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...
THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN SADIE AWOKE FROM WHAT I HOPED WAS real sleep and not the Raven-tainted variety, she found me sitting in the leather chair I had bonded with in the 18 hours we'd been here.
"You could have woken me," she said. "It's nearly ten a.m."
"I wanted to let you sleep. You have to sleep enough for the both of us," I said, but I could hear in my own voice that the lightness that was supposed to be there wasn't. She'd been seeing Raven in her head. Talking to him. Interacting with him. And she hadn't told me.
What happened to It's me and you, kid? What happened to the partnership we had? The understanding?
And if she had neglected to mention something as huge as that, what else had she left out?
"How did our covert op go?" she asked.
"The GPS is in, but I don't know if it works. I can't work the iPhone's touchscreen, remember?" I said.
"Mark! You should have woken me up to see if it was working," she said.
"Sorry," I said. I was angry with her. After all the stupid shit she'd pulled, this was the straw that broke the camel's back.
But now matter how pissed I was, I wanted now more than ever than to protect the hell out of her. She was more vulnerable than we imagined, which was saying something. She needed us. She needed me.
I processed all this as she unlocked her phone and pulled up the app. I forgot how monumentally terrible I was at processing this kind of emotion.
"Oh my god, it worked," she said.
This lifted my spirits a little. "Really? Let me see." She handed me the phone, and there, as clear as day, a blinking red light in Paris just off the Champs-Elysees.
"Can you see where she's been?" I asked.
"Yeah, let's see . . . I think there's a 36 hour history," she said. She opened up another screen that gave the coordinates of each place the device had been for more than fifteen minutes at a time in the last day and a half or, in this case, since it had been turned on. It spent an hour at 246 Spring Street — where we were now — and then a few more hours at a place nearby. Next, it appeared for an hour in York, I assume at Mausoleum Town, and then in Paris, where it had been ever since.
I couldn't believe it worked.
"What do we do next?" she asked.
"We wait and see where she goes and stays or where she visits repeatedly. Those will be our places of interest," I said, and Sadie agreed.
"But how will we know where Raven is?" she asked. "Inevitably, he can't be at all the places she visits."
"That's true," I said, willing myself not to scream something like, Why don't you ask him the next time you see him? "But hopefully the patterns will tell us."
"And if not?"
"Then we figure it out. We always do," I said. Then I had a thought. "Or we could track your power."
"What do you mean? I'm sitting right here," she said.
"You are, sure, but half your reading power is out there walking around with Alexander Raven. Did you ever think of that? That you two might have some kind of connection?" There it was. I was offering her an out, a way to come clean.
"No," she said plainly. I gritted my teeth.
"Well, then we have a new plan. We see where Sam goes via GPS, then we see if we can find even the faintest hint of a trace of your reading power in those places. If we can, that's where we find Raven."
"That's a good idea," she said. "Hey, do you think he could track me by tracking his own reading power?"
"Are you worried he's doing that?" I asked.
"No, not at all, I just . . ." she trailed off. "Good. I'm glad he can't." I hadn't said he couldn't. I was obviously absolutely sure he was doing that.
I got to my feet. "Hey, little one, let's pack and go."
"Go where?" she said, following me.
"Home," I said. "It's sit and wait time. We have a place for that."
"Home," she said. But I knew that, to her, home didn't mean a damn thing.
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WHEN WE GOT BACK TO CANADA A WHOPPING TWENTY MINUTES LATER, I immediately sought out Everett. "Tree?" I asked him when I found him. He followed me there.
When we were alone, I told him what had happened the night before. His reaction was about what mine was: terror that it was happening to her, dismay that she hadn't mentioned it, helplessness that we couldn't protect her, fear for what it meant.
"You think she's safe and then you find out . . ."
"You find out there is no such thing as safe," I interjected. "Are you going to talk to her about it?"
"Of course not. If you corner her, she shuts up even more. You know that, right?"
"Of course I know that," I said. "I just wondered what you would do."
"What can I do?" he asked, and it sounded like a rhetorical question. But when I didn't answer, he said, "No, seriously. What can I do?"
I sat down on the couch and put my forehead in my palms. "I don't know, Ev. He isn't playing fair, or any kind of game we know how to beat. I think there's a lot we're going to have to figure out." Sadie, Sadie, Sadie. "I'm worried about her now."
"I've been worried all along," he said faintly, and for the first time I understood why. This is what it was like to think that Sadie trusted you and find out she didn't. This is what it was like to be Everett.
"I can't thank you enough for telling me," he said.
"Keeping her secrets isn't helping anymore," I said. I hated that this was true.
When Sadie and I were together, it was Us and Them. And now? Just like that, I realized I'd become one of Them.
