Ron sighs in relief. “Exactly.”
Ron mixes her cereal so the pieces at the bottom are now at the top, and then she begins to eat.
Between bites, she says, “By the way, I need to check my email. Do you have a computer I can use? Mine was stolen.”
She nods. “Yeah, it’s in our room. I’ll bring it out once I’m done with this.”
“Thanks.”
Giselle finishes eating first. She puts her bowl and spoon in the sink and then heads to their room. When she comes back, she’s holding a heavy-looking silver laptop with the cord bundled on top and is now wearing dark blue skinny jeans and a lacy white tank top. She sets the laptop on the table in front of the couch.
“Here you go,” she says to Ron at the table. “I’m gonna head out of town for a couple hours to get some products to restock our store. Wanna tag along?”
“Oh, no thanks. I’ll just be here.”
“Okay. Carl always goes to the bar in the evening with his friends, so we can go investigate his cabin when I come back.”
Ron nods. “Sounds like a plan.”
Giselle nods back and leaves.
Ron finishes her bowl of cereal and then another one. Then, she goes to the sink and washes the dishes, including the bowl Giselle left behind. She puts the milk back in the fridge and the cereal on top of the fridge, next to the other boxes.
She sits on the couch and pushes the cord off the top of the computer. She brings the computer to her lap and boots it up. It’s at full charge.
She opens an incognito tab in the browser and logs into her email. The first email is from Chrys with the subject, “The Scoop.”
She clicks on it and reads it, chuckling at Chrys’s all-caps warning to not get involved with the giftists. Way too late for that.
She writes a response.
Sorely missed Chrysanthemum,
Of course I haven’t been caught. Have you forgotten how skilled I am?
I’m glad that rumor is true, and you can actually get your gift removed. (By the way you’re okay with calling it a “gift” now?)
I’m sorry to hear about that kid dying. Hope everyone else there is okay.
I’ve been staying with a couple of giftists actually… XD
But don’t worry, they’re decent people and I’m safe. I think there may be someone gifted in this town, but I’m not sure yet. I think he’s being held hostage by some other giftists here. Will investigate tonight. Update you tomorrow.
The one and only,
Rhododendron
She sends the email and leans back in the couch, watching her inbox. She wants a reply to come immediately, but she knows that’s not likely. There’s also no point in texting Chrys because she’s probably keeping the phone off to conserve the battery.
Sighing, Ron signs out of her email and does a search for technology that can detect gifts. She scrolls through the results and clicks on some that seem interesting, but most of them are just speculative.
On page four of the search results, the site address of one of the links catches her eye: normalnews.net.
Is that the website of that newspaper Iris is always reading?
She clicks on the link. At the top is the same logo as the newspaper, but this isn’t the main website. It’s just a forum.
She scrolls down. The thread is called, “Scanner v2.4, update 11: it works!” by a guy called Normal-C with an avatar of a dragon breathing fire onto a town.
She skims through the post, but stops reading once the images catch her eye. There are two images side by side below a wall of text. On the left, there is a scanner gun pressed against a guy’s arm, a rectangular screen with a large green circle on it, clearly visible. It looks a lot like the scanner Carl had yesterday.
On the right, the scanner gun is pointed at a man propped up against the wall with a dirty sheet covering his body. The screen has a large red X.
Ron’s heart is pounding.
Below the images is one paragraph. It says, “Left is tested against me. As you can see, it says I’m normal, which is true. Right is tested against someone I KNOW to be gifted and the scanner concludes that as well.”
That’s the end of the post.
There are tons of comments below, some skeptical and hopeful, but most are derogatory and doubtful, saying he could have easily photoshopped those results.
And then, Normal-C replies with a video filmed with a camera strapped to his head, it looks like. It shows him pressing the gun on his arm as he did in the photo. The screen is on but blank. He presses the trigger. There’s a loading screen and then it dings and displays the large green circle.
Then, he points it at the man under the sheet, who’s lying down on that mattress instead of propped up on the wall like in the photo. He presses the trigger again. Loading screen. Buzzer sound. Large red X.
After that post, there are still some doubtful comments, but the derogatory tone is gone.
Carl. It has to be.
Ron goes back up to the first page of this thread and clicks on Normal-C’s avatar. He has thousands of posts and comments in this forum.
Ron starts reading.
Chapter 19
I spend a half hour or so skimming through various search results about Bluewater. I pair the town name with “gift” and “gifted” and “giftists” but don’t find anything eye-catching or alarming.
Bored, I type in “Alicia Brown Oregon missing.” There are some hits, but nothing related to what I’m really looking for.
Has Mary seriously not reported us missing yet? How has no one noticed?
I sit back in the chair, staring at the screen. On the one hand, it’s nice that no one’s out there looking for us. But on the other hand, it also kind of
