“Hey,” she said.
“Remember,” he said, “I told you I wasn’t any good at this.”
They walked to an empty room on the top floor of Fort McDowell. These rooms reminded her of the study carrels in Stanford’s library—not that she had gotten far in her coursework there.
Jeremy pulled two chairs over. “It’s like what we do with Dunn,” he said. “Except you don’t ask, you demand. I hate that part. It makes me feel sick.”
Teddy took a deep breath. Her eyes scanned the room, settling on the window behind him. She’d ask—no, demand—that Jeremy open the window.
“Ready?” he asked.
She’d never been inside Jeremy’s mind. It looked different than the inky blackness she waded through in others’ minds, which was navy in some places, black in others, like velvet. The inside of Jeremy’s mind felt like negative space, pitch-black and dense. Open the window, Teddy said. She felt bile rise in the back of her throat.
No, Jeremy said.
Open the window, she repeated. Her voice echoed around in her head and his. She tried to focus on the command, but her thoughts wandered back to the night weeks earlier when Jeremy, cross-legged on the floor of her dorm room, had been the first to agree to help.
She blinked, and she was standing there again in her mind’s eye, watching her friends watching her. The images came fast and furious now. Without an organizational technique, without a house, she had no way to control her astral telepathy. It was just like what had happened with Molly in Dunn’s class. Teddy lost her breath trying to keep up: Jeremy as a kid, in his mother’s arms, reading a book; Jeremy watching the Twin Towers fall; Jeremy crying in his bed, alone; Jeremy teaching himself to ride a bike; Jeremy studying with tutors, papers scattered across a desk; Jeremy, always alone; then Jeremy embracing Molly on the shore of Angel Island; Jeremy, with the other Misfits in the dining hall; Jeremy on his speedboat, crossing the bay—
And then a wall, smooth and cold, slammed up in front of her eyes with such force that Teddy fell off her chair. Teddy’s skin felt arctic, and not because she’d successfully commanded Jeremy to open the window.
“I think you’ve got the general idea,” Jeremy said. His voice was shaking. Teddy couldn’t tell if he was upset or angry.
Teddy pulled herself up. “Jeremy, I didn’t mean to—” He’d been trying to help her, and she’d screwed everything up.
“What’s going on in here?” a booming voice asked. Clint Corbett stood in the doorway of the small classroom. Immediately, Teddy surged her wall into place.
“I reserved the room, Professor Corbett,” Jeremy said. “We’re finished, anyway.” He grabbed his bag and left without giving Teddy another glance.
She’d been avoiding Clint for months, and now here he was, feet away. The distance between them felt like miles. They were separated by everything he’d refused to discuss: the theft, her parents, Sector Three. She might as well have been standing on the other side of Angel Island—or even back in Vegas.
“You haven’t been coming to class,” he said, though his question—why?—remained unasked.
Teddy had expected Clint to be angry. To be on her ass about ditching. She was practically daring him to kick her out of Whitfield. Yet he hadn’t. She gripped the wooden desk. She was so angry with him.
“Maybe we should both sit down. And you can explain yourself.”
“I don’t think that I’m the one who needs to explain myself,” she said, releasing her grip on the desk. She took the photo out of her pocket; she’d been carrying it around since the day Yates had handed it to her in San Quentin. She laid it on the desk.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, slack-jawed.
“I dreamed about it first,” Teddy said. She cleared her throat, knowing she couldn’t mention Yates. If she did, Clint would surely intervene—transfer him, or burn the file, or something. She sent another surge of power to her wall. “And then it came in the mail a few weeks ago,” she lied.
Clint’s brow wrinkled. “No return address? No note?”
“No,” Teddy said. “But I know those are my parents. And that’s you with them.”
Clint sighed. “Teddy, this would have been a distraction.”
“You knew them! You knew my parents and you never told me!”
Of all the things that Clint had kept from her, this one hurt the most. If she had sat across from him in his Taurus in Vegas and he had said: I knew your birth parents, they were psychic, she would have told him to sign her up right then.
Finally, Clint said, “We were young when we first met. Younger than you are now—”
“Where?” Teddy said. “Where did you meet?” She wanted to see if he would put all his cards on the table.
“At a government training facility.”
“Do you mean a school like Whitfield or something different?”
“It was a high-security military facility. The primary purpose was to teach desert combat techniques to troops who would be deployed overseas.” He winced as if remembering something painful. “The psychic training was ancillary to the facility’s primary directive, genetic experimentation. There was little oversight, no real direction or control. No accountability. I think that was the venture’s downfall. Ultimately, it pioneered genetic research on psychics.”
“Sector Three,” Teddy said.
Clint’s eyes met hers. “How do you know about Sector Three?”
“Rumors floating around school.” She couldn’t tell him that Yates thought something similar might be happening at Whitfield. Another thing that Clint had kept from her. Another thing she was keeping from him.
He cleared his throat. “Your father was an enormously talented telepath. He passed that ability on to you. It doesn’t always happen like that. Psychic abilities skip generations and even manifest in people who have no family history.”
“And my mother?”
“An astral traveler. It’s likely that she’s the source of your astral power,” Clint continued. “In altered states, your mother’s astral body could visit other planes. Like dreams.” He leaned forward. “You said
