“To us. Our thoughts. Right now.”
She shakes her head emphatically. “That’s not what I’m doing,” she says, though her gaze flicks briefly to Jamie, Mara. “I have to concentrate, hard, to do it. And I hate it, so I take drugs to blur out the voices. Otherwise, it’s too much.” She looks at Jamie. “You guys know that.”
“Drugs?” Goose perks up. “What sort?”
“Prescription . . . ?”
“Actually,” Daniel says. “No offence, Stella—”
“He’s about to say something offensive,” Jamie stage-whispers.
“I’d be more comfortable knowing you’re not poking around in my brain either. I think that would go a long way toward trust, on both sides.” Ever the mediator.
Stella looks to Leo, and when he nods, I can actually feel her relief. Doesn’t escape my attention that she’s been looking to Leo for quite a lot. Codependent or . . . something more? Something . . . else?
Stella retreats to the bathroom, returns with some pills. Shows them to Daniel. “Do they pass inspection?”
He raises his hands up in defence. “You don’t have to show me. I know what you were going through last year. I know how badly you wanted a cure.”
A cure. Mara mentioned that in passing, that it was Stella’s main motivation for joining her and Jamie in their search for me. She’d hoped they’d find something that would stop the voices in her head. She’d hoped to find a way to be rid of her affliction.
A flush rises in Stella’s cheeks. She’s embarrassed. There’s a furtive glance at Leo as well. Is she not supposed to want it? A cure? Fuck. I’ve missed so much.
She shakes out a couple of pills. We stand silently in the dead room, waiting, but they start to work quickly. Her heartbeat grows sluggish, her chest rises and falls slowly. It’s possible she could still hear our thoughts, but when asked directly, she says no, and I believe her.
“Two days ago,” she says slowly, “Felicity just disappeared. We were sleeping in our bedroom”—she nods to the stairs—“and when I woke up on Saturday morning, she was just . . . gone.”
“Wait, she was here?” Daniel asks. “The paper says she lived with her parents—”
“She was Felix’s girlfriend,” Stella says. “He lived here, with us.”
“Did the rest of them?” I ask Leo. “Live here with you?”
Leo doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, Stella continues, “She told her parents she was staying with a friend Friday night, but then she just—”
A movement from Leo, slight, barely perceptible. But I notice, as does Stella.
“Obviously, Felix tried her cell phone, e-mail—Stella was listening, trying to find a trace of her but—”
“No,” I say, annoyed and suspicious. “That doesn’t track.” I have the room now. “You followed Beth to the subway because you heard her thoughts, yeah? But you didn’t know her ability.” Which she was thinking about before she died, and which Stella would’ve known if she really did hear her.
Silence from both of them—something’s off, but I don’t press, because I don’t want to admit to them that I heard Beth’s thoughts myself.
“And us?” I ask instead, directing a piercing look at Stella. “You just happened to know we were in the city? Knew we’d be at the Second Avenue stop heading downtown?” I gesture to the papers of the other missing teenagers. “You said it yourself, Stella—it’s hard to focus on one person in all the noise—and okay, yeah, I’ll buy that Goose has an ability and is amplifying yours or whatever, but that doesn’t explain why Felix would kill himself two days after his girlfriend went missing. So tell me,” I say. “Stop fucking around and tell me. What is happening to these people? And how do you know about it?”
Stella’s caught short by my aggression. Leo . . . isn’t. He’s considering, editing again.
“We know someone who . . . can identify people like us. Other Gifted.”
And there it is. He doesn’t go on, so Daniel tries to prompt him.
“And once identified, you bring them here?”
Leo shrugs. “Some people find us. Some people, we find. And we share what we know with the ones who stay here, practice with us—”
Jamie straightens up. “Practice? Practice what?”
“Using our Gifts.” Leo has Jamie’s full, hungry attention, which he knows, because he says, “I can show you, if you want,”
“Maybe later, thanks,” I say, interrupting. “Right now we want to know everything you know about everyone who’s missing.”
“And everyone who’s died,” Daniel adds. Mara is notably silent.
Leo draws himself up. “Let me ask you this,” he says to me. “How did you know her name was Beth?” All eyes on me. “You can find people as well, can’t you?”
“It’s not like that. I’m not hunting anyone,” I retort.
“We’re not hunting anyone either.”
“Oh, so the people you find, they want to be found?” I ask. Even Daniel quiets at this, and I’m rapidly losing the plot. “Tell me how it works. Tell me how you knew Sam.”
“Did you know Sam, Noah?” Leo’s tone is suggestive, accusing.
“No,” I say. But it takes effort to stay calm, dismissive.
“Why don’t you tell us how it works?” Leo asks, “How you knew to come here?”
“I can see and feel what they see and feel when they’re suffering, right before they die.”
“But you didn’t stop it,” Leo says, picking my scabs.
“Because it’s too late by then. I’m not there with them. I just see and feel. But this isn’t the case for you. These are your friends, no?” I pick up the papers. “Some of them lived here, but they keep going missing—”
“They keep dying.”
I round on Stella. “How do you know?”
Her eyes dart nervously. Before she can lie, Leo says smoothly, “One of us can . . . see connections. To other people with Gifts. And when one of us goes missing, the connection dies. They just—vanish. Wiped off the grid.”
“And who’s making these connections?”
“She doesn’t make them, she sees them. Or feels them, I guess. And it’s not for me to out her. If she wants you to know, she’ll find you.”
“So if they disappear,” Daniel says, “How’d you know where to find Beth?”
“She says they flare up right before they die. I guess that part of her ability’s familiar to you,” Leo says to me.
“You could’ve stopped Beth from killing herself,” I say, and then it’s out there. The reason I’m so angry. They actually could’ve done something to help her, and they didn’t—and without any guilt. I couldn’t have, but feel responsible anyway.
“We didn’t know.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “Stella could hear her thoughts.”
“I couldn’t. It was like there was something—cloaking them. She was . . . different, somehow.”
“And Sam?” Mara asks, the first thing she’s said since all this has come out.
“He was too far away,” Leo says. “For us to do anything about.”
Implying that there should’ve been a way for me to do something about it. I feel like hitting him. More than that.
But Jamie’s actually the one to move on this, surprisingly. “How about Felix, then? He killed himself in your house!”
“He chose to,” I say before catching myself. Leo’s pale eyebrows rise slightly.
“Meaning what?” Jamie’s focused on me now. “That the others didn’t choose to kill themselves?”
“It’s true,” Stella says, saving me. “And anyway we weren’t here when it happened.”
“How convenient,” Jamie says.
“It’s not like he’d have chosen a time when he could’ve been rushed to the hospital and had his stomach pumped,” I say without meaning to. Stella looks grateful, though I didn’t say it for her benefit. I shouldn’t have said it at all, as I’ve no interest in playing patient to Mara’s or Jamie’s armchair psychologist later—Mara’s expression is shadowed, and Jamie’s confusion has turned to suspicion. Daniel and Goose are both unruffled, knowing well enough to leave it alone. If Goose wasn’t actually present for all the injuries I tried to explain away in school, he would’ve heard about them.