I was outside. The street was dark.
How had the street gotten dark?
I crept along the edge of the building. The space in front of Betty’s had turned into this pool of figures with Leon at the head. They almost looked like a bunch of Vs moving around.
This was why I didn’t leave my hotel room anymore.
Dozens of them were outside Betty’s and it was almost dark. The shouts, the slap of running feet, a sense that people were looking for trouble. I didn’t understand. It was summer, the days were long, I had gone into Betty’s during the late afternoon.
A panicked feeling climbed into my throat. I had lost time again. I had been—
No. I told myself to stop. My Faints needed me. Ricker would be wondering where I was.
Instead of dreading the stairs and the door and his face, I was eager for it now. I would rise above this terrible energy. I would climb three stories and the crowd’s shouts would fade until they stopped altogether, and even if Molly rolled out of her bed on purpose, tonight it would be okay, I would gladly put her back again.
I hurried down the street, away from the crowd. They were fools, going after the cure because someone claimed he heard someone else claim he had struck gold. A small voice in my head wondered if maybe there could be a real cure after all. I shut that thought down. We’d saved so many people and they didn’t listen to us anymore. They didn’t care what a bunch of kids had to say about things, even if we had rescued them.
I stopped at the edge of the sidewalk, at the part where I was supposed to cross over to the hotel. The chorus of shouts continued on one end, faint, but like a humming that threatened to grow and consume everything in its way. There was quiet on the other side, except for a lone cricket. The darkness would only deepen. I could smell smoke from someone’s wood stove. Since the sun was gone so was the heat. Temperatures dropped fast this high in the foothills. My skin prickled into goosebumps.
There was a rustling noise, opposite from the crowd. I snapped my attention to it knowing even as I did that the darkness would keep me from seeing anything. The town always posted sentries and there were only two ways in and out, both guarded. But that didn’t keep my skin from crawling like someone watched me. I had felt that way often in my aunt’s house, before she had died and I had been sent to live with my uncle here in America. Her breath had always smelled like sardines because she loved them, claiming they made her glow and kept her skin young. She was old, but still beautiful, so maybe she was right about that.
I shook my head like a dog shaking off water. Stop it.
I hopped from one foot to the other and started talking out loud, anything to push my aunt to where she belonged, somewhere far back in my brain where she couldn’t come out again. “This is ridiculous. Don’t just stand around here hallucinating. Cross the stupid street and go home.” The memories began to disintegrate. “There, see? You DO know better.”
I crossed the road, the starlight just bright enough for me to avoid the potholes and mounds of weeds that cracked the asphalt. I jumped onto the boarded sidewalk and reached for the stair railing.
A hand came out of the darkness and covered mine, pinching it to the railing.
“Ow,” I said and tried to pull it away. The darkness didn’t reveal much, other than the shadow was taller than me. The hand was rough but small. “What do you want?” Had a Faint escaped? Had a V gotten inside after all?
A hint of honey hit my nose. Jen Huey liked honey. After we’d rescued her, I helped her go through every empty house in town. She’d taken their honey bears and lined them all up on a counter. At first Gabbi had thought she’d gone crazy, but then Jen explained—Faints responded to sweet things better than to anything else. Plus, she liked a dab of it on her breakfast every morning. She thought it made more of her memory-rushes into good ones.
She’d come from Camp Pacific and they’d done something to her. It had addled her brain just a little more than most of us other Feebs. Still, it had been in a sweet way, like the honey.
“Jen, is that you?”
The hand twitched at the name.
“Jen, how’s it going at the hospital? Corrina always says you’re the best with all the Faints. They just seem to calm down and listen when you’re around.”
“You had no right to do that, you know. No right at all.” Her voice dripped with venom, stinging, harsh, cutting me through the chest. It was Jen, even though it barely sounded like her. My skin burned as she twisted my hand in her grip.
“Jen, whatever you’re remembering…it’s me, it’s Maibe. I saved you, remember? I helped you collect honey from all the houses and we lined them all up together and—”
She stepped closer and the sugar smell became stronger. Something shined on her cheek, like she had wiped honey on her face. Her eyes were black pits. Her upper body seemed almost detached from the arm and hand that trapped mine.
“Jen, you need to move around and snap yourself out of this.” Whatever was happening to Jen, it couldn’t be a memory-rush, those mostly stopped you in your tracks while you relived the memory. She must have gotten bitten by a V somehow and sent back into the memory-fevers. The fevers were dangerous, you reenacted things, which was why we always tied each other down when we went through them. It protected everyone else from you.
But if she’d been injured by a V, that meant a V had gotten into town.
Her arm began to shake, making mine tremble. I thought it might mean she was coming back to her senses and I tried to pull away again. Her other arm sprang out of the darkness and wrapped itself in my hair.
I was pulled to my knees. My scalp burned and tears sprang into my eyes from the pain.
“Jen,” I gasped. “Jen Huey. Please stop. I saved you, remember?” But she didn’t listen and a part of me was almost glad. It was painful and maybe I deserved the pain because I had saved her but I hadn’t saved the girl and her family. I couldn’t save myself.
“I know better now,” she said. “I didn’t know then, but now I know and I won’t let you hurt anyone else. I won’t…no, just try to call the police. Just you try—” She released my hand, but then a slap slammed across my cheek, jerking my head back, pulling my hair out.
I began sobbing. “Please stop. Please.” I balled my hand into a fist and tried to force back the vision of my aunt. I would not. I would not let her do this again.
She let go of my hair and I dropped to my knees. Blood dripped cold along my scalp. Hands closed around my throat.
“You will never touch anyone again,” she said.
My aunt’s face swam across my vision.
“I made that promise to myself,” she said.
My throat closed. I tried to scream, but nothing got past Jen’s iron grip. She held me up by my neck. Light began to flash in front of my eyes. My aunt’s face swirled, flattened, swirled back. I reached out and scratched and found her eye sockets and began to press. The burning in my lungs grew unstoppable, mountainous, all consuming. I pressed with all my remaining strength, not sure how much strength I really had left, not sorry that I would make my aunt pay, but sorry that I would die on the sidewalk and Jen would find me and never forgive herself.
Something popped under my right thumb, gushing wetness and heat.
She screamed and screamed and dropped her hands and I tumbled and suddenly my aunt’s face became Jen’s face again. I jumped to her side and caught her before she fell.
“Jen! Jen!” I pulled her back down the street. She was screaming. My muscles shook with her weight and my hands slipped along the slime that coated both of us. Corrina’s makeshift hospital was down this block, wasn’t it? I worked from memory because there was nothing to light the way except shadows.
“We’ll get you help, okay?" I gasped. "It’s going to be okay.” But I knew it wasn’t going to be okay. My mind replayed how her eye popped under my thumb and how she had been my aunt for a split second. I had been both glad and sickened by what I’d done—the choking, the burning in my scalp, the stream of liquid. Her screams. Jen’s horrible, terrible, haunting screams.
What had happened to her? What was happening to all of us?