When the Sky Fell on Splendor(66)

My own body felt claustrophobic, and I couldn’t get a good breath.

“Then what are they here for?” Nick demanded.

I threw open the back door and tumbled out onto the shoulder, gasping for oxygen. I bent over and pressed my hands against my knees as I struggled to inhale.

Two more SUVS were roaring past behind the trucks, bumping up behind them like security guards.

“Franny?” Sofía said, jumping out of the car and trailing me to the evergreen trees. “Franny, are you okay?”

I turned back to her, staring through the heady clumps of mist drifting through the headlights.

I tried to speak, but no sound came out. I shook my head. Remy opened his door and stood, his silhouette peering over the car at me as Sofía took two slow steps, murmuring, “It’s making you sick, isn’t it?”

I blinked at her.

“I know it is,” she said shakily. “All night you’ve seemed like you were about to collapse. . . . Using that power is hurting you.”

It should’ve been obvious, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me before then.

Every time a burst of the power receded from my body, pain and nausea raced in to take its place.

Every time I tapped into the energy, the pain got a little worse.

“Whatever’s going on,” she said, voice wet and rattling, “please just tell me. For once, just tell me.”

Tears flooded my eyes. I felt suddenly small, helpless. The others had gotten out of the car too and were watching, waiting for an explanation for my outburst.

The last thing I wanted to do was tell them, but it was time.

I could end this for all of us, if I was just honest.

“Remy’s right,” I rasped. “The FBI isn’t here to save the world.”

“We don’t really know what they’re here for,” he cut in. “But whatever it is—”

“They’re here for me,” I said. “For the thing inside me.”





TWENTY-FOUR



“IT WENT INTO ME,” I said. “I didn’t remember at first either, but . . .”

Remy turned away, shaking his head angrily, but it was never his job to protect me, and I shouldn’t have let him try.

My heart pounded as I went on. “But at the end, right before we came to . . . the thing walked into me. That’s how it disappeared, when it all stopped. It entered me.”

There was a beat of silence.

Levi’s mouth dipped open. “What. The.”

Nick’s eyes bulged. “I swear to Gah.”

Arthur went white-faced, and Sofía stepped back, like she’d been pushed.

“That’s what you’ve been keeping from us?” she said.

I glanced at Remy. He’d walked into the middle of the road, his hands folded behind his head like he was stretching his neck.

I took a deep breath. “There’s more.” I held my phone out to Arthur, but he made no move to take it. He was stunned into uncommon silence and stillness. “I e-mailed that guy. Black Mailbox Bill, who said he’d seen one of the discs? Look what he said.”

Arthur stared at the phone like it was a living rabbit I’d just pulled from Levi’s fedora. Sofía took the phone instead, and Nick and Levi crowded around her, reading over her shoulder.

“Okay, now we really need to tell someone,” Levi said. “We’ve got to blow this thing wide open.”

Remy spun back. “And this is why we didn’t tell you.”

Levi looked gobsmacked. “You knew too?” he asked, right as Arthur sprung back to life, saying to me, “You told him and not me?”

“I was handling it,” I explained.

“Obviously not,” Arthur argued.

“I was trying to,” I said. “I thought if Bill could tell me what had happened to him, then—”

“Then you could just leave me in the dark?” Arthur demanded. “You trusted a total stranger over me, Franny!”

“Oh, come on, Arthur,” Remy said, stalking back toward us. “You might not have known the thing was in her, but you knew it had done something to her, and all you cared about was getting enough groundbreaking footage to land your own Wikipedia page.”

“That’s not fair,” Levi said. “We were all affected—we didn’t know she was any different!”

“She’s shooting lightning out of her fingertips!” Nick said. “Not that it matters, because as soon as you realized that thing had affected any of us, you should have given a rat’s ass what that might have meant! But you weren’t affected, Art, so of course it was all fun and games! Of course it was all just trying to find the next thing that could fucking turn you into someone, so you can finally outshine your brother, no matter what or who it’s costing!”

“Thank you!” Remy said, caught up in the moment, but I was staring at Arthur, watching the expression melt off his face like he’d been slapped.

“Stop it,” Sofía said quietly, but Nick was rounding on me and Remy now.

“And as for you two, I don’t know why, but I expected better! You knew what kind of danger you were putting us all in, and you said nothing! Didn’t even warn us that every second we stayed in this shit-show, we were risking being—being disappeared by the gah-damn U.S. government! I’m so freaking tired of all your lies and secrets, and that goes for all of you!”