“Throw it at me,” Jeremy calls to Sarra across the lawn. “As hard as you can.”
Sarra cocks an eyebrow and tosses the polished red ball up in the air. They had originally asked Chatravati if there were any baseball supplies anywhere in the mansion, but he had instead directed them a wedge-shaped bat and a seamed red ball and told them to try playing cricket.
Neither Sarra or Jeremy have any idea what “cricket” is, but Chatravati seemed unusually keen on the idea.
Now, Jeremy stands some distance away from Sarra on Westcrest’s front lawn and hefts the cricket bat at shoulder level as though he’s waiting for a baseball pitch. “As hard as you can,” he repeats and Sarra throws the ball.
Chock is the noise the ball makes as it strikes the bat and goes soaring away across the grass. “Not hard enough,” Jeremy calls to her as Sarra goes to retrieve it. “And I want you to throw it at me. Not the bat.”
Sarra tries again and again, but each time Jeremy twists the cricket bat into the perfect position and the ball richochets away. “Harder!” Jeremy says exasperatedly when Sarra returns to her original position and Sarra—who is tired of playing fetch—is starting to get frustrated.
“Fine,” she calls back at him and now she can feel a tingling in her palms. “Then hit this,”
The ball glows for a moment in her hand and she hurls it like a fireball towards Jeremy. Rather than ducking for cover like she had expected him to do, Jeremy swats (rather lazily) at the energised cricket ball.
It makes no difference. The ball spins through the air above Sarra’s head and lands, smouldering, in one of Chatravati’s flowerbeds. There is a black scorch mark on the cricket bat, but Jeremy is unharmed.
This time he follows Sarra to the location of the ball. He can’t stop grinning.
“So… you’re good at sports,” says Sarra as she squats to pick up the cricket ball.
“It’s got nothing to do with sports,” Jeremy tells her. “Remember that plant that Chatravati brought back from Beringsford?”
“The one that won’t bite you?”
Jeremy nods. “Even out at the farm, one of them looked right at me. But it didn’t attack.”
“Neither did the troll,” says Sarra, thinking back to the first day Jeremy came to the island. The grey-skinned monster had stopped short of Jeremy and just… sort of “stood there” for long enough for Chatravati to put bullets in each of its eyes.
“And then Chatravati tried to shoot at me,” Jeremy reminds her.
“And the gun misfired,” says Sarra. “So what are you getting at?”
Jeremy looks up and down the garden, suddenly nervous. He feels like saying it out loud might stop it from being true. “I think I’ve finally figured out my super-power,” he says.
“Spit it out,” says Sarra.
“I think… I’m invincible.”