Night had
fallen some time ago as Deborah lounged back on a bale of hay. They had been going all day, and well into
the night, longer than before. It wasn't
fun, as they kept up a near running pace for most of it, but it was completely
necessary. Undoubtedly the authorities
would be out looking for them after what L’lorne had done inside the CDPC.
Now,
though, they could relax, just as soon as L’lorne got back from talking to the
farmers about getting some blankets. The
old barn that she now laid in the upper loft of was plenty warm enough, and the
nights had been very nice recently, but the main concern was the itchy hay, and
their combined desire not to lie upon it.
Warm
nights. It had been oddly warm, it
finally occurred to Deborah, especially for mid March. Hadn't the weather man mentioned something
about the weather being out of season or something? She could remember snippets of it, but it
really wasn't important. Something else
about the report was important, but she couldn't lock her thoughts on what it
was exactly.
"Hey,"
L’lorne stopped and shook her head as Deborah giggled at the greeting. "Ha, ha, very funny. Here," she tossed a blanket at Deborah
and it covered her head in a lump.
"We're good here until tomorrow.
We've even been invited for breakfast."
"Sounds
good," Deborah laid out her blanket against and along the hay bale and
nestled into it. Ah, not to be itchy, it
felt good. "Think we'll be able to
take them up on it?"
"Maybe,
depends."
"On
whether they're still looking for us?"
"Oh, I
doubt they'll stop looking for us," L’lorne said, then started to gaze at
a beam in the wall.
Deborah
picked up on it. "What are you
looking for?"
"Police
frequencies. They may not stop looking
for us, but they might move their search elsewhere." Her face went from blank to curiously
confused. “Interesting, nothing.”
“Eh?”
“No police
or military frequencies. It’s as if
they’re going for radio silence. . .” L’lorne trailed off.
“What is
it?”
L’lorne
looked at her and smiled. “Oh nothing
you need to worry about.”
Deborah
looked at her companion then shrugged and leaned back. If it was important, she had decided sometime
ago, L’lorne would tell her. If it
wasn't, she'd just have to ask later.
Speaking of which. "You
really beat the hell out of those guys."
"Yeah,"
L’lorne responded as she shuffled her blanket around amongst the hay. "That I did."
"Especially
since they all had guns and you didn't have anything."
L’lorne
chuckled slightly, again. Deborah was
both irritated and relieved. Irritated
every time L’lorne revealed some new trick or idea, and relieved that there was
a new trick she hadn't heard about yet.
"Not exactly nothing, I used this." With that, she tapped on a small pouch on her
right hip.
Deborah, in
all the time walking with L’lorne, had never even noticed it, and this was the
second time it had happened. The first
was the watch that even now she could see bobbing on the wrist that tapped on
the new addition, a strange pouch with a crescent shaped bottom that stretched
out slightly farther than the rest of the pouch. "What is it, a gun?"
"An
axe."
Deborah
looked at the pouch and thought that yes, she could see it being an axe, an axe
head at least. She wondered where the
handle was, probably in another pouch that she won't notice until the last
minute. "Um, wouldn't that have
left more serious injuries than simply knocking them out?"
"I use
it mostly for the weight," L’lorne closed her eyes and leaned against the
wall of hay. "That and I'm very
good at using it, if I must say so myself." Deborah chuckled with L’lorne this time at
the little bit of self praise L’lorne just issued. "But that's not what you wanted to
know. Is it?"
The girl
blinked, scratched her cheekbones lightly and almost blushed. “Well, yeah, it’s just,” she paused again,
searching for the wording she wanted.
“How did I do it?” L’lorne looked
at her and Deborah quickly added, “How did I find my mother?”
“Ah, that’s
what’s on your mind. Alright, I’ll try
to explain it.” She moved forward so she
could look Deborah right in the eyes.
“Your brain is wired differently than most other people. You have this natural ability to see patterns
in complicated things, sometimes things thought to be unpredictable.”
“How do I
do that?”
“That
requires knowing a lot about how the brain works, physics and a few other
things that, to be honest, you don’t quite know enough to understand yet.” She held up her hand trying to hold off the
negative reaction she expected from Deborah.
“In time you can learn them, but until then, you’ll just have to trust
that you can do it, and leave it at that.”
L’lorne leaned back against the wall again.
Deborah
could only accept this response, agreeing with L’lorne’s assessment of her
education, but also knowing that she really didn’t have the time at the moment
to learn it. “Okay, but what do you mean
by patterns and unpredictable things?”
“Well,
let’s try it this way.” L’lorne twirled
her fingers in the air a bit as she seemed to think of the best way to
explain. “A smart person, a very smart
person, could look at a sequence of numbers and say what the next number is. If I said ‘1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, they could
probably work out the next number is 9, and later what every number in the
sequence is, using a mathematical formula.”
She looked over at Deborah. “If I
said ‘1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 to you and asked for the 30th number in
the sequence, you would reply. . .”
“3329,”
Deborah said without thought. She
blinked, a bit shocked at the sudden response, while L’lorne smiled, confirming
it as the correct answer. “And this
helped me find mama?”
“Indeed,
but that’s only the most recent example of what you can do. Earlier you could predict things such as the
routes of police cars on the streets, knowing where the next blow from an
attacker was coming from, tracking me through the city and a simple game of
chess all fall within the same category.”
“Like seeing
bullets?”
L’lorne
seemed surprised at the question and looked at Deborah for a brief moment. “You could see them? Interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“Well,” L’lorne
said looking up at the ceiling in thought.
“The path of a bullet isn’t exactly complicated, but under normal
conditions, no, you can’t see bullets.”
“But I
did,” Deborah protested.
“I don’t
doubt that, but the conditions at the time weren’t exactly normal.” Deborah scrunched her face in
frustration. “First, you had been using
your talent quite extensively on the data stream. At the moment, you can’t simply turn on and
off your talent; it just flows from one event to another. That would help, but in the end, you mostly
saw them because you were still wearing the glasses.”
The glasses were now in her pocket,
Deborah checked the pocket with a pat, but she hadn't actually taken them off
until they had reached the farm. "I
don't understand."
"Once
you knew what you were doing, the glasses made an effort to help you do
it. They assisted in finding the
information on your mother initially, highlighting whatever word or phrase your
eyes focused on. When we were being shot
at, your eyes started looking for the routes of the bullets. The glasses helped by filling in what you
wanted to see. The bullets."
"The
bullets." Deborah said it nearly at
the same time as L’lorne. "I didn't
realize they were so powerful."
"Not
really," L’lorne off handedly.
"Truth is they're a simple tool, nothing special, but important
when you're first learning."
"Learning
what?"
L’lorne
opened her mouth to speak, but stopped and looked out the open loft door. "We have visitors."
Deborah
turned to the door and peered out. A
truck, a big one, with military markings, rumbled down the road kicking up a
mess of dust that even in the darkening evening stood out against ground. "They found us," she said with
alarm.
"Relax. I'll go see what's up." L’lorne began climbing down the ladder to the
barn floor.
"Wait,
I'll go with you," Deborah started.
"You
can watch, the glasses work like binoculars too." And she was gone.
Deborah
tried to find the breath to counter the suggestion she just stay put, but gave
up on it and dug the glasses out of her pocket.
---------
Questions
1. What kind of person is Lcorn Llorne? What does she look like (in your mind)?
2. What kind of person is the Deborah Ignigus? What does she look like (in your mind)?
3. Does the setting seem fitting? Would you like to know more?
4. Does the explanation of Deborah's ability make sense here?
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