Overtaken (23 page)

“Let's go.” Topher was already locking up the room.

I followed the throbbing bass back downstairs to the gym. The dance was just as energetic as I'd left it. I hoped that also meant no one had noticed Topher and I were gone for almost thirty minutes, but I knew better than to be too cocky about it. Dana Fox had a way of knowing exactly what I wanted to keep from her.

I started scanning the room for Chase. I visibly jerked when an arm slipped around my waist. There he was, finding me before I could find him.

“Where did you go? I thought you were worried about me,” I teased him, at least until I could see that he was not in the teasing mood. I changed my line of questioning: “What's wrong?”

“Maya's here. I don't know what happened exactly, but she seemed really upset. It gave me this really weird sense of déjà vu. . . .”

I immediately knew what he meant even if he didn't. I had almost forgotten about Chase's memory loss following his coma a few months earlier. He might not have remembered exactly the chaos that happened when Maya got upset, but his subconscious seemed to. I had to get to her right away.

“Where is she?”

He shook his head, unsure. “She tore out of here a couple minutes ago.”

I tried the door to the nearest girls' bathroom, but it was locked when I tried to open it. My instincts were right. “Maya? It's me. Open the door.”

There was a long pause before a
click
and the door cracked open just a sliver. I slipped inside, shutting it behind me. I knew she was in trouble as soon as I saw the state of the bathroom. It looked like someone had thrown a full-on tantrum, but Maya was beautiful and unharmed, huddled in the middle of the floor. She was weeping and the room was in shambles. Every mirror cracked or shattered, the fluorescent lights overhead flickering and barely hanging on to the ceiling, every paper towel dispenser emptied with the towels themselves tossed about like a tornado had hit them. It was all the more frightening because I knew she hadn't done it with her hands.

I approached her like a wounded, cornered animal, crouching, hands outstretched, eyes low. “Maya, are you okay? Can you tell me what happened?”

Maya's voice was cracked and throaty. “I never should've come back to Barrington. I thought maybe I'd scared Dana the other night, but she just went straight for the jugular.”

My mind was racing. I'd barely been gone half an hour. The dance seemed undisturbed. What had happened that left my friend so broken? “What did Dana do?” I asked as gently as I could.

“I tried to talk to my old friends. Annie, Maddie, Jaden, and Emily from cheerleading squad. They called me an imposter. They said Maya Bartoli was dead. Then they demanded that I leave.”

My insides curdled, and it reminded me of the living nightmare of my father's blank stare, of his threat to call the police on his own flesh and blood.

“Maya, I'm so sorry. After my dad and what happened at the game the other night . . . I never should've let you come to the dance.”

It was in that moment that I saw a spark in her eyes. A switch was thrown, turning Maya from sad victim to bold aggressor. She peeled herself up off the floor and turned her rage on me. “No. You never should've let me stay.”

The room was suddenly alive again. The glass rattled off the mirror frames, crumbling into the sinks. The light above us was rocking back and forth, almost tearing itself wire by wire out of the ceiling tiles, finally shattering into a million shards of glass.

“Maya—” I tried to interrupt, but there was no stopping her.

“Poor Nica,” Maya exclaimed, her eyes getting wide with anger. “Sad and alone with no one to turn to. You needed me. You needed help. Do you remember what happened when that was me? When I was alone and I needed help? You sent me away! You and your friends stayed here together—safe—and I had to go off on my own. I had to grow and suffer because no one here could handle it.”

I was afraid. I was afraid of my own friend. I didn't know if she'd hurt me on purpose, but I didn't think she'd stop the bathroom from eating me alive.

“I'm done being a good soldier, Nica!” Maya shouted, advancing toward me. “I'm not going to fall in line with your plan and try to pull everything into a neat solution. This is war. There will be casualties. Dana's going to pay.”

Maya stormed out of the bathroom, and it was like a bomb exploded. I dropped to the floor and covered my face as glass flew and metal warped and the light finally made good on its promise, crashing to the floor inches from my huddling form. I couldn't stop shaking, but I had to stop her.

Unsteady, but on two feet, I opened the door and stumbled back out into the hall, scratched and bleeding. Maya was already out of sight, but I knew exactly where she was headed.

When I reached the gym, I didn't understand what was going on. The music had dropped to a schmaltzy ballad, but no one was dancing. Instead, it was almost deathly quiet except for the soprano melody and strings. All eyes were on the far wall, lit up with some sort of slide show.

I pushed through the crowd, simultaneously trying to get a better look at what was happening and attempting to find Topher and Maya. I had to stop her before she reached Dana. As the pictures came into view, I didn't recognize them at first: cute kindergarten class photos, a girls' soccer team, elementary-school art projects that only a parent could love. I didn't pick out the recurring figure until she entered her awkward middle-school photos. I was putting it together like a slow-motion car crash—all of the photos were of Maya.

As they eased into high school, I could only watch in horror. She was sparklingly photogenic in each captured moment: from being the only pretty girl in the Science Olympiad, to her stint as captain of the cheerleading squad, to photos of her year on homecoming court, and all the way through to her with Chase at a dance in the weeks before she disappeared. I felt the bile rise as I read the banner fading in above the photos:
IN MEMORIAM
. Soft sobs began to fill the room as friends and strangers mourned their loss.

It was so much worse than I'd even thought. Dana hadn't brainwashed the entire school—not to mention the entire town—into forgetting Maya Bartoli. She'd brainwashed them into thinking Maya was dead.

It was hard to spot Maya in the crowd, but I finally set my eyes on her. She was crying along with the rest of them. What did they even see when they saw her? How had Dana distorted the truth? Did the real, living, and breathing Maya just bring up a blank? I knew it didn't really matter, though. The emotional damage was real. And it was catastrophic.

As I looked around at the tears and the quietly shaking shoulders of my fellow classmates, it was clear that they all genuinely believed they were suffering the passing of a friend, one who was actually standing among them, a ghost at her own funeral. No one here was free enough of Dana's distortion field to understand the truth. I wanted to scream.
What the hell are you people doing? Do you understand the pain you're causing?
But they didn't. They thought that the Maya among them was a basket case.

I turned to Maya with “don't” on my lips, but it was too late. The tears that stained her face dribbled from eyes that had rolled fully back into her head. She wasn't blinking, and I could see that there was nothing left but the whites of her eyes, crisscrossed with the bright red lightning bolts that were her strained and shattering blood vessels. In that instant, I felt a powerful, inescapable truth in my gut.

We were all going to die.

I'd never considered what it would be like to perish in a building collapse. Being wiped from the face of the earth by a car crash, or a plane crash, or the violent protestations of an angry mob as they turned against their government had all been real possibilities in my travels with Lydia. I'm sure we'd stayed in places that sat on jittery tectonic plates or were known to have been in the path of deadly storms, but I'd never witnessed anything of the sort and never lay awake in bed at night fearing that the ceiling might collapse onto me. It struck me now that I hoped it would be quick.

A mess of multicolored electronic noises broke the photos into crazy patterns and lines. They snapped right back the first time, but then—
bzzrkkkt, bzzrkkkt
—the projector fritzed twice more and the smiling faces of Maya and pals didn't come back. The bulb exploded with a brilliant white snap. One-hundred-some-odd kids and chaperones flinched at the same time, covering their eyes and yelping in surprise.

“Everyone okay?” shouted a voice from across the room. The replies all came back positive. The glass and sparks were contained within the machine, so no one had been hit with debris, and no one needed medical attention.

Except for Maya. Unnoticed in the aftermath of the sudden shock, she was still standing next to me in the back of the room near the soda machines, looking for all the world like she was having some sort of terrifying standing seizure. She wasn't convulsing or foaming at the mouth, but I knew she wasn't in control. Her fingers twitched like they were playing a complex concerto or counting to one million in a way that couldn't be easily comprehended. Her feet were beginning to lift off the ground. She rose barely an inch at first, then began to warp the air around her as she rose, causing it to shimmer like heat off of sunbaked pavement. The waves rippled up her body and crashed over her head, silent and gentle. I tried to follow the ripple outward from its conception point, but it quickly vanished.

This first wave of energy pulsated through the room so low and slow that it didn't even register as a physical phenomenon. It didn't create a wind or a shock. It wormed its way into people's ears and guts, spinning their senses and dropping them to their knees. One girl to my left fell to the floor and vomited. The chaperones were still recovering from the exploding projector and found themselves caught off guard by the new turn of events. Panic seized their faces. Was that an earthquake? What the hell was going on?

The last time Maya's powers had threatened the school, they'd been new, untested, almost useless in her clumsy hands, but that was before she'd trained herself. Before she could rip tree stumps from the ground and toss Dana around like a rag doll with nothing more than her mind and an endless supply of anger. It was impossible to know where those reservoirs were held or how they were formed, but whatever they were, they were real and very, very dangerous.

The second wave of energy came as a powerful thunderclap. It shattered every bulb in the ceiling and wrenched the projector down from its mount. Decorations ripped from the walls, and the snack bar in the corner was demolished. The sound served as whip crack that started a stampede of terrified teens. As they ran for the back, they came to a dead stop at the surreal sight of Maya, hovering two feet off the ground, head back like she was going to ascend to heaven.

Her fingers still twitched so hard they looked like they might wrap around themselves and break. My eyes caught Oliver's through the crowd—they were wide with fear. Though he knew about Maya's power, he'd never seen it manifest like this. Neither had Jackson or Dana herself, from the looks of things. They were equally wide-eyed and stunned. A third wave began to build at Maya's feet. More than just a ripple, it seemed to be bending and mirroring the reality around her. As it grew, swelling like a piece of blown glass that I knew was going to burst, I searched for my voice.

“R-run! RUN!” I shouted, realizing it was the only thing I could do at that moment to save people from the destruction that was sure to follow.

That snapped everyone out of it. The sudden crush of panicked bodies slamming into mine sent me spinning to the floor. My hands shot to my face and throat to fend off the feet that threatened to crush my windpipe. A hand burst through the crowd and yanked me up. It was Chase, and I clung to him as he threw his body between the crowd streaming for the exits and me.

“We got to get outta h—”

The third wave came and stole his words. It wasn't like the other two, loud and frightening. No, this one was almost silent. An explosion free of flames but furious in its destructive force. The molecules of the air itself were blasted apart from one another, torn asunder by Maya's terrible power. The room was leveled in the blink of an eye. Kids tumbled over tables, and tables tumbled through walls. Bricks collapsed into sand. The soda machines erupted into geysers of neon and sugar water. Every door and window in the room burst into pieces and sailed into the parking lot. Chase was yanked away from me so fast he looked like he shared Oliver's power. I was sent soaring at the same time and slammed into the remnants of a wall as the ceiling came tumbling down.

Then there was nothing: vague shapes in the dark, popping colors that danced across the backs of my eyelids, but no thoughts, no sounds. I couldn't have stayed out for very long, since Maya was still standing in the same spot when I came to. She was covered in dust like a cheap stage ghost, shivering and crying. I wanted to leap to my feet to console her, but my body was unresponsive. My first horrified thought was that I'd been paralyzed, but the reality was that I was trapped under a pile of debris. It was too heavy to move, and I had to take to wriggling out from under it. I pulled my legs free and wobbled to my feet.

I noticed all the bodies. Some people must've made it outside, but those who hadn't had been tossed by the blast. I couldn't be sure if they were alive or dead. Hell, I could barely be sure of my own status in the land of the living. “Chase?”

No reply outside of a few groans coming from others who were rising to their own stunned feet. Sirens wailed in the distance, and the sound carried in through the ceiling, which was now open to the sky. I limped toward Maya, hands outstretched to comfort her, maybe even help her off the newly minted battlefield. Instead, her head whipped up and she shrieked, sending me back through the air with a flick of her wrist. I crashed down into a broken cafeteria table as Maya started to run, flinging away anything in her path with little more than a look and a wave of her hand. When she reached the back wall, she ripped the rest of that down the same way and stalked off into the night.

A dusty, bleeding hand fell onto my shoulder. “Hey, you okay?” Topher asked.

I turned and pulled him into a hug. I wasn't okay. I was terrified, ready to crawl into my bed and never come out—but I wasn't about to let him know that.

“We've got to get help,” I said, as if that wasn't already clear.

“First we've got to get outta here,” he proclaimed as he grabbed my hand and led me into the blown-out hallway. It was borderline apocalyptic, covered in garbage and debris that had been displaced in the wake of Maya's psychic freak-out. Topher held a finger to his lips as we slipped past the mouth of another hallway. He pointed out a group of kids huddled around someone on the ground, and in my rush to make sure that everyone was okay, I made a huge mistake. I ignored Topher's shushing and opened my mouth.

“Is somebody hurt?” One head turned toward me, then another. My stomach sank. All of Dana's minions. Then Jackson turned around, hoisting Dana to her feet with one muscular arm.

Shit.

“Stop her!” Dana shouted.

Topher and I bolted. He tore down the hallway behind me, pulled even, and in seconds, blew right by. It hit me that my three-inch heels, though plenty sensible for a dance, might as well be cinder blocks in this situation. I kicked the dressy spikes to the side and stepped on the gas, barefoot. It felt good. I caught right back up to Topher and shouted for him to hook right, up the rapidly approaching stairs.

FWAH-BOOM!
A searing, liquid fireball hocked from down the hall exploded in the space we'd occupied seconds earlier. It melted lockers and tore the water fountain from the wall, sending a geyser of water flying free from the exposed pipe. Through the soaking spray, I saw Dana leading her army down the hall, right on our heels.

As we took the stairs two and three at a time, Topher tried to pin down our next step. “Where are we going?”

“To the Bridge!” We cleared the last steps, hit the landing, and there it was: An eighty-foot-long hallway enclosed by floor-to-ceiling sheets of plate glass, the Bridge connected the original high school that we were in to an expansion built a few years before I arrived. It was as futuristic and stupidly expensive-looking as the rest of the architecture in town that Bar Tech had a hand in and definitely wasn't a smart place to hide or fight, but it did have a set of steel fire doors at each end. As at any high school concerned with security and safety, they were installed there in case of emergency. Should there be a fire, or God forbid, a shooter in the halls, the doors could be remotely or locally closed, locked, and set to contain the problem. We passed through the first set, spun around, and slammed them shut with a metal-on-metal clang.

In that same instant, a blindingly bright halogen light roared to life on the other side of the giant glass panels. Topher and I turned away, but the light moved with us, keeping us from getting a good look at where it was coming from. I didn't need my sight to recognize the sound—the familiar grit and holler of a hovering helicopter. The glass barely dulled the noise, and Topher had to scream to be heard.

“Holy shit!” Topher exclaimed, looking terrified. “Are they from Bar Tech?”

“Unless you arranged transportation for us,” I barked back, “I'd say yeah!”

As if to confirm our suspicions, a disembodied voice crackled over the bird's loudspeaker: “The situation has been contained. Please exit the building. Again, the situation has been contained.”

They were either lying or had no idea what was going on. Either way, I wasn't about to turn myself over. Topher and I kept running. About halfway down the Bridge, the fire doors I'd closed behind us began to slam back and forth in their frames. Someone on the other side was giving them a beating. Instead of holding firm, one exploded from its hinges and flipped past us, scarring the floor in a flurry of sparks. I turned to see a Bar Tech Security guard the size of a mutant linebacker—like he'd injected himself with all the steroids in the state—hulking in the empty frame with a smoking bazooka. He charged with a guttural howl, Dana and the rest of her militia right behind him. A deranged-looking group of students flung the remaining fire door in our direction and missed by inches. Instead of taking my head, it smashed through one of the glass panels and careened into the parking lot below.

The helicopter repositioned itself, arcing high over the Bridge and coming level with us on the other side. As its floodlight blinded us for a second time, a voice cried out:

“Nica! Look out!” That sounded like Oliver, I thought.
Look out for what?

A silver glint answered at the very edge of my peripheral vision. I turned away from the searing light to look out the opposite window. What I saw took my breath away. It was a bus. One of our shiny, high-tech, Bar Tech–supplied wonders of public transportation, except this one was suspended in the sky, twirling on the end of a wild, invisible string. And coming straight for me.

I spotted Maya in the parking lot below, wild-eyed, arms still extended from the effort of directing the vehicular projectile my way. The battered fire door was embedded into the roof of a car a few inches to the side of her. She must have thought the door was aimed at her. And now she was reacting like any wild animal would—by going on the offense. Unfortunately, I was standing directly between her and vengeance.

As the last seconds of my life ticked by, the bus grew closer and filled my entire field of vision, like the mouth of a giant coming to swallow me whole. It no longer sparkled in the light, it was consumed by shadow, a monolithic structure about to lay waste to what seemed like the entire world.

I didn't see what hit my chest, but the force of the contact ripped me off my feet and lifted me off the ground. I soared backward as the bus hit the glass at highway speeds, nearly rupturing my eardrums with its sound and fury. It tore through the steel like paper and pulverized anything less tensile. It stayed partially intact as it bisected the Bridge but met with the helicopter in midair when it erupted out the other side. The resulting explosion lit up the night and rained flaming chunks of debris down on what was left of the Bridge.

I landed on my back, and the air cracked out of my lungs. In the split second before he rolled off and vanished, I saw Oliver checking my face to make sure I was conscious and alive. He was gone before I could catch my breath. Had that really just happened?