They Who from the Heavens Came (The Wisdom, #1)

When Itzy got off the underground, her phone beeped with overdue messages. She read through them as she reluctantly walked home, the opposite direction from Aidan. One was from Seth, asking if she wanted to meet him outside – seeing as he had somehow accidentally wound up in front of her house.

Itzy rolled her eyes at the message before replying that she was down the road and would meet him in a minute.

When she had first met Seth, she hadn’t known what to make of him. He’d struck her as handsome and friendly, but perhaps a little too self-assured. After the crop circle incident, though, she had discovered he also had a soft heart and could be a very good friend.

The trouble was she knew he felt something for her that she no longer thought she could reciprocate. It hung around them like hummingbirds, softly buzzing in their ears and waiting for them to open themselves up for consumption.

He wasn’t outside the house, like she’d expected. Instead, she heard voices coming from an open window. She let herself in and followed the sound to the kitchen, where she found him sitting across from her mother, at the breakfast table. They had mugs of tea: one had a peeling image of Mickey Mouse; the other was from Madam Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.

‘Hiya, Itz!’ Seth greeted her merrily. Across from him, Myra smiled.

‘Hi,’ Itzy said, astonished at the sight. It seemed the magic of her story hadn’t worn off, after all. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had been remotely sociable with one of her friends. It was nice…but it would take getting used to.

‘How’d your maybe-it-was-a-date go?’ Myra asked, oblivious to the way Seth winced at the question.

‘Um…it was…nice,’ Itzy made out. She didn’t want to get into it with Seth there. She turned to him. ‘Seth – you wanted to talk to me or something?’

His former smile returned. ‘That’s right. Thought I’d take a walk and wondered if you’d join me.’

‘Sure,’ she said, belatedly realising her reformed mother might actually care if she went right back out. After all, it was past ten at night.

As if reading Itzy’s mind, Myra waved her hand and said, ‘Go on. Just be home by midnight.’

Itzy nodded, overwhelmed by the moment. ‘Alright. I’ll just get changed. Be back down soon.’

She hurried out of the Twilight Zone kitchen and up to her room. A few minutes later, she returned, but the kitchen was empty.

She headed to the front door and slipped into a pair of black pumps. She’d let down her hair and wore sensible jeans, but her blouse (stolen from her mother’s wardrobe) was oversized and floaty, opaque black covered in translucent black gauze printed with shimmering silver stars.

She pulled her black mac off a hook by the front door and stepped out to find Seth on her patio. His body was twisted at the waist and his head was turned up in the direction of the night sky. His painter’s hands were stuffed in the pockets of the light blue jacket he wore over jeans and gleaming white trainers. In the moonlight, his blond hair matched his shoes.

‘What are you looking at?’ Itzy asked. She closed the door behind her and tied the belt of her mac around her waist.

‘Hm?’ he said, his eyes glued to the sky. ‘Oh, I was just thinking: somewhere out there, maybe we have family.’

Itzy put her hands in her pockets. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

Seth laughed and finally looked at her. His eyes ran up and down the length of her. ‘It sort of does your head in, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

Seth used his chin to motion to the house. ‘Your mum’s nothing like I imagined. You had me thinking she was some neglectful alcoholic.’

‘She was. I sort of…fixed her.’

Seth’s eyes grew wide and he let out a low whistle. ‘Wow,’ he said. Then, again, ‘Wow.’

‘Yeah.’ She removed one of her hands from its pocket and pushed her hair behind her ear. ‘So, um…what about your family? Do you get on with them?’

Seth frowned. He put out his arm for her to take and they started walking. ‘My mum, yes. Not so much my father. He’s a bit...distant. I told you my parents are both Descendants – but we’re the first generation to gain these powers. My parents are a little frightened of it.’

‘I can’t imagine growing up knowing everything,’ Itzy said.

‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to learn everything you were told was a lie,’ Seth said softly.

She could hear the sympathy in his voice, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. It reminded her there was something about her to feel sorry for.

‘Do you think you’ll end up marrying another Descendant?’ she asked.

Seth glanced at her sideways. ‘I don’t know. That seems a little…exclusive, don’t you think?’

‘Yes. But if you married a human, would you tell her the truth? Or would you keep it secret, like my father did?’

And like I’m doing with my mum, she added in her head.

Seth didn’t need to think about this. ‘I’d tell her.’

‘But what if she thinks you’re mad?’ Itzy pressed.

He shrugged. ‘Then she’s not the one.’

‘The one?’

‘You know. The one.’ He gave her a meaningful look, before turning away abruptly and looking ahead.

‘So you’d just tell her,’ Itzy pushed, hoping to lighten the mood a little. ‘You’d say, Listen, love, before we get too serious, there’s something you need to know about me. I’m an alien.’

‘Part alien,’ Seth corrected her with a laugh, ‘and yes. It’s not love if you can’t be honest about who you are. Besides,’ he added with a wicked grin, ‘who wouldn’t want a man who can cook and clean without having to lift a finger?’

‘That’s a poor choice of words,’ she told him. ‘You can’t do it without lifting your fingers.’

He rolled his eyes at her. ‘You are such a pedant. Anyway, we’re here.’

They had reached a long empty football field a few blocks from her house. In the distance, they could see a playground, which backed onto a primary school.

‘This is your surprise?’ Itzy said dubiously.

‘Hey, shh. Don’t be deceived by appearances.’

Seth pulled her into the middle of the field and she watched his long fingers dance in the air, his face beautiful with concentration. The atmosphere started to bend before her eyes. It wobbled and seemed to collapse on itself. Black streaked the air and the environment suddenly changed. It was surreal in its ordinariness. Itzy thought it should have had a sound effect. A bassy blip! perhaps.

The field was gone. The night was gone. All around them lay the ocean; and above, they were surrounded by azure sky, bringing to mind a Lord Alfred Tennyson poem Itzy had studied in GCSE English. The Eagle, it was called.

Not a cloud could be spotted. Their feet sank into the sand of the desert island Seth had somehow managed to draw for them.

‘Can’t everyone see this?’ Itzy whispered in shock.

Seth shook his head. ‘They would’ve seen us disappear into thin air. That’s why I brought us somewhere empty – I don’t want us ending up in the papers. But they can’t see where we’ve gone. I’ve been practising all day. This isn’t really in the field. It’s more like…well, I think they exist in the same place.’

‘You think,’ she repeated.

She turned around in circles, taking it all in. Behind them was an array of palm trees. Their long threaded green leaves rippled in the ocean breeze. Beyond that, there was nothing.

‘I’m still not sure how it works,’ Seth confessed, ‘but I’ve spent a lot of time drawing boxes around me and testing whether Oz can see me. He can’t. He can’t hear me, either. It’s odd. I can actually hide myself that way.’

‘So you’ve basically bent space around us,’ Itzy said.

‘If you want to make this into Star Trek, then…yeah, I think so.’

‘That’s incredible,’ she told him. ‘I mean, really incredible. I know you did it before, but that was sort of a whim, wasn’t it? You didn’t know it would work.’

He nodded in confirmation.

She kicked off her pumps and delved her bare feet into the sand, savouring the warm, easy way it slid between her toes. She wriggled them against the grains. She untied and unbuttoned her mac, revealing her bare arms and the silver stars that dashed down her front, and sat down, leaning her hands back in the beach.

‘It feels so real, too,’ she said. She looked at Seth with awe. ‘You’re pure magic, you know that?’

He shrugged, looking very pleased with himself, and said, ‘I try.’ He tore off his jacket, exposing his long toned arms extending from a turquoise short-sleeved t-shirt. He sat in the sand and pulled off his own shoes and socks, burying his feet under the sand that was so like Itzy’s skin in colour.

‘So,’ said Itzy, ‘if we walk around here, are we actually walking around the field in Ealing? Like, could we walk into traffic and get hit by a car?’ She’d once read a Daphne Du Maurier book like that. Someone had died on a train track, when he thought he was running through a field hundreds of years in the past.

‘I don’t think so,’ Seth said. ‘I think we’re in a sort of spacey bubble.’ He moved his hands in the air as he said spacey, like wavy flashback lines on a ’90s sitcom.

Itzy smiled. ‘I still feel uncertain about my abilities, and I’ve had them longer than you. But you make them look as natural as breathing. You do things like this –’ she lifted one of her hands and gestured all around them, at the island and the ocean ‘– as if you’ve been doing it all your life. How’d you do it?’

Seth drummed his feet under the sand, making the grains bounce out and dust his eyes. He shook his face free of it and said, ‘It was hard work. Much harder than it’s been for you, I promise.’ He met her dark eyes and smiled at his own memories.

Itzy changed tracks. ‘You know when you met Oz? Did you know what he was, right away?’

Seth shook his head. ‘We found out by accident. We were down the park kicking round a football, and –’ He broke off, laughing at something only he could see, in his mind. ‘Sorry, it’s just that – if you ever see Oz play football, he is aggressive. He kicked that ball like he meant to smash a window with it. And it came flying at me, right at my face, yeah? And you know when you can see what’s about to happen but you can’t stop it?’

Itzy nodded.

‘Well, that’s what it was like. I didn’t have time to think what I was doing. I just threw my hands in front of my eyes to protect myself, because the ball was coming so fast…and a wall appeared.’

Itzy smiled at this image. ‘You blocked him.’

‘Right! I had my eyes shut, though, so I didn’t see what I’d done. Then I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I remember I sort of opened one eye first. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been smashed in the face with the ball. Then I saw the wall and I was stunned. It was only maybe six feet tall and three feet wide, but it was right in front of me and clearly built just to protect me. And there was Oz, standing next to me, staring at what I’d made.’

‘What’d he say?’ Itzy asked.

Seth grinned. ‘Same thing you said: I can do that too.’

‘Were you relieved?’ she asked.

He scratched the side of his face before leaning his hand back in the sand behind him. ‘No. I was too gobsmacked for that. I didn’t know what was real anymore.’

Itzy could definitely relate to that. ‘When did you first find out what Oz could do?’

Seth broke out laughing again. ‘That was fantastic,’ he said. His eyes sparkled in the light. ‘See, we used to row a lot, back then. I especially wasn’t as in control of myself. We were in my back garden and I was making my usual smart remarks about something. I used to be really sarcastic – like defensively so. It was my way of dealing with what I was feeling.’ He shrugged reflectively and said, ‘Maybe I still do that.’

‘You do,’ Itzy told him with a small smile.

‘Alright, I’ll give you that. Anyway. I was worse, then, yeah? And Oz had less patience for it, too. So we got into one of our rows, and for some reason it just escalated. Before I knew what I was doing, I slapped a steel plate over his mouth to shut him up.’

Itzy gaped at him. ‘You what?’

Seth shook his head. ‘I know, I know. But come on. I’m sure sometimes you’ve wanted to do it to him, too.’

Itzy laughed. She was coming to love her brother dearly, but she knew what Seth meant. Sometimes Oz could be a little…serious.

‘And what did he do to you?’ she asked.

Seth winked at her. ‘Ah. Well, I felt everything start shaking underneath me, and I thought, hang on, how is there an earthquake in Kent? Then there was this horrible noise, and – well, you’ve seen it.’ He waved his hand in her direction

‘What did he raise?’

Seth doubled over his own knees with laughter now. When he lifted his head, Itzy could see his eyes were tearing up.

‘That’s the best part,’ he said. ‘It was – it was –’

She leaned forward in the sand. ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘What was it?’

Through his laughter, she thought she could make out the word gerbil. Her eyes widened.

‘He raised someone’s pet gerbil?’ she said. Seth nodded through his hysterics and Itzy commented, ‘That’s a little creepy, if you think about it.’

Seth gathered himself together and wiped the tears from his eyes, streaking his face with grains of sand. ‘I guess you had to be there,’ he said. ‘This huge earthquake, like something huge was about to happen – and then that. I thought he was bonkers.’

Itzy laughed. ‘But you knew it was him, yeah?’

Seth nodded quickly. ‘Of course. That’s also how I learned I could “erase” the things I made, because I was so curious about that stupid gerbil that I removed the metal plate so Oz could explain himself. That was when he told me, you know, blah blah, I raise the dead, I never know what’s going to come up, it depends on what’s buried there, blah blah blah.’

‘I love how casually you say that,’ Itzy marvelled. ‘So when did he start training you?’

‘Oh, right away,’ Seth said. ‘I mean, after that…well, it was like you and Parson Brown. I couldn’t just go round taking out my aggression on people without knowing what I was doing.’

‘But you said it took you a long time to train,’ she remembered. ‘Longer than me. What did Oz do with you?’

Seth lifted one of his feet out of the sand and watched as the grains fell from his toes, before diving his foot back in again. ‘Oz took me out to practise nearly every day. It took months of exhausting effort. For a long time, we just worked on trying to control the emotions. A lot of that was me learning to recognise my emotional triggers, so I could step in and take over before the moods overcame me.

‘It wasn’t easy. It demands a self-awareness I didn’t have, back then. I wasn’t used to looking inside. Maybe that’s why you got it so quickly,’ he told her softly. ‘Because you’ve spent more time inside your own head. You’re a writer. Character analysis is more natural to you, isn’t it?’

Itzy hadn’t considered this before, but she thought maybe he had a point. It wasn’t one that made her particularly happy, though, because the reason she’d spent so much time in her head was the outside world had always been so frightening.

‘Oz taught me meditation techniques,’ Seth continued. ‘He taught me to feel my emotions more fully. Instead of rebelling against them and feeling caught in the turmoil, I had to learn to embrace them, integrate all the parts of myself into one entity. He gave me a lot of books to read, of course.’ He shot Itzy a look that read, But that’s Oz. ‘It was a very painful process, because I had to learn to tap into other emotions. Like I told you, it can’t all be about rage, you know?’

Yes, Itzy knew.

‘So I suppose, in answer to your original question,’ he said, ‘the reason I can make my magic look so natural now…is that the magic comes from me.’ He pressed one of his hands against his chest. The fingers curled into a light fist. ‘And I mean, really me. I put all the pieces of myself together and this is who I am. My power is just part of it.’ He and frowned at his own words and asked, ‘Does that make any sense?’

Itzy considered what he’d just shared. ‘I think so. I guess I still see my powers as something separate. I find it hard to believe they’re mine, so they’re not really part of me yet. At least, I don’t feel like they are. They’re more….’ She struggled to find the right way to put it, and Seth jumped in for her.

‘It’s something you can do, rather than something you are,’ he said.

‘Exactly!’ she cried, excited someone had finally been able to articulate what she’d been feeling. ‘That’s exactly it. So do you think, with time, that will change?’

Seth smiled. ‘I know it will. It’s frightening to think how much you could do, if you really put your mind to it. You just need to start believing that.’

Itzy grew shy and asked, ‘Is that what you were trying to do for me, then? Were you trying to give me that belief, when you…?’

She trailed off there, allowing them both to remember that wondrous moment when Seth had touched his forehead to hers and flooded her with peace, that day in her room.

‘That’s another sort of imaging,’ Seth told her. His voice betrayed his emotions at the recollection of the kiss they had shared. ‘You know how the first time I did one of my magic paintings, I drew my teacher’s face and somehow made something happen to make him feel what his portrait felt?’

Itzy nodded.

‘Well, with you, I was painting you in my head. Only in my painting, you were peaceful and happy and you knew what you could do.’

Seth held her eyes with his, allowing the sweetness of his intentions to become clear to her.

A beautiful silence fell over them. Then, the sounds of their dreamlike environment slowly made themselves heard. The tide gently washed over the shore in mesmeric rhythm. The leaves of the palms fluttered against the breeze. In the distance, there were seagulls, a sound Itzy had always liked because of its association with the ocean. Itzy had always loved the ocean. There was something so peaceful about watching the waves undulate under the horizon.

Itzy began burying her own legs in the sand. Across from her, Seth produced a pink plastic sand castle mould and pulled himself to his feet. He walked over to the incoming tide and dug into the wet sand with his hands, flinging it into the mould and packing it down tightly until every bend in the plastic was filled. Then he returned to where Itzy sat and turned over the mould, lifting it to reveal his little castle. It crumbled almost instantly.

‘These things never do work,’ he spoke with defeat.

He erased the mould from existence with a wipe of his hands and pushed his fingers through the subsiding castle, scooping up heaps of sand and letting them drop back onto the shore.

‘Can I ask you something else?’ Itzy said as she watched him.

‘Sure.’ He abandoned the sand and sat down near her. He drew a square in the air and a bar of chocolate fell in the sand, leaving Itzy to conclude that he truly was miraculous. ‘Want some?’ he offered.

She nodded as he unwrapped the foil on the chocolate and broke the bar in two, handing her half. He wiped his hands through the air and made the wrapper disappear. Black sparked in its place. Itzy wondered if Seth could see those lines, too.

Itzy took the chocolate and held it to her mouth. ‘Ta,’ she said. ‘So you know when we were in the pyramid?’

‘Uh-huh.’ He took a large bite of his half of the chocolate bar. His expression made Itzy curious to know just what sort of chocolate he had procured, anyway. ‘What about it?’ he asked, once he’d swallowed it down.

‘Well, you said you were afraid of being alone,’ she began.

Then she bit into the chocolate, and a burst of flavour exploded on her tongue. She hadn’t thought chocolate could get any better than it already was – and she liked to think of herself as a connoisseur – but this was something else. This was bordering on –

‘Heavenly,’ she blurted.

He grinned at her and chewed his own chocolate in response. Then he said, ‘You want to know why I said that. In the pyramid, I mean.’

‘Yeah.’ Reluctantly, she swallowed down the last bit of chocolate. All she wanted was more. She was on a desert island and she didn’t think of water, just chocolate. Was that rational?

‘I guess it’s always bothered me the way our ancestors just left us here,’ Seth told her. ‘You have to understand: I grew up with that stuff the way some kids grow up with religion. The stories were always hanging over me. And I always thought it was like they just decided we weren’t good enough, and left.’ He drew up his knees to his chest, his toes buried in the sand, and wrapped his arms around his calves. ‘Don’t you find that sad?’ he asked.

Itzy struggled to grasp as real the concept of this being someone’s history. In a way, it was Seth’s faith, whereas Itzy had been raised agnostic – albeit, in a There is God, but I haven’t made up my mind about the point of life, yet way. It was hard for her to attach an emotion to the Ancients.

‘Do you mean,’ she said, ‘you feel alone in the universe? Literally?’

Seth considered this. ‘Something like that.’

‘And what about religion? Since you mentioned it.’

‘Are you asking me what I believe?’

Itzy nodded.

He exhaled loudly. ‘Oh boy. I don’t know.’

‘No one knows,’ she pointed out. ‘That’s why they call it faith.’

‘Fair enough.’ He tapped his feet in a steady rhythm against the shore, making grains of sand fly. ‘Well. In that case. Aliens, God, whatever – I’ve always felt a bit disconnected from it all.’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose that’s part of my fear, too. Because being that unsure of what made you who you are…it’s really isolating, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘When you put it like that, it really is.’

This was a new Seth, the Seth lurking in the shadows of the optimistic Seth Itzy was used to. But it was reassuring to know she wasn’t the only one worrying about such things, and that she had someone to talk to about it.

Itzy flicked a strand of hair out of her face and asked, ‘Do you think other people – humans, I mean – do you think they worry about these sorts of things as much as we do?’

Seth grew ponderous for a moment before shaking his head. ‘I don’t think it affects them as much as it does us,’ he decided. ‘They don’t feel that same connection to the stars that we do. It’s in our blood to search beyond this world, beyond what we’re told is reality. We couldn’t help it if we tried.’

Itzy thought he was probably right about this. She’d always felt like maybe when she looked at things she saw something different from what other people saw.

* * *

Later, they abandoned the serious talk for a game of volley ball. There was a freeness to Seth that Itzy liked. It made her realise just how intense she could be.

But then, sometimes Seth was too free and easy.

‘So,’ Itzy said after she’d beaten him, ‘why the urgency to bring me out here, tonight?’

Seth’s chest heaved in and out as he tried to catch his breath after running after her power-serves. ‘I just had a bad feeling tonight and wanted to get you out of the house. Maybe Oz’s paranoia is catching,’ he added in a low voice, as if it were at all possible that someone might be listening to them there, ‘but I could’ve sworn I heard someone outside your door when I was waiting for you.’

An involuntary chill flew down Itzy’s back, despite the heat. ‘Really?’

Seth nodded. ‘But no worries, right?’ He lifted his hand carelessly. ‘Because I got you out. No one can find you here.’

‘Yeah. No worries,’ she echoed nervously. ‘I have to leave eventually, though. I can’t just live in a bubble.’

‘Why not?’ Seth cast his hands in a semicircle, to indicate the landscape surrounding them, as if that alone were reason not to go anywhere.

‘Seth, honestly. You and Oz live in the clouds. You have no concept of normal life.’

Seth pouted. ‘I do.’

Itzy crossed her arms in front of her and shot him a look of challenge. ‘You don’t have a job – you don’t have lessons – you don’t –’

‘I don’t need that stuff,’ Seth interrupted. ‘You don’t need money when you can make everything appear out of thin air.’

‘I know.’ She uncrossed her arms. ‘I’m not criticising you. I’m just saying: you don’t live in the real world. You’ve no idea what it’s like to be normal.’

‘Are you angry?’ Seth asked in surprise.

‘No,’ she said, though her voice did sound a little edgy. She rotated her shoulders in an effort to relax. ‘It’s just…I feel like I’ve jumped into this dream world where everything is maybe a little too perfect.’

Seth smirked. ‘You’re complaining because life’s too good?’

‘No,’ Itzy said obstinately. Then, ‘Maybe.’ She kicked at the sand and glanced at him under her eyelashes. Then she laughed and said, ‘I guess I’m not used to things being this easy. I don’t trust it. I keep waiting to wake up, or for someone to come along and tell me there’s been a mistake and this isn’t really my life, or just…something.’

‘You’re right.’ Seth came toward her so they were only two feet apart. He used one of his hands as a visor over his eyes and squinted at her in the sunlight. ‘I’ve been feeling that way too. Convenient is the word that comes to mind. I often don’t feel in control of my life. It’s like we’ve been sent on some predetermined path and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Maybe it wasn’t really my idea to take you out here,’ he noted in a spooky voice. He waggled his hands at her like a cartoon ghost.

‘Well,’ she said, her voice dry, ‘at least then you don’t need to worry about being abandoned by our creator.’

For a moment, neither of them said anything. Then Itzy said, ‘Come on, Seth.’ She took his arm and smiled sadly at him. ‘It’s time to return to reality.’