JURA WAS WAITING FOR ME OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL THAT next morning.
“Did you hear it’s going to rain again?” she asked, shaking a Settee at me.
“Really? Fall is usually dry,” I replied, peeking at the newspaper. ANOTHER FROG STRANGLER! it said.
“Anyway, I’ve been thinking about how to get maximum leverage off your superpowers,” she said, pulling a spiral notebook from her satchel. It was filled with a sort of strange writing, lots of swooping loops and zigzaggy curls.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Shorthand. Old-school secretaries used to use it. It’s a way to write really fast.” She flipped a few pages. “Okay. First thing—”
Just then, I saw Travis’s face behind the glass of the door. I had a notion he was waiting for us.
I squinched my nose. “Not here,” I told Jura. A glance at the credit-union clock told me we still had a few minutes before first bell. “Follow me.”
I led her to a spot I’d been visiting since my ankle-biter days, a little patch of woods just behind the school. It was through a hole in the fence, down an animal trail and up a small hill, past patches of brilliant sunlight and mosquitoey chunks of shade. Finally, we reached Sass Rock, a great gray boulder where, Ham once told me, my ma used to come to gather her thoughts when she was in school.
We hunkered down on the cool stone.
“So, what’cha got?” I asked.
Jura took a breath. “I’ve come up with three broad categories of world saving. I’ll tell you what they are, you pick one, and then we’ll look at specific strategies. Make sense?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Category one. Historical Intervention. We pick some terrible world event and wish it happened differently.”
I was enough of an amateur historian to understand that if you pulled on one of time’s threads, a whole lot else could come unraveled. “Naw. Better not.”
“Okay, two. Major Planetary Intervention. We choose a worldwide issue and wish it fixed anywhere we find it. Like hunger or war.”
Interesting. “All right. And three?”
“Act Locally, Think Globally. We direct all the wishing at improving the quality of life in a smaller area, like Sass or Georgia, hoping that other communities see what we’re doing and do it too.”
I picked up a twig and poked at a hole in my shoe. “That only works if they have their own wish fetcher.”
“Maybe. Depends.”
“On what?” I asked.
“On what we do.”
I gave that a short think and moved on. “Go back to your Major Planetary Thingy. Do you really reckon we could get everyone fed?” I asked, the issue of empty bellies being near and dear to my heart.
She set the notebook aside and leaned back on her hands. “You’d know better than I would what the limits of your wishes are. How big can we go?”
It was a sensible question. I would have liked to make a sensible reply.
“Truth to tell, I’m not really sure how the star power works,” I admitted. “I could ask my gram.”
Jura shrugged. “You don’t have to. We can probably figure it out on our own.”
“How’s that?”
“We’re dealing with stars, right? Stars mean light speed. String theory. That kind of thing.” She chewed on her lip. “So . . . when we look at the stars, the light we’re seeing has been traveling for years, even centuries, before getting to Earth, right?”
I hadn’t heard that, but it made some sense. “All right.”
“The farther away the star, the older the starlight, right? Based on Einstein’s stuff, a light from a star that’s one hundred light years away took one hundred years to get here. So, if you think about it, what we’re really seeing is what that star looked like one hundred years ago.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And when we look through a telescope at a galaxy a million light years away, we’re seeing what that galaxy looked like a million years ago!”
“Bring it back around the barn, Jura.”
“I’m almost there,” she promised. “So. With their really strong telescopes, scientists can see so far back in time that they’re actually looking at stars that were born when the universe began. Your star juice could be as infinite as the universe itself.”
I was starting to get it. And, truth to tell, I was scared.
Jura grabbed my hand and shook it. “Genuine!”
“Ye-ah?”
“You have the power of the entire space-time continuum at your command!” she proclaimed. “You can go as big as you want!”
My mind reeled. I was suddenly dizzy and my shoes were too tight. I couldn’t breathe! Was that foxfire dancing before my eyes? “That’s a lot of biscuits.”
All right, Gen, I told myself. Get hold of those reins. If you wanna feed the world—if you wanna be something more than Dangerous Dale Sweet’s woeful daughter—big power is just what you need.
“Good thing I’ve got miracle flour,” I muttered.
“Miracle flour?” Jura gave me a puzzled look.
“It’s this bottomless bag of flour I use to make the biscuits.”
“You are full of surprises, Genuine Sweet.”
Off in the distance, the first bell rang.
“We got three minutes.” I reached for my satchel.
Jura held up her hand. “Hang on! Real quick! Let’s say we did decide to end hunger. I could wish for it and you could fetch it, right? But given all the starlight infinities we’re slogging through, not to mention all the steps involved in getting people organized, plus the time to grow the food—”
I saw where she was headed. “It might take a hundred years to actually make anything happen.”
She nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. I mean, even my mom had to wait a few days for a job ad to appear in the Settee, right? If you want to make a difference—fast—we might need to find places where there’s already some anti-hunger infrastructure.”
“Infra-huh?”