“Adam?” I whispered.
A grunt. I dropped to my knees and slid in his direction, feeling with my hands out in front of me until my palm landed on his arm. I slid my fingers down until I could grasp his hand. He squeezed and, in the darkness, where no one could see, I smiled.
“You’re alive,” I said.
“I was never really alive.”
My fingers wriggled around to his wrist, where I could feel the throbbing of the veins underneath. “You have a pulse. You have a heartbeat. You have blood coursing through you,” I said softly.
“Are those the things that make a person alive?” My eyes adjusted. “Look at me.” A shadowy outline of Adam reached up and snatched the wires attached to his chest.
I recognized the dark shift of mood that came over Adam after each recharge, but I still hated it and wished it away with a selfishness that was childish.
Our hands didn’t leave each other. The darkness distorted my perception of the distance between us, but I sensed his closeness like a charge in the air. The short space between our two faces. The hairs on the backs of my arms raised.
“I saw fire,” he said. “The house.” His voice was strangled. “The one that I always see, it was burning.” He pulled his knees to his chest. “I heard people screaming.”
“And you’re sure it’s not, I don’t know, a nightmare or a hallucination or something. It could be anything. It could—”
“I was there, Victoria. I can smell the smoke. I can feel the ashes falling in my hair. The fire’s hot. It pushed me back. I couldn’t go any closer or else I’d burn…” He trailed off. “They’re screaming in there.”
I gulped. If Adam’s memory was, indeed, returning, how long until he remembered how he’d died? I wanted to tell him. In the dark, here, when he couldn’t see my face, but I was too chicken. And then the lights flickered on. Adam and I squinted against the sudden brightness. I felt woozy. The floor seemed to rock.
Someone pounded on the door.
“Let me in.” My head snapped up. Cassidy. “They saw you go in there.” The doorknob jiggled. I stood up and helped Adam to his feet. We looked at each other, then I searched for a window.
Too late. The doorknob stopped jiggling. A metallic click and the door swung open. Cassidy stood wielding a bobby pin, which she quickly returned to her hair.
Adam and I were now shoulder to shoulder in the bedroom opposite Paisley, Knox, and a very pissed-off Cassidy. Her fists made tiny balls by her sides. Her bangs fell askew across her forehead. “I knew it,” she said. Her accent came out thick and mad.
Paisley gasped. An accusing finger flew up and pointed at Adam, who, I realized at that moment, was standing dressed only in his boxers, dripping water onto the carpet. Tracks of silvery scar tissue left twisted rivers of raised skin across his stomach and ribs. Angry sutures pinned muscle and fat over bone. “Freak,” Paisley said.
Cassidy’s eyes widened as she took Adam in. My shoulders slumped. “It’s not what you think.” A hiccup punctuated the end of my sentence.
A boy. A girl. A party. A locked bedroom. Cassidy was good at math and she’d already run the calculations.
She tore her gaze from Adam’s chest and focused on my face. “Everyone said I shouldn’t trust you.” Tears pooled in her eyelids. Her pink-stained lower lip trembled. “And they were right.” She spun on her heel and pushed through the onlookers.
Adam snatched his clothes from the floor and tugged on the pair of jeans and jersey. Black paint ran down his cheeks. His raven hair stood on end. He was wild. He shoved through Paisley and Knox. “Cassidy!” he called. “Wait!”
“Nice scars, you mutant freak.” Paisley scoffed and then trained her cold blue eyes in my direction. “Now I see what he saw in you. The circus sideshow and the Whore of Babylon. You deserve each other.”
When Paisley turned to leave, her form split in two. I pushed the heels of my hands into the side of my head and groaned. The carpet seemed to be tilting at a sharp incline. The outline of everything multiplied like a TV with a bad signal.
“Turn the music back on,” someone yelled from the other room just before a rap song blasted through the surround sound speakers. The pounding bass nearly buckled my knees.
“You don’t look so good.” I couldn’t make out any of the features on Knox’s face.
“I’m fine.” I staggered toward where he stood near the open hall. My shoulder banged into the doorjamb. Deep breaths, Tor. If only this house would stay in one place.
I followed Adam’s path more slowly, leaning against the wall for support.
“Slut,” someone said to me as I passed. This garnered hearty chuckles all around that took on a fun house echo.