I groan and lean back against the tree. “It’s gonna be a long night then.”
Chapter 32
Yawning, I enter the computer room, feeling the cell phone in my pocket against my leg as I walk. I charged it overnight and took it with me before I came here.
I head over to the computer near the window, but it’s already on. On the screen is some sort of pixel farm and farmhouse. The little character is moving around and the mouse on the table is moving and clicking too.
“It’s me,” Darius says from the seemingly empty chair in front of the computer.
“Oh, right,” I say. “I sort of forgot about you.”
“No worries. I’m easily forgettable.”
I sit down at the computer next to him and turn it on. “When did you get here? It’s five in the morning.”
“Been here since dinner last night. Sorry I can’t turn visible right now. Exhausted.”
“You’ve been up all night playing a farming game?”
“Yep.”
I try to look at Darius to see his facial expressions or his body language, but of course there’s nothing. He’s still tapping on the keyboard and using the mouse so I take it he isn’t even looking at me as we talk.
Still, I keep looking over in his direction. “I thought you’d more so be into—I don’t know, like those fighting games and stuff.”
“Nah, I’m more of a casual gamer.”
“Playing a game all night long is anything but casual.”
“Shrug,” he says.
I chuckle. “Shrug?”
“Yeah, you can’t see me shrugging so I’m letting you know I’m shrugging.”
“Thanks, that’s useful I guess.”
“Any time.”
The bland way Darius always seems to speak is kind of off-putting. Knowing that I can’t see him, I wish he’d speak with more expression.
The character on his screen leaves the farm and goes to some sort of town. He walks around talking to people.
“So why are you here at 5 AM?” he says.
“Well, I couldn’t fall back asleep so I thought I’d just come do some research.”
“On what?”
“A gift. Dreams.”
“Oh, you’re talking about that psychologist, right? Madeline Taylor?”
“Yeah, you know about her?”
“Sure. I wrote a ten page essay on her last semester.”
“Here, at camp?”
“Yeah. You’re lucky you came during the summer. Otherwise you would’ve had to jump straight into the classes.”
Darius is talking about it like it’s a bad thing, but I actually like the sound of taking classes like that. I’ve never known any classes in normal schools to have any content about gifts. History textbooks don’t mention it at all.
“What do you want to know?” Darius says. “I can probably save you some time. Her stuff is pretty hard to find. The best source is a password-protected website, but I’m pretty sure mine doesn’t work anymore. She gave me a temporary password.”
“Well, I sort of need to know… everything. I haven’t even heard about her until recently. All I know is she tried to treat her patients with dreams.”
“Oh, that was just a small part of what she did. Madeline’s main interest was trying to understand her gift and its limitations. She ran multiple experiments on herself and wrote everything down in journals. Recently, one of her grandkids found all the journals and typed them all up and put them online—on that website I was talking about. I think I only managed to read through, like, less than a quarter of it.”
He yawns, making me yawn too.
“Anyway, Madeline was one of the OGs,” he continues.
“OG?” I say.
“Yeah, the originals? The first ones? Don’t you know about that?”
“Oh, yeah. I do.”
The originals were the first known gifted. The oldest records of gifts anyone can find dates to 1900—about babies who could do strange things. No one knows where exactly the gifts came from but all we know is they haven’t always been around, unless they were well hidden back in the day. And many of them were killed at a young age, hunted by many thinking they were demons. Then, people noticed the exact same powers were showing up in other babies, and eventually one of them was born to a preacher, who claimed they weren’t demons, but gifted. He did a lot of work to publicize the term and his message that the gifted were blessings. The term stuck around, but not really the message.
“Madeline was born in 1900 exactly,” Darius says. “She started keeping the journals in the 1930s, up until her death in the ‘60s. That’s thirty years of content to wade through. Took her granddaughter a decade just to type them all up.”
“So, did she do any experiments on her range?”
The character on his screen stops moving and there are no more taps or clicks. “She did. Her range was amazing.” Darius’s voice goes from that flat, lazy monotone to a quicker, more excited tone as he talks. “Most of her tests were done in Ireland, since that’s where she was from, but at some point one of her friends moved to America, and she could still enter her dreams.”
“From Ireland to America?”
“Yeah. Amazing, right? But it seems like she had two ranges. One for people she didn’t know, and one for people she did. If she knew you, seemed like she could reach you from just about anywhere. But if you were a stranger—someone she’s never met or spoken to—then she could only reach you if you were within a hundred-mile radius.”
“Still, a hundred miles is huge.”
“For sure. Her gift is extremely powerful. Sometimes, I like to think that all of us have equally powerful gifts but maybe we just haven’t unlocked our potential yet. Like with Madeline, maybe she could have reached farther eventually. When she first started out, it was only a twenty-mile radius. But she kept pushing her limits and improving her capabilities.”
“So you think that you can improve yours?” I turn away from him and lean back in the chair, staring at the log-in screen on my computer.
“I know I can. When I was young, I could
