Freakling Read Free

going to roll the whole time? Taemon began to relax. Their street didn’t have much of a slope. They wouldn’t get far.
    “Now comes the fun part,” Yens said.
    The bad feeling in Taemon’s stomach was back in an instant. A quadrider was coming toward them on the street, and Yens seemed to be steering toward it.
    “Uh, Yens?” Taemon tried not to sound terrified. “Shouldn’t we try to avoid the quadrider?” His voice cracked.
    Yens laughed and stayed his course. “That’s the ticket, Tae. Put your life on the line, and you can do anything you want with psi.”
    Life on the line? Holy Mother Mountain!
    The quadrider honked frantically. There was no room for it to pass — not with the unisphere in the middle of the street.
    “Yens!” Taemon cried.
    Just then, Taemon felt the engine starting up underneath him. The unisphere jerked and whined. Suddenly Taemon realized what Yens had done. In urgent danger, the survival instinct sometimes became stronger than a person’s conscience and psi could be used if the person kept a calm head.
    Sometimes.
    They picked up speed. The unisphere sputtered. Lurched. Wobbled. This is exactly why psi was such a tricky thing. Authority, knowledge, state of mind — all of these played against each other and you could mess things up if you didn’t stick to what you absolutely knew you could do.
    Yens was losing control.
    The quadrider honked again, mere feet away from them.
    Before Taemon knew what was happening, Yens launched himself from the unisphere and tumbled into the grass at the side of the road.
    Taemon wobbled, but even as he did so, he could feel his psi taking over. Once he made the decision to stay on the seat, all anxiety left him. His mind was clear and calm.
    He knew how to drive the unisphere.
    In one complete image, he pictured it in his head. The spring releasing the stored energy. The gears moving forward in a burst of speed. The steering mechanism pulling hard to the left. The seat staying balanced above the ball. It all came to his mind precisely and instantly. He gathered his psi and directed it toward the unisphere.
Be it so!
    Taemon hung on as he rocketed forward off the road and onto the grass, missing the quadrider by inches. He righted his course, then bounced back onto the road, flinging dry pine needles behind him.
    He exhaled slowly. It wouldn’t do to crash now. He had to stay calm a little longer.
    He drove around the block and willed himself to be at peace.
    The wind had smeared purple and gray across the twilit sky.
    A squirrel bounded across the road.
    The crickets began their song of darkness.
    And Taemon parked Uncle Fierre’s unisphere in the driveway.
    Once he put the emergency brake on and withdrew his psi, the fear came back in a rush. He had come within a breath of dying. He started shaking.
    Taemon stumbled off the seat. His legs felt too weak to stand. But before he could steady himself, Yens yanked him sideways and shoved him up against the splintery rough wood of their fence. He wedged his forearm across Taemon’s neck. Even stronger than the pain and fear was the humiliation of being manhandled. Yens was attacking Taemon, which meant he had to do it with his hands. To use psi against another person, you had to be defending, assisting, or showing affection. And Yens was doing none of these.
    “How did you drive it? You said you’d never seen one before.”
    “I had to do something.” Taemon choked out the words. “You almost got us killed!”
    Tiny splinters dug into his scalp as Yens pushed harder, forcing Taemon’s chin up and his head back.
    “Tell me what you did just now,” Yens said, a terrible fierceness in his voice. “You shouldn’t be able to do that.”
    His brother let the pressure off long enough for Taemon to gasp out a few words. “I can’t. I don’t even know what I did.”
    “Taemon! Yens!” Mam called from the house. “Time for nut cake!”
    Yens slammed him against the fence again. “You’ll tell