Free The Sister by Max China

a small circle, almost to a halt, rotating at right angles to its former position, and then as if driven by something inside, it did it all over again, a miniature perpetual motion machine.
    He picked it up and stroked an eyebrow, somewhat mystified. "That's a meteorite thingy," he said holding it close to his eyeball, trying to fathom it. "It melted when it came in through the atmosphere and turned into thousands of tiny balls when they fell into the sea." He was deadly serious.
    "Aww, c'mon Mick, you can't really know that!" she scolded, and crossed her arms in front of her chest.
    His face was a picture of amused indignation as he protested, "Yes I do, actually, or how else d'you think it turned into that shape!"
    She smiled at him. He's such a joker.
    He plopped it into her outstretched palm. The moment it touched, a fragment of Mick's life had flashed in her mind's eye. Afraid, she grabbed at his hand; the jolt from it almost felled her. The impressions rushing into her were the same as the stone but amplified by many, many times. She looked at her friend. Oh, please God it cannot be . . .
    Bemused by her expression, he said, "What?"
    Vera spoke very slowly, quietly. "I'm not sure … promise me, Mick, that you'll be careful . . ."
    She knew what she knew; something akin to a code of conduct meant she could do nothing about it. When he'd handled it, she drew off what the stone absorbed from him, and after that, it was clean again. She took from the stone, and it took from her. Her skin, already pale, became more sensitive still, so that even dull daylight could burn her.
    "She has no melanin in her at all." She recalled what Ryan had told her aunt, and it meant that she needed to cover herself from head to toe, whenever she ventured outdoors. And because of it, she preferred to spend her days inside, introspecting alone at the window, making sense of her precious black stone, watching other kids play, listening to the peals of their laughter. She put the memories of childhood behind her.
     
     
    Now, it was like that again. All day spent indoors, but at night, quiet and inconspicuous, she began pastoral work, visiting the homeless, the tramps and wino's who congregated in the quiet, dark alleyways away from the main roads leading from the seafront; outside the boarded up pubs and guesthouses. Her association with the stone charged her with an energy she hadn't possessed before she found it, and by now, she had an understanding of its powers.
    Without the sphere, she could already see what was to come. What it did, was allow her to reverse engineer from the future to the past, something akin to analysing the moves that resulted in checkmate once the chess was over. She'd seen the rope of life with its many fibres and strands, its loops and its coils, the coming together, and the pulling apart. She understood at last, exactly what fate held for her, just as she had the night she found it, when the stone had eclipsed the moon.
    She watched from the shadows as a group of rough sleepers gathered around a fire burning in a perforated oil drum. In hushed tones, one was talking; he had a blanket draped over his head and shoulders. The others, mostly, listened in awe.
    "Midnight it was, I couldn't sleep because I hadn't had a drop for hours. I was shivering, sick and cold to the bone; I wanted to die. Not knowing what else to do, I closed my eyes and prayed. When I opened them, she stood above me, in that cape o' hers, all alight as if she'd a fire burning behind her. She leaned over me, her hand out straight - like that - and I swear it glowed. I was scared; I never seen anything like it, and she was smiling, and I felt warm. The next thing I knew it was morning. I've not had a drop since."
    A murmur rose amidst the men. Some believed him. A few wanted to believe. The others were too far gone to care.
    "Well, how come you're still on the streets then?"
    "God did not build Rome in a day. All in good time, Czech, all in good