The Intuitives(65)

“I think whoever’s watching us doesn’t know what’s going on,” Mackenzie said. “I don’t think they could see that thing yesterday.”

“How could they not see it?” Daniel muttered.

“I don’t know,” Mackenzie admitted, “but think about it. Why else would he stand in front of that one-way mirror and say it didn’t work?”

“Unless he didn’t see it himself,” Sam said, thinking out loud. “But then he just would have said it didn’t work. He wouldn’t have acted all weird about it.”

“Agreed,” Mackenzie responded. “I think he knows it worked, and obviously we know it worked—but whoever’s watching us, I think they don’t know it worked, and Ammu doesn’t want them to figure it out.”

“But why not?” Kaitlyn asked.

“I have no idea,” Mackenzie said, and everyone fell silent, pondering the question.

“Whoever we’re doing this for, ultimately,” Rush said finally, “wouldn’t Ammu want them to know it was working? I mean, that’s gotta make him look good, right?”

“Yeah,” Mackenzie agreed. “Something must have changed. But what?”

“I don’t know,” Rush said. “But that thing…” He paused, not sure he wanted to admit what he’d felt.

“What thing?” Sketch wanted to know.

“I’m pretty sure that thing yesterday was some kind of portal. I swear I could feel something on the other side, trying to come through.”

“I knew it!” Sam crowed.

“Keep your voice down,” Rush hissed. “But yeah, I think you and Grid were right. I think Ammu has us trying to… I don’t know… to call something here… from somewhere else… and I think it has to be that gryphon. But I have no idea why.”

“Maybe if we actually do it, we can figure that out,” Sam suggested.

“But Ammu doesn’t want us to anymore,” Kaitlyn protested.

“He doesn’t want us to do it in front of that mirror,” Sam countered. “But there’s no mirror here.”

“What? Now?” Rush glared at Sam. “You’re out of your mind.”

“I want to see it,” Sketch said quietly. He was tired of being the only one who could see things nobody else could see. If his friends could see the portal and the people behind the mirror couldn’t, maybe the gryphon would be like that too.

“Look, Sketch—” Rush began, but Kaitlyn interrupted him.

“I want to see it, too,” she said. “I mean, come on! It’s a miniature gryphon! Don’t you guys want to see a gryphon?”

Daniel shrugged. If Kaitlyn wanted to see a gryphon, he didn’t want to argue against her, but he wasn’t so sure about the idea himself.

“Grid,” Rush protested. “For God’s sake, help me out here. Please tell them we should not be trying to summon something we don’t know anything about—especially not all on our own in the middle of the night without any backup.”

“Look, I want to know what’s really going on,” Mac replied cautiously, “but I’m not the one who freaked out. What do you know that we don’t?”

Rush just glared at her, refusing to answer.

“Rush?” Kaitlyn tried. “We’ll listen to you, OK? If you tell us we shouldn’t do it, we won’t do it. But can you tell us why?”

“I don’t know,” Rush said reluctantly.

“Rush,” Mac prompted him again, leaving his name hanging in the air.

“Fine!” he said finally. “I felt it coming through, OK? There was definitely, absolutely, no-doubt-about-it something coming through that portal. Wouldn’t that have freaked you out?”

“Probably,” Mac admitted. “But Ammu keeps telling us to trust our unconscious minds, and the rest of us didn’t sense anything wrong. You’re the only one who felt it, whatever it was. So did it feel like something we wouldn’t want to bring here?”

For several long moments, Rush didn’t say a word. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. They all just watched him, waiting for an answer.

“No,” he finally admitted, sighing deeply. “If anything, it felt happy, like it really wanted to be here. It just freaked me out because I wasn’t expecting it.”

Not that I even belong here, he thought. Since I didn’t really take the stupid test, and you’re all crazy to listen to me at all, let alone hang on my every word. But even he had to admit that he had seen the portal—and that he had felt the thing on the other side, wanting to come through. Whatever was happening here, he was a part of it, whether he had expected to be or not.

“Then I say we try it,” Mac declared, and this time nobody, not even Rush, tried to say they shouldn’t.





34


Experiment



In one of the cupboards, Kaitlyn found a piece of white chalk she could use to draw on the gray concrete floor of the workshop.

“I hope the color doesn’t matter. There isn’t any blue in here,” she said, but she wasn’t talking to anyone in particular.

“We’ll just have to use what we have,” Mackenzie replied. “Either it will work, or it won’t.”