Ghost Hand

by Ripley Patton

  “So, if you found out Yale’s real name or that Nose has two sisters, you wouldn’t be this pissed at them?”

  “No, I wouldn’t!” I said, standing up and getting in his face.

  “Why not? What makes me so special?” he asked, raising his voice to match mine.

  “What makes you so special?” I asked, poking my finger at him, tempted to poke it right into his chest. “What makes you different from the guy who tied me up and gagged me?” I jabbed my finger in Nose’s direction. “Or the guy who let Jason kick me in the ribs?” I pointed at Yale. “Or the guy who keeps sticking loaded guns in my face?”

  “Yes,” Marcus said, sounding momentarily confused as he looked from Nose to Yale. There hadn’t been time to tell him about the events in the garage. “Why aren’t you this pissed at them?”

  “Well, let’s see. Maybe because they didn’t kiss me while they did any of that!” I yelled. “They didn’t hold my hand, and call me babe, and undress me, and share their fucking tent with me.”

  Marcus stared at me, his eyes wide with surprise.

  The others looked anywhere but at us.

  “If you really don’t know what makes you different from them,” I said weakly, the fight gone out of me. “What makes us special, then you’re not just a pathological liar, you’re a complete idiot.”

  34

  TRUST ME

  I left them all there in the dark and marched straight to Marcus’s tent. I untied the flaps, ducked in, and found The Other Olivia staring back at me.

  “What are you looking at?” I snapped. Then I started packing my stuff.

  I was kneeling on the floor, cramming the last of my clothes back into the Campbells’ bag, when I heard him come in.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, sounding alarmed.

  “Packing.”

  “Packing?” He said it as if he’d never heard the word before. “Olivia, don’t be—you can’t leave. Palmer is out there somewhere. There may still be CAMFers in town. It’s not safe.”

  “Why? Because I’m on the list? Is there really even a list, or was that a lie too?’

  “You think I lied about the list?” He sounded pissed off, and that made me very happy.

  “You lied about everything else,” I said, turning to look at him.

  “No,” he shook his head. “Not everything.”

  “Whatever,” I said, jamming a pair of jeans into the bag.

  “You want to see it?” He went over to the tubs next to the trunk. “Fine. I’ll show you,” he said, shoving the top one aside, and picking up the keepsake box, the one I’d snooped in that first morning. He yanked off the lid and looked down into it. Then he glanced at me, embarrassment flashing across his face before it closed up, snapped shut as quickly and firmly as the lid he’d just snapped back on the tub. “We should look at it later,” he said.

  “See, that’s what I mean.” I cinched the bag of clothes and stood up. “There’s no reason for me to stay here.”

  “You’re leaving because I won’t show you the list right now?” he asked, anger flaring in his eyes.

  “No. I’m leaving because you have serious trust issues.” I slung the bag over my back and moved toward the tent flaps.

  “Olivia, don’t,” he said, dropping the tub in a camp chair and stepping in front of me.

  “Get out of my way,” I said, trying to step around him, but he moved with me, blocking my way again, his chest in my face. It was exactly what Jason and Nose and Yale had done to keep me from leaving the garage. “Get out of my fucking way,” I said. “Or are you going to tie me up like they did? Here, you want to see?” I threw the clothes bag down, yanking my shirt up to show him my ribs. “This,” I pointed at the fading purple, yellow and green bruise on my side, “is where Jason kicked me while I was tied up and lying on a garage floor completely helpless. He did that because you didn’t trust me. What they did—they were following your orders and your lead. I trusted you, and you did this to me.” I gestured at the bruise, trying to keep the tears jammed down in my throat. “And now you expect me to just hang around for more of that?”

  He reached out his right hand and laid it over the bruise, his palm gentle and warm, his eyes looking haunted. “Shit,” he said. “You’re right.”

  “I know I am,” I said, wishing he’d remove that hand before I fell into his arms and ruined all the progress I’d just made knocking sense into his head. Thankfully, he dropped his hand, but then grabbed mine with it.

  “Come here,” he said, pulling me back to the middle of the tent. He picked up the keepsake box and held it out to me.

  I stared at it, then at him.

  His eyes were the deep, dark pools of intensity I’d first fallen into. He was making me a trust offering. This box was the summation of his life. All the important, private things he’d secreted away and kept safe from everyone. And he was holding it out to me.

  I reached out and took it.

  He got me a camp chair, and sat down across from me, our knees touching.

  I opened the box.

  On the very top was something that had not been there last time. It was my hospital bracelet. He must have cut it off while I lay unconscious in his tent that first night.

  He touched it, uncurling the plastic so I could clearly see my name in crisp, stark, medical letting. “That night at the hospital,” he said softly. “That was the night I knew I was falling for you.”

  This was why he’d snapped the lid back on the box earlier. It hadn’t been the list he was hiding.

  “Why that night?” I asked. He was falling for me. It wasn’t a ploy or a plan or a strategy.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes finding mine. “I guess because you’re a survivor. The CAMFers burned down your house, and you were still roaring to go after them and the blades all by yourself.”

  So, did he want me as a girlfriend, or as a superhero sidekick? Then again, maybe someone who’d lost everyone they’d ever loved, and pretty much couldn’t die, was looking for both. But I wasn’t both, was I?

  “You don’t think it’s creepy that I kept it?” he asked, running his fingertips across my name.

  “No,” I said, touching it too, our fingertips brushing against each other. I didn’t think it was creepy; I thought it was sweet.

  He slid the bracelet gently to the side, and there was the picture of him and his sister—just two, scared, homeless kids.

  I picked it up, understanding the look in their eyes now. It was the will to live. The determination to survive against all odds. “Tell me about her. About the two of you,” I said.

  “It’s not—a nice story.” he said, his eyes so vulnerable.

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Okay,” he sighed. “We grew up in Oregon, in the foster care system. You already know that.”

  “What happened to your parents?”

  “There was a train-car collision when I was seven and Danielle was five.”

  “Oh my God! They got hit by a train?”

  “We got hit by a train. Danielle and I were in the car too.”

  “And you survived that?”

  “One of us did,” he said. “The train hit toward the front of the car where my parents were. Danielle was in a car seat in the back. I was in the back too, but my seatbelt wasn’t clipped in properly. I was thrown over the front seat and out the windshield. I sustained severe internal injuries.”

  “And you died,” I said.

  “Yeah. That was the first time my PSS rebooted.”

  I tried to imagine it. A boy of seven, waking up at the scene of such an awful accident, finding his parents dead.

  “I also had a broken arm,” he continued, his voice monotone. “And a broken leg. There was a lot of glass in my head. My skull was fractured in multiple places. And I had a blood clot behind my left eye.”

  “What about Danielle?”

  “She had a few minor injuries. Nothing like mine. Which was good because she wouldn’t have
been able to come back.”

  “She had a PSS hand and arm.” The pieces of the puzzle were finally falling into place. “That’s where you learned the Vulcan nerve pinch. Could she reach into people?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but her ability was different than yours. She could fix things inside people—physical things.”

  “You mean like heal them?”

  “Not always. It depended on what was wrong with them. But, yeah. She’s the reason I recovered from the accident so quickly, though the doctors took all the credit, of course. That was the first time she used her ability. But even at that age, we knew better than to tell anyone. Then much later, she got sick. She was diagnosed with leukemia, and she used her hand on herself.”

  “She healed herself of cancer?” I asked, incredulous.

  “It wasn’t a one-time cure. She had to keep tweaking things to keep herself in remission.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “I guess so,” he said, shrugging. “Our abilities didn’t keep our parents alive. Or keep us out of the system. Or keep us safe. Instead they landed us straight in the hands of the CAMFers.”

  “How did they find you and take you without anyone knowing?”

  “We had run away from foster care again. We’d stolen a car that time, and we got caught. The cops who pulled us over were scumbags, and when they saw Danielle’s PSS—” he stopped, giving me an anguished look.

  “What?” I prompted gently.

  “First, they handcuffed us,” he said, his jawline growing tight, his eyes gone cold and distant as if he were seeing something else, someplace else. “Then they took turns—hurting her.”

  I wanted to stop him. Wanted to wrap him in my arms and tell him it was all right. But that would have been a lie.

  “I was handcuffed to the car,” he said, his voice breaking. “I couldn’t do anything. I screamed at them, but that just made it worse. Then I screamed for help, but we were on some back road somewhere.”

  My heart felt mangled inside my chest. This was the truth I’d been after. The truth he always kept buried in lies. And now I understood why.

  “After that, they put us in the car,” he went on, “but they didn’t drive us to the police station. They drove us to some kind of compound, with gates and walls around it—a CAMFer research facility, and that’s where I first met Dr. Julian.”

  “He was in charge?”

  “No, he was lower down. Just one of the researchers. But that didn’t stop him from killing Danielle.”

  “He told me she died from the leukemia,” I said.

  “He did?” Marcus laughed bitterly. “I guess I’m not the only liar. No, he extracted her. He sucked the life out of her right in front of me. And then they took her away, tossed her body somewhere.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said and immediately wished I could take it back. When my dad had died, I’d gotten so tired of people saying that. Sorry was a kid’s game, or something you said when you bumped into someone. It didn’t hold a fucking candle to death. I reached out and took his hands in mine, stroking his long brown fingers. I could see it in his eyes. He was stuck there in his mind, in that place where Danielle had died. “How did you get out?” I asked, calling him back.

  “They extracted me,” he said, squeezing my hands. “But they didn’t know I could reboot. Some idiot took his lunch break and just left me there on the table. Their security was shitty. It only took me a couple of hours to get out of the facility.”

  “And that’s when you found the list?”

  “Yeah. Just by accident. I had to sneak through this room, and the list was there. So, I memorized it, and later I wrote it down.”

  “And then you went to find Yale?”

  “Not at first. I hid out for a while. I tried to come up with a plan for blowing up the compound, but after I escaped, they beefed up security a lot. Eventually, I had to give that up. And then I turned eighteen, and I got the settlement from the accident,” he said, his entire body coiling with anger. “One million dollars plus interest that no one had ever told us about. The letter from the lawyer said it had been kept out of our file to protect our assets. All we’d had to do was wait a few more weeks, and we would have had a life.”

  “There was no way you could have known that.” I said. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was my job to protect her. And I didn’t.”

  “But you’ve protected me, and Nose, and Yale, and Jason. I know that doesn’t bring her back, but it’s something.”

  “I guess,” he said, lacing his fingers in mine. “I’ve never told anyone any of that before.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “Olivia,” he said, setting the tub aside and pulling me across the gap between our chairs into his lap, “I never meant to hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  “Does that mean you’re not leaving?” he asked, burying his face in my hair.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. How could I leave Greenfield and everything and everyone I’d ever known? But if I stayed, the CAMfers would come back for me, and I wouldn’t have help this time. If I went with Marcus, I’d be doing something. Maybe that was what the power of my hand was for.

  “I’ll talk to the guys,” Marcus said, his voice growing fierce, “and I swear to you that no one in this camp will ever hurt you again.”

  “Good,” I said, reluctantly extracting myself from his embrace and returning to my own chair. “But I’d still like to see the list.”

  “Okay,” he said, picking up the tub, shuffling past the picture and most of the other things. At the bottom was a crumpled, worn piece of paper, rubbed soft from handling. He pulled it out and handed it to me.

  At the very top, Danielle Elizabeth Jordon was scrawled in Marcus’s handwriting. Written next to her name was Portland, Oregon, February 14. He and Danielle had been taken on Valentine’s Day. Of course, by the time he’d copied this down, she’d been gone. Under her name was his—David Marcus Jordon, Portland, February 14. So, Marcus was his middle name. That made me feel a little better.

  The third name on the list was Gilbert Lee Ling.

  “Yale’s real name is Gilbert?” I asked. “No wonder he goes by Yale.”

  Gilbert was followed by Trey Emmanuel Faison (aka Nose), Jason Williams and then me, Olivia Anne Black, all with dates and locations. After my name came Samantha Eva James, who apparently lived in Indianapolis, Indiana, and would be accosted by the CAMFers just in time for Halloween. The last name, Kaylee Pasnova, had no location or date next to it.

  “What’s with this one?” I asked, pointing at it.

  “That’s how it was on their list, and I haven’t been able to find anything about her on the internet. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

  “These locations move in order from west to east. Portland is west of Fresno by a little, and then it keeps moving east to Colorado, Texas, Illinois and Indiana.”

  “I noticed that too,” Marcus said.

  “So, if it keeps to that pattern, Kaylee is somewhere east of Indianapolis.”

  “Probably,” he nodded. “But I have no idea how we’ll find her.”

  Samantha and Kaylee. They were girls like me. Girls with PSS and no idea their world was about to come crashing down around them.

  “I want to help you do this,” I said to Marcus.

  “Good,” he said, smiling.

  I leaned forward, about to kiss those gorgeously curved lips, when I heard the shuffling of feet and muted voices just outside the tent.

  “Hey, can we come in?” Emma called through the canvas.

  Poor Emma. And Passion. I’d left them out there in the dark with a pack of strange boys.

  “Come in,” I said, tucking the list back in the box and handing it to Marcus.

  “I thought the three of you could sleep in here tonight,” he said, putting the lid on the tub as Emma and Passion entered. They glanced between me and Marcus, and I suddenly remembered my outburst in
front of everyone where I’d rattled off every intimate moment Marcus and I had ever had.

  “No,” I said, knowing my face was bright red. “What about you?” I didn’t want to displace him, but it was more than that. I’d gotten used to his tent being our place.

  “I can crash in Jason’s tent until he gets back,” he said. “And don’t worry. We’ll have someone on watch all night.” Because Palmer was still out there somewhere. And he struck me as the kind of guy who had acquired a taste for revenge.

  “If you’re sure,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed.

  Marcus put away his keepsake box and crossed to the door. “Goodnight,” he said, slipping through the canvas flaps into the dark.

  35

  JASON RETURNS

  “Liv,” Emma said, glancing around the tent, “you’re not actually going to go with them, are you?” Her eyes landed on The Other Olivia and she frowned. “I mean, are you sure they know what they’re doing?”

  “No,” I said, sitting down in a chair and putting my head in my hands. “But I can’t stay here, and I think I’m safer with them than on my own.”

  “What about your mom?” Emma said, sitting down in the chair across from me, just like Marcus had.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She won’t believe any of this. She’s been dating the guy who killed Marcus’s sister and then kidnapped you. She might still be dating him.”

  “Yeah, that would be awkward,” Emma said.

  I looked up and realized that Passion was standing over us, a girl I didn’t really know, and she was looking at me with some kind of weird worshipful awe in her eyes.

  “What?” I said, staring back at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she blushed. “I just think what you can do is amazing. I wish I had something like that. Some special power.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Passion Wainwright was some kind of groupie. My groupie. Was it possible she didn’t know what my hand had done to her? Dr. Julian had said she knew. He’d said it right in front of her, but then again, she’d been drugged out of her mind. And he could have been lying. I looked up, searching her face. If she didn’t know, then I had to tell her.