Shock

By the time Natasha got there, Tatiana was on the ground, straddling Gaia, her hands in a choking stranglehold around her neck. Gaia's arms were flailing, smacking haphazardly at Tatiana's face, shoulders, anywhere, just trying to get a grip on her to defend herself. But it was useless. Natasha approached and placed a foot squarely in the center of Gaia's chest, making it impossible for Gaia to move. Tatiana let go of her throat and held her flailing arms to the ground.

“Natasha,” she wheezed, unable to get a decent breath with a boot on her chest. “Why are you doing this?”

“Stop the charade,” Natasha scolded her. “I think you were expecting to see us. Perhaps not tonight, in this place, but when you took our gun, you knew we would come after you.”

Gaia

Some
mornings I wake up and everything seems okay. It's something my brain does. I suppose everyone's brain does it. You're in dreamland, and the wish fulfillment fairies take over and douse you in their bogus happy dust. Peek into your hidden desires and make you believe that you've satisfied them. Paint pictures that your eyes, flicking back and forth behind your closed lids, devour with an embarrassingly ravenous greed. And by the time you open your eyes, you're full of ill-gotten endorphins, convinced that all is well with the world.

Sometimes I can float there for thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes. I can will myself to believe I'm just a regular teenager whose biggest problem is figuring out how to sneak out after curfew. I can look at the sky outside my window and think,
Good morning, sunshine! Are we ready for another fabulous day?

But reality always gets me in the end.

Before I can even wipe the boogers out of my eyes, I start to remember.

That's when the fairies take off. The minute they see my eyelids flicker, they start laughing like a bunch of punky eight-year-olds and take off out the window. And all the good feelings they gave me get slowly squished by the lead-and-tar mixture of the very real mess that is my life. I sink under the weight of reality. And pretty soon the bright colors of my dream fade to the dismal black-and-white of facts.

Fact one: Ed, my boyfriend up until last night, but more important, the person who's been my closest friend through all of this…well, he hates me. Wants to keep distance between us, where there used to be nothing but the best of friendships.

Fact two: Sam, my first love—as in the person you never fully get over—turns up just long enough to ruin things with Ed and then turns out to be a two-faced killer. Just like George Niven and everyone else I tried to trust.

And worst of all, fact three: My dad is missing. A particularly gut-wrenching fact that should make all boyfriend troubles irrelevant. He's out there somewhere, and nobody seems to know the first thing about how to find him. I might be his only hope. Which just makes me that much more of a target for whoever is trying to kill me.

Oh, yes. Trying to kill me. Shots fired, life in jeopardy. Someone actually wants to take this dismal life from me, and I'm damned if I'm going to let them. My father needs me too much.

For one brief moment I had everything I wanted: a family—two parents and a sister. A boyfriend. And I let myself believe it was mine, that those stupid dreams had really come true. And it all fell apart.

Note to self: Never fall for that one again.

Period.

End of story.

Beginning of day.

Rise and shine!

This was so WEIRD. Like a new reality show:
When Best Friends Go Bad
. They didn't speak to each other like this.

GAIA MOORE EXITED THE BUILDING SHE
lived in, on East Seventy-second Street, in a foul mood. She didn't even know where she was heading; she just knew she had to get out of that apartment and go somewhere, anywhere. It was stupid to stay in one place for long if her would-be killers—with or without the help of Sam—were looking for her. She wanted to search for her dad, but with nothing to go on, her energy just floated around in a hyper haze. It made her feel wired and weird.

To make matters worse, some asshole was letting his cell phone ring. Probably an idiot yuppie fresh from his morning workout getting a frantic call from the office asking what was going on with the Hooper account. Or a frazzled mom with two bratty kids who left her phone in the diaper bag and couldn't find it. Or some “boutique” dermatologist avoiding her needy patients jonesing for their Botox fix.

What Gaia couldn't understand was, why did people carry cell phones if they didn't want to answer them? And if they knew they were going to blow off a call, why not turn off the ringer and save everyone from having to hear that incessant, bleating whine? The worst part was, whoever the phone belonged to seemed to be following Gaia down the street. She glared at the people passing her, trying to shame whoever it was into turning off that annoying ring, but it kept going and going. Jesus, it sounded like it was coming right from her own backpack. Who the hell…?

Crap. It was Gaia's cell phone. She kept forgetting she was one of the wirelessly enhanced masses!

She dropped her backpack to the ground and quickly unzipped it, yanking the zipper up so that the grimy pack flopped against the ground. She spotted the cheerful silver phone in the dank recesses and reached in to get it, at which point it finally stopped.

Aaah. Sweet silence.

She checked the incoming-calls screen and saw that the phone number was for Dmitri's apartment. She hit the talk button twice and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, legs planted on either side of her open backpack, listening intently. She'd never get used to this tiny electronic dork tool. It clicked a few times, then beeped. She tried again, but the damn thing wouldn't connect. She waited to see if the little envelope would pop up—maybe he was leaving a message—but after about a minute and a half she realized that nothing was happening. Maybe Sam had signed her up for one of those low-rent plans.

Sam.
As she closed up the phone, Gaia was disturbed to realize that her heart was thudding. Despite all evidence that he was a two-faced, double-crossing, wanna-be killer, there was still a part of her that just didn't get it. That wished he was calling. How dumb was that? The guy had given her instructions to meet him at a Ukranian church the night before, and as soon as she got there,
bam,
gunshots were headed straight for her gut. He had to be involved. He'd obviously been the willing bait to bring her there. But some small, idiotic part of her still felt a connection to the guy she had fallen for long ago.

The human heart was undeniably the stupidest organ in the body.

Forget it,
she thought.
There's nowhere to go and nothing to do. I might as well go to school.

Stuffing her nonworking phone into her backpack, she disappeared down the yawning maw of the subway tunnels. She'd try calling Dmitri again when she got to school.

GAIA WALKED UP THE CONCRETE STEPS
to her high school in her usual state of bored irritation and inward concentration. Even if she were actually thinking about nothing more interesting than paper plates, it kept people from talking to her. But as she stepped through the wide metal doors, she stopped. Something was distinctly different.

There was a weird buzz in the air. Something undeniably festive was happening.

Gaia hated festive.

“What's going on?” she murmured to no one in particular.

“It's intramural week, silly,” Megan shrieked. Megan was a particularly loathsome friend of Heather's. That is, she had been a friend of Heather's before Heather had gone blind from one of Loki's experiments and been whisked off to a hospital. Now she was a friend of Tatiana's—Gaia's roommate and almost stepsister had stepped into the part with barely a ripple—who looked surprisingly fresh, considering she'd been partying it up in Gaia's apartment just the night before. In fact, Megan was just as perky as she'd ever been. A cynical observer might even have said that Megan could barely tell the difference between Heather and Tatiana and didn't care which one was head of the proud crowd as long as Megan was among the top bananas. That FOH and FOT were all the same to Megan the Shallow. But that observer would have been a very,
very
cynical person.

“Intramural week.” Gaia didn't state it in the form of a question, but Megan didn't let that stop her from expanding on her dementedly exciting news.

“I wouldn't expect you'd know about it,” Megan said with a sigh. “I mean, Gaia, you're not exactly Miss School Spirit. But intramural week is when everybody forms different teams, and we play against each other.”

“For what?” Gaia asked.

“For fun!” Megan squealed. “And trophies. But mostly for fun!” She moved in close, so close that their noses almost touched. Gaia caught a whiff of her very specific scent: a combination of fabric softener, Chanel Coco Mademoiselle, and spunkiness. “I formed a swing-dancing team,” Megan said confidentially. “We have three couples. I mean, anything goes.”

“Swing dancing is a sport?”

“They're trying to get it into the Olympics,” Megan said sadly. “It's hard to get respect, but swing dancing takes a lot of athletic ability.”

“Hm. Yeah, if curling gets to be in the Olympics, there's pretty much nothing that can't be considered a sport. Even golf,” Gaia said.

“Exactly!” For a moment Megan seemed to feel very vindicated. Then she saw the complete lack of expression on Gaia's face and remembered who she was talking to. The freak of the school. “Oh, Gaia. You're being sarcastic again.”

Gaia shrugged.

“I wouldn't expect you to understand,” Megan complained. “But just look at how excited everyone is.” With a sweep of her hand she gestured to the groups of chattering girls and on-a-mission guys crowding the hallway. “You'd do yourself a lot of good if you joined in, Gaia.”

“Sure.” Gaia hoisted her backpack higher on her shoulder and gave a little nod as she walked off. Wow, Megan had no clue. About anything!
Maybe I should start a dad-finding team,
she thought.
Would that make me more normal in your eyes? But who would I compete against?

In her rush to get out of the main hallway Gaia took a quick left and felt herself collide with someone. She backed up and muttered an apology, but the someone wouldn't move his lanky frame out of her way. She looked up, about to spit out a withering insult, when she saw that her human obstacle was Jake.

Why did Gaia always call him “snake” in her mind? Despite his friendly words to her the night before, somehow this guy seemed inherently untrustworthy. He was new to the school, and his ridiculously movie-star-level good looks made him a prime target for the FOHs (or FOTs or whatever they were). The most desirable divas in school were working themselves into a group frenzy over him, and he seemed to enjoy the attention—but part of him seemed to stand back, not quite joining in, not quite playing their games.

Of course, Gaia herself was the definition of standoffish, but she wasn't used to seeing other people hold back like she did. And he did it so subtly, she wasn't even sure she was right about her feelings. She couldn't get a read on him, and that made her suspicious. That plus the fact that he'd challenged her to a karate competition and had very nearly beaten her. That was just not normal. His eyes narrowed as he fixed her with a smile that could only be described as sly.

“Trying to escape the epidemic?” he asked her.

“What epidemic?” she asked warily.

“The school-spirit epidemic,” he said. “It's spreading like wildfire. I think they put something in the cafeteria Jell-O.”

“That wouldn't spread anything,” Gaia informed him. “Nobody in their right mind would eat the cafeteria Jell-O.”

“Good point. So you're going to join in, right?”

“Yeah, right.” Gaia made a move to pass him, but Jake blocked her way and put a firm hand on her arm. His grip was surprisingly strong.

“I'm serious,” he said. “I'm putting together a karate team. We'll beat the pants off of everybody if you and I are on the same team.”

“Wow, I so would prefer to see pants remain
on
.”

“Don't you want to win? Don't you want to beat these clowns at their own game—literally?”

“You're so goal-oriented,” Gaia told him. “I thought intramural week was all for the
fun
of the games.”

“Come on,” Jake said. “Those were some wild moves you pulled on me. You humiliated me, for chris-sake. The least you could do is make it up to me by being on my team.”

“Sorry, but I don't need to show off,” Gaia told him. “Besides, I've got a new hobby taking up my time.”

“What, you're a secret agent?” Jake asked.

Gaia didn't let her surprise show on her face. She studied Jake carefully secretly, exactly as her father had trained her to do. She took in his body language: His muscular arms, crossed over his chest, said he had something to hide, but he was leaning toward her with his head tilted—which was supposed to indicate that he was friendly and unthreatening. She noticed he was actually just a little too close—was he trying to intimidate her by invading her space? His pupils were dilated, a sure sign he liked what he saw. But his eyes wouldn't quite meet Gaia's, flicking away when she gazed back into them. Damn it. The guy was a walking pile of conflicting information. There had to be something in what her dad told her, some way to read what was behind Jake's words: He seemed to be kidding. She
hoped
he was kidding.

“Secret agent? Right,” she said, sliding her own eyes to the side so he wouldn't see how rattled she was. “No, I just really feel that watching paint dry is my true calling,” she went on. “It satisfies some deep inner passion.”

“That's just how I feel about watching grass grow,” Jake retorted, without skipping a beat. “It's so meditative. Almost as good as watching concrete set.”

“Ha ha.” Gaia almost included a smile in her response. Almost. But Jake seemed happy just to have gotten the “ha ha” out of her.

“Think about it,” he said, and walked away.

“Yuh-huh,” Gaia said noncommittally, and continued down the hall to her locker. She wondered what was really going on there. Jake wanted something from her. He seemed to be curious—a little too curious. Then again, he could just be flirting with her.

Yeah. Right.

She mulled over the Jake question as she walked down the hall, trying to untangle the strands of information she had from him. She was so distracted, she didn't really notice Ed Fargo walking straight toward her. In fact, she almost said hi to his familiar, loping form.

Then she remembered: The argument. The dismissal. The double-sided promise that they'd keep their distance from each other. Seeing Ed made Gaia feel like hydrogen peroxide had been dumped in a fresh gash in the middle of her gut: It burned and bubbled and ate away at her. Somehow the pain she felt when she saw him was exactly proportional to the closeness they used to have. It was amazing. Best friend had turned to boyfriend and then to total enemy in less time than it took for one of the FOTs to relax a perm. It made Gaia feel sad, sadder than almost anything else in the world, but she wasn't about to let anyone else in on that little secret. Least of all Ed, the guy who was the cause of it.

And here he was. Duh. Of course she was going to have to see him around school. She was going to have to be polite. If not out of respect for their old friendship, then out of the dim hope that the FOTs wouldn't get more fodder for their gossipy bitchfests.

Ed's face didn't betray any emotion. Well, it did, but for him, he was being pretty stoic. Trying to show Gaia a mask of calm. She knew that underneath he was hurting as badly as she was. Stopping about five feet away, his skateboard tucked under his arm, he stood there uncertainly.

“What's up,” he said.

“Nothing,” she answered, not looking at him.

Gaia's skin felt like it was on fire. The last time she'd seen Ed, he'd been standing on the sidewalk, half drunk, calling her a liar and a cheater and demanding she stay the hell away from him. Her guts turned into a colony of cockroaches, skittering around inside her. She wanted nothing more than to just go back to being friends. But the way he'd spoken to her last night? That wasn't just going to go away. And she had to be honest: She had lied to him. Having Sam show up out of the blue had really knocked her for a loop, and she had been lying to Ed when she'd said she didn't have feelings for Sam anymore. That made her feel horribly guilty. Like maybe Ed was right for wanting to keep his distance. Like maybe she needed to be on her own until she sorted out her unbelievably annoying jumble of emotions.

“So how's Sam,” he said, as if he'd been reading her mind and the guilty feelings that were blotched all over it. He was convinced she'd been canoodling with Sam behind his back.

“I don't know. I haven't seen him,” she told him, emphasizing the last half of her sentence.

No need to tell him that he'd just tried to kill her. And no need to tell him that before that, Sam Moon's return to the land of the living had made her feel confused. Still, as far as Gaia was concerned, she hadn't
done anything
about her confusion—that was what counted. And Ed was supposed to trust her. And he didn't. Which was why she was pissed.

“So, I'm doing a skateboard clinic as part of intramural week,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” she murmured. No congratulations, no questions—not even a little bit of teasing about how he was joining in with the school-spirit masses.

This was so WEIRD. Like a new reality show:
When Best Friends Go Bad.
They didn't speak to each other like this. Except they did now. Gaia felt horrible. But this conversation had to end. She needed him to get away from her, fast.

“Yeah. I thought it'd be fun,” Ed said. It was a limp, nondescript sentence, and it plopped onto the floor between them and lay there. For Gaia the silence that followed was full of unspoken accusations.
You can't be part of anything, you freak,
he seemed to say.
Like a family. Like a couple. Like anything you desperately want and won't let yourself have.
It stung to hear him say it—stung for the words to be there, sandwiched between the lines in glaring, accusing, ten-foot-high red letters. Without another word Gaia turned back to her locker, hoping he wouldn't see the slight tremble of her chin as she listened to his sneakers squeak down the hall away from her like the turns of a screwdriver driving a rusty screw deep into the soft flesh of her heart.