“Bottled water’s on the stairs. Help yourself. Ask before you eat anything.”
“Okay.”
To the others she said, “This is Flex.”
“Renee is fine,” I said.
They all said their names, which I mostly knew. Turned out Wings’s name was Nicolas. We all stared at each other, waiting for someone else to say something. As I stood in the dim light, knowing it was at least two a.m. and probably closer to dawn, fatigue crept over me. I cracked a yawn, which had the adverse effect of making everyone else start yawning.
“You can sleep there,” Sasha said, pointing to a bare mattress in the corner by the bathroom. She dropped down onto another mattress and pulled a tattered blanket up over her, not even bothering to take off her boots.
“Thank you,” I said.
Everyone scattered to their individual sleeping spots, and one by one the three living room lanterns were turned off. I stared at the water-stained ceiling, barely visible from the glow of the kitchen lantern, and listened to six strangers breathing. My arm throbbed, my chest hurt from stress, and my neck itched from the collar. My eyes drooped shut, but my mind was racing with too many things.
I rested, but did not sleep.
A ringing phone snapped me out of my dozing. I shot upright and blinked across the dim room, out of sorts from the lack of sunlight. Sasha sat up as she said, “Yes?”
Some of the others stirred while she listened.
“Okay, thanks.” She hung up. “That was Trance. Maddie is out of surgery and resting. She’s getting blood and antibiotics. Trance will call again in a few hours with another report.”
Various voices mumbled things I didn’t understand. Sasha rolled off her mattress and retrieved a bottle of water from the stairs. She saw me watching her and tossed one at me, which I caught without fumbling.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“A little after six.” She plunked down on the mattress next to me without an invitation. “Tell me about the Rangers.”
“Like what? I was twelve when the Rangers ceased to exist.”
“But you still believe in the idea of the Rangers, right? What they did and stood for?”
“Mostly I do, yes. We genuinely want to help people.”
“Why?” She didn’t seem to mind carrying on a conversation at full volume while four other people were trying to sleep, so I went with it.
“Why do we want to help people?” I asked.
“Yeah. You don’t know them. I don’t understand it.”
“You might understand better than you think, honey. Bethany and Landon helped people, using the skills Uncle taught them. They stole food and gave it to strangers who needed it.”
“That’s different.”
“How?” I glanced at Bethany, whose eyes were open, watching us from across the room.
“Giving them food isn’t the same as jumping in front of a bullet for someone.”
“Sure it is. The act is different but the intent comes from the same place.” I could see her face screw into an epic frown, so I grasped for something she could identify with. “You’d take a bullet for any of the kids in this room, right?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“They’re important to me. They’re family.”
“You understand better than you think, then.”
More of the kids were waking up, listening, lighting the lanterns. Only Barry didn’t seem to have noticed the conversation.
Nicolas sat with his wings wrapped around his shoulders like a blanket. “Were you always blue?” he asked suddenly.
I paused, thrown by the left-field question, until the reasoning behind it made a little bit of sense. For most Meta kids, powers and accompanying physical changes developed in childhood and early adolescence. Nicolas’s wings should have started growing sometime after the age of eight or nine, but I knew from talking to several other young Metas, ones whose powers didn’t appear until last January, that that hadn’t happened for them. Overnight, Kate Lowry went from a French manicure to thick claws she had to hide with gloves.
“No, I wasn’t,” I replied. “I was born with ordinary skin. I began to turn blue right after my eighth birthday.”
“Did it hurt?”
Fear coiled around my spine. “The physical change didn’t hurt, no.”
“My wings hurt.” He frowned and shuddered. “Felt like someone was ripping my bones out through my back for, like, a solid hour. When it was over, I was all bloody and scared.”
“You knew you were Meta, but you didn’t know what your power would be?”
He shook his head, and the others made noises that suggested they hadn’t known, either.
“Did you know?” Sasha asked.
“I didn’t even know I was Meta,” I replied. I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to give details of my hellish childhood to a bunch of strangers. But it also felt right. Like I could relate to them somehow, even though we were nothing alike. “I was born in a place called Paradise Ranch in Montana. It was run by a group of people who believed that Metas were demonic spawn, and that Satan was working through their powers.”
“The fuck?” Bethany said, as incredulous as I’d ever seen her.
“Unfortunately, Paradise Ranch wasn’t an anomaly. Other places like it did and probably do still exist.”
“You were born there?” Sasha asked. Her sparkly eyes went wide. “What did they do when you turned blue?”
Icicles stabbed me in the guts. My skin felt cold, tight. I pushed through the panic and dredged up the offending memories. “It didn’t happen all at once,” I replied. “I could hide it for a few days, until it spread to my hands and face. The morning I woke up and my eyes were glowing, I ran straight into my parents’ bedroom, sobbing, and I begged them to help me. My mother looked at me and started to cry. My father left the room. Neither one of them would touch me.”
“Did they turn you in?”
“Not at first. They kept me out of school for a few days. I couldn’t leave the house.” My skin tingled. “They tried giving me scalding-hot baths, then ice-cold baths, like it would leach the color out of my skin. They prayed over me. I was terrified, because all I knew of Metas was that they were demons, and I didn’t want to be a demon. Then I used my Flex power for the first time—stretched my wrist out six inches.”
My eyes burned with tears from old hurts.
“They called the town elders. My parents accused each other of being the cause of my”—I made air quotes—“possession. The elders promised to cast out my demon.”
Six horrified faces stared back at me, and I found the words were coming more easily. Now that the dam had cracked, the pressure was too great. Everything was coming out.
“I was taken to the church where everyone worshipped and then locked in a pitch-black cell in the basement. My parents threw me into hell, and they did it willingly. For two months, I was deprived of light, starved, beaten, tortured with water and sound and heat and light. The elders performed what I can only describe as rituals, where they chanted and flung things at me. Water, wine, blood, urine, I have no idea. I told them I wasn’t a demon, that I didn’t want my powers, that I was sorry.” I withheld some of the details of my torture from my audience. They didn’t need to know the most vile parts, the acts that still occasionally gave me nightmares. The things the elders did that—I realized many years later—had nothing to do with the exorcism attempts.
“My parents never came for me,” I said.
I glanced at Bethany, whose cheeks were streaked with tears, and damn it, I wanted to hug her. And I had no idea why. I wiped at my own eyes with the back of my hand, as torn up by the memories as I was calmed by them. Saying these things out loud took the monster from the closet and exposed him to the light of day.
