Monster (Gone 7)

Shade sighed like a disapproving parent, shook her head, and said, “Well, who knows? Maybe the world we’ll grow up in will be very different than we expect and all that education will be useless.”

“Yeah. I was thinking that, too.”

“Maybe we’ll be the ones to make the world different,” Shade said with a significant glance.

That glance made Cruz queasy. “Look out, light’s changing.”

Shade stepped on the gas and accelerated through the yellow light as an old bald man in a Mercedes leaned on his horn and showed them his middle finger.

“Where are we going?” Cruz asked.

“To a very quiet place,” Shade muttered.

I borrow your confidence, Cruz thought. Do you know that, Shade Darby? Do you know that you’re the shark and I’m just the remora fish attached to you?

Do you secretly despise me?

They passed a gloomy, Gothic stone arch that marked the gate of the cemetery that divided Evanston and Chicago. They drove slowly down a side street into a quiet neighborhood of stone and brick Victorians that had mostly been converted to apartments or condos. The street ended in a cul-de-sac, where Shade parked.

“Seriously?” Cruz asked.

“More than serious: grave,” Shade joked.

They climbed out and pushed through an unlocked iron side gate. They walked silently down a path that brought them to the cemetery’s perimeter, marked by a low brick wall topped by a three-foot-high chain-link fence. There was a hole in the wire and they squeezed through.

“How come you know about this hole in the fence?” Cruz asked suspiciously.

“My mother is here,” Shade said in a flat tone that discouraged further questions. But still, Cruz saw her look away toward the east end of the cemetery, and saw, too, the look of sadness that crossed her face like a shadow and then was duly suppressed.

My father, her mother, Cruz thought. Do we ever escape our parents?

There was no denying that the cemetery was a strange and spine-tingling place, quiet but for traffic sounds and the whine of a plane passing overhead on its approach to O’Hare. There were tombstones, mismatched, some humble, some quite grand with impressive plinths supporting plaster angels and blank-eyed saints, crosses, and the occasional Star of David or Muslim crescent.

The cemetery formed a rectangle with rounded edges, one side facing Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan beyond. A main pathway bisected the cemetery lengthwise like a spine, with smaller paths extending like ribs. Trees that offered welcome shade on hot days were now sinister, looming creatures, bare branches silhouetted against the orange glow of the city lights to the south. The pitying faces of chipped and pitted stone Madonnas seemed to disapprove of both of them.

Cruz crossed herself and intercepted an eye roll from Shade.

“Hey,” Cruz said, “a graveyard at night is no place to go all atheist.”

“There’s a quiet little area up here,” Shade said.

It was a spot where trees blocked most of the artificial light, a space with very old-looking tombstones, and when Cruz bent down to peer closely she saw that at least one dated from the nineteenth century.

“Okay,” Shade announced, apparently unfazed by the gloom, and perhaps, unlike her friend, not tortured by memories of a dozen horror movies set in graveyards. “If a groundskeeper comes, I’ll tell him we got lost looking for my mom’s grave.”

“Yeah, and if the ground opens up and you see zombies, run! Now, how do we do this?”

“I reread the Ellison book, the part about Sam Temple when he first exhibited signs of developing a power. Her theory is that it was strong emotion—anger, whatever—that put him in touch with his power.”

“Okay, strong emotion,” Cruz said. Then, with deliberate drollery, “Strong emotion.

In you.”

“I have emotions,” Shade protested weakly. “I just . . . I don’t . . . I guess I don’t like them.”

“Is it because they make you feel vulnerable?”

“Of course,” Shade agreed readily. “You know why men have all the power in this world, Cruz? I’ll tell you. Because Homo sapiens is about 200,000 years old, as a species. All of human civilization from, like, Ur of the Chaldees—”