At the ground floor, the lobby is a mess. Half the school is running around, teachers barking orders, students looking for friends, BMAC agents and policemen trying their best to herd the masses of people out the door. It’ll only take one person to recognise Gabby and we’re screwed.
I hand her my hat but she doesn’t notice, her eyes dead as she mutters to herself and wrings her hands.
I put the hat on her head for her and pull the bill over her face. I want to look back, to see if the man’s behind us. But I don’t. We had a big head start and we’re in the crowd now. There’s safety in the crowd – so long as no one stops us.
We keep our heads down and make our way to the doors, and I can feel a cold sweat beading along my back. Gabby’s pretty easy to spot. How could anyone miss her?
To the right I see Mrs Dibbs and my heart nearly stops, but she’s not even facing us. She’s yelling at a bunch of the football team who are throwing around a bunch of school trophies that have fallen out of the shattered display case.
I can feel the breeze from outside on my cheek, and when I look back I’m standing in front of the doors. Gabby’s already outside.
There’s a tickle at the base of my neck, a mild irritation, and I know it’s him – my Shadow – trying to get a feel for my emotions. I shake my head, shoving him away, and he tunes me out immediately. I’m over the I’m-about-to-die panic, and I guess that’s good enough for him.
And then I see Ollie. He’s standing over by the sign-in desk with Miss Farley and a bunch of BMAC officers. He’s talking to the officers, his arms flailing wildly, and one of them scribbles down whatever he’s saying. I duck my head and turn away before he can see me. Movers don’t have friends.
My arms reach out and I push the revolving doors. The familiar wind of the Eventualies wraps itself around me and I breathe it in through my nose until my lungs can’t take it any more.
SIX
Gabby and I make our way through the busy city streets. It’s chaos. People running everywhere as the thunder blasts overhead. BMAC vehicles plough through the crowds, rushing to get to the school. I notice a woman with arms full of shopping bags; she’s not looking at the sky like everyone else – but at Gabby, who hasn’t stopped mumbling to herself since the stairwell, since the lightning man; her eyes have barely focused at all and she’s still shaking.
‘Gabby, pull it together, will you?’
But it’s not just her. I knock shoulders with some business-suit man, and his eyes follow me, looking me up and down like I’ve just arrived from outer space. People are noticing us.
I look down at my shirt – it’s practically white it’s so covered in dust. My arms, my jeans, my shoes. Gabby’s the same. We’re filthy, scraped up, bruised and smothered in white chalky stuff.
‘We have to get off the main road,’ I say.
I don’t need to say it twice. She’s already ducked into a narrow alley, scurrying away from me and mumbling more. I follow after her, the sound of thunder drowning the echo of BMAC sirens back on the main road.
Gabby stops beside a dumpster that reeks of rotting food and pee, and digs around in her pockets.
‘What are you doing?’
She acts like she hasn’t heard me – maybe she didn’t, she’s so busy talking to herself – and pulls out a silver droidlet.
‘Are you calling someone?’
No. She isn’t. Before I can blink, she spikes the little sphere into the asphalt, shattering it into pieces.
‘Gabby!’
She drops to her knees, sifting through the shards.
‘What are you doing?!’
She reaches for a tiny plastic square of green and snaps it in two between her fingers, then scrambles to collect the rest of the pieces and drops it all into the dumpster before she whirls on me.
‘Where’s your droidlet?’ She looks wild, crazy, as she glares me down.
I take a step back. ‘Why? What do you care?’
Her hands grab hold of my collar. ‘They’ll track us! BMAC monitors droidlets!’
‘What?’ I can feel my heart rate kick into high gear and I reach into my back pocket. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Everyone knows that,’ she growls.
I didn’t. I bet a lot of people don’t. But Gabby’s not like a lot of people. She’s a brainer.
‘Your droidlet,’ she says, holding out a demanding hand.
I feel around in my jeans and there’s nothing there. ‘It’s gone,’ I realise. ‘I must have lost it back at school.’
Gabby looks at me for a moment, and when I guess she decides I’m not lying she backs off, leaning against the dumpster. She stares up at the sky, her chest rising and falling so quickly it looks almost painful. Whatever’s scared her has scared her good.
‘Gabby,’ I say, ‘what the breezes was that back there? The lightning, I mean. That guy just – he killed them with lightning!’
‘It didn’t feel any different.’
‘What?’
‘During the Move!’ she says. ‘I should have felt myself do it. I should have chosen to do it! But – nothing felt any different. For a Move to happen, the pungits have to get excited. If they’re attached to me, I’m the one who has to decide to Move.’
‘Pungits?’ She’s rambling about her Mover particle. ‘Gabby, forget your stupid experiments. This is serious!’
‘It’s not stupid!’ she screams at me. ‘Pungits are the whole key to everything. Don’t you get it? They are the tiny fragments of the universe that make a Mover Move! They reach through time and space and connect you to your Shadow and that’s the whole reason this is happening!’
I don’t have time to debate her theories. I don’t even understand them anyway. ‘Gabby, what are you talking about? What are you saying?’
‘It’s the whole reason he’s here!’
Her mouth clamps shut, like she’s just said something she shouldn’t, and she turns away from me.
‘You know him,’ I say. That much is obvious. If I wasn’t sure before, I’m positive now. I move in front of her and she tries to step around me but I’m faster. ‘Gabby, I just put a whole lot on the line for you, so I think you need to start talking right now. Who was that man?’
‘I think he …’ Tears fill her eyes and she looks down at her feet to hide them. ‘No, I know it. That man, he’s my …’ She stops, like she can’t decide how to finish her sentence. Like she doesn’t want to.
And then I understand why. ‘Your Shadow,’ I finish for her. ‘Gabby, you think that guy on the stairs was your Shadow?’
She nods weakly.
‘Your Shadow,’ I say again, trying to get my head around the idea. ‘Your Shadow?! But you told me – you told me you didn’t do this!’
‘I didn’t!’
I grab my head, suddenly wanting to rip out all my hair. ‘That doesn’t make any sense!’ I slam my foot against the dumpster, stubbing my toes, and the sting makes me bite down on my lip. ‘Gabby,’ I say, taking a deep breath, ‘you either did it, or you didn’t. It’s not a grey area.’
‘I didn’t,’ she insists.
‘Then what are you talking about?’
She shakes her head, struggling for an explanation, and I’m mad at her for it. Mad at her for being so weird. For not talking to me, having a conversation, like a normal human being. She slides to the ground, pulling her knees up.
‘Gabby! Just answer me!’
‘I didn’t feel anything,’ she says finally. ‘Not when the Move happened. The pungits that make up my connection, their energy levels should have skyrocketed. I would have felt that, if I’d done it. I would have made that happen. Shouldn’t I have felt myself doing it?’
‘How should I know?!’ It’s not like I’ve ever done it.
The Eventualies whistle as they funnel down the alleyway, rippling through my clothes, and I take another breath. You’d think she would have felt something. Even if her pungit theory was wrong. Whenever my Shadow pays attention to me,
there’s a tingle, a light burning in my head. And something else, swelling in the pit of my stomach, expanding kind of. I would have thought that when a Mover Moves someone it would feel like that, but … times a billion.
‘You figured out the pungits,’ she says suddenly.
‘What?’
She looks away from me, drawing into herself the way she does at school. ‘You messed with my pungits so you could get back here, didn’t you? You did something to the connection on your end,’ she goes on, and suddenly I feel like I’m alone in this alleyway. She’s not talking to me at all. She’s talking to—
The answer splits through my brain like lightning and all at once relief swells through me, so much that I crouch down in front of Gabby, grabbing her knees to get her to look at me.
She flinches.
‘Gabby! Are you talking to your Shadow now? Is that who you’ve been mumbling to this whole time?’
She watches me, frowning, tears staining her cheeks.
‘Can you feel him now? Can you feel where he is?’ It’s like the fog. I can tell how far away my Shadow is. And I’m only Phase 1. Not the exact year or anything, but still, I know my Shadow’s not here, in this time. He’s ahead of me. I feel him ahead of me. Shouldn’t it be that way for Gabby? ‘Is he far away or nearby?’
She thinks for a minute, and then her frown slides off her face. ‘Far,’ she says. ‘But also close. But it’s all messed up somehow. Noisy inside my head. I can’t—’
Close. The thought scares me. Shadows are supposed to be in the future. That’s where they belong. ‘Gabby, he can’t be in two places at once. If you can still feel him in the future, then he can’t be here. Maybe you’re wrong about the guy on the stairs. You’re just confused. Maybe the guy just looks like whatever you think your Shadow looks like.’
Her eyes are huge, like an owl, as she looks at me. Finally she shakes her head, as if it hurts her to do it, tears falling down her cheeks. ‘My head hurts too much. I don’t know what I feel. But I do know it was him on the stairs. I know it. He was older, but it was him.’
And it’s right there in her eyes. The truth of it. The truth of a Mover who knows her own Shadow.
‘He’s my Shadow, Pat,’ she says, her voice breaking. ‘I wish he wasn’t, but …’
But he is. It’s all over her. The guilt of it. I want her to be lying because it doesn’t make sense. ‘How …?’ I start. ‘How can he be here if you didn’t Move him?’
She shakes her head. She’s just as confused as I am. ‘He must have done something to the pungits. Messed them up somehow.’
‘Gabby, pungits aren’t—’
Her wet eyes meet mine, like she knows what I’m going to say, and I stop. I don’t want to debate the existence of her Movers particle right now. It’s not helpful.
‘You could still be wrong …’ I tell her instead.
‘I’m not,’ she says. ‘My Shadow’s here.’
But my brain doesn’t know how to process it. What she’s saying is nonsense, pungits or no pungits. She either Moved him or she didn’t.
‘My Shadow’s here,’ she says again. ‘What will BMAC do to me?’
There’s an ache in my throat. What have I got myself into? I want to scream, groan, cry, laugh. I don’t know what to do. If Gabby’s right, if the lightning man on the stairs is her Shadow, then BMAC is going to be on the warpath. He killed two of their agents. Because of Gabby. Everyone was there, on that roof yard. They saw me help her. I just put myself between BMAC and a guilty Mover. Why did I do it? Why the breezes did I let myself get involved in this?
I slam my foot against the dumpster and the whole thing rattles.
And Gabby sniffles into her arms.
Because she’s scared.
And when I look down at her I remember exactly why I helped her.
Because of Dad.
Since Sibichendosh’s letter – Gabby could just as easily be Maggie.
I hear sirens and look back to the mouth of the alleyway. Two more BMAC vehicles rush by on their way to Romsey. ‘We need to get off the street.’
‘And go where?’ she says quietly.
Good question. BMAC’s on the hunt for her. They’ve probably got a dozen officers at her house already. They might even be looking for me, if Miss Farley and Ollie told them who I am. This is big, I realise, and my brain feels like it’s swelling, trying to sort out what we need to do. This is too big.
And then the East Grove lady is in my head – what Maggie asked me the other day on the fire escape. Could Mom have helped her?
Yes.
‘We’ll go to my place,’ I say.
Gabby looks up, surprised.
But it’s the best place to be. This is something Mom knows how to handle.
A distant rumble of thunder echoes over the sirens and I bite my lip.
If anyone will know what to do next, it’s Mom.
SEVEN
‘Mom!’ The apartment’s dark and silent. Everything’s still and quiet just when all I want is noise. I want to hear her voice call out, nag me to fix the tank again, or pick up my clothes off the floor. There’s only silence. ‘Mom?’ She’s supposed to be here. She can’t still be with Sibichendosh, can she?
I grind my teeth together to stop the floaty feeling.
‘She might’ve gone to the school. Went to pick me up when she heard what happened,’ I say. Or maybe she’s still yelling at Sibichendosh. The walls of my stomach feel hot with nerves. ‘I guess we’ll just have to wait for her to get back.’
Gabby stands outside in the hall, staring at her feet.
‘You coming?’
She doesn’t acknowledge me. She’s clawing at her finger, and the sound of her nails on her skin is grossing me out.
‘Gab!’
She stops mid-scratch and her dark eyes meet mine.
‘You wanna hang out in the hall all day?’
Without answering, she squeezes by me and into my home. I can’t help but shake my head when she plops herself down on the doormat and tries to wriggle out of her tan leather cowboy boots. Gabby ‘Gooba’ Vargas is in my apartment.
‘You, uh, want to call your parents?’ I ask. ‘They’ll be freaking out.’
She shakes her head. ‘No. They won’t.’
Before I can ask what she means, there’s a thunk. It’s coming from the window. Another thunk.
It’s Maggie’s stupid bird, tapping on the glass.
I ignore it, watching Gabby free her left foot and start struggling to release the right. The effort’s too much for her, I guess, and she takes a break, leaning her head back against the wall.
‘You can use my mom’s smartdesk,’ I tell her. ‘They’ll want to know you’re OK—’
‘I don’t want to call them, all right? It’s fine.’
I shut my mouth. I don’t understand, but she clearly doesn’t want to explain, so I leave it alone.
Gabby pulls my hat off her head and a cloud of dust falls off. My own skin feels choked and sticky from being covered. I want a shower.
She shakes her head to let more dust fall away, then holds the hat out for me without looking up.
My throat is dry and ticklish – I can taste that chalky dust clinging to the back of my tongue – and I need water.
‘You want a drink?’ I ask, taking back my hat.
She acts like I haven’t said anything. Just goes back to struggling with her boot. She does that a lot, ignores what I said. I wonder if it’s just cos she’s not used to talking to people.
I sigh and figure that’s a yes.
Another thunk from Beauty.
I head over to the cupboards and grab a blue plastic cup for myself. ‘Water OK?’ Gabby just sits there on the floor, scratching anxiously at her finger. At least she’s not talking to herself. I reach in for another blue cup and turn the tap. The pipes groan and a sad brown drip trickles out.
Right. The tank’s still busted. So I guess a shower’s out.
I pull open the fr
idge, looking for something else. All we have is Pretty Pruny’s Princess Juice – some purple lemonade junk that Mom buys for Maggie. ‘Do you like Pruny’s?’
Gabby shakes her head. No. Me neither.
Frustrated, I toss the cups into the sink and lean against the counter. The tickle in my throat is strangling me. I try to clear it, hacking and coughing.
Gabby glances in my direction.
I guess that was gross.
‘Sorry,’ I say, and she goes back to scratching her finger.
‘You think I’m crazy, don’t you?’
Her voice is so quiet I’m not sure I heard her. ‘What?’
‘You think my experiments are stupid,’ she says.
I just stare at her, not sure what to say to that, or why she wants to talk about it, considering we’ve got bigger problems.
‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘Everyone thinks it’s stupid. Even Mrs Dibbs.’
Her chin is in her chest while she picks harder at her finger, and I find myself feeling a bit bad that I’ve never really bothered to listen to her presentations. But that was only because I could never understand them.
‘I think the stuff you say is just over Mrs Dibbs’s head.’
I can tell from the curious look on her face that she’s never considered that as a possibility. So I figure it’s best to just be honest. ‘No one really knows what you’re talking about, so we all just kind of zone out. Price you pay for being too bright, I guess.’
Gabby smiles and blushes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her smile. I hadn’t meant it as a compliment. It’s always just been a fact. Gabby’s smarter than everybody. I guess the only person who didn’t know that was Gabby.
She looks back at her lap and tucks her hands away beneath her. At last she’s stopped the scratching.
The two of us are silent then, alone in the apartment together. I still have that chalk taste on my tongue, and I try to clear it as quietly as I can. I feel it on my skin too. And it’s starting to itch. I need to get out of these clothes.
I head to the bedroom – Beauty squawking at me from the other side of the glass – and dig through the hamper. I pull out a red sweatshirt and lay it on the bed, then peel off the dust-caked T-shirt, using it to wipe what’s left on my arms. Another thunk from Beauty, and when I look over at the window I see Gabby reflected in the glass. She’s leaning forward, watching me from her spot on the floor. She jumps when she sees me looking at her and goes back to staring at her lap.
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