Chapter Ten #5
“I just don’t want you to get discouraged if this takes us a while.
So before we start, I have to explain some things,” he said, suddenly all business.
“Strength, speed, agility, acute hearing and eyesight, beauty, rapid healing, and intelligence, although that last one’s debatable, these are all gifts that pretty much every Scion has, and we don’t have to be trained to use them.
But there’s another group of talents that are rare, and most of them take some work.
Flying is one of the rare ones. And it’s one of the hardest to get the hang of. ”
“I honestly don’t care how hard it is to master this. I don’t care if this takes me years. I’m just dying to do it again!” Helen bounced up and down on her toes impatiently.
“Okay, okay! First of all, you have to hold still. The jumping part comes later when you want speed,” he said with a laugh as he put his hands on Helen’s waist.
She gasped faintly at the unexpected touch, and tried to make herself stand still like he had said, but it wasn’t easy. They stood for a few moments, just staring at each other.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered. Helen’s heart was racing and she had a feeling Lucas could hear it.
“Calm down,” he said, smiling with his eyes closed. “Try and slow your pulse down if you can.”
“I’m trying. Do you have to stand so close?” Helen asked, her voice thin and shaky.
“Yes. I don’t want you to get away from me. That would be bad,” he said in a deadpan voice, maintaining his concentration. A few seconds passed. When he next spoke he sounded very calm and far away.
“Now. Focus on your body. Take a deep breath and follow it in, like your brain is floating gently inside that air you’re breathing.” He waited a few moments for Helen to get to where he was.
It took her a few breaths, but eventually she was able to do it. He knew exactly when she was ready. “Good. Now you’re inside of yourself,” he said triumphantly. “Can you feel the weight of you, all stacked up and all tied together?”
She did feel it. She could feel the weight of her skin on top of her muscles on top of her bones, all stacked up, just like he had said.
There were millions and millions of little bits of her, all marching around like soldiers with different but cohesive orders.
Those were her cells, she realized at once.
She giggled, thinking how strange it was to be this massive army and never feel it.
She heard Lucas laugh, too, and she knew that he was right there with her, experiencing what she was experiencing.
“Now I want you to do something really hard,” he said, his voice light and curious, almost childlike. “I want you to stay inside, but also look out, if you can. Don’t be scared. I’m right here with you.”
Helen did as he told her, but the sensation was way too intense to process.
She had lost her sunglasses once. She’d looked all over, in the kitchen, the living room, back up in her bedroom, but she couldn’t find them anywhere.
It was annoying because she knew she had just had them in her hand, but she couldn’t remember what she’d done with them.
Then her dad told her that her sunglasses were on top of her head.
In that moment she realized that she had been using the wrong sense.
She had been looking when she should have been feeling.
She reached up and felt her glasses with her hand, but she also felt them with her scalp, and when she thought about it she realized that she had been feeling her glasses up there the whole time.
She’d just been so busy looking she hadn’t thought to feel.
This was similar. Again, she was realizing that there were many different ways to experience the world around her.
Now she was still aware of all of her millions of cells, but she could also feel something new.
She felt herself falling toward something truly huge, and she knew she had another sense that could stop the falling.
Scared out of her mind, she instinctively pushed with this new sense. She needed to put some distance between her little army and the big, fast monster she was falling toward—the monster she suddenly realized she had been falling toward every second of every day of her life.
A moment too late to stop herself, Helen realized that the monster was the earth, and the falling sensation was gravity—and that what she had just done was switch it off.
Vertigo sucked at her, pulling her off balance.
She grabbed on to Lucas, frantically burying her face against his chest. He was the only unmovable object in the entire universe, and if Helen let him go of him she knew she would spin off into space forever and ever.
“It’s okay,” he whispered into her ear. His breath was warm, and his voice soothed her. “I won’t let you go, Helen. I promise. Do you trust me?” The temperature dropped and great gusts of wind tossed her hair around in a tangle.
She kept her face pressed against the L-shaped hollow where Lucas’s shoulder turned into his neck. She told herself that this is what difficult felt like, this was the “hard” that she had been cavalier enough to tell Lucas she preferred to “easy.”
“Yes,” she whispered, feeling the cold, thin air crawl into her clothes and snatch the sounds she made away from her lips as soon as she spoke.
“Then prove it,” he whispered back. “Open your eyes.”
They stayed in the air until the sky was almost completely dark and Helen was so cold she couldn’t stop shaking.
There was a lot for her to learn. Defying gravity was a big deal, but it was only half of flying.
The other half was less of a mental leap, but it was also much trickier.
Helen learned that to move through the air she couldn’t just flap her arms or kick her feet.
She had to manipulate the air around her.
Lucas started to teach her how to command the air, make it denser on one side and thinner on another so that a tiny, Helen-sized current was created around her.
When Lucas did it, it seemed as if he were floating underwater.
The wind didn’t whip at his hair or clothes but flowed around him, gently holding him or quickly pushing him, depending on how fast he wanted to go.
Lucas spent most of this first lesson just floating there in front of Helen as if he were in the ocean, his long limbs sinuously riding the currents, his fingers splayed to stave off random eddies.
He kept his arms out and ready to catch her in case she shot off too fast, or slipped off a current of air pressure that she had created unevenly before she tumbled into a spin.
Flying was complicated, and Helen didn’t have the feel of it yet.
It was a bit like learning to drive a car and aim a rifle at the same time.
It required a light touch and complete concentration.
Lucas also taught her tricks for not getting spotted by the “gravity impaired,” as he called the poor landlocked suckers they were looking down on.
Helen was surprised to learn that early evening was actually the most dangerous time to fly.
Sunset was when people looked up to admire the pretty colors, and on Nantucket it was also when half the island’s residents were making their living taking photos or churning out watercolors.
Several times, Lucas had to grab Helen and fly out over the ocean so they weren’t seen.
Apparently, flying any time during the day was dangerous, but if Helen stayed high enough, anyone who spotted her would think she was a bird.
Night was the safest time, of course, and that’s when they could fly closer to the ground, which Lucas promised was a thrill.
But all of it was a thrill to Helen, and when Lucas finally said that they should go in, she literally whined and asked for five more minutes. Lucas just laughed.
“Believe me, I know how you feel. But I’m freezing,” he said. Helen pushed away from him with narrowed eyes and a small smile. She swooped over his shoulder and around his back, softly brushing against him as she passed.
“Tomorrow?” she asked, feeling shy and powerful at the same time. He rolled over gracefully and captured one of her arms just before she could drift away.
“Tomorrow. I promise,” he said quietly as he reeled her in. “But it’s nearly dark and my family will worry about us if we stay out any longer tonight.”
Helen couldn’t argue with that, so she let Lucas hold her shoulders and steer her down to the soft patch of grass they had taken off from. She hovered above him as he transitioned gracefully into the gravity-state.
“What do I do?” she asked, suddenly frightened again.
“It’s okay. I know landing is intimidating, but I’m right here,” Lucas said patiently as he stood on the ground, his arms stretched up to hold both her hands as she floated above him.
“I think I’ve seen a painting like this,” Helen said, giddy with fear. “But the woman in the painting had wings.”
“Demigods, and gods for that matter, have always been attracted to artists, and sometimes they’ve painted us. The wings are total bull, of course, but they are pretty,” he said in a light tone. He was just giving her time to calm down, and she knew it.
“Okay. What do I do?” she asked evenly.
“I want you to pick the world back up again,” he answered.
“What do you mean, pick up the world?” she sputtered.
“Concentrate. You can feel what I mean, I know you can, but you have to trust me.”