-black, around her coffee-coloured forefinger, upon which fluorescent yellow nail polish blazed like molten drops of neon light. Nodding her head in time to the beat, she shifted her weight on the chair – a clapped-out typist’s model, salvaged from a dumpster – and as her heavy thighs spilled further over the edges, the chair groaned with a protracted creak. The embarrassing sound triggered a hot blush across Paola’s chubby, heavily freckled face. Instinct catapulted her hand up to her face, and those neon-tinted fingertips, adorned with too many cheap rings, wormed their way through burgundy-painted lips while two dozen bracelets jingled. Grinding teeth began their habitual, anxiety-ridden work, adding further jaggedness to fingernails that never needed cutting. Her upturned nose, with its wide, flared nostrils wrinkled as a nervous tic darted blips through her facial muscles.
‘We can’t. It’s impossible,’ Chloe O’Connor answered, her voice bolstered with the unwavering conviction of hormone-gushing youth. At seventeen, she was the oldest member of Eisenhower High’s Environmental Club and its unofficial leader, even though the structure of the club was based on a strictly egalitarian, non-hierarchical model. ‘Seriously, we just can’t,’ she continued, driving the point home with force, as she usually did in debates. ‘Death is the one thing we’ll never be able to overcome. It’s just, like … the primary law of the universe.’
‘The, uh, um, the second law of thermodynamics,’ Jun Chen murmured in his freshly broken voice, almost too deeply sonorous for his diminutive, emaciated form. Cringing immediately, as if he expected to be chastised for interrupting, even though he was among his closest friends, he stared at the floor, fidgeting frenetically with hyperactive fingers as he continued. ‘Entropy increases when, um, energy is transferred. Everything living thing … has to die.’
Chloe nodded in agreement, running a pale hand – sprayed with a heavy smattering of freckles, like the rest of her body – through her multicoloured hair, dyed in hues of electric blue, neon pink, shimmering violet and radioactive green, which hung thick and shaggy about her shoulders on her left, but which was buzzed down to a number two grade on the right side of her skull, where her mousey brown roots showed.
Jun swallowed slowly, his wide set eye – two dark slits in shallow sockets – darting around the room like those of some small, nervous forest creature. These twin obsidian orbs were the only things on his broad, square face – perched like a lollipop on a delicate neck – that conveyed any emotion. The rest of his features seemed so immovable and unchanging that his face could have been a prosthetic device stapled onto atrophied musculature beneath. None of Jun’s friends had ever seen him smile.
‘What about those, like … tardigrade things?’ Paola asked, ever hopeful. ‘Or um, the immortal jellyfish, what’s its scientific name again?’ After speaking, she continued to nibble on her nails and tried to shift her weight on the chair without making it creak again.
‘Turritopsis dohrnii,’ Jun answered.
‘Yeah, that,’ Paola said, popping her fingertips out of her mouth. ‘I’m sure I remember reading a blog about how the immortal jellyfish could, like, revert to a state of youth when it started to age, and it could, like, keep doing that indefinitely … I’m sure the scientists said that it was, like, immortal, essentially. And those tardigrades, they can’t be killed by radiation, high temperatures, low temperatures, starvation, or even like, being in a total vacuum … nothing! C’mon, that’s like pretty close to being immortal.’
‘Close,’ Chloe said dismissively, fidgeting with one of the many animal rights pins on her black pleather jacket as she folded up her long legs, wrapped in ripped, skin-tight grey jeans, on the ratty sofa. ‘But those things are literally freaks of nature, and—’
A somewhat timid knocking on the apartment door interrupted Chloe. All three of the teens looked up in surprise; none of Paola’s family members were supposed to be coming home until much later in the day, and there was no other reason anyone else would be knocking on the apartment door. The knocking cut through the suddenly tense silence again, it was a little more insistent this time.
‘Uh, hello? I’m uh, I’m l-, l-, looking for the Eisenhower High Environmental C-, Club.’
The voice was deep but soft, and none of the three teens quite recognised it, but if it was indeed someone looking for the Environmental Club, they had come to the right
