Pulse

building.
    “Ya think?” Faith asked, but then she was up on her feet, running to him, hugging him tightly. When she pulled away, Dylan looked a little stunned, which she didn’t quite know how to respond to. Being Faith, she resorted to cleverness in the face of confusion.
    “You smell like building. New cologne?”
    Dylan smiled as she brushed the dust off his V-neck T-shirt, black this time, which she had liked from the moment he showed up.
    Dylan looked deeply into her eyes, like he was searching for something he couldn’t find but wanted to very badly. “That’s the second pulse. You could drop a car on my head, but it knows. I’d be fine. What you have is only half of what you need.”
    “You mean I’m no good to you, no help, unless I can have a car dropped on my head?”
    It was a funny way of putting things, but Dylan basically agreed, nodding with a half smile on his face.
    “But why would anyone want to hurt me?”
    Faith asked the question, but she also suddenly understood something that had only been a whisper of a thought—until Dylan had used his head to drive a hole into the roof of a Nordstrom building.
    “You’re recruiting me,” she said. “For something more than just fun and games.”
    Dylan didn’t answer. He didn’t betray any feeling about what she was suggesting as he returned to the table and sat down. “Let’s get back to work, see if we can’t get you lifting heavier stuff.”
    Faith was starting to realize that the only way to the answers she needed was to keep going. If Dylan wanted to be difficult, fine; he could be difficult. But soon enough she’d be too powerful for him to control. Then she’d get her answers whether he liked it or not.
    “Let’s do it,” she said.
    They spent the rest of that night and many nights after working on Faith’s first-pulse abilities. Within a few more days she was lifting bowling balls and fifty-pound weights. And she was flying and carefully landing on her own. She was so immersed in the building up of her own powers that the answers to her questions started to matter less and less. She felt stronger than she’d ever felt in her life, and yet there was a growing fear taking up more and more of the space in her heart. Seeing a bowling ball fly through the air started to have the unnerving effect of making her duck even when it was nowhere near her. The mere thought of having it clobber her before she could move would take over, and she’d lose concentration. It was one thing to move objects that couldn’t do any harm if they went astray, such as foam blocks and plastic cups. It was something else entirely when things got heavy enough to kill her.
    But more than that, Faith was starting to feel things for Dylan she couldn’t deny. She kept telling herself, over and over, not to let her feelings get involved. And the longer she spent time with Dylan, the more she was intrigued by the idea that he had something she didn’t. Between the two of them, he alone had a second pulse.
     
    “I don’t see why I can’t come, too,” Hawk said. It was the last day of school, and he was angling for an invitation to wherever Faith had been disappearing to every night. “Especially tonight. It’s the end!”
    “I told you already; it’s not my call. Dylan says no. I even asked him.”
    That wasn’t exactly true. Faith had asked if Hawk could know about carriers, and Dylan had said absolutely not. She’d never asked if Hawk could come up to the roof.
    “Dylan, Dylan, Dylan,” Hawk repeated. “When you fall, you fall hard.”
    “Oh, come on, I’m not that bad. And we’re just talking, taking it very slowly.”
    “Mmmm-hmmmm,” Hawk said.
    The hall had seemed empty as they entered the school, heading for their last day of class at Old Park Hill. But they’d walked past Clara Quinn, who was standing off to one side, staring into her Tablet. She snapped the screen small, placed it in her hip pocket, and advanced on the pair.
    “Taking what slowly?” she asked Faith. Faith tried to move around Clara, but Clara was a tall, strong girl, and she kept stepping in front of Faith as she tried to get by.
    “Aren’t you supposed to be leaving for the games or something?” Faith asked. What she really wanted to do was throw Clara through a door. Just knowing she was capable of doing it gave Faith more confidence than normal.
    “We’re leaving in a couple of hours,” Clara answered. “Have to stay for Wade’s blowout, right?