HEAR

by Robin Epstein

  “If the pizza’s really that good, I want to go too,” Dan says.

  “No,” Mara snaps. “We don’t know how much time they have to get this right, and any outside interference could throw things off. We can’t risk it at the moment.”

  Dan crosses his arms over his chest. “Fine. But you guys better bring me back a slice or two, okay?”

  I look at Pankaj. Did you put the thought of trying that in Mara’s head?

  I definitely would have if it had occurred to me. Then out loud, Pankaj announces, “We should get going.”

  I nod, not knowing which of my feelings to trust, and walk over to Alex, whose cheeks are still wet.

  “ You’re going to be okay,” I say, squeezing his arm. “ You’re going to find someone else who’s even better and who appreciates you for who you are.”

  “Thanks, Kass.” He forces a smile. “I know I have to do a better job getting my emotions under control. I just . . . I know it’s ridiculous. I hardly knew her. This is just the way I am. We all have our stuff, right?”

  I nod. “That we do.”

  As soon as the door to the student center closes behind us, Pankaj says, “Well this is an outcome I didn’t expect.”

  “No kidding. And that Mara is telling us to do this? You think she knows what we were really doing?”

  Pankaj is nodding before I even finish the question. “Oh, she definitely knows what’s up. Alex may be the best telepath—when he’s channeling things properly—but Mara’s the one with the best understanding of the way it all works. If anyone can see the order behind things, it’s Mara. She’s tuned in on that deep Jungian level, the particle level.”

  I’m now too curious not to ask. “So what did she tell you when she gave you your reading?”

  We walk in the direction of the Henley Gardens, and since we don’t have a particular destination, this seems as good a place as any.

  “She nailed my family, knew about some really tough stuff with my sister, Nisha,” Pankaj says. He steers us to a bench that’s partially obscured by the branches of a dogwood tree and brushes away the fallen petals before we sit. “She kept mentioning how important my mom was, and that I needed to listen to her.” He rolls his eyes. “And then she said that I’d meet a dangerous girl who’d try to seduce me in a secluded wooded area.”

  “Dangerous, huh?” I say, cuffing him on the arm.

  “She was pretty adamant about this girl bringing about my demise.”

  I catch a slight waver in his smile, and the expression betrays his confidence. He’s wondering if I’m the threat. “Am I scaring you?”

  “ Yeah . . . but in a good way.”

  We say nothing for a moment, looking around at the flowers and shrubbery and trees and everything that is not each other. The fact that we need to get back to the “place” we were, as Mara put it, consumes us—and I think it’s fair to say we’re both terrified. I’ve started feeling shy and self-conscious on top of that, wondering if Pankaj has ever truly been attracted to me or if he and Alex just came up with a set of lines together. I’m midspin in this wheel of insecurities when I realize Pankaj is staring at me.

  “What?”

  He doesn’t answer. Instead he simply leans in and kisses me. When I pull back, thinking I should apologize for something (though I’m not quite sure what), he puts his arms around my waist and pulls me close. The gesture makes me feel singular, special. Doubt dissolves. I close my eyes and feel the heat radiating between us.

  Then I start smelling smoke. The vision comes: flames, curling paper; sparks and shards flying skyward. The smell is so pungent that my eyelids squeeze tighter on instinct to prevent the smoldering ash from getting in. I hear Pankaj trying to communicate something over the roar of the inferno.

  Body.

  “Body?” I cry out loud.

  “ Yes!” he says. “Pea! Body! The library . . . Peabody Library’s on fire.”

  We start running across campus in the direction of the library. I fish my cell out of my pocket and call 911.

  “Nine-one-one; what’s your emergency?” a nasal female voice answers.

  “Fire! There’s a fire at Peabody Library on the Henley campus.”

  “Fire, ma’am?” the operator responds calmly. “I’ll send the fire department over right now and alert the campus authorities. Can you tell me where it started?”

  I pull the phone away from my mouth and ask Pankaj, “Where’d the fire start?” He shakes his head at me.

  “Ma’am?” the operator presses.

  “Sorry, I don’t know. But please come quickly.”

  “Hang up,” Pankaj whispers. I follow his order. “Good,” he says. “I was worried that you were going to say it hadn’t started yet.”

  “Has it started yet?”

  “I don’t know,” he says out loud. Silently he adds, But if there’s any chance of salvaging what we have here, let’s hope not.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In the distance we hear the scream of a fire engine. We’re out of breath when we arrive in front of Peabody, and I crumple from our sprint, grabbing my knees with my hands.

  Pankaj looks at the building, pacing around me, elbows out with his hands on his waist. “We should go in . . . yeah?”

  I can’t tell if he’s asking or telling. I don’t see anything that looks like it’s on fire, and though I pick up the scent of something in the air, I don’t think it’s smoke. “I don’t normally advise running into a burning building, but I don’t think anything’s burning yet.”

  “So we should go in . . .”

  Again the statement, which is maybe a question, dangles between us. The wail of approaching sirens makes it progressively harder to think.

  “It’s probably our last and only chance,” I say. “Let’s do it. Let’s go.” I walk to the library’s door and hold it open for Pankaj. “After you.”

  “ You know I’m going to deduct points for sending me into an inferno first. . .”

  Weirdly, everything seems normal as we enter the lobby. Students are reading in the reference room on the left; librarians are scanning books at the checkout counter; and grad students and professor types are milling around, looking a lot less happy than they should. For everyone else—those who don’t know “better”—this is a day like any other.

  Behind us, the library doors smash open.

  We turn and watch eight firefighters decked in long black coats and pants piped with yellow-orange reflective tape as they stomp into the building. They consult with the guard at the front then disperse in teams of two.

  “They’re doing a size-up,” Pankaj whispers. “Checking things out to see what they’re dealing with. Is there anything else we can do at this point?”

  I look around, and as far as I can tell, we’ve done everything we can. “Since the fire department is already here, should we take another look at the microfilm?”

  Pankaj nods.

  A minute later, as we enter the Special Collections Room, we see that Erika’s on duty. She smiles as we approach the desk.

  “Hey, Punk! Hi . . . you,” she says to me. “I’m sorry. You know, I don’t think I ever caught your name. I hope you’re feeling better?”

  “It’s Kass, and yeah, thanks. Feeling much better,” I answer. “Alex isn’t doing so well, though.”

  “Ah.” She purses her lips. “He told you I ended things.”

  “Kind of came spilling out of him,” Pankaj responds.

  Erika shrugs. “I’m sorry; I know you’re friends. He’s just so intense. He wouldn’t leave me alone. He was here all the time, and he—” She stops herself, possibly realizing that pleading her case to us isn’t the right thing to do. “I just thought it was fairer and kinder to end things before he got attached.”

  Too late, I think to myself.

  “Anyway,” I say, �
��we’d like to take a look at the microfilm for the US Army Research Institute archive.”

  A strange smile crosses her face. “Funny, there’s been a lot of interest in those things recently. I just checked two boxes out for some older gentleman who was here earlier.”

  Pankaj stiffens beside me.

  “ You wouldn’t happen to remember his name, would you?” I ask.

  “Not off the top of my head, but I can find out. He was a bit of a wanker actually.” Erika walks over to the computer and types an access code. “C. Figg.”

  I turn to Pankaj. Why was Chris Figg here?

  Strange, Pankaj instantaneously replies.

  “How many boxes can we take at once?” he asks Erika.

  “Officially two.” She leans across the desk then whispers, “But being an FOE grants you special privileges.”

  “A foe?”

  “Friend of Erika.”

  “We’ve got FOEs in high places,” Pankaj mutters.

  “Every FOE says that,” Erika replies with a wink.

  She and Alex have the winking thing in common, at least. Maybe there’s hope for the two of them yet . . . But before I allow myself to get more distracted by wondering if butterfly-beautiful Erika is now flirting with Pankaj, or allow myself to get irritated by the possibility, I clear my throat.

  “We’d love to take a look at however many you can snag without getting yourself in trouble.”

  Erika nods and heads back to the cabinet. Two firefighters enter the Special Collections Room while her back is turned. They sweep through the space rapidly, seeing neither smoke nor fire. “Here you go.” She hands a few boxes of microfilm to Pankaj and me. “ You know how to use the fiche reader . . . ?” Her voice trails off, her puzzled eyes now on the firefighters who are regrouping in the library’s main lobby.

  “ Yeah, thanks,” I reply. I walk to the reader, drop my bag, and sit down. “Too bad Alex freaked her out,” I whisper to Pankaj. “She actually seems very cool.”

  He grunts in agreement. I haven’t even gotten the microfilm out of the box when Pankaj suddenly grips the back of my chair.

  “Oh no!” he says, alarmed. “They’re gonna leave.”

  “What?”

  “The firemen didn’t find a fire, so they’re going to leave. Look.” He nods in the direction of the picture window. Two of the firefighters are still conferring in the middle of the lobby, but the rest are trickling out the front doors.

  “What do we do? We should keep them here . . . right?”

  “I don’t know.” He looks as stumped as I feel. “What if this is like a Mara-versus-the-tsunami scenario? Did she tell you about that? She started getting visions a month in advance. We could be off by a month . . . or more.”

  He’s right. Of course he’s right.

  I’m hit with a woozy wave of embarrassment. That possibility hadn’t even dawned on me before. I grip my stomach, trying to massage away the sick juice that’s now churning inside me.

  “ You’re really white,” Pankaj says.

  “Excuse me?” I manage to croak. “My whiteness has nothing to do with my ditziness per se—”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “I mean all the color just drained from your cheeks. You look like you’re going to pass out.”

  When he says this, it clicks. My gut isn’t churning out of embarrassment or anger; it’s warning me: danger looms. “It’s soon . . .”

  “When?”

  I shake my head in frustration.

  “Understood,” he says. “At least you’re getting something. I’m not getting anything.” Pankaj chews his lip. “We need the firefighters to stick around. And if we want them to stay, we’re going to need to give them a reason.”

  “ You think we should tell them about our vision?” I ask, not wanting to.

  “No, no chance they’d believe us. I think we need to give them a real reason to be here. We need to start a fire. Just something small. Easily containable.”

  My head shakes before I can get the words out. “No, absolutely not. That’s a terrible idea. Plus, do you know what would happen if we got caught?”

  “Kass, when has that ever been a concern of yours when you were trying to do the right thing?”

  I stand and pocket the microfilm I’m holding. “Okay, fine, so then one of us has to find an out-of-the-way spot with no surveillance cameras.” Strange how that happened so fast—I’m not only going along with his stupid plan; I’m now the one engineering it. “The other needs to convince the firefighters that there’s a blaze they missed in their walk-through.”

  Pankaj massages his temples.

  “What?”

  “I just had an awful thought. What if our fire gets out of control? What if our fire is the one that becomes the inferno we saw, and our fire is the one that kills people?”

  I flash to what Uncle Brian mentioned about the “imperfect” nature of ESP and incidents with tragic consequences—probably just like this one—where owing to “failures of intelligence,” the worst conceivable decisions were made. Are we really about to risk doing the same?

  “No, you’re right. We can’t do it, it’s too risky. And insane.”

  “Okay.” He nods. “Okay. But what other option is there?”

  I see flashing lights. I turn my head to look for the police car arriving on the scene. But there isn’t one. When my head begins to thunder, I know the flashing lights are appearing only in my field of vision.

  “Kass?”

  I shake my head. “It’s near. Something’s going to happen very soon. I think you’re right. I think the only way we can stop a major crisis is by starting a mini one.” The trolley problem pings through my mind: If you kill an innocent man by pushing him onto the tracks of an oncoming train, you can save five other people from certain death. Do you do it? Rationally, the answer is yes. But that doesn’t make shoving that poor guy in front of the train any easier. “Which part do you want to do?”

  “ You’ll have more luck convincing the guys to take another look around,” Pankaj says. “So I’ll try to find a place where—”

  “Bathroom,” I interrupt. “No security cameras, no books.”

  He nods. “Give me as much time as you can to find the right spot.” He starts walking away, then quickly turns back. “Problem.” He flips his empty pockets inside out. “How am I supposed to start a fire?”

  I reach into my bag and pull out the Zippo lighter.

  Pankaj almost smiles as he takes it. “That thing I said about you being a badass? Namaste. The light in me bows to the lighter in you.”

  We head for the door of the Special Collections Room. I wave at Erika and mouth, We’ll be right back. She nods. I watch as Pankaj takes the staircase down to a lower level, then study the firemen for a moment as I feel the adrenaline coursing through me. My heart beats fast; if I’m going to do this, I have to do it now.

  “Excuse me!” I call out, running for the firefighter who looks most senior, the one wearing the red helmet.

  He turns his head as he’s pushing through the door. “ Yeah?”

  I follow him as he walks outside where his men and truck are waiting. “So the fire’s out already?”

  “There was no fire,” he replies. “False alarm.”

  “But I saw it.” Not exactly untrue. I stare directly into his eyes. Fire in the C-floor women’s bathroom. Fire in the C-floor women’s bathroom. “That’s why I was asking. I didn’t see any of your guys go down to the C floor.”

  He looks from me to the fire truck. “ You guys hit the C floor, right?”

  “ Yeah, Captain,” one of the men replies. “Of course.”

  Fire in the C-floor women’s bathroom. Fire in the C-floor women’s bathroom.

  The captain’s eyes widen, and he turns back to the library. He stares at the building for a minut
e then charges for its door.

  “Captain?” the guy yells. But the captain doesn’t answer. Instead he throws the door open and rushes back inside because he suddenly has the idea that there’s a fire in the C-floor women’s bathroom. Within a fraction of a second, several of the other men have mobilized and rush back into the building. Following them in, I watch them run down the stairs. After what feels like an eternity, Pankaj comes back up.

  “Where?” I ask.

  “C floor.”

  I feel elated, until I realize I’ve made a very stupid error: he wouldn’t have gone into the women’s room. “C-floor men’s room?”

  “ Yes. And no.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I lit some paper towels, but . . . I couldn’t do it.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I threw them in the sink. I couldn’t stop thinking that I’d wind up setting the fire that would kill people, and I . . .” He trails off.

  I close my eyes. My stomach flares in pain. This was so incredibly foolish; Pankaj was right to try to stop me. But it’s too late now. We screwed up. The firefighters are stomping back up the stairs, boots heavy on the steps, and the captain is heading directly for me, his face twisted in a scowl.

  “We found charred paper towels in one of the sinks,” he snaps. “But that wouldn’t produce enough smoke to set off an alarm. So unless you set them on fire yourself, I’m not sure how you’d know that anything was on fire at all.”

  Neither Pankaj nor I answer. I am staring at the floor now, my pulse pounding in my ears.

  “Falsely reporting a fire is a criminal offense,” the captain is saying. “And setting a fire is arson, which is a felony.”

  Pankaj clears his throat. “Sir, I’m sorry. You have to—”

  Pankaj’s lips keep moving but the sound of his voice is replaced by a thundering boom that rips through the air. It’s followed by the sound of shattering glass and collapsing debris. The floor rocks beneath my feet. My eyes widen; the side windows of the library have been blown out in a thunderclap of destruction. Instinctively, I wrap my arms around my face, one over my eyes, the other covering my nose and mouth.