Authors: Bethany Frenette
Dark Star
Bethany Frenette
DISNEY HYPERION BOOKS
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First edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK
ISBN 978-1-4231-4665-0
Reinforced binding
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For Ambur, my first (and favorite) audience
1
You know when you have that dream?
The one where you haven’t been to math class all year, and suddenly you’re taking the final exam? Or the one where you’re about to go on stage, and not only have you forgotten your lines, but for some reason you aren’t wearing pants?
This dream wasn’t like that.
In this dream, I stood on the roof of a building, looking down across the city. Minneapolis. My city. I knew those streets, the high-rises, the corporate offices reaching skyward. There was heat at my back, but no light. In a city of nearly four hundred thousand people, the silence felt heavy. Dead. The towering buildings sat dark around me. Empty streets trailed off into ramps and freeways, touching the edge of the horizon. The sky was starless, blank and bare. I stood and breathed and all around me the silence gathered. The darkness gathered.
Then.
A band of light. A circle spreading outward, touching the buildings, the sidewalks, the idle buses and taxis scattered in the streets. A flash, and gone. Dark again.
Then noise. Noise that broke through my body, through the night, through the darkness and the stillness and the heat at my back. Like an explosion far below, beneath the roots of the trees that lined the parks, beneath the streets and the sewers and beneath the oldest secrets the city held. Beneath.
One by one, the buildings crumbled. Not like dominoes, or a line of cards—nothing so innocent as that. Glass shattered. Bricks fell. I heard the creak and groan of metal and concrete as skyscrapers toppled. Then the hotels collapsed, and the apartment complexes, the bars and restaurants and shops. Tree branches splintered. Streetlights bowed. The river went dark and dry, and the air filled with the scent of blood. Only I remained. And I knew. I had done this.
I looked down.
Fire.
Fire in my hands.
***
If Gram had been alive, she’d have reminded me that most dreams aren’t prophetic, even if you have a Knowing. She’d have reminded me of nightmares I’d had as a child, dreams of monsters that crept out from shadows with cold, unblinking eyes—and, as it turned out, Gram said, those never came true. She’d have reminded me that having a Knowing didn’t mean it was always right.
But it wasn’t every night I dreamed I’d destroyed an entire city. I woke shaking, a chill of dread filling my lungs. It was still dark—barely. Outside, the first gray of morning pushed back the darkness, and I heard the chatter of birds in the trees. I rose from my bed and moved to the window, placing my hands on the blinds.
I heard a voice and spun around, searching the half-light of my room. Someone had spoken. Someone had spoken my name, and then—A whisper.
“I’m going to tell you a secret, Audrey. Don’t forget.”
“Gram?” I asked, seeking, not seeing.
“Look for the light.”
I was still dreaming.
Then, as the dream moved on: “What do you remember?”
***
What I remember best about Gram is walking.
Summer mornings, we walked down sleepy streets where traffic wasn’t heavy. We followed trails that led into parks, looping around lakes, feeling the early sun on our skin. We went just after dawn, the time of morning when the sky is the color of lilacs and the light is just beginning to crest. Every summer, from the time I was eight until the year she died, we walked.
And as we walked, she told me secrets.
“Audrey,” she would say, smiling. “Listen. I’m going to tell you a secret.”
I’d lean toward her, feeling the difference in the air, as though her words cast a spell around us. Secrets had a kind of magic, she often said—but only when kept. “Don’t tell,” she’d say, even if it was simply a memory, or a thought she didn’t want repeated. And I would nod. I understood about secrets. How to hold them close. How to keep them. It was one of those things I’d grown up knowing.
Some of the secrets were real.
“I’m going to tell you something very special,” she said, one morning when I was eleven. “I’m going to tell you who you are.”
“I’m Audrey,” I said.
She smiled, pausing in our walk to cup my face with her hands. “Yes. But that’s not the name you were born with.”
I was young, but not too young to understand the implications of this. I fixed a little frown on my face and looked up at her. “I was adopted?” I asked. My best friend, Gideon, was adopted, but it had never occurred to me that I might be, as well.
Her laughter was soft and musical. “No. You’re not adopted. But you are hidden.” And then, to put me at ease, she took me home and showed me my birth certificate.
Esther Audrey Whitticomb.
I looked up at her, still frowning.
“That’s you, of course,” she said. “I thought it was time you knew your own name.”
Panic formed, a lump in my throat. She’d said I was hidden, but she hadn’t said why.
“Gram,” I said. “Was I a mistake?”
She pressed her hands over mine, those smooth hands just beginning to wrinkle. Gram was never old the way grandmothers in movies are, but she was beginning to look stretched, a little worn out. Her hair was still blond, with only a hint of gray, and she wore it long, in a braid that fell down her back. But some part of me—my Knowing, maybe—told me that our moments were being counted off, a tally run through. I knew I should remember every detail, everything she told me. And when I asked her if I was a mistake, she smiled and held my hands when she answered.
“No, sweeting, you weren’t a mistake. But you are a secret. The very best kind.”
She never would explain what she meant by that.
What do you remember?
Everything, Gram, I wanted to tell her. Everything you’ve told me. I remember it all. Walking. The ground beneath my feet. The swell of a storm. The red summer sky. Secrets and mistakes.
But the dream was fading. And the light warming my eyes wasn’t the light she wanted me to find, but the sun.
I’d overslept. Again.
The truth is?
Even without things like hidden names and Gram’s whispered secrets, my life wouldn’t have been normal. You can’t be normal when your mom leaves the house every night as soon as dusk falls and returns with the first blue of dawn, like some kind of vampire, or when she’s strong enough to bend the barrel of a shotgun with barely a flick of her wrist. When your mom’s a superhero, normal isn’t even in your vocabulary. Of course, Mom never liked the term superhero, but I’ve seen enough cartoons and read enough comics to know it’s an apt description. And she’d strictly forbidden me to call Leon her sidekick. They were Guardians, she explained. Guardians of the Twin Cities—even though she has trouble remembering things like dental appointments, and Leon’s just some skinny college kid who works at a bakery.
Guardian. Superhero. I’d long ago decided they were basically the same thing. Guardian was simply the preferred term. I mean, she even had an alter ego. The Cities didn’t know her true name, so they gave her another one. They called her Morning Star. That was Mom’s other face: a hooded figure moving in darkness. She was called vigilante, hero, menace, myth. Most adults I knew claimed not to believe in her, but at school I heard talk.
Whispers and exaggerations, mostly, things Mom couldn’t have possibly done—like stopping a train with her bare hands, or saving entire neighborhoods from the spring floods. Morning Star was a fantasy, a story told to children. Like Santa or the Tooth Fairy.
When pressed, I claimed to be a disbeliever.
Officially, Mom worked for a private security firm out of downtown Minneapolis, H&H Security. Unofficially, she did the whole Guardian thing, and we lived off her inheritance and investments. When I was eight, we’d moved into this monster of a house that was left to Gram, so Mom didn’t have to worry about snooping neighbors. To most of the world, we’ve always just been Lucy and Audrey Whitticomb, normal mother and daughter. Which just means we have to work even harder to keep the secret.
We aren’t always successful. My friend Gideon found out about Mom when I was in third grade. Mom had been driving us home from martial arts when a truck ran a red light. It didn’t hit us hard, but it was enough to toss me forward against the seat in front of me. As soon as we were through the intersection, Mom pulled over and scrambled to get us out. She opened the door next to Gideon by yanking it right off the car.
After that, we kind of had to tell him.
Mom worried over that for weeks. She wasn’t certain Gideon would be able to keep the secret. But Gideon never went through a comic book phase like I did, and even though he liked cartoon superheroes as much as any little boy, he was already smart enough to know that some secrets are better when kept. He never said a word to anyone.
I’d known all along it would be all right. Ever since Gideon and I met, I could tell he was special. He was the person who first made me aware of my Knowing. In second grade, when my family moved back to Minneapolis, Gideon was in my class at the elementary school. I walked in, and there he was, sitting in the front row, smiling—a boy like most little boys I’d known, with a mop of dark hair, face full of mischief, and legs covered in scabs.
But all around him was light. A brilliant, shining light that radiated out of him, like a sun caught in a snow globe.
Gram told me later I was reading him, that I had a Knowing.
Gram had it, and Mom had it a little, and I had it too. Certain people, Gram told me, I would look at and Know. Others I might be drawn to or repelled by. And I knew then, immediately, before the universe had spent another fraction of a second, that Gideon and I would be friends. No other Knowing before or since had ever been so strong. I’d never seen his aura again, but I knew it was there—just as I knew he would never reveal our secret. I’m not sure why Mom worried. Even people who have no Knowing at all seem to understand about Gideon. When we were little, no one ever teased him. He never got bullied or had his head dunked in a toilet or whatever else the little cannibals in elementary school come up with when they decide to eat their own. And year after year, Gideon was invariably teacher’s pet.
You’d think this would make everyone hate him. But no; he lives with the curse of being almost universally adored. I didn’t even hate him for being wide awake and cheerful on a Monday morning, eating pancakes in my kitchen when I walked downstairs still tired and shaken from my dream.
And I didn’t hate him for looking at me, sighing, and then saying, “I see you’re continuing this trend of rolling out of bed and into yesterday’s clothes. Also, we’re late.”
I poured myself a glass of orange juice and sat down beside him, rubbing my face with my hands. Even on good days, mornings do not contain my most shining hours. That morning, I’d done pretty much what Gideon accused me of: climbed out of bed, pulled on the pair of jeans I’d left on the floor, tossed my hair into a ponytail, and then grabbed the first clean shirt I’d groped my way to in the closet.