Awakenings

            Kellin’s nostrils flared as she stared at the ravine.  The sun was high in the sky, cloaked by clouds, struggling to burn through them.  The rain had stopped, at least, though the break in the weather probably wouldn’t last that long.  She shivered a little, hands curling into tight fists, refusing to give into the chill of the wind.  It was getting colder, that was for sure.
            What should have started to settle down was getting worse instead.  It hadn’t stopped—the twisting and knotting of the lines of power, of the earth’s veins and arteries, of the conduits of latent energies that skated along or just beneath the surface.  It was as if the planet itself, the living part, was writhing in pain—or as if the world was suddenly being rewired.
            Her mouth was dry.  Could that really be what was happening?  The natural power grid…being rewritten, redrawn?  She couldn’t quite see it, but she could feel it, knew exactly where the lines were, where they were knotting.  Where they were moving.
            She shivered again.  It was all too close, and getting closer.
            “Kel?”
            She startled, gasping in a breath before slowly turning toward Carolyn.  “Care.  Something wrong?”
            The other woman started to shake her head, then hesitated.  “Maybe.  What are you looking at?”
            Kellin took another deep breath and looked at Carolyn.  “What do you think I’m looking at?”  She asked quietly, without malice or sarcasm.  Carolyn looked back at her, brow furrowing slightly.
            “At something I can’t see but I can feel,” she said after a long silence.  She stared at the creek far below them, at the bottom of the ravine, watched the water tumble over rocks and fallen tree limbs for a moment before looking back at Kellin.  “It’s so quiet,” she whispered.  “Like there was all this noise before and I never noticed that it was there until it was suddenly gone.  And now I just…feel things.  Hear whispers.”  Her lips thinned.  “That night by Lake Superior Hall, you guys weren’t kidding, were you?  There really was something there.  Is something there.  The fairies.  I thought I dreamed it.”
            Kellin shook her head slightly and looked back toward the ravine.  “No,” she said quietly.  “You didn’t dream it.  They were really there.  I can’t see them.  Marin can, sometimes.  Rory can, too, sometimes, but they don’t like him.”  She smiled weakly and glanced at Carolyn.  The other woman was still standing next to her, where any sane person probably would have backed away slowly.  “You’re not running away.”
            Carolyn shook her head, hugging her sweatshirt tighter around her thin body.  “No.  Maybe a year ago I’d have thought you were talking crazy, that we’d finally played too much D&D and gotten our brains scrambled by it.  Now…now I’m not sure what to think.”  She crouched, wrapping her arms around her knees.  “All I know is that the world feels…empty.  Lost, hurt.  But mostly empty.”
            Kellin frowned.  “Empty?  Empty how?”
            She winced.  “Like there’s suddenly a lot fewer people breathing its air,” she said, wetting her lips.  “I don’t know, Kel.  I don’t…I don’t really have words to describe what it feels like.”  She sucked in a breath and exhaled it slowly.  “It’s just…there.  A knowing.  A feeling I just can’t shake.  Like I knew that a lot of people were dead, that…that this was the end of the world.”  She sniffled, swiped at her nose with her sleeve, then looked up at Kellin again.  “It is, isn’t it?  The end?  You said it was.”
            Kellin bit her lip.  I did say it was.  “I also said it was the beginning of something else, Care,” she murmured, slowly sitting down in the grass with Carolyn.  She stared straight across the ravine, into the trees.  “Welcome to the new world and all that jazz.”
            “The new world,” Carolyn echoed, then sighed.  “Not sure if I like it yet.”
            “I’m not sure it’s quite born yet,” Kellin said.  Her stomach twisted, like the lines below.  “But we’re watching it happen.  And we’ll keep watching it happen right before our eyes.”  She tore her eyes away from the dark tree trunks and studied Carolyn.  “You’re starting to understand.  To see and feel it.”
            Carolyn looked back at her.  “This is all the stuff you guys told me I could ignore.  I told Marin that I knew—or that I was starting to, anyway.”
            “I know,” Kellin said quietly.  “She told me.  How much of what you just told me did you tell her?”
            She shook her head slightly.  “Not a lot.  Just that I knew it was the end of the world.  A feeling I had.  Nothing else.  She kind of got scared when I said it, I think.  Like she hadn’t been expecting it from me.”
            She sure as hell wasn’t.  None of us ever thought that you’d be one of the ones to suddenly become aware of all of this stuff.  I’m sure she didn’t think you’d be first.  Kellin toyed with a smooth, flat stone, running her thumb along its surface as she cupped it in her palm.  “We’ve known for a long time that a lot of you could be aware of a lot of the things that we could just…see and feel…but we didn’t want to press any of you.  It’s usually safer to just let it all happen naturally, if it’s going to happen at all.”  She looked at Carolyn again.  “I’ll be honest.  We knew you had the ability, we just never thought you’d tap it.”
            “What ability?”
            Kellin gestured vaguely toward the ravine.  “What you’re feeling—sensing, really.  Things shifting and changing.  That’s the sign that you’re becoming aware of what most people go through their lives never realizing existed, everything that’s out there operating on another level, a level I believe most of us have simply just forgotten is there.  Society trains us to think in a certain way so most of us never go looking, and not everyone who goes looking can perceive the undercurrents, or the overtones, depending on how you look at it.”  Her hand tightened around the stone.  “I can’t even tell you what to call it.  The supernatural.  The preternatural.  The unseen world.  Magic.  I don’t even know.  I just know it’s there.”
            “Like Marin and Rory and Drew,” Carolyn said.  She relaxed slowly, arms loosening.  She rested her chin on her knee and watched Kellin.  “What can I do, Kel?”
            “What do you mean?”
            “I mean…what can I do?  To help?  To…what can I do with this?  Is there anything?  I mean…you found people with your pendulum.  Marin sees things before they happen.  Drew’s gut isn’t wrong very often and he always seems like he knows when someone needs a hug or go punch something.  Stuff like that.  Do you know?  Is it possible to know?”
            Kellin hesitated for a moment, then shook her head a little.  “I’m not sure what you can do yet, Care.  We’re going to have to wait a little while and see.  We used to think that maybe you had some kind of connection to air spirits, because of the fairies in the garden, but maybe…acch.  I don’t know.”  She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples.  “I don’t know, Care.  Could be you’re in tune with a lot of things.  Something tells me that all of us, the survivors here…I think most of us have something.  A spark.  Underlying ability that we haven’t been able to tap.  And I think a lot of us have more than one connection.  Does that make any sense?”
            She frowned for a moment, then nodded slowly.  “I think so.  You’re saying that it’s very likely Marin can do more than see the future, that you can do more than sense what you’re sensing and find people with your pendulum.  That I can maybe do more than just feel things like I’m feeling them right now.”
            Kellin exhaled, nodding.  She gets it.  That’s a start, anyway.  “Yes.”
            Carolyn nodded slightly and looked back at the ravine.  “So how do I learn?  How do I figure it out?”
            Kellin touched her shoulder and smiled a hopefully reassuring smile.  “You be patient and don’t run from it.  Understanding comes with patience and time.”  She smiled wryly.  “And practice, sometimes.”
            Carolyn laughed.  “So just keep…doing what I’m doing?”
            She nodded.  “Unless we tell you to stop.”  She looked back out toward the ravine, brow creasing for a moment.
            Carolyn’s brow furrowed, too.  “What’s wrong?  The dim?”
            Ice filled Kellin’s guts.  “You can feel it?”
            “Out at the edges.  Beyond the river.  But yeah.  A dimness, cold and hot at the same time.”  Carolyn shuddered.  “I don’t like it.”
            Neither do I, Kellin thought.  She pressed her lips tightly together.  “Do something for me,” she said quietly.  Carolyn nodded.
            “Just tell me.”
            “If you feel that getting closer, find Marin or Drew or Rory or I as fast as you can.”
            “What is it?”
            “Nothing good,” Kellin murmured.  I used to think we could just…coexist with it.  That it was part of a natural balance.  Now I’m not so sure.  She squeezed Carolyn’s shoulder.  “Come on.  Break time’s over.  Let’s see what we can do back at camp.”
            “Right,” Carolyn said, standing up.  She glanced out over the ravine again, then smiled faintly, a smile that touched her gray eyes.  “They’re still there,” she murmured.
            “Who?”
            “The fairies,” she said softly, almost breathless.  “I can see them in the trees.”  She smiled at Kellin.  “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”
            “Maybe,” Kellin agreed, stomach feeling hollow.  I wish she was right.  I wish I didn’t know that she’s wrong.  Things weren’t going to go easily, not by a long shot.  She didn’t have the heart to tell Carolyn that, though.  Not yet.
            Who knows?  I’m not the one with visions.  Maybe she’ll be right.
            She could hope, anyway.

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            Thom sat near the fire, watching the clouds twist in the sky outside the tent, trying not to shiver.  Shivering hurt.  The bruises were healing, but he still ached.  Their numbers had stabilized a little in the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours.  They were still too few and too many all at once.  The others were ranging farther in their hunt for supplies, even in the foul weather that had been omnipresent.  It was chill, much colder than it should have been.  They were trying to bring in everything they could before things got worse.  Most of them were thinking things were going to get a lot worse.
            We need to make a plan.  More plans than we’ve already made.  He shivered, winced, and drew his blanket closer, though he didn’t try to edge closer to the fire.  He was close enough.  Closer and the embers were almost certain to catch on his blanket.  Burns were the last thing he needed.  He stared at his hands and thought about Marin.  Again.  She’d gone out to help round up all the bicycles that were left on campus.  As long as they could ward off rust, they’d be a vaguely reliable source of transportation, or scrap metal.  One or the other.  He hadn’t argued.  It wasn’t an entirely useless idea.  They’d already done the same thing with some of the cars yesterday.  Some misspent youths had been useful in that activity.
            He poked at the fire with the stick in his hand, nudging one of the logs closer so it would start to catch before too long.  Right now, he wasn’t good for much more than keeping the fire going and thinking too much.
            “You okay, Thom?”
            “Yeah,” he murmured to J.T.  “Just thinking.  Probably too much.”
            “About Marin?”
            Thom winced.  “How’d you know?”
            J.T. smiled wryly, sitting down on the ground next to him.  “Well, considering you kept apologizing to her when we were down in the hole…call it a hunch.”  He rested his elbows on his knees, half stretching his hands toward the crackling fire.  “What’s eating at you, Thom?”
            He shook his head, biting the inside of his cheek and staring at the fire.  “Just…worried about her, that’s all.  She’s going to overstretch herself.”
            “No further than you’re going to overstretch yourself,” J.T. said quietly.  “Why should she hold herself to a lesser standard than you’re going to hold yourself?”
            Thom winced again and hunkered down with his blanket.  “She shouldn’t be trying to shoulder as much as she’s going to try to shoulder.”
            “You say that like you know how much she’s going to shoulder.”
            “I don’t want to talk about this, Jay.”
            “Too bad, Thom.”  He stared at the fire.  “She’s worried about you, too, y’know.”
            “She doesn’t have anything to worry about,” Thom mumbled.
            “Bullshit,” J.T. said.  “And you know it’s bullshit.”
            He fell quiet, staring at the fire.  It was a long moment before he took a breath and opened his mouth again.  “I can’t do anything else right now except for worry and plan.  If I could do anything else, I would be.  The rest of you don’t have time to be worrying.  You’ve got too much else to do.”
            “A lot of what we need to be doing still leaves time to think.  A lot of time, if you want to know.  Moving things, gathering wood…doesn’t really require that much active brain power, bro.”  He shook his head.  “We all know that it’s not going to be easy, Thom.  We’re all thinking.  We’re all trying to find ways of making this work better.”
            “And if it won’t?  What then?”
            “Then we die and we won’t be in a position to worry about anything ever again.”
            Thom snorted.  J.T. was right, after all.  “Have we started to talk?  To plan?”
            “A little,” J.T. said.  “Until the weather lets up a little and we’ve stockpiled a little more loot, we can’t plan too far.  The greenhouse at Padnos looks like it’s intact, so we can use that, at least as long as it stays standing and we can get to it.  Raided the hardware store for pots and seeds.  We’ll grow some of the hardier plants up here and grow others down there.  Some folks were going to look at the greenhouses up across M-45 today, if at all possible.”  J.T. glanced out toward the sky.  “Hopefully we’ll find a good way to dry out some wood.  This rain isn’t helping us stay warm or dry.”
            “Looks like there’s been ice after the sun goes down.”
            “There has been,” J.T. said.  “We’ll manage somehow.  We’re not done with the hardware store.  Who knows what they’ve got stashed away in their stockroom, waiting for September.”
            Thom grunted and nodded a little.  He shivered, then winced and inched closer to the fire.  To hell with setting myself on fire.  It’s bloody cold out here.  “Bloody hell,” he muttered.
            J.T. shook his head.  “There’s meds in the kit.”
            “I don’t want meds,” Thom said.  “We’ll have to do without them soon enough anyway.  I’ll be fine I’m just…sore.  And cold.”
            “More than sore, looks like.  I would be.  That was a lot of ceiling.”
            Thom grunted again and hunkered down.  “We need to think about defenses, J.T.  And soon.”
            “Give it another couple of days and then we’ll cross that bridge, Thom.  We’re not stupid.  We know we’ll need to defend ourselves and whatever we can scrape together from other people who want it.  Hell.  We’ll probably build some walls or some shit before we build houses.  Maybe.  You know how bad winters here get.”  J.T. shook his head.  “Why do you think we picked the high ground with our backs to the ravine?”
            Thom shook his head slightly.  “We need weapons.  People who know how to use them.”
            “A few of us do, and Matt and Drew went looking for guns today.  If we’re lucky, they’ll find some and that’ll be a start.”
            “Y’think our luck’s going to hold out enough for that?”
            J.T. shrugged.  “Don’t know.  I can hope.  That’s about all we’ve got left right about now.  Hope, guts, and a prayer or three.”  He was quiet for a moment, then finally spoke.  “I should get back to work.”
            Thom just nodded.  Yeah.  Get back to being useful.  I’ll sit here and stew.  And ache.  He could hear Marin’s voice on the wind, but couldn’t make out the words.  He closed his eyes.  J.T. squeezed his shoulder.
            “Stop beating yourself up, man.  Mackinac did that for you.”
            Thom choked on a laugh.  J.T. left him sitting there by the fire.  Guts, luck, and a few dozen prayers.  Don’t have much else to work with right now, I guess.  He glanced in the direction J.T. had disappeared in.  Guess we could be facing worse than that.  At least we’ve got the guts and prayers.
            Eventually, our luck’s going to run out, though.  He exhaled and looked toward the fire again.  I just hope we’ll be ready for it when it does.

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            She stared at me, eyes narrowing a moment before she edged closer, cradling her mug in both hands.  “You’re sure?”
            I nodded a little.  “As sure as I can be.  Never saw him buried…never saw him actually slip away….but I saw him in the process of…”  I exhaled, rubbing at my eyes, hard, as if rubbing my eyes would erase the memory of the awful vision, would stop it from happening.  “That can’t be real, Kellin.  I can’t let it be real.”  I laced my fingers through my hair, holding my head for a moment, shaking it slightly.  “I can’t let it happen the way I keep seeing it happen.”   I wanted to curl up and hide, pull a blanket over my head.  It wasn’t going to do anyone any good…but I was pretty sure I’d feel better, at least for a little while.  A little while was all I really wanted right then.
            Kellin hugged me gently as I struggled not to start crying.  The ache inside of me didn’t go away, it only grew, along with a sick feeling.  I can’t let him die.  I just can’t.  She was saying something reassuring, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying—maybe I didn’t want to hear whatever she was saying.  I just struggled not to cry, hugging my knees against my chest.
            “Whatever happens tomorrow, Mar, he’s still here now.  Who knows.  Maybe this is one of those things you’re seeing so you can stop it from happening.”
            I looked up at her, sniffling a little.  “Do you think that’s possible?”           
            “Anything’s possible,” she murmured back, giving me a squeeze.  “Ask any of our friends two days ago if what happened yesterday was possible.  Things can change in a heartbeat.”  She held me at arms’ length for a moment.  “Besides.  You said you never saw us putting him in the ground.  Who knows what path lies in front of him, and where it’ll end.  None of us.”
            I sniffled again.  “You really think that’s true?”
            She shrugged.  “You’re the last person I’d lie to about it, Mar.  All I know is that things’ll be what they’ll be.  You’re the one who sees things.  Remember, you thought the world was going to end with nuclear war.  Instead we got an asteroid or something.  Not everything that you see comes true in the way you think it’s going to.  What’s going to happen is going to happen, we just make do with whatever insights we can get.”
            It will be what it will be.  I closed my eyes and took a slow breath.  I couldn’t let him die.  There was no way I was going to let him die on me.  There was just too much that needed to be done.  I need him too much.  We need him too much.  All of us.  Not just me.
            “I’m going to have to get moving soon,” Kellin murmured.
            I nodded.  “It’s…it’s okay.  I’ll be all right.”  I lifted her head and patted her foot, smiling briefly.  “Really.”
            She hugged me briefly.  “Hope so, Mar.  Hope so.  We need you, and your visions, as unpleasant as they might be.”
            I swallowed hard and nodded slowly.  She was right, of course.  I licked my lips.  “I’ll spread the cards later.  I want you to ask the questions, though.”
            After blinking, she nodded slowly.  “All right.  Later, we’ll do it.”
            I stretched my hands out toward the fire, leaning forward.  Does she know why I want her to ask the questions?  She must.  She must realize I’m afraid of what they’ll say if I ask.  I sighed and closed my eyes, trying to shove the fears aside.  Those would only cloud my visions, potentially alter what the cards would tell me.  I’d see them differently if I let my fears consume me.
            Focus.  I needed to focus.  And clarity.  I needed both, but finding them was easier said than done.  Stuff like that was always easier said than done.   I looked back over my shoulder again toward where Thom was sleeping.  My hands tightened into fists and I pulled them back from the fire.  I wasn’t going to lose him—couldn’t lose him.  I’d make sure he survived, even if it killed me, if it killed us.  I couldn’t afford to be selfish and put our relationship above his survival.
            It would mean more fights, I knew that.  I just hoped that I could prepare myself for them.  I just wish I knew what he’d dreamed, that J.T. knew what it was so he could tell me.  What was it that had him so badly scared he’d switched from acceptance to full-on denial?  Part of me wasn’t sure I wanted to know.  The rest of me knew that I needed to know, if I was going to fix this.  Otherwise, Thom’s denial was liable to get him killed.
            That much, I was sure of.

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            It was about twenty minutes or so before Kellin returned, about the same time the kettle was starting to hiss, steam escaping through the whistle-hole.  I took it off the tripod, set it on the ground near the fire.  Kellin came back with a couple of mugs and a metal ball full of tea, which she proceeded to drop into the kettle as she settled down near me.  Her clothes were dry—she’d changed them—but she went barefoot except for the five dollar flip-flops she’d gotten earlier in the summer, when she’d gone shopping with Jacqueline, Carolyn, and I.  She thrust her feet nearer to the fire, wiggling her toes, then looked at me.
            “Damn cold out there in that mess, I’ll tell you that.”
            “I believe it,” I murmured, still hugging my knees against my chest.  “Glad I’m not venturing out in it.  You guys are braver than I am.”
            She snorted.  “We just didn’t walk nearly as far as you did yesterday, that’s all.  We’ve still got the legs for it—and we might as well use them while we’ve got them, before something else happens.”  She arranged the pair of mugs near the kettle.  The tea was fragrant as it steeped in the pot.  “What have you been seeing lately?  You know me.  I don’t really see anything.  I usually just feel, and all I’ve really felt lately is a knowing that yesterday was an end and a beginning all at once.”
            I chewed my lip a little.  How to explain it?  Everything had been so fragmentary so far, and not all of it made much sense.  “It’s dicey, at best, I think,” I finally told her, rocking a little, forward and backward, resting my chin on my knee.  “I can’t really piece all of them together cohesively.  Something bad’s going to happen with Thom if he keeps denying his abilities, I know that much.  Long, hard winter, I think, and it’s going to come early.  We’ll be grateful for the greenhouses we’ll be able to get up and running, that’ll keep us fed.”  Do I tell her about the vision of a son?  Of me having a son?  Or is that just…was it just a dream?  I shook my head a little.  “Like I said.  It’s all fuzzy—nothing really makes a lot of sense if you try to piece it into some sort of coherent picture.  I wish it did.”
            “Isn’t that the way it always is?”  She sighed.  “Well.  Maybe we’ll be able to piece something together from them if you keep having them—well.  When you have more.”
            I nodded mutely.  Should I tell her about Thom?  About what I keep seeing about him?  I chewed my lip.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her about that.  I was almost afraid of what she might say.  “Haven’t tried to spread the cards yet,” I mumbled, pushing hair out of my face.  “Afraid of what they’ll tell me.  That this is all going to get us killed sooner rather than later.”
            Kellin shook her head a little, pouring the tea out into the mugs, passing one to me.  I took it, cradling it between both hands against my knee, as she settled back and began to speak.  “I don’t think that’s what fate has planned for us, Marin.  We survived for a reason.  Not really certain what it is, but I know we’re still walking and talking for a reason—why we’re still breathing.  If we were supposed to die anytime soon, we’d already be dead.  Object lessons, at this point, I’m thinking are a thing that would be totally lost on us.”  She slid her arm around my shoulders and hugged me gently, managing to find a smile somewhere.  “Spread the cards or don’t spread the cards.  You’re seeing things.  Either way…we’re getting the insights we’re going to need.”  She squeezed me gently and took a sip of her tea, sitting back for a moment and staring at the fire while I stared into my mug, stealing glances in her direction.
            I sighed a little, taking a long swallow of the tea, letting it scald the back of my throat.  I took a shaky breath and exhaled slowly.  “I hope you’re right, Kel,” I murmured.  I glanced back over my shoulder, toward where Thom was still sleeping, exhaling again and shaking my head.  “Do you think they’re always right?”
            She blinked at me.  “What kind of question is that?  You know what I think.  They’ve never been wrong before, have they?”
            “I’ve been wrong before,” I said quietly.  “I thought the world was going to end with a nuclear attack.  I was wrong.”
            “But not about the world ending.  Just about how.”  She shook her head again.  “What’s got you so worried, Marin?  What are you seeing that’s making you ask these questions?”
            “Nothing,” I quickly lied, taking a gulp of tea, swallowing quickly and mumbling a curse at my burnt tongue.
            Kellin snorted.  “You’re an awful liar about some things, Marin.  What’s wrong?  Thom?”  She frowned as I cast a quick glance back over my shoulder again, toward our shelter.  “It’s about Thom.  Tell me, Marin.”
            I shook my head.  I can’t.  What if I’m right, and it’ll kill him?  But he can’t die.  We’re going to have a son.  What am I going to do?  What’s right and what’s wrong?  They can’t all be right, can they?  I took another sip of tea and winced.  I couldn’t even taste it, just knew that it was hot.  “It’s nothing, Kellin.”
            “It’s not nothing,” she hissed, glaring at the people that seemed to have started to listen in—no one we knew very well—before looking back to me.  “You wouldn’t be hurting so much and starting to question yourself like this if he wasn’t involved.  So tell me what’s bothering you.”
            I shook my head again.  The words just wouldn’t come—I couldn’t find them.  I swallowed again.  Kellin started at me and sighed.
            “Don’t tell me, then.  Bottle it.  It’ll either come out, or it’ll kill you both.”
            What?  I blinked at her.  “What did you just say?”
            She shook her head.  “Bottling it up is like trying to rot yourselves from inside.  If you don’t let this out, if you let it fester…it’s not going to do either of you any good.”
            Festering…like an open wound.  Guess that’s what this is, after all.  A gaping wound in our relationship.  More than just a sore spot.  I rubbed at my face.  “…I just…keep seeing things, Kellin.  Things I don’t want to see.”
            “Like what, Mar?”
            I swallowed hard, my voice a bare whisper.  “Like Thom dying.”

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            “How is he, Marin?”
            I sniffled, swiping my sleeve across my eyes.  “Not good.  Still not listening.  I just…I can’t…”
            Carolyn wrapped her arms around me and hugged me gently, kneeling behind me on the ground.  “He’s too stubborn for his own good sometimes.  He’ll be okay, though.  You know that he has to be.”
            I shook my head a little, leaning back against her, hugging her arms.  “I don’t know if he will be this time, Carolyn.  Not if I can’t make him listen.  Not if I can’t convince him to stop denying…”  What if I’m wrong?  What if I was just imagining…
            “You’ll find a way, Mar.  He’s not going to give in and just die, is he?”  She looked at me seriously.  “You’ll make him realize that it’s real.  Most of the rest of us believe it, now, have seen it.  But you two…you’re the ones that can see what most of us only feel.  He can’t keep saying that’s not real, not for much longer.”
            “Denying it is killing him,” I mumbled.  “You can’t just bottle it up.  You can’t just…you can’t do that.  There’s too much there, too much inside of him.  And it’s destroying him from the inside out.”
            “Either he’ll realize it on his own or you’ll convince him of it.  I have faith in you.”  She smirked.  “More faith than in him, that’s for sure.”
            I squeezed her arm, staring at Thom’s prone, fevered form, nodding a little.  This was one fight with him I couldn’t afford to lose, for the sake of us all.

            “They’re coming more frequently, aren’t they?”
            J.T. was gone—long gone, from the looks of things—and Kellin was standing in his place, carrying a bag that looked heavy.  She was soaked to the skin, the rainwater that dripped from her hair splashing down into the fire and hissing as it hit hot coals.  I blinked at her, momentarily uncomprehending—what was she asking me?
            “Visions, Marin.  They’re coming more frequently, aren’t they?”
            I shook my head as if to clear it, what she was asking me finally registering.  I nodded mutely, feeding a few sticks into the guttering flames.  It was a few more minutes before I trusted myself to speak.  “More than they have been before this shit started happening, yeah.  They’re weird.  Not like the ones before—not like them at all.”  These ones are clear, if fragmentary.  Not cryptic.  And stronger, much stronger, with no discernable trigger, either.  God.  It’s like I’m folding time and peeking over the edge to see what’s coming months and years from now.
            Kellin nodded a little.  “Remember what we talked about a few months ago, Marin?  When I said that I thought people were going to start realizing what’s really going on around them?”
            I nodded.  It had been late one evening, and we’d been sitting in the courtyard at Mackinac, just talking as we were wont to do late at night when neither of us could sleep—and there had been many of those sleepless nights that summer, with Thom giving me the cold shoulder, trying to detach.  I’d spent a lot of time with Kellin, just talking, sometimes about what we felt, what we believed.  I’d complained about feeling a shifting in the balance around us, one that worried me.  She’d only shaken her head at that concern—things would correct themselves in time, she’d counseled.  They’d rebalance and we wouldn’t have to worry so much about the way things felt—or, at least, Drew and I wouldn’t have to worry so much.  Rory had been reveling at the feeling of things tilting toward a darker end of the spectrum, but that was simply because of his nature—or the image of his nature I was convinced he carefully cultivated to obscure reality.  On one of those evenings out in the darkness, Kellin had told me very quietly when I’d been complaining about Thom—again—that she didn’t think that I’d have much to worry about soon enough.  She could feel it, somehow, that those around us were going to start realizing what was going on around them, beginning to Awaken, in the terminology of my late aunt.  Their own talents would begin to manifest, slowly but surely, and we’d have a lot to deal with suddenly—so much that the balance wouldn’t even concern me anymore.
            “Do you think this is that time you felt coming, Kel?”
            “It’s certainly a possibility,” she said quietly.  “I wouldn’t say it’s entirely outside that realm, anyway.  Have you been listening to Carolyn?  It sounds like she’s already starting to realize things aren’t what she thought they always were.”
            I laughed weakly.  “Oh, believe me.  I know.  She’s been acting…well.  Not like Carolyn and at the same time more like the Carolyn we always knew was hiding in there somewhere that didn’t get to come out to play very often.”
            “Exactly.”  Kellin shifted her weight from one foot to the other.  “We could be in a lot of trouble, Mar.  Hell-ah trouble.”
            “I know,” I murmured, glancing back toward the fire, thinking of Thom.  How many of our friends would end up like him, denying what was growing inside of them, denying the feelings, denying the truth of what was inside?  I prayed it would be none, but I knew that wouldn’t be the case—I was too much of a realist to think otherwise.
            “Here.”  Kellin produced a tea kettle and a jug of water from one of the bags she was carrying—their raid on the grocery store must have been successful.  “Put that on the fire.  I’ve got to dig out some teabags.  We need to talk a bit.”
            “Sure.”  I slowly moved to start filling the kettle with water.  “How was it?”
            “How was what?  Raiding the store?”  She exhaled through her teeth.  “We had to break in the door.  Thank god no one was there when this all started.  Place was locked up solid.  Generator’s still running—we think we’ve got it rigged to run for a while, but we packed all the cold cases with ice.  That’s what took so long.  Raiding the secondhand store next, for clothes and coats and stuff.  But I’ll tell you about it after I get this stuff stashed away, okay?”
            I nodded, feeding a few more small sticks into the fire and settling the kettle over the flames, on the makeshift tripod we’d gotten rigged up.  Maybe we’d have enough supplies to last us.  Maybe we wouldn’t.
            If our friends are Awakening, this could get really messy really, really fast.  And probably not in an easy way to fix.  I rubbed my face, suddenly weary.  How would we handle it?  Some of our friends already knew that there was something funky going on, but they’d never really inquired too deeply about it—J.T. was like that.  We’d tried to insulate others, like Carolyn and Jacqueline and Brandon.  There was no reason for them to get involved with any of our crap.  Not until now, at least.  Not until they began to manifest signs of being aware of more than they could see or smell or taste with their mundane senses.
            I glanced toward where Thom still lay asleep, still ignorant of my departure, and sighed softly.  My cards were there, near him.  I’d have to read them soon enough, if only to seek some guidance, some direction—if they decided to give me anything useful at all.  They didn’t always like to read well for me.  For other people my Tarot readings were fantastic.  Whenever I happened to ask something of it, though, that was entirely a different story.  I’d always wondered if it was perhaps that I was too close to the situation to perceive things correctly, or if I was trying to influence the outcome of the readings too hard.  Regardless, it never seemed to work well for me.
            Maybe I’ll just have Kellin ask the question about what we should do, how we should…how we should let this all pan out, what we should do next, how this should come together.  How to handle it all.  I rubbed my eyes.  Maybe I’d do that, but maybe I wouldn’t.  Maybe the visions would just come and tell me what to do.
            I’d never had control over when they would come, or how long they’d last.  I’d only tried once or twice to stimulate them—that had resulted in the nastiness following the vision I was sure was the end of the world, the vision that seemed to have come true yesterday—was it yesterday?—though in a way not wholly like I’d perceived it then.  Maybe that was the problem with my visions then, when I’d tried for more information.  Maybe I was just meant to let them come, let things be as they would be and not try to press for more.
            God knows I already didn’t like some of what I’d seen in my visions since the day before.

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            I stared at J.T. for a long moment.  Thom, scared?  Thom wasn’t afraid of anything.  “Scared of what?”  He could handle all of it originally…he was okay that first time down in the ravine with Drew and I, when everything started to…to happen…  I scrubbed my hand across my eyes.  He was okay for months.  This only started a few months ago.  He was fine for months before.  What changed?
            J.T. shook his head a little.  “He woke up screaming one night, Marin, like eight or nine months back.  Wouldn’t tell me why.  A nightmare.  That’s what he said it was.  Wouldn’t say more than that.  He must’ve seen something, though, that scared the shit out of him.  That was the weekend that you two were supposed to go up to Mackinac Island, remember?”
            I nodded slowly.  Eight months ago.  He told me something came up, an emergency back home.  He’d make it up to me, somehow.  But that’s when he started denying all of it, saying it wasn’t real.  “And he didn’t talk about what he saw at all?”  My voice sounded so small.  I drew my knees against my chest, setting aside my bowl.  What could scare you so much, Thom?  What did it?  What…what made you want to convince yourself and me that none of it’s real?
            “Didn’t tell me, and he tells me a lot.  He’s hinted, but anything solid?  Nothing.”  J.T. made eye contact with me for a moment, then his gaze flicked toward the fire.  “He loves you, though.  ‘s why he didn’t go to Chicago this weekend, why he cancelled his interview.  You were more important than that to him.”  He frowned.  “Good thing he realized it before it was too late.”
            Before it’s too late.  A lot of things need to happen before it’s too late.  My mouth was dry and I just nodded, looking away from him, away from the fire, toward the rain—rain and sleet mix, it seemed.  A gust of wind sent ashes swirling, carried them away.  I shivered.  Going to get a lot worse before it gets better.  A lot of things will.  I glanced back toward where I’d slept curled up with Thom, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.  What sort of nightmare would make him start denying everything he’d come to accept?  Everything that he knew was real, even if we didn’t quite understand what it all meant.  What kind of awfulness could scare him that badly?  He’s never been scared of anything, not in all the time I’ve known him.
            “You can’t tell him I said anything, Marin,” J.T. said quietly.  “I wasn’t even supposed to tell you as much as I did just now.  He’ll kick my ass and stop speaking to me, and we both know the bastard needs someone to talk to and it might as well be my sorry ass.”  He looked at me and shook his head a little.  “He’s my brother and I know how he gets.  He’ll make me pay for it if he finds out.”
            He looks at you the same way, Jay.  Like the brother he never had.  I patted his arm gently.  “I won’t say anything.  Not until you’ve had a chance to try to get him to explain all of it to you, anyway.”  I smiled weakly.  If Thom hadn’t told J.T. already, Thom wasn’t going to tell anyone what had gotten him so tied up in knots.  They were like brothers to each other, and treated each other that way—like brothers that had grown up in the same wholly dysfunctional household together.  I shook my head a little.  “It just…it worries me.  What the hell was it that could make him so afraid?”
            J.T. shrugged, setting down his now empty bowl and standing.  “Almost glad I don’t know, Marin.  If I did, I might be trying to prevent whatever it is.”  He raked a hand through his dark hair.  “Honestly, that might be it.”  He shook his head.  “I’ve screwed around long enough.  More than time for me to start figuring shit out.  You sticking around here?”
            I nodded.  “Holding down the fort.  My feet aren’t up for going all that far.  What’s first on your list?”
            “Firewood, I guess.  Might as well not wait for folks to get back before we take care of it.  I’ll round up your brother if you feel like you can keep things together here.”  He glanced toward the pile of empty bowls that was slowly materializing.  “…if I get some clean water up here, think you can get these clean?”
            “Get me enough and I think I can.”  It’ll just take a bit of engineering, that’s all.  Figuring out how it’ll work.  “I’ll make it work.”
            J.T. nodded.  “Right.  Well.  We’ll get shit organized and figure out who needs to go where and do what.  Leave you and Thom and the professor and a few others here, probably.  I think Leah’s still sleeping, so she can take care of the hurt folks.”  He gestured a little toward the oatmeal.  “Probably should see if you can get Thom to eat some of that.”
            “Eventually,” I said.  “Right now I’m going to let him sleep.  Not sure how much of it he actually got.”  More than we could’ve, if we’d…god, but that wouldn’t have been a smart idea.  I’d have hurt him, and then where would we be?  I glanced toward where he was still sleeping one more time, then sighed, looking back at the fire.

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            “How’s Thom?”
            I sighed and shook my head slightly at J.T.’s question.  “Sleeping.  Being himself.  That’s about it.”  I chewed my lip.  “Was a cold night,” I said quietly.
            “Probably in for more,” J.T. said, rubbing at his forehead and shoveling a mouthful of oatmeal into his mouth.  “Doesn’t look like things are going to get any better anytime soon.  Probably a lot worse, in fact.”
            I nodded slowly.  “Early winter, I think.”

            Snow flew, drifting down, tossed and sent swirling on the wind.  The sound of Matt and Davon laying cinderblocks together was a counterpoint to the sound of the wind whipping through what was left of the buildings.  We were still mostly working with debris that had come down from Mackinac, from some of the other buildings, building homes—building something that would hopefully keep us safe and warm.
            How many weeks had it been?  None of us were sure.  The fire crackled and I stretched my hands out toward it, letting the warmth bleed into my fingers.  It was just so cold, and so quickly.
            “Only going to get worse,” Greg Doyle murmured.  “Much worse.  Long, hard winter.  Been watching the animals.”  He was hunkered down beneath a blanket, perched precariously on a stool near the fire, keeping an eye on the kettle so it wouldn’t boil over.  His arm had healed straight and functional, but he still complained that it ached, and the ache got worse the colder it got. If Thom had a similar complaint about his ankle, he kept it to himself, though I suspected it hurt him as much as Dr. Doyle’s arm bothered him.
            Carolyn’s voice was quiet.  “How many winters like this do you think we’re looking at, Professor?”
            He shook his head.  “Matt may know better.  Books might know better.  Nothing can tell us for sure.  Could be just this one.  Could be for a couple years down the road.  Thank god we’ve got that little greenhouse, and then the one up the road.  It’ll be a hike to get there and back through this mess, but we’ll be glad of it halfway through the season.  More than glad.  Come spring, too.”  He rubbed his face.  “A lot of people are going to die this first winter.  Maybe not here, but anywhere else…probably a lot of dying.  Starving.  Freezing.”  He glanced toward Matt and Davon, stubbornly working despite the worsening snowstorm.  “We’re luckier than most.”
            I nodded slowly.  Even if it didn’t seem like it sometimes, we were much, much luckier than most.

            “Long winter, too,” I murmured, swallowing down some more oatmeal.
            “Just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”  For the first time since all of this had begun, he sounded glum.  I had to smile at him, reached out to pat his thigh gently.
            “We’ll be okay, J.T.  Picked these teams for a reason, right?”
            He smiled a little and nodded.  “Yeah.  Right.”  He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and hugged me briefly, letting go as figures began to trickle toward us to get their breakfast, looking about as tired as I realized I still felt.
            We didn’t have the luxury of sleep at this point.  There was too much to do to ensure our survival past the next few weeks, the next few months.  We might actually have enough food between the local grocery stores, whatever we would be able to salvage—laboring under the assumption that we, in fact, were the only pocket of live people within twenty or thirty miles or so—from houses and farms and the like to last us for a few months, to last us into the winter I suspected would be here within a few weeks.  The meteorites that had come down more than likely hadn’t done much good at all for the atmosphere; this was probably as close to a nuclear winter as we were going to get, now, ever.
            I’ll take it, if this is as close to that hell as we’ll ever get.  Radiation…no.  No, never want to deal with that.  Not ever.  I squeezed my eyes shut and struggled to banish the memory of those old visions from years ago, of the look of my friends seeming to melt away before my eyes because of radiation poisoning.  Maybe those had just been my imagination—my brain extrapolating from the original visions I’d had that day when I was a freshman.  Maybe.  It wouldn’t have been the first time, after all, and I’d read more than one thing about that sort of thing happening.  Those visions, the ones that I’d had after the original take a breath and wait to die vision…those had had more of a dream-like—or nightmarish—property than most of what I’d seen in the past, or what I’d seen since.  It wouldn’t have surprised me if those visions were nightmares, the ones of my friends dying.  Had I really seen what happened yesterday years ago, only from a different point of view?  Perhaps.  I wasn’t going to discount it as a possibility.

            Thom grasped my hand, but his strength was all but gone.  “Stay.”
            I swallowed past a lump in my throat, gently stroking his hair.  “Forever, if you asked me.”  He can’t keep denying it.  Can’t keep bottling it.  He’ll just get worse…  “Thom…”
            He closed his eyes and shook his head slightly.  “Not going to fight about it again, Marin.  Not going to fight about it.  Just…just stay with me, hold me.  Just…just stay.”
            I don’t want to lose you, Thom!  I swallowed and nodded, leaning in gently to kiss him gently.  “Of course, Thom,” I mumbled.
            He didn’t say anything, just held onto me, and I stayed.  I stayed all night, until he was so quiet that I thought he’d died, only an occasional rasp of breath, a shiver, told me that I hadn’t lost him yet, that he was still here, still with me.  But for how long?

            “J.T.?”
            “Huh?”  He looked at me, spoon hanging out of his mouth.  He sucked the oatmeal off of it and swallowed.  “What’s wrong, Marin?”
            “You believe me, right?  You believe me when I talk about what I see?  You believe all of us, don’t you?”  I felt sick.  Did they all think we were crazy?  What if we really were crazy?  What if it was just all our imaginations?
            His brow furrowed and he swallowed again.  “Marin,” he said hoarsely, “you and Kellin and Drew and Rory are about all I’ve got left to believe.  In for an inch, in for a mile.  I believe you—I always have.”  He reached out and squeezed my shoulder.  “What’s got you worked up over this?  What’d Thom say?”
            “It’s not Thom.”  But it was.  It was Thom.
            “You lie about as well as he does.”  J.T. shook his head a little.  “To me, anyway,” he amended, shifting his position slightly, stretching a little.  “He doesn’t think you’re crazy, either.  He just can’t accept…whatever the hell it is you both can feel.  The shit the rest of us can’t see.  He won’t accept it anymore.”  He grimaced, taking another spoonful of oatmeal, swallowing it before continuing.  “He’s just scared, Marin.  That’s all.”

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