Proud Machinery

CHAPTER TEN

Kess sat in her car outside the coffee shop in Lawrenceville where Elias had agreed to meet his Internet mystery person. She thought about how Elias had kissed her.

He'd kissed her, and she'd shocked him, and he'd gotten over that for some reason, and he'd turned out to be so... so smart. And now he was inside the coffee shop, waiting for Kess. It made her want to drive back home at two-hundred miles an hour. But instead she got out and went inside. It helped to think of it as "possibly deadly intrigue" rather than "meeting up with a boy."

Elias was slouched in an armchair in a back corner. He looked up at Kess when she got close. She'd forgotten how much she liked his deep-set wizard eyes.

"So he's not here yet," she said.

"Nope."

"He's probably a murderer. You know he's probably a murderer, right?"

"If he looks like a murderer, you can leave."

Kess sat in a chair next to Elias. There was one more chair in this corner. Kess's eyes flickered between the empty seat and Elias as her anxiety flickered between Potential Murderer and Boy.

How did her mind classify Elias, given that he was neither a Red nor a Blue? Now that she saw him in person again, there was something... strangerly about him. He was other, un-Blue, not to be trusted. But he also didn't inspire the bitter, insurmountable antagonism she felt towards the Reds. And if she thought about all the conversations they'd had, the information he'd shared with her, she could push past the fact that he wasn't a Blue and the vague uneasy feeling that gave her. Then she could see him as himself. Elias. Her friend. She remembered feeling something similar about her parents before they left on their trip.

"Has anyone looked at your eyes since you started seeing waves?" asked Elias. "Studied them, I mean."

That snapped her out of her anxiety loop. "Ugh, no."

"Then you don't know how it works."

"I don't know how any of it works."

"Yeah, but electricity comes out of your hands because your hands changed. You can see strange things, so your eyes must have changed."

She hadn't thought of that, which embarrassed her a little. That old newspaper article about Vance Holifeld really had shaken her disbelief in magic. She was half convinced that her powers were a divine blessing, like Lorraine had joked, or a curse or a possession or something.

"You're right, you're right." She gripped the edge of her chair. "Okay. Do it."

Elias laughed. "You look like you just asked me to punch you."

"I don't like... eyes. And the looking into of them."

"Pretend I'm the optometrist."

"I hate optometrists. I hate doctors generally. They ask questions and touch you and look in your eyes."

Elias held up his phone. "Just look at this."

And she did, holding her eye wide open, and he took a picture and showed it to her.

"There's little things," she said.

"They look like beads. Little clear beads in the whites of your eyes."

"My eyes burned before I first saw the lights. They burned for days. It must have been those things, growing."

"I can sort of tell, now that I know they're there. When the light hits your eyes just right, it glitters off of them. And they look sort of blue-ish gray-ish. They're usually brown, right?" He got a funny look on his face for a moment. "After this, you should show me what they can do."