“Who do you think you are, sneaking up on people like that?!?”
I held my ground. “I wasn’t sneaking. I just heard you—”
She cut me off, her voice suddenly puzzled. “You snuck up on me!”
“You said that already.” Maybe I should have gotten Alexa. “I was trying to expla—”
“How is that possible?” she interrupted again.
“I… don’t know how to answer that.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
It was time to exit Crazytown. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. Seems like you are—” Outside of being a total lunatic. “—so I’m going to—”
“Don’t move.”
Me not liking people? This sort of shit might be why.
Kayleigh came forward, closing in on me like personal space was something to be conquered. Even though her head barely came to my chest, I was the one fighting not to step back.
Badass Crow, and all it takes to freak him out is one crazy chick. Her Majesty would be laughing her leather-clad, inhumanly fine ass off.
“I can’t feel you,” she finally said, voice soft and full of wonder. “At all.”
“Probably because you’re not touching me,” I pointed out helpfully. “Although I can feel you breathing on my shirt.”
“I’m talking about your emotions, Necromancer.”
“Oh.” Everything clicked. “You’re an Empath?”
“Unfortunately.” Lightning-quick, she reached out and touched my hand. For a moment, she was stunned to silence. This time, her voice was outright awed. “Holy cow.”
“Holy cow?”
“When I touch you, everything goes quiet.” She started to cry again, small shoulders shaking, but I recognized these tears too, remembered them from the handful of kids who’d made it out of the system and into loving families and good homes. Not tears of joy so much as they were tears of relief.
“What does that mean?” I finally asked. “Everything goes quiet?”
“What do you know about Empaths?”
“You hear emotions.” Like Bard had said, I’d aced the History of Powers section of my entrance exams.
“Yeah. Everyone’s emotions. Except yours, apparently.” She let go of my hand, and then quickly reached out and grabbed it again. “But when I touch you, I don’t hear anything.”
“You just said that—”
“I mean anything,” she interrupted for what felt like the hundredth time. “The three guards down on the wall. The couple making out on the field. The janitors cleaning the nearest classrooms. When I’m touching you, I can’t hear any of them.”
“And that’s… good?”
“It’s kind of a miracle.” She breathed out a little sigh and the tears finally stopped.
CHAPTER 27
“…so the scientific community—or what little of it survived the Break—worked feverishly to understand everything that had changed and to develop new theories to accommodate our very different new reality.”
I haven’t talked a lot about Amos to this point. Haven’t talked at all about his class. Nothing too unusual about that; I haven’t spent any time on Philosophy or Math or even Jessica Strich’s weapons classes either. Life as a first-year was, as I may’ve mentioned, really busy, and if I was going to tell you every minor detail, we’d be here until I was as dead as you are. And what good would that do anyone? You’re just going to have to trust that I’m hitting the high notes and the low notes, and that the rest of it is inconsequential.
Or don’t. I’m not forcing you to listen, even though we know I could. Any of you can take off whenever you feel like it.
Say hi to hell for me when you go.
Anyway, Amos. He’s the closest thing to proof that Dr. Nowhere had a sense of humor. Why else would you give immortality to someone who’s already old, wrinkly, and as foul-tempered as a Beast-shifter during mating season? Any reasonable person would’ve granted that gift to someone young and hot. An eternally young Orca… just the idea makes me want to fall to my knees and give thanks.
But not Dr. Nowhere. No, he gave us old Amos. Eternally old Amos. Born before the Break, during what he calls the first World War, whatever that means. God knows the world’s been at war the entire time the rest of us were alive. On the first day of class, Amos had joked that it was more His Story than History, since he’d actually lived the whole damn thing. Some people even laughed.
If you attend the Academy in your next life, do everyone a favor: don’t laugh. It only encourages him.
“While physicists and chemists ran experiments to confirm that some of the universe’s rules had stayed the same, biologists and zoologists focused on a different problem. People like me. People like some of you.” Amos waved to the left side of the auditorium, where the first-years were seated. Twenty-four of us in total, outnumbered five-to-one by the regular students, but there wasn’t a single non-Cape on the left side of the room, even if it left the other hundred-twenty students squashed together on the right.
I didn’t have much of a handle on what Academy life was like for the regular students. They were there to major in careers that supported Capes or the industry we’d given rise to. More than a few hoped the connections they made would translate into job opportunities when they graduated, and no relationship was more valuable than a Cape who wanted you on their staff… but in the few mixed classes we had, this same pattern of division repeated over and over again. Maybe it was awe. Maybe it was fear. Maybe they just really hated the grey sweats that every first-year wore during the week. Whatever the reason, it was as much their doing as ours.
“I’m not sure how many sleepless nights it took,” continued Amos, “but they went through a godawful amount of
