by Clara Kensie
Heath had never even spoken in my presence. The idea of that sweet, shy man punching Kellan in my defense filled me with vengeful glee.
Tristan’s duffle bag lay open on the floor, another of his sweatshirts folded on top, this one white with royal blue lettering and a lightning bolt. On impulse, I slipped it over my gray prison top.
“You can make holes in the cuffs if you want,” Tristan said. “You did on my other one.”
“I did? I’m sorry.” I looked down at the sleeves. I’d already started rubbing the fabric with my thumbnails.
“It’s okay. I like it when you do that.”
“Lilybrook High Lightning,” I said, reading the sweatshirt.
“I went from the Lilybrook High Lightning to the TLC Thunderclouds.”
“You told me you were from Milwaukee.”
“Milwaukee is about four hours south of here.”
I traced the blue letters with my fingertip. “Are all the kids in Lilybrook undercover agents?”
He laughed. “No. Most kids in Lilybrook are just regular kids. But the people who work here at the APR are all psionic, and usually their kids are too. We can work here as interns once we’re in high school. I was interning in the lab back in March when Kellan asked me to help him out with his new case. He wouldn’t tell me any details, just that I’d have to live in a town called Twelve Lakes and wait for a family to move in, then befriend the kids to find out if anyone in the family had psionic abilities. I accepted the job. Being an investigator for the APR was all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
“What about school?”
“I was a senior just weeks away from graduation. I had straight As and I already had enough credits to graduate. The APR arranged it so I could finish my senior year by correspondence. But I had to enroll as a junior at TLC because we didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for your family. When you still didn’t come by the end of summer, I had to postpone college and be a senior again.” He sank to the cot, chin in hand. “Taking this job was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
I refused to be impressed or to feel sorry for him. “I’m sure your father gave you lots of advice.”
He shook his head. “He was against it, even though Kellan told him it was a basic fact-finding mission and he’d arranged for a safeguard and a healer to be my chaperones. Combined with my warning premonitions, I’d be perfectly safe. My dad was still against it, but I was eighteen, so ultimately it was my decision.”
That’s right—Tristan was eighteen. He’d graduated high school. “There’s still so much I don’t know about you,” I said, “and you know everything about me.”
“That’s not completely true,” he said. “I didn’t know your last name until Friday night.” He said my full name aloud. “Tessa Carson.”
“Tessa Lynne Carson,” I added.
“Really? Your initials are TLC? Like the school?”
“Yep. ‘You’ll find TLC at TLC’,” I quoted Twelve Lakes Community High School’s slogan. “I guess you really did.”
He laughed. “TLC. That’s amazing.”
“Why?”
“My middle name is Lawrence.”
“Tristan Lawrence... Oh. We have the same initials.” I was quiet for a moment, and then I decided to be cruel, because for a moment I’d forgotten he was the enemy and his kindness was just another one of his tricks. “But I think for you, TLC stands for terrible, loathsome and contemptible.”
The light left his eyes, and he sank to the cot with a sigh. “I hope one day you’ll change your mind about that,” he murmured.
I just shook my head.
* * *
“You want me to believe my parents are criminals,” I said to Tristan after sitting in silence for a while. “That they blackmailed and murdered people.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to believe that Denn—that he isn’t going to kill us.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to believe the complete opposite of everything I’ve known for the last eight years.”
“Yes.”
“Even after everything Kellan did. Punching me, kidnapping me, holding me as bait. He made me watch his men shoot my parents. After all that, you still want me to believe that my parents are the bad guys.”
Sighing, he ran his hand through his hair. “Yes.”
“If I believe you,” I said, “that means my parents were lying to me.”
“They were,” he said.
“If I believe my parents, that means you’re lying to me.”
“I’m not lying to you.”
“But you did lie to me, Tristan Walker.”
He winced. “Yes.”
“So the only thing I can prove is that you are the liar.”
He slowly nodded his head. “What can I do to make things better?”
Nothing he did now could ever make things better. He’d lied to me. Used me. Betrayed me. Tristan was the son of Dennis Connelly. Killer’s blood coursed through his veins with every beat of his heart.
I studied him from the corner of my eye. Legs wide, shoulders slumped, elbows on knees. Head down. Dejected.
He turned his head to look at me, his eyes wide and sorrowful.
He was desperate as well.
I licked my lips. Tristan had used me; now I was going to use him. “There is something you can do.”
“Anything.”
“I need you to help me get that green binder Dr. Sheldon had.”
“Why?”
“Whatever evidence you claim to have is in that binder. I want to see it.” And then I would prove there was no evidence. Once I convinced him of that, I would get him to help my parents and me escape.
And then I would leave him behind forever.
He eyed me for a long moment, and I offered him a tiny smile.
“Okay,” he said. “Tonight. After everyone has gone home.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The alarm on Tristan’s phone rang at exactly eleven o’clock that night. “Ready?”
Holding my breath, I nodded.
He rang the buzzer on the intercom, and a few moments later a low voice crackled through the speakers. “Yeah?”
“We need a guard down here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just need a guard to let me out.”
The intercom went silent, and Tristan buzzed it again. “I’m not a prisoner. I work here. I’m an agent.”
“What’s an agent doing locked up in the Underground?”
“That’s classified.”
No reply from the intercom.
Tristan sighed. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“...No.”
“I’m Tristan Connelly.”
“So?”
Licking his lips, he glanced at me. “So, my dad is Dennis Connelly.”
I tried not to show him how much that upset me as the intercom clicked off.
When a few minutes passed without it clicking back on, I said, “He’s not coming.”
Tristan gave me a knowing smirk. “He’s coming.”
A few minutes later, a guard with a thin, weasely face and a stubbly attempt at a mustache opened the door. Tristan took my hand and stepped into the doorway. “Whoa, not so fast,” the guard said. “Warden says you can leave whenever you want.” His eyes landed on me. “But the girl stays.”
Tristan tightened his grip on my hand. “That’s right. She stays with me.”
Weasel Face widened his stance, folding his arms across his chest. “I can’t let her out. Warden said it’s Doc Sheldon’s orders.”
Tristan growled and fisted his hand, but I stepped in front of him. Intimidation wasn’t going to get me
that binder, not with this guard. I lowered my chin and looked up at him with doe eyes, attempting to appear as docile and meek as possible. “Please, sir?” I begged Weasel Face, who couldn’t be more than three years older than me. “You’re the only one who can help us.”
He looked nervously down the hall and back to me. I made my lower lip tremble. With one more glance down the hall, he stepped back, waving us out. Tristan squeezed my hand, and we rushed from the cell before the guard could change his mind.
I’d been in the hallway three times before but had never seen it. I’d either been blindfolded, paralyzed by fear, or lost in the fog. This time I purposely raised the fog, enough to clear my mind and focus on every detail, planning an escape route.
The hallway was long, narrow, full of turns. Musty and damp. Gray metal doors, all sealed shut, lined the cinderblock walls.
My parents were behind those doors.
Strutting beside us, Weasel Face watched me with a suspicious frown. I blinked innocently at him.
We reached the elevator. “Wait for us here,” Tristan told the guard.
He snorted and rested his hand on his tranq gun. “No way.”
The elevator doors slid open silently, and the three of us entered. We rode up four floors and arrived at ground level.
We dashed close to the walls. This hallway was lined with closed doors as well, but instead of solid steel, they were made of heavy paneled wood and had brass knobs. Shadows stretched above us as the hall disappeared into complete blackness at the far end. From the other end came the faint tapping of booted footsteps—guards on patrol, perhaps. I tried to breathe slowly through my nose, sure they would be able to hear each exhale.
We neared a door illuminated in red from the word EXIT hanging above it. Tristan seized my arm, pulled me in tight. Weasel Face noticed and gripped his gun.
They were probably right to suspect I’d try to burst through that door and flee, but running hadn’t even occurred to me. I needed that binder. I needed Tristan to know the truth, that my parents were innocent. I marched past the exit without a second glance.
Tristan stopped at the last door in the hall. “This is Dr. Sheldon’s office,” he whispered, and turned the knob. “Locked. Damn.” He turned to Weasel Face. “Do you have the key?”
“Nope.”
Before I could even begin to be disappointed, Weasel Face bent his fingers into a claw and stared hard at the knob. He swiveled his hand in the air, and a few seconds later I heard a tiny click.
“Nice,” Tristan said. “You’re psychokinetic?”
“Kinda. Ferrokinetic. I can manipulate metal.” He pointed to his belt buckle, which was twisted into a big, stylized G. “I just made this tonight,” he said. “It’s for the Green Bay Packers.”
I gave him a whispered, slow ooooo, like I was awed by his handiwork. He beamed and pushed the door open.
Tristan ushered me inside. A computer monitor was on and gave the room an eerie blue glow. The monitor sat on a utilitarian desk, cluttered with papers, pens and old cups of coffee. A garbage can stuffed to overflowing sat in the corner. Black filing cabinets lined the back wall. Stacked haphazardly on top of the filing cabinet was a pile of manila folders with papers sticking out, old date books and a vase holding a dusty silk flower.
And balanced precariously on the very edge of the cabinets were four green binders. I could just make out the code running down the spine of the top one: CARS0520.
Tristan and I glanced at each other, then he turned to Weasel Face. “So, buddy, where you from? Who recruited you?”
“I’m from Sioux Falls,” the guard said. “Ted Rigby found me. I was just working for a mechanic, doing oil changes and pretending to pound out dents. Now I’m here. Wild.”
“Yeah, Rigby’s great. How long have you been working here?”
While Tristan kept Weasel Face occupied, I grabbed the binder, then slipped it under my top, grateful I was wearing Tristan’s huge sweatshirt. Dr. Sheldon’s office was so messy, hopefully she would just assume she’d misplaced the binder. I put a confused look on my face. “I don’t see it.”
Tristan played along, pretending to look around the office. “I don’t either.”
“What are you looking for?” Weasel Face asked.
“Um, my Green Bay Packers sweatshirt,” Tristan said. “It’s lucky. Every time she wears it, they win.”
Weasel Face pursed his lips as he scanned the office. “I don’t see it. Damn.”
I swapped my confused expression for a disappointed one. “I hope the Packers can win without me.”
“Hopefully,” Tristan said, and smiled. We work well together, his smile seemed to say.
Yeah. We do, I smiled back.
Too bad for him this was the last time.
Chapter Forty
Weasel Face—who no longer seemed so weasely—escorted Tristan and me back through the hallways and down the elevator to the Underground. Tristan gave him a handshake and a promise to go out to watch the Green Bay Packers soon, then suggested it would be awesome if he would disable the surveillance camera over the door. With a conspiratorial grin, Weasel Face wiggled his index finger at it. Tristan quickly steered him out, the door sealing shut behind him.
I took the binder from under my sweatshirt and opened to a random page. A black and white surveillance photo of my parents. Young and serious, they were sitting at an outdoor cafe. Mom was absently fiddling with her wedding ring. Dad was looking at the menu. A completely neutral photo, boring really, but it brought tears to my eyes.
I flipped through the pages. How odd to see our real names in print after all these years.
Andrew Carson.
Gwendolyn Carson.
Jillian. Tessa. Logan.
We’d wiped away our identities with each move, and this binder held the only proof of our existence.
Clips from my father’s newspaper columns when he wrote as Xander Xavier.
A picture of our big red brick house in Virginia, standing majestically over an expansive lawn.
My parents’ old financial records. “See, Tristan? They really did make all that money,” I said. “Paychecks. Stock market investments. It’s all right here. All legal.”
“They wouldn’t mark their blackmail payments as blackmail. They’d mark them as stock market investments.”
I glared at him for a full minute before returning to the binder.
Another photo of our house, this time reduced to rubble and ashes.
Pictures of some of the other houses and apartments we’d lived in.
Testimonies from our old neighbors.
A list of our aliases.
Phone records. My parents were right to get rid of our landline.
A list of websites we’d visited. My parents were right to get rid of our internet access too.
Reports from various precognitives and psychics, including a child’s drawing of twelve blue, misshapen circles with wave symbols. “What’s this?” I asked Tristan.
“Twelve lakes,” he said. “That’s how we knew you would go there.”
In the binder, Dennis Connelly had written notes about where we’d been and where he guessed we might go next. We were always careful not to leave anything personal behind, but he still found a few items. Those items he brought back to the APR for psychometric readings, and he also flew psychics out to the homes we’d fled. Several times he’d noted his frustration that the psychics were never able to get a clear reading on our family through the objects or places we’d left behind.
I read every detail of a receipt from an electronics store near our hideout in Seattle, back when we were the Abbott family. My name was Amanda for about ten months. Jillian was Allison and Logan was Alexander. The receipt showed that we’d paid cash for a DVD player and a stack of D
isney movies.
One of the papers was a program from a dance recital. The name Renee Roberts was circled on the program—Jillian’s alias in Oregon. My pseudonym had been Rachel, and Logan’s had been Ryan. I’d wanted the name Rebecca but my father had said no. Jillian didn’t appear in the class picture with the other little ballerinas, but my parents had been upset that her name was in print. We’d fled to our next hideout soon after that.
Logan had left behind one of the music scores he’d written when we lived in Florida. Another page was a scan of a painting I’d made in art class, probably when I was eleven. A single petal lying on the ground, broken off from the rest of the flower. What state were we living in then—maybe Missouri? North Carolina? The image on the page was black and white, but I remembered using shades of blue for the petal. It might have been the last painting I’d ever done. It was too painful to paint anyway, knowing my parents would ooh and ahh over it, tell me I was so talented, and then sometime before our next run they would burn it. The canvases wouldn’t fit in my getaway bag, and we could leave nothing personal behind.
Disney movies, dance recitals, art classes. It was nice to remember that a small part of our childhood had actually been normal. How odd to think that Dennis Connelly was the keeper of my childhood memories.
D. Connelly was written on the bottom of the earlier reports. Toward the back pages, his name was replaced by J. Kellan. Tristan’s name appeared on some of the reports too.
My stomach clenched when I saw recent pictures of me. Jogging with Tristan. Walking happily to school holding his hand. In one photo he was laughing as I whispered in his ear. An intimate, happy moment, captured by a long-range surveillance camera.
Another photo of the two of us sitting on a bench under a leafless tree. Ethan’s backyard. That was the night Tristan had told me he loved me, the night I’d told him my real name. The next photo, taken the same night, showed us talking in the back seat of his car. When I looked closely, Heath was in the background in almost every picture, either standing behind a tree or huddling in a car.