“Hey.” There are no boys here. Not teenagers, anyway. Only men. With weapons. (It hurts, it hurts, my body hurts.)
“James. Keane. James Keane.” He sticks out his hand for me to shake it.
I keep my murderer hands to myself. “Keane as in the Keane Foundation?”
“The very same!”
“I should bash your brains in right now,” I say, but I am too tired to do it.
“You’re the third person to say that to me today!” He winks, then takes my arm and links it through his own. “Why don’t you take me on the grand tour of the secret school.”
“Why don’t you take a walking tour through rush-hour traffic?”
He laughs. “I like you. What did you say your name is?”
“Sofia.”
“Sofia. Soooofia. Sofia, I have done something very bad.”
It is wrong to go with him as he pulls me down the hall toward the empty classrooms. I go anyway. “I’ll bet I’ve done something worse.” Tap tap goes my finger.
“I would love to hear it if you have. But I get to go first. I have”—he looks both ways down the hall in exaggerated caution, then leans in and whispers right in my ear (wrong, wrong, but it doesn’t stop the shivers from going up and down my spine; he is gorgeous, I have never been this close to a gorgeous boy) —“broken into a boarding school for special teenage girls.”
I shove him back, glare. “That’s it? That’s pathetic.”
“It’s not! It’s very, very bad. You see, I brought whiskey with me. Stolen whiskey.”
I yawn, patting my hand over my mouth. “Stolen from the dean of my college.”
I check the watch I am not wearing for the time.
“After he expelled me.”
I look him straight in the eyes. “I delivered a package bomb that killed two people.”
His face freezes. I shouldn’t have told. I shouldn’t have. I don’t care. I stare defiantly at him.
His frozen face melts into a smile. “Well, my dear girl, you win. I think this calls for a drink.” He tries to open the nearest door, but it’s locked. He takes a step back, lifts his leg, and kicks it open with a resounding crack. “That’ll hurt in the morning. Ladies first.” He holds out a hand to the now-open room.
He doesn’t care that I killed two people.
What is wrong with him?
I walk in. (In this room I have picked which gun was unloaded out of ten options. And then they pulled the trigger on me. I have picked stocks that went on to skyrocket. I have picked which pencil I would shove into Ms. Robertson’s ear until she kicked me out for thinking about it.)
James staggers/swaggers past me and sits on the floor against the wall out of view of the damaged door. He pats the floor next to him.
I sit. He passes me a bottle he pulls out of his coat and I know—I know, I know—I should not ever taste alcohol.
I take a swig.
I choke and cough and he laughs. I take another and manage to swallow it.
“That’s a girl. Now, do you want to know a secret?”
“I know too many secrets.”
“Well, you don’t know any of mine. My mother was psychic. Genuine, see-the-future, real-deal psychic.” He waits. “You aren’t impressed?”
“Should I be?”
“Probably not. Made it awfully hard to really get into trouble, though. She could always see it coming. Do you want to know the trick to getting in trouble under the watchful eye of a psychic?”
I think of the nailed-shut windows. I think of Clarice. I think of the two, the two, the two who are now zero. Tap tap. “Yes.”
“Don’t plan it. Don’t even think about it. The second you get an inkling of what you could do, do it then. Never plan anything ahead of time. Always go on pure instinct.”
I smile, take another long drink before he pulls it away. “I can do that.”
“To my mother,” he says, raising the bottle. “And to yours.” He passes it back to me.
“Mine’s dead.”
“Mine, too!”
He doesn’t seem sorry. Usually people are sorry about dead parents. I like that he isn’t sorry. “Both my parents died in a car wreck. My sister saw it before it happened. It still happened.”
“My mother shot herself in the head. Yesterday.”
I stare at him in shock and horror. Then I hand the bottle back and say, “Well, my dear boy, you win. This calls for a drink.”
He laughs, and I do too, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve laughed in six months. I think I’m in love with him. And I know I’m in love with this drink and the soft, fuzzy way it makes me feel.
“I broke in here tonight to see the reason my mother blew her brains out. I’m very disappointed it’s just a building. I’m less disappointed in the company.”
“I would burn this school to the ground if I could.”
“You’d be hurting the wrong people. It’s my father. You should burn him. I hate him.”
“To your father.” I take another few gulps.
“To burning my father to the ground.”
In the morning when they find us passed out next to each other on the floor, James is sent away but not before he salutes me. Clarice doesn’t say a word about it, but Annie is in a rage when I get back to my room.
My head hurts, hurts. I remember the laughing, though. And his face. And that he knows what I did and he still sat next to me and laughed and told me I had the prettiest eyes he’d ever seen but that I was far too young for him to kiss until he had had at least three more drinks.
I don’t know why Annie is talking so loud. Why is she talking? I want her to stop talking.
“Listen to me, Fia!” She grabs my shoulders and forces me to look into her face, even though she can’t see mine. I stick my tongue out at her. “Never drink again.”
“But it was fun,” I whine.
“Anything could have happened to you!”
My head agrees. She’s right, I know she’s right. “Fine.”
“And stay away from James.”
“Why? What does it matter? He’s gone. I’ll probably never see him again.” I want to, though. He was wrong, but it didn’t make me feel sick—it made me feel dizzy, that feeling you get on the edge of a very high place where you feel immortal and fragile at the same time, and I liked it.
“I promised you I wouldn’t tell Clarice about the new things I was seeing. You promise me you’ll stay away from James. He’s bad news; he’s dangerous, Fia.”
Not as dangerous as I am, Annie. I promise her anyway.
“I NEED TO TALK TO MR. KEANE. NOW.” I TAP MY FOOT impatiently at Hallway Darren, who smells of mustard. I’ve tried to call Fia back, but it goes straight to voice mail. She’s going to do something stupid; I know she’s going to go dancing. Probably right now. She can’t mess up, not again. I’m getting so much better. I know I’ll see what we need soon, something that will get us free. Something that will atone for all the ways I’ve destroyed my sister.
I can feel it—it’s close, that future where we’re free. That secret future I’ve never told anyone about, that I don’t even know any details about other than the way I feel in it. I have to get things back under control so we can find that future.
Darren shifts in his chair. It creaks. “I’ll call his secretary and see if I can set something up.”
“You might want to mention I’ve seen his death. His imminent death. Just so they know who to blame when he doesn’t get warned in time.”
I’ve read of the blood draining from people’s faces when they’re scared. I like to imagine that’s what’s happening to Darren right now. I hear something thud to the floor—small, must be his phone, butterfingers—before he stammers to someone that I need an appointment with Mr. Keane immediately. He doesn’t say why. Probably doesn’t want to be culpable if something really does go wrong.
“He’s in the building.” Darren says, relief evident in his voice. No one knows where Keane will be at any give
n time, and he’s very rarely here. This is lucky. “I can take you up right now.”
“There’s a good boy.”
He tries to take my elbow. He always tries to take my elbow. I want to take my elbow to his face. Instead, I move it away and walk down the hall to the elevator on my own. As if I don’t know the confines of my prison. As if I am not aware of every square foot of space that holds me here, where no one can get to me and where no one can get me out. These walls hold Fia, too, even though she’s not in them.
I wish she could leave me. But I know she never will.
The elevator’s familiar hum and cheerful ding announce our arrival on the top floor. I’ve only been here one other time, just last week. It smells clean, perfectly clean, the air purified and washed and dried of everything that goes on underneath it. The rest of the school and dorms smell like women. This floor has not a single scent of perfume or floral shampoo or lotion.
I am the only woman here who Keane will see. I suppose I should be flattered, but he knows I’m the only one who can see him without seeing him. He won’t let Readers or Feelers within two floors of himself, and he never lets any of the psychics see his face, because if we don’t know his face, we can’t recognize him if we see him in a vision.
A bit paranoid, our mysterious boss. Probably comes with the territory when you have US senators killed. Fia still doesn’t know she told me about that. Oh, Fia.
Good thing Darren isn’t bright enough to have figured out that there’s no way I could have seen a vision with Keane in it and known what I was seeing. I step away from the elevator doors. Then I stand. And wait. It’s humiliating. I try to stand as straight as possible, to keep my face perfectly even and composed. I have been living on my few prison floors for so long that being anywhere else without Eden terrifies me. It could all be open. It could stretch on forever without any walls. It could be nothing but an infinite white space.
I don’t know. I can never know. And I can’t do a thing until someone lets me. I miss the way Fia used to hold my hand. I felt like I lost a limb when she stopped doing it.
“This way, Miss Rosen.”
I startle. Someone is right next to me. The carpet up here is so thick, I didn’t even hear him approach. But I know his voice. He is—Daniel. John. Daniel/John. The man who recognized that Fia belonged here, too. Without him, it would have only been me, it would have only ever been me.
“Daniel. Or was it John?”
“You have an excellent memory.” He takes my elbow lightly and leads me to my left. I count the steps. Thirty-two until he directs me to go ahead of him and the carpet changes. It’s a different room this time.
The door closes behind me. He didn’t escort me to a chair. I wish I could kill him.
I know Keane is in the room. I can feel him like electricity, but he doesn’t say anything. So I walk forward, shoulders back, one hand lifted casually in front of myself. What if there is no chair or desk? What if I walk until I run into Keane? The idea of touching him makes me want to turn and run. I stop, and stand where I am.
“Good evening, Annabelle.” His voice is deep and even and devoid of tone.
“I need to know who shot my sister.” I wait. He says nothing. “I didn’t see them. It’s hard to see Sofia when she’s out and acting on pure instinct. She shifts, based on things that don’t make sense, things that shouldn’t affect anything, so we—I—can’t see it. I only get glimpses, and even those don’t always happen. So I need to know who else was there and whether they were there for her or Adam Denting. If they were there for Denting, then we have no more problems because he’s dead. But if they were there for Sofia, that means you aren’t the only one using psychics, which means our problems are very, very big.”
He lets out a considering breath. It is the first noise he’s made aside from his greeting. He does not move. He does not fidget. He is not a person in my head. He is a robot, chrome and steel, without blood, without a heart. I cannot even begin to piece together in my head what this soulless voice should look like.
“You are very bright, Annabelle. Did you know what Adam Denting was working on?”
I do not let so much as a muscle in my face twitch. I knew only what his work would lead to. “I have no idea. It wasn’t a real-life vision. I already told you—I just saw his name swallowing up yours, destroying it.”
“You’re seeing in the abstract now. I find that very intriguing. You will, of course, keep us posted on any more of these idea visions.”
I hate that I had to admit I can see more than just the solid future after promising Fia I never would. But what I really saw—face after face after face of women, women who I knew could see and feel and read, suddenly coming into focus and then fading into black, with a voice that sounded like my own whispering Adam Denting’s name over and over again . . . I panicked. I had to help those women, keep them safe.
“Of course,” I snap. “It would help if I knew what anyone actually does here, though.” I still don’t. All these years later, everything Fia’s done.
I have no idea what any of it is for.
I am so stupid. After the vision about Adam, I demanded a meeting with Keane and told him the first thing I could think of to get him to order a hit immediately. Oh, Fia, I didn’t want you to have to kill anyone, ever. I never thought they’d send you, but I needed Adam Denting dead.
We all did.
I wonder how Keane is sitting. What his chair looks like. How he moves his hands. Apparently he’s done with me, though. He says, “I’m looking into the disturbance. It isn’t your concern.”
“If it involves my sister, it is. You know no one can see her like I do. Are you really going to risk losing her?”
He won’t. I know he won’t. Of all of us, he’s put the most time into her. With what she did two years ago, any of the rest of us would have been dead. Immediately. No questions. Fia got a pass.
“The name we have is Lerner. Whether that is a person or the entire group we don’t know yet. They aren’t playing on the same field as we are; however, they’re getting close. We believe we have a few pictures of their people, but those won’t do you any good, now, will they?”
I bristle. I think I hear a ghost of a laugh.
“Rest assured that I have nothing but your sister’s best interests at heart, as I do with all my girls. And you know that your best interest is to keep your sister working.”
“How could I forget. I’ll look for anything with Lerner.”
“Give your sister my regards.”
I turn and walk out, knowing exactly how many steps will take me away from that monster. Once again wishing I were Fia, Fia who could have killed him with her bare hands.
Fia who is impossibly broken because she can do just that.
Back at my own table, a mug of tea between my hands, I can finally breathe again. I know where I am in space. It’s not where I want to be, but at least I know it.
I bring the mug to my face to blink in the steam. Lerner. I’ll bet anything they were there for Adam. No one could track Fia’s movements that well. Not even Clarice could have.
It’s so wrong that I miss her sometimes. I know it’s wrong. I can’t help it.
I breathe in again, deeper, and light bursts in front of my eyes. I can see! The familiar euphoria fills me like the steam from my tea, expanding in my lungs. And then I process what I’m seeing.
A guy sitting at a table under a bright light. He has the long arms and long legs and nice eyes that Fia told me about.
He can only be Adam Denting. She was right. I do like him. I ordered him dead, but I like him. I like his messy hair and kind eyes. I even like his ears.
He’s fidgeting, looking down and up and over his shoulder. He’s scared. Someone is talking to him. He’s nervously answering questions about who he is and what his research is, questions about who Sofia Rosen is and exactly what she told him about herself.
And a woman’s voice, from somewhere I can’t see, reassures him th
at he’s safe now that he’s with Lerner.
FIA’S IN MY ROOM. SHE’S BEEN AVOIDING ME FOR SO long, but lately she’s here all the time. It makes me happy.
And sad. Because it’s different. She’s quiet. She never laughs. I wish she could laugh and that it could be easy between us, that Eden could still come over when Fia’s here and we could all three just hang out.
I’m using the braille display on my new laptop. I’ve had speech-to-text technology for a while, but this way I can read everything instead of waiting for the computer to read it for me. This is one of the things I tried to get the public school system to bring in, but they never had the budget to aid one blind student. Now all I have to do is find the products and technology I want to try, tell Clarice about them, and within a week they’re here.
My fingers fly through websites for research on my senior project, an examination of adaptations of the Cassandra myth from ancient Greece. “This display is freaky cool, Fia.”
“Mmmm hmmm.”
“You doing homework?”
“Nope.”
“What are you doing?”
“Wondering if a fourteen-year-old who is an accessory to murder can be tried as an adult.”
My fingers stop midword. “What? Why would you wonder about that?”
“Just something to think about. It seems like for most crimes you won’t get tried as an adult, but murder they push the age pretty low.”
I frown. “Is this for a class?” Only Eden is left from her age group. Girls leave the school a lot for other programs run by the foundation or get kicked out because the curriculum isn’t working for them. I’m so relieved it’s never happened to us. Aunt Ellen hasn’t even written in two years. I worry about Fia getting kicked out—I literally have no idea what we’d do.
“Oh, I never go to class. Why would I go to class?”
I knock the braille display over as I whip around to face her. “You aren’t going to class?”
“Class comes to me. I read a lot. I sleep a lot. Nobody cares.”
“That’s terrible! I can’t believe this. What kind of curriculum do they have you on? I understand that they’re flexible, but that’s unacceptable.” I pause, not wanting to ask, needing to ask. “Are they . . . are you doing those weird self-defense things again?”