Even before I’m downstairs a humming starts in my head, like string instruments playing all at once. It’s nothing like the Axiom Stream messages, not at all. Those are loud and intrusive and overly cheery. This is subtle murmuring, inviting and comforting, and it feels as if it’s breathing new life into me. I reach for the door to go out but Bea stops me.
“What’re you doing?” she cautions. “You need your suit.”
“Oh, that,” I say as an afterthought. I shrug myself into it, and with a wave of impatience, reach for my mask. Somehow I don’t feel like I need these things any more. Why, I can’t say.
My energy returns in great bursts as I plunge into the field. I feel as if I could leap over plants and even people. Is it because I haven’t eaten for a week and I’ve lost weight?
“Be careful,” Bea warns, as I falter and catch myself. “Look over here,” she says.
But I’ve already seen it, and I’m halfway over there. Good god! The Fireseed has pushed its way through one of Thorn’s intentional holes. “In one week it’s grown twice as big as any plant in here.”
“See?” Bea states the obvious. “It’s shot up like that old fairy tale, Jack and the Beanstalk. How did Thorn know to open up the space for it?”
I brush up against the Fireseed’s rustling leaves, as if I’m convinced it will give me the answer. As I do, the droning gets more insistent—a kind of lovely, wild music in my head. Food, it sings, food, food, food.
That’s what Thorn told me! I inspect the leaves. They’re clean and red and smooth. Running to another plant, I finger those leaves. “It’s gone!” I tell Bea.
“What’s gone?” Her brow crosses in confusion.
“The blight Thorn said was on the Fireseed.”
“Thorn talks to you?” She crosses her arms and gapes at me. “I thought you said that his words were beaten out of him. Did you lie? Why would you do that?”
“I did say that, Bea. Thorn doesn’t talk out loud. He … he talks with his eyes.” Her face is a grimace of disbelief. I don’t care about Jan and Vesper, but it’s important that at least Bea believes me. “Thorn pointed out the whitish puckering on the leaves. You never noticed it?”
“No.” She uncrosses her arms. “What does that have to do with how Thorn knew they’d grow taller if they were exposed to sun? Nevada convinced us they’d burn up and die.”
“I don’t know,” I say truthfully. When I say that, the noise in my head swells. Sun, sun, sun, it drones and I have an inexplicable drive to escape the confines of the field and run out toward the dunes.
To hold myself back from running to the fence and ducking under is like trying not to scratch a horrid itch. Bea would surely report me as a danger to myself. I’d be quarantined like Thorn. This I know.
“Where is Thorn?” I ask Bea as I look back toward the school. Suddenly I’m exhausted. Even if I forgot, my throbbing back and quaking knees remember that I was basically in a coma for a week.
“Come on.” Bea leads me to the Project Room, where everyone turns to me at once. Blane’s mouth drops open as if he’s looking at a glowing ghoul from Skull’s Wrath. My eyes move to Thorn. He’s moved his equipment to the table that Radius and I share where he’s standing on a box. It looks from the items in his hands that he’s working on a Fireseed project. I run over and hug him. He hugs me back ferociously. Then I hold him at arm’s length to examine how he looks. His skin looks tan, he’s a little thinner, but he looks amazingly fine.
“You were really disintegrated,” Jan blurts out from behind me.
“No thanks to you,” I snort, without turning.
“Whatever that stuff was, it was really powerful,” says Radius. He’s sitting at his end of the long table. “Well, I’m glad you survived.”
“Thanks, Radius.” That’s the first really nice thing any of the guys, aside from Armonk, has said to me. Though I did catch a heartening glimmer of relief in Blane’s eyes.
Vesper narrows her eyes as I march up to her. “Did you give my brother any of that red powder?” I stare into her striking, dark face, set in a jeer. “Did you?”
“Not me.” She wheels away.
I navigate around to her front again, and force her to look at me a second time. “Where’s the rest of it?”
She shrugs. “Couldn’t tell you.”
“Not good enough,” I say, though I’m resigned to not finding out. I’ll have to collect more for the competition. Besides, it nearly killed me, so I’m not sure it’s wise to keep experimenting with it. “Don’t you come near me or my brother again, do you understand?”
“Who would want to?” she answers defiantly.
“Then that’s settled.”
With that, I float downstairs, my brother at my heel. “Did they make you snort up some red powder?” I ask him, when we reach the compound’s front door.
He nods, and smiles.
“What’s so darn funny?” I ask him. “Didn’t it make you sick?”