Shine (20 page)

“I do, but—I don’t want you to let me go.” His left eye twitched. “Ach, that sounded pathetic.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do.” He stared hard at the camera. “Aura, don’t pity me. I can’t take that. This summer wasn’t easy, but it’s over, and I’m fine.” He stressed the last word so hard, it cracked. “Except for missing you, and that’s a pain I want to cure in only one way.”

My pulse pounded at the thought of being with him again, but we couldn’t discuss details when the DMP could be listening. “Do you know what made them decide to let you go?”

“Not sure. I was told the Foreign Office leaned on the State Department, who leaned on the DMP, but why they changed their mind, I dunno.”

That was exactly what I’d expected to hear Zachary say on video.

I checked my watch. “Would you believe I have a history paper due on the second day of school? I need to go proofread it before I hand it in.”

He nodded understanding. We said our good-byes, then joined each other in the encrypted chat room.

Me:
I KNOW WHY THEY LET YOU GO. IT WAS THE STATE DEPT AND WHATEVER, BUT ALSO MI-X.

Him:
I FIGURED. BUT WHAT TOOK THEM SO LONG?

Me:
THEY NEEDED LEVERAGE AGAINST THE DMP.

Him:
LIKE WHAT?

Me:
LIKE THE FACT THAT THE COMPANY THAT MAKES BLACKBOX HIRED PRIVATE SPIES TO BOMB FLIGHT 346.

Him:
WHAT?!!! HOW DO THEY KNOW THIS?

My fingers paused over the keyboard.

Me:
BECAUSE I TOLD THEM.

Zachary didn’t respond for several moments, then the chat window showed that he was typing, then stopping, then typing, then stopping again. Finally he simply said,
SORRY?

Me:
I DID RESEARCH. AND I GOT INFO FROM NICOLA.

Him:
NICOLA FROM DMP? YOU WERE SPYING?

Me:
NOT SPYING. INVESTIGATING.

Him:
YOU COULD GO TO JAIL!

Me:
I DID THIS FOR YOU.

After a long, excruciating wait, while my heart seemed to stop, he typed:
I’M NOT WORTH THAT.

I felt like crying, but tried to hold it together.
CAN I SEE YOU?

Him:
I HAVE TO GO NOW.

And he was gone. I let the tears pour forth. Maybe I shouldn’t have told Zachary what I’d done, but it would’ve felt like lying. I’d always been honest with him, even when it hurt.

My vision blurry, I started packing my book bag. Normally the smell of new school supplies filled me with anticipation. Now I felt nothing but dread.

My phone buzzed with a text message from Zachary.

AURA, I’M SORRY. I LOVE YOU.

I LOVE YOU TOO. ARE YOU MAD?

NOT AT YOU. NEVER AT YOU.

IF YOU NEED TO TALK
…

I CAN’T. NOT YET.

WHEN YOU’RE READY.

His reply took so long, I double-checked that my phone was receiving a signal. Finally …

I WILL
.

S
houldn’t we feel different?” Megan asked as we worked our way through our first lab experiment in AP Chemistry.

“Now that we’re seniors?”

“What did you want, a red carpet when we walked into school yesterday morning? Trumpets? Confetti?”

“Something like that. We worked and suffered all these years.” She carefully measured the liquid in the test tube. “They should honor us.”

“I think the honor comes in June. A little thing called graduation?”

“We don’t need a reward at graduation. Leaving this place is reward enough.” She glanced up at Mrs. Oswald, who was hovering around our side of the room, checking on students’ progress. When she drifted away, Megan added, “Did you see the new exchange student over there?”

I adjusted my goggles and peered across the room at Simon, pretending I was hearing about him for the first time. “Cute. Where’s he from?”

“England. His mom’s a diplomat or something.”

It felt like Simon was the only person in school
not
watching me. I heard the whispers in the hallway as I passed, the conversations that mysteriously stopped when I approached. Two-and-a-half months after Logan’s concert, people were still speculating that I’d somehow brought him back to life.

In my junior year, I’d been the girl with the dead druggie boyfriend, someone to pity. In my senior year, I was destined to be a freak. Someone to fear.

It bothered me, though it shouldn’t have. I had way more important concerns, like bringing down the DMP.

Megan continued to hog the hands-on portions of the experiment—she planned to learn every aspect of the funeral home business. Bored, I snuck another glance at yesterday’s text message from Nicola:

GLAD TO HEAR ZACHARY’S FREE! :) THIS IS THE LAST YOU’LL HEAR FROM ME, FOR YOUR SAKE. I HAVE SOME STUFF I NEED TO DO ON MY OWN.

What did she mean by “stuff”? If she had more dirt on the DMP, I wanted to know. But she hadn’t replied to my texts or phone calls.

I brought up the most recent message sent from Zachary late this morning. Since no signals would reach inside our school’s BlackBoxed walls, I hadn’t received it until Megan, Jenna, Christopher, and I had gone outside to the senior courtyard for lunch.

Zachary:
CAN’T CHAT TONIGHT. GOING OUT OF TOWN FOR A GOOD CAUSE. WISH ME LUCK.

At least he sounded like he was in a better mood. But where was he going? Who was he seeing? Was he pulling away from me already?

“Siobhan called me last night,” Megan said, interrupting my gloom. “She said College Park is crazy fun.”

“So she’s not missing Connor?”

“You know her.” Megan made air quotes. “That ‘whole long-distance thing’ never works.”

“She better be wrong.”

“I’m sure you and Zach will be fine. You’re way different.”

Right. Because before he left, we’d been boyfriend-girlfriend all of three days. If Siobhan and Connor—who’d been together for more than a year—couldn’t make it, how could we?

And after what Zachary had been through this summer—which he wouldn’t even tell me about—he might decide it’d be easier to forget the entire continent. He could start up with a girl from his hometown, someone who never had to ask him to repeat himself or explain a phrase or a joke. Someone who could help him forget.

“Ready?” Megan held up the beaker. “If we did it right, it’ll be so cool.” She poured the fluid into the test tube. The mixture bubbled, steamed, then changed from white to black.

“Whoa.” I jotted our observations in our lab notebook, then glanced around the room to confirm that others’ experiments showed the same results.

I began to write the explanation for the reaction, then stopped and stared at the test tube. The two chemicals on their own had certain
original properties. But when they mingled, they took on a new life with new qualities. New powers.

In my own notebook, I doodled in the margin, using chemical equation notation:

Me + Zachary → weirdness + happiness

As much as I’d loved Logan, and as much as I cared for Dylan, neither of them had ever changed who I was, turned me into a new person like Zachary had. And as much as it scared me, these changes seemed like a sign that we shouldn’t walk away. We were each other’s way forward in life.

Zachary and I had done many so-called impossible things together. But only one thing was truly impossible: leaving each other for good.

The following night Zachary was waiting in our encrypted chat room when I logged on with my excruciatingly long password.

Him:
I HAVE GOOD NEWS AND BETTER NEWS. WHICH ONE DO YOU WANT FIRST?

Me:
OOH! THE GOOD NEWS. SAVE THE BEST FOR LAST.

Him:
THAT’S MY GIRL. THE GOOD NEWS IS, I’VE FOUND AN APP THAT’LL LET US ENCRYPT VIDEO CHATS.

“Yes!” I shouted. Then I held down the shift and 1 keys to rattle off a hundred exclamation points.

Him:
I’M GLAD, TOO. MY HANDS ARE GETTING TIRED.

Me:
I MISS YOUR HANDS.

Him:
HAH! CHEEKY MONKEY. I’VE UPLOADED THE VIDEO PROGRAM HERE.

He posted a link to a secure file transfer site. It took forever to install, but ten minutes later, there he was on my screen.

I dropped my pen. “Your hair! That’s where you went yesterday for a good cause?”

“What?” He passed a hand over his head, where the dark strands were shorter now and nearly straight. “No. I got it cut today here. It was hideously long.”

“I liked it.”

“I needed a change, and this is more the style here. Does it look bad?”

His face was more visible without the wavy bangs tumbling down his forehead. I’d never noticed how high and defined his cheekbones were, and his eyes now seemed twice as green.

“It looks hot.”

He gave me a crooked grin. “So, I went overnight to the Black Isle, up in the Highlands.” He slid a large white box in front of the camera. “I got this.”

“A case of copy paper. Congrats.”

He lifted the lid, spinning it in his hands, then withdrew a manila envelope with a red wax seal, like the seal on—

“Oh my God! My mom’s journal?”

“Aye. I saw Eowyn. She’s up north in a new safe house.”

“Open it! Open it!” I bounced in my chair, then dove under my desk for the pen I’d dropped. “Start after January twentieth. That was the last date I read. After that I skimmed until the equinox.” When my mom had described her seventeen minutes of passion with my dad. Blech.

Zachary scanned the sheets, hands trembling from fatigue or excitement or both. “I don’t remember this bit.

“January 24

Haven’t had time to write lately—out wandering with Anthony, down the streets of medieval towns like Slane and Kells and Trim. Since I pretend I’m walking alone, he does most of the talking.

But I had to journal tonight. Anthony told me something odd, something he said he’s been holding back until he could figure it all out. He didn’t want to worry me.”

Hmm. I was getting a better picture of my dad—a little protective, a little secretive.

Zachary kept reading.

“We were walking down the sidewalk in Kells, near the famous church and tower. Anthony said that the night of the solstice—after I’d been to Newgrange—he was haunting one of the local pubs. He overheard a middle-aged woman speaking with a young couple about something that had happened that morning at Newgrange. Not tourist-talk—this was serious.

The older lady was speaking in Gaelic, and the young man (her son, apparently) was translating for his wife. The mother said, ‘The good god has done his work. The day will rise again, with the next return of the light.’

I had no clue what that meant, but Anthony (ye olde mythology buff) said that ‘the good god’ was a name for the Dagda, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The TDD weren’t creator-gods, more like superhero wizard types that lived in Ireland way, way back.

“Remember the Tuatha Dé Danann from our thesis?” Zachary pronounced the Gaelic,
TOO-ah jay DAN-an.

I nodded. According to legend, after the Celts invaded, the Tuatha Dé Danann literally went underground and now lived in the “Otherworld” in hills or mounds called
sidhe
(“
shee
”). Over time,
sidhe
came to mean faeries themselves. The Dagda has supposedly lived inside Newgrange all this time, which is why the locals were too scared to disturb it for thousands of years.

Zachary flipped the page.

“I asked Anthony what she meant about Dagda’s work. He had no idea, except that it had something to do with the solstice.

Because of that, he started following this older woman. He found out her name was Brigit Murphy, and she lived in Rathcairn, a nearby Gaelic-speaking town, one of the few in eastern Ireland.

Anthony said that after he left me around midnight last night, he went to Brigit Murphy’s house and found a group of people gathered there. It was like a cult meeting of the TDD worshippers. He said they wore robes like Druids, but weren’t real Druids. They call themselves Children of the Sun.”

“Creepy,” I commented.