sense her presence. There was no comforting hum of “friendly telepath in the house.” There was only the ringing silence that had become too damned familiar over the course of the past five years.
“Sarah?” I said, more loudly. I thought it at the same time, and in my mind, I was screaming.
She stopped walking and turned, slowly, to face me. The light in her eyes didn’t fade. The air between us grew static, like it had been laced with an electric charge.
“Sarah, I don’t know what’s happening, but you’re sort of scaring us,” I said. No one else was moving, and so I moved, taking a step toward her. “Can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying? You’re safe now. We went and we found you and we brought you home.”
Home, she said, directly into my mind. Her voice was louder than anything I’d ever heard before, like the ringing of a cloister bell. I clutched the sides of my head. Mom moaned, and I heard something hit the floor. I didn’t turn to see who had dropped what. Taking my eyes off of Sarah suddenly seemed like a terrible idea.
Yes, she continued, still in that silent, impossible scream. Home is part of the equation. This is the wrong number.
“I don’t like the look of this,” said Elsie. I glanced back, long enough to see her standing right behind me.
“I don’t like it either,” I said grimly, and returned my attention to Sarah. She seemed like the biggest threat, in the moment. “Sarah, you are home. Try to remember where you are. Try to see us. I know it may be hard right now, but we’re right here. Please.”
Sarah tilted her head to the side. Her hair didn’t move. It stayed floating in the air around her, unmoving, unchanged. Somehow that was the most terrifying thing she’d done yet.
Yes, she said, as calm as if she had been trying to order something from a recalcitrant drive-through window. You’re right here. That’s part of the problem. The math doesn’t work if you’re right here. But I can fix it.
The air grew even heavier, like a storm was rolling in.
Aunt Evie had grown up in a house with a cuckoo. Had spent her childhood with a cuckoo for a mother, learning how to be human from someone who had had to learn those lessons second-hand. Maybe that was why the next voice I heard was hers.
“Get down!” she shrieked as she hurled what looked like a water balloon into the center of the room. It burst on impact with the floor, filling the air with a white, powdery substance. I clapped a hand over my mouth and nose. Unless someone has been beating erasers in a classroom, nothing that fills the air with powder is a good thing.
Interesting, said Sarah’s echoing mental voice, as the light in her eyes somehow grew even brighter, until looking at her face was like trying to look directly into the sun. The air around her pulsed, her hair rising further away from her shoulders, and the powder began moving in fractal swirls toward a single spot in the air, pulling itself together until it had formed a perfect sphere. It was as if she had somehow reconstituted the water balloon without the actual “balloon part.”
A shiver ran across my skin. We’d talked about telekinesis before, how she felt like it was somehow connected to telepathy in the real world—not just in comic books, where good was good and bad was bad and everyone looked good in spandex. More importantly, we’d talked about the sheer amount of power it would require.
No wonder her eyes were glowing like that. She was eating herself alive, kicking off chemical reactions in her brain that would allow her to influence the world around her.
“Sarah.” I took a step toward her. “You need to stop.”
Why did you try to hurt me? She was still looking at the ball of white material she’d siphoned from the air. This would have hurt me. That was foolish of you.
I realized two things at the same time, and both of them were terrible.
The first was that the white stuff Aunt Evie had thrown at Sarah—her sister—must have been powdered theobromine. Cuckoos are allergic to theobromine. They love tomatoes, and they hate chocolate. It makes them itchy. That much of the stuff would have been enough to cause a serious reaction in a human or Lilu. In a cuckoo . . .