Read Online Solace & Grief by Foz Meadows - Free Book Online

asked talk later ? She nodded. Manx's mouth twitched. Their exchange having gone unnoticed, he returned to Evan. ‘You'll need the artistic support, if nothing else.’
    ‘Excellent!’ Evan cackled, in apparent ignorance of both glance and joke. ‘And now – to our noble purpose!’
    ‘Yeah,’ Manx echoed, grinning at the others. ‘Noble.’
    Tingling faintly, Solace watched as the soon-to-be miscreants jostled one another up the stairs. Questions buzzed under her skin with the urgency of regrown cells, so that the force of her mingled awe and curiosity seemed to extend outwards from her body like a new sense, made hypersensitive by anticipation.
    ‘So,’ Electra murmured, after a moment. ‘Those were some pretty original surveys. Which, coincidentally, Evan seems to have left behind – remind me again why we let him be in charge?’
    Jess shrugged languidly, pouting as she noticed that someone, probably Manx, had finished the rest of her milk. ‘Not a clue. Lapse in judgement, anyone?’
    ‘Did we just –’ Solace interjected, then stopped. Jess and Electra were watching her, not quite grinning, not quite calm. Frazzled, she rubbed her eyes and blinked. ‘I mean, did we all just admit… are we, um… do we all have… super powers?’
    Jess held the now-empty glass upside down over her mouth and tapped on the bottom, inducing a stray drop of milk to drip onto her tongue. She licked it away, quickly, then said, ‘Yes.’
    ‘Right,’ echoed Solace. ‘Right. Just so long as we're clear.’
    ‘We're clear,’ said Electra, glancing longingly over her shoulder towards the kitchen. ‘Kitchen’ was a loose term: there was a big wonky table and a dilapidated, ancient fridge clustered next to a stand-alone metal sink that looked as if it had once been destined for life in an industrial laundry. ‘On an unrelated note, do we have any chips?’
    ‘I think Glide took them,’ said Jess, whose eyes had closed.
    ‘Damn. I could really do with some chips.’
    Solace burst out laughing.
    Jess opened one eye and watched her from under thick lashes. ‘And our lack of chips is funny because…?’
    ‘Because I threw a table at Kelly.’
    ‘Ah. This must be what linguists call a non sequitur . Table? Kelly? Context?’
    ‘Sorry.’ Solace clenched her hands to stop the fingers trembling. ‘It was the first freakish thing I'd ever done. After that, I just kept getting stronger. Kelly was the catalyst. But just then, I started thinking of Spiderman, and it was like: my radioactive spider-bite was a kitchen table. How weird is that?’
    There was a pause, during which her friends gave this statement due consideration. Then Electra snorted.
    ‘It's funny,’ said Jess, ‘how easy it can be to accept what you are, no matter how crazy it is. I've got this theory that deep down, most of us want to believe in magic, even if we'd never say so out loud. All it takes is the right perspective, the right moment, and suddenly something that seemed impossible five minutes ago makes perfect, logical sense.’
    ‘Is that how it was for you?’ asked Solace.
    Jess's smile faded a little. ‘In a way.’ She dropped her gaze. ‘The problem is other people.’
    From there, the conversation changed course, slipping back towards mundane topics: their most recent excursion to the Gadfly, favourite colours and why, precisely, Evan was so fond of drawing on Glide.
    Solace was about to ask Jess if her brother's weirdness had manifested in childhood or if it was the product of later psychological issues when a sonorous booming started to issue from the kitchen. As neither Jess nor Electra was startled by this – and as, in fact, Electra promptly stood up and headed towards it – Solace concluded that the noise was both familiar and benign, if startling to the uninitiated. Puzzled, she turned to Jess. ‘What is that?’
    ‘Nobody told you? Evan found a baby dinosaur wandering the streets. We keep it chained under the sink as a