the feeling of cozying up to a lightning bolt, what it feels like to look at someone’s face and see your heart there.
The peace inside my head, the murmurs of happy memories, they’re pale compared to how it feels to live inside a real moment like this. I let my heart tune itself like a radio jumping between stations; I can’t move, but it feels like I’m careening around the room. I am bursting with that same breathless excitement I had whenever Sam and me would run through Greenwood. When I’d get myself lost and wait for her to come. She is singing a song that only I can understand, and I call back, I call back. She finds me where I’ve been hiding all along.
You are the biggest sap in the universe, Orfeo.
We’re not supposed to care about others. The Trainers want to leave nothing in our hearts but them. I focus on her face again, tired, pale, bruised, and think of sunlight, grass, golden hair, the feel of rough bark on my palms as we climbed up and up and up into the tree fort. The singe of sparks on the Fourth of July as they rose and showered down around us. I don’t speak until the bad feelings clear and my mind is blue skies again.
“Hey, Sunshine,” I whisper. My parents’ nickname for her, Sammy Sunshine. The word stuck in my throat, left it raw. “I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry—I wanted to kill them, all of them—”
“You couldn’t,” she says, resting her forehead against the bars. I want to melt the hinges off the door, pry it open and scoop her out. Sam must read it in my face because she adds, quickly, “You can’t.”
Her soft breath fans across my face. I breathe in the smell of soap and detergent and rainwater.
“Are you in pain?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
“I’m okay,” she says, bravely. “I’ve had worse.” I shudder, because of course she has.
Her hands are small enough that she can slide one through the gap in the crate’s bars. She reaches for me and I seize it like I’m drowning and she is the only thing that can pull me clear. My other hand hooks on the door and, within an instant, she’s covered my fingers with her own. It’s not enough.
“You’re warm,” she whispers, a strange note in her voice.
“Red,” I say, trying to hide the flush of shame. “Comes with the territory. Megafreak.”
Sam pulls her face back, her eyes hard. “Who called you that?”
“No one. Everyone.” I smile, recognizing her indignation all too well. “What are you gonna do about it, Sammy?”
She looks down, her own small smile touched with sadness. “Let the air out of their bike tires. Set off fireworks under their window. Hit them with snowballs walking home from school.”
“My champion,” I say. “My hero.” I’d seen her do all that and more when some of the guys at school picked on me for no reason other than my best friend was a girl. Kids can be real dicks, even without the freak abilities.
Sam seems to remember where we are suddenly, breaking from her own daze. She tries to pull her hand back through the bars, but I won’t let her.
“The power is out,” I remind her, “the camera isn’t on. It’s just you and me.”
Her face is so flustered that I know it’s more than that. Sam has her pride. She doesn’t want me to see her like this, despite everything. This may be the one chance I have to talk to her; she has to know that the only thing I care about is that she’s safe and alive and that I hate that I can’t hold her and touch her and…
I almost can’t believe it, that it’s the first reaction I have, that it’s still there after everything that’s happened this morning.
It’s because you’ve been alone, it’s because everyone is gone and you can’t admit to yourself you’re scared, and because it feels like home, it’ll feel like nothing ever changed. I know all of it is true, but I also know, on a very basic, human level, hers is the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. They must have created art specifically for people like her, to try and fail forever to capture these small looks, all her various angles and the colors of her moods.
The urge is overwhelming, and I wonder…I wonder if she’s thinking about the same thing, because her eyes