Mind Games (8 page)

I’m twenty-two tonight.

The only thing ruining the effect is the bandage on my left arm (it joins my other faint scars), but nothing to be done there. Shot is shot is shot. No room for a knife in this dress. I lean
back and ponder. Don’t need one tonight.

I slink down the hall into the main room.

James is standing by the window, the sun now set, his beautiful, strong, all-American-boy face creased and pinched. “We need to be more careful. This type of work isn’t good for her. It risks everything I’ve built up the last two years. Why don’t we have her back on stocks and trading and espionage? She’s perfect there. This—” he pauses, only for a second but I know his dad will see the weakness there “—assassination work messes her up. She won’t be useful for months in this state of mind.”

Oh, useful. I won’t be
useful
. Heaven forbid. If they only knew what their pet had done. A pause, where I can only guess what the elder Keane is saying. I’ve never met him. None of the girls from the school ever have. I tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. I need to get out of here.

I grab my purse from the counter by the door, take off my heels, and hook them around my wrist.

“Yes, sir. I understand.” James’s dad can’t see the way his jaw tightens, the way every muscle in his body traces a line of anger and barely controlled rebellion. He is never more beautiful to me than when he is livid. But still James does as James is told. Good boy, James. Have another treat. Sit, James. Roll over. Play dead. Kill. There’s a good son!

“Going out,” I call, and he whips around in time to see me
blow a kiss before I slam the door shut and sprint down the stairs, past the bewildered doorman, and out of the building. I can’t run away. But I can run.

And I can dance.

FIA

Two-and-a-Half Years Ago

ANNIE WANTS ME TO MOVE BACK INTO HER ROOM.

She doesn’t understand. I can’t. I can’t live with her because I can’t tell her, and if I live with her, she’ll know, she’ll figure it out. She’s worried about me.

She has no idea.

I am a murderer.

That day on the beach. I am trapped in that day on the beach. I take the small package. It fits in the palm of my hand. I focus on getting it in the woman’s bag without being seen. It’s easy. I know exactly what to do. No one notices a thing out of place, as the gangly teenage girl chases her ball past with a determined look.

No one connects her to the explosion that kills two people
three minutes later.

Her. Me. Her. Me. I did that.

“Please choose, Sofia.” Clarice is sitting in front of me, calm and placid. She is always calm—I want to claw her eyes out sometimes. On the table between us are five boxes wrapped in plain brown paper. Five boxes. Two people. One explosion. Two murderers in this room.

I can’t leave now, not ever. I’d get caught. They’d know. They’d know it was me. I can’t tell anyone what this school really is because then I’d have to tell them what I did.

“Who cares. They’re all boxes. Why does it matter which box I choose?”

“We need to test the limits. Can you make the correct choices on instinct only when you understand what is going on, or can your intuitive senses help you make the correct choices even when you have no idea what you are choosing?”

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does anyone give a crap?” I mutter.

“Now, please.”

I glare at her. We are murderers together, Clarice and me. I point to the box on the far left. “I’d take that one.”

She smiles. “Very good.”

“What’s in them?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it doesn’t.” I lean back in my chair and stare at the
ceiling. “Can I be done now?”

“It’s interesting,” she says, carefully picking up the boxes and stacking them in the corner of the big, cinder-block walled, windowless basement room. Annie has never been down here. Most of the girls haven’t. Only Eden and I are left from my original class, anyway. “I have the hardest time seeing you. Some people are easier than others, of course, but your constant ability to react without thinking makes it very, very hard to see anything in your future.”

I wonder if she could still have visions with her eyes clawed out. Annie loves her. Annie thinks she’s the best thing that ever happened to us. Annie needs her. They are running tests and diagnostics, and every three months there is another bit of hope for Annie’s sight.

I can’t leave anyway because I am a murderer and they would send me to jail and I couldn’t take care of Annie if I were in jail.

“Did you know we had no idea you existed?” She walks over to the door and taps on it three times. Tap tap goes my finger. Two taps. Two lives. “It was only Annie we were interested in. She’s proved less than exceptional, but you were the real find. At first we thought you were a Reader, or maybe a Feeler, since you knew this school wasn’t all it was set up to be. But you’ve proved far more interesting than any of that.”

“Goodie for me.” I could pick up the chair. I could smash it into her face. I wonder if I’m going to. Would she have already
seen it if I was going to? Guess I’m not going to, then. Or she just can’t see it. I’m bored. I want to go sleep.

Sleep, sleep.

Tap tap. I don’t know what their faces looked like. I never really saw them. Would knowing what their faces looked like make the nightmares better or worse? I know their names. I looked up the story online, later, much later.

I killed a senator. Does that make it murder and treason? I’m scared. I’m scared in here, and I’m scared out there. I can never leave.

The door opens and three men dressed in gray sweats come in. They each have a small black thing in their hands, like a boxy cell phone. I don’t know what it is, but every sense is on alert and my heart is racing and my focus is narrowing, getting sharper. This is bad. I need to get out of this room. I stand and put the table between us, gripping Clarice’s chair. It’s heavy. Too heavy for much, I wish it were lighter, but I can take out someone’s leg.

Why do I need to take out someone’s leg?

“Sofia, these gentlemen are going to help you with some training. They’ve all got stun guns. Your job is to get out of the room.”

“Without getting shocked?” I stare at her, aghast. We haven’t done one of these in so long. I thought we were done.

“No. Your job is to fight back and get out of the room in
spite of getting shocked.” She smiles pleasantly. “Consider it an exercise in focusing through pain.”

I should have smashed her head in with the chair, seen how well she could focus then.

Don’t cry, don’t cry. Annie can hear if I’m crying. She can’t see me curled in a ball on the couch, every part of my body in pain. She can’t see that I’m biting my wrist as hard as I can. I got out of the room. Oh, it hurts so much.

“So, what’s new?” she asks. She sounds nervous. She should be. She hasn’t tried to touch me today.

“Nothing.”

“You haven’t been here much.”

“Busy. School stuff.”

“Oh.” There’s a long pause and I hope she is done trying to talk to me. “I’ve been getting better. That’s good, right?”

“Better at what?”

“Seeing things. Clarice thought I should focus on you, and it helps. A little. But lately I haven’t been seeing things exactly how they will happen. I’ve been seeing…I don’t know. Bits and pieces that feel like they mean something more. Like maybe they’re still shifting and not set. It feels…big. Not like what I used to see, where it was something that really was going to happen exactly like that, and I only had to figure out how to understand the images. These visions are more like puzzles.
Lots of little pieces. Like a recent vision, there was a guy with light hair and one with dark hair, opposite each other like they were two sides of a mirror. And a flash of you, and one of Clarice, and the color red, and a room all filled with tables and chairs but really fancy looking, official…I don’t know. It’s kind of scary, and I don’t understand it yet. But some are good. I’ve even started dreaming them. Sometimes they’re happy.” She gets a sort of dreamy smile on her face.

I sit up (it hurts, it hurts, my body hurts) and grab her hand in mine. She startles; I haven’t been touching her at all lately. I don’t like my hands anymore. I used to think they were pretty. Now they look like they belong on someone else’s body. Someone who kills people. “Listen to me. Do
not
tell them. Don’t tell them you’re seeing more. Don’t tell Clarice. Don’t even think about what you’re seeing.”

“Why? Fia, you’re scaring me. Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“Promise me you won’t tell them!”

“I won’t! I promise! What’s going on?”

I drop her hand. “Nothing. And stop trying to see me. You won’t like it.” I walk out of her dorm room.

Down the hall.

Down the stairs.

Doesn’t matter where I go.

Outside the entrance hall I nearly bump into a boy. He’s
wearing a coat and he is tall and he belongs black-and-white and shirtless on the wall of a clothing store and his warm brown eyes are completely glazed over. I simultaneously want to kiss him and to get as far away from him as possible. He feels wrong, he feels dangerous; my heart speeds up the same way for him that it did for the stun guns.

Everything here feels wrong all the time. But he feels exciting wrong.

“Hey,” he says, grinning, his eyes tracing over me without apology.

“Hey.” There are no boys here. Not teenagers, anyway. Only men. With weapons. (It hurts, it hurts, my body hurts.)

“James. Keane. James Keane.” He sticks out his hand for me to shake it.

I keep my murderer hands to myself. “Keane as in the Keane Foundation?”

“The very same!”

“I should bash your brains in right now,” I say, but I am too tired to do it.

“You’re the third person to say that to me today!” He winks, then takes my arm and links it through his own. “Why don’t you take me on the grand tour of the secret school.”

“Why don’t you take a walking tour through rush-hour traffic?”

He laughs. “I like you. What did you say your name is?”

“Sofia.”

“Sofia. Soooofia. Sofia, I have done something very bad.”

It is wrong to go with him as he pulls me down the hall toward the empty classrooms. I go anyway. “I’ll bet I’ve done something worse.” Tap tap goes my finger.

“I would love to hear it if you have. But I get to go first. I have”—he looks both ways down the hall in exaggerated caution, then leans in and whispers right in my ear (wrong, wrong, but it doesn’t stop the shivers from going up and down my spine; he is gorgeous, I have never been this close to a gorgeous boy)—“broken into a boarding school for special teenage girls.”

I shove him back, glare. “That’s it? That’s pathetic.”

“It’s not! It’s very, very bad. You see, I brought whiskey with me.
Stolen
whiskey.”

I yawn, patting my hand over my mouth.

“Stolen from the dean of my college.”

I check the watch I am not wearing for the time.

“After he expelled me.”

I look him straight in the eyes. “I delivered a package bomb that killed two people.”

His face freezes. I shouldn’t have told. I shouldn’t have. I don’t care. I stare defiantly at him.

His frozen face melts into a smile. “Well, my dear girl, you win. I think this calls for a drink.” He tries to open the nearest door, but it’s locked. He takes a step back, lifts his leg, and kicks
it open with a resounding crack. “That’ll hurt in the morning. Ladies first.” He holds out a hand to the now-open room.

He doesn’t care that I killed two people.

What is wrong with him?

I walk in. (In this room I have picked which gun was unloaded out of ten options. And then they pulled the trigger on me. I have picked stocks that went on to skyrocket. I have picked which pencil I would shove into Ms. Robertson’s ear until she kicked me out for thinking about it.)

James staggers/swaggers past me and sits on the floor against the wall out of view of the damaged door. He pats the floor next to him.

I sit. He passes me a bottle he pulls out of his coat and I know—I know, I know—I should not ever taste alcohol.

I take a swig.

I choke and cough and he laughs. I take another and manage to swallow it.

“That’s a girl. Now, do you want to know a secret?”

“I know too many secrets.”

“Well, you don’t know any of mine. My mother was psychic. Genuine, see-the-future, real-deal psychic.” He waits. “You aren’t impressed?”

“Should I be?”

“Probably not. Made it awfully hard to really get into trouble, though. She could always see it coming. Do you want to
know the trick to getting in trouble under the watchful eye of a psychic?”

I think of the nailed-shut windows. I think of Clarice. I think of the two, the two, the two who are now zero. Tap tap. “Yes.”

“Don’t plan it. Don’t even think about it. The second you get an inkling of what you could do, do it then. Never plan anything ahead of time. Always go on pure instinct.”

I smile, take another long drink before he pulls it away. “I can do that.”

“To my mother,” he says, raising the bottle. “And to yours.” He passes it back to me.

“Mine’s dead.”

“Mine, too!”

He doesn’t seem sorry. Usually people are sorry about dead parents. I like that he isn’t sorry. “Both my parents died in a car wreck. My sister saw it before it happened. It still happened.”

“My mother shot herself in the head. Yesterday.”

I stare at him in shock and horror. Then I hand the bottle back and say, “Well, my dear boy, you win. This calls for a drink.”

He laughs, and I do too, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve laughed in six months. I think I’m in love with him. And I know I’m in love with this drink and the soft, fuzzy way it makes me feel.

“I broke in here tonight to see the reason my mother blew her brains out. I’m very disappointed it’s just a building. I’m less disappointed in the company.”

“I would burn this school to the ground if I could.”

“You’d be hurting the wrong people. It’s my father. You should burn him. I hate him.”