Conjured

walk out the door and go with Aidan, no matter what her past self had planned.

“I don’t have a car. Or even use of my mom’s lunchbox-on-wheels.” But he seemed pleased. His eyes were bright again, and his cheeks were twitching as if he wanted to smile but thought he shouldn’t.

“Where do you go after work?” Eve asked.

“Home. I live a few streets that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction from Aidan. “Come home with me. For lunch, I mean.” He blushed pink. “I make a mean egg salad bagel sandwich. Pickles and everything.”

She thought that sounded wonderful. She was aware she was smiling goofily at him. He wore the same expression, his eyes full of her, as though drinking her in. “Can we skip the everything bagel?” she asked.

“You don’t like everything bagels?”

She shook her head.

“Why didn’t you ever say so before?”

“I’m saying so now.” I can’t be bound by a past self I don’t remember, she thought. It was a freeing thought, and she felt her entire heart lift.

His smile faded as his eyes flicked to look over her shoulder and out the window. “So, Pretty Boy … He won’t call your aunt and freak her out if you don’t show?”

Her shoulders slumped. He would, of course, and Aunt Nicki and Malcolm would crash down on her with full wrath if she left with no word. Eve peered out the window at Aidan and felt as if a box lid were slamming shut on her and she were shrinking inside. And then she straightened as an idea occurred to her. “I’ll tell Patti.”

Without waiting for Zach to respond, Eve crossed the lobby to the circulation desk.

The librarian immediately looked down at her computer, as if she hadn’t been staring at Eve for the past ten minutes. “Yes?” she said, like she’d expected a patron.

“There’s a boy waiting for me outside. I …” She thought of how concerned Patti had been about security, of Patti’s secret eyes, of her arrangement with WitSec. She’s hiding too, Eve thought. “I don’t feel safe with him.”

Patti looked up sharply, dropping the feigned air of disinterest. “He’s picked you up before. He must have been approved.”

“I know.” Eve couldn’t explain it to Patti any more than she could explain it to herself. She looked down at her feet, unable to meet Patti’s intense gaze, and thought that maybe this was a bad idea, maybe she should go with Aidan and not second-guess the agency.

“Intuition?”

Eve nodded, still studying her shoes. “I’d just … feel better if I went home with Zach. I can have Malcolm or Aunt Nicki pick me up at his house.”

“You’ll tell them about your unease with the boy?”

Eve looked up at Patti. There was sympathy in her eyes. “I will.”

“Good. I’ll take care of him for now.” Patti smiled reassuringly at Eve. The smile transformed the woman’s face, softening her by a decade.

Eve smiled back, though her cheeks felt stiff. “Thank you very much.”

“You have to trust yourself,” Patti said, and then her smile faded. “In the end—when they find you, when whoever you’re running from catches up—that’s all you can do.”

Eve shivered and wondered if that was experience talking or prophecy. She backed away slowly, then quickly, and returned to Zach. She took a deep breath, looked one more time out at Aidan, who was checking his watch, and said to Zach, “Show me that back door?”

He led her through the library, deep into the stacks, to a door marked STAFF ONLY, tucked between the audiobooks and older magazines. He forced the door open—it was half-barricaded by books—and they slipped inside.

The staff room was stuffed with books. Stacks of books were piled on the floor as high as Eve’s hip. Several work tables overflowed with books. Metal bookshelves that ran floor to ceiling were crammed with more books. In one corner a refrigerator hummed, and even it had books shoved on top of it. She wished she could burrow in between all the books and stay, but Aidan would undoubtedly find her here, as soon as he tired of waiting and came in to search the library. Following Zach, she zigzagged through the piles to a bright-orange door marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.

Zach pushed through the door. No alarm sounded. He held it open for her, and she stepped outside. The back of the library faced the woods.

The woods were thick. Oak, maple, and evergreen trees clustered close together, obscuring any view of the streets or houses beyond. Vines twisted around their trunks, and the undergrowth was a snarl of green bushes. Anything or anyone could be hiding in them. Eve stepped back toward the door as it sucked shut. She squeezed the door handle—it had locked behind them.

“Come on,” Zach said, “before Pretty Boy decides to look for you.” He tromped into the underbrush. “As much as I’d love to fight for your honor, that guy could flatten me with his pinkie. I have a fine sense of self- preservation.”

Eve doubted that. If he had, he wouldn’t be anywhere near her. But she followed Zach anyway. As she stepped into the woods, she heard the crackle of tiny branches snapping under her shoes—and she remembered she’d been in woods before.

The memory slammed into her so hard that she had to steady herself on a tree trunk.

Woods.

But not like these.

She’d been in a forest of gnarled, ancient trees whose leaves blotted out the sun, leaving the forest floor in perpetual twilight. The roots had been so thick that she’d had to climb over them. Here, the trees were as skinny as her arm, and the sun poked through the canopy above. The underbrush was thick and green, tangling her feet and covering a fallen stone wall. “This is a young forest,” she said.

“Used to be a cow pasture,” Zach said. “All of this was farmland. Hence all the stone walls. Now it’s just houses and trees. Must have looked really different.”

“You don’t remember?” Continuing after him, she remembered the sound of her feet crunching a layer of old leaves and needles as she ran. The mat of branches overhead had been so thick that only moss and a few ferns grew on the forest floor.

“It was a hundred years ago. Or, you know, some large number of years. Probably if we chopped down the fattest tree and counted the rings, we’d know. I don’t, however, have an ax handy.”

She couldn’t remember where the other forest was or why she had been fleeing or who had been with her. She did remember the way the trees had towered above her, how the branches had battered her, and how the roots had slowed her escape.

Eve checked behind them. She saw no one, but still, she felt watched. Shivers traveled up and down her spine. Birds rustled in the branches above. A squirrel darted through the underbrush. She jumped at each sound, her ears straining to hear more.

“I used to come here when I was a kid. It was pretty much the best superhero secret lair ever. That was one of my forts.” He pointed toward a fallen tree. “And that was my lookout.” He pointed next to a massive boulder beyond the fallen tree. She tried to see it as a child’s playground, not as the forest that loomed in her memory. “You know, to spot the supervillains that I’d proceed to defeat with my array of superpowers.” Still in the same light voice, he asked, “So, how long have you had superpowers?”

She halted for an instant, looking across the woods at the boulder. She’d thought she’d seen … It had looked like the S-curve of a snake, sleek scales reflecting the bits of sunlight that filtered through the leaves. Victoria? Eve started walking again, faster.

“I mean, it’s obviously not my power.” Crashing through the underbrush, Zach hurried to catch up to her. “I have never been able to do a single thing like that before. Believe me, I tried. I was that kid who used to attempt the Jedi mind trick on his teachers in elementary school. For art class, I fashioned my own Harry Potter wand. Lacked a phoenix feather, though. But when I kissed you … I was thinking how kissing you was like floating on air—and we did. And the second time, I deliberately imagined us levitating.”

“And the books flying?”

“I wanted to see what else we could do. So I imagined that. And it worked!” Up ahead, the trees were thinning, and she saw bits of roofs and corners of houses through the branches. “My current theory,” Zach