Sasha was a… And suddenly, it made sense. Not the kidnapping and murder part—I still didn’t get that. What made sense was Sasha’s earnestly telling me that her dolls danced around her room at night.
She hadn’t imagined it—they’d actually moved. She’d used Greater-Than powers like mine to make them dance.
I thought about the jumble of dolls on Sasha’s usually orderly shelves and imagined her, in that awful moment when she was being abducted, delivering a telekinetic blast of fear and anger.
Cal, however, was still skeptical. “How do you know that Sasha had, you know, powers like Sky?”
Dana looked at Cal. “How do I know?” She laughed. Then, she closed her eyes and nodded three times.
With a swoosh, Cal’s wheelchair lifted off the ground. The computer news printouts floated lazily in the air as Calvin’s wheelchair spun in an elliptical pattern before cascading toward the floor and landing gently in front of Dana. Then, one by one, the pieces of paper dropped onto Calvin’s lap, forming a neat pile atop the manila envelope.
“I know,” she whispered, leaning in close to Calvin’s astonished face, “because I know.” She tapped the papers on Cal’s lap. “So what do you think, Scoot? Are you ready to believe me yet? Or do you need more proof?”
Chapter Nine
Calvin didn’t move for a moment. The theater was silent except for the sound of our breathing. Dana’s breath sounded fast and labored, as if she’d just run a fast mile.
“Man, what’s up with all y’all girls?” Cal finally said, peeking over the side of his wheelchair to make sure he was safely on the ground. “How did you learn to do that?
“It takes practice, practice, and more practice,” Dana said matter-of-factly as she took the bottom of her tank top and lifted it up to her face. She dabbed at a few beads of sweat on her temples.
I caught Calvin staring at Dana’s six-pack abs. “Okay,” he replied slowly. “No offense, but I could practice my damn ass off until my brain pops, and there’s still no way I’d be spinning shit around with my mind.”
Dana nodded. “You’re right about that, Boy Wonder,” she said, pulling her shirt back down, as she gestured to me with her head. “I’m talking to the girl who’s already got the gift.”
From what I’d read on the Internet, I wasn’t so sure being a G-T was a gift.
But Milo was smiling at me, so I managed to smile back.
“Okay,” Calvin said. “Okay. All right. Let me just…process.”
“Take your time, ’cause I’ve got all night.” Dana squatted in front of me. She rested her elbows on her knees.
“You okay?” I asked, leaning down. She still seemed pretty out of breath.
“I’m just a little out of shape.”
Calvin snorted. “Um, have you looked in a mirror lately? Girl, you’re swoll.”
“Swoll?” Dana replied, one eyebrow raised.
“Cal, you’re stupid,” I said, and laughed.
“Well, yeah.” Calvin nodded his agreement.
I looked at Dana. She was solid muscle. Even though I towered over her petite frame, every square inch of her was tight and rippling. Her crystalline eyes were smudged on top and bottom with jet black eyeliner, and she had a shock of blond hair short enough to be a boy’s cut. Yet, for every feature that would have normally been harsh—even masculine—she balanced it with curves and attitude.
If I had to picture a girl who could move objects with her mind, I’d picture Dana. Not skinny, freckly, red-haired little old me.
“Tell me about this so-called gift,” I said. “Tell me why Sasha and Lacey were kidnapped and killed if their powers were supposedly so valuable.” Even as I said the word “killed,” I still didn’t believe that Sasha was really dead. “And how come, if Lacey was seven and Sasha was nine, I’m only just now noticing my powers. I’m almost seventeen.”
Dana nodded, and her expression was grim. She motioned for me to sit down again. Calvin leaned over, and Milo came forward as well. He took a seat next to me. I expected to smell smoke, but when he leaned close, I caught a whiff of vanilla instead.
“Some girls get their powers early,” she told me. “Some, like you, are late bloomers. I don’t know why that happens, but you should be grateful for that. Like I said, it’s the little ones who aren’t careful who get noticed. You’ll catch up pretty quickly once you start practicing.”
“Practicing,” I echoed. I thought about how much effort it had taken to move my hairbrush.
“Skills like telekinesis take practice to hone,” Dana said. “Same way little kids have to practice walking or using a fork. You have to work out your abilities just like you work out a muscle. You have to get your gifts swoll, as Boyfriend likes to call it. Truth is, I’ve never met anyone whose abilities are perfect from the get-go. Well, no one who’s not on the verge of jokering anyway.”
Cal and I looked at each other. There was that word again. Jokering.
“But that’s a whole ’nother thing,” Dana continued. “What we’re talking about here—being a Greater-Than—is related to a science called neural integration. G-Ts can learn, through practice, to integrate more of our neural nets—aka our brains—and do all kinds of stuff that normies can’t do.”
“Telekinesis, telepathy, prescience…” Cal listed some of the things we’d found from googling Greater-Thans.
“Some of us can control electricity—cause blackouts or power surges,” Dana said, nodding. “Some G-Ts can even deliver an electrical charge with their bodies. Some control fire or water or wind. Some are just plain freaking-crazy empathic. The list goes on and on. Sometimes talents translate into normal-seeming things. An ability to play the piano or learn languages. And it’s always an individual thing.” She looked at me. “You won’t develop the same abilities that I have—even with intense practice.”
“So…how will I know what my skill sets are?” I asked.
“It’s kind of touch and go,” Dana replied.
“Minus the touching part,” Cal offered.
“Stupid and cheesy,” I muttered, and Cal blew me a kiss.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Milo run a hand through his shoulder-length hair. Dana looked at him. “Don’t worry, I’m getting there. This is a lot for her.” She smirked at me. “Milo got all excited when I told him what you’d smelled. The fish, the sewage.”
Milo gave Dana an exasperated look. And all I could think was, She’d told him about me?
“Are you a Greater-Than too?” Cal asked him.
Milo shook his head. “I’m nothing special.”
I caught another whiff of vanilla and wondered why I didn’t believe him.
“It’s all trial and error, Sugar Plum,” Dana said. “Figuring out what you can and can’t do. I got my powers when I was ten, and I’m still learning what I’m capable of. I wish the training was as simple as doing push-ups—you do the work, you get the muscle? But there are some G-T things—a lot of G-T things—that I just can’t seem to do.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I can’t read minds,” Dana said. “God, how I wish I had telepathy. But it’s not my thing. I can tell you how many people are in a building as I approach, or how many rats are in this room. Two, in that corner.” She pointed.
“Rats?” I said my voice going up an octave.
Milo flashed the light into the corner, and it caught the shining eyes of, yes, one, two rats.
“Ew!” I leaped to my feet.
“Begone!” Dana commanded, and they turned and ran away.
Milo followed them with the light, all the way out of the room.
“That was cool,” Cal said as I slowly sat back down.
“If you don’t mind, I wanted to ask you about those smells,” Milo said as he put the light back. He had been so quiet until now that his voice startled me, and I j
umped again.
Dana smirked at my display of nerves. “It’s rumored that some G-Ts can actually smell emotions.”
“I can do that,” I said without thinking. Immediately I covered my mouth, shocked. Could I really do that?
Calvin was looking at me like I was crazy. “Girl, what are you talking about?”
“That sewage smell in Sasha’s room,” I said. “I smelled it—you didn’t.”
Milo nodded.
“And the fish smell in the Sav’A’Buck,” I continued. “You didn’t smell that, either.”
“What good does it do to be able to smell emotion?” Cal asked. “No offense to your nose, Sky, but if I were a Greater-Than, I’d choose invisibility or maybe shooting lightning bolts from my fingertips.”
“But it’s not a choice,” Dana said. “We don’t get to choose. We are who we are. And Sky’s apparently smell-sensitive.” She turned back to me. “We’ve heard stories about girls smelling things like cinnamon, cloves, garlic, sewage”—she checked them off on her fingers—“vanilla, fish… And the reason it’s a cool power to have, despite what Scooter thinks, is that it gives you insight into the manifest emotions of the people around you. Imagine being able to walk into a room and know with one sniff that the people in there want to kill you.”
What kind of rooms did this girl walk into?
Milo cleared his throat. “Manifest emotions are the basics—love being the biggest because it covers so much ground.”
“Maternal love, friendship and loyalty, attraction and desire,” Dana listed. “Fear is the opposite of love, by the way. Most people think hatred is, but it’s not. Fear and grief create the more complex anger and hate.”
“The fish smell is fear,” I realized. How did I know that?
But Milo was nodding. “And the sewage…?” he prompted quietly.
I answered with hesitation. “Evil.”
Dana was nodding now too. “The smell of sewage has been linked to evil. For the record? Pure evil is completely devoid of all human emotion. So you’re smelling a lack of humanity—without even the basic emotions present.”
My head was spinning. But this seemed like the perfect time to ask: “Cal and I read about G-Ts online. That they—we—turn into sociopaths, that we lose our ability to relate to…” I didn’t know what to call regular people.
But Dana did. “Normies?” she said. “Yeah, that’s total bullshit. The few normies who know about G-Ts tend to be afraid of us, so they turn us into scary monsters.” She made big claw hands, and her shadow behind her on the wall was actually kind of awful. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Bubble Gum. In fact, you could use some toughening up.”
I wasn’t convinced, and Milo seemed to know that. “It’s a big responsibility, but with the right training, you’ll be okay,” he told me with kindness in his eyes.
I thought about that vanilla smell I’d noticed when Milo had sat down, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. I also had no idea where I was supposed to go for the right training. It wasn’t as if I could pop over to the local G-T Technical School for a class or two.
I looked at Cal, and I knew he was antsy because it was getting late. His mom was awesome, but even awesome had its limits. And I still hadn’t gotten any real answers about Sasha. So I reluctantly changed the subject. “Back to Sasha. Are you saying that people—normies—kill G-Ts because they’re scared of us?” It still felt weird saying us.
Dana shook her head. “It’s way worse than that.” She stared at the flashlight intently. The light flickered a little and then became brighter. “Okay. I don’t know exactly what goes on in our bodies, but apparently we have some special enzyme in our blood that normies don’t. You won’t find it running through Milo’s body or Scoot’s, and probably not even your mom’s. But there is a way to extract that enzyme from a G-T’s blood and cook it along with some other awesome ingredients. The result is an illegal drug called Destiny,” Dana continued.
“Seriously?” I said. “Destiny is made from…” It was too awful. I couldn’t say it.
Dana could. “Our blood,” she confirmed. “And I guess you already know what Destiny is.”
“We know,” Cal said grimly. “Addictive, deadly, expensive.”
“Really expensive,” she said. “And now you know why.”
Again, I did the math. “So you think Sasha and Lacey were killed for this enzyme that’s in their blood”—an enzyme that was in my blood too—“by the people, whoever they are, who make Destiny.”
“Give the girl a prize,” Dana said.
I shook my head, because it still didn’t quite add up. “If they wanted Sasha’s blood, then why was there so much of it in the back of her father’s truck?”
“My theory,” Dana said harshly, “is that they grab girls like Lacey and Sasha—and you—and they bring ’em to their lab to bleed ’em out, and then they dispose of their bodies somehow. I don’t know how, but they make ’em disappear. Probably because if they showed up exsanguinated there’d be too many questions.”
I swallowed hard, imagining Sasha’s bloodless body tossed in some overflowing landfill, never to be recovered.
“They somehow extract the enzyme from the blood,” Dana continued. “And after the enzyme’s out, they use the blood to frame the most likely suspect—the girl’s father. Whom they’ve kidnapped, so that Daddy mysteriously disappears at the same time the little girl vanishes, right?”
“Oh, my God,” I said.
I smelled more vanilla, and I glanced at Milo. He was looking at me. He was always looking at me. I was starting to wonder if I had something stuck in my teeth or if I had my shirt on backward.
“When police are investigating a crime like this, their first suspects are always the immediate family members.” Calvin finally seemed convinced.
“So it was an easy frame.” I looked down at the manila envelope that Cal was still holding. “One they’ve done before.”
“Yeah,” Dana agreed.
“So your plan is to find Edmund—Sasha’s father—before the police do.” I looked from Dana to Milo and back. “I want to help.”
“Whoa,” Dana said. “Bubble Gum, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you’re untrained. You and Skippy would be more of a hindrance.”
“So train me,” I said, looking to Milo for support. For once, he was looking at Dana, one eyebrow slightly raised.
“No.” Dana swiftly stood up. “I’m done.”
I stood too. “Done following me? That’s why you were at the Sav’A’Buck, right? Because you’ve been following me?”
She shrugged. “I thought you might know something. I knew you were Sasha’s babysitter, and I could tell you were a G-T, but…I realized, back in the Sav’A’Buck when you didn’t understand what I was saying, that you were clueless—and completely untrained.” She looked over at Milo, who had slowly gotten to his feet too.
“Milo here made me reach out to you—to warn you to keep your powers on the DL. And I’ve done that. Consider yourself warned. Go home and lie low, Sugar Plum. When it’s time for college, if you live that long, think about Boston. There’s a super-secret G-T training center up there. They’d accept a girl like you in a heartbeat. As for here and now, I’m gone.” She headed for the door, but Milo didn’t follow her. There was impatience in her voice when she turned back. “Milo…?”
He just looked at her.
Cal spoke. “At least give us your cell numbers, in case we need to reach you.”
“Yeah,” I said, chin high as I glared at Dana. “In case we find Edmund before you do. Because I’m not going to stop looking—for him or for Sasha.”
“You really think we have cell phones?” Dana scoffed. She looked at Milo imploringly. “You don’t honestly want to babysit Goo and Gah here, do you?”
“She can smell evil,” Milo said quietly. He w
as talking about me. “And if you train her, the way she wants? We won’t be babysitting for very long.”
And there we all were, in the silence of that old movie theater, as Dana and I tried to stare each other down. I was not going to be the one to look away, regardless of the freaky color of her eyes.
Cal broke the silence. “I kinda need to get home,” he said to Milo as if he’d identified the boy as the only other sane person in the room. “Are you and Ms. Crazy Pants camping out here?”
“No,” Milo answered him. “We tend to keep moving, never staying in the same place for very long.”
Even though Dana and Milo weren’t that much older than Cal and me—they both looked to be about eighteen, maybe nineteen at the most—it was clear that they didn’t have a mom—insane or other—waiting for them at home.
It was also pretty clear from that we that Dana and Milo were together. Together together. But really, what did I expect—that Milo wouldn’t be madly in love with a girl like Dana?
“So what’s the best way to get in touch?” Cal asked.
Milo chuckled a little. “Would you believe me if I said all you have to do is want us to show up, and we’ll show up?”
“I thought Hot Shot wasn’t telepathic,” Cal said.
“It’s not quite the same thing.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
Dana blinked first. “Meet us tomorrow at noon,” she finally said. “The Lenox Hotel, downtown Harrisburg. Bring pictures—printed photos—of Edmund Rodriguez. Wear shoes you can run in and a Kevlar vest if you have one. And don’t be late.” She turned and walked out of the theater, and I could still hear her when she added, “Jesus, I’m going to hate this.”
Chapter Ten
“Would you rather,” Cal said on Sunday morning as we headed into the heart of Harrisburg, “projectile vomit or develop sudden, uncontrollable Tourette’s while on a blind date?”
I’d made it home last night and gotten into the house without Mom waking up. This morning as I’d nearly collided with her in the kitchen, I’d been tempted to ask her if the whole stacked-up-pillows-beneath-the-covers thing had really worked, but obviously that would have defeated the purpose.
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