Night Sky (12 page)

And together we followed Dana and Milo inside the mall.

—

The graffiti in the cineplex's former lobby was really pretty amazing.

Milo caught me looking up at it and shone his flashlight along the decorated walls so I could see it better.

There were nicknames and messages so stylized that I couldn't decipher most of them, the letters and numbers in a beautiful rainbow of colors.

Dana was still leading the way—to a doorway marked theater six—when Calvin asked, “Are we really safe in here? I mean, if a guard comes—”

“Budget cuts have the security team doing a five-second drive-by, way out on the main road,” Dana informed us.

This entrance was way around the back.

“And the serial killer zombies…?” Cal was making a joke. Partly. “Have budget cuts kept them away too?”

We followed Dana into the former movie theater. I could see from Milo's flashlight that someone had taken the screen off the wall and removed the rows of seats. Little metal bumps—places where those seats had been attached—dotted the slanting floor. And more graffiti decorated the walls and even the ceiling.

“Feel free to wait in the car,” Dana told Cal as her buddy Milo put his flashlight on the ground, positioning it so that the light shone upward. Dana sat down beside it, and it dramatically illuminated her face. She motioned to me. “Sit.”

I looked down at the dusty floor, and she laughed.

“Oh, come on,” she exclaimed. “Really? I guess I was right the first time, Sunshine. You
are
a little diva.”

I scowled and plopped down without any further hesitation. She wasn't going to call
me
a diva. “Tell me about Sasha,” I demanded.

Dana laughed again, pulling something from her pocket as she glanced up at Milo. “Part diva, part pit bull.”

I looked up at Milo too and saw that he was leaning back, one of his heels resting against the nearby wall. He'd taken a cigarette from behind his ear and was patting his pockets—for a lighter, I presumed.

“Ew,” I said. “Seriously, could you not light that?”

He froze as he looked at me.

“Not only is it disgusting, but it's dangerous for Calvin.” I pointed to Cal, who'd wheeled his chair between me and Dana. She'd started eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells. They landed, each with a click, on the slanted theater floor. “He has a stent in his heart from his accident, and it makes him really sensitive to secondhand smoke.”

Cal shook his head—both at me and at Dana, who'd offered him some of her sunflower seeds. “Nah, Sky. It's cool.”

“It's
not
cool,” I insisted. Because of the damage done to his heart when the gas line to his house exploded, Calvin was going to be lucky if he lived to age forty, a fact that I didn't let myself think about very often. But I was determined that, with my help, he'd be a statistical anomaly and die while skydiving at age ninety-five.

“I was thoughtless,” Milo said quietly. His voice was soft, with a gentle Southern twang. He snapped his unlit cigarette in half before putting it into his shirt pocket.

And before I could turn back to Dana to ask her again about Sasha, she said, “Before we get into the weeds, I need to know if you've told anyone besides Scooter here about your abilities.”

“No.” I shook my head as I looked back at her.

She looked…like a Greater-Than. Her hair, her eyes, her face. Even her clothes. She wore ripped skinny jeans tucked into those clunky black boots. Her shirt was white and tight against her muscles. Beneath, the black of her bra bled through the thin material. For a second, I thought about my own bra—how I had so little up top that I didn't even need to wear one. This girl was all curves and sex appeal, and I felt gangly and angular in comparison.

Yeah, if anyone here was something called a “Greater-Than,” it was Dana, and not me.

“Today on the beach,” she said, holding my gaze, “with Jock Itch.”

Cal snickered at the nickname she'd given Garrett.

“Did he figure it out?” Dana asked me. “The reason why you run so fast?”

So running fast
was
one of my G-T abilities. I swallowed hard and shook my head. “No. He's clueless.”

Calvin backed me up. “Garrett's douche-tastically self-centered,” he said, then turned to frown at me. “Were you really not bullshitting me? I mean, how fast
can
you run?”

Dana answered for me. “Fast.” She glanced again at Milo—who was still looking at me. “Well, that's good, at least. Keep it that way. No show-and-tell games at school or at a party. No more sharing cool tricks with ‘special' friends.” She made air quotes around “special” as she glanced at Cal.

“And while you're at it? Stay away from hospitals. Your personal boutique doctor might not give a damn about your unusual brain-wave patterns, but any large-scale medical facility will pop an eyebrow. As soon as you're tagged as different, the bad guys will know it, and before you can blink, you'll be dead. Your secret needs to be secret. Even Mommy can't know. Am I clear?”

I nodded. Unusual brain-wave patterns? “But…—”

“No buts. End of discussion. Keep your mouth closed, your running to a jog, and your inanimate objects on the ground.”

Calvin giggled.

Dana glared at him, and Calvin stopped giggling.

“I have questions,” I told Dana, “about the whole…unusual-brain-wave-patterns thing, but—”

She knew what I wanted. “Sasha first.”

“Yeah.” I nodded.

She carefully folded up her sunflower-seed package and put it back in her pocket as she said, “Police say her daddy killed—”

I cut her off. “He didn't. That's bullshit! Edmund would
never
hurt Sasha.”

Dana smiled at that. I glanced up. Milo was smiling at me too.

“Why is that funny?” I asked.

“It's not,” Dana said. “Funny. We're just glad you think that.” She reached out a foot and kicked Calvin's wheel. “You're not convinced, though, are you, Scoot?”

“The evidence—” Calvin started.

“Is exactly the same as the so-called evidence that showed up when another little girl vanished, years ago, in Alabama,” Dana said. “The two cases are virtually identical, and in both of them, the murdered girl's father is being framed.”

Yes! That made sense to me.
That
I believed—that Edmund was being framed.

“But you said it yourself at the Sav'A'Buck,” Calvin argued. “Little girls disappear all the time. It sucks and it's horrible, but it happens more often than most people think.”

Dana shook her head. Her lips were pursed, like she was angry but didn't want to show it. I was surprised. Dana didn't seem to have a problem exhibiting anger. But she was holding something back. I could tell. “You're right, Boyfriend,” she replied. “Girls do go missing, and it
is
horrible. But you're wrong about this. These two cases are connected.” She looked again at Milo.

At her cue, he pushed himself off the wall and removed something from his inside jacket pocket. It was an old-fashioned manila envelope.

“What's that?” Calvin asked.

Milo leaned down to hand it to me, looking me in the eyes.

I opened the envelope. Cal moved forward a little and leaned over to peer down at its contents as I angled it slightly to catch the light.

It contained news articles from the Internet. A lot of them. They were old enough so that the cheap paper they'd been printed on had turned soft and yellow at the edges. I wondered if Milo's nasty cigarette smoke had contributed to their decay.

The headlines were all variations on the same theme.

Montgomery resident in custody for murder of seven-year-old daughter

Alabama Man Charged with Girl's Murder

I skimmed the top article. It was about a little girl named Lacey Zannino who had disappeared from her bedroom in the middle of the night. It mentioned her father, Ryan, and how he had disappeared the same evening that Lacey had gone missing.

The second paragraph was even more startling.

Police found Ryan Zannino's truck on the west side of Montgomery, thirty-five miles from his residence. Crime-scene investigators have determined that the bed of the truck contained large amounts of the victim's blood—enough for police to arrest Zannino for Lacey's murder without recovering the little girl's body.

I looked up, and Dana nodded knowingly. “Do you know if the police found anything else in Sasha's dad's truck? Besides the blood?” she asked.

Calvin pointed to the printouts, and I handed the entire packet to him. He leaned closer to the beam of the flashlight so he could read the rest of the article.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don't know what, exactly. Something made them think…awful things. But there
was
a truck, and it had Sasha's blood in it. Although I don't understand, if there's not a body, how they know—absolutely—that she's…” I had to clear my throat. “Dead.”

“It's math, Sky,” Calvin told me quietly as he flipped through the clippings. “The human body contains a set amount of blood. If you lose too much of it, you die. There's an expression called
bleeding
out
.”

I cut him off. “I know what that means. I just… I feel like I would know it if Sasha was dead and…”

“Reality's a bitch,” Dana said flatly. “Answer me this—did Sasha's dad work nights?”

“He was a security guard,” I replied, nodding.

“Yup,” Dana said. “So was Ryan Zannino. And have they found Sasha's dad yet?”

I shook my head. “No.”

Milo crossed his arms over his chest. “If history repeats, he'll turn up soon,” he said. “And he'll go straight into solitary confinement.”

“Not if we find him first,” Dana vowed.

Calvin shook his head. “Wait, wait, wait.” His voice was tinged with irritation. He'd sifted through the articles and now pointed to one. “This says the Zannino dude was found guilty. They put him on death row
years
ago, for crying out loud. He's been in prison ever since.” He looked up. “So how do you figure that he has anything to do with Sasha's murder?”

Dana gave Cal an impatient look. “You're not listening, Sidekick,” she said. “I'm not saying that. I'm saying Sasha's dad is being framed, exactly the same way and probably by the same people who framed Ryan Zannino for Lacey's murder.”

Dana was right. The similarities between the two crimes
were
remarkable. “Have you gone to the police—” I started to say.

She cut me off. “The cops and I aren't exactly on friendly terms.”

Okay. “Then maybe
I
should—”

“You really need to start paying attention too, Bubble Gum. Last thing you want to do is attract the attention of the people who took Sasha and Lacey. You do that, and Cal's gonna be wandering around Coconut Key searching for
you
.”

I was definitely missing something here, and not because I wasn't paying attention. “Why would they come after me?” I asked. “And I'm still not clear on why anyone would want to kidnap and kill these little girls.”

Dana sat down again on the dusty floor as she smiled tightly. “Because they both had something extremely valuable.”

I still didn't understand, and when Dana rolled her eyes, I felt stupid and incredibly less-than.

Dana leaned toward me. “Those girls were Greater-Thans too. Only they were too little to keep it a secret, and the wrong people found out.”

Sasha
was a… And suddenly, it made sense. Not the kidnapping and murder part—I still didn't get that. What made sense was Sasha's earnestly telling me that her dolls danced around her room at night.

She hadn't imagined it—they'd actually moved. She'd used Greater-Than powers like mine to make them dance.

I thought about the jumble of dolls on Sasha's usually orderly shelves and imagined her, in that awful moment when she was being abducted, delivering a telekinetic blast of fear and anger.

Cal, however, was still skeptical. “How do you know that Sasha had, you know, powers like Sky?”

Dana looked at Cal. “How do I know?” She laughed. Then, she closed her eyes and nodded three times.

With a swoosh, Cal's wheelchair lifted off the ground. The computer news printouts floated lazily in the air as Calvin's wheelchair spun in an elliptical pattern before cascading toward the floor and landing gently in front of Dana. Then, one by one, the pieces of paper dropped onto Calvin's lap, forming a neat pile atop the manila envelope.

“I know,” she whispered, leaning in close to Calvin's astonished face, “because I know.” She tapped the papers on Cal's lap. “So what do you think, Scoot? Are you ready to believe me yet? Or do you need more proof?”

Calvin didn't move for a moment. The theater was silent except for the sound of our breathing. Dana's breath sounded fast and labored, as if she'd just run a fast mile.

“Man, what's up with all y'all girls?” Cal finally said, peeking over the side of his wheelchair to make sure he was safely on the ground. “How did you learn to do that?

“It takes practice, practice, and more practice,” Dana said matter-of-factly as she took the bottom of her tank top and lifted it up to her face. She dabbed at a few beads of sweat on her temples.

I caught Calvin staring at Dana's six-pack abs. “Okay,” he replied slowly. “No offense, but I could practice my damn ass off until my brain pops, and there's
still
no way I'd be spinning shit around with my mind.”

Dana nodded. “You're right about that, Boy Wonder,” she said, pulling her shirt back down, as she gestured to me with her head. “I'm talking to the girl who's already got the gift.”

From what I'd read on the Internet, I wasn't so sure being a G-T was a gift.

But Milo was smiling at me, so I managed to smile back.

“Okay,” Calvin said. “Okay. All right. Let me just…process.”

“Take your time, 'cause I've got all night.” Dana squatted in front of me. She rested her elbows on her knees.

“You okay?” I asked, leaning down. She still seemed pretty out of breath.

“I'm just a little out of shape.”

Calvin snorted. “Um, have you
looked
in a mirror lately? Girl, you're
swoll
.”

“Swoll?” Dana replied, one eyebrow raised.

“Cal, you're stupid,” I said, and laughed.

“Well, yeah.” Calvin nodded his agreement.

I looked at Dana. She
was
solid muscle. Even though I towered over her petite frame, every square inch of her was tight and rippling. Her crystalline eyes were smudged on top and bottom with jet black eyeliner, and she had a shock of blond hair short enough to be a boy's cut. Yet, for every feature that would have normally been harsh—even masculine—she balanced it with curves and attitude.

If I had to picture a girl who could move objects with her mind, I'd picture Dana. Not skinny, freckly, red-haired little old
me
.

“Tell me about this so-called gift,” I said. “Tell me why Sasha and Lacey were kidnapped and killed if their powers were supposedly so valuable.” Even as I said the word “killed,” I still didn't believe that Sasha was really dead. “And how come, if Lacey was seven and Sasha was nine, I'm only just now noticing my powers. I'm almost seventeen.”

Dana nodded, and her expression was grim. She motioned for me to sit down again. Calvin leaned over, and Milo came forward as well. He took a seat next to me. I expected to smell smoke, but when he leaned close, I caught a whiff of vanilla instead.

“Some girls get their powers early,” she told me. “Some, like you, are late bloomers. I don't know why that happens, but you should be grateful for that. Like I said, it's the little ones who aren't careful who get noticed. You'll catch up pretty quickly once you start practicing.”

“Practicing,” I echoed. I thought about how much effort it had taken to move my hairbrush.

“Skills like telekinesis take practice to hone,” Dana said. “Same way little kids have to practice walking or using a fork. You have to work out your abilities just like you work out a muscle. You have to get your gifts
swoll
, as Boyfriend likes to call it. Truth is, I've never met anyone whose abilities are perfect from the get-go. Well, no one who's not on the verge of jokering anyway.”

Cal and I looked at each other. There was that word again. Jokering.

“But that's a whole 'nother thing,” Dana continued. “What we're talking about here—being a Greater-Than—is related to a science called
neural
integration
. G-Ts can learn, through practice, to integrate more of our neural nets—aka our brains—and do all kinds of stuff that normies can't do.”

“Telekinesis, telepathy, prescience…” Cal listed some of the things we'd found from googling Greater-Thans.

“Some of us can control electricity—cause blackouts or power surges,” Dana said, nodding. “Some G-Ts can even deliver an electrical charge with their bodies. Some control fire or water or wind. Some are just plain freaking-crazy empathic. The list goes on and on. Sometimes talents translate into normal-seeming things. An ability to play the piano or learn languages. And it's always an individual thing.” She looked at me. “You won't develop the same abilities that I have—even with intense practice.”

“So…how will I know what my skill sets are?” I asked.

“It's kind of touch and go,” Dana replied.

“Minus the touching part,” Cal offered.

“Stupid
and
cheesy,” I muttered, and Cal blew me a kiss.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Milo run a hand through his shoulder-length hair. Dana looked at him. “Don't worry, I'm getting there. This is a lot for her.” She smirked at me. “Milo got all excited when I told him what you'd smelled. The fish, the sewage.”

Milo gave Dana an exasperated look. And all I could think was,
S
he'd told him about me
?

“Are you a Greater-Than too?” Cal asked him.

Milo shook his head. “I'm nothing special.”

I caught another whiff of vanilla and wondered why I didn't believe him.

“It's all trial and error, Sugar Plum,” Dana said. “Figuring out what you can and can't do. I got my powers when I was ten, and I'm still learning what I'm capable of. I wish the training was as simple as doing push-ups—you do the work, you get the muscle? But there are some G-T things—a lot of G-T things—that I just can't seem to do.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I can't read minds,” Dana said. “God, how I wish I had telepathy. But it's not my thing. I can tell you how many people are in a building as I approach, or how many rats are in this room. Two, in that corner.” She pointed.

“Rats?” I said my voice going up an octave.

Milo flashed the light into the corner, and it caught the shining eyes of, yes, one, two rats.

“Ew!” I leaped to my feet.

“Begone!” Dana commanded, and they turned and ran away.

Milo followed them with the light, all the way out of the room.

“
That
was cool,” Cal said as I slowly sat back down.

“If you don't mind, I wanted to ask you about those smells,” Milo said as he put the light back. He had been so quiet until now that his voice startled me, and I jumped again.

Dana smirked at my display of nerves. “It's rumored that some G-Ts can actually smell emotions.”

“I can do that,” I said without thinking. Immediately I covered my mouth, shocked.
Could
I really do that?

Calvin was looking at me like I was crazy. “Girl,
what
are you talking about?”

“That sewage smell in Sasha's room,” I said. “I smelled it—you didn't.”

Milo nodded.

“And the fish smell in the Sav'A'Buck,” I continued. “You didn't smell that, either.”

“What good does it do to be able to smell emotion?” Cal asked. “No offense to your nose, Sky, but if I were a Greater-Than, I'd choose invisibility or maybe shooting lightning bolts from my fingertips.”

“But it's not a choice,” Dana said. “We don't get to choose. We are who we are. And Sky's apparently smell-sensitive.” She turned back to me. “We've heard stories about girls smelling things like cinnamon, cloves, garlic, sewage”—she checked them off on her fingers—“vanilla, fish… And the reason it's a cool power to have, despite what Scooter thinks, is that it gives you insight into the manifest emotions of the people around you. Imagine being able to walk into a room and know with one sniff that the people in there want to kill you.”

What kind of rooms did this girl walk into?

Milo cleared his throat. “Manifest emotions are the basics—love being the biggest because it covers so much ground.”

“Maternal love, friendship and loyalty, attraction and desire,” Dana listed. “Fear is the opposite of love, by the way. Most people think hatred is, but it's not. Fear and grief create the more complex anger and hate.”

“The fish smell is fear,” I realized. How did I know that?

But Milo was nodding. “And the sewage…?” he prompted quietly.

I answered with hesitation. “Evil.”

Dana was nodding now too. “The smell of sewage
has
been linked to evil. For the record? Pure evil is completely devoid of all human emotion. So you're smelling a
lack
of humanity—without even the basic emotions present.”

My head was spinning. But this seemed like the perfect time to ask: “Cal and I read about G-Ts online. That they—we—turn into sociopaths, that we lose our ability to relate to…” I didn't know what to call regular people.

But Dana did. “Normies?” she said. “Yeah, that's total bullshit. The few normies who know about G-Ts tend to be afraid of us, so they turn us into scary monsters.” She made big claw hands, and her shadow behind her on the wall was actually kind of awful. “You don't have anything to worry about, Bubble Gum. In fact, you could use some toughening up.”

I wasn't convinced, and Milo seemed to know that. “It's a big responsibility, but with the right training, you'll be okay,” he told me with kindness in his eyes.

I thought about that vanilla smell I'd noticed when Milo had sat down, but I couldn't figure out what it meant. I also had no idea where I was supposed to go for
the
right
training
. It wasn't as if I could pop over to the local G-T Technical School for a class or two.

I looked at Cal, and I knew he was antsy because it was getting late. His mom was awesome, but even awesome had its limits. And I still hadn't gotten any real answers about Sasha. So I reluctantly changed the subject. “Back to Sasha. Are you saying that people—normies—kill G-Ts because they're scared of us?” It still felt weird saying
us
.

Dana shook her head. “It's way worse than that.” She stared at the flashlight intently. The light flickered a little and then became brighter. “Okay. I don't know
exactly
what goes on in our bodies, but apparently we have some special enzyme in our blood that normies don't. You won't find it running through Milo's body or Scoot's, and probably not even your mom's. But there
is
a way to extract that enzyme from a G-T's blood and cook it along with some other
awesome
ingredients. The result is an illegal drug called Destiny,” Dana continued.

“Seriously?” I said. “Destiny is made from…” It was too awful. I couldn't say it.

Dana could. “Our blood,” she confirmed. “And I guess you already know what Destiny is.”

“We know,” Cal said grimly. “Addictive, deadly, expensive.”

“Really expensive,” she said. “And now you know why.”

Again, I did the math. “So you think Sasha and Lacey were killed for this enzyme that's in their blood”—an enzyme that was in
my
blood too—“by the people, whoever they are, who make Destiny.”

“Give the girl a prize,” Dana said.

I shook my head, because it still didn't quite add up. “If they wanted Sasha's blood, then why was there so much of it in the back of her father's truck?”

“My theory,” Dana said harshly, “is that they grab girls like Lacey and Sasha—and you—and they bring 'em to their lab to bleed 'em out, and then they dispose of their bodies somehow. I don't know how, but they make 'em disappear. Probably because if they showed up exsanguinated there'd be too many questions.”

I swallowed hard, imagining Sasha's bloodless body tossed in some overflowing landfill, never to be recovered.

“They somehow extract the enzyme from the blood,” Dana continued. “And after the enzyme's out, they use the blood to frame the most likely suspect—the girl's father. Whom they've kidnapped, so that Daddy mysteriously disappears at the same time the little girl vanishes, right?”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

I smelled more vanilla, and I glanced at Milo. He was looking at me. He was always looking at me. I was starting to wonder if I had something stuck in my teeth or if I had my shirt on backward.

“When police are investigating a crime like this, their first suspects are always the immediate family members.” Calvin finally seemed convinced.

“So it was an easy frame.” I looked down at the manila envelope that Cal was still holding. “One they've done before.”

“Yeah,” Dana agreed.

“So your plan is to find Edmund—Sasha's father—before the police do.” I looked from Dana to Milo and back. “I want to help.”

“Whoa,” Dana said. “Bubble Gum, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you're untrained. You and Skippy would be more of a hindrance.”

“So train me,” I said, looking to Milo for support. For once, he was looking at Dana, one eyebrow slightly raised.

“No.” Dana swiftly stood up. “I'm done.”

I stood too. “Done following me? That's why you were at the Sav'A'Buck, right? Because you've been following me?”

She shrugged. “I thought you might know something. I knew you were Sasha's babysitter, and I could tell you were a G-T, but…I realized, back in the Sav'A'Buck when you didn't understand what I was saying, that you were clueless—and completely untrained.” She looked over at Milo, who had slowly gotten to his feet too.

“Milo here made me reach out to you—to warn you to keep your powers on the DL. And I've done that. Consider yourself warned. Go home and lie low, Sugar Plum. When it's time for college, if you live that long, think about Boston. There's a super-secret G-T training center up there. They'd accept a girl like you in a heartbeat. As for here and now, I'm gone.” She headed for the door, but Milo didn't follow her. There was impatience in her voice when she turned back. “Milo…?”