Girl One(102)

We were frozen for a moment, watching it happen, and then everything sped up, a blur of movement, everyone driven by instinct. Orange Shirt lunged for the dropped gun. Cate trained her gun on the men, face stoic and ghostly, sweat at her temples. She took a faltering step back and I realized that the third man was charging at us, a bull, head lowered. “Stop!” I shouted, ineffectually, meaninglessly. Cate fired once, a sharp crack through the silence, birds fluttering into the air from across the river.

She’d missed. Suddenly he was right there. He caught her jaw: it was a blunt and dirty attack, sloppy with rage. Her head snapped back on her neck, blood darkening her face so swiftly that it felt like black magic. Her eyes, agonized, caught against mine, and then he’d shoved her down into the grass, his knee braced against her. I watched him hit her again, saw the way he shook his fist, as if clearing away the muscle memory of what had happened.

In the background, yelling. Orange Shirt. Isabelle. I couldn’t focus.

I darted forward, not caring about myself. I reached for the man who was straddling Cate. He lifted an arm to block me, but I’d snatched his sunglasses off his face, revealing his startled-looking eyes, pale and blinking and human. Those wide-open pupils. Relief washed through me. I was back on solid ground, I was surging with power.

I locked eyes with him. “Let her—”

Pain exploded in my lower back. The ground rose toward me, a sick rush. I’d been kicked to the dirt, my skull ringing and ringing, the pain an expanding continent across my body. How? Orange Shirt was yards away from me, fighting with Isabelle, and the third man was dead already—we were evenly matched—

No. When they’d first arrived, Orange Shirt had asked after Junior. They’d brought a fourth man, expecting four of us. He had outflanked us from the trees. We were outnumbered.

Gathering all the strength I had, I fought, I screamed, I spat. The man twisted my wrist, wrenched my arm, and bound my hands.

“And her eyes,” someone said.

Then the world blacked out. Everything vanished. For a wild moment I thought I’d lost my vision, or dropped into some other reality. I felt the agonizing, tugging pressure at the back of my head. A blindfold. I was being blindfolded. A thick fabric, scratchy, sweaty. I could barely blink, my eyelids pinned by its weight. I screamed, kicked backward, tried to squirm away. The world spun. I didn’t know which way was up.

Dimly, I heard the click of a revolver. Nearby. Too close. I was back in that motel room in Pennsylvania, my heart draining out onto the bed, my lungs giving way.

“Cate,” I cried. “Are you okay?”

“I’m here,” she said. Still close. Her voice faint, breathing labored.

“What’s happening? Can you see?”

“Yes,” she said. The blindfold was just for me. “There was a fourth, and he ambushed you—” A second later, the crunch of sole against bone. She gave a strangled cry.

I was aware of the chaos behind me as if I were listening to it from underwater. The men shouting, crowing, laughing. Isabelle was silent. The fear was so thick now, like a bad dream, like being chased by an unseen beast that paralyzed with its presence alone. What had Isabelle thought would happen? She was rage-addled, grief-muddled. Cate was a force that could put things back together, not tear them apart. Isabelle was too small to take on all these men. And I was useless: my power thwarted by something as simple as a blindfold.

We needed them all. I saw that now. We needed Soo-jin’s wild, world-rending scream, Bonnie’s ability to fade into the world itself. Emily’s foresight. We needed Delilah and Gina, raised from the dead. We needed Fiona. But there were just the three of us, separated and alone.

Cate screamed and groaned. “Stop,” I yelled, my voice not my own. “You fucking—”

A boot to my belly, a dull thud of pain that exploded slowly outward. I keened in pain.

Isabelle’s sudden sharp scream.

This was where it would end for us. For me, Isabelle, and Cate. Cate. By the time Cate was forming a flickering pulse inside her mother’s body, I was already out in the world, running wild. I’d pressed my ear to Tonya’s stomach to listen to the watery echo and to feel the soft, impossible kick of her heel against me. Like stars forming at different reaches of the universe. She’d brought me back to life, but I couldn’t protect her in turn.

Birds were singing. The insects’ wail rose and ebbed, rose and ebbed.

“Stop,” I said again. My voice was thin now, and defeated. Panic beat weakly at my temples, my body chilled with a slick of sweat.

There was so much noise. I couldn’t tell what was happening where. There were screams, groans, the men laughing, calling to each other. Isabelle’s voice. Cate’s voice. The memory of that night brought back. I waited for the shock of pain, the warm, creeping wetness of the wound. Nothing. But Isabelle was crying, somewhere not far, the sound ragged and small. If they realized how much power she held in her hands and found a way to stunt that—and we were helpless now, my powers blinded, Isabelle hurting and hopeless, Cate—

We weren’t the trap. We’d walked into one willingly.

I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. It took me a second to identify it: I missed my mother, the way I had as a child. Her warm, strong presence. Her assurance that it would all be okay. Something I’d carried with me my whole life, even when I was angry, even when I took everything about her for granted.