Her father brought her to his office and took a blood sample.
If what her father said was true, then that meant that that same sunken-in face, the same wetness that she had felt on Nigel’s body when she attacked him, would soon find itself on her own body.
Her heart had been beating fast all morning and sweat seeped into her clothes.
A few minutes later, her father returned. His face looked in pure shock more than anything.
“Oh God, what?” Becca said.
“You have his NaU inside of you,” he said. When they had spoken earlier, it had been on the side of possibility, not anything real. Now it was real, his words spoken and etched into the ethos of the time, cemented in reality. She was going to die.
He rushed over to her.
“No, no, it’s okay, Becca. I saw something else.”
The two of them walked down the hall.
“You don’t have one NaU inside of you,” her father said. “You have two.”
When the accident happened, and the NaU was released into the air through her mother’s corpse, she too had been affected like everyone else in that house that day.
“Your NaU was different from all the other ones,” Robbie said. “And that’s why I couldn’t see it before. You’re NaU is the most harmless out of all of them because it didn’t change you. You didn’t get flight, or the ability to regrow injuries, and so nothing bad happened to you because of it. And now that you have Nigel’s NaU inside of you, the effect seems to have spread to his NaU as well. You won’t have any cell decay like Nigel.”
And on and on, her father spoke, but all Becca could think of was the fact that she wasn’t dying. Her NaU happened to be harmless. Either she got lucky, or it was who she was. Robbie said that the different NaUs that merged came from the people themselves, like the way that light could be refracted into a rainbow of different colors.
“Can it be extracted?” Becca said, “Or anything else that I can do to help all of you?”
“Maybe,” her father said. “Maybe.”
He was deep in thought, thinking over the hundreds of other the ways in which her powers could be used to save all of the—
The ground shook beneath them. Pictures fell from the walls, and pencils rolled off desks.
In the distance, Becca could see a figure levitating above the open farmlands, and even from there, she could tell that he was angry.
****
Matt didn’t say anything as Becca and her father approached.
The air around Matt sparked with orange light. The boy wasn’t even trying to hide his NaU anymore, like the others of them.
“Why don’t you come down to the ground there, Matt?” her father said. “Wouldn’t want anyone to see you up there, would you?”
Becca felt Matt’s touch on her. Robbie must’ve felt it too.
“This is your sister here, Matt,” Robbie said. “No need to do something you will regret.”
“Where is he?” Matt said.
“Your father is buried somewhere safe and sound.”
“I want to know where.”
“I’m not sure I can tell you that at this moment,” Robbie said. “Not sure what you would do with that information, and you can feel my heart right now, so you know I won’t lie to you.”
“You’re afraid I’ll tell the police,” Matt said.
“Crossed my mind,” her father said.
The wind blew a sharp breeze amongst them, but Becca had a feeling that none of them felt it.
“Mom told me what happened,” Matt said. “Said you protected her and Robbie in self-defense. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Becca said.
She still felt his touch on her, afraid that he might snap her neck at any second.
But he didn’t.
“I came home this morning to tell you that Danni killed Peter last night,” Matt said, “And when I got home, I instead got berated by my mother telling me that my sister had shoved a pencil into my father’s neck the night before.”
“She didn’t want to do that, Matt,” her father said. “None of us last night wanted to be in the situation except for your father. He was mad. I’m sure your mother told you what happened.”
“Yes, she told me,” Matt said. “She told me that you two had been able to subdue your NaUs and that you couldn’t defend yourselves, and that it was only Rebecca who could have stopped him.”
Becca wondered what she could say. She had imagined this talk with Matt ever since she made the jump onto his father’s back and drove the pencil through his neck. She could say thousands of things, all ranging from “I didn’t know what I was doing” to, “I was an adrenaline rush, that’s all,” to “I’m sorry, Matt, I didn’t want to do it.”
She hadn’t planned on killing anyone in her life, and the fact that such an action could carry a nonchalance to it equivalent to that of going to the grocery store or forgetting a birthday, made Becca’s skin crawl.
But none of it would have done any good, and all parties involved seemed to realize that, even if that agreement hadn’t been brought forward through physical talk, cementing it into the plane of reality the way most conversation does.
Becca felt Matt’s touch leave her. Her father relaxed next to her.
“Like I said earlier,” Matt said, “Danni killed Peter last night. The two of them had gotten into a nasty fight in the Cainabel cornfield. Danni hit Peter so hard that it broke his NaU and killed him.
“Much the same as my mother described this morning, like how my father’s NaU went into Rebecca, Peter’s NaU went inside of Danni. The girl must’ve come to since when Jolie and I found Peter last night, Danni was nowhere to be found. I think I felt him up in the mountains, near the Vermont border. I was coming home to tell you all that, and then say that Jolie and I were going to go look
