Everyone else in the gym was completely oblivious.
“Montgomery, you good?” O’Brien called over his rhythmic clapping.
Kane had no idea what had just happened. Clearly no one else did, either. Whatever space Kane and Elliot had just occupied, it had been private. And it was gone, and Elliot with it.
With that photo. With Kane’s photo.
“I’m going to the nurse,” Kane called, snatching up his bag and running after Elliot. If he suspected a connection to Elliot before, he was sure of it now. Logically, he knew he should feel fear, but all he felt was the blue electricity of adrenaline in his blood.
Kane ran into the hall in time to catch a glimpse of Elliot as he swung around a corner. A moment later Kane was there, waiting a beat before turning in case Elliot glanced back. Then he saw Elliot jogging down the south staircase, which was odd. Students weren’t allowed in the basement. That’s where the theater department stored stuff and where the janitorial offices were. And the boiler room.
The boiler room.
Something in Kane bristled. Something under his thoughts, not a memory, but the shell of it, like the brittle husk left behind by a cicada. He tiptoed down the stairs. Whatever the memory was, he held it in his head with a gentle grasp as though it were his only precious thing. To his surprise, it guided him through the basement tunnels, to the boiler room doors, without making one wrong turn.
The doors were ajar. The hot sigh of machinery breathed out, smelling of grease and dust, and he remembered all the legends about the monsters living in the dark guts of Amity Regional High. Flesh eating. Freshman hazing. Could they be real?
There wasn’t time to wonder. He wanted his photo back.
It was easy to sneak into the noisy, dark room. Through the whirring he made out a voice, then two voices, and soon he was able to make out a whole conversation from where he hid among the pipes.
Except it wasn’t a conversation. It was a debate.
“How can you be sure?” asked Elliot.
“Because I just am, okay?”
Kane clapped his hands over his mouth. That was Ursula!
“That photo is proof he’s still in there,” she said.
“The only thing this photo proves is that we didn’t do a good job purging his room.”
Kane’s whole body went cold, then numb. They were talking about him. They were talking about his room. They had been inside his house.
“If anything,” Elliot was saying, “it shows he’s trying to figure things out himself using hints, which somebody is clearly leaving for him, Ursula. What did you tell him on the path? You wanted him to find those photos, didn’t you?”
“Is that an accusation?” The level of drama in her voice told Kane, and probably Elliot, that she was definitely guilty.
“Chill out, you two,” said a new voice. An icy soprano Kane didn’t know. “Even if we missed a few photos by mistake—right, Urs?—Kane has no real idea who we are or what we do. I spent all of bio watching him write in that journal, and he didn’t even look at me until the end. He’s not going to remember anything on his own. He can’t.”
“She’s right,” said Elliot. “Adeline knows better than anyone about this sort of thing. We’ll have to go on without him.”
Kane seized on the name. Adeline, the girl who had tried to give him his homework in bio. Adeline Bishop. “Popular” didn’t do her justice. It was more like Reigning Sociopath of Amity Regional High. What someone like her was doing in a boiler room, Kane didn’t get. He pictured the scene he was spying on: Ursula Abernathy, alleged lesbian jock; Elliot Levi, jawline-blessed Adonis; Adeline Bishop, the gold-plated queen bee, all having a secret meeting in the basement of the high school. It was an after-school special on break.
“But what about the reveries?” said Ursula. “It’s Kane’s job to unravel them. And what about those things he said chased him? They sounded like they escaped from a reverie. I didn’t even know things could escape from reveries.”
“Maybe it’s the next reverie,” Adeline said. “Sometimes the stronger reveries formed partially at first, in bits and pieces. Kane called them visions. Maybe the next reverie will form near Harrow Creek?”
Elliot sighed. “No, the next reverie is going to be here at the school. I’m sure of it.”
“Because of the lobsters that started glowing in the bio lab?”
“They’re not lobsters, Adeline. They’re isopods. Completely different thing.”
Kane could not see Adeline, but the eye roll was clear in her voice. “Elliot. Focus. The glowing is what’s important, not the taxonomy.”
“But isopods are—”
“Who cares?” cut in Ursula. “What’s important is that Kane is the one who usually unravels the reveries, and he’s basically powerless right now.”
“Good,” said Elliot and Adeline at the same time. Elliot picked it up: “We can’t risk involving Kane, not as he is now. Not even if he regained his powers. Remember what happened to Maxine?”
Kane’s stomach twisted. They knew about Maxine. They knew what happened. If there was any doubt he was involved with Maxine’s death, it had just been obliterated by the horrible connection this conversation was creating.
“We can’t manage another cover-up,” said Elliot. “We’re barely getting through this one.”
“But Urs is right, Elliot. We’re not the Others without Kane. We need him so we can do it right. I know I said I could probably handle erasing the reveries when they form, but it’s not the same.”
“If they form,” said Ursula, hopefully.
“When they form,” Adeline snapped. “And they will form. You know that. We need Kane’s powers, but we can’t involve Kane until we figure out a way to fix him.”
Fix him.
“He’s not broken,” Ursula said. “He’s just lost.”
“Whatever,” Adeline said. “Right now, he’s deadweight.”
“He’s our leader.”
“Then why did he abandon us, Ursula?”
Tension silenced the boiler room, letting the din wash back over the secret meeting.
“Kane hid a lot from us, didn’t he?” asked Ursula.
“Seems like it,” said Adeline. “But we can’t dwell on the past. That Kane is gone. We need to move forward with whoever he is now, and he’s got no idea about any of this. We’ve got to recruit him like he recruited each of us to the Others. Gently. Or else he might break apart all over again.”