I’m back in my chair long before Mr. Dysart returns. “All right, Kalea confirmed your story. Just, Mason, next time get a visitor’s pass, okay? The safety of the kids here is my first priority, and it’s not like you left on, you know, the best of terms.”
“Again, really sorry, sir, just wasn’t thinking.” I point at the plushy cloud on his desk, and he hands it to me.
“Hope whatever Kalea’s got turns out to be nothing. She sounded pretty good on the phone.”
I wave goodbye to the security guard and go back outside and fish the Beretta out of the trash can with my back to the cameras. Back in the car, I toss the plush cloud to Kalea in the back seat as I climb behind the wheel. She clutches it to her heart. “You let Mr. Dysart catch you?”
“Sorry, sue me. Maybe you should’ve mentioned this kid was voted Ex-Student Most Likely to Come Back and Shoot Up the Place.”
“You were the one so gung ho to look like him. Can you go back to looking like yourself, please?”
“Not quickly enough.” I lock eyes with her and effortlessly shift from Mason Miller’s form back to what Clark calls my “angry ghost” form: white skin, red eyes, and all. She visibly shivers. My stomach grumbles. “What’d this guy do to you that got you so upset, anyway?”
“None of your beeswax,” Clark barks.
“I never said he did anything to me,” Kalea snaps. “But it’s not important right now. We need to get to a high, isolated spot . . .”
“What about the castle,” her brother asks her.
“Yeah, that could work. Squire’s Castle, in the county park. I can tell you the way—”
“No need.” I wave my hand at the steering column, and the car starts. I nod at the GPS, and a point appears in the middle of a mostly green map: 14.5 miles north, about a half-hour drive. I put both hands on the steering wheel but hesitate to move forward.
“What is it?” Kalea asks.
“Do you know other . . . psiots? Ones with different powers? That aren’t telepathy related, I mean?”
“Maybe. Why do you ask?”
“I think . . . for the first time, I think I remembered something. Of the time before you found me. I was in that same wood where I was, but I was fighting someone—someone who could generate, or control, lightning.”
“That’s ‘electrokinesis,’ Holmes,” says Clark.
“They set all the trees on fire, then blasted me . . . and that’s where the memory ends.”
“Why would you be fighting another psiot?” Kalea asks.
The question makes my spine squirm. I pop the brakes and drive off as if I can peel away from having to answer it. “How do you know the other psiot didn’t start it?”
“‘Lightning can heat the air it passes through up to fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit,’” Kalea reads off her phone. “That’s five times hotter than the surface of the sun, apparently.” She holds up the web page. “Powers wiki.”
“Can we trust that site? Bunch of wannabes,” Clark scoffs.
“It’d explain why those trees all around you got flash-fried without setting the rest of the forest on fire,” Kalea says.
I don’t say anything. I just drive to where the GPS tells me. On the way we pass a supermarket. I stop in to fill the trunk with all the snacks I can find: Pringles, Twizzlers, Doritos, Slim Jims, Famous Amos cookies, Fruit Roll-Ups, energy bars, bottles of blue Gatorade. If my body is going to be crying at me every time I use it for something more strenuous than walking, I want to make sure I have plenty of provisions on hand.
“The Bloodshot Diet.” Clark laughs when he sees my arms full of grocery bags. “Eating crap and kicking ass.”
Squire’s Castle is really just the gatehouse part of a castle, a tall tower like a chess rook and some battlements and a big, wide arch that an iron portcullis used to block. Still, dropped on the edge of trees and a picnic lawn in a sprawling county park, it’s pretty cool all the same. As the car rolls up, I have a sense of driving back in time.
“We should probably wait until dark before we try contacting my friends,” Kalea says.
“Snack picnic!” Clark shoots his fist straight up. “Yes!”
We eat garbage food sitting on a picnic table. It’s the middle of the week, so while people come or go in cars and bikes or walk dogs on foot, we mostly have the place to ourselves. After eating a whole roll of red ribbon licorice, Clark starts running around in circles, yelling, high on sugar. Kalea and I watch and laugh at him.
Out of nowhere, she says, “Mason Miller didn’t do anything to me. I did something to him.”
She looks into my face for a response, but I just sit and listen.
“You know the #PowerParty hashtag? It started to really be a thing a year or two ago. When you hit our age, that’s when your psiot powers start to develop. So something people do at sleepovers and parties or whatever, you know, when no parents are around, is dare each other to show off what they can do. Film it, try to make it go viral. A lot of them are basically magic tricks or, like, Ouija board stunts. Some of them, I bet, are altered in computers. The ones that really take off, though . . . are harder to just explain away. Like . . .”
Kalea hands me her phone. The social feed cycles rapidly through the highest-rated videos under #PowerParty. In the first one, a bunch of kids are standing around a marble-topped kitchen island in a posh suburban house, clutching red Solo cups. They lose their minds with screams and OMGs as a curly-haired boy sends his eyeballs under his eyelids and all the drawers open and out fly silverware and steel whisks and such. He shudders as the metal utensils spin in a silver typhoon over the countertop before stabilizing into stacked tiers, like the layers of a wedding cake. Forks and spoons and knives start doing a spinning kick-dance, Disney musical style. The video abruptly ends when a pale-faced, long-haired brunette watching this display faints dead away to the floor.
“My friend Yvonne Wilshire had one, and I was the only one at my school who could really, like, do anything. I networked everyone’s minds and made them, like, do handstands and recite Doja Cat lyrics in unison. The video made it to the #PowerParty hashtag, but it didn’t get many views. I get it; something like that could have easily been faked. But the people who were actually there, I mean, they knew. They knew I took control of them. They knew it was real.
“It freaked some of the people who go to my school out, but mostly everybody there thought it was cool. But Mason Miller, who I knew from lifeguarding at the rec center, who is just, you saw him with his shirt off—I mean, come on, right?”
“He’s a good-looking guy,” I say through gritted teeth.
“I mean, he was into it. He was into me. We started dating, sort of, in, like, a silly tenth-grade sort of way. I could hardly believe it, a guy like him would be into a girl like me. I guess that’s why when Yvonne told me she thought he was cheating on me, I believed her almost instantly. I guess she was into him, or maybe she was just mad I was so happy. You know how people get.
“Yvonne . . . she planted this idea in my head, and I couldn’t get rid of it, you know? The thought of Mason with someone else just ate me up inside. I couldn’t think about anything else. So when we were at the movies, I forget what it was, some superhero thing, his hand was in mine, and I thought, Let me try. Let me see what I find in there.”
She falls silent. “What’d you find?” I ask.
“I didn’t understand what I was yet, you know? It’s not like on TV, you know, where you just close your eyes and scrunch up your nose and hear people’s thoughts like it’s their own private podcast? It’s not like that at all. It’s not even what I can do.
“I network people’s minds, and when I threw open Mason’s mind, it’s like I . . . threw open a window and this big breeze came in and knocked all his thoughts out everywhere. The girls he fantasized about, the mean things he thought about teachers behind their backs, the mean things he thought about his best friends behind their backs . . . and the real reason he was into me.
“He desperately wanted powers of his own. I mean, more than anything else in the world. He was just glued to those #PowerParty videos. All he wanted out of life was to be special. His mom wouldn’t leave him alone about it. And he wasn’t even that into me! He thought maybe, I don’t know, that by being near me he could figure out my trick, right? Or that my power would rub off on him.
“Thing is, like I said, I network minds. Multiple minds. And I accidentally gave those things, Mason’s private thoughts, to everyone else in the theater. They all knew those things. They didn’t know why they knew, but they did. And he knew. And when he looked at my face . . . he knew it was me who did it. He didn’t know how, he didn’t know why, but he knew I did it.
“He ran out of that theater so fast he dumped his popcorn all over me. He basically had a total nervous breakdown. He had to finish out school at a clinic somewhere. Then his parents moved out of the state. I never saw him again.”
She takes a deep breath. “I was scared and alone and I didn’t have anyone to talk to. If I hadn’t found other people like me . . . who could explain to me what I was, and how I could protect myself . . . I don’t know what I would’ve done without them. Those are the same people I am going to contact for you tonight.”
“How did you find them?”
“You don’t find Generation Zero. Generation Zero finds you. Turns out they saw my #PowerParty video. I spent a summer with them at the current hideout in . . . the Rockies, I think. I wasn’t entirely sure. They’ve got to keep moving around because the government is always looking for them. Capture them, study them. PRS, I guess. But I’m luckier than a lot of kids. I realized I could use my powers to wipe the memories of everyone who was at the party. I made sure to delete my video. When summer ended, I could come back and resume my regular life.”
“Until I showed up. Sorry about that, Kalea.”
She shrugs. “Not a big deal. I know there are tons of psiots who can’t hide their powers. People who look . . . uh, you know, unusual, like you. No offense.”
“It’s okay. I’ve seen a mirror.”
“And if I can’t help people who don’t have the advantages I have, I mean . . . what kind of person would do that? Psiots would be the monsters a lot of people think they are.”
Night falls. The streetlamps ringing the parking lot all glow on at the same time. We eat a dinner of extra sugars and naturally flavored meat-like substances. We tell Clark it’s not safe to call Mom five or six more times. The crickets start strumming in the darkness. Kalea complains she’s getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. They’re ignoring me. I wonder why. A self-regenerating body should be an all-you-can-eat buffet to a bloodsucker.
“You want to see something cool?” she asks me out of nowhere.
“Who doesn’t?”
“Don’t check the temperature.” Well, as soon as she says that, her phone instantly chirps in my head with the exact current temperature, but I keep that number to myself. “Just listen to the crickets.”
They chirp everywhere and nowhere, surrounding us unseen, before lapsing into silence for a spell.
“When they come back, count them for fourteen seconds.”
“Why?”
“Because—” Clark starts to say, but his sister shushes him.
“Don’t ruin it. Just do it.”
When the woodland strings section returns, Kalea starts counting off the seconds under her breath. I start counting the chirps. When she gets to fourteen, I’ve gotten to eighteen.
“Now add that to forty. And that’s the current temperature. In Fahrenheit, obviously.”
“Huh. Yeah. Fifty-eight degrees. That’s exactly right. Okay. That is cool.”
“See, you don’t need machines for everything.” She beams. “The crickets have slept all winter as larvae, and now that it’s getting warmer, they come out singing for mates. Longer the summer goes, the more desperate they get, so the faster they sing.”
“They wanna get biz-zay,” Clark says offhandedly. “Nature’s dating app.”
“Cronus taught me that last summer,” Kalea says. “He knows all sorts of weird survivalist stuff like that. He kind of has to.”
When I hear Cronus’s name, my scalp gets warm. I don’t want to think about why. “He your new boyfriend or something?” I say just as I think I probably shouldn’t.
“No,” she says. She’s staring off into the distance. In the dusk I can’t really see her expression. It sounds like the question doesn’t bother her, but also like she wasn’t exactly not expecting it either.
“Kalea, I was thinking—would it be possible for you to scan my mind? Even if you only got impressions, there might . . . there might be some of ‘me’ you could get out of there, you know?”
“No,” she says again, in exactly the same way, and now I get even hotter.
“Jeez, sorry.” I get up off the picnic table before I even know what I’m doing. “I thought maybe you wanted to help me.”
I start to turn away, but she grabs my arm. “No, Bloodshot, sorry. I meant—it isn’t actually possible for me to scan your mind. It’s not that I, uh, tried before or anything, but—it’s kind of involuntary, I’m just aware, at all times, of the minds around me. And yours . . . isn’t one of them. I reach out to your mind . . . and there’s just nothing there. Nothing I can pick up on, anyway.”
“Don’t worry, dude,” Clark says, “you still seem super smart to me.”
I mean, I know I have a mind. I’m not insecure about that. But . . . is psychic shielding another random power granted me by the Power Fairy?
A bad thought comes to me. “That doesn’t make me . . . weird to you or anything? Does it?”
“No! Quite the contrary. It means . . . what happened to Mason is never going to happen to you. I can let my guard down around you. Be myself. It’s kind of awesome, to be honest.”
I nod, and she laughs, letting go of me. “Oh, good, you can smile.”
Once the sun sets all the way, Kalea declares, “It’s time,” and hops off the picnic table. She walks to Squire’s Castle and motions for me to help her up. I lift her by her hips. She digs her sneakers into the jutting masonry and climbs up the rest of the way through an arrow-slit window into the turret of the main spire. I do the same for Clark, then follow up on my own. The conical turret on the castle’s tower is hollow inside, but there’s no direct access to it from the ground. That hasn’t stopped kids from covering the walls with scratched graffiti and littering the floor with cigarette butts and smashed beer bottles.
“Cool clubhouse,” I grunt.
Kalea snorts and sits in a lotus position in the middle of the floor, crossing one leg over the other. “It’s all I’ve got in this nowhere town. For what I’m doing I need height and quiet. And this.” She holds up the plush cloud I got from her locker. “I can get . . . lost, out there.”
“Out there?”
“In the clouds.” She holds the plush in her lap with both hands and squeezes it tight. “I need the tactile sensation, the soft fur, the squishiness, so I remain anchored to the grou . . .”
Her eyes are still open, but her head lolls to the side, like she’s fallen asleep midword. I step forward, reaching out to her, but Clark stops me with a hand.
“Freaky, right? But that’s how she does it. Touching the cloud keeps her brain connected to her body.” Clark sighs. “Before she figured that out, she could stay like that for days. Freaked Mom out. Sent her to all these hospitals for, like, sleep disorders because that’s what she thought it was. But then, finally, Generation Zero found her. I’m the only one she told about them,” he adds, beaming. The little brother let in on the big kids’ secrets. “After she went to Gen Zero camp, Mom just thought she was cured. And we like it that way.”
“Yes, Cronus, it’s me, Cloud,” Kalea says in a strong, assertive voice unlike any I’ve heard out of her mouth before.
“Cronus is in charge of Generation Zero,” Clark whispers. “I’ve never met him. She says he’s really cool, a slightly older kid—like seventeen or something.”
Her head is still resting on her shoulder. “I’ve come across a psiot that needs your help. PRS has already tried to nab him. They’ve tried to nab me and my brother just for knowing about him. No, I don’t think they know about my powers, not yet. Here, I’m opening the relevant memories to you. You see? Yes, that’s him. Yes, he’s with me now. I’m sharing my location with you . . . You will? Yes. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much, Cronus. You’re the best.”
She squeezes the plush cloud extra tight in her hands and straightens her neck. She blinks and shakes her head. “All right! Well, I thought I’d have to argue for you a bit more, but Cronus says he’s sending a first-contact team right away. Thirty minutes or less.”
“Like a pizza,” I say suspiciously. “Convenient. Their headquarters nearby?”
Kalea shrugs. “Doesn’t need to be. Not with some of these kids’ powers.”
The longest twenty-eight minutes of my life ensue—at least in my memory, ha ha. The tower room is tiny and smells like month-old dried booze. I want to wait for them outside in the fresh air, but Kalea tells me to sit tight—that’s what Cronus said.
Whatever help Cronus is going to give me better be worth all this bossing around.