Chapter 36

THE MOMENT I hear Cop #1 step away from the door, I fling the chair away from the handle and spark the door open, sending it smashing across the hallway. Cop #1 hollers and skitters back, and I take the chance to book it.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Them. People who work for the clinic. People who work for Doctor Heed. There are four of them, dressed in normal clothes like they’re just regular people. Like they’re harmless.

I race down the hall, but I don’t get far before two pairs of hands clamp around me. I scream, kicking and thrashing as They haul me back. They can’t take me. I won’t let them.

They want to steal my power? They want to see it so badly?

Fine.

I scream, and a volley of sparks bursts around me. The people holding me cry out, their hands loosening, and I shove away, holding my burning hands out in case either of Them tries something again. They’re both on the ground, cradling their arms, and I see drops of blood on the linoleum.

Cop #1 and Cop #2 startle back, reaching for their holsters. Instinctively, I swing my hands towards them.

“Stop!” Doctor Heed calls.

The two cops freeze. They haven’t drawn their weapons yet, and I can tell they’re confused. They don’t understand the threat is me, that I’m the reason two grown men are squirming on the ground. And if I so much as see their fingers twitch on their guns, they’ll be next.

“Dany,” Doctor Heed says gently, coming towards me with his leftover goons. My hands are shaking, and I don’t know if I can call another volley of sparks. I can barely take a step back without wavering. But still, I glare at him with the promise of violence, and that’s enough to make him and his goons go still at the edge of the cafeteria.

Doctor Heed puts his hands up. Not a surrender, but to prove he means no harm. I haven’t seen him in two years. That was back when I thought he was nice. He still looks nice, wearing a brown coat over a blue plaid shirt and khaki pants like he’s just somebody’s very kind, very normal uncle.

But I know it’s all a front, and I won’t fall for it again.

“Dany,” he says. “Just stay calm.”

Something’s wrong, something in that thick lullaby drawl, and it takes me a second to put it together. My name. He knows my name, my new name.

That’s not possible.

“How did you know that?” I demand.

He shakes his head a little, frowning. “Know what?”

My eyes dart between him and his goons. “You called me Dany.”

His expression loosens, his lips parted in an Ah. “Well. I know because we found this at the motel.”

He takes out a small book from inside his coat, and I almost gasp.

My diary.

The idea of him reading it makes my skin feel like it’s about to peel away in papery curls. The diary is mine. No one else is allowed to read it. Not even Marisa.

“Give it back.” I want to sound mean and strong, but I sound like a chihuahua trying to bark down a wolf. Doctor Heed is still holding my diary, and I can’t stand it being in his hands for another second. “Give it back!”

“Alright,” he says, and he sounds calm in a way that makes me feel like I’m wrong for being so loud. I kick the feeling away and watch him slide the book across the floor. It stops a few steps away from me, and I pick it up as quickly as I can, keeping one hand pointing at him. I want to flip through it and make sure he didn’t ruin it, but I don’t want to take my eyes off of him.

“Sorry to say, but I did read it," he says.

I hold the diary tight to my chest like that might exorcize Doctor Heed’s sliminess from it.

“It seems like Marisa hasn’t been telling you everything.”

“Shut up,” I say, taking a step back. “I’m leaving.”

“Dany…”

“I’m leaving!”

“Dany, she is lying to you.”

This is the first time he sounds like anything other than a nice reasonable man, and it makes me stop. There’s something like panic in his voice. Like he really, really needs me to listen.

“No, she’s not,” I say.

“She’s lying.”

“You’re lying!” I shout. “You’re just saying whatever you want so I would believe you! So I would go with you! So—”

“So I could cut you apart?”

I clamp my mouth shut, my chest still pumping from shouting. Why would he admit that?

“Dany,” he says evenly, and I want him to stop saying my name. “Why would I cut you apart?”

“Take my power. Experiment on me. Make more of me. I don’t—” I don’t know is what I was about to say, but I don’t need to tell him that. He’s playing mind tricks on me. I can’t let him win that easily.

Doctor Heed shakes his head slowly. His blue eyes are wide, like he can’t believe the barbaric things I’m saying. “No,” he says quietly. “No. No. You…you are special. That power you possess, we have never seen it before, and we will never see it again. We would not waste you like that.”

He takes a step forward, and I take a step back, my hand wavering. “Don’t,” I warn.

He stays where he is, his hands still held up. “Back at the motel? That was quite something. The biggest sparks we’d ever seen. Could you do that before, Dany? Or was that the first time?”

My eyes dodge to the side, just for half of a half of a second. But it seems to answer his question. He nods like it makes a lot of sense, something dark and glistening in his eyes. Sadness.

“We wanted to help you,” he says. “We wanted to train you. Make you stronger. That was always our goal.”

I scrape out a laugh through my teeth. “No, it wasn’t.”

“It was,” he says. “From the very beginning. When we saw what you kids could do, we knew we had to help. You couldn’t go on in life without being able to control it. If you had stayed with us, you would have been able to call those big bright sparks within months of training. Maybe even weeks. And by now, you could have been the most powerful person anyone has ever known.” He spreads his arms and laughs. A wheeze of a laugh. “Dany. Think about what you can do with that power. How many people you can help. How many people you can save.”

I feel my heart tipping towards him, but I yank it back and shake my head. Lies. He would say anything to make me believe him.

But something wriggles in the back of my mind. I had thought the same thing. That if I had trained every day, I would already be powerful. I would already be unstoppable.

And that night, after we escaped from the motel, when I got so mad at Marisa for acting like I shouldn’t have used my power, like it’s a dangerous weapon I should never use...

I was angry because none of it was true. My power saved us.

“That was what we wanted,” says Doctor Heed, the sadness creeping into his voice. “We planned it, for years and years. But Marisa always had a different idea.”

I shake my head. He said always, as if Marisa was part of the planning, as if Marisa worked for him, but that’s not true. She only met him because of Lilian. She only met him after I showed my power.

That’s what she told me.

“She thought it would be too difficult, too time-consuming to train you kids. She proposed that once you showed your power—”

My heart is rattling in my chest. “No,” I say.

“—that we should put you under. Cut you apart. Study your brains. Figure out where this power comes from and figure out how to replicate it.”

“No!” I shout. “She wouldn’t—she wouldn’t—”

“And we did not like the idea,” he says, raising his voice. “We tried to convince her otherwise, but she would not listen. She was putting together a team. She was ready to do it. But that day, that day. We told her we wouldn’t do it. We all rejected her proposal. And she took you, and she ran.”

I shake my head. I want to cover my ears. I don’t want to hear any more of this.

“I feel for her,” Doctor Heed presses on. “I understand her pain. She lost her folks. I lost my wife. But she went too far.”

My pulse hitches. Her parents. “What are you talking about?”

“Her folks. They died in Suddence.” He pauses. “She didn’t tell you?”

I grit my teeth. I don’t want to shake my head. I don’t want to prove him right.

“Suddence,” he says. “The town where she grew up. The town where you were born. Something terrible happened. It killed her parents. It made her sick. Everyone had to leave. But it gave you your power. You, and all the other kids like you. And I think, in her mind, she needed her parents’ deaths to mean something, before her grief ate her alive.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t believe you. She wouldn’t.”

“She didn’t want your power to grow, did she?” Doctor Heed says, gently. “She was keen on keeping your power weak. To make sure you are never strong enough to fight back.”

Hot tears are blurring my vision, and my outstretched hand is shaking uncontrollably now. I try to keep it steady, to push back on what Doctor Heed is telling me. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. Marisa wouldn’t lie to me. She wouldn’t.

“Where was Marisa taking you,” Doctor Heed asks. “Did she ever tell you?”

My voice is weak, and it takes a few tries to say, “Out of the country.”

“To where?”

“Where I’ll be…” A sob crawls up my throat. “Where I’ll be safe.”

“No,” he says. Sadly, like he doesn’t want to tell me this, but someone has to. “Out of the country, where we won’t be able to stop her.”

“No,” I say sharply, like it could cut through the lie. “No. She wouldn’t.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because—” Because I know Marisa. Because she raised me. Because she would do anything to protect me.

But she lies, a voice inside me says. You know she lies. She lied about Lilian. She didn’t tell me about her medicine. She didn’t tell me about Suddence, about where I was from, about why she adopted me. She kept so much from me until she was forced to tell me. What else is she holding back? What else is she lying about?

What if Doctor Heed is telling the truth?

But I think of her crying in my arms, her soft and tear-broken sorry. The way we slept back-to-back since she got sick, how she pinky-promised me ice cream and french fries, how after the motel she hugged me and I hugged her and we laughed through our tears and she promised she would never lie to me again. She wouldn’t lie to me about this. She wouldn’t.

A gunshot blasts through the school, and we all dodge. The bullet shatters a classroom window. The cops and Doctor Heed’s goons whip out their guns and whirl around, firing back, and I see someone duck behind the wall.

Marisa.

“Stop,” I say, but my voice is still weak. “Stop. Stop it!”

I thrust out my hand, and sparks burst against the cops and Doctor Heed’s goons, knocking them aside. Doctor Heed, huddling behind a column, turns to look at me with eyes wide with betrayal.

Marisa takes this chance to shoot him in the shoulder.

He screams, clutching his wound, and I stagger back, my head spinning. He’s on the ground, helpless, and Marisa is…Marisa is…

She’s marching towards me, a gun in her hands and menace in her eyes.

“Marisa,” I say. I’m backing away, without really meaning to. “I…I…”

“We have to go,” she says, catching my wrist. She’s still pale from sickness, and her hand is fever-hot around my arm. For a second, I dig my heels into the ground.

She looks back. “Dany?” She sees my expression, the tears slipping down my cheeks. “Dany, what did he tell you?”

“He…” I can’t find the strength to speak. When I open my mouth again, I begin to cry.

“Listen to me.” She cups the side of my face with her free hand. “You cannot believe anything he says. He will do anything to get you back. You understand? You cannot believe him.”

How much of what he said is true? I want to ask.

How much of what you said is a lie?

But I only nod. A flutter of a nod. More tears trace down my cheeks, hot and scalding.

“Good,” she says, and takes my wrist again. “Let’s go.”