I glanced at Marcus. Was it really a good idea to start this interrogation with Jason holding a gun to Palmer’s head? We needed that head, or at least we needed the information inside of it. But Marcus wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at Palmer.
Palmer.
When had I started thinking of him by his last name? Was it easier to dehumanize people when you did that? Probably. It certainly seemed to work for coaches and gym teachers.
“What are you gonna do, kill me?” Palmer asked, looking past Jason and the gun to Marcus; he knew who was really in charge. “Go ahead. Doesn’t matter. Whatever you do, I’m not gonna tell you anything.”
“Naw, we’re not gonna kill you,” Jason said, pulling the gun away. “We’re gonna do something worse.” Marcus looked at me and nodded.
I could feel all their eyes on me as I stepped forward past Jason, trying not to inhale too deeply. I stared down at Palmer, and everything seemed to recede into the background but him and me. He was my enemy. He had tried to destroy me, end me. He was the door that led to Emma, and I was the key.
I held my gloved ghost hand in front of Palmer’s face and saw his eyes flicker with fear. I reached out with my left hand and stripped the glove off, peeling it back, revealing my PSS one slow centimeter at a time, like some kind of uncanny stripper.
Palmer’s eyes flashed with uncontrolled panic and dawning understanding.
“My hand goes into people,” I said, my voice sounding like someone else’s. I raised my ghost hand to his face, almost touching him.
“You’re lying,” he panted, his very breath belying his confidence. “PSS can’t do that.”
“You have no idea what I can do,” I said, caressing his cheek.
His head recoiled, banging against the tree trunk behind him.
An inexplicable thrill ran through me. He was actually afraid of me. This man who had terrorized me. Now he was afraid.
“Don’t touch me, bitch,” he said, half-demand, half-plea.
I didn’t listen, caressing his face again.
He cringed from my touch, like my mother had in the hospital, thrashing his head back and forth, his wide, white eyes tracking my ghost hand as if he were incapable of looking away. “I’ll kill you,” he said, spitting at me, the glob of pink phlegm landing on my shoulder.
“And how would you do that?” I asked, white hot rage welling in me. “You’re tied to a tree, sitting in your own piss.”
“Doesn’t matter what you do to me,” he said. “They’re gonna get you. They’re gonna get you all, and make you pay.”
“Who’s going to make me pay?”
“You don’t know?” He laughed.
“So, why don’t you tell me?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, grinning wickedly. “I’ll let that part be a special surprise.”
Somehow, I’d lost the edge of fear I’d held over him, and I wanted it back. “I’ll give you a special surprise,” I said, putting my hand back up and touching his face.
This time he resisted the urge to recoil. He was fighting his fear.
“I got somewhere else you can put that hand of yours,” he said, leering at me.
My hand began to melt into tendrils, licking at his cheeks, winding in his hair.
His eyes bulged, and he writhed in his cocoon of rope like a giant fly in a spider’s web.
Coils of my PSS wound around his neck.
“No, you can’t,” he choked, squeezing his eyes shut so he wouldn’t have to see what I could do to him, so he could pretend it wasn’t real.
And I wasn’t really choking him, but it didn’t matter as long as he thought I was.
“But I can,” I said, two of my elongated fingers snaking along his eyelids, peeling them back with the subtle force of my PSS. He was going to watch this. He was going to look at me and know who to fear.
The whites of his eyes rolled in their sockets, frantic, terrified. I wasn’t even doing anything to him. He wasn’t in physical pain. I’d experienced more discomfort putting my eyeliner on in the morning. But Marcus had been right; fear was more powerful than pain.
I heard murmurs behind me, but I ignored them. They’d asked me to scare Palmer, and that’s exactly what I was doing. It wasn’t my problem if it scared them too.
Palmer began to thrash as if he were having a seizure. The crotch of his pants grew suddenly darker, the odor of fresh urine spritzing the air even as I heard the trickle down the inside of his pants.
I felt disgusted by him, but I felt something else too. Powerful. This time, I was in control. I was the predator, not the prey. Gone was the insignificant, defective girl. I was some kind of fucking comic book vigilante, and it felt—amazing.
Someone came up to me, touched my upper arm, and I barely bit back the words, “Back off!”
“Olivia,” Marcus said.
It was all part of the plan. I was just supposed to scare Palmer. Marcus was going to interrogate him. And while he did, I was supposed stay focused enough to keep my hand from going into anyone. What was wrong with me? I had almost lost control.
Marcus’s hand was still on my arm, and I glanced at him, retracting my elongated fingers from the Fire Chief’s eyes. I left the tendrils waving around his face and head though, an incentive to cooperate.
“Please. Oh God, please,” Palmer whimpered in Marcus’s direction.
“Tell us what we need, and I’ll keep her off you” Marcus said. “How many CAMFers are in town?”
“Four,” Palmer said weakly, his chin falling to his chest. “I told them we didn’t need many. She’s only a girl. And I didn’t know there were more of you. I didn’t know.”
“Four including you?” Marcus asked.
“Yes.”
“Armed with what?”
I saw Palmer hesitate and I sent a tentacle out, tickling his nostril.
“Guns, and minus meters,” he blurted, jerking his head away. “But the meters are fucked. They don’t work in town. Something is jamming them.”
“Can they still extract?” Marcus asked.
“I don’t know,” Palmer said, avoiding Marcus’s gaze. “We didn’t test that.”
Because they hadn’t had anyone to test it on.
“Where’s the base of operations? Your house?” Marcus drilled him.
“Yes,” Palmer said, looking up at us, comprehension dawning on his face. “You’re going in there?” he asked, almost laughing. “You’re actually going in there?” Now he was laughing, bloody drool running down his chin. “If that’s what this is about, if you’re just going to walk in there and give yourselves up, I’ll tell you anything you want.”
“Is that where her backpack is?” Marcus asked, ignoring Palmer’s taunt. “Your place?”
“Yes,” Palmer answered, but suddenly he wasn’t laughing anymore. His eyes looked away. He knew something more about my backpack.
“Do you know what’s in it?” Marcus pressed.
Palmer didn’t answer. His eyes had gone hard and defiant again.
I wrapped a PSS tendril around his neck and placed the tip just at the opening of his left ear.
He glared at me. He didn’t think I had the guts to really hurt him. He thought we were just kids who would lie down, and roll over, and let them kill us.
I made my PSS expand and wind its way into his ear canal. It was a strange sensation. Not at all like any of the times my hand had gone into flesh, but just as intimate, like I was insinuating myself into places no one should go. “I could burst your ear drum right now,” I told him, realizing it was true only as I said it. It would be just like picking a lock, except messier.
Palmer squirmed and bucked, yelling something incomprehensible.
“Do you know what’s in the backpack?” Marcus demanded again.
I increased the pressure of my PSS by a fraction. What would it feel like to have me in your ear, in your head, probing, pressing?
“Blades,” Palmer yelled, shaking his head back and forth as if he could dislodge me.
“And what do they do?”
“I don’t know,” he cried. “We don’t know. He was running tests.”
“At your house?”
“Yes. Fuck. Make her stop. She’s hurting me.” He squeezed his eyes shut.
“I’m not hurting him,” I said. “He knows more.”
“I don’t,” Palmer cried. “Get her out of me!”
Marcus looked at me, and I pulled back on the ear penetration, but only a little.
“How do they run guard patrol? What shifts do they take? What frequency is your radio contact?” Marcus fired questions at Palmer.
And he answered without any more encouragement from my hand. Maybe it was only what he’d said, that if the information he gave us led us to walk right into the CAMFers’ trap, all the better for him. Whatever the reason for his sudden compliance, I didn’t like it. It left me feeling disappointed, my hand itching to go deeper into him.
As I stood there, the interrogation droning in my head, my hand grew warm. I could feel my PSS yearning to do it. There was something in him longing to be brought forth into the light of day. Something I could use. It was calling to me.
It was right there. So close. It would be easy.
But I’d promised myself I wouldn’t.
But I wanted to. This was my power. This is what my hand was made to do. What point was there in denying that?
“Olivia!” someone yelled, grabbing my right wrist and pinching it. A flash of cold ran up my arm.
I looked down to see Marcus clutching my wrist, my PSS completely back in hand form. I looked up to see Mike Palmer slumped unconscious in the ropes that bound him to the tree.
“What happened?” I asked, feeling cold and numb and lost. “Did I reach into him?”
“No,” Marcus said, “He—he just started screaming, and then he passed out.”
“I didn’t hear him scream,” I said, confused. I was standing mere inches from Palmer. How could I have not heard him scream?
“Well, he was,” Nose said, and that’s when I realized that they were gathered around me. Yale had a hand on my shoulder. Nose was gripping my left arm. Even Jason was there, leaning slightly into me, his shoulder brushing mine.
“You did good,” Jason said with just a hint of grudging admiration. “He told us a lot.”
I bent over and vomited my breakfast straight onto his boots.
OPERATION ORANGE FRISBEE
Yale checked Palmer’s pulse and concluded he wasn’t dead.
“Maybe he had a heart attack,” Nose suggested.
“He just passed out,” Marcus said. “He’ll be fine.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down at Jason’s boots. I wasn’t feeling so good.
“Is it your head?” Marcus asked, touching my shoulder.
“No, it’s just—” Just what? That I suddenly didn’t have the stomach for torture, or that I’d found out I actually did? “I’m okay,” I said, straightening up.
“Good,” he said. “Because I think we got what we needed. Nose, you keep an eye on Palmer. Yale and Jason, go get the weapons and gear ready.”
“Does he really need to be watched?” Nose asked.
“Probably not,” Marcus said, checking the security of the ropes. “We can’t afford to leave someone behind with him tonight anyway. We have the numbers on them, and I want to keep it that way. Still, check him every half hour until we leave.”
Back at camp, Marcus led me to the tent, and the first thing he did when we got inside was sit me down at the laptop table and hand me a cup of water.
“Drink,” he said, sitting down next to me. “I know that was tough.” He took my hands, holding them in his. “Are you sure you’re all right? You look really pale.”
“Yeah, I’m better,” I said, and drank, which actually did make me feel better, at least physically. I tried not to think about what I’d just done. It had been for Emma, I told myself. Now we could go get her. And Marcus said Palmer would be fine.
“Good. I hate to cut right to it, but do you have the bullet?” Marcus asked.
“Oh, yeah.” I started rifling through my pockets. But it wasn’t there. “It’s in my jeans from last night,” I realized, glancing around the tent.
After a short search, we found my jeans, and I pulled Jason’s bullet from the front pocket, the cold metal kissing my palm. Immediately, it began to thrum, resonating in my bones, vibrating almost like the blades.
“Give me your hand,” I said to Marcus and deposited it in his palm. “Do you feel anything?”
“Nope,” Marcus said, looking at me. “Why, do you?”
“Yeah. A vibration. I didn’t notice it before, but it’s there now.”
“Maybe because you used it,” Marcus said. “Like it’s tuned to you or something.”
“Maybe,” I took the bullet back, rolling it between my fingers. All we had were a whole lot of maybes. “We have no idea how it works. Or how the blades work. We don’t even know how our PSS works. How are we ever going to pull this off?” I was starting to panic and realize that my bravado about rescuing Emma had been just that. Bravado.
“Let’s start with what we do know,” Marcus said calmly.
“We know it disappears things,” I said, cupping the bullet in my ghost palm.
“More like it transports them,” Marcus said. “It moves them from one place to another instantly.”
“I had to touch Palmer and the painting to make them transport,” I said. “So, it takes physical contact for it to work.”
“But are we sure of that?” Marcus asked.
“Good point,” I said, looking around the tent for something to experiment on.
“Wait,” Marcus said, holding up his hand. “Let’s think this through first. Last time both things you sent nearly landed on Jason. Why Jason?”
“Jason is the anchor,” I said. “The bullet came from him so that’s where it sends things.” I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did.
Marcus didn’t argue. “Let’s assume that’s true,” he said. “If he’s the anchor, what does that make you? Are you the only one who can use the bullet, or could I?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“There’s only one way to find out.” Marcus crossed to one of his plastic tubs and rummaged through it. “We need to test it,” he said, turning back to me with a stack of bright orange Frisbees in his hand.
“By playing Frisbee?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
“We’re not going to throw them.” He smiled wickedly. “We’re going to bullet them.”
“We’re going to bullet orange Frisbees at Jason?” I asked, trying not to smile too. “You did see what he did to Palmer, right?”
“I’ll protect you,” Marcus teased, setting all but one of the Frisbees down on the table.