CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

SOMEHOW I MANAGED to drive the last several blocks to Congress Avenue without further incident. I pulled Marisol’s Camaro to the curb and shut off the engine three blocks south of the bridge.

I couldn’t shake the red eye and the exploding traffic light. Dear Lord, if the twitch somehow unlocked telekinetic abilities, maybe everything up to this point had been me. At the lab, at my house. The minivan. My background mind flashed, showing the crushed van, not rusting in the desert sand but smoking on the sidewalk in front of my neighbors.

The color and make were familiar. My gut lurched halfway up my throat. The van belonged to the Claxtons. I buried my head in my hands. No way anyone survived inside the wreckage, but it couldn’t have been me. Then I remembered the way Marisol had looked at me in the truck, like I was the threat. She’d seen the moments from the lab I’d blocked out.

I opened the door and stood in the street. A car honked before driving around. My background mind chattered, swarming me as if the pavement were alive, teaming with roaches. I had to do something, or risk becoming completely inhuman. Maybe it was too late. Maybe this was the game changer I’d already embraced. I grasped at the final thread of my humanity—Evie.

I buoyed my conscious mind with the nursery rhyme I had used to put Evie to sleep during our first years together. Both of us uneasy with the other, we’d tried our best to be a family. The simple, ingrained words served as focus enough to keep the surging mental current from overwhelming the rest of me.

Hush little baby, don’t say a word.

Halos grew around the street lamps until the air itself rattled. A van approached from the north, stopping in the middle of the bridge. I started to jog. The ground shook with each footfall. My boots on the damp pavement were tiny explosions. Still a few hundred feet away, I heard the woman, Adel, talking to someone else in the van. I couldn’t decipher her words from the echoing slap of my soles. At the edge of the bridge I slowed, waiting for the next move.

And if that mocking bird won’t sing.

Adel stepped from the van, waving me forward. Before I could comply, the van spiraled upward, fifty feet above the bridge, and froze in mid-air.