Pulse

hand didn’t budge. When the pool ball hit her squarely on the knuckles, she yelled in pain. Without thinking, she used her power to pick up the ball again and throw it in the direction of Dylan’s chest. He in turn moved the ball back toward her, catching her in the sternum.
    “Stop throwing that thing at me!” she yelled.
    “I will if you will.”
    Faith hated being manipulated more than anything. She wanted to get up and leave, but she couldn’t. Her hand was still stuck to the table.
    “How long are you going to hold my hand down?” she asked.
    Dylan leaned forward.
    “Throw it as hard as you can, right at my forehead.”
    “You’re crazy.”
    Dylan moved the ball so it clocked Faith on the side of the head. Not too hard, but hard enough that she definitely felt it.
    “Do it. Hit me with the ball. Use everything you’ve got.”
    Faith’s face turned angry: her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. The eight ball flew behind her, then back toward Dylan like it had been shot out of a cannon. When it arrived at his forehead he didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t care. It seemed to hit him, but he didn’t react. The ball appeared to bounce off his forehead. As it ricocheted forward it found Faith’s shoulder. The impact hurt worse than the shots to the chest and hand put together.
    “Ouch! Okay, that one really hurt. That’s gonna leave a bruise.”
    “Probably so. Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen. But it makes my point. Accidents happen when you do this stuff. Bad accidents.”
    He stood up and came around to Faith’s side of the table, leaning back and sitting down on its edge, tossing the eight ball between his two hands.
    “How’s your head?” Faith asked. It felt like they’d had a small war in which they’d inflicted minor wounds on each other for no reason.
    “I have a second pulse, Faith,” Dylan said. “You don’t.”
    Faith seemed to finally understand that there was something fundamentally different about the power in Dylan’s hands than in her own.
    “Wait, you mean you didn’t feel that at all?”
    “It didn’t actually hit me. Came pretty close though.”
    Faith ran out of words and looked up into his eyes, confused.
    “The first pulse for a carrier is what gives us our ability to move things, but the second pulse is just as important. It senses everything around it. It knows when something is going to hurt and deflects it.”
    “Use the force, Luke,” Faith said in a monotone voice, only half joking.
    “You’re not too far from the truth. Watch.”
    Dylan was gone in a flash, flying straight up in the air.
    “Dylan?” she called, staring into the starry sky above, but it returned only cold silence. Another ten seconds went by, and Faith stood up, wondering if this was a test she was supposed to understand but didn’t. At least Dylan had freed her hand from the table.
    “Dylan?” she called again, then more to herself than to him added, “You are one mysterious dude, Dylan Gilmore.”
    And then she saw him. He was diving headfirst at shotgun speed, like he wanted to drive his head into the roof of the Nordstrom building and split his entire body wide-open. She tried to scream, but nothing would come out. Her head tilted down, watching the tucked arms and the rigid body. When his head hit the roof, it was like something out of a movie, an asteroid hitting pavement, dust and debris clouding up around the impact. Faith fell to her knees, then flopped over onto her left hip and put her bare hands on the roof. A state of shock pulled at her insides and drawing each breath was a struggle. Her mind told her he was gone, that he’d made a calculated error. Dylan was dead, and she was alone with endless questions she could never answer for herself.
    The dust settled quickly, leaving the soft light of the stars and a few candles that had been set around the foot of the table. Dylan wasn’t there. His body had gone through the roof, leaving a tattered opening about the size of a manhole cover. She crept a little closer, until she was surprised by the black eight ball, which popped out of the hole and rolled toward her, stopping just shy of her knee. She picked it up, examined its smooth surface, feeling the slick marble against her fingers.
    “I might have gone a little overboard there,” Dylan said. He was shaking the plaster and dust out of his mop of dark hair and brushing off his shoulders as he drifted up and out of the hole he’d just made in a