Lena nodded. “Yep. Like you can do?” She guessed.
The girl frowned. She darted another look at Phoebe. “We’re not allowed.”
“You are now.” Lena was matter-of-fact and firm. “And I’m going to teach you.” She smiled. Then she focused, taking a breath and pushing out with the exhale. As she worked with the Dust, she could feel Marissa’s mind poking at it, too, tentative and furtive.
She eased back. “Okay, Marissa. Now it’s your turn.”
Marissa frowned again.
“I could feel you,” she whispered to the small girl, winking. “Did you understand what I was doing? Would you like to try? There’s one blister left.”
Marissa took a little breath. She gave Lena a searching look, then reached up and hooked her small fingers around Lena’s hand. She squeezed tight and another breath hiccupped in.
Lena felt when she let go of her fear and reached out. Not only could she feel the girl’s mind, stronger than any sense she got from the men, but she recognized the way her eyes glazed as she pushed away from herself and out to the Dust. Marissa was doing it.
Moments later, Marissa’s face brightened as she popped back into her own mind. “I did it?” She breathed the question.
Lena could hear relief and happiness in her own laughter. “You did it!”
“Just like that?” Jackson asked from the front of the train.
Lena nodded. “Just like that.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis, and then leaned in and stage-whispered, “Don’t mind him. He’s a little jealous. It took him two weeks to learn to heal.” She looked in Alex’s direction from the corner of her eyes, the smile playing over her lips answered by his own, “And he hasn’t learned to do it well, at all.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jackson said, but he smiled again, finally.
Alex guffawed, but his gaze was intent. She could feel his warmth and pride from across the car. It felt good.
Marissa tittered. The small sound seemed to surprise even her. She bit her lip to contain her broad, proud smile.
Lena ran a hand over the hair of her first precocious pupil and grinned. She turned to the other girls. “Can anybody else do that yet?” Lena asked them.
Rose’s blindfolded face turned toward them as she listened intently. Heads shook.
The teenager next to Phoebe cleared her throat. A redhead with hair that shone a brilliant shade of orange, she didn’t share Lena’s freckles. Her pale skin was mottled and peeling from sunburn. “I think I might be able to now?”
“Okay.” Lena patted Marissa’s hand and stood. She crossed to the redhead. “Mmmm….” The girl’s name started with “M”.
“Marin,” Rose supplied from beside her. The woman had risen and crossed to stand beside Lena with her blindfold still in place. She reached out with a searching hand for the arm of Marin’s chair. When she found it, she crouched low, like Lena had before. “I’d like to try,” she told Lena brusquely, “so do I have to see to do this?”
“I don’t know,” Lena told her. “But there’s only one way to find out.”
She knelt beside her. The rest of the girls scooted to the edge of their seats, peering around Lena and Rose, stretching to see.
“So, I just—” Rose stopped, at a loss.
“Breathe. And when you’re ready, push your thoughts out to the Dust with your breath. I like to take it easy, a nice long exhale so I can reach out. But instead of feeling the space for the charge I’m going to leave in an object, I feel for the energy inside. The Dust in a body is warm and it…kind of pulses. Once I feel it, I show it what I want.”
“Show it?” Rose was doubtful. “Like, pictures?”
“Pictures, if I don’t have the words. Words, if I don’t have the pictures.” She smiled and put a reassuring hand on Rose’s shoulder. “The Dust wants to help us. It was made to talk to us. It’ll meet you halfway, I promise.” She glanced up and over Marin’s shoulders at Alex, watchful and silent.
Rose thought for a moment. “Like…with a new machine? I might not have seen it before, but it’s like my mind can sink down into it. And then I can see how it works.”
“Yes! Exactly.” Lena smiled. The smile faded when she remembered Rose wouldn’t see it because of the blindfold. “I push out and into it. You sink down and settle in.” She looked around at the girls. “Anyone else?”
One of the two hugging brunettes glanced at the other. “We see it as a reflection, like a mirror, and we…recognize it. But we’ve never talked to it.”
Lena noted the tiny trio of moles like a constellation on the right cheek of one and the left of the other. They were twins, no more than twelve or thirteen years old. Had they first learned to recognize the Dust in each other?
Rose nodded again. She reached her hands out to Marin, searching without seeing.