HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
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SADIE DIDN'T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. OR THE NIGHT AFTER THAT. OR ANY after that.
She had maintained her new brave ferocity, but inside, something was wavering.
It could have been any number of things. The news Noah brought was devastating. "He played us," she'd said, neck deep in her books and notes. "Raven pretended he didn't know about the war. That he didn't know what was to come. But he'd planned every second of it."
We all felt a bit more scared, a bit more enraged, and admittedly a bit more hopeless now. But we were focused.
While my father kept training the Red Bloods, the Survivors among us recreated the power charts Noah told us the rogues had made, trying to determine everyone's power and possible weakness. But there was a flaw: Powers, passed down through the generations, began to mutate. A Survivor's power sourced from his parentage, and if they were able to determine a Survivor's parents, they thought they'd have a better shot at knowing where the physical weakness that would serve as a Survivor's Achilles heel would be on his body. Sadie had always asked questions of parentage and power, but now she had reason to go after this information. So Ben, Noah, and Sadie began tracing any lines they could between one Survivor's power and another, between one's possible weakness and another's. They covered the guest room walls in butcher paper and wrote on them.
One afternoon, I wandered in, and they were all arguing.
"We can't forget what we already know as facts," Sadie said. She stood in front of a wall where they had written the names of the fourteen elders at the top, then a line of all who they theorized to be second-generation Survivors, then third, fourth, and fifth, forming a giant pyramid. They were, of course, only guesses. "All Survivors in our family have powers that are traceable back to the fourteen elders."
"And you want to what? Figure out where everyone's power comes from to have a guess at what their weaknesses might be?" Noah asked.
"So what you really need to know," Sarah said, "is each Survivor's parentage."
Sadie saw the conflict of interest here, and sidestepped it. "We need to know the power's point of origin — its ancestry, if you will. That will tell us where the power is housed in the body, I'd assume, from the success Noah had in determining Peter's weakness residing in his windpipe since that's where his power lived." Her answer was diplomatic and didn't answer Sarah's question. But we all knew that determining parents was exactly what she was after.
Ben scoffed. "It's no use! That assumes we know which power a second or third-generation Survivor's powers evolved from, but we can't know that. There are too many variations of powers as they get passed down. Look at all the Red Bloods. They descended from only two powers — Kutoyis's and Sky's — but there are a dozen versions of inherited powers in the second generation alone. There will be no way to distinguish who a power came from, not really."
