Select (Select #1)(48)

At that moment we heard the front door open and the sound of Alex’s voice. John quickly moved to his door and paused before opening it. “I’ll go talk to him. Let me take your clothes.”

I reluctantly handed over the evidence.

While John was gone I paced the room, realizing I was trapped for an hour or more, and I started to get anxious.

John walked back in, interrupting my rising panic. “He’s with his boyfriend, August, so we won’t see them. I told them you’re here.”

“Great.”

I sat down awkwardly on the edge of John’s bed, realizing too late I should have sat in his desk chair. I covered my lap and legs with the quilt that was half falling off the bed. John came over to join me and sat in the middle of the bed, facing me, legs crossed into a half-lotus position. I stared at his tanned bare feet, wondering for the first time in my life what it would be like to be an ordinary girl.

Since I first saw him, it was as if on some level I knew John would end up knowing everything. What was it about him that made me unable to lie to him? I didn’t want to lie to him. In the end the choice I made felt inevitable.

“I didn’t say a word about Barton Springs even when I was under arrest, so you know I would never…”

“I know.”

“Is it that bad if I know?”

“It is. But not if you never say a word for the rest of your life.” Before John I’d never had more than a cordial conversation with an outsider, and now I was considering telling him our secrets.

He began by laying out what he knew.

“After jail that night I read an article about your family. There was a comment about a group that was in Peru. You sound exactly the same.”

So he had read that far. I looked him straight in the eye but didn’t say a word.

He sat back. “So are you actually related to them? It was a tribe most people thought died out.”

“It’s not a big deal. There are all kinds of tribes.”

Holy shit. “Not magical ones.”

“We’re not magical.”

“Then what are you?”

“Are you sure?” I asked. I gave him one last chance to decide whether he wanted to cross over into knowing.

“Yes.”

“The tribe I’m descended from lived in complete isolation until they were discovered in the late eighteen hundreds.”

“So you’re from that tribe in the article. The ones the gold miners killed?” he asked.

“Yes. There was a genocide, but a number of us escaped. I’m directly descended from that group.”

“But you can do extra…” He searched for the words but couldn’t come up with anything.

“Technically, we’re a different species.” I’d said it. He looked like he hadn’t heard me right.

Please tell me he can handle this. All I heard coming from him was white noise.

“Because of geographic isolation and serious inbreeding, at some point in time we shifted as a group. So we’re close, but we’re not identical to Homo sapiens. There’s just a shade of difference from a genetic standpoint. We became a separate species evolving in parallel.”

John’s mind was still a blank.

“No,” he said, flat out.

“It’s true. Our DNA sequence is different. Just a tiny bit.”

“What scientist would—”

“Some of us have become leaders in genetic research.”

It was silent for a full ten seconds.

“Who else knows?” he asked, looking at me skeptically but with a touch of awe.

“No one,” I answered. “We’ve managed to adapt quickly and figure out how to hide among the population. We’re too smart to get caught. We have every advantage.”

“That’s hard to believe. Look at that article. And isn’t your dad under investigation? You obviously haven’t hidden that well.” So he’d done his research.

He leaned back, almost like he was scared of me, although he remained in his position on the bed. It was craziness that my biggest fear was that I would repulse him.

“What can you do, exactly?” he asked. I was relieved he’d moved on from the most difficult part, so I was almost happy to answer.

“Better vision, better sense of hearing, sense of smell, all of that. It helps us pick up on a lot and stay ahead. So everyone is just pretty quick—with sports, how they learn, reading nonverbal cues….”

“But there’s other stuff. How did your sister survive that day? And how did Magnus, or whatever his name is, destroy that grate?”

“We can amp up adrenaline on command.”

“Okay. But how did you know your sister was drowning?

Or tonight with the fire? Even if your senses are great, how can you actually sense things before they happen?”

I wasn’t entirely sure myself. “I think we’re just genetically more complex. Our brains evolved with more biological receptors.”

“But how does that work? What does that feel like?”

“It feels like a wave of energy goes through my body and I know. Maybe it’s picking up a different frequency of electrical waves, the way animals do. You know—how animals can sense an earthquake or storm before it happens? It’s all biological. Nothing magical.”