~~~~~
The next morning, the click-clack-click of Cooper pacing on the hardwood floor woke me. It took me only a moment to realize I wasn’t in the chair, but was instead nestled in a bed. As I took a deep breath, the smell of rubbing alcohol filled my nose.
My hair was splayed over my face, partially blocking my view of the room, and I felt the pressure of a warm body behind me and quiet breathing tickling my ear. My heart fluttered as I realized where I was. Slowly brushing my hair out of my face, I was astonished to find Jake’s arm wrapped around me. How the…
“Zoe, what are you doing?” Sanchez said disapprovingly in my mind. I raised my head to find her standing in the doorway to the foyer, her face a mixture of both horror and skepticism.
Carefully removing the covers, I snuck out of Jake’s bed. I tiptoed out of the room, trying not to wake him, and gently closed the door behind me.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said, shrugging defensively. Did I climb into his bed? I hadn’t drank that much…had I?
“Biggs is making breakfast. Be back down here in ten.” Sanchez’s voice followed me as I headed up the staircase to brush my teeth and change clothes.
“Yes, Mother,” I muttered. I felt like I was seventeen again and had just been grounded for sneaking a boy in through my bedroom window.
As I opened the door, I wished I had time to sneak under the bed’s plush down comforter for a quick nap. My mind was still fuzzy from sleep…or maybe from the shots I’d taken with Sarah after we’d returned to the house. Unfortunately, Sanchez’s disapproving expression had promised she would retrieve me if I took too long.
After combing out my tangled hair, I brushed my teeth and washed my face, trying to quantify how much I’d drank. Pulling on a clean, purple V-neck and a fresh pair of jeans, I stepped back to appraise myself in the standing, full-length mirror beside the desk. At least I don’t look hungover. I shrugged and headed for the door. As I turned the curved, bronze door handle, I heard my name echo in the grand entryway.
“Zoe!” Harper yelled again, and I flung open the door.
“I know, I know, I’m coming. Jesus. You’ve eaten without me before.” I hurried to the nearest stairway. Halfway down the stairs, I froze. Jake, wearing a white t-shirt and plaid pajama pants, stood in the foyer. Everyone else was crowded around him, but he was staring at me.
Sarah gestured back toward the library. “You should sit down, Jake.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“I need to ask you some questions—make sure you’re alright,” Harper said.
I could barely hear their demands over my thudding heartbeat. Seeing Jake out of bed, I felt weightless, and the constant worry that had been taunting me all week fizzled away.
“Morning,” Jake said, his voice rough. He stood near the doorway to the library with attentive eyes, waiting for a response, but I could only stare at him in astonishment.
After a few rapid heartbeats, I finally whispered, “Morning.” My voice was trapped in between excessive excitement and disbelief.
“You were gone when I woke up,” he said coolly, but a wry grin followed. It melted every part of me, weakening my knees until I almost fell down the stairs. I barely noticed Sarah and Harper whispering something to the right of Jake, or Sanchez watching us from his left. I couldn’t look away from Jake’s all-consuming eyes.
“You read Dumas,” he added in my silence, and I instantly knew he’d heard everything—what I’d told him about my family and Dani, about Clara, and about how infuriated I was with him for running back into the fire.
Nodding dumbly, I felt my chin quiver and a tear streak down my cheek. Another followed, and before I could stop myself, I was running down the stairs. Running to him. I leapt into his arms, and wrapped my limbs around him, squeezing desperately. I was afraid he would disappear.
“You’re awake,” was all I could think to say as he held me snugly against him. His chest moved with mine, and I clutched his sleeves in my hands—he was real, and being wrapped in his arms was even more comforting than I’d imagined it would be.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, his lips brushing my ear.
“I can’t believe you heard me,” I choked. “I can’t believe you’re awake.” I suddenly realized I’d launched myself at a man who’d nearly died only days before. I leaned away from him and searched his face. “Am I hurting you?”
He shook his head.
I wiped the tears from my cheeks with one hand. Of course I’d fall apart in front of him…again. “I was doing so good,” I whimpered.
Jake chuckled and looked deep into my eyes, searching for something. “You were in my dreams.”
“Was I blubbering like an idiot?” I asked sarcastically. Suddenly conscious of the scene I was making, I unwrapped my legs and lowered my feet to the cold marble floor.
“Come on, Jake,” Harper called from the library. “Let’s check your vitals.” But Jake said nothing, his gaze holding mine as he backed away, one step at a time.
“Come on, Sleeping Beauty,” Harper said, ushering Jake into the room.
Before turning away, Jake smiled at me. “Alright, Doc.”
43
DANI
Chris sat on a boulder a few feet away, the weak rays of the fading winter sun turning her blonde hair an ethereal silver-gold as she studied me. Behind her, the surface of an expansive lake reflected the pines and snow-capped mountains surrounding it, looking like Monet’s version of the breathtaking alpine scenery. Chris and I were sitting near the lakeshore, several hundred feet from the tents in their dense shield of trees.
“There has to be a way. You can’t keep going like this,” Chris said.
“I’m fine.” I waved her worry away and shifted on my own little boulder—my butt wasn’t enjoying the cold stone, especially not after another day spent in the saddle.
She snorted. “Yeah…you’re so fine that you almost slid right off your horse.”
I shrugged. I’d been maintaining a connection with the animals around us for the past four days, ever since we left Bodega Bay. It was necessary, but it also came at a high price, leaving me completely exhausted…except at night. Once we stopped each evening, I would find several dozen nocturnal animals and ask them to keep an eye out for other “two-legs.” Even though I kept the connection with them open while I slept—using my Ability throughout the night—I tended to feel a little better when I woke each morning. I should have been more worn out…it just didn’t make sense. On the other hand, the unusual dreams about stalking deer through deep woods and soaring over snowy peaks made perfect sense—the animals’ thoughts were bleeding into my subconscious and influencing my dreams.
Chris pursed her lips for a minute before speaking. “Maybe it’s like a passive and active thing. Like you’re trying harder when you’re awake. Can’t you just turn it down or something, so it’s not as tiring?”
“I don’t think so…it’s more of an on-and-off thing. I’m either connected to a mind, or I’m not.”
Frustrated, Chris huffed. “Well you’re always connected to Jack, right?”
“Yep.”
“But that doesn’t wear you out, right?”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t seem to.”
“So it’s also a numbers game. The more minds you’re connected to, the more energy you expend.”
Nodding, I gave a tight-lipped smile. “And people’s minds are harder, like they’re trying to kick me out.”
“But why are you less tired in the morning? You said you’re still doing it at night,” Chris said, thinking out loud. We’d already been over it, multiple times. Narrowing her eyes, she asked, “How do you find them? The minds, I mean.”
“I don’t know…at first it was like casting out a net and seeing what I caught. But the past few days I’ve sort of been able to see them in my head.”
She leaned forward, intent. “Like radar?”
I thought about it briefly, picturing a black scree
n with sonorous beeps bringing green shapes intermittently to life. “I think…maybe?”
“So right now, can you tell me where the nearest living mammal is, besides me?” Her eyes were bright, excited.
It took only a moment of focus. “Down there,” I said, pointing to the ground beneath us. “It’s a group of something small. They’re hibernating, I think.”
“If you do whatever you just did, how long can you just ‘observe’ without actually connecting?”
“I’m not sure. Want me to try right now?” I asked, and Chris nodded.
Exactly as I’d done with the small, furry family beneath us, I focused on the part of my brain that let me hold conversations in others’ minds. It was like removing headphones to hear what somebody was saying. I closed my eyes, blocking out distracting visual stimuli, and a world of living minds blossomed around me.
Every other time I’d entered the “observation” state, I’d been looking so intently for specific individuals that I’d missed the wonder of the collective. It was breathtakingly beautiful, like an orchestra of stars pulsing together in harmony, playing the song of life. I lost myself in their melody. It was balanced and perfect and random and…right. When one throbbing mind extinguished, another appeared elsewhere. Death and life—the natural order of things.
Like the mythical Sirens, each mind hummed, luring me in. I wanted to take the next step, to bridge the chasm separating us. I wanted to connect.
“Dani?” Chris asked softly, pulling me back from the precipice.
“Hmmm?” The sound was wistful. As I opened my eyes I felt rejuvenated, like I’d spent the day at a spa instead of on horseback.
“How’d it feel?”
I smiled. “Great. Gets dark fast here, huh?” It had been late afternoon when I’d closed my eyes, but twilight had fallen.
Without taking her eyes from me, Chris rubbed her hand over her mouth before resting her chin on her fist. Sitting on a rock, with an elbow on her knee, she could easily have been posing for the female version of Rodin’s The Thinker.
“Your eyes have been closed for almost an hour,” she told me slowly, letting the words sink in.
Shocked, I stared at her.
“And you don’t feel more tired?” she asked.
I shook my head. I felt awesome—completely alive, like the mental immersion had pumped me full of endorphins.
“Can you tell the difference between people and animals when you’re, you know…in observation mode?”
I nodded.
“What’s your range?” she asked. At my confused look, she amended her question. “How far can you ‘see’?”
“I…,” I began but had to clear my throat. “I don’t know. I could feel everyone in the camp, but that’s not that far.”
“Hmmm…,” she said, pulling a map out from the pack she’d set down beside her rock. “According to your ‘scouts’, the last group of people we passed was in that little town about five miles back. Can you try to reach that far?”
I nodded again and reentered the state of concentration. Reaching out, I expanded the diameter of my awareness, each new life increasing the lure of the Siren song. Suddenly, a cluster of armored, human minds appeared, and I gasped.
Gritting my teeth, I said, “I…feel…them.”
“Go further,” Chris’s distant voice instructed. I pushed on.
The further I stretched my awareness, the more clumps of humans appeared. It wasn’t tiring exactly, just difficult to resist completing the connections. I was about to pull back—overwhelmed by the millions of living creatures pulsing around me—when I noticed it. It was like the glow of city lights in the dead of night, barely visible over a hillcrest. It drew me in, and again, I pushed on.
As a throng of human minds appeared, the sliver of a gap between my mind and all others threatened to vanish. I was so painfully close to connecting to all of them, thousands of human minds. If I did, I was certain it would permanently fry my brain, but I didn’t seem to be strong enough to resist their magnetic pull.
“No…no…too close…too many…,” I repeated over and over. I was vaguely aware that I’d begun rocking back and forth on my boulder and had buried my face in my gloved hands.
Suddenly, I was no longer moving, and my mumbling stopped. I could barely think through the need to close that final infinitesimal distance separating my mind from all of the others. Someone was pulling on my wrists, trying to remove my hands from my face.
“Dani, look at me!” Jason’s voice was strong, deep, and reassuring. But it also held terror…his was a voice that should never sound terrified.
Barely cracking open my eyelids, I peeked at the man kneeling on the ground before me. His eyes were bright, wild, and his face was ferocious.
He looked away and roared at Chris, “WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?”
“Not…Chris’s…fault,” I groaned, reaching up to grasp Jason’s wrist. “Too far…too many people…too much…can’t stop…”
Jason pulled off my gloves and grasped my hands almost painfully, but his voice was calm when he spoke. “Focus, Dani. Come back to me. You have to fight. You can do this.”
The pulsing minds didn’t blink out of existence, not like when I’d stopped using my Ability completely, but they suddenly stopped pulling me toward them. It was like I’d flipped a switch that muted their enticing song. I quickly retracted my awareness until it barely extended beyond our camp. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t passed out, why I didn’t feel the bone-deep exhaustion I’d grown used to, but I certainly didn’t mind.
Smiling weakly at Jason, I removed his hands from my shoulders and held them in my lap, ignoring the salty tears on my cheeks. “Thank you.”
He scooted forward, wedging himself between my knees, and wrapped me in a fierce embrace. “Sometimes you scare the shit out of me,” he said, his voice gruff.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.” If a mind voice could tremble, mine did.
Chris rose and quickly skirted around us, saying, “I’m just going to go do…something…not here…”
“Fuck! I’m not used to this!” Jason exclaimed as he stood and stepped backward, leaving me alone on my rock. The lure of the minds instantly resurfaced at full force.
“Oh!” I exclaimed and leapt up after him. When I seized his hand, the lure faded again. “It’s you!”
Jason didn’t seem to hear me. Unexpectedly, he turned to me, grabbed my face with his hands, and crushed his lips against mine. Rising on tiptoes, I clutched his jacket at his sides and pulled his body closer. I made an involuntary, throaty noise and readied to reel in my awareness completely. The minds! The lure! Jason!
“Jason, wait!” I gasped as he started backing me toward our tent. He had taken to setting it up a short distance from the others, so we’d at least have the appearance of privacy. Even so, I was exceptionally grateful the sun had set and our companions couldn’t watch us groping each other.
“Jason!” I said sharply once we reached our tent. “Wait! I have to tell you something.”
“What?” He unzipped the tent, and then did the same with his coat, shrugging it off and tossing it inside. Our enormous, moss-green tent had two “rooms” and was a few inches taller than me at its apex.
“Something happens when you touch me,” I told him.
He held my eyes, unzipping my down jacket and sliding his hands along my shoulders to slip it off. “You have no idea what can happen when I touch you,” he said, tossing the coat on top of his in the tent.
As Jason clenched my waist in his hands, pulling my body to his, I took a deep breath and held on tightly to my thoughts. But his hands were moving under my shirt, sliding up my ribcage. His thumbs traced along the curve of my bra just under my breasts. I shook my head, refocusing. “I mean…something happens to my telepathy when you touch me,” I told him, and he stilled, his mouth inches from mine.
“What?”
“I gained control when you touched me, then lost some of it when you wa
lked away, and then it came back when I grabbed your hand. It’s like you make me stronger.”
His face was unreadable, his hands unmoving.
“Jason…I think you have an Ability, too.” Not for the first time, I wondered if MG had been right when he’d told me that everyone who survived the Virus would eventually develop a strange new skill…at least, everyone who wasn’t a Crazy.
“And that Ability is what, exactly?”
Thinking hard, I bit the right side of my lower lip. It was a silly, manufactured habit that had become second nature. I could remember Zoe laughing at me when I’d practiced it on her in seventh grade. Around that time, I’d realized that teenage boys were less interested in smart, nice girls, and instead preferred pretty, flirty girls. So, I’d practiced being flirtatious until I no longer had to think about it. I’d transformed.
Jason’s eyes flicked from mine, lower, to the soft, pink flesh pulled between my teeth. His hands tightened around my ribs, and he licked his lips.
“Maybe it’s like a megaphone, but it amplifies other people’s Abilities instead of their voices?” I tapped my pointer finger gently against my lips—another of those silly habits—before pressing it against his chest. “Or…it could be like a volume dial, turning other people’s Abilities up or down. That could be super useful!”
“Sounds boring.”
“Not even! What if someone was going to hurt us with their fancy superpower, and they could, I don’t know—shoot lasers out of their eyeballs or something—and you could stop them by using your own crazy awesome Ability!?”
He straightened, looking down at me with narrowed eyes. “You think it’s possible?”
I smiled. “I think you’re already doing it.”
When he raised his eyebrows, I explained, “So, there’s kind of this guy who can enter people’s dreams…and he was entering mine, mostly when I was on my own. He did it a few times in the week before I left, but not when you stayed with me that one night. But anyway, he helped me figure out what I can do; he’s actually where the ‘Ability’ thing came from. And…he hasn’t shown up since I rejoined you guys. So I’m thinking—it’s you. You must be blocking him somehow.”
The Ending Series: The Complete Series Page 40