“Of course I do.”
“Ha, nice try, Foster,” Keefe said. “I can feel your dread all the way over here.”
“It’s not dread,” she argued. “It’s just a lot of pressure. I don’t want to let anyone down.”
“You could never let me down.” Fitz said something else too, but it was drowned out by the plethora of gagging sounds coming from Dex and Keefe.
“Don’t Cognates have to share all their secrets with each other?” Biana asked.
Mr. Forkle nodded. “It’s how they reach the necessary level of trust.”
Keefe smirked. “Okay, now I feel the dread.”
“A perfectly normal reaction,” Granite told him. “Sophie has been alone with her secrets for a very long time. Sharing them so openly is a whole new concept—one, I might add, that I myself have never been comfortable with.”
“Yeah,” Sophie agreed. “Plus . . . this could be super dangerous—”
“Nope! We’re not doing the ‘I’m trying to protect you’ speech again,” Fitz interrupted. “You’re not allowed to worry about me anymore—and I don’t want to have to worry about you. That’s why I want to do this. A Cognate is a Telepath’s ultimate backup. I promise, I won’t be mad if it doesn’t work out. But isn’t it worth trying?”
He looked so adorably excited, Sophie could feel her cheeks blushing.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Wonderful! So come over here, Mr. Vacker,” Mr. Forkle ordered. “I want your minds to be connected as I return Miss Foster’s memory.”
Sophie’s mouth went desert dry as Fitz and Mr. Forkle reached for her temples.
“Try to let your mind relax, Miss Foster,” Mr. Forkle told her. “And let me know once you clear the point of trust, Mr. Vacker.”
The Black Swan had designed Sophie’s mind with a hidden entry point, where her subconscious could pull someone past her mental blocking. Apparently they had to transmit some sort of password to convince her mind she could trust them.
She had no idea what word Fitz used, but he grinned and said, “I’m in!”
“Very good,” Mr. Forkle told him. “Her mind is trusting you much faster.”
“Of course it is,” Dex grumbled.
“I’m going to return the memory,” Mr. Forkle said. “And it can be a bit disorienting, so perhaps you should hold someone’s hand, Miss Foster.”
Dex and Keefe both offered, but Biana wrapped an arm around Sophie’s waist and had Sophie lean against her.
“On three,” Mr. Forkle said.
Sophie braced for pain, but when he got to “three” all she felt was a whisper of cold.
“Is that it?” she asked. “I don’t see the memory.”
“It takes a moment to register on your consciousness. You should feel it . . . now.”
Sophie swayed as the memory hit, fighting to get her bearings. It felt like her mind had been dropped into the middle of a movie running on fast forward.
That’s me, she realized as the scene slowed to a normal pace and she watched her five-year-old self reading on the steps in front of her small square house.
What book is that? Fitz transmitted.
Looks like an encyclopedia. I read the whole thing from A to Z by the time I was six.
She wasn’t supposed to be reading that day. Her mom had ordered her to go outside and play with Bethany Lopez, the first-grader who lived across the street. But Bethany had called her Dorktionary and told her to go spell something. Sophie had just beaten a fifth grader in her school’s spelling bee. She didn’t understand why everyone was making such big deal about it. Why did it matter that she was only in kindergarten? Why was her principal talking to her parents about having her skip grades?
That was the real reason her parents had sent her outside. They’d caught her listening to their whispered conversation. She’d still heard three words, though: “She’s not normal.”
Sophie could feel her eyes burn as her emotions synced with the memory. Her five-year-old self hadn’t understood why it was so hard to fit in like her parents wanted. She’d been thinking about running away when she’d felt the prickly sense of someone watching her.
She could feel Fitz lean closer as they relived the moment she’d looked up and spotted the strange boy in the blue bramble jersey. He was peeking at her from behind her yard’s sycamore tree—or she assumed he was. His head was turned her way, but his face was a blur.
Sophie fought to focus the memory, but the boy remained fuzzy, even as he raised a crystal up to the sunlight and disappeared. Now Sophie knew he’d light leaped—but at the time she’d been terrified she’d seen a ghost. She’d grabbed her book and raced for the safety of her house. But her toe caught on the concrete stairs, and the last thing she remembered was the ground racing toward her and a sharp pain in her head.
From there the memory skipped to the part Sophie already knew: waking up in the hospital, hearing thoughts for the first time and crying because she couldn’t understand what was happening.