longer.”
“Weeks!” said Enoch. “Longer!”
“We won’t need weeks,” I said. “We’ll go in the school. Talk to people. Ask around. You guys will just have to blend in.”
“That’ll be a snap, thanks to the extensive and thorough normalling lessons you’ve given us,” said Enoch.
“That was sarcasm!” said Bronwyn.
Enoch pointed at her. “Now you’re catching on.”
* * *
• • •
If I hadn’t been so tired, I’m sure the weirdness of sleeping on the pull-out sofa while Emma lay across the room would’ve kept me awake half the night. The distance between us felt unnatural, and in the rare moments of quiet we enjoyed, it preoccupied my mind completely. But the instant my head hit the pillow I was unconscious, and it seemed like only minutes had passed when I opened my eyes again to see Bronwyn bending over me, shaking my shoulder. Eight hours had disappeared in a dreamless blip, and though I hardly felt rested, it was already time to get moving again.
School would be starting in a couple of hours, and I wanted us to have the whole day to search. The one time-suck we allowed ourselves to indulge in was showers. Our hair was greasy and we had road dirt in our ears and under our nails. We would be representing all of peculiardom when we introduced ourselves to this person, whoever they were. At the very least, we agreed, we shouldn’t look like we’d all been sleeping in a car.
I showered first, then had some time to kill. I decided to do a newspaper search, like Abe and H had done in the case of the invisible girl. Such things were easier now, in the internet age, though I did have to leave the room and go back out of the loop so that my phone would function.
Standing by the ice machine in the hot, noisy present, I conducted a quick search for recent articles that mentioned the school. Within a short time, I found an article in the Brooklyn Eagle, dated a few weeks earlier, with the headline BIZARRE POWER OUTAGES MYSTIFY CON EDISON, FRAY NERVES AT HOOVER HIGH. The gist of the story was that, in the middle of a school day, during a presentation in the auditorium, all the lights had gone out. Eight hundred kids had been plunged into sudden blackness, and it had caused such chaos that there was a stampede, which led to injuries.
I thought that seemed strange. What was so terrifying about a blackout? It happened at our school, in lightning-storm-prone Florida, all the time. So I scrolled down to the comments, where actual students had posted, and learned that it was more than just a blackout. The generator-powered emergency lights failed, too. Strangest of all, one commenter wrote: “The flashlight on my cell didn’t work, and neither did anyone else’s.” The lights came on again a few minutes later, but by then the damage had been done.
To me, it sounded like an EMP—an electromagnetic pulse—that had knocked out devices, both electric and battery-powered. But there was another part of the story that didn’t fit that theory. Later that same day, there had been an explosion in the girls’ bathroom. Except it wasn’t exactly an explosion, according to the commenters.
“It looked like a flash bomb had gone off,” one person wrote. “The walls were burned and stuff, but nothing was broken.”
In other words, there was no blast damage. That meant it wasn’t a bomb, or a traditional explosion, or a fire. So what had happened?
Two men were reported injured, both school employees. The suspect in the blast was a female student, whose name wasn’t given because she was a minor. She had fled the scene and was being sought for questioning. What had two male employees of the school been doing in the girls’ bathroom? The article didn’t speculate, but one commenter did:
“PERRRRRRVS!!!!”
I returned to the loop, went back to our room, and told the others what I’d learned.
“Sounds like a peculiar event to me,” said Bronwyn.
Emma leaned out of the bathroom door, vigorously drying her hair. “If it is,” she said, her voice vibrating as she dried, “then I reckon we’re looking for someone who can manipulate electricity.”
“Or light,” said Millard.
“So we should start by talking to people about that day,” I said. “Ask them what they remember and who was involved. High schools are gossip factories. All we have to do is make some fast friends, and tap into people’s natural inclination to talk crap about one another.”
As I