Hydropower Chapter 15
A mid-season finale
The story so far on Hydropower: After a freak storm, some citizens of Crowhill Cove have developed superpowers. Ash, Cairo, Maxie, and Annabel teamed up to stop Van from burning down the college campus with his fire-starting abilities.
Trigger warning for this chapter: small reference to school violence
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Chapter 15
“Look,” Cairo was saying, “if you need support, you can come and live with me. I’ve got room.”
Van sniffled a little, wiping at his face with the backs of his hands. He’d calmed down once they started to talk, but every now and then, the emotion seemed to come over him again. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You really want someone like me living with you, after everything I told you?”
Cairo gave a half-laugh. “Dude, we’re all fucked up in our own ways,” he said. “Ask Evie. She’ll tell you. I’ve got whole closets full of my dead Mom and sister’s things. Can’t let go of them.”
“Yeah, and I dropped out of college completely,” Evie said, catching onto the need for encouragement. She filed away the information about his family for later examination, trying not to appear surprised – she’d expected something like that, after all. “You’re stronger than me. I couldn’t handle it. I just straight-up quit.”
Ash was typing out something rapidly on his phone, but Evie touched his hand with a smile, knowing what he would say. “Ash isn’t out to his parents,” she said. “Can you imagine? In this day and age. And his parents are super nice, too. But he keeps it secret from them, anyway.”
Ash gave her a kind of half-twisted smile and a look that suggested he might have put it differently, but that otherwise, she was on the money.
All of them looked at Annabel and Maxie.
“Like they said, everyone has their fucked-up things,” Annabel said hastily.
“Yep,” Maxie agreed.
Both of them were making it clear from their hard expressions and closed-off body language, arms folded over chests and shoulders turned away, that they weren’t going to volunteer anything further.
That was fine, Evie figured. There were levels of trust to be earned, and not all of them were there yet.
“I guess,” Van said. He allowed himself a weak but brave smile, his eyes glancing particularly at Cairo and Evie. “I mean, if you’ll have me, I guess I’d be happy to accept.”
“Alright!” Cairo exclaimed, clapping him on the shoulder. “Welcome, roomie. You want to go get your stuff and start moving in?”
Van nodded eagerly. “It won’t take long,” he said. “I don’t have a lot here with me.”
They all got up from their chairs, attracting the attention of the lone barista who emerged from the back of the café again, watching them go with a hint of surliness as if she was upset they hadn’t bought enough – or maybe that she would now be forced to deal with an entirely new set of customers, since her tables were no longer full. Outside on the sidewalk, Maxie and Annabel made their goodbyes, excusing themselves for a day of work.
Cairo and Van started off in the general direction of the campus, leading the way to Van’s current lodgings, and Ash and Evie fell in behind them. Evie nudged Ash with her elbow to get his attention, though she didn’t say a word.
Are you still sure you don’t want to come live with us, too? she thought, as clearly as she could.
Ash made a kind of half-shrug gesture, turning his head from one side to the other as if to say maybe, maybe, maybe.
I’d like it a lot, Evie thought with a smile. She grabbed his arm and linked her elbow through his, the way they often did when it was just the two of them. It was possessive and close and warm and comforting, this sign to everyone in the outside world that she was his and he was hers, even if only in the strictest platonic sense. It felt good just to belong to someone.
It was turning into a nice day, after all. Without smoke roiling from the campus buildings to clog the sky, it was an unseasonably warm and sunny morning, and people were strolling around or sitting on the grass together, tilting their heads up instead of looking at their books. They crossed the whole campus and Ash pointed sideways, to the building looming at their side – the building Evie had taken classes in, too, until not long ago at all.
Even if it felt like a lifetime ago, now – so much so that even being here, even talking about it, she almost forgot that Ash still studied there.
“You have class?” she prompted out loud, and Ash nodded. Evie called out, but Cairo and Van had gone on too far ahead – they were lost in conversation and didn’t hear her. She shrugged, turning back to Ash. “Will you be alright?”
He nodded, held up his phone: he would be alright because he could always type out whatever he needed to say. Ash was the kind of student who kept his head down in class, anyway, and they’d always huddled close and spoken only to one another. It was quite likely that no one would even notice the change.
Evie felt a pang of sadness, and something deeper, something unnamable. She hadn’t been able to stick it out, to hack it, and even though they’d been two parts of one whole, it turned out that Ash was strong enough to survive without her. He hadn’t been brought down when she fell. He’d just straightened up and continued. He didn’t need her the way she needed him. He didn’t, it seemed, need anyone.
Ash nodded his goodbye and stepped aside, joining the flow of students – a few of whom Evie recognized – going into the building. She watched until he was safely inside, the door yawning wide and swallowing him into the contrasting darkness, and took a breath.
Van and Cairo were still visible, though a long way ahead. She went after them, keeping them in her sights, knowing to thread her way through the dorms and stop outside the place where Van lived. She didn’t feel like going inside. He’d said he didn’t have much, and it was a nice day – nice to feel the sun on her skin, after what had seemed like an endless night, much of it obscured by the weightlessness and loss of sensation that came with stopped time – so she sat on the low wall outside and waited.
Oz Hunter leaned against the shadowed wall of one of the dorms, watching, trying not to make it obvious. He held up his phone in front of his face, keeping the camera pointed ostentatiously down to avoid another suspicion, and waited with the girl in his peripheral vision.
Of course, she wasn’t his target. It was the boy who had left her outside.
It had been luck only that led him to walk past the campus entrance just as a young Black woman with a petite build said something that caught his attention: “What you do with fire, I do with water”. In another life, it wouldn’t have meant a thing to him.
But this was a life where he’d all of a sudden gained the power to be invulnerable, and so when someone said a phrase like that in his hearing, he listened.
And when she mentioned that the guy had a thing for burning things down, he listened even harder.
He was almost sure one of the others had used some kind of power, too, though he couldn’t be sure.
He’d trailed them to a café, managed to blend in with the crowd at a larger, chain café further up the street where there were more passers-by and yet he still mostly had a clear line of sight to the door the kids had gone through. He’d waited and watched, and when they finally left, he’d managed to trail them again, sticking with the firebug as the group split into smaller and smaller factions.
It had been a small moment of panic when the girl had passed him again, given that he’d thought she was leaving the group, too, but she hadn’t noticed him. Not even when he pitched up at the building opposite and tried to look casual. She had her eyes closed, her head tilted towards the sky, as if she was just enjoying the weather.
He had to stick with them.
This wasn’t just his job – it was his calling. It had always been his calling. And now that he could do it without getting burned, it was his duty.
He wasn’t going to let a firebug get away.
They drove back to the house in Cairo’s car. It was funny; Evie had only spent one night in it, as far as the others were concerned, but she was sick and tired of the interior. She’d spent so many hours, actual hours, real hours, only to reverse them and start again. The others had it easy. She was tired of everything. She needed sleep.
Only, it seemed like the universe had other plans – because there was a small, scruffy, shifty kind of man standing outside the gates of Cairo’s house, and he didn’t move when Cairo sounded his horn and gestured at him to get out of the way.
“Hey,” he said instead, hugging his arms against himself and leaning forward, squinting his eyes into the wintry sun. “Cairo, right? I need to talk to you.”
Cairo exchanged a glance with Van in the passenger seat, then back to Evie behind them. She shrugged. She didn’t know who the guy was, either.
Cairo opened the door of his car and got out; clearly, he was confident in his newfound strength, had no qualms about confronting a stranger. Evie leaned forward, trying to catch the whole conversation.
“How do you know my name?” Cairo asked, and she had to admit it was as good a place to start as any.
“I saw it,” the man said, twitching his head in the direction of the house. Was he high? Or coming down? “In there. We were talking. I have this kind of thing, see? I can, like, tell the future, or something, I guess.”
Cairo looked into the car again, catching Evie’s eye. “Okay,” he said, straightening up and facing the stranger. “What were we talking about?”
“You were offering me a place to stay,” he said right away. “I’m Don. I got nowhere else to go and you said it was okay if I crashed.”
“Yeah?” Cairo said. “Okay, Don. Did you see anything else in your… what, vision?”
He nodded sharply. “You got super-strength,” he said. He nodded at the car. “Evie’s got time travel. And some kid Ash, not that one there, but he can read minds. He was reading mine. I saw it. I don’t know who that kid is. It was just the four of us.”
“So, you came here to find us?” Cairo said.
“I thought I might as well speed things up,” Don said. “Yeah? So, like, we gonna go in or whatever?”
There was a long moment. “Yeah,” Cairo said, shrugging helplessly. “I guess.”
For a brief moment, Evie wished maybe Cairo was a bit more discerning with who he invited into his home – but given it was the whole reason she had a place to stay right now, maybe she had better bite her tongue.
She watched Cairo open the gates so the man could walk inside while they drove, keeping an eye on him, wondering what his deal was and whether he could be trusted at all.
Oz had parked around the corner, bringing his car to a stop a good enough distance away that he didn’t draw attention. He watched the group go inside the gates of the fancy house, their ranks swelling again by one. It seemed like they just kept picking up someone new, dropping someone else, all the time. Who were these people?
He knew where to find them now. He knew who to watch. And he had enough free time on his hands to do it.
He leaned back in his seat, settling in for as much surveillance as was necessary.
No one was going to be setting any fires on his watch.
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