I lie there for a while with my phone clutched to my chest until drowsiness begins to sink around me like a fog. I should turn the news on. Maybe there’s an update on the crash. Maybe they’ve released the name of the deceased. I don’t want to hope that it’s Grant . . . but I do hope that it’s Grant. I just hope . . .
My phone rings again and again and again and it won’t stop. It won’t stop. My fingers fumble over the screen and I hold it to my ear. “Peter?” I ask, my voice thick with sleep. “Finally.”
“Faith.” But it’s not Peter who speaks my name. “Faith. Can you hear me?”
For a moment, it’s easy to forget that the last twenty-four hours even happened. It’s easy to imagine that this Dakota is the same Dakota who just two days ago kissed me, but then I quickly remember that just yesterday that same Dakota shot at me.
“Faith?”
I sit up, working the dryness out of my mouth. “What do you want? Didn’t threaten me quite enough from the safety of my own kitchen?”
“I only have a few minutes,” she says. “I’m a shit person. I get it. I don’t need you to remind me.”
That silences me for a moment.
“I know what you are,” she tells me.
And then I remember—she’s seen what I can do.
“Good and evil is black-and-white for you, Faith. You’ve always had that luxury. But none of this is that simple. A+ is more than just an upper.”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “You’re hurting people with it. You’re making animals and people your . . . experiments.” The word leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
“It’s not perfect, okay? Things like this don’t just start out perfect, but what if I told you something like A+ could help us identify other psiots?” She whispers that last word.
“What do you even know about psiots?” I spit.
She doesn’t answer me. “What if there was one tiny little pill that could have saved you all the pain and trauma of what happened to you last summer?”
“You don’t know anything about what happened to me,” I say through gritted teeth.
“We’re so close, Faith. We’re so close to perfecting this thing. Think of all the pain it could save people like us.”
Like us? People like us? Is Dakota a psiot? I have too many questions and not enough brainpower to organize them. “At what cost?” I ask. “What about Gretchen and Colleen and the homeless people who went missing? And the animals, Dakota! Where are they? And Grant and Ches! They were arrested and now one of them is dead and the other is missing. I don’t even know if my best friend is alive, Dakota!”
“Gretchen and Colleen were never part of the original plan,” she assures me, like that’s supposed to change something. “Besides, Colleen is safe for now. And I’m the one who planted Gretchen in the maze. I wanted her to be found . . . I can’t explain it all right now. I have to go. Just . . . don’t do anything rash, okay? Keep your head down.”
“Was it real?” I manage to ask. “Us?”
There is silence for a long moment and I think maybe she’s gone. “So real it stings,” she finally says.
“It wasn’t just my blog,” I tell her. “You knew more than that.”
“I did.”
“Am I the whole reason why you’re in Glenwood?” I feel foolish even asking her. Surely this entire operation and TV show didn’t uproot itself just for me.
“One of the reasons,” she tells me.
Tears threaten to spill. “You could just leave it all,” I tell her. “We can save people. We can help people like . . . like you. Without hurting other people. Without making other people experiments. This doesn’t have to be who you are.”
“You have no idea who I have to be,” she tells me, her voice clipped and unflinching. “You have no idea.”
“Dakota—”
“Ches is alive. Now just stay out of it, Faith. Trust me.”
And then the line cuts out.
Relief hits me like a gust of wind. Ches is alive. Somehow, I have more questions than I did before answering her call. I’m dizzy with possibilities and uncertainty. But Ches is alive! Before I even know what I’m doing, my fingers are fumbling to dial Matt.
The line only rings for half a second. “Faith? She’s alive,” he says. “I just talked to Ms. Palmer. She—”
I don’t hear anything else, because both of us are crying so hard that words are useless.
“So where’s Ches?” I finally ask.
“No one knows,” he says. “Faith, I’m really freaked out.”
“How does no one know?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Ms. Palmer said it’s like she was kidnapped.”
Dakota knew Ches was alive, which could only mean that Margaret is behind this and she’s going to great lengths to stop Ches and Grant from appearing in court. So great, in fact, that Grant is dead. He might have been awful, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.
I don’t know what exactly is going on, but I do know that whatever that drug does, it’s already ruined Ches’s life. And no matter what comes of this, Dakota had a part in that.
Colleen. I can’t forget Colleen too, hooked up to all those monitors.
After I hang up with Matt, I almost call the police. That’s the most obvious answer. But for very selfish reasons, I don’t. If the police show up at the Grove headquarters, it’s very likely that I’ll never know what Dakota meant when she said there’s something out there that could have saved me from the hell that was this summer. It’s too late for me, but I know the Harbinger Foundation is out there trying to find other kids like me. Just because I’m safe doesn’t mean others will be. And I can’t count how many nights I’ve spent staring up at the ceiling, wondering what happened to all the other kids on my bus. When Peter broke me out, all the other dorms—no, cells—were empty. It’s all too easy for my brain to rewrite history and for me to pretend that they all just happened to be in other parts of the compound, when the truth that eats away at me is that I was the only one to make it out.
At least I know Ches is alive. If they’d wanted her dead, they would have killed her on the scene. At least I think so.
I need a plan. I need a clear head and a good plan.
I reach for a blank pack of note cards on my bedroom floor and carefully remove every picture and article clipping from my corkboard. One note card at a time, I write down everything I know. I map every fact out just like Mrs. Raburn taught us.
The first card reads: My name is Faith Herbert, and my psiot abilities were activated at the Harbinger Foundation by Peter Stanchek.
28
All of Glenwood is buzzing with the news of Ches and Grant. A few hours after I found out Ches was alive, the local news breaks the story that she was the one taken in the unmarked armored vehicle. The next night, Grant’s family’s lawyer makes a statement, naming Grant as the deceased and asking for the media and citizens of Glenwood to give the Vincent family time and privacy to mourn.
Miss Ella sits on the couch with us and snarls as the lawyer takes questions. “That Francesca girl is all trouble. Faith, you’re lucky. That could have been you in the morgue instead of that Vincent boy.”