“You can’t help your friend if you are in hiding,” he pointed out. “Nor can you help your sister.”
“I need to find Ella, then we’ll see.”
I opened my eyes, looked closely at Alex’s face, to see his reaction.
He surprised the hell out of me. “Yeah, you do.”
“You agree?” I felt like he’d hit me with that imaginary ice brick again.
He nodded. “Yeah, I do. I want to help you.”
Help me? If he came along, it would be like giving Support a hotline to me.
“No way,” I said. For an instant, he looked like I’d just gut punched him, then his face went all professional.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I can see why you’d feel that way.” But the way he held his head made me think he was lying. Or maybe it was the way he blinked.
“When do you have to return to Support?”
“Not for a while. Six weeks.”
I nodded. “Go get some sun on a nice beach somewhere, and let me find my sister. I’ll call your number when I do.”
Now I was lying. I wasn’t sure what the hell I’d do when I found her, except protect her and convince her to come with me.
“I really should go with you,” he said.
“Beach.”
A faint smile crept over his lips. “Okay, okay. Beach it is.” He gave me a long look. He was so earnest, and there was something so warm, longing, in that gaze. It made me twitchy and made my stomach do flip flops.
“Thanks,” I said. I couldn’t feel like that. Not now. Maybe not ever.
We said goodbye, and I watched him walk off in a slouch, shoulders slumped, head thrust forward, back to being a stoner.
3
I told Keisha I’d gotten rid of him, but she lowered her head and squinted at me, her lips pressed together.
“Really? Stoner guy just happens to find us?” You could have cut her suspicion with a knife. The hell of it was, she was right to be suspicious. I was being an asshole for lying to her, but what choice did I have?
“The dude had been following us after I did the stupid thing,” I said.
“Which you didn’t mention to me before,” she said. She crossed her arms, stared at a corner of the cramped room.
I came over, sat on her bed. “I’m sorry. Really. I fucked up. I should have told you.” I didn’t have to fake the awkwardness, my words came out in a stuttered jumble.
She sighed. “Okay, I forgive you for being you an idiot. Like you always are.”
That made me grin a little. Me from a year ago would have thought I’d gone nuts for apologizing to a psycho like Keisha, but I’d learned she wasn’t a psycho. She was my best friend.
Shame swirled inside me. I still lied to her. Saying it was for her own good would be total bullshit. I did it because it helped me stay alive and keep her off my back. I couldn’t lie to her forever, but if I didn’t, there’d be hell to pay when she found out.
Again, I didn’t have a choice.
A nightmare hit me after I fell asleep. A nightmare starring Winterfield and bitch queen Zhukova, my old boss from Support, along with an army of faceless agents. Karl Cooper was in there too, in his blue Hero Council jumpsuit, all blond and square-jawed.
Typical nightmare fuel. He still looked like he did when I’d freed him from Nefarious’s little jail. A huge bruise blackened one side of his face from where I’d punched him, his jumpsuit ripped and bloody from the blackberry vines I’d coiled around him. It had all been to make my supposedly interrogating him look convincing to that speedster idiot Overclock. Cooper pinned me against a wall, while Zhukova lectured me.
I tried to escape, but Support’s other pet Empowered, Willow Chang, in a black jumpsuit rather than the blue Hero Council one Cooper wore, telekinetically hurled a boulder at me, smashing my legs.
Cooper strode up to me. “You should have stayed in prison,” he said.
“Just get it over with and kill me,” I told nightmare him.
Zhukova looked at me coldly. “We’re not going to waste you,” she said. “You’ll find your sister, and give her to us, and you will come back as well.
I woke up in a panic, my sheets thrown off me. My legs ached from nightmare caused Charlie It was still dark outside.
Keisha snored in her bed, dead to the world. I sucked in air in deep, slow breaths, but it took a long damn time to get my heart to slow down, and even longer to fall back asleep.
The next morning we got up and checked out of the hotel. The sky was clear. It looked like a very nice day for Portland, even with it being May. I needed to see Ruth, and I wanted Keisha in a good mood this time when I told her, like always, that she couldn’t come with me. So, we had breakfast at a greasy spoon not far away, just off 82nd Avenue. Keisha had some kind of giant omelet with extra onions and bacon. I had a stack of pancakes and sausage.
I put down my fork. I still had one pancake left in the stack, but I couldn’t eat any more. Breakfast suddenly tasted like paste. I picked up my coffee cup, took a swig. I didn’t notice the taste. It was time to tell Keisha I was going to Ruth’s without her.
“Good breakfast?” I asked her as she forked more omelet into her mouth. Lame question, but it was all I could think of.
She nodded. “Pretty good for a dump like this,” she said as she chewed.
That was something at any rate. Maybe she’d be cool with being told no for the umpteenth time.
“So, we heading to Ruth’s now?” she asked.
If I just told her no, we’d have a big fight right here. She put down her fork.
Hell, I needed to tell her already. I sucked at stalling and beating around the bush.
I opened my mouth to tell her the bad news, but she beat me to it.
“I’ll drive,” she said.
“What?” I narrowed my eyes.
“Over to your grandma’s,” she said.
“But you don’t know the way.”
The waitress came over, asked us if we needed anything else.
“We’re good,” Keisha told her. She nodded at me. “My friend’s paying the check this time.”
My eyes must have bulged, because she flashed a grin.
“Sure thing, miss,” the waitress said, and laid the check in front of me. She strode off.
“It’s your turn to pay,” Keisha said. “And my turn to drive us to Ruth’s.”
“Okay. Fine.” That didn’t matter. We split the money we took from the gangers and crooks. I didn’t care about the money.
“About that…” I began, but she cut me off.
“I’m driving us there.” A sharp edge, just a hint, came into her low voice. I swear her eyes flashed. “I’m meeting Ruth and your sister Ava. We’re in this together.”
I should have said no. I didn’t want Keisha exposed, and I didn’t want anyone who might be watching Ruth’s place, Support or whoever, to know Keisha was alive.
Maybe Alex was right and they thought we were dead.
“Okay,” I said.
I caught just a flicker of surprise in her eyes, maybe Miss Confident and Sure of Herself actually had doubts about how I’d react.
I snatched the check from the table and stood. “You’re right. It’s high time you met my family.”
Ruth lived in Beaverton, a suburb just outside of Portland. We took Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway rather than the Sunset. It took a bit longer, but I was trying to take different routes wherever we went, and Keisha agreed.
We passed a high school, and a bunch of normal kids were outside, running around the track. We were stopped at the light for a minute. Teens laughed together after they had finished, chattering like birds, gesturing and grinning.
I hadn’t had that sort of carefree attitude even before my Empowering.
Keisha glanced at the kids. “Must be nice just to be able to live.”
“Yeah.” The kids were lucky to be normals. The rare teen that became Empowered got sent to a crèche school and then the Academy, unless they went and forswor
e never to use their power. Or, they ended up like I had, a rogue. But 99.999 percent of all kids were normal. They were the lucky ones.
Keisha parked the beater van a block from Ruth’s. She looked around as we walked down the sidewalk to Ruth’s, at all the nice little houses with well-trimmed lawns, flower beds, and no junk in the yards.
“This is a pretty nice neighborhood.”
“Yeah, Ruth got lucky.”
She stopped and looked at me.
“She got on a special government program,” I said. Another lie to add to the pile I already had with Keisha. So many lies. Starting with the fact that I’d been in Support the whole time she knew me.
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s kinda like the lottery.” I started walking again, heading toward Ruth’s down that sidewalk. Keisha followed me, looking unsure.
Yeah, the lie sucked, but I didn’t have anything else to go run with right then, so it went on the pile.
We reached Ruth’s. Her old Ford Galactic was parked in the driveway.
My skin tingled as we passed the car. It was like a faint version of the tingling you got when another Empowered was near. Exactly like the sensation I’d gotten last night in the abandoned church. I peered out of the corner of my eyes. Nothing, but my skin still tingled.
Keisha noticed, too. We both froze next to the Galactic’s hood, looked around.
“Shit,” she said under her breath.
Then the pricking feeling was gone. Just like that.
“Nothing there,” I whispered.
“But there was,” she whispered back. “It felt like another Empowered, but weaker.”
I shrugged. “Hell if I know.”
Instead of rapping on the screen door I rang the doorbell.
A moment later the inside door opened. Ava stood there, red-eyed like she’d been crying.
“Sis,” I said, and smiled.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Ava said automatically.
“That’s what you always say when I come over.”
She rubbed her eyes, and her face hardened. “Because it’s true,” she said. “You’re just going to get Ruth and me in trouble.” Ava looked past me at Keisha.
“Who’s this?” Ava demanded, her voice thick with suspicion.
“My friend Keisha,” I said.
“Are you Empowered?” Ava asked Keisha.
“Yeah,” Keisha said. “I am.”
“You shouldn’t be here either.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why are you guys here?” She kept blinking. Nervous and angry.
She was like me, tended to get pissed off easily. Ava and Ella had that secret connection between them because they were twins. I was always on the outside, big Sis, four years older. Then I became the Empowered one.
But Ava was a lot like me with her quick temper and anger. Ella had always been calmer. The Empowered Ella, well, I didn’t know her, and I hadn’t talked directly to her since I’d seen her, sick, in her bed.
Ava, on the other hand, I knew that anger. And she wasn’t really angry right then, she was afraid, and using the anger to cover her fear. I wondered what she was afraid of.
No more beating around the bush. Time to find out. “I want to see Ruth, and ask about Ella.”
Her left eye twitched and she blinked. “Ella hasn’t been here,” she blurted. She ignored Keisha and glared at me.
“Duh, sis,” I said. “I’m looking for her, so that she doesn’t get her ass in trouble like I did.”
Ava started to close the door in our faces. “You’re still in trouble. Leave.”
“Stop with the phony anger and let us in, or I’ll have my friend remove the hinges on the door.”
Ava’s eyes grew big as she stared at Keisha. “You could do that?” she asked Keisha in a small voice.
Keisha nodded. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t want to.”
Ava swallowed. She trembled as she opened the door and let us inside. Damn it, I didn’t want to make her afraid, but I needed to talk to Ruth.
The living room was empty. “Where’s Ruth?” I demanded.
“In bed—sick.”
A hand clenched my heart. “I thought she was better.” I pushed past Ava and hurried to Ruth’s bedroom. The door was closed. I turned the knob and pushed it open gently.
Ruth lay in bed, half sitting up. Her eyes were closed. Her face was wet. Her hands clutched a tissue, twisting it.
“Ruth, it’s me, Mathilda,” I said.
She coughed and opened her eyes. Her eyes were red. She’d been crying.
She coughed again, a thick, mucus-filled cough.
Those fuckers, Support, they must have cut off the new super meds she’d been taking to keep Thalik’s from killing her. Maybe Alex was right. Maybe I should have called Winterfield and returned to Support after Emerald Green.
I ended the thought right there. I couldn’t go back, not now.
“Mat,” Ruth said, her voice thick with congestion.
I knelt next to her. “You’re not getting your medication for Thalik’s.”
“I am. But I came down with this bad cold.”
I held my breath. Colds sucked, but Thalik’s disease had no cure. The super expensive experimental trial drugs Support had arranged for Ruth to get through the cover of some kind of special government grant slowed down the terminal illness. Ruth sounded like someone who had smoked three packs a day for all her life. She said she’d smoked in the army but quit after she left, and that was forty years ago.
Maybe Ruth had a cold. Or maybe she was lying.
Ruth didn’t lie to me. Ever. I let out my breath.
“I’m sorry about the cold.”
She coughed again, but waved me off when I went to pour her a glass of water from the pitcher on the little end table by her bed
“I’m not thirsty.”
I couldn’t remember if lack of thirst was another part of Thalik’s disease. Damn it, I didn’t have time to grill her. She never lied. Maybe she was wrong and it was Thalik’s but there wasn’t anything I could do about it anyway.
“I saw Ella,” I blurted. “Her apparition, projection, whatever you want to call it. You know, what her power can create.”
Ruth’s eyes widened. “Where?” Her voice was a rasp.
“At the abandoned Methodist church on Fremont.”
Ruth stared at me. It hit me. She wasn’t surprised. She knew about Ella’s power. She knew about Ella’s power because she’d seen Ella.
“Ella was here, wasn’t she? Just now.”
Ruth hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“She told me to leave her alone!” I said, anger filling me. “I’ve been looking for her just like I said I would.”
Ruth coughed into a tissue. “I told her to come home,” she said.
“What did she say?” I demanded, raising my voice. Normally Ruth would have asked me to settle down and keep a normal tone of voice, but not today. That told me more than anything how she was right then.
“She said she’d found a new home. That this was goodbye.”
I fought to keep my voice even. Ella was an idiot. “Did you tell her she’ll go to prison, or worse, if she’s caught now? She needs to go to the Hero Council.”
Ruth closed her eyes, nodded. A tear rolled down her check.
My stomach twisted. “I’ll find her, grandma, I will,” I said.
“I don’t want you to get caught. I don’t want to lose two granddaughters.”
I squatted by the bed. “You’re not going to lose any.” I touched her face. “They think I’m dead, remember?”
“But for how long?”
I ignored the question. “Ella gave me a clue, I think, about where she might be. Do you know what the “Song of Moss” might mean?”
Ruth blinked, looked down at her hands. “I’m not sure. It seems like I’ve heard it before.”
Ruth used to have a steel-sharp memory. Thalik’s. I cursed the disease again under my breath.
“You can’t fix e
verything, Mathilda,” Ruth said.
“I’m not trying to, just trying to get Ella back and help us survive,” I said. That was all I cared about. I wasn’t trying to change the world. I wasn’t that stupid. “But what does that have to do with the Song of Moss?”
“Nothing. Everything.”
She wasn’t making sense.
Ruth sighed. “You remind me so much of your mother. Michelle tried to fix everything, too. She encouraged your father after he’d been turned down to work with her doing special research for the Hero Council.”
I’d never heard about that.
“She worked hard to build a life for him and you, while she worked on that special, secret project for the Hero Council. She urged your father to apply for a research job at a science foundation in Colorado, something that supported the research she was doing. They snapped him up.”
I still didn’t understand what that had to do with finding Ella, but Ruth rarely spoke about mom or dad, so I let her talk.
“She pushed herself too hard. Your father had been working long hours, too. They headed home for Christmas, but they both were exhausted. You girls had been staying with me when your mom went to Colorado for a special project and to meet up with your father. They should have flown home, but your mother liked to drive.”
I swallowed, squeezed my eyes. I wasn’t going to cry.
Ruth coughed, rubbed her face, brushing another tear away with the back of her hand.
“I don’t want you girls to die,” Ruth said.
I hugged her. “We won’t, grandma. I promise. I’ll find Ella, I promise. I’m not going to quit until I find her and bring her home.”
She nodded.
I squeezed her shoulder. “Try and remember what the “Song of Moss” might mean.”
Ruth looked at her hands, then at me. “Outdoor school. That was it. She went to outdoor school at a camp near Mossville in the Gorge. Ava went to one near Fossil. It was a big deal between them attending different outdoor schools.”
I remembered a fight, an argument. Ava was mad that she couldn’t go with Ella, and angry that her twin wasn’t mad about it, too.
“That grungy old ghost town? Why would she talk about Mossville? I don’t get it. What does that have to do with anything?”
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