Shine (17 page)

I was glad she couldn’t see my face, only my words:
OMG! WHO WAS IT
?

Nicola:
THEY DIDN’T CATCH THEM. ANYWAY, TALK SOON, I HOPE! *WAVES*

I folded the letter from Zachary into a tiny square, then clutched it inside my fist. “I hope so, too.”

A
s the heat wave intensified, so did my fear and frustration. Every rescue scheme I devised came unraveled in the face of reality. I began to feel like a ghost, wandering through my own life like it no longer belonged to me, like I could no longer change even one small corner of the world.

Cheryl, Gina’s immigration-lawyer friend, was finally allowed to visit Zachary. She took with her a man from the British consulate, and afterward reported that Zachary was “fine, but a little thin.” I knew that couldn’t be the full truth, but I clung to that proof of his survival like a life jacket in a stormy sea.

A hundred times I picked up the phone to call a newspaper or TV station, hoping media attention to Zachary’s case might set him free. A hundred times I put the phone back down.

Gina had warned that now that the DMP were seen as heroes
protecting us from ghosts, revealing Zachary’s whereabouts would only make him look suspicious. People would ask, “Why would they detain him if he’d done nothing wrong?” When it came to ghost-crimes these days, guilty before proven innocent was becoming the rule. And if the person was a foreigner like the alleged suicide bomber teen? Doubly suspicious. Doubly condemned.

Tammi Teller had become the symbol of the Flight 346 tragedy, and her Keeley Brothers’ fandom kept people talking about Logan. Since I was connected to him, the spotlight was always searching for me. If people found out my new boyfriend was some kind of anti-ghost freak, that spotlight would find and destroy my life.

And if it became known that I was the First, soon everyone would draw the same conclusion the DMP had: If my birth had caused the Shift, then maybe my death would end it. Killing me would be one quick solution to the “ghost problem.”

The media fed the country’s rising hysteria about the dead. Every week brought a new prime-time TV program about “radical influential ghosts.” These always got huge ratings in the pre-Shifter target audience.

Post-Shifters felt like we were under a microscope. I’d walk down the street with Megan and our friend Jenna, and the other pedestrians would examine us to determine (a) whether we were pre- or post-Shifters (one of “them” or one of “us”), and (b) whether we were talking to one another or talking to ghosts. It was like when we were little kids and the world had just started believing us. But now we were old enough to understand:
We
were the enemy within.

I kept myself sane by researching university astronomy programs
to narrow down my list of colleges. In a moment of extreme hope, I put the University of Glasgow on my list. It helped to pretend that my future could one day be my own.

And lastly, to feed my hope, I got up at sunrise every morning, rain or shine. I lit the green candle Gina had used for our vigil on the night of the Flight 346 crash. For exactly one minute, I closed my eyes and thought of Zachary. Then I blew it out and went back to sleep, hoping to dream of him—and that somehow, somewhere, he’d dream of me, too.

“How did you get these amazing seats?” I asked Nicola.

She shrugged. “From work, of course.”

Nicola Hughes had called me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to see an Orioles game with her at Camden Yards. I didn’t follow baseball much, since the only thing that changed from year to year was the degree of the Orioles’ suckitude, and by August the season was long past hope. But I couldn’t pass up the chance to get more information.

I set my soda in the cup holder and examined my surroundings. We were so close to home plate, I swore I could feel the breeze from the batters’ swings.

No way a government agency could afford Camden Yards box seats. I’d seen the DMP offices—their decor was vintage early ’90s. These seats belonged to SecuriLab.

Eating my crab cake sandwich, I thought wistfully of the times I’d been here with Logan and his family, and resolved to call Dylan the next day. Megan and I hadn’t spent much time with the Keeleys
since our failed Fourth of July “commando raid.” It was too painful after her breakup with Mickey.

Nicola elbowed me. “You should put your hat back on so you don’t get sunburned.”

“But it’s seven o’clock in the—”

“Put your hat on.” Nicola peeked over her shoulder up the stairs. “Now.”

I didn’t question. I pulled my battered black Orioles cap out of my bag and placed it firmly on my head, pulling my ponytail through the hole.

In a low voice, Nicola said, “Two places women are most invisible in this world? Boardrooms and sporting events. When I go golfing with my coworkers, I learn a lot by just shutting up. They forget I’m there, and they discuss things I’m not supposed to hear.”

I tugged down the brim of my hat, sat back in my seat, and watched from the corner of my eye as two late-middle-aged guys in expensive polo shirts and khaki slacks sat behind us.

They turned out to be Yankees fans, so they spent the first hour dissing the Orioles. I wanted to throw them a dirty look, but couldn’t risk them recognizing me. For all I knew, my face was on a Most Annoying poster in the SecuriLab offices.

“Did you see those July numbers?” asked the guy on the right, the one with the deep voice and the heavier New York accent.

“Did I
see
’em? I’m thinking of getting them tattooed on my ass. Biggest sales growth since the first two months of release. Can’t wait to see those quarterly figures.”

“Tell me about it. Gonna be a good Christmas.”

I tried to chew softly so I could hear.

“I’m taking the family to Tahiti. Hang on.” He let out a forceful sneeze that made me want to go buy an umbrella. “Damn hay fever. Happens every time I leave Manhattan.”

“Tahiti, huh?”

“Yep.” The sneezer blew his nose. “Tax-deductible, of course, since it’s a market we’ve been trying to reach. I’ll make a few initial contacts, feel them out. Don’t want to lay on the hard sell yet.”

“Don’t need to anymore—346 speaks for itself.”

My spine jolted. Did they mean
Flight
346? It sounded like they were talking about the increased sales of BlackBox since the disaster. It made sense—with the rising paranoia, people would be clamoring for a way to make their homes and businesses off-limits to ghosts.

I glanced at Nicola, who had been unusually quiet, especially for her. She paged absentmindedly through her ball-game program as she sipped her soda.

Deep-Voice Guy added, “Of course, part of the profit increase is the unit price, not just number of units moved. Demand went up, so we raised the price, because we could. Nice, huh?”

The sneezer gave a heavy sigh. “Nah, Joe, it’s not nice. This whole business …”

I stopped chewing. Beside me, Nicola had gone totally still. Their next words could hold the key to—

A crack sounded, then the crowd roared, rising to its feet.
Damn it.

“No, no, no, no, no, no!” Joe whined as the ball soared over the
center-field fence. His next words were lost in the crescendo of cheers and blare of music.

While I clapped and danced, I checked out the men from the corner of my eye. They wore and carried nothing that gave me a clue. Not that I thought they’d bring a briefcase of classified documents to a baseball game, or wear badges that read:
I BOMBED FLIGHT 346. ASK ME HOW
!

The men sat back down while the home crowd savored this rare crushing of the Evil Empire. I strained to hear the guys’ next words, which were louder than I think they knew:

“The lengths we gotta go to sometimes,” said the sneezer. “The slime buckets we gotta deal with. Sometimes I think I’d rather, I don’t know, retire to a farm somewhere and forget them all.”

“I take it you mean Nighthawk?” Joe asked.

I sat down, partly to hear better and partly because my legs had gone rubbery from the shock and thrill.

“Yeah,” the sneezer said. “If those pit bulls did what I think they did, and did it for us—”

“Don’t think about it. When the cards are all counted, we’re protecting the public. Never forget that.”

I sipped my soda to ease my nerves and look natural.

“I know, I know, I tell myself that all the time. But whenever I see Tammi Teller’s face on the news, I wonder, did we put her there?”

I bit the straw so hard it cracked.

There was a long silence, then Joe spoke. “Did we?”

They stopped talking for several minutes. I got a headache from straining my ears to hear them. Eventually they started discussing the Yankees’ playoff chances.

When Nicola went to the restroom, I jotted everything I could remember of the guys’ conversation into my phone, looking like any other bored girl at a baseball game, texting her friends. I held it low in my lap so they couldn’t see.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Excuse me, miss.”

Instinctively I shoved my sunglasses up the bridge of my nose to better cover my eyes. “What?” I snapped.

“Your friend. What’s her name?”

I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to tell them a fake name for Nicola, in case they actually knew her.

“It’s not what you think,” he said. “I’m not trying to hit on you guys. I just thought I knew her from work.”

“Then you can ask her when she comes back.”

But they didn’t.

Nicola and I walked to the parking lot amid the jubilant Oriole fans and morose Yankee fans. My stomach was twisted in a knot, and not just from all the junk food. I sensed that if I asked the perfect question, Nicola would confirm my suspicions about SecuriLab and Flight 346. She must have brought me to the ball game tonight hoping I’d hear what I needed to know.

“Um, Nicola?”

She spoke quickly. “Those guys behind us were obnoxious, weren’t they? When I go to Nationals games, the Phillies fans are the same way. They come in from out of town and take over the stadium. It ends up being like a Phillies home game, with all the noise they make.”

She kept chattering, which gave me my answer. We weren’t to
remotely acknowledge why we’d really been at the game.

That night I typed up the rest of my notes, which now totaled nearly a hundred pages’ worth of conversations, conjectures, and search results. None of it was hard evidence, but it all pointed in one direction:

MI-X was wrong when they thought the DMP sent that plane down. It was SecuriLab—or rather, it was Nighthawk, SecuriLab’s “pit bulls.”

Or was it? The guys at the game had only implied that Nighthawk was responsible. Maybe they weren’t high up enough in the company to know that kind of dirt for sure.

But they’d had their suspicions, and my goal wasn’t to convict them in a court of law. I just needed the DMP to know that someone on the outside suspected, too.

Someone who needed “leverage” to set Zachary free.

“I got you a present,” I told Simon as I slid into the seat across from him at the Free Spirit Café.

He eyed my office-supply store shopping bag. “Huzzah?”

“School supplies. They were on massive sale, and I figured you might not know what to get.” I set the bag on the shiny black-tile floor next to his feet.

“You realize we have schools in England. I went to one, in fact. They let each of us have our own notebook and everything.”

“Three-ring binders are really big here. They’re the best for organizing information.” I emphasized the last word. “For projects. Especially.”

Simon tilted up his chin, a barely perceptible gesture of understanding. “Brilliant. Thanks very much.”

I tapped my heel against the floor, bobbing my knee. Inside that binder were my notes—the activities of the DMP and their BlackBox-making buddies. Which I was now giving to a foreign agent.

This information wasn’t stolen, and I didn’t work for the government myself, but this act probably made me a traitor. It could’ve fallen into the category of “whatever it takes” to get Zachary free.

But I didn’t just want my boyfriend back. I wanted revenge. I wanted to destroy the DMP forever.

I
nsomnia usually plagued me the night before the first day of school. I’d be worried I’d forgotten everything about math, or that I’d get a teacher in love with pop quizzes, or that my lunch schedule wouldn’t match any of my friends’ and I’d have to eat alone.

But the night before my senior year began, I lost sleep for another reason: It had been a week since I’d delivered to MI-X what seemed like killer dirt on the DMP, and Zachary was still in custody. Maybe they would never let him go. Or maybe he was already dead. His parents hadn’t heard directly from him since early July, when he’d sent them a brief letter like the one he sent me. The man from the British consulate hadn’t seen him since the beginning of August.

When I finally drifted off to sleep, I wished I hadn’t.