by Lauren Sabel
DEDICATION
To Alex, my baby girl. You make it all worth it every time you smile.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Three Months Later
Acknowledgments
Back Ads
About the Author
Books by Lauren Sabel
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
It all started when the spoon bent.
I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened, completely out of the blue at Stanford University’s Christmas party, among Mom’s nerdy colleagues and their families. One second I was staring at my reflection in my coffee spoon, waiting for Charlie to stop talking to my mom about college, and the next moment the spoon was bent at a ninety-degree angle in my hand.
“What were you thinking just then?” a voice asked inches from my ear. It was a washed-up looking hippie, with stringy blond hair and the stubble of a beard.
I tucked the spoon into my purse before anyone else could see it. “I was thinking how stirring coffee has just become problematic?”
I glanced over at Charlie and Mom to make sure they hadn’t noticed the bent spoon. They hadn’t. Not that they would, with Mom trying to convince Charlie of the hundred reasons he should stay in San Francisco forever, rather than taking her only child away from her. It struck me that the problem with being an only child is the word only.
“Can you do that again?” the hippie asked, and reached for the spoon in my purse.
I put my hand over my purse. “You do realize that I don’t know you, right?”
He sighed and withdrew his hand. “You’re right. I should spend the next hour explaining how I know about the migraines that paralyze you several times a week, and how, when you’re falling asleep sometimes, you suddenly know things that you shouldn’t know, things that are in other people’s minds.”
I felt my mouth fall open in surprise.
“And then I should explain how you sometimes guess what’s going to happen long before it does,” he continued, “and you see really terrifying things happening to people, and how you’ve tried to hide these things from the people you love, scared they’ll call you a—”
“Freak,” I whispered.
“And after we’ve gone through all that, assuming we won’t have been interrupted by your mom or boyfriend, I’ll ask you to bend the spoon again, and you’ll do it because you’ll know that someone finally understands you, and that your future is going to be very different from now on than how you had ever imagined it to be.”
I took the spoon out and handed it to him. He straightened it between both hands, and handed it back to me. “Name’s Indigo,” he said.
“Mine’s Callie,” I said, and then, when he smiled in response, I added, “but you probably already know that.”
He nodded, and I quickly glanced over at Charlie and Mom, who were still in a passionate discussion about college.
“The things you see in your mind—they’re real,” Indigo said. “The fact that you can see them makes you a target, and if the people you love know the truth about what you can do”—he nodded toward Mom and Charlie—“they become targets too.”
I swallowed hard. “Targets?”
Indigo nodded. “You know what I’m talking about.”
That was just it: I did know what he was talking about. I had seen people in my mind dying in the most horrible ways. Somehow I knew that those people were targets, but of whom or why, I had no idea.
Around us, the room buzzed with activity. Kids ran around, spilling sodas out of their plastic Stanford cups, and parents yelled vague instructions to them while carrying on conversations about left-wing politics. In the midst of it all, we were completely unnoticed by the partygoers.
I first checked to make sure Charlie and Mom weren’t watching, and then I held the spoon out in front of me. In the curved metal surface, I could see two faces side by side: my confused face and Indigo’s smile. When the spoon bent again, his smile got bigger.
“Focus that same energy somewhere else,” he said. “Test it.”
At the time, I didn’t know exactly why I was doing what he told me to do, but it was as if I couldn’t do anything else—like this moment had been waiting for me all these years, and I just had to live it. When I focused on a metal light switch across the room, I felt this intense confidence, this feeling that my life was mine alone, and that I could go anywhere and do anything with it. As this feeling surged through me, I felt heat sliding down my arm into my fingertips.
“Test your power,” Indigo said.
It was like the word “power” flipped some switch inside me. I lost focus, and my gaze slid a few inches over, to a small metal box.
The fire alarm went off.
Everyone screamed and ran for the exits, grabbing their kids along the way. Across the room, I saw Charlie and Mom headed toward me, and when I looked over, Indigo was gone. Ice-cold drops of sprinkler water pelted my skin and I tensed from the cold. In my fist, where the spoon had been, there was now a card with a phone number on it. Right then, I knew that everything had changed.
I would never be normal again.
CHAPTER ONE
“Callie?” Indigo says from across the darkened room. I open my eyes, suddenly realizing that I’ve written the word normal, and I’m drawing a dark box around it. “What are you seeing now?” he asks. Indigo’s voice is so familiar by now it amazes me that I’ve only known him for a little over a year. So many things have happened since the Christmas party, things I can never say aloud to protect the safety of our nation, and the people I love.
I look at the word normal stretched across the white copy paper, mingling with the drawings of cargo ships and parts of radioactive bombs. “Sorry,” I whisper, wishing it wasn’t too late to hide the paper. I focus again, this time on what I’m supposed to be looking at. The aircraft carrier.
I let myself sink into a trance again, and my mind feels like it is twisting, stretching. The world slips past me, faster and faster, until the blur makes me dizzy. I fall into the shattering of it, the rough pieces of images real and imagined merging into a kaleidoscope of colors. As the dizzying colors get brighter, my mind wanders to places thousands of miles away, to an ocean I’ve seen a hundred times, but never with my own eyes.
“Callie? Are you okay?” The voice comes from far away, as distant as a dying star, and I’m suddenly remembering the day Mom told me Dad was never coming back, and the way the truth crushed me under its unbearable weight. That was back when I valued truth, and finding out I had been lied to meant someth
ing—back before I knew everything was a lie.
“Callie?” the voice says, and now faster, dizzier, into a white space, a space without anything, no walls, no boundaries, just the deep blue ocean, and the reflection of something (me? a bird?) skipping across the water. “She’s not responding,” the voice says, and the backward count begins. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
I feel myself being sucked out of this world, and I’m grasping onto nothing, my arms flailing out like a bird.
“Seven . . . six . . . five . . .”
And then I see it.
Weaving in and out of reflections, the aircraft carrier coasts almost motionlessly across the waves. I swoop closer, constricting myself until I fit through the carrier tower’s solid steel roof.
I taste metal. I am vapor. I am moving and not moving, all at once.
When I emerge into the control room, I see the Russian captain directing aircraft activity from his stately leather chair. “He’s still there,” I say aloud.
The counting stops abruptly. “Where’s the target?” Indigo asks.
I am aware of the pen in my hand, and the sheets of paper I’m pressing the pen against, but I don’t watch as my hand moves in jagged lines across the paper. I just feel my way through the sketch, slowly developing what I see in my mind until it’s a clear picture on the paper, a picture of a control room with the captain in his chair and the helmsman steering the ship and, on the deck directly below them, wispy red smoke.
“I see the target,” I say.
The red smoke is why I’m here. Unlike the other psychic viewers, I can see a rare type of electromagnetic radiation. This type of radiation is found in several different metals, many of which power your standard X-ray machine, TV set, or computer chip. Or your deadly, military-grade laser on a Russian aircraft carrier thousands of miles across the ocean.
The radiation is the reason only I can work this case: I’m the only psychic at Branch 13 who can see it. We all have our own specific talents, and this very one just happens to be mine. This is why Indigo calls me his secret weapon. But I don’t like thinking of myself, of my mind, as a weapon. Something created to hurt people.
“What’s the target’s location?” Indigo asks. “And which direction is it facing?”
“It’s on the fantail,” I respond. “Facing the bow.”
“Good,” Indigo says, writing down the location on an index card and clipping it onto a sealed manila envelope. “We’re done for the day.”
There are some clichés that are true.
One of them is that people are like books, full of adventure and romance and dark moments. But if we are all books, my book is more fiction than nonfiction. Even the index is all lies; each chapter is invented to make me look like a normal girl.
The truth is that I’m the kind of book most people never open. I don’t blame them, not really. According to my boyfriend, Charlie, I don’t allow anyone to get close enough to me to let them peek inside. Unlike him. Charlie is one of those people with nothing to hide. He assumes the world is an open book, a place where all is revealed if we just read it. That’s one of the things I love about him.
He’s easy to lie to.
These are the basic facts about me:
I am seventeen.
I live in San Francisco.
I work for a secret government agency.
I am a psychic spy.
CHAPTER TWO
Right now, all over the world, there are psychics searching for dangerous weapons, biological hazards, serial killers. But you’ll never know about it. The government will deny it. “That is not reliable information,” they will say, not mentioning the hundreds of psychics behind closed doors, accurately finding kidnapped people and murder victims. They won’t tell you about how some minds can see below the ground, above the earth, backward and forward in time. And they won’t tell you that some of them are housed in mental institutions, or that one of them is your neighbor, or that one of them is below the legal voting age. Or that, for those people, life is a secret they can’t share, so they are always alone, except for one place: in their own minds.
Indigo and I may be done viewing for the day, but that doesn’t mean I can go home. Our monthly training, as short as it may be, comes way too often for my taste. I sigh and lean back against the couch cushions, my body stiff from hours of viewing.
While Indigo leaves the viewing room to drop the sealed manila envelope into the Completed Sessions file, I crumple up the paper with the word NORMAL on it. He’s always saying how lucky I am to have such a gift at my age, and I don’t want him to know the truth: that sometimes my ability feels less like a blessing, and more like a curse, pain reserved only for me. I mean, what if I don’t want to see the future? What if I just want a normal life? I toss the crumpled-up paper at the trash can, but it bounces off the edge and rolls across the floor. I pick it up, back up a few feet, and throw it again, but I’m an inch too far to the left.
“So much for practice making perfect,” I mutter under my breath.
“Don’t forget about training this afternoon,” Indigo says, coming back into the viewing room. He picks up the crumpled paper and pauses by the trashcan to unfold it. “Normal?” he asks, raising his eyebrows.
I shrug. “I obviously wasn’t writing about you.”
He grins. “Obviously.”
“Let’s just do this training thing,” I say, planting my scuffed combat boots on the floor. I’m never excited to stay late after work, as much as I love what I do. By the time I’ve viewed a full session, and then written an extensive deposition of the day’s session, I’m exhausted. But I admit I’m lucky: unlike Martina and Pat, I don’t emerge with mental bruises from my training with Indigo. He tries to break into my mind, of course, and I try to defend my mind in return, a sort of mental sparring, but when he gets in, he doesn’t yell “Yahtzee!” the way he does with the adult viewers—he just irritates me exceptionally well.
“Still hiding that acceptance letter from your mom?” Indigo asks calmly, sitting down in the chair across from me.
“Read my mind much?” I joke, although I know our gifts don’t work like that. Using psychic powers is like finding a single grain of sand in a desert: you have to focus deeply on what you’re looking for, and after sifting through the desert, one grain shines a little more brightly than the others, and that’s what you focus on. It’s not something we can just do, like flipping a light switch. It often takes hours to do one session, and since the process is so brain-draining, one session is all Indigo allows us to do per day.
“Nope, no mind reading going on here,” Indigo says. “You’re just predictable.” He balls up the paper again and throws it at the trash can. “And the crowd goes wild!” He grins.
“Yay,” I say without enthusiasm.
Indigo looks at me closely. “For this training, try to close down the emotion.”
“You do know you’re saying that to a teenage girl, right?” I ask, kicking my combat boots impatiently into the floor. “Almost ready,” I say. I pull out my Chapstick and run it over my lips, and then flick some of my hair out of my eyes. “Okay, I’m ready.”
“You don’t need to do your nails or anything?” Indigo jokes.
I look down at my unpainted fingernails, made worse by my chewed-to-hell cuticles. When I’m stressed, they’re the first to go. “Going à la nude,” I say. “Watch out.”
Indigo picks up a file folder on the table and flips through the worksheets we’ve already completed in the past dozen training sessions. “Here we are,” he says, stopping at a file. “Reading body language.”
“Not again,” I groan.
Indigo nods, and I can tell that there’s no negotiating on this even though we’ve been over it at least five times. I know that reading body language is important since the people I’m watching in my sessions are often lying, and for the sake of national security, I need to know exactly what they’re saying and what it really means. If I was able to reach
the second level of psychic power—influencing through either mind control or altering physical matter, like bending metal, I would be able to not only read minds, but change people’s decisions and environments. Indigo tries to push me to get there, but ever since my first and only time metal bending, I haven’t come close. So far I can only watch things happen, hand over the information I see, and hope the CIA does something about it.
“Ask me a question,” Indigo says, officially starting the session. He settles his face into a perfectly blank stare.
“Am I your favorite viewer at the agency?”
“No.” Indigo’s face stays as blank as a sheet of paper, but I notice that his eyebrows draw slightly upward, making soft lines appear across his forehead, and he purses his lips minutely. Barely noticeable, but telltale micro-expressions of someone who’s lying.
“Easy peasy,” I say, rubbing my hands together to let him know I’m just getting started.
“You can’t ask questions you already know the answer to,” Indigo complains.
“It’s possible you could have another favorite here,” I respond.
“Like who?”
I shrug. “Not satisfied with my question? Fine. You ask one, then.”
“How about this one?” Indigo says. “Tell me which one of these things is a lie: I was born in Indiana under a different name. My father’s name was Joe and he had three cows and a goat named Chicken Little. I got As in school but decided college wasn’t for me.”
I watch Indigo carefully throughout the entire story, noticing every time his eyes shift to the right or he shuffles his feet or touches his mouth. “You were a C student,” I finally say, and he nods. “Real name?” I ask.
“Gary,” he says. “Changed it when I moved here.” Indigo glances at his watch, and a concerned look flickers over his face. He abruptly stands up and smooths out the wrinkles in his royal blue pants with glow-in-the-dark stars. Sometimes I can’t believe I work for a dude who looks like his own constellation. “Let’s cut this one short,” Indigo says. “Say hi to your mom for me.”
