She laughs. “Doubt was a rather optimistic word, huh? She wanted to send my brother-in-law to get me, as if he could somehow break the bond you made.” She shakes her head. “Look, you may not have a mother, but all humans do, and we all know something very basic about them. They will believe anything about their kids. They’re hard to dissuade, and they’re eternally optimistic. I had to tell her it was pointless, even if she sent our richest, most powerful human relative. Do you disagree?” She arches one eyebrow.
Put like that. . . I sniff. “No, you were right. It is pointless.”
She shifts, heading back outside. “Are you mad at me, because I didn’t tell you I wanted to call my family?”
Now I feel stupid. “Not mad. I know humans love their families.” Usually. Some of them hate them, but they do seem to create major emotions one way or another.
“Alright, well, if you’re not angry anymore, can we go find a place without lots of humans and practice my mastery of water?”
“You should try to use earth and water together.” I clear my throat. “And that woman has put out the fire, and she appears to be upset.”
It’s the store clerk. I’m guessing it was her phone that I melted. “You said you were borrowing my phone.” She glances down at it in dismay. “You destroyed it.”
“I mean, technically he did that.” Whitney releases my arm and points at me.
“I didn’t even touch it.” I walk past them and out the door.
Whitney hands the woman a wad of the money we stole. She told me that sometimes humans don’t even require the exchange of paper. Sometimes they do things, providing goods and services, for a simple change of numbers on a page. It makes no sense to me, but then the new world often makes no sense after I wake.
I suppose that’s Whitney’s point.
How can I balance a world I don’t understand? How can I eliminate creatures I don’t know? They’re all things I’ve never before wondered, and doing so now is unsettling. Without even thinking about it, I let Whitney drive.
That’s a huge mistake.
I nearly crashed the Tahoe a time or two when I was learning, but she’s been living in this time her entire life, so she’s clearly just trying to kill us.
And she’s laughing loudly while doing it.
“That’s a tree,” I shout, as she zooms past the edge of the lake, where a tree that’s growing precariously sideways nearly takes off my head.
“You said you can’t be hurt,” she shouts. “And that I can’t be harmed either, not while you’re here.”
“Now you’re headed for rocks.” My hands clamp tighter about her waist. “This is very unsafe.”
“You can’t die!” She’s getting a little too excited about that.
“But I’d rather not spend unnecessary energy saving you.” I reach for the steering bars, but she slaps my hands away.
“It’s my turn for once.”
But before I can take control, we accelerate, then slow down, turn fast, and spray water in all directions. There aren’t even any other humans around by now. Apparently not many humans participate in water events when it’s this cold. But being here with Whitney, the cool water, the warmth of the sun overhead, I don’t hate it.
It’s a little like the burger.
Strange.
Uninvited.
And surprisingly enjoyable.
It scares me a little bit how much I like it, because I’ve never liked things before. I’ve certainly never liked a human before. But eventually I regain control of my senses, and I stop her. “This is fine. You can stop now.”
She stops the jet ski near an out-jutting tree, and she shivers. “They weren’t lying. With the wind and the water.” Her mouth looks a bit blue.
I fix that immediately. “It’s a very simple matter to warm the air.” I stop. “Now, you try.”
She scowls at first, which is kind of cute, and then she shivers again as the heat I created dissipates. “I can’t.”
