can control it. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.
My hands curled into fists. Outside the motel, the power lines whispered back to me, as if hissing in agreement.
I didn’t kill those people. I needed to talk to someone who would believe me—who could fight for me. If I had to take the phone from Priyanka by force, I’d do it.
“Come on,” Priyanka grumbled to him. “This is ridiculous. You know I could just shut—”
“You won’t,” Roman said sharply to her before passing over the old flip phone and fixing me with a long look. “Tell me this is someone you trust with your life.”
I nodded. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.
I only knew three numbers off the top of my head without the crutch of my cell phone’s contacts list, and only one of those was likely to answer on the first ring. My hands shook so badly, I had to enter it twice, squinting at the small black-and-white display, before I hit CALL.
Roman cast a cold glare at Priyanka and she returned it with fire. I had to turn my back to them; I couldn’t take their uncertainty, and I didn’t want them to see mine.
The phone only rang once before it was picked up and a breathless voice said, “Hello, this is Charles—”
The words burst out of me. “It’s not true—what they’re saying. It didn’t happen like that! The video makes it seem like—”
“Suzume?” Chubs interrupted. “Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I knew it!” Priyanka made a cut motion with her hands. “You called one of your government buddies? Are you really this brainwashed? They’re tracing your call!”
“I know,” I snapped back at her. The risks were real, but Chubs would have a plan. Would know who I should talk to. He knew everything, and now everyone. I could picture him in his office in DC so clearly, flanked by that enormous window and a view of the newly finished Capitol Building.
I could see other things, too. The cameras installed in the ceiling monitoring his every move. The tracking device he wore as a watch. The security detail outside his door.
The years of saying yes, okay, all right sped forward, slamming into me now. I almost couldn’t breathe from the pressure of the realization—the knowledge of how quickly every small agreement had added up to this moment.
“I need you to calm down and pay attention to what I’m saying,” he said sharply. “Where are you? A safe place? Somewhere hidden?”
An ugly feeling planted itself at the back of my mind, taking root there and sending a shiver down the ridges of my spine. The words poured out of me, and as much as I tried to stop them, slow them, shape them, they came out nonsensical. “Tell everyone that I didn’t do it. He tried to—These men grabbed me before I could get away—I don’t know how. It was an accident—self-defense.”
But I remembered Roman’s voice, the way he’d spoken so softly in the uncertain darkness of the truck: For us, there is no such thing as self-defense.
The truth of it suddenly crystallized around me.
Legally, I couldn’t claim it. I knew that. Some part of me had recognized the danger in the new order when the government had issued it the year before, but it had felt so abstract—so reasonable.
The Psi could harness their abilities like weapons, drawing out their deadly sides. The balance of power between a Psi and non-Psi in any given situation would always be unequal. The government had enacted laws to prevent us from being targeted or hunted by anyone. We had special protections. It was only right the others had certain legal protections, too. After all, I’d seen it for myself countless times. Not every Psi had good intentions, and fury at the way we’d been treated in the past was never in short supply.
Every day, we lived at that crumbling edge of civility and cooperation with the interim government. The only recourse was to work together, because the other option was no option at all. We couldn’t let things spiral back into chaos. That would finally force the government’s hand, and the cure would no longer be a choice, but the only way to claim our futures. And that was the marker that things had gone too far—that was the line we had all agreed upon, years ago.
My pulse was thrumming again, sweat breaking out along the back of my neck.
Chubs was so calm, the order so crisp: “You need to drive