Pulse

good.
    Wade controlled himself after that, letting himself finish midfield in the rest of his events. The thought of losing when he could have so easily won pounded into his soul in a way that he’d never experienced before. Letting the win slip through his fingers when he could have annihilated every single one of his competitors with ease was almost too much to bear. And yet he knew his slipup in the 100-meter—the way he’d used his powers to force himself down the track without so much as barely thinking about it—had been a scary eye-opener. Had he imagined himself at the finish line instead of the halfway mark, he would have blown the existing record to smithereens in such grand fashion it would have almost certainly caused a wide and endless investigation. It was not the kind of situation that his father or Gretchen would have appreciated.
    As he walked off the track, defeated soundly in every event he had competed in, Wade pondered the fact that he’d almost let his sister get to him once again. She’d tried to poison him with thoughts of seizing the Field Games by the throat and choking the life out of every sickeningly normal competitor. Why should they stand by and do nothing? This was their time to shine. They’d earned it, living outside with Drifters and scum and garbage. They deserved to win! Wade had let these kinds of thoughts sink in. He’d held them deep inside and turned them over and over in his mind. He could see himself crossing every finish line first and jumping higher than anyone had ever seen. He could feel the heat coming off the crowd, the power of their adulation. These thoughts made him warm and happy inside. These were things he badly wanted. It was a miracle that he’d been able to stop himself when he did; and really, he didn’t completely understand how it had happened. Not until he saw Clara after, and she smirked at him on her way to the throwing area.
    “That was taking it a little far, don’t you think?” she asked him. He understood immediately that it had been she, not himself, who had dropped him to last in the race. Clara had used her own power against him, slowing him down when he’d gone so disastrously out of control.
    “Look, brother,” Clara said, wrapping her hand around the center of a javelin and pointing the tip at his chest. “You’re stronger than I am, always will be. But you’re reckless. You might have just shown the world something it’s not supposed to see. Not yet.”
    “You were the one who said we should crush these losers. What happened to that idea? Did you lose your nerve?” Wade asked. He hated the idea that she had intervened in the race. It felt like a violation of the rules, an unsaid thing they should never do to each other.
    “Your problem is that you have no control,” Clara said, touching the end of the javelin to his chest. A crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand was watching, wondering what the two of them were talking so intensely about and why Clara was pointing a javelin at her brother. “You don’t know anything about subtlety. You’re a loose cannon. And in the end, that’s exactly what might get us killed.”
    Clara walked away, but she smiled first for the cameras. She made it look like they had a harmless sibling rivalry going. Wade was totally confused, which tended to be the way his sister always made him feel.
    An hour later he would find himself more confused still. The memory of Wade’s brief and unexplainable move to the front of the pack was about to be pounded into the dirt by Clara Quinn.
     
    Clara didn’t think she was smarter than just her brother. That wasn’t saying much. She felt smarter than pretty much everyone on the planet. Her bravado, unlike Wade’s, had as much to do with outwitting people as it did with beating them physically. There was only one person who would later claim to understand all the reasons behind her decision making on the final day of the Field Games, and that was Gretchen. She alone knew the mind of Clara Quinn in ways that no one else did.
    Unlike her brother, Clara had no true illusions of grandeur when it came to something as meaningless as throwing a javelin or a hammer. Nothing about athletics had the allure of true power. In the events that followed, Clara Quinn threw an average javelin, raced an average heat in her finals, and threw a below-average hammer into the middle of the field. They were not stunningly bad results for a newcomer from the outside; in