HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
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I HAD NEVER FELT ANYTHING LIKE IT.
My hand was on fire, and my bones were shattering and mending in a continuous wave of destruction and construction. I had the distinct feeling of being reborn.
Mark had told me about acquisition. He had described it as odd and sometimes painful, depending on the powers acquired, but it hadn't sounded like this.
Sadie was terrified. She looked like she too was in excruciating pain. Or was watching me die.
"I'm okay," I kept saying. Only I wasn't. In my life, the only pain I felt was thirst. But this was pain.
"I'm okay," I repeated, trying to ease her, but she put her palms to her ears and her eyes darted back and forth across the landscape.
So with my hand feeling as if it had been taken from me. I reached out for her. I had to touch her. She would be my anchor.
I got one hand and then the other on her shoulders. I exuded all my strength just to curl my hand around her shoulder and shake her to look at me. To speak to me. To let me in on what the hell was going on.
Finally she met my gaze. "Lizzie," she said. "You sound like Lizzie."
I shook my head because I didn't understand. I couldn't. The way Sadie tracked, the way she sensed a person, heard their hum, had nothing to do with a power. It was not something that could be acquired. She tracked a person. She tracked a soul.
"I need to get to Anthony. He'll know what to do." I let go of her and launched myself through the trees. But she caught me. Grabbed me by the shoulder in midair and we both tumbled to the ground.
"No," she said. Either the pain was subsiding or I was becoming numb to it. "The press has every inch of this forest covered between here and Canada. They're all still here. You can't run. We have to drive."
I managed to nod, understanding, and leapt down the mountain in several long bounds back to the Lodge. Sadie got in the driver's seat and sped off down the road.
WE DIDN'T SPEAK THE WHOLE WAY TO CANADA. THE LOOK ON HER FACE TOLD me she was feeling something she wouldn't talk about unless I pried, and I was hardly in any shape to force it. She blasted the Black Keys, undoubtedly to block out the sounds in her mind. I can't say I minded the reprieve.
When we got to the house, I called out for my father so we could have a conversation he'd been waiting 163 years for. I went to his study on the third floor, off the master suite. He had heard me, obviously, but he hadn't felt compelled to move. I found him sitting in an armchair he'd built out of the hide of a buffalo he'd killed a hundred years ago. He had a pipe in his mouth and a book in his hands.
He didn't look up when I entered. "Jesus, Everett, would you quit screaming? You'd think the world was on fire the way you panic over every goddamned thing," he said, puffing blue-white tobacco smoke.
