I giggle. I can’t help it. My arm hurts so bad and I got shot and I’m riding toward James in a car with the boy I was supposed to kill but didn’t and my entire world is shot and I’m going to have to figure it out really fast or we’ll all be dead.
“You’re awake,” Adam, says, looking over at me with surprise in his soft gray eyes.
“You have pretty eyes. I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“Uh, yeah, me too.”
“I feel fuzzy.”
He shifts uncomfortably, eyes on the road. “I might have overdosed you. Just a little. I needed to think.”
Hmm. He drugged me. That’s interesting. I felt like I was safe with him. I still do. My instincts are totally cracked from years of misuse. Maybe I’m trying to kill myself? I’m not brave enough to try again in real life, but maybe my subconscious is braver than I am and it’s trying to do me in.
Oh! Adam has long eyelashes. Long arms. Long legs. Long fingers. Everything about him is long. Eden would make a dirty joke. I giggle imagining it.
Focus, focus, focus. “You drugged me.”
“I almost pulled over at three different hospitals. You’re bleeding through the bandaging.”
I look down at the black sleeve of his shirt; it’s wet. “Ruined your shirt. Sorry.” I giggle again. I haven’t giggled in years. Maybe I should let Adam overdose me more often. It’s nice.
“I’ll get a new one.”
“Why didn’t you pull over? Or call the cops?”
He’s quiet for a while, knuckles tight on the steering wheel. “Because I’ve been trying to figure it out. I believe you—about the hit—I probably wouldn’t if those other guys hadn’t showed up, but it’s all too weird to be fake. Plus I, uh, looked through your purse. Another knife in the lining, along with a few thousand dollars. Four different IDs. Is that picture of you and Annie?”
I sigh. “Yes.”
“She’s the one they’ll hurt if you mess up.”
“I already messed up. She’s the one they’ll hurt if I don’t fix this. Wait, how do you know her name?”
“You talked. I mean, when you were out. I asked you questions, and you answered them.”
I glare suspiciously at him. “You should know I lie all the time.” Most people lie with words; I lie with my whole body. I lie with my thoughts and my emotions; I lie with everything that makes me who I am. I’m the best liar in the whole entire world. I hope I lied to him, whatever he asked. “What did I say?”
“Have you really killed three people?”
Tap tap tap I need to tap tap tap I need to get out of this car. I can’t breathe. “Why didn’t you stop at a hospital?”
“I know why I’m in the middle of this.”
Why is he still talking to me? He should be scared, he should get away from me. “Oh?”
“My research. What I’ve been working on. I told you it was with MRI and tracking chemicals in the body to examine brain disorders, right? What I didn’t tell you is there’s a very specific focus. I’m mapping the brain functions of people who claim to have psychic abilities. It started as a focus inspired by this crazy aunt on my mom’s side, more to disprove it than anything else, but, well, there were patterns. Specific areas of the brain more active than others, certain chemical markers present. Only in women. So I was going to expand it—start gathering information on huge segments of the population to see if I could find the same patterns in women who don’t claim to be psychic.”
I close my eyes, rest my head against the window. If they had that information, if they could access medical records and find women without depending on sketchy news reports or rumors or the muddled visions of their Seers, they could find all of them. No one would be safe.
“They shouldn’t want to kill you,” I whisper. “You’re their dream come true.” And now I know I have to keep him hidden no matter what, because if Keane knew, if Keane got him…
“I’d really like to look at your brain,” Adam says.
I snort. “That has got to be the weirdest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I mean, in an MRI. I’d like to run some tests. On you and on Annie, if I can, if she’s really psychic like you say she is. What is it you can do, again? I wasn’t clear on it.” He runs a hand through his hair, and I see why it has that messy look. “I’m not really clear on any of this, honestly. I was still viewing it as a specific set of mental disorders that we could actually see in a scan. But if it’s all true…”
“It’s all true. Promise. And there’s nothing special about my brain. If you scanned it, you’d probably see a swirling black mass.” I close my eyes and imagine my brain. It’d be dark, all of it, black and red with bright shining spots you’d want to cling to, but all they’d do is illuminate things I never want to see again. My brain scan would give him nightmares.