me since then. And it can’t be you, unless the cops gave you access to a computer.”
“Can’t be Arthur,” Checker picked up the thread. “Or Rio. That leaves…”
“Me,” Pilar said, lowering her eyes.
“Or Diego,” I pointed out. “Or any of the kids except Elisa. She wasn’t here either.”
Six people whom we no longer knew we could trust.
“Should I…” Pilar started hesitantly.
Something caught at my mind. Something obvious. A number that was unequal. “We’re missing someone,” I cut her off. “We had nine people in the house at the time, and we’ve only counted eight of them.”
Checker’s face knotted up as he thought back through as well. “Simon wasn’t here, right? And you just said Elisa wasn’t. And I wasn’t.”
Pilar counted on her fingers. “Me, Diego, Tabitha, Juwon, Roy, and Matti. Plus you and Rio, Cas. That’s eight. Right?”
I glanced around the long living/dining room as if it would spark my memory. Juwon was still across from us reading his book. I could hear the twins and Diego in the kitchen. We’d counted all of them. Who else?
Then my gaze hit the security monitor next to me, and it was as if I were seeing double.
“Willow Grace.” My mouth shaped the syllables, but they were barely audible.
“Oh, right,” Checker said. “Well, it wouldn’t have been her…” He frowned.
But Willow Grace could have been influenced by a telepath like anyone else, couldn’t she?
Then why was it a grinding cognitive dissonance in my head to believe she might have been? If Pilar or Diego or Tabitha had been brainwashed by a psychic, that wouldn’t be their fault, I could accept that … hell, Pithica had told Arthur to point a gun at me before and he had.
But Willow Grace was trustworthy. We’d checked her background. We knew—
That doesn’t matter when it comes to psychics! You know it doesn’t matter!
“Why do we…” I said slowly. It was a struggle to push sound into speech.
Why do we trust her?
The only person who didn’t was Rio, and I’d been writing his concerns off as the paranoia of someone who didn’t trust anyone.
And Simon hadn’t met her.
Willow Grace had lied to us from the beginning, and I’d let her off easy and with mild irritation, instead of nailing her to the wall and interrogating her. She’d delayed us in finding Arthur, and Checker and Pilar had been upset, but they should have taken her head off. Diego had easily convinced me to let her walk out and go home. Somehow, Tabitha had maintained some doubts—precocious, naïve Tabitha—and I’d brushed off her gut feeling too.
Telepathy isn’t an exact science, Simon had reminded me over and over again.
“She can’t be Pithica, right?” Checker asked, sounding freaked. He craned his neck around, as if he could see through the walls to where Willow Grace stood outside. “If she were, we wouldn’t—we wouldn’t know, would we?”
I got what he meant. The simple fact that we had begun to doubt her—if she were Pithica, I didn’t think we’d have been able to start suspecting her on our own, even as difficult as it seemed to be. I’d never been able to figure out myself whether someone from Pithica was psychically influencing me, not without Rio’s help.
Unless … what if there were levels of skill? What if she just wasn’t as strong? Something had sure as hell been influencing me—
Just like with Oscar.
“Hard-coding,” I whispered. Oscar was forgettable, and so I forgot him; Coach and the dogs were terrifying, and so I panicked; and Willow Grace was … I’d thought she was only beautiful. But she was more.
I’d dismissed her allure as not having the mathematical capability to be mind-warping. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Teplova might have worked on her in a separate way, for another purpose. That one set of surgeries didn’t preclude another.
Because I’d trusted Willow Grace before it could.
She was perfectly positioned too. She graced everyone’s televisions, telling people to trust her, making them feel safe … becoming a goddess in their minds. Hell, Pilar and Checker and almost everyone else had already seen her on the screen before meeting her. They would have been doubly primed to believe everything good about her. I’d suspected her, a little—but I’d kept rationalizing that away until it was gone, so smoothly it had felt like the natural course of logic. Tabitha probably would have relented too, eventually, but she’d been alert enough to question and to bring it to me, and I’d—I’d dismissed her utterly.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck,” said