Freakling Read Free Page A

me. I’ll make sure of it.” He let go and walked away.
    Taemon sucked in short breaths and forced his tears back. He never should have allowed his mind to wander. It was bad, like Da said. What about what Yens had done? Placing yourself in danger so you can act outside authority?
    Cha. That was bad, too.

Taemon sat in the backseat of the quadrider, with the luggage under his feet. Da was driving, Mam sat next to him, Yens and Uncle Fierre sat in the middle seats, and Taemon sat facing the back. It was just as well. Last night’s argument had picked up again, and he could steer clear of the bickering by sitting all the way back. At the moment, Yens was badgering Da.
    “One of these days, you’re going to have to admit that the old ways don’t matter anymore.”
    “Strength comes in many forms,” Da said. “Psi is only one of them.”
    Yens snorted.
    Taemon turned back to the view from the rear window, letting the others argue to their hearts’ content. They drove east toward the shore, passing the farmland that fed the city. In the backseat Taemon faced west, watching the city wall grow smaller in the distance and admiring the mountains that rose behind Deliverance. At their base they were green and lush with the early summer rain. Higher, the peaks were craggy, a row of spikes that protected the city from the rest of the world.
    It had been Taemon’s own ancestor, the prophet Nathan, who had yanked those mountains out of flat ground. Talk about some powerful psi. Nathan was the one who discovered it. Only Da wouldn’t use the word
discovered.
Da said that the Heart of the Earth granted psi to the prophet Nathan because he was so righteous that he would never use it to hurt anyone or do anything selfish. Either way you look at it, Nathan was the first one to have the power to visualize something and make it so.
    It had been over two hundred years since Nathan had fled from the Republik with his family and friends during the Great War. You’d think a person with psi would be revered, but the opposite was true. People had feared Nathan, despised him. The Republikite army had wanted to use him as a weapon in the Great War, but Nathan refused. He and his followers moved to a wilderness area by the coast and built the city of Deliverance. Nathan passed psi on to his children and his followers’ children, charging them to use it for good. Before long, Deliverance became a city of psi wielders. They tried to keep to themselves, but the Republik still harassed them. So Nathan used his psi to make the very mountains Taemon was staring at right now, the mountains that kept them separate from the rest of the world. The world finally got the idea and left them alone. Even now, there was no contact at all with the psiless cities of the Republik and the powerless people that lived on the other side of those mountains.
    Taemon wondered how people lived without psi. Their lives must be so primitive. Did they even have running water? How would you turn it off without psi? It would have to have a lever of some kind that would move up and down to control the flow. Or maybe something like a screw would work better. But how would you turn a screw without psi?
    Thinking up crazy machines and gadgets was Taemon’s favorite way to daydream. Soon his brain had moved from psiless faucets to Uncle Fierre’s unisphere. He saw its engine so clearly in his mind. As images swam through his head, his fingers twitched with anticipation; he longed to draw the unisphere.
    He could do it. Da had given a journal to each of his boys as a way to encourage them to practice reading and writing. Yens had thrown his away, but Taemon had been filling his pages with sketches, bits of ideas, and questions about how things worked. His journal was tucked inside his suitcase, which was underneath his feet.
    But he shouldn’t. If anyone saw his drawing of the unisphere, he’d be hard-pressed to explain how he’d seen the engine. Not only that, but reading