Ashes (Ashes Trilogy 1)

She had never considered this, but she could see the logic. In school, your reputation could rest on a rumor. “Okay.”

“Good. Now if you do sense something off, you tell me or the Rev, period. You got that?”

And not any of the other Council members … That was interesting. “What are you going to do if someone else pops up with a super-sense?”

“We’ll deal with it then. I don’t think it’s as common as all that, anyway.” That one-eyed squint again. “You got any ideas why this might have happened to you?”

She felt a small flutter of alarm. “No.” When he said nothing, she added, “Really.”

“Mmm.” Kincaid’s mouth screwed to a pucker. “You know, I’m not like Yeager, but I do believe that’s the first lie you’ve told me, Alex, and here’s why. All the survivors—us older people—our brains are different even from people who are in their forties, fifties. Sleep patterns are way different, for one; we don’t dream as much as younger people.”

She thought about Tom and his broken sleep, as well as her monster and that nightmare. “Would it only be sleep then? Dreams?”

“A magic bullet? No, probably a combination of things that tip the balance. Older people’s brains just aren’t as spry as they used to be. Our brains don’t make as many neurochemicals. Now, that’s not uniform; there are some very sharp ninety-year-olds. I knew one, in fact, but the hell of it is, he died right away, too. Like he was

forty instead of ninety.”

“Meaning what?”

“Well, let’s just think about it for a second. This … Zap, as you call it, was a whole bunch of high-intensity EMPs, right? Well, what are those but electrical discharges, and what is the brain but an organ that relies on what is, in essence, electricity to function? A brain is like a hive of bees; all the cells have to be firing in the right order, or you’ve got chaos: a bunch of bees going every which way and nothing getting done.”

She thought she saw where he was going. “So if you zap the brain with enough of a charge, you’d create chaos? Release a flood of neurochemicals? Why would that matter?”

“Alex, what do you think a seizure is? It’s that chaos thing again: a bunch of brain cells firing in an uncoordinated manner. Plus, seizures can kill you. The brain can seize up and stop working, and the person will die. So what I’m thinking is that older people, whose brains already don’t work as well as when they were younger, were protected. They got knocked for a loop when the Zap hit, but they didn’t die. Those of us who were bad off—the Awakened—our brains were like little raisins. So, for us, the Zap kind of woke us up, primed our brains to make chemicals we’d been missing. I think it’s probably more complicated than that, but you get the general idea.”

She did, but that still didn’t answer why Tom had lived. Or her—unless she was right about the monster having done enough damage to save her. “But then what about kids?”

“Don’t know. Kids’ brains aren’t set in stone. They’re still growing and developing. I know for a fact that kids can survive brain injuries, like cold-water drownings, that would kill or cripple an adult. The older you get, the less able your brain is to absorb an injury and adapt. I guess there’s just a natural cutoff where the injury gets to be too much for the brain to handle. In the context of the Zap, that means the majority of adults couldn’t absorb the trauma and they flat-out died.”

“What about the Change?”

“Based on what we’ve seen, I think it’s got to do with brain development and hormones.”

“Tom and I wondered the same thing.” She told Kincaid about meeting Larry and Deidre.

Kincaid bobbed his head in a nod. “That fits. Hormones would also explain why kids are still Changing as they get older.”

Her thoughts darted to Ellie. “You mean, every little kid is going to Change?”

“Maybe. So far, that looks to be true. On the other hand, it’s only been a couple of months, and so maybe whatever changed in their brains will repair itself. The really young ones—babies and toddlers, kindergartners—they might have a chance. But maybe not.”

A whole generation of kids Changing? The thought sent a shiver down her spine. “But then why have some of us Changed and not others?”

“The Spared? I don’t know what’s going on with you all; why you and people like Chris and Peter and this Tom of yours didn’t change. Your brains are probably different somehow, but I’ll be damned if I know.”

She hesitated a moment. “You said that old people’s sleep and dreams are different. I think something bad happened to Tom in Afghanistan—enough so he … he didn’t sleep much and never for very long.”

Kincaid’s eyebrows arched. “Post-traumatic stress? Hmm. I never thought of that. Could be, though.”

“Why?”

“Because the brains of people with PTSD show permanent changes, and the symptoms reinforce the damage, and then the damage means more symptoms. That’s why PTSD is so hard to treat. People can learn to function, but it’s an injury the brain just never recovers from.” Kincaid huffed out a silent laugh, like a dog. “If I wasn’t just a country doctor and got a big enough sample of kids and had a fancy laboratory and could do all kinds of tests, maybe I’d figure it out, but that’s not ever happening. One thing I do know, though: all of us Awakened, we got some kind of brain damage, by definition, and now I’m thinking that some of the older kids who should’ve changed didn’t because their brains and hormones were somehow different.” He paused. “You see where I’m going with this, right?”

Her stomach tightened in a sudden twist of fear. “Not really.”

“Alex, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I am a doctor and I can put two and two together. The Rev had bad brain damage, and he’s got a super-sense. We got another Awakened with super-hearing. But you are the only kid I know who’s both Spared and got a super-sense. So, Alex, I got to know,” Kincaid said, with his best one-eyed squint, “what exactly is living in that head of yours?”

54

“Are you okay?” Sarah said. She halted as Ghost snuffled around a tree. “You’ve been really quiet all night.”

“Just tired.” Alex hunched her shoulders as the wind forked up a fistful of icy snow and sent it whirling in a sparkling arabesque in the light of their torch. She could see the bulky silhouette of their guard a few steps ahead and the flash of snow splintering the harsh white light of his lantern.