pulse jump as it scrapes across the rocky dirt. And for a second, I’m confused, because the face that appears in the darkness is Zu’s—Zu the way I’d seen her in the skip tracer network, with long, silky hair. Her eyes go wide, and her mouth opens in a scream.
And then I see the blond hair behind her, the girl with the gun in her hand who doesn’t even hesitate before she fires it straight at my chest.
It feels…
I feel…
It’s like…
My mind blanks with the fiery burst of pain that tears through me, ripping me up from the inside out. I can’t—what’s—I don’t understand, the girls are yelling, the three of them from the valley, but the last thing I feel before my legs go is Zu at my back trying to hold me up.
Move—I don’t want to hurt her, but I can’t feel anything below my waist. I’m going to collapse back on her, I’m…
When my eyes open again, I’m on the ground and warm rain is spilling down on me from the clear river of stars overhead.
“—the man from the road, I thought he—!”
Zu flashes in and out of my vision. She shoves the girl with the gun, beats her hands against the teen’s chest. I hear “call,” “can’t,” “hospital,” and then nothing but the sound of my own heartbeat. I want to lift my hands, to apply pressure to the place in my chest she’s just cracked open, but I can’t breathe—I can’t—I can’t—I’m choking on air and the metallic bitterness coating my tongue.
One of them disappears into the dark of the stables. I can smell the place’s old musky animal scent, the sharp, fresh hay, but even that begins to fade. Zu’s face appears over mine, and her mouth is moving, her lips are moving, with a message for me and only me, but there are no pens here, no paper. I can read the desperation and fear in her face. I see her hands come down against my chest, but I can’t feel them.
“D-Dorothy—” My throat burns. It’s the only way I know the words are leaving it. “Guess we…shouldn’t have left Oz….”
I feel myself drift back. Her whole body is heaving with sobs, snot and tears dripping down her face, and I want to say so much to her, and I want to tell her—Her face begins to dissolve into gray, and it takes my breath with it. My voice.
Stop it, you stupid kid. Jesus, stop crying.
Don’t you know I hate it?
Dorothy, it’s so stupid. Don’t be so stupid about this.
Don’t.
Don’t—
I DON’T FORGET FACES.
I don’t forget anything my eyes have landed on—not the smallest detail of the white flowering wallpaper in our neighbors’ house, not the cursive letters written on my classroom’s whiteboard, not the numbers that flashed on the screen as the man in the white coat adjusted my position under the machine’s metal halo, the signs on the towering fence as our bus pulled in for the first time. DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, NOT A LOADING ZONE, STAY ALERT.
Its smells and sounds have gone hazy; I think, sometimes, that I can remember what it was like to lay out in the freshly mown grass in our backyard. I think it smelled sweet. I think I can just about remember how silky Scout, our golden retriever, was, lying in a patch of sunshine. There was laughter, too, from the Orfeo kids trying to climb over the wall between our houses, half tumbling into the bushes. What I remember most is the cloudless powder-blue sky. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I haven’t seen one like it since.
This place has reduced my world to gray, black, brown.
Everything gets filed away inside my head, neat and tidy, until I need it. Somehow, without trying, I pull the right card out of the deck each time. I test myself all the time; that same white coat, the one who’d been all freezing fingers and sneered words, told me not to—that using my freak catchall of a memory would somehow overload it, and I’d be as dead and stiff as the kids already buried. They tried that lie on all of us, I’m sure.
For the first two years, I’d catch myself doing it, drawing out those memories, and close my eyes, throat swelling with thick panic. Stop it, you’ll die, you’ll die, Sam—
For the next three, it was like a dare. Each success was a small pop of bright exhilaration to pepper forever sunless