5

The Weather Freak

Early that afternoon, Mira arrived at their cabin with bags of groceries and supplies. The place stood at the edge of the wilderness preserve, on the last stretch of land where private homes could be built. She and Sheppard had bought it shortly after they’d gotten married, a weekend retreat that was private, solar-powered, with its own server, so they were essentially off the grid.

But not really.

Since real estate records in Florida were public, they’d purchased the place under a corporate name—MS Dreams, which was short for Morales/Sheppard Dreams. At the time, she hadn’t had any idea what their common dreams were and she didn’t think Sheppard did, either. But they’d both loved the idea, a takeoff, she supposed, from Spielberg’s DreamWorks. But as the years had passed, as those dreams had begun to clarify, their individual dreams hadn’t coalesced into a common collective dream until those moments after they’d escaped the bridge. She didn’t have any idea where this admission would go from here, but for the moment it was enough.

She hurried around the cabin, putting away the stuff she’d bought in the madhouse that had been Tango Market. She made the beds in the three bedrooms, put out clean towels and fresh bars of soap, made up the sleeper in the living room, arranged the stuff in the fridge for easy access. On the second floor, she pulled down the ramp to the rooftop and walked up into the afternoon sky.

They’d installed the ramp—and the electric chair that hooked to the staircase railing—during the last year of Nadine’s life, when she needed a wheelchair most of the time to get around. She used to love it up here. She had created an herb garden on the eastern side of the roof and every week or so Mira harvested cilantro, lemon grass, mint, basil, and a host of other herbs.

The roof wasn’t flat, not like so many buildings constructed here in the seventies, but it had a flat section that served as a great barbecue area. It boasted a grill, a cabinet for supplies, a built-in cooler, even a canopy to protect against the brutal summer sun. The cooler was solar-powered like the rest of the house and had an ice maker that had been working overtime since this had started and now was jammed with ice.

Mira stocked it with bottled water and other supplies that might be necessary if this area became their first defense. Sheppard had installed spotlights around the periphery and tonight she would turn them on. Just in case. She didn’t like thinking like that, out of a place of fear, a place of Plan Bs and Cs. But the emotion was genuine, and she honored it.

She paused at the formidable wall around this area and gazed out into the preserve and then to her right, across the bay between Tango and Key West, and then toward the lighthouse. Will more of them arrive tonight? Tomorrow? From which direction? What will their abilities be? Chameleon? Shape shifter? Telekinetic?

It sounded like a list for a presentation at a comic book convention. For some reason, comic books reminded Mira she hadn’t been to the bookstore all day. It hadn’t opened today, not many businesses had, but she needed to secure it for the night. She hurried back downstairs, grabbed her bag, and ran out to her car.

She took Old Post Road but traffic came to a complete standstill about a mile from the ferry docks. Some of the cars in the long lines were probably locals who were evacuating. But she guessed the campers, vans, and SUVs loaded with bicycles, kayaks, and canoes were snowbirds trying to get the hell off the island before curfew started. Snowbirds had been evacuating all day, and the ferries, on their return journeys, brought in trucks of supplies to replenish the emptying shelves at the markets, hardware stores, restaurants.

Basically, they were stocking for the diehard holdouts who wouldn’t evacuate and for the feds and local law enforcement and emergency personnel who remained. But who would be around to open those stores? Man those gas stations? How many health personnel had left?

Two traffic cops directed drivers around the line of cars, but it was slow. When she moved past it, the next holdup was at the bottom of the hill, the turnoff for the bridge. It had been completely blocked off by cop cars, trucks, vans, and tractor trailers. But drivers nonetheless had pulled to the side of the road to snap photos.

The afternoon light revealed the gaping hole in the middle of the bridge, at least six miles of it, gone along with cables, struts, siding, sidewalks. The burned-out hulks of cars were being removed by cranes. Coast Guard cutters still churned through the Atlantic waters, searching for bodies and survivors. Workers in yellow hard hats were clustered in several groups, and cops kept urging drivers along, directing them to the right, away from the bridge, or straight ahead.

She remembered what the bridge had looked like after Hurricane Danielle had slammed into Tango in 2005. This was worse. This devastation looked like some massive giant had taken a massive sledge hammer to the bridge and tossed in grenades for good measure. After Danielle, it had taken months for the bridge to be rebuilt.

This might take years.

The scope of the destruction terrified her. They couldn’t defend themselves against something like this, Sheppard was right. What other abilities might these freaks have besides what she’d seen when she’d read Stoner? Beyond what the lightning freak had done?

Hiding out in the cabin was cowardly, yet it might ensure their survival. But suppose nothing happened tonight? Would they hide out in the cabin for another night? And another? It wasn’t like waiting for a hurricane to make landfall.

For a hurricane, you prepared and then the wind and rain ramped up and started howling and pounding. But most hurricanes moved on quickly. Except for Dorian. The night before Dorian was supposed to travel up the East coast of Florida—and then stalled—the bookstore had hosted Bill Homan, author and proprietor of the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull. He had inherited it from Anna Mitchell-Hedges, the adopted daughter of a British adventurer and traveler, F. A. Mitchell-Hedges. She discovered it in the early 1920s beneath the altar of a Mayan temple in Lubaantun, a ruined city in Belize. She was just seventeen at the time.

It was one of the most exquisite objects Mira had ever seen, carved from a translucent crystal, its haunted eyes like portals to other times and worlds. Given the hurricane preparations and warnings about Dorian, the group that had turned out for Homan’s presentation was small. But each person had the opportunity to meditate with the skull and then they had meditated with it as a group. Their intention was to turn Dorian away from the East coast of the U.S. and send it back out to sea to churn endlessly northward to cold waters.

The turning away part worked but the rest of it didn’t. Four days later, over Labor Day weekend, Dorian crashed into the Abacos in the Bahamas. It stalled there with 185 mph winds for forty hours, dumped several feet of rain, and basically wiped the island off the map. Was Dorian a preliminary taste of the climate change that ultimately had necessitated life in domes?

Were these Crows Dorian in human form?

2

Downtown Tango Key was eerily quiet, not many people on the street, most of the shops and businesses closed. Island Grill, one of the spots the weird snow globe had shown, was still open and Mira popped in there first to buy a package of their tacos, the best on the island, and another 12-pack of water. The restaurant area was empty, but the bar was jammed with locals and old-timers who probably would ignore the curfew and the Grill would accommodate them by closing up and continuing to serve them until sunrise.

Pam Gibbons, the TV producer, stood at the other end of the bar, talking animatedly with an older woman with salt-and-pepper hair and a kind of dignified air about her. Mira hoped she could get out of here without Pam noticing her. She already had spoken with the woman and didn’t have any desire to do so again. She wasn’t interested in being in a documentary.

She selected a package of tacos and the water from the wall fridge and hurried over to the other end of the bar, where the register was. The two servers were so busy she had to wait. And wait. By the time a server rang up her purchases, Pam had seen her and hurried over, the older woman beside her.

“Mira, I was hoping to catch you at your store today, but it was closed.”

“With everything that’s been going on, it seemed like the wisest thing to do.”

“Do you have some time now to talk?” She motioned at the older woman. “This is Risa Griffin, the physician who was the Key West coroner in 1985. She autopsied the Crow who had a chip in his leg. I think Ian Rincon told you about that. Risa, this is Mira Morales.”

“A pleasure, but we’ve met.” Risa shook Mira’s outstretched hand. “Years ago, you did a reading for me. It was spot on.”

Mira wished she remembered, but over the years she had read for so many people that if she’d tried to recall every face, every reading, there wouldn’t be any room left on her brain’s hard drive. “How was I accurate?”

“I was going through a divorce at the time and you accurately called the outcome, that I would win fifty percent of everything even if it wasn’t joint property. You also told me there would be four wives.”

“Were there?”

Risa laughed. “Yup. The divorce was the best thing that ever happened to me. You were right about that, too.”

“Let’s walk over to the store and talk,” Mira said. “I’m curious about your autopsy on the Crow back in 1985.”

“And I’ve got a zillion questions for both of you,” Pam added. “Starting with what really happened on the bridge?”

Mira wasn’t in the mood for chatting with Pam, but felt obligated because she had brought O’Hara into Mira’s life, and thus into Annie’s. However, she really wanted to talk with Risa. “I can whip us up a bite to eat and we can talk privately, the three of us.”

“Great,” Pam said. “My crew and I have been out here most of the day, talking to people, shooting footage of the bridge, the ferry dock, the Humvees and Jeeps that rolled into town. Anyone who has seen the YouTube videos isn’t buying the official story about a terrorist attack. The usual conspiracy nuts are all over the place on this one—that the lightning freak was created in a government lab, illegal immigrants are behind it, she was an alien, that it’s all an elaborate hoax that Hollywood enacted because they’re all extreme left-wing liberals.”

“Not an alien,” Risa remarked. “But remarkably different from us.” She paused, looked at Mira. “Ian has kept me in the loop about what’s going on.”

“Explain what you found,” Mira said.

“Nothing like what Ian discovered about the lightning woman. But the man I autopsied in 1985—crow 919—had a nictitating eyelid, much like cats have.”‘

“A third eyelid?” Pam exclaimed.

Risa nodded. “Most species have them, but not humans and only some primates. Usually, it’s large enough to completely cover the cornea. I think of it as a kind of windshield wiper blade that clears away stuff and redistributes tears over the cornea. And maybe it did that for 919, but his third eyelid was darkly tinted, like sunglasses.”

It made a kind of sense to Mira. What she’d seen through the eyes of the dead Crows had caused her to believe that the world outside of the dome was not only toxic, but besieged by frequent and violent tempests, and pounded by sunlight so bright it could blind you.

“What else?” Mira asked.

“His lungs were larger than ours. And then the metallic strip found in his leg bone, with White Crow 919 and the date 2120 on it. In other words, human but changed.”

“Any indication of what kind of ability he had?” Mira asked.

“Nothing. But in 1985, this guy was just a weird anomaly. A fluke. I was twenty-eight years old. I knew there was something important in the discovery, but there wasn’t any context for it. For someone like him.”

“I’d like to show you two a book that may have predicted the dome life,” Mira said. “You may want to reference it on your show, Pam.”

“Really? What’s it called?”

“Mass Dreams of the Future by Chet Snow and Helen Wambaugh.”

“Never heard of it. Have you, Risa?”

“No.”

They entered the store and Mira went into the aisle where she shelved her favorite books. “In the early 1980s, psychologist Wambaugh progressed 2,500 Europeans to the year 2100 and asked them to report on where they were living, what they saw and experienced. Several different scenarios emerged: humanity was living in space stations, in underground caverns, in rustic spiritual communities, or in domes that protected them against the devastated environment.”

“Incredible!” Pam exclaimed.

Mira pulled out two copies of Mass Dreams and handed one to each of them. “Wait a sec,” Risa said, staring at the cover, “I know this story. Wambaugh died before the book was finished and Snow, her assistant, finished it. There’re some maps about how the U.S. will look in the future.”

Mira nodded. “Most of Florida and the East and West coasts are gone, the Mississippi has flooded, the Gulf waters reach clear to the Great Lakes, and the Pacific reaches up through Arizona to Idaho. Now here’s a strange personal note about this book. Several years before it was published, my grandmother, Nadine, led a group of her friends in a progression. I was just in my teens at the time, but she always let me sit in on stuff like this. I saw myself as a tall, bald woman living in a dome because the outside world was so toxic and ruined. When I found the book a couple of years later, I was floored.”

Pam glanced up, frowning. “Do you think that influenced your reading of the stone woman?”

“I hope not.”

“I’d like to buy this,” Risa said.

“Me, too,” Pam added.

“Keep them. Courtesy of the store. How about expressos, ladies?”

“I’d love one, thanks,” Risa said. “But I need to catch the last ferry out. I’ll be in touch.”

They walked to the front door with Risa, then Mira and Pam returned to the cafe. “Where do you think this dome is located, Mira?”

“No idea. But the migration inland from the coasts apparently took years.”

Pam settled at a table next to the window and Mira ducked behind the counter to make their expressos. A breeze had kicked up outside, coming in off the Gulf, and it was starting to cloud over, dark tendrils swirling against the grayish sky. Even here inside the store, the air smelled of rain. Distantly, thunder rumbled.

Mira checked the weather app on her phone, but no rain appeared on the Tango radar or forecast. The radar app showed clear skies. The weather this evening was supposed to be cool and clear.

Alarm whipped through her. She paid closer attention to her immediate environment, things outside the store, her internal climate. She made two expressos, then warmed up a couple of cheese croissants, carried everything over to the table, and sat down. Rain started pelting the window as she talked, explaining what she knew and how she’d discovered it, more details than Pam had asked for or needed, but what the hell. It felt good to talk about it to a virtual stranger, to hear the sound of her own voice trying to make sense of everything. She even told Pam about what she and Sheppard had experienced on the bridge, the visceral terror and horror, and that a chip had been found in the lightning freak’s shoulder.

Pam’s recorder was on, capturing not only what Mira said, but the way the storm was picking up speed and intensity. The wind howled now, rain lashed against the window, the cacophony of this strange storm that had come out of nowhere. This weird, abrupt storm was the source of her alarm.

She stood, rubbing her hand over the fogging glass of the front window, clearing a circle on it. And through that circle, she saw something moving outside and wasn’t sure what it was. She stood up, rubbing her sleeve over a wider area of the glass.

Someone in a jacket, hood raised, stumbled around through the tempest.

Pam stood beside Mira. “Some idiot’s wandering around out there in this storm.”

Mira didn’t get the impression that the person was wandering. Or an idiot. It looked to her as if he or she relished spinning through the storm, arms thrown out, head dropped back, moving steadily up the road. Her cell suddenly rang, Annie’s name came up in the window. Mira took the call but before she could say anything, Annie blurted, “Mom, where are you?”

“In the store with…” Pam, now running toward the front door.

“The dolphins are going bonkers, something’s happening, I’m texting everyone…”

“Jesus, I think one of the Crows is outside,” Mira hissed.

She thrust her cell into her back pocket, grabbed the weapon from her bag, and ran after Pam, now outside, standing in the middle of the street, in a wall of rain. Pam shouted at the man, gestured wildly at the store. The dry store. Her unmistakable invitation to take shelter was met with a single, graceful spin, then he flung his arms into the air, and twirled them counter clockwise.

A tornado appeared in the sky, dark and low and menacing, then it abruptly dropped into the street, and raced toward them. Windows shattered, debris flew, trash cans clattered through the road.

Fuck. A weather freak.

Mira flung open the door, the wind hurled rain into her face. She took aim, fired. The shot pierced the tornado, and now Pam tore back toward the store. Mira darted under the awning, hoping Pam ran toward her. As Mira steadied herself for another shot, a Humvee turned onto the road, a yellow monster that picked up speed.

The weather freak spun toward it, moved his arms in a certain way, hands fisted, and hail the size of basketballs pelted the road, the Humvee, and Pam. She covered her head with her arms and ran faster, the tornado chasing her, hail hitting her, and stumbled. Mira steadied her right hand with her left and took aim. Fired.

But the fucker in the middle of the road evaded the shot and suddenly turned all the rain to ice and grabbed two long spears of it. He hurled one at the Humvee—it struck the windshield and broke—and threw the other at Pam. It slammed into her back and pierced her body all the way through to the front of her chest. Her hands flew to the long pole of ice sticking out of her, then she fell forward.

Mira fired again, repeatedly, emptying the clip, and as the weather freak was falling, the Humvee slammed into him with such force that his body was thrown forward thirty yards.

The storm abruptly stopped—no cold, no ice, no wind, no rain, no tornado, no tempest at all. The afternoon sun was bright, shadows formed against the road. Mira sank to her knees. The gun dropped from her hand, the Humvee stopped just short of Pam’s body. A man in camouflage leaped out—Frank Keel, head of the National Guard troops—and ran over to Pam. He checked for vitals and moved on to the weather freak’s body, checking him to make sure he was dead, too.

He spoke into a radio clipped to his collar, then hurried over to Mira. She was trying to stand, but her legs gave her trouble and he immediately extended a hand. “Are you okay, Mira?”

She grasped his hand and for moments, felt information about him pass into her, but was too distracted to clarify it. He pulled her up. “Yes, I’m okay. But Pam…”

“She’s gone,” he said.

“And that weather fuck out there? He’s dead, right? Since the weather cleared up?”

“Yeah.” Keel paused and looked slowly around, taking it all in. “Once Detective Delgado gets here to pick up the bodies, I can follow you home, Mira. This is one of the areas where some of our men are supposed to be when the curfew starts.”

“In front of my store?”

“No, around the Island Grill half a block from here. That’s where he first appeared.”

“The weather guy… has to go to forensics.”

“I already spoke to Dr. Rincon. That’s why Delgado is on the way.”

Mira felt steady enough to walk now without falling on her face and made a beeline to the weather freak’s body. She crouched beside it, beside him, noting his odd clothing, and ran her hands over his trousers and shirt. They weren’t made of a fabric she recognized, not cotton or rayon, not silk or polyester or any combination of them. She felt something in the right pocket of his trousers, brought it out.

“Mr. Keel…” She held up a small fabric bag. “You want to take a look first or should I?”

He came over, crouched on the other side of the body, took the bag, opened it. He brought out an object that looked like a red laser light identical to the one that drove cats crazy as they tried to leap on it and seize the moving red dot. But when he turned it on, a holographic image of a woman and a young girl took shape.

The woman was tall, completely bald, drop-dead gorgeous. The girl was maybe eight or nine. They held hands, crying—not hysterically, but in a measured way that required great self-control. “Come back to us, Daddy,” the girl pleaded.

“We love you,” the woman said, swiping at her eyes.

Aw, shit. I shot him.

But he had killed Pam, destroyed half the shops on this street, and for what?

Mira’s guilt ebbed.

“You really shouldn’t be removing anything from his body,” Keel said. “Let forensics do it.” He dropped the object in an evidence bag.

Mira resented it. She already had unbuttoned the freak’s shirt. Now she folded the sides back, laying his chest bare. She pressed her hands against the skin there, the skin that covered his heart, skin so pale it was as if it hadn’t met the sun in decades. And in those moments, she saw his life in the dome, one image after another, one compromise after another, so that his family could eat, survive, and perhaps one day escape—if there was somewhere to escape to.

And, as she’d seen initially with the stone statue, he was one of hundreds making their way into the twenty-first. These outliers, psychic freaks, abnormals, White Crows, whatever they were called, were desperate enough to try anything, even traveling back to this century in spite of evidence that the journey might break them, render them crazy, or kill them.

How do you Crows get here? she asked.

The image that came to mind was of a room filled with these people, meditating and using their extraordinary abilities to gather the past around them. They literally pulled it into their experience, just as she’d seen when she’d read the stone statue. A confirmation of an earlier vision.

And Tango was their target. It was isolated, small enough to imagine. They apparently had some information about the island and considered it ground zero in terms of climate change. They hoped to alter the status quo that had led to the mess that was their world, a noble enough intention. Yet, Mira sensed a weakness in all this, something she couldn’t pinpoint, a deeper motive. Hal’s motive, Hal’s narrative. But fuck them for trying to get here by killing hundreds on the bridge and killing Pam as she ran out into the storm to offer the man shelter.

“Mira?” Keel said.

“Let me finish.” She pressed her hands to either side of the man’s head and whispered, “Please help me.”

This time she didn’t feel that information was being blocked from her or that she lacked the skills. It was simply more difficult because the man was dead and the dead didn’t surrender their secrets easily. She counted in her head, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, as though she were trying to measure the distance between lightning and a clap of thunder. She reached eleven thousand before her hands started heating up. And then the story poured through her.

Weather Wizard and Hal meet in a park in the dome. “You’re staying?” Hal asks.

“The resistance needs help.”

Hal slaps his hand against the dome wall. “It won’t hold, Wizard. It’s a futile battle. Join us.”

“No way. You know this journey back may drive us insane, but you’re sending people anyway. Sending the ones who believe in you, early arrivals to pave the way for you and Red or whoever you deem worthy of accompanying you.”

“I should melt you, Wizard.”

“You may be the most powerful among us, Hal, but my tornadoes could suck you up in seconds and chew you up before you could melt me. You’ve got another agenda. Go fuck yourself.”

Hal throws his arms out to his sides. “Hey, go save everyone. Be a hero. But you’ll die trying.”

And the journey had broken the weather freak Wizard and killed him and Pam, and here Mira stood, grappling with the reality that she had shot him.

“Mira?” Keel’s voice, sharp and urgent, then he touched her shoulder, urging her back from Wizard’s body.

Pissed, Mira shrugged off his hand, rocked back onto her heels and stabbed her finger at Keel. “You. Something about you doesn’t add up.” She blurted it and immediately regretted it.

Keel’s brows shot up, throwing his forehead into a chaos of lines. “Yeah? I’m one of them in disguise?”

“Maybe you’d like to be.”

They were at eye level. She could see herself reflected in his pupils. “I find what these Crows can do absolutely fascinating,” Keel said. “They look like us, they appear to be human, but their abilities are so far beyond anything we know that it’s mind-blowing. Have you ever encountered anyone who can control electricity or lightning or whatever it was like the woman who destroyed the bridge? Or who can control the weather? Think about it, Mira. How could these abilities mitigate climate change?”

She brushed her hands against her thighs, pushed to her feet. Keel was still crouched by Wizard’s body, looking up at her. Who the hell was this strange man with an autistic son, head of the 2,000 troops on the island?

“That sounds politically correct, Frank. But you’ve already said you’d like to capture one of them and I think your agenda is to study a Crow like it’s some sort of lab rat.”

His hand moved almost casually to his weapon and rested there. She sensed it was one of those macho reflexive cop things, a show of force, nothing more. But maybe not. Maybe a psychopath lurked inside him, too deep for her to see. “Really?” She stabbed her thumb at his hand. “What’s that about? Hand on the gun and all.”

His eyes held hers for long uncomfortable moments, as though he was considering what she said, then he laughed and stood upright, his hand falling away from his gun. “Anyone ever tell you you’re paranoid, Mira?”

“Sounds like projection. You’ve got something to hide. You shouldn’t have offered me your hand, Frank.”

“Good point.”

“Your day job. You work in a lab. You’re a scientist who researches molecular structures. For a department that hopes to weaponize these abilities if you can duplicate them. Something fucked up like that.”

He looked surprised, then quickly tried to cover it with a laugh. “Yeah. Right. So you’re a paranoid conspiracy nut.”

“You nailed it. That’s me.”

Keel gestured at the van coming up behind them. “There’s Detective Delgado to pick up the bodies. I can follow you home now. Where’re you parked?”

“I can drive myself home. I’m armed, remember? And I need to finish locking up my store.”

The van pulled alongside the Humvee and Delgado got out. He looked at the two bodies, trotted over to Mira and Keel. “You two okay?”

“We’re fine,” Keel said.

“Better than she is.” Mira gestured at Pam’s body.

“The doc is going to need details, but for now, can you help me get the bodies into the van, Frank?”

“Sure thing.”

“I have to lock up the store,” Mira said. “See you at the cabin, Carlos.”

She hurried back into One World Books, troubled by Keel, by the strange, unsettled feelings she had. In the cafe, she unplugged everything. As she picked up the cups and plates with half-eaten croissants on them, she caught sight of her reflection in the glass. She looked like some crazed woman who had stumbled out of an apocalypse, hair wild, eyes wild, everything about her wild and uncertain.

Then her dead husband took shape in the glass, standing just behind her, Tom with his dark hair, his handsome face. Mira spun around so fast the plates and cups dropped to the floor, shattering, and the half-eaten croissants skittered away like startled roaches. Tom still looked so transparent she could see through him to a table and chairs.

“Tom.” She could barely speak around the pounding lump in her throat.

When he spoke, his voice was soft, but audible. “Elementary school, the girl who bullied you, Mira. Remember? You’re going to need the tool you used.”

Just as quickly as he appeared, he faded away. She was left standing there, sobbing, shards of the shattered plates and cups at her feet, the old wound of his death more than twenty years ago tearing open her heart again. And what the hell had he meant about the girl in elementary school?

Furious at herself for getting involved in this by reading the stone woman, at Tom for offering some stupid riddle she couldn’t decipher, she kicked the remains of an expresso cup across the cafe. Then she grabbed her purse, turned off her cell, swept Mass Dreams of the Future off the table where Pam had left it, and locked up the store. She fled out the back door to the parking lot.

3

What now? What the hell was she supposed to do now? Cower and hide in the cabin and wait for the apocalypse? Read the dead weather dude? All she wanted was for her life to return to normal. But what was normal?

For the last six years, normal had been running the bookstore, scheduling events and author signings, seeing a couple of private clients every week, traveling when time allowed, and stifling her ability so she could keep peace in her marriage. She didn’t want that last part anymore, but she couldn’t embrace this chaos, either.

So here she was, stuck in a situation that had been thrust upon them, Tom’s riddle rolling around inside her. The girl who bullied you… you’re going to need the tool you used. What tool? What girl? When?

Mira scrambled into her car, pulled out of the lot onto Tango Boulevard, then turned onto Old Post. The line for the ferry to Key West was considerably shorter, but it looked like the inbound ferry had just arrived. Supply trucks were driving off, military Jeeps, state police cars. She drove past and at a high point just beyond the docks, stopped at a lookout area, where she could see across the bay to Key West. Off to her right, in between here and there, of course, lay the gaping hole that had been the bridge.

Mira got out and walked to the railing at the farthest point. That weather freak, Pam’s death, and Tom appearing to her for the first time in six years: pivotal moments, all within a period of—what? An hour? Two?

Elementary school. A bully. Think, think. Who? What was the situation?

The problem with remembering: she had blocked out much of her childhood. Born to parents who often had believed she was possessed or just evil, she had learned to keep her psychic insights to herself. If it hadn’t been for Nadine, those conditions might have persisted for years.

And then it came to her, what Tom had meant.

In third grade, she’d been bullied by a girl who disliked her because she was part Latina and spoke Spanish. Her most horrendous prank was dumping used cat litter into Mira’s backpack and when she’d brought out her books during a class, clumped cat shit had come out, too.

Mira had gotten detention, the bully had gotten popular.

Eventually, Mira had gotten even.

One afternoon when the class was in the PE locker room, Bully was bragging about something. Mira, without touching the girl, had yanked down her gym shorts and the bully had been so freaked out she had peed on the floor. She claimed Mira had assaulted her and Mira was suspended for three days from school. Her parents had grounded her for two weeks. And that summer, they shipped her off to Tango Key to stay with Nadine, who subsequently raised her and had made all the difference.

You’re going to need… Could she do it again? Could she affect matter without touching it? Was it, as Tom had implied, an ability she had squashed for nearly forty years? And if so, how the hell was she supposed to wake it up?

She threw her arms into the air and shouted, “Pull her gym shorts down!”

Nothing happened.

She exploded with laughter. “C’mon, Mira.”

There was no little kid here, much less one wearing gym shorts. But the memory stood here with her—bright, vivid, powerful—and on her fourth try, with her arms stretching skyward, pebbles on the ground suddenly shot upward and the wooden railing crackled and popped with fissures.

“Holy shit!”

The pebbles fell to the ground, she wrenched back from the railing. The wood was so splintered it looked like it might crumble in the next hard rain. The heightened energy still coursed through her, so she pointed at the ruined bridge and shouted, “Repair!”

Nothing changed with the bridge. It didn’t magically knit back together. But one of the tires on her car blew. She ran over to it, examined it. She didn’t have to look hard to see how it had torn apart at the tire’s rim. “You were supposed to heal—not destroy.”

She slapped her hands against the tire, but nothing changed. She laughed again. She thought of that third grade bully and how her gym shorts had fallen to her ankles and doubled over, laughing until she sobbed. How gratifying it had been.

“I can do this. I can. I will. Shit. I sound like The Little Engine That Could.”

She got into her car and drove slowly toward the cabin, the flat tire slapping against the pavement.