from behind an overgrown fern, dousing everything in the audible fire that was White Noise.
Close—I was so close. The speaker’s power licked at the fine hairs of my ears, my face, my neck. Mud seeped through my jeans as I crouched, focusing my attention on connecting to the device’s power signature, even if I couldn’t see it. This one must have been larger than the first, because the charge pushed back twice as hard against my senses.
A sharp pain snapped against the base of my skull. Tingling warmth exploded there, the sensation crawling up and down the length of my spine as my hands flew back, searching for the wound, for the place the bullet had cut through bone and nerve and muscle.
But it wasn’t there. No blood, no gash—
As suddenly as the knifing pain had come on, it disappeared, throwing off my sense of balance. I barely caught myself on my hands as I tipped forward. Crawling, I tore at the mud and underbrush, calling to the silver thread in my mind, trying to spark it in the direction of the speaker.
Nothing.
A trill of panic, higher even than the White Noise, wormed its way into my chest.
There was no prickle of awareness of the speaker’s power. No pulse of its current. No static to curl against my mind as I entered its circuit.
Nothing.
I staggered forward through the foliage until I found the device. I slapped my hand against the speaker’s hard shell. I felt nothing. I was alone in my own body with only that emptiness in my head opening its jaws, devouring me whole.
There wasn’t a single spark left in me.
My power was gone.
“WHAT…THE HELL?”
I clenched my hair in my hands, squeezing my eyes shut, concentrating on the silver thread, imagining it there, coiled in my mind. The longer I crouched, my heart kicking at my ribs, the deeper I fell into that spiral of horror.
Someone screamed—they screamed my name.
I snapped back into myself, registering the weight of the gun in my hand and the reality of that moment. The White Noise was shredding the silence, and it seemed to only scream louder the longer I stood there, doing nothing, feeling nothing.
But in the dark chaos of the moment, a single, clarifying thought managed to get through.
“Like you need psionic powers to destroy a speaker, you idiot,” I breathed out.
Shutting out the sounds and movement on all sides, I took aim and fired directly into the face of the device. It leaped off the ground as the shot pierced it. A second bullet finally silenced it.
The other speaker was close enough to track by sound alone. I braced my feet against the ground, swiveling until my ears pricked with pain, pinpointing the direction of the sound. My gaze narrowed, searching through the fog, the darkness, the trees—everything that stood between it and me.
It was an impossible shot—impossible because I couldn’t see to aim, and I couldn’t get any closer, not with the men and kids on the trail. Instead, I pointed up, aiming at the thick arms of the oak that supported the unfinished frame of Tree House Ten.
It felt like the gun was trying to rocket out of my hand as I fired, unloading the clip on that branch. Bullets swarmed the trees like wasps, coming in from every direction, but I didn’t stop shooting, not until the massive branch cracked.
I threw myself down as it split off the trunk. I heard, rather than saw, the branch crash to the ground, taking with it the beginnings of the tree house Liam had built. The wood pounded the ground, and, in the end, I hadn’t needed to find the exact location of the speaker. The limb and debris buried it, muffling the White Noise.
A branch snapped behind me. I spun, catching a glimpse of something moving in the corner of my vision. I trained my gun at it.
At a girl.
The teen was a shade of white too pale to be truly healthy—her skin had hollowed out beneath her wide eyes, and her cheekbones looked too thin, like you could strip away her clothes and see where all of her blue veins connected to her beating heart. Full, dark lashes framed her startlingly blue eyes.
I relaxed, just slightly. At least one kid had gotten away from the tree houses.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She reached up, touching the small gold flower charm on her necklace as she stared at me. Clearly overwhelmed by what was happening.
“You need to run,”