Except it wasn’t how she felt not how she normally felt the thing she was describing was the thing he felt every day but it was a high for her momentary fleeting he had forgotten to ask how long this drug lasted. And—his stomach dropped at the thought—what if he had chosen the Superman pill instead and what a name, was the thing he normally felt a Superman feeling? Would it have amped his brain up even more? He tried to imagine it tried to imagine what it would be like to have even more stimulation he would go crazy he would be the person who clawed his own eyes out who ran his head into a wall unless it was like the way stimulants worked with ADHD he’d seen brain diagrams they somehow worked with the overcharged brain instead of making it explode.
He checked the time and it had been only fifteen minutes he still didn’t know which pill he’d taken but his heart was racing like he knew he knew he knew he had made a mistake he was going to die this was how he would die not an IED not like the little boy not a sniper just his own brain exploding because he took a pill at a party. Kids, don’t do drugs. What had he even been thinking. He watched Alyssa watch the world through his normal everyday hyperaware hypervigilant eyes. Fun for a little while, maybe.
He didn’t remember it being fun ever. If she panicked he could tell her all of his coping mechanisms, the things that worked on patrol to control it the things that worked in a mall with his mother as much as they worked at all he was still a work in progress. Running. Fighting. Playing with language like it was a puzzle a toy a Rubik’s cube. He could tell her all those things if she asked. If she needed.
She didn’t look like she needed. She looked like she was enjoying herself, and this wasn’t a comparison he would use out loud, he wasn’t that dense, but she looked like a dog on a car ride with her head out the window. Eyes alert and darting everywhere, body tense. He watched her watching the world, watched with her, considered how rarely he could count something as a shared experience. He didn’t seem to be ramping up.
And then it happened. An un-thing. An unclenching. Not a blanket he had to fight out from under, but a blanket wrapped around him, arms wrapped around him. The feeling behind the feeling of being told everything was going to be okay and believing it. Punctuation on a sentence that had been running so long in his head he didn’t even remember where it had started. Quiet.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
SOPHIE
Sophie ignored the first knock on her door. And the second. They had no reason to assume she was awake at eight a.m. Then her phone beeped, which was unusual, since the rule was the moms had to knock three times. Before she could reach for it, her door opened.
She was about to open her mouth to say they had a deal, three times, but Val threw up her hands like a surrender. Sophie expected a lecture on how the rule wasn’t license to ignore them; the look on Val’s face quieted her.
“What’s up?” Sophie asked.
“Turn on the news.”
Sophie reached for her tablet. She didn’t need to go to a news site because it had already come to her. Three of her keyword alerts had brought hits during the night, and they were all queued and waiting.
Break-in at Balkenhol was the headline. An unnamed intruder had been arrested. It didn’t say how they’d gotten in, but a shiver ran along her spine. Three alerts for the same article. The “Balkenhol” keyword was the obvious one, right there in the headline. The second was “Pilot,” as in “The company is best known as the manufacturers of the ubiquitous Pilot implants.” She was afraid to look at the third, afraid to see if the phrase that had triggered the third alert was “David Geller-Bradley,” which would mean her brother’s stolen ID had gotten him in trouble.
The third alert was “anti-Pilot,” as in “believed to be an anti-Pilot activist,” which was obviously why Val had told her, and which in itself was bad, bad, bad, but at least she saw no mention of her brother or his ID.
Val still stood in the doorway. Watching her reaction? Waiting to see if she was surprised?
“Thank you,” Sophie said.
“Of course.” She shut the door behind her.
Sophie texted Gabe first. How goes it?
She dressed, waiting for him to respond, but nothing came. She wasn’t supposed to contact Lana Robinson from her personal phone, but really, someone should be telling her something. It wasn’t fair that they would leave her in the dark, especially if this involved her brother’s ID.
Her phone chimed. It goes, wrote Gabe. Hugs.
So it was urgent, but there was no hint of where to find him. Given no mention of coffee, the default had to be the meeting space.
The lights were off when she arrived, the windowless space giving the impression the sun hadn’t yet risen. She stepped carefully over the occupied sleeping bags scattered across the floor.
There was a Gabe-shaped dent in the office couch, but he sat at the desk talking on the phone. He nodded at her as she walked in.
“Yeah, you can print that we have no idea who that is, and we did not send him. Gabriel Clary. Yeah. Uh, you can say ‘a spokesperson for the local group.’ Yeah. You, too. Yeah.” He disconnected and turned to her. “That’s like the twenty-seventh call. It’s been ringing since six. They’ve all asked the same things over
