“No, Alcatraz. Breaking things – now that’s a real Talent. One of the great old talents, talked about in the legends. I know I shouldn’t really complain about my power – I should be happy to have anything. But you… it would be a true shame to speak ill of a Talent like that. And it couldn’t have been given to a better Smedry.
A better Smedry…
Sing smiled at me encouragingly, and glanced away. I’m getting too attached to him, I thought. To all of them – Grandpa Smedry, Sing, even Bastille.
“Come on,” Sing said. “Don’t look so glum.”
“You don’t really know me, Sing,” I found myself saying. “I’m not a good person.”
“Nonsense!” Sing said.
I leaned against the bars of the cell, glancing out – not that there was much to look at. A simple stone wall stood across from the cell. “You don’t know the things I’ve done, Sing. The… breaking. The pain I’ve brought to good people – people who just wanted to give me a home.”
Sing shrugged. “Actually, Alcatraz, Grandpa Smedry spoke of you sometimes. He talked about the… mishaps that happened around you. He said he thought it might be related to your Talent, and turns out it was. Not your fault at all!”
Why did you burn down your foster parents’ kitchen? Grandpa Smedry had asked. It seems like a perversion of your Talent….
“No,” I said. “It was my fault, Sing. I didn’t break simple, ordinary things. I broke the things that were the most valuable to people who cared for me. I made them hate me. On purpose.”
“No,” Sing said. “No, that doesn’t sound like something a Smedry could do.”
“Every family has its black sheep, Sing,” I said. “I’m a… broken Smedry. Maybe that’s why the Dark Oculator didn’t kill me. Maybe he knows that I’m not noble like the rest of you. Maybe he knows that he might be able to pull me to his side. Perhaps I’d be better there.”
Sing fell silent. I waited for him to look horrified or betrayed.
After a few moments, Sing raised a hand and put it on my shoulder. “You’re still my cousin. Even if you’ve done bad things, that doesn’t make you a Dark Oculator. Anything you’ve done, you can fix. You can change.”
It’s not that easy, I thought. Will Sing be that forgiving when I accidentally break something precious to him? His books perhaps? What will Sing Smedry do when he finds all that he loves broken and mangled, discarded at the feet of the disaster known as Alcatraz Smedry?
Sing smiled, removing his hand from my shoulder, apparently thinking that the problem was resolved. But it wasn’t, not for me. I sat down on the stones, arms around my knees. What’s wrong with me lately? Sing seems determined to like me. Why am I so concerned with making certain he knows what I’ve done?
I turned away from Sing and, for some reason, found myself thinking about days long past.
I have trouble remembering the first things I broke. They were valuable, though – I remember that. Expensive crystal things, collected by my first foster mother. It seemed that I could barely walk by her room without one of them shattering.
That wasn’t all either. Any room they locked me in I could escape without even really trying. Anything they bought or brought into the home, the curious young Alcatraz would study and inspect.
And break.
So, they got rid of me. They hadn’t been cruel people – I’d just been too much for them. I saw them once, on the street a few months later, walking with a little girl. My replacement. A girl who didn’t break everything she touched, a girl who fit better into what they had imagined for their lives.
I shivered, sitting with my back to the glass bars of my prison cell. Sometimes I tried – I tried so hard – not to break anything. But it was like the Talent welled up inside of me when I did that. And then, when it burst free, it was even more powerful.
A tear rolled down my cheek. After moving from family to family enough times, I’d realized that they would all leave me eventually. After that, I hadn’t worried as much about what I broke. In fact… I’d begun to break things more often – important things. The valuable cars of a father who collected vehicles. The trophies won by a father who played sports in college. The kitchen of a mother who was a renowned chef.
I’d told myself that these things were simply accidents. But now I saw a pattern in my life.
I broke things early, quickly. The most valuable, important things. That way, they’d know. They’d know what I was.
And they’d send me away. Before I could come to care for them. And get hurt again.
It felt safer to act that way. But what had it done to me? In breaking so many objects, had I broken myself? I shivered again. Sitting in that cold Librarian dungeon – faced by my first (but certainly not last) failure as a leader – I finally admitted something to myself.
I don’t just break, I thought. I destroy.
Chapter 12
At this point, perhaps you feel sorry for me. Or perhaps you feel that my suffering was deserved, considering what I’d done to all those families who tried to take me in.