She opens her mouth, and instinctively, I cover my ears, preparing for her splintering scream. But after a moment, I realize that the only thing coming out of her mouth is her normal voice, so I let my hands drop to my side.
“Of course,” she says, her voice coming out more like a shriek. “When I speak, you never listen. You never have. You don’t see me. You don’t hear me. None of you do.”
“I’m so sorry, Colleen. I never meant to ignore you in journalism—”
She laughs, but nothing about it sounds funny. “You think this is about journalism? You think this is about you and that spineless little shit, Johnny? Or Mrs. Raburn, who never let me do anything other than check for goddamn comma splices and proper nouns?”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“6-968. That was my number.”
“Your number?”
“Oh, you think you’re the only special one?” she asks. “The only psiot in Glenwood? I was there over the summer, Faith. I was at the Harbinger Foundation, except no one cared to remember me when Peter rebelled. The two of you ran right past me. No, instead I escaped all on my own in the madness. I ran after you and Peter, but the two of you got into that car and left me in the dust. No matter how many times I screamed your name, you never heard me.”
“You . . . but . . .” And then I remember seeing Colleen in journalism. Gloves on her hands.
“I hitchhiked the whole way back to Glenwood. Even accidentally caught some stranger’s car on fire with him inside. Finally, I got home, and you wanna know what the worst part was? My sister didn’t even notice I was gone. She thought I was at my aunt’s.” She holds up her hands. “And then there are these. I can’t even touch my nephew without lighting him on fire.”
She steps forward and I instinctively jump back.
“At least now you have a real reason to avoid me. My hands might be eternally burning torches, but I can control my vocal cords.” She lets out a delighted sigh. “There’s some sort of satisfaction that comes with the quietest girl in school discovering she has the gift of a siren’s scream.”
Behind Colleen, a woman in scrubs appears, terror written on her face. I need to keep Colleen distracted. “But how did you end up here?” I ask.
“I decided to investigate the story Mrs. Raburn tried assigning to you, and got stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. You would’ve thought these people hit the lottery when they realized they could run their experiments on a real live psiot. Took a tranquilizer to take me down.”
I pivot, hoping Colleen will follow. Trying my best to be discreet, I make a small waving motion to the woman, willing her to sneak off now before Colleen notices her. “I know what it feels like to be an experiment.”
Colleen shifts, watching me quizzically. “You have no idea what—” In a brief, flashing moment, Colleen whirls on her heels, and all it takes is her bare fingers on the woman’s shoulder before she’s screaming, her whole body slowly catching on fire as she drops to the ground.
Spinning back to me, Colleen lets out a howling scream, bursting a handful of large windows, flames shooting out through them.
I’m already in the air, flying toward the landing where the lab is with all the animals and people. Even with my hands over my ears, I can feel the echo of Colleen’s scream crawling up my spine, leaving goose bumps on my skin.
Below me, I can hear firefighters entering the building, and I just hope that Colleen leaves them and attempts to escape, because none of them stand a chance against her.
The door on the landing is wide open and so is the soundproof door to the room of kennels. I find Dakota fumbling with the keypad on the wall as she tries to get into the lab, dogs and cats frantically barking and meowing.
“Let them loose!” I tell her.
“But they’re infected. We have to transport them all out of here. Or leave them.” She throws her arms up. “Of course you couldn’t just listen! For fuck’s sake, Faith! You were supposed to get Ches and leave.”
I march right over to her and slam her against the wall. “Let. Them. Out. Your little experiment is over.” My voice softens slightly. “Show me you’re more than this. Show me the person who carried Ches up a flight of stairs with me. I know you don’t want to see all these animals and people die for no reason.”
She sighs. “You want to let me go then?”
Quickly, she punches a six-digit code into a different keypad closer to the kennels and presses her thumb against a scanner. One section at a time, the kennel doors open. Both of us run around the room, helping whatever animals we can out of their kennels. I take a crate from below the counter in the middle of the room and squeeze in every animal who is catatonic or unable to move.
The crate is heavy. Maybe the heaviest thing I’ve ever carried, but if I could carry Ches out, I can carry these animals. When that one’s full, I fill another until every kennel is cleared. Dakota helps me drag the crates out to the staircase as dogs and cats race past us, their instincts guiding them to safety.
There’s no good way to do this. I have to get back and help the people. They should’ve been the first priority, but I can’t second-guess myself now.
I take a deep breath and pick up each crate, before forcing my body into the air and over the railing.
Dakota runs down the stairs to meet me as I land much harder than I was expecting.
“I could have carried that,” she says, yanking a crate from me and running off toward the exit as she covers her mouth with the collar of her shirt.
I do my best not to inhale and follow her, searching for any sign of Colleen, but she’s gone.
I feel so lost. In the short moments I spent upstairs, the lower level has become nearly impossible to navigate. My eyes burn too much to open them, and just when I think we’re done for and that we’re going to suffocate, we burst through the smoke, blue skies hanging above us.
Immediately, we’re swarmed with firefighters, and I don’t think my lungs will ever be clean again.
“Dakota! Dakota!” I shout, but all I see is her disappearing back into the smoke. Firefighters pin me back. “Dakota!” I shriek.
Frantically, I try to string words together. “People! The missing people! They’re all upstairs. All of them. You have to save them.”
“We’re on it,” says a women in a full fire suit as she passes me off to an EMT.
“And the animals!” I shout. “Those are people’s pets. We need to catch them! And Ches! My friend! She’s on the other side of the building in the grass. She’s been drugged!”
The EMT forces me to sit, clapping an oxygen mask over my mouth. “Dakota,” I say again, but her name comes out muffled. “Dakota.”
32
I’m not surprised by how quickly the building is in flames, but I am surprised by how long it takes for it to burn out. In fact, when the ambulance takes me to the hospital, the fire is still burning. After preliminary questioning by Detective Wallace, who is surprised to see me again so soon after sneaking me in to see Ches, Grandma Lou and Miss Ella pick me up. The two of them fuss over me, and Miss Ella holds her tongue when I know she really just wants to shake the daylights out of me and ask me what the hell I was even doing at that warehouse.