45

ALORA

JULY 4, 2013

Palmer notices I’m looking behind him. He glances back and hisses, “Who are you?”

The girl smiles—a cold smile that doesn’t reach her eyes—and raises her arm. A small, silvery object glistens in her hand.

“Drop it or I’ll shoot,” Palmer says.

“I don’t think so,” she replies in a clipped voice with a trace of a weird accent. Her eyes close, and she vanishes.

Palmer yells, “What the hell!” He circles in place, while holding the gun ahead of him. I try to shrink myself into a ball on the floor.

“Who is she?” Palmer asks, now pointing the gun at me. I can’t speak. All I see is the tip of the barrel. I imagine the bullet speeding out and hitting me. “Is she your sister? Answer me!” He yanks me up and drags me to the foyer, his head swiveling back and forth.

She suddenly reappears next to him. Palmer doesn’t have time to react. She slams her fist into the side of his face and snatches the gun from his grip as he staggers.

Palmer quickly regains his balance and charges at her. A bright blast flashes between them, and then he collapses to the floor, twitching.

“That was wild.” The girl kicks Palmer hard in the ribs. He grunts but otherwise doesn’t say anything. “Don’t worry,” she says. “He’s not going anywhere for a while. Furing psycho.” She kicks him again, then looks at me. “Do you know he’s murdered fifteen girls over the past five years? You were supposed to be number sixteen. All because he flirted with two of his former students and they turned him in.”

I clutch my arms to my stomach as I stare at the scene. At the girl who just saved me. Who is she? How does she know all of that about Palmer?

I really look at her. She’s dressed in my clothes. I hadn’t noticed it until now, but she’s wearing the same dress I wore to Levi’s party back in April. I’d hid it in the back of my closet.

“It looks good on me, doesn’t it?” she asks as she twirls. “Nice for something so archaic.”

“Why are you wearing it?”

She gives me a flippant shrug. “Maybe I wanted to see what it felt like to be the favorite daughter.”

Okay, now she’s starting to freak me out. I take a few steps back, but she fixes me with a frosty gaze, her eyes narrowed to slits. “Stay where you are.”

The words are a slap. “What? I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re blank.”

“I’m what?”

“Blank. It means you’re empty up here,” she says, tapping the side of her forehead with the silver object. “You don’t know anything.”

I hate feeling like a trapped animal for the second time in the same night, for not understanding her. “What do you mean?”

The girl rolls her eyes. “This is so tedious. I’ll say this so even a Null could get it. You are not from this time. You are from the future.” She says each word slowly, like I’m too stupid to understand. “Our father broke the law. He brought you here and abandoned you to his sister. Our beloved aunt.”

If anybody said this to me before I met Bridger, I would’ve laughed in their face. Not anymore. Remembering what he said about traveling in time and waking up in different places after blacking out . . . yeah, it doesn’t sound so strange now.

“If that’s the case, why are you so mad at me? I don’t even know you,” I say.

She fixes me with a contemptuous gaze. “That’s because we’ve never met.”