“You haven’t?” Mica said.
I shook my head, not believing I’d never bothered. “I always assumed it was white. I know I’m a good person, and I never had any reason to think my cloud would be different from anybody else’s.”
“Well, don’t dilly dally!” Mica said. “Go look!”
I got up and raced to the bathroom mirror. As soon as I switched my vision, what billowed around my shoulders made me smile. A beautiful bright green mixed with blue stared back at me. Any doubt I may have carried over being connected to this group vanished. Di was right. I was one of them.
I returned to the living room, smiling.
“Well?” Mica asked.
“Green and blue.”
“I knew it’d be like ours.” Mica grinned.
I sat beside Flint. His arm once again settled over my shoulders. I liked the weight of it. I also liked its possessive feel.
“Okay,” Di said. “Now that you know about us, there’s no need to hide things from you.”
I frowned. “Why did you hide this from me? Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
Jet quirked an eyebrow. “Do you not remember your reaction to us?”
“Yeah,” Jasper agreed. “It was pretty obvious you didn’t know what to make of us, and I’ve never seen someone hide her tattoo so fast when we asked about it.”
I ducked my head sheepishly. They were right. After months of hitchhiking and lying about myself to strangers, it’d been an instinctual reaction to guard myself against others.
Jacinda put her hand over mine, her honey brown eyes soft. “What they’re trying to say, is that we’ve found it’s easier to wait before we tell a new person. Most of us had similar reactions to yours when we met the group, although, not quite as severe.” She said the last bit in a very soothing voice and patted my hand.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. Maybe if I hadn’t thought they were so strange, I would have been more open to trusting them.
“Don’t be,” Jacinda said. “We all felt untrusting initially.”
“You did?”
Jasper smirked. “Jet punched me when I told him it was me in his head. It’s not like me being his twin gave it away or anything.”
Mica laughed. “He seriously freaked out!”
“We did try to tell you sooner,” Di interjected. “Last night, we wanted to tell you when we got to this cabin, but then you bolted for the bathroom and pretended to go to sleep right after that. It was obvious you weren’t ready.”
“Yeah,” Mica piped in. “They tried telling me right after they picked me up, but I almost jumped out of the vehicle.” She tucked a strand of short, brown hair behind her ear. Apparently, she found this funny now because she grinned.
“I didn’t take it well either,” Jacinda said. “I was told ten minutes after I was picked up, and it was a lot to take in. Can you imagine how you would have felt when we picked you up? If the second the door closed, we showed you our tattoos, or told you we had no memory of who we were, and had been waiting and looking for you? How do you think you would have reacted?”
I tried to picture it. I couldn’t. I was already uncomfortable from what I’d seen in their clouds. Having them spill all of that information on me would have probably had me running for the hills. Literally. I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess it would have made it harder.”
“So we started waiting a few hours, sometimes a day,” Di explained. “Just so the newbies could become used to us and know we’re not crazy.”
I started putting two and two together. “You all arrived here at different times then?”
Di nodded her head. “I got here first, maybe two weeks after I woke up. I kept seeing this place and images of everyone. I knew I needed to find you all and pull us together. After me it was Flint, then Mica followed by Jacinda. After her, it was Jasper, then Jet a few days later. The twins got here about two weeks ago.”
“And now we don’t need to hide anything from you!” Mica stated loudly. “Now we can be ourselves again.”
“That is, until the new girl gets here,” Di warned.
I cocked my head. “The new girl?”
“That’s the other thing,” Di said. “There’s another one of us. She’s coming in a few weeks. She’s the last.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I sank into the couch. There are more of us?
“There’s another girl…like me? Who’s out there right now, trying to follow the pull?”
“Yes,” Di replied.
“Who is she? Where is she? What’s her name?”
Di shook her head. “I don’t know her name or who she is, but she looks young and always appears afraid.”
“Where’s she’s coming from?”
“I think Texas, but I’m not sure. She’s been on the road for so long, but she’s always on a form of public transport. She’s done a lot of traveling in the wrong direction.”
I frowned. Poor girl. I knew how she felt. It was awful, traveling alone, with no one to help you. The added stress of not having an identity or any idea of why you were traveling made it harder.
“I hope she gets here safely,” I said.
“She will.” Di leaned back and crossed her arms. “In two to three weeks, she’ll be here. And unlike you, she doesn’t seem impulsive.”
“How do you know I’m impulsive?”
Di rolled her eyes. “My visions of you changed rapidly. Every time you made an impulsive decision, my hold on you would disappear. You’ve been very hard to track.”
“Oh.” That did sound like me.
“You know, you did disappear in the middle of the night,” Mica added.
I remembered my sudden need to find answers, now. I nodded sheepishly. “Yeah. I did.”
Mica sighed. “Don’t make a habit of it. You’re not easy to find.”
“How did you find me this morning?”
“Flint,” Mica said.
Flint shrugged. “I guessed you went back to Little Raven, so I went looking for you.”
“More like freaked out, jumped in the car and drove off before any of us could join you,” Mica retorted. “I’ve never seen you panic like that.”
Flint tensed.
He panicked that I disappeared?
“Anyway,” Di said. “Now, that we know you’re safe and we’ve told you about us, we can get on with things until the new girl arrives.”
“Hmm.” I was still reeling that Flint had panicked about me being missing. A warm feeling coated my insides.
“Do you have questions about anything else?” Di asked.
I shook myself, trying to clear my head. “So if you can see the future, do you know what happens to us?”
Di frowned. “Unfortunately, no.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “I’ve seen snippets of the eight of us in the future, brief visions here and there. In most of them we’re here, on the ranch, so I know we’re not leaving anytime soon, but I know that will eventually change. I’ve had a few visions of us in some desert, but I’m not sure where, and I’ve seen us in a large city or two, but I wasn’t able to see enough to know what cities they were.”
“Oh.” So we’d leave here eventually and all travel somewhere together? “Do you know anything else about our future?”
Di shook her head. “Not at the moment, but that could change. I can’t control my visions. They come as they want and show me things unreliably.”
“Maybe the new girl will know more.” As scary as everything was, I felt better that I wasn’t alone.
“Yeah, don’t count on it.” Jet lounged back in his chair and ran a hand through his dark curly hair. Some dirt fell off his boots when he propped them on the hassock. “Personally, I think we’re all screwed. There’s nothing normal about any of this, and the fact that we can all do something no other human can, seems like a bad omen to me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked warily.
“Jet,” Di interrupted. “We don’t know anything. No n
eed to get anyone worried.”
“Yeah.” Jacinda clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Sharp blue veins stuck out from the backs of her hands. “Di’s right. No one needs to be worried.”
“But don’t tell me you haven’t wondered?” Jet persisted. “Eight people with no memories, matching tattoos and this messed up desire to flee to the same region in Colorado? Not to mention unusual, even unique, physical abilities? And what about the fake ID’s? Or the money? Or the fancy condos? You’re not gonna tell me that’s not a bad omen. And you’re not gonna tell me it’s all an innocent coincidence. Something’s going on here and if you ask me – it’s not good.”
I swallowed uneasily while Jacinda looked ready to pass out. Di was scowling, but then something Jet said caught my attention.
“Wait. ID’s? Money? Condos?”
“Right, that’s something I wanted to ask you,” Di said. “Didn’t you wake up in a luxury condominium with money and identification?”
“Um, no, I pretty much woke up opposite to that.”
She frowned. “We’ve been wondering how you were homeless. It doesn’t make any sense when we woke up with money.” She shook her head. “If you didn’t wake up in a condominium, where did you wake up?”
“In an alleyway in Rapid City.”
Di’s eyes bulged. “In an alleyway, outside?”
“Yeah.”
Perplexed expressions covered everyone’s faces. “And you didn’t have any cash or personal documents on you?” Di asked.
“No, nothing.”
Di cocked her head. “I wonder why that is, since the rest of us all woke up in similar conditions. Except Flint. His was a little different.”
Before I could ask what was different about Flint’s, Di said, “That’s bizarre that you woke up outside.”
“So, the rest of you woke up in a condo? With money?” I felt strangely left out.
“Yes,” Jacinda nodded. “We all woke up in furnished luxury penthouses or condos, with money, identification and cell phones on the kitchen counters.”
“Of course, none of us knew how we got there or why we had those things,” Di added, “but that’s how we woke up, and even stranger, the properties belonged to us. The legal paperwork was also on the counter. The deeds were in our names.”
“Why did you all have money but I didn’t?” The feeling of being excluded grew.
“I don’t know,” Di said, “but we all had ten thousand in cash, a bank card with five million dollars in our accounts, a driver’s license, a social security card, a birth certificate and the paperwork for the condos we owned. It was all neatly arranged on our kitchen counters in our mysteriously owned homes.”
I thought back to that morning when I’d woken by the dumpster in the alleyway. It would have been much less stressful if I’d had resources like that. “Jeez, that would have made life easier.”
“But at least you were able to make your way here, without money. That’s what matters,” Jacinda said soothingly.
“I have some money.” Granted, it was from people who gave it to me out of pity, insisting I take it, but it was still money. I paused as another thought struck me. “If you all have ID’s then you do know your identity, right? You just don’t remember it?”
Di eyed Flint. “No. I wish it was that easy, but all of our identification is fake. High quality fakes, but still fakes. Flint and I looked into it and found that the hospitals of our supposed births have no records of us, not to mention our Social Security numbers all belong to dead people.”
My mouth dropped as I finally understood the enormity of what she was saying. “So, you’re saying that something or someone set this all up?”
“It’s the only way to explain it,” Di said. “If we all woke with money, similar ID’s and tattooed symbols, then we’re obviously connected and someone knows about us. I doubt one of us did this. How could we?”
I was too shocked to move.
“See what I mean?” Jet said. “Bad omen.”
I shivered.
Flint’s side warmed beside me. “That’s enough. I think we’ve explained what we need to right now. It’s been a tough morning for Lena. She doesn’t need to worry anymore.”
“No.” I shook off the bad feeling. “I want to know. Can I see the stuff you guys woke up with?”
Flint grunted in disapproval, but Di walked into her bedroom and returned with a large duffel bag. “Here.” She handed it to me.
I unzipped it. My eyes widened when I saw the considerable amount of cash. “How much is in here?”
“Forty-eight thousand, eight hundred and four dollars. Plus or minus a few pennies,” Flint replied. “We combined all of the money each of us had after we found one another.”
“We call it the pile.” Mica grinned. “There’d be more if Jet and Jacinda hadn’t blown so much of theirs.”
Jet held his hands up. “Hey, what’s a brother supposed to do when he wakes up in Vegas?”
“Gambling and designer clothes are not a good way to spend our cash,” Di said sharply.
Jacinda sighed. “I did buy most of my things on my debit card.”
“Also not a good idea,” Di replied. “Bank transactions can be tracked.”
“Anyway, as I was trying to say…” Mica said loudly. “We also have almost thirty million in our bank accounts, minus what the Suburban cost and what Jacinda spent. And it grows by the day with all the interest!”
I pulled out a Ziplock bag that held the licenses and social security cards. Opening the bag, I thumbed through them. “Flint Smith.” I studied Flint’s license. The address was some rural route in Wyoming. “Di Johnson.” I flipped to hers. Her address was in Wichita, Kansas. “Jacinda Jones from Phoenix, Arizona.” I kept flipping. “Jasper Brown from Salt Lake City, Utah; Jet Davis from Las Vegas, Nevada; and Mica Wilson from El Paso, Texas.” I frowned.
“Are those the cities all of you woke up in?” I asked.
“Yep,” Mica replied.
I scanned the cards again. Each seemed to have a current picture along with fairly accurate height, weight and eye color. I studied all of the last names again. “Why do these last names seem familiar?”
“Because they’re in the top eight most common last names in the U.S.” Flint replied. “The other most common last names are Williams and Miller. My guess is your missing ID had one of those names. If you ever had an ID.”
I thumbed through the cards again. “There are birth dates on these!”
“Yes,” Di replied. “If those are correct, Flint’s the oldest at twenty-four, followed by me at twenty-three, then Jacinda and the twins – also twenty-three. Mica’s the youngest at twenty-one.”
“You’re all roughly the same age?”
“If those ages are correct, yes, we’re all within a few years of one another,” Di replied.
“So I’m probably around that age too? Maybe early twenties?”
“You look to be in your twenties,” Jasper said.
“Yep, no wrinkles yet,” Jet added.
I’m in my early twenties? Granted I didn’t have proof, but most likely I was around the same age as everyone else. More than anything, I wished I knew why I’d woken outside and not in a condo. What I’d give to have documents like these! At least some identity semblance, even if it was fake, would be comforting.
“So this new girl is probably around our age too?” I asked.
“Most likely,” Di replied.
I dug through the bag again. “Where are the cell phones?”
“We got rid of them,” Di said. “Cell phones can be tracked. We didn’t want to take the risk.”
I gaped. “Right.”
“See?” Jet said. “Can’t be anything good.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“Okay, we’re done,” Flint said. “This meeting’s over. Everyone up.”
The tone of his voice surprised me. It was almost protective sounding. His arm was still around me too, and I once again
sensed that strange energy coming off him. It felt like heat mixed with power. I shook my head. Weird.
“Flint’s right,” Di said. “I think we’ve given Lena enough to think about.”
Flint stood. His arm dropped from around me. “Jet, Jasper and Mica, I need you guys to stand up.”
He moved away. Within seconds, the furniture was back to where it’d originally been. I stared in stunned disbelief. It was like a tornado ripped through the room. His movements were so fast he’d actually been a blur. I’d never in my life, well in the few short months of my known existence, had ever seen someone move so fast.
“How’d you do that?” I asked.
Flint shrugged. A lock of chestnut hair fell across his forehead. My pulse quickened. “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “If I don’t keep it in check, I’d probably move that fast all of the time. It hasn’t been easy to adapt to.”
“Huh,” I managed.
“Well if we’re all done here, I’m heading up to the house for lunch.” Jet stretched and yawned loudly. “I’m starving.”
The thought of food made my mouth water. “I’ll join you.” I eyed Flint and wondered what he’d do.
“Di?” Flint said. “You want to…” He didn’t finish his sentence. Instead, he nodded toward the door.
Di stood. “Yeah.”
Without another word, the two of them left. A rush of air entered the cabin when the door shut behind them.
I watched through the window as they took off down the driveway. They walked closely, their heads dipped toward one another. A brief swell of disappointment filled me. Flint hadn’t said goodbye or looked at me since rearranging the furniture. I tried to shrug that feeling off.
“I know you’re hungry…” Jacinda’s comment snapped me back to my surroundings. “But how about you come with me first. You can’t go up to the house wearing that.” Her nose wrinkled as she assessed my clothes.
“But I wore this last night,” I replied.
“We’re heading out,” Jet said. “You guys coming?”
Jacinda shook her head. “Lena and I will be up in a minute. You three go ahead.”
Mica, Jet and Jasper walked out the door. I watched them enviously. “Can’t we eat first?”
Forgotten (The Lost Children Trilogy Book 1) Page 6