Levitating Las Vegas

15




Holly saw one flash of her dad’s body dropping on the far side of the pole. She leaped forward and had a vague impression of knocking both her mom and the temporary fence out of the way with her power in her effort to catch her dad, like a baseball player pursuing a hit into left field.

His hand had hit the asphalt already. She heard the smack. But she caught the rest of him. He hovered facedown an inch from the ground, cradling his hand. A wave of guilt washed over her that she might have broken her dad’s hand. Gently she released him from her power.

But he didn’t move. He continued to hover. He must have saved himself at the same instant Holly caught him. He sank the last inch.

The audience wasn’t fooled. They’d seen magicians’ acts before. They knew that the ploy of the trick going wrong and the magician barely escaping death was just another ruse Peter Starr pulled from his pocket occasionally for variety. But this performance was convincing, and they appreciated it. The applause was thunderous.

“Show’s over, folks!” the black-suited goons shouted. Holly looked around and saw that her mom was talking to one of them. Several of them parted the crowd on either side of the pole and directed the spectators through the large doors back into the casino—down the corridors and past the slot machines where they might gamble again, rather than into the street from which Holly had entered. Voices escalated to a fever pitch as the crowd discussed at what point they’d realized it was all a trick and where the wires had been hidden this time.

Now Holly herself was surrounded by more of the black-suited goons. Several of them put out their hands to grab her. She created a force field around herself. They couldn’t reach through it. She clopped forward to the tall metal pole, walking as one unit with the goons. Her dad sat with his back against it, cradling his hand in his lap, his face red. Her mom knelt in front of him.

“Dad,” Holly said breathlessly. “I’m so sorry.”

Her dad wrinkled his brow and squeezed his eyes shut, as if he was in so much pain that he couldn’t speak.

Her mom spoke for him. “It’s a little late now! You haven’t learned a thing out gallivanting with Elijah Brown. Until you do, shut that power down!”

“I wouldn’t have gallivanted with Elijah Brown,” Holly said indignantly, “if you’d told me what was going on. Or if you’d told me anything in the past seven years!”

Holly’s mom straightened and whirled to face her. “We didn’t tell you because you would have acted exactly like this!”

Holly felt her heart in her throat. She’d been so angry at her parents, but what if she really was the one to blame? Would she have hurt her dad if they’d allowed her to have power when she was fourteen? Would she have hurt him on purpose?

Her mom didn’t care enough anymore to wait while Holly worked out this conundrum in her head. Disheveled now with her tiara hanging off one side of her bouffant hairdo, she bent in front of Holly’s dad again. “Here comes the limo, sweetie,” she said softly. Her sequined booty rose as she helped him stand.

Holly reached out with her power and gave her dad an additional very gentle boost underneath. He stood instantly and glared at her. He and her mom made their feeble way past the pole, away from the casino.

“Where are you going?” Holly cried, half apologetic, half exasperated.

“To the hospital, unless you know someone with magical powers of healing,” her mom spat as if this were a ridiculous idea. Magical powers, ha! The casino’s black limo sped across the asphalt and screeched to a halt in front of them. Holly’s parents slipped into the backseat. Almost as an afterthought, Holly’s mom leaned out the door and called, “Come with us.”

Holly wanted to. Even if her dad did glare at her, she wanted to sit beside him while the doctor examined his hand. But she still didn’t trust her parents. They might drug her or worse, especially now that she’d hurt her dad.

As a test, she considered easing the limo onto its side, just as she’d tumbled the SUV around the parking lot in Icarus the night before. Her mom’s earnest gaze didn’t change. She wasn’t a mind reader.

Then Holly said, “No, I’m not going with you.” She waited, but she didn’t suddenly decide going with her parents was a good idea. Her mom wasn’t a mind changer, either.

“Come on, sweetie,” her mom said almost kindly, but unable to disguise the edge in her voice. “Your father is in pain. We’ve got to go and we can’t leave you here.”

“I’ll go into the casino and talk to Mr. Diamond,” Holly said. The casino was clearly behind this conspiracy. If her parents were out of commission for the moment, she should go straight to the source.

Her mom nodded vigorously. “Yes. Go see Mr. Diamond. He’ll explain everything.” A goon stepped in front of Holly and shut the limo door.

Holly watched the limo speed across the pavement, clunk down the curb into the street, and disappear into traffic on the Strip. The usual noise of Vegas at 11 a.m. settled around her: cars swishing by on the side street, the casino’s enormous air conditioners grinding behind her. The normalcy of the sounds belied the fact that she was surrounded by six black-suited goons who were staring at her, kept at a careful distance by her power, waiting for her next move.

She turned on her high heel and crossed the pavement, toward the casino. She snatched up her purse as she passed her lawn chair, marveling that no one had stolen it—but maybe even pickpockets understood it wasn’t wise to steal from a girl who could inflate plastic palm trees with her mind and break her dad’s hand. She clopped all the way inside the casino and down the corridor to the employee elevator. The portrait of Mr. Diamond stared at her inside. The goons crowded in around her. Too late she realized she should have stopped them from coming with her. Telekinetic power took practice.

“Forty, please,” she said to the goon nearest the elevator buttons. She felt the elevator jerk into movement upward. She turned to the goon on her left. He stared at her, his face not a foot from hers. She mustered the most evil expression in her repertoire, which, granted, probably wasn’t all that threatening. He stared blandly back at her. He was probably reading her mind.

The doors slid open. The goons parted for her. Maybe it was a trap. Molten lava would rush down the hall at her! But that was ridiculous. Mr. Diamond’s office was at the end of the hall, and Kaylee would never allow molten lava around the big man. The penthouse was up here too. Kaylee would not allow lava near the penthouse if it was rented by celebrities.

Holly stepped off the elevator as if she had no misgivings, and she turned for Mr. Diamond’s office. Glancing over her shoulder, she watched the elevator doors sliding shut. No goons had stayed with her.

Kaylee walked out of her office next to Mr. Diamond’s, her business suit immaculate as usual, her golden hair shining like an angel’s in the sunlight streaming through the corridor windows. Kaylee’s expression was confident, her stride sure. Holly had met her match.

Bursting into Mr. Diamond’s office to confront him, which had been Holly’s imperative next step, suddenly seemed like the world’s worst idea.

“Oh, yeah?” Holly exclaimed. “Is that all you’ve got? Why didn’t you change my mind and stop me from breaking my dad’s hand?” Her voice started low with defiance and pitched into the shrillness of a little girl caught and guilty. She cringed.

“You’re not my only concern this morning.” Kaylee nodded to her office door, urging Holly inside.

Holly hesitated. There could still be lava. Or piranhas. Normally she would have sworn Kaylee would not do that to her. But the landmarks of Holly’s life had been shaken from their foundations, and her moral compass spun in the air in front of her.

“No tricks.” Kaylee pulled back her silk cuff. “Nothing up my sleeve.”

“Make me,” Holly said petulantly.

Kaylee huffed out her disapproval. “You asked for it.”

Instantly, going into Kaylee’s office seemed like a good idea. Holly skipped past Kaylee into the room, sat in the chair for guests in front of Kaylee’s desk, and crossed her legs primly. She knew Kaylee had changed her mind—she knew it—but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. A good idea was a good idea.

Kaylee closed the door behind them and rounded her desk. “As I was saying—”

With her power, Holly jerked open all of the blinds at once, exposing Kaylee to the dazzling late-morning sunlight.

Kaylee jumped and closed her eyes. “I hate levitators,” she grumbled. Then she opened her blue eyes and looked at Holly. “No offense.”

Holly shrugged. “None taken.”

Kaylee sat down and gestured to the bank of monitors mounted on the wall beside her desk, each displaying a feed from a different security camera. “Elijah’s mom just sensed an intruder, and some of our other mind readers felt it too. It’s the fifth time in the past couple of weeks. I was headed downstairs to stop you from trashing Peter’s show when I was called back to deal with this. And, of course”—she waved her hand out the window—“Elijah’s on the loose.” She pressed her lips together, barely suppressing a smile. “So, you spent the past two nights getting down and dirty with Elijah Brown?”

Holly felt her face light up, and she started to tell Kaylee she wished they’d gotten down and dirty. But then she remembered she’d threatened to hurt Elijah when they parted ways. That probably meant they’d broken up. And then she thought about what Kaylee had just said: Elijah is on the loose.

Like Elijah was a fugitive, and Kaylee intended to capture him.

The Kaylee she would have gushed to about her wild ride with Elijah was gone, replaced by the head of security at the casino, even more powerful and dangerous than Holly had imagined, leaning toward her across a wide and imposing desk. Holly couldn’t reveal anything she knew about Elijah and put him in danger.

“Not the whole two nights,” she fumbled.

“It’s okay.” Kaylee leaned back in her chair. “I understand completely. Elijah is hot. Last winter when we remodeled the bar next to the high-limit slots, we had to put up extra barriers around the construction site because women were staring at him rather than gambling. And, of course, he’s a mind reader. You’ve probably figured that out already.” She turned to watch one of the monitors.

Holly picked up every single object on Kaylee’s desk, every paper and pen, even the computer screen and keyboard, and moved them all with her mind until they crowded in the air just behind Kaylee’s head, seeming as insulted as Holly was that Kaylee didn’t give her full attention to this conversation. “What are you looking for?” Holly asked.

Kaylee glanced over at Holly and jumped again, startled by the computer screen so close to her face. She leaned around it to say, “Somebody I know. Look, Holly, mind readers are dangerous. It’s not just that they read your mind. They use what they find in your mind to manipulate you. As long as they know what you want, they can be your perfect employee or your perfect friend or your perfect boyfriend, until you trust them with your life. And then they can do whatever they want with you.”

When Kaylee had started describing Holly’s experience with Elijah, Holly’s heart sank. But by the time Kaylee stopped, Holly had regained a little hope. “He didn’t try to be a perfect anything,” she said self-righteously. “He did the opposite of what I wanted.”

“To get a rise out of you, so he could feel you using your power.” Kaylee nodded. “He hasn’t been able to read minds long enough. He hasn’t learned to be subtle. Either way, he made you very angry, and you escaped from his grip the only way you knew how. What did you do to him, Holly? Did you break his hand, like you broke your father’s?”

“No!” Holly shouted, beginning to panic.

Kaylee held her fingers to her porcelain neck. “Did you press his carotid artery until he passed out? That’s your dad’s favorite trick. Did you force all the air out of his lungs until he thought he would suffocate?”

Holly’s jaw dropped, and along with it everything she’d been levitating next to Kaylee. Pencils clattered on the desktop. Kaylee jerked her rolling chair toward the bank of camera monitors just in time to avoid being hit by the computer screen, which tumbled across the rich Oriental carpet and fell on its face.

Kaylee never took her eyes off Holly. “You did something to get away from him. That’s why you’re here right now, and he’s not.”

She said this with such vehemence that Holly wondered whether Kaylee had some very personal experience with mind readers.

And then Kaylee said, “Your parents were right to keep you two apart when you were fourteen.”

Holly picked up the computer screen with her mind and slammed it against the far wall. It left a lighter-colored mark in the dark wood paneling and fell to the carpet in a jumble of electronics. “Were they right to drug us, too?” Holly demanded. “What the hell is Mentafixol, anyway? If it’s just a sedative, why go to the trouble of having it made in the mountains and shipped here?”

Adding to Holly’s frustration, Kaylee didn’t react to the smashed computer. She turned back to the bank of camera monitors. “Mentafixol isn’t a sedative,” she said. “All the powers we know about are caused by genetic variations in the brain. Mentafixol contains molybdenum, which is necessary for brain function but slows some processes at high doses.”

Holly put her hands in her hair. “You’ve been slowing down my brain on purpose?”

“Yes, but high molybdenum levels are protective against cancer and impotency, so look on the bright side.”

Holly sank back into her chair with a sigh. “Why’d you just cut off the pill like that, rather than being honest with us? You could have saved us fourteen hundred miles and a whole lot of gas.”

“It works best this way,” Kaylee said. “People are horrified at the loss of the drug, and they hide their powers. Two days later, after the drug has cleared their system, we call them in to speak with Mr. Diamond. He explains the situation and offers them jobs. They’re so relieved to find out they’re not insane, they forget they’ve been drugged since they were teenagers. They immediately accept and come to work for the casino.”

Holly rubbed her aching head. “Unless they don’t take no for an answer from the casino pharmacy and go on a wild goose chase for Mentafixol.”

“Elijah inherited power from both parents,” Kaylee said. “He’s awfully strong. We should have predicted he would fly off the handle like that. But if we’d seen it coming, I’m not sure we would have done anything differently.” She rolled her chair closer to her desk and spread out her hands toward Holly, seeming earnest for the first time.

“What would the alternative be?” Kaylee asked. “We could lock him up while he came off the drug, which would make him angrier and more resistant. The thinking is that if you get arrested, you’ll be that much more grateful to us for bailing you out, so you’ll be more compliant when we ask you to join us. Certainly more compliant that you would have been if we’d locked you up in a room. And if you got in any real trouble with the law, surely the rest of us combining our power could get you out of it. I can’t tell you how many lawsuits against the casino I’ve gotten dismissed just by sitting in the courtroom and toying with the judge. We only hope you don’t kill anybody while you’re out on your field trip. Especially each other.”

Holly nodded. “I can’t imagine why we would be angry or resistant. Kaylee, you had no right to drug us for seven years!”

“Yes, we did. Men with telekinesis or mind-changing ability, women with telepathy—they can settle into a trade, like your father, and Elijah’s mom, without causing too much trouble. We tread more carefully around male mind readers and female mind changers and levitators, because they’re so strong. What if you’d constructed your own magic act to compete with your father? It would have been catastrophic when you were fourteen. You would have tried tricks that were too hard just to outdo him. You would have wound up dead, possibly blowing the casino’s cover and threatening the lives of all our people along the way.”

Twelve hours ago, Holly would have sworn this wasn’t true. After her mishap with her dad that morning, she wasn’t so sure.

But she did know one thing: Kaylee had no right to play God, because she didn’t know what it felt like to be manipulated this way. “You were never drugged,” Holly said.

“No,” Kaylee admitted. “By fifteen I was at the Res. I finally escaped last year, and Mr. Diamond took me in. He chose me to lead his security team. That was right before you and I met.”

“Which wasn’t an accident,” Holly said sadly, heart sinking. “Mr. Diamond set us up to be friends so you could watch me. We were never really close. At least, not on your end.”

Kaylee’s eyes flickered. Holly thought she caught the tiniest glimmer of real feeling there.

But no. Stone-cold Kaylee didn’t even bother to deny their friendship had been a lie. She turned back to peer at the camera monitors yet again.

Holly asked, “What’s the Res?”

Kaylee nodded at the monitors. “The Res is what I’m looking for. If the casino is a safe haven for people with power, the Res is hell.” She looked over at Holly. “And very appealing to teenagers, which is the reason the casino started drugging young people in the first place.”

“Does the Res drug people like the casino does?” Holly asked. “Because if not, it does sound pretty appealing in comparison.”

Kaylee shook her head sternly. “The Res doesn’t have to drug you. The Res itself is intoxicating. People with power go there to test themselves and pit themselves against each other. Mind readers especially love it because they can read everyone and feel lots of powers at once. Levitators and mind changers may look the strongest, but mind readers will back you into a corner. They’ll blackmail you into using your power the way they want. Your power is your weakness, and it will be your downfall. Remember that girl who jumped off Hoover Dam last week?”

Holly nodded. It seemed like a million years ago now, but she remembered hearing about that girl on the news. She remembered feeling jealous of her.

“I knew that girl.” Kaylee squinted at the monitors. “But I don’t recognize anybody on these screens, which worries me. Where did they go? Elijah’s mom is a weak mind reader, but when she does sense something, she’s right.”

“So you think the Res is coming for me?” Holly asked.

“That’s somewhat vain of you.” Kaylee eyed Holly. “The Res was poking around already. We’d planned to keep you and Elijah on Mentafixol until you were thirty years old—”

“Thirty!” Holly squealed.

“Yes, because your powers would start to fade by then. I took you off early because I need your help. Putting teenagers on Mentafixol makes sense if we’re only trying to protect you from yourselves. But now we think the Res is trying to take over the casino. We have very few people who can fight them. We’re drugging the people who are strongest. It’s dangerous to wean people off the drug, so I have to release one or two at a time. I chose you and Elijah first. I hope you’ll come to work for me.”

Holly lifted her hand for silence. “When hell freezes over. I’ll go find this Res and save us all the trouble.”

“No!” Kaylee shouted.

She had never shouted at Holly before, ever, and the shrill sound of her voice rattled Holly’s already shot nerves.

“Why the hell not?” Holly yelled back. “It doesn’t sound so bad when I think about all the shit you and my parents have put me through. Just for starters, all the edamame, Kaylee. My mom brainwashed me into purchasing and steaming my very own edamame even now that I’m out from under her roof, just to keep my weight down. Do you know how many cookies I’ve missed out on in the last seven years, all in the name of pleasing my parents despite my fake debilitating mental illness? God!”

“Well, there’s some good news. Now you can eat all the cookies you want.”

“Damn straight!” Holly said. “My parents can kiss my big dimpled ass.”

“No, I mean you really can,” Kaylee said. “Using your power boosts your metabolism. You can eat anything you want. Mentafixol slowed your metabolism, which is why your mom made you take ballet and kept on you about your weight. It’s also why Elijah’s mom put him in lacrosse and got him a job here as a carpenter. I mean, really that was so the casino could keep an eye on him, but it didn’t hurt that we made him carry a lot of plywood.”

Holly knew Kaylee was trying to lighten the mood with a joke. It wasn’t working. Holly was speechless with anger.

“It’s not that everyone at the casino’s been trying to control you,” Kaylee said gently. “Everyone’s been trying to keep you safe. Those of us with power remember what it was like to make that discovery when we were fourteen. A lot of us were lured into the Res at that age. We wanted to protect you from that. Most people can see this when we take them off Mentafixol. I think you and Elijah would see it, too, if you hadn’t gone off on your own for the past few days. And that’s my fault. This is the first withdrawal I’ve been in charge of, and I’ve screwed it up. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you because of what I’ve done. I’m your roommate and your friend, and I care about you.”

“Bullshit,” Holly said.

Kaylee sat back in her chair, eyes hollow, as if genuinely disturbed that her relationship with Holly was ruined. Holly didn’t believe it for a second.

Then Kaylee put her elbows on the desk. “If you don’t want to be part of the casino right now, we’ll respect that. I’m very disappointed. You’re putting all of us in danger. I still have to respect it. But you’ll have to stay away from the Res”—she counted on one finger—“and stay away from Elijah.” She counted on a second finger. “Keep in mind how he manipulated you. That’s what he’ll do to you, times a hundred, if you end up at the Res together. They’ll make you turn on each other, and then they’ll use you both to take the whole casino down.” She glanced at a monitor and exclaimed, “Oh! Speak of the devil.”

Holly understood it wasn’t a good strategy to leap forward and dive halfway across Kaylee’s desk to get a glimpse of Elijah on the monitor, thus revealing to Kaylee how deep her feelings for him ran. However, this was what she did. She was rewarded with a low-resolution image of him crossing the casino floor and slipping onto an empty stool at his mom’s blackjack table.

If Kaylee hadn’t pointed him out, Holly might not have seen him—he could have been any tall athlete with a mess of wavy hair—but she recognized the way he walked and the familiar movements of his hands as he fingered the cards his mom dealt him. He wasn’t the domineering man shouting at her in Shane’s car anymore. He was the boy she’d always known. He was her high school sweetheart.

She and Kaylee both jerked to attention as the office door banged open.



“You need a haircut.”

Elijah stopped short in the middle of the casino floor. He’d just come through the door with his sights on his mom behind a blackjack table. He’d waded through the flashing lights and tinkling sounds of the slot machines and the usual morass of other people’s thoughts, which were giving him a worse than usual headache on top of the pain Shane had given him in the back of the head. Suddenly this very clear message drowned out everyone else.

He watched his mom. She swept up the cards, dealt another hand to herself and a man in blue scrubs at her table, and never glanced up at Elijah.

“Well, who do you think is talking to you in your own mind?”

Now she looked up at him and winked.

He took a few bills from his wallet, tossed them down in the box, and seated himself a careful distance away from the man in scrubs.

His mom dealt new cards to Elijah, the man, and herself. “Mind-readers can only read what’s at the front of someone’s mind, on the tip of the tongue,” she told him telepathically. “Form a thought as if you were going to say it, and I can pick it up. Be clear, though. Female mind-readers aren’t as strong as males, and everybody’s power gets weaker as we grow older. Sometimes I have trouble.”

Elijah was having trouble himself. The feel of the cards, the solid clicking of the chips, the scents of his mother’s perfume and lunch grilling in a restaurant nearby—all this took him back to his earliest memory. He was two years old, seated at the kitchen table in their apartment, eating a grilled cheese sandwich, watching cartoons on TV, and playing blackjack with his mother. He hadn’t been able to add, and he found the game repetitive and boring.

But this memory triggered his mother’s own memory, which flooded his mind with an explanation. She’d been practicing. She needed to read the minds of distracted customers while dealing a seamless game. She’d learned on Elijah, playing blackjack with him while tasting his sandwich through his toddler’s tongue and watching cartoons through his eyes.

She motioned to him to keep the game going.

As he split his pair and moved his money, he wondered why he suddenly felt he’d been punched in the stomach, like the throbbing pain in the back of his head wasn’t bad enough.

“It’s the smell,” she said almost as clearly as if her mouth had moved. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the restaurant. “You need to eat something. You’ve got four times the metabolism you had on Mentafixol. What’s the last thing you ate? Dinner last night in Colorado? Jeez, no wonder.” The house had beat both Elijah and the man in scrubs. She raked up the cards and chips. “Try it. Say something to me.”

Elijah intended to, but the room was full of distractions—sights, sounds, smells, and now the musings of the man in scrubs, who thought Elijah’s mother was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen. Nearly every morning when he got off graveyard shift as a nurse at the hospital, he came here just so he could sit at her table and watch the way her long black hair caught in the buttons on her uniform.

She gathered her hair in a ponytail and smoothed it behind her shoulders. “All in a day’s work, honey,” she said silently to Elijah. “Go ahead.”

Elijah looked down at his cards without seeing them. He asked as clearly as he could, “Who, besides you?”

“Mr. Diamond is a mind-reader,” she said. “Then there’s Holly’s father, obviously. A levitator, but a lot weaker than her, because he’s a man and he’s older. And of course Kaylee. She’s a very strong mind changer at the height of her power, which is why she’s Mr. Diamond’s second-in-command. A lot of her security guards, but that’s just what I’ve learned from reading them. Mr. Diamond knows who everybody is because he approves all the hires, but he keeps that information to himself for everyone’s protection. We don’t have potlucks and socialize together on the weekend. It’s not safe.”

“Shane?” Elijah asked.

“I never heard that he was. But you’ll run into more people in Vegas with power, no doubt. Vegas attracts us because we can get jobs here. And because we tend to seek each other out, feed off each other’s energy.”

Elijah felt that energy now. He could hardly sense the cards between his fingers because of his skin tingling as he read his mom’s mind. Her own skin tingled with the same energy, and he felt that too—an endless feedback loop. If she’d come within fifteen feet of him before he left for Icarus, he would have sensed this instantly. That must be why she’d left town.

“Which reminds me,” she said inside his head. “How was your trip?”

He looked down at the new cards his mom had dealt him and went through the motions of doubling down. If he’d ever had girl troubles—which he hadn’t, because he’d steered clear of girls altogether—he wouldn’t have discussed them with his mom. This was different. This was Holly.

And the trouble between him and Holly boiled down to the very essence of who they were—though this wasn’t who they’d been last week, or even yesterday. Now his heart sped up at the thought of what he’d almost had with her, and what he’d thrown in the garbage. She’d scared him, but he’d forced her into it by scaring her first.

Now he worried about her. He wondered where she was. He’d hoped when he walked in the front door of the casino, he’d find her hovering above the high-limit slots, pouring Singapore Slings with no hands for everyone in the vast room.

His mom winced and put her finger to her temple. “That’s real complicated, hon, and I’m not that good a reader.” She nodded at his hand, reminding him to signal his bet. “I don’t know what you did to that girl, but I can imagine. Be more careful with her. Both of you are at the height of your powers and very dangerous to the rest of us. We’d planned to keep you on Mentafixol until you were thirty, but Kaylee took you off to help protect us from the Res.”

“The Res?” Elijah sat up straight on his stool. All his life when his mom had talked about the Res Res Res blah blah blah, she hadn’t meant a Native American reservation at all. Elijah and his mom weren’t Native American, either.

“No, we’re not Native American,” his mother said. “Why would you think that?”

“You have black hair.”

“I’m thirty-nine, Elijah. I dye it.”

His gaze shifted to her earrings. “You wear a lot of turquoise.”

“Well, yeah, you’ve got me there. I guess I do play it up. Tourists tip better if you have a little mystique about you.” She winked at the nurse, who smiled moonily back at her as she collected his cards and his bet.

“Reading minds wasn’t adequate?”

“It wouldn’t do me any good, dealing blackjack,” his mom pointed out. “The casino doesn’t want to cheat people, anyway. Our percent payback to customers is set by law. We could change the minds of the gaming commission, I suppose, but we make enough money without doing that, and we don’t want to get a bad rep with the gamblers. I’m just here to catch cheats and protect us all from troublemakers. Like the folks from the Res who just wandered through here, looking for you.”

Elijah leaned forward. “They want me?”

She shook her head, then realized what she’d done. She moved her head in a circle to pop her neck as if that’s what she’d intended all along, her hair zigzagging behind her shoulders with the motion. “A male mind reader—I doubt they’d be that stupid,” she said inside his brain. “A really powerful mind reader can get out from under a mind changer’s power if she lets up for even a second. That’s why a mind reader is always at the top of the heap at the Res. He wins the game of rock-paper-scissors.” She cocked her head to one side, considering him, turquoise earrings swinging. “No, they probably want you so they can get to Holly.”

“What for?”

As his mom danced her dealer’s dance, moving cards and chips around the table, she concentrated on the EXIT sign behind him, above the doors to the street. He realized she must be deliberately stopping him from reading her mind. As long as Holly’s fate wasn’t in the front of his mom’s mind, he couldn’t read it.

He was afraid he knew why. “Oh, no, no, no. We’re done with secrets. That’s why I’m here. What kind of place is the Res?”

She dealt a new hand. “Teenagers with power find it through the grapevine. They go there because they’ve had trouble fitting in on the outside. And once they get there, they can’t leave.”

Elijah swallowed. “Because they lock you up? Or do they give you Mentafixol?”

“Worse. They grab for power. They shift allegiances. They play mind games. They invade each other in every way imaginable.”

“It sounds like a cross between a cult and a pick-up bar.”

“Good analogy, except people with power don’t drink or do drugs. That would dull their power, and nothing feels better than power.”

“I don’t see what’s so awful about that,” he said.

“I don’t see what’s so awful about the Res,” she repeated, and even managed to convey sarcasm telepathically, like she couldn’t believe he’d said something that stupid.

Which really ticked him off. “What’s so awful about the Res, Mom? It’s bad enough that you keep all this from me for my whole life. You don’t have to act like I’m an idiot for wanting to know.” Impatiently he gave up listening to her. He looked as far into her mind as he could go.

“Don’t do that.” Ignoring the nurse’s signal to hit him again, she closed her eyes. Elijah felt her trying to make her mind go blank. But he’d already caught a glimpse of her blind fear. She opened her eyes and stared hard at the EXIT sign, deliberately clearing her mind so he wouldn’t see anything else.

“This is why I’ve always told you to keep your mouth shut about MAD and Mentafixol,” she told him. “Even mind readers can’t find you unless they’re close. But now they’re close.” She’d forgotten to concentrate on the EXIT sign. Her cold terror gripped Elijah again, stronger and more real than Holly’s hand around his throat.

“So, what do I do?” Elijah asked, tossing his useless cards back to her. “Bow before Kaylee and Mr. Diamond and pledge allegiance? Why can’t I just leave town?”

“Now that you have power,” his mom said, “you’ll be shocked how hard it is to get along out in the world without people thinking you’re insane.”

Judging from his experience of the past week, Elijah knew this wouldn’t shock him at all.

“You figure you can make a lot of money from this power,” she said. “What rich person on top of the world wouldn’t want a mind reader on their side? But those people would rather kill you than deal with you. It’s not that they want you for your power. They want other people not to have your power. They’re scared they won’t be able to control you. They want to be the ones with power, and if they can’t have it, no one can.” Ending that hand, she picked up a thick stack of chips from the holder at her side, the many dollars Elijah had lost over the past few minutes, and placed them in front of the nurse.

“Of course, you can’t be forced to join the casino,” she said. “But if you won’t join us, the casino won’t protect you. And in that case, by all means, get out of town before the Res finds you.”

“I guess that’s what I’ll do,” he said. “I need to find Holly first.”

“You can’t take her out of town with you.” Alarm swirled in his mom’s head.

“Why not?” Elijah asked, alarmed himself now, scared for Holly. “I can’t let the casino get her either.”

“That’s a decision she needs to make for herself. But if you take her out of town, she’ll be a lot more vulnerable to the Res. The Res makes that decision for you.”

Elijah should leave town, but Holly couldn’t? Their parents would keep them apart again? If that’s all the control they had over their own lives, they might as well have stayed in the ninth grade. He tapped his cards on the table in frustration.

His mother responded to that signal by dealing him another card, even though he’d intended to stand on that hand and she knew it.

He glared at her.

“Believe it,” his mom said. “There’s nobody at the Res older than twenty-five. They don’t last that long. Holly might get away eventually. I did. Kaylee did. But a lot of girls don’t. And even if Holly did get away from the Res, she’d be different. If you love her now, you wouldn’t love her then.” His mom concentrated on the EXIT sign.

“Mom,” he said. “Mom, what does that mean?”

“Think what fun they would have corrupting that sweet girl. It means keep her out of there.” Exit. Exit. Exit. Exit.

He had no choice, then. If leaving town would put Holly in more danger than staying, she would stay, and Elijah would stay with her. There was only the matter of finding her and convincing her to trust him again.

“Lady luck isn’t smiling on me today,” he said out loud, slipping off his stool. When his mom glanced up at him, he looked straight at her and thought, “I love you,” very clearly, so she would know he was saying it, not the nurse.

As he turned for the EXIT sign, he felt his mother’s message in his head: “I love you, too.” And then, when he was close to the front doors and almost out of range to read her: “Be sure you eat something.”