HEAR (8 page)

I nod. The good news is that Mara is beginning to come into focus for me. The bad news is that, globally, there isn't a large enough supply of ginger to bring this girl back to earth. “Can I ask
why
my uncle told you to stop taking your pills?” I say. I plant my feet so she's no longer able to drag me along behind her. Her hand slips from my wrist.

With a dramatic sigh, she says, “Fine. The drugs interfere with your brain chemistry. They're
supposed
to do that, that's how they
work
, but I'm pretty sure they interfere with our ability to have visions. Also, my cards said I was blocked, so I knew I had to do something to reverse that. It's what the tarot was telling me. It felt like I'd been trying to swim through drying cement. Now I'm back in clear blue waters.” She moves her arms as if she's doing a breaststroke for emphasis.

I glance around to see if anyone is nearby, if anyone is listening.

Mara pulls her cell phone out of one of the front pockets of her bag and slides her finger across the screen. “Don't freak out—I'm not using the phone to call or text anyone, so you don't need to rat on me. But check this out.” She flips through the picture gallery and hands me the phone. “I did this series of paintings the last time I went off the meds. That first one is a detail of the larger work.”

I peer at the screen: an image of three terrified-looking Asian people. Their bodies appear to be in motion, but it's impossible to see what they're running from. “Can I?”

“ Yeah, keep flipping,” Mara encourages me.

I swipe my finger across the screen, and the whole picture appears. Behind the three people in the previous image, hundreds of other equally detailed figures are running as well—from a monstrous flood—stampeding through a small seaside village. But there's no escape. Angry waves crash over the bulkhead, filling the streets with seawater. With a shudder, I realize that the image is so horrifying in part because it is so familiar. I've seen this before. I look up at Mara and my eyes narrow. “What is this?”

“It's a depiction of the disaster in Japan. You remember when they had the earthquake in 2011, which set off a tsunami, which screwed up their nuclear facility in Fukushima?”

“ Yeah, sure.” It was actually one of the first major world events of which I was conscious. It terrified me. And I remember exactly why: it was the first time I truly realized that there are things we absolutely can't control. “This painting is really good, Mara.” I expand the image on the screen with my thumb and index finger to zoom in on the details. The fear on the victims' faces is palpable. “How long did it take you to do this?”

“Uh,” she replies, looking up to the ceiling, “I don't know, maybe a couple of days. I kind of lost track of time. I wasn't sleeping in February of 2011 either. I just worked in a real manic-y burst. Keep flipping, though. I downloaded a photo of the actual disaster, which was a month later, from the CNN website. I think you'll find it interesting.”

My fingers feel clammy; they tremble as I do as she says. When I find the CNN photo, it is literally a pale imitation of her painting. The photo is all sea green, brown, and grey. Mara's painting is dotted with the hot pink of a little girl's sweatshirt, the fire-engine red of a motorbike being swept out to sea, and the neon multicolors of a supermarket sign wrenched from its facade.

I remember this photograph; it haunted me. This was nature's wrath—the picture of chaos—and even at the age of thirteen, I was conscious of how the photographer had managed to capture that raw and brutal destruction.

Yet Mara saw it and captured it too. A month before it happened. I start to feel wobbly, dizzy. I lean against the wall for support.

“Did you try to stop it?” I ask her.

“The earthquake and tsunami?” she asks. She gives a little laugh. “Kass, I appreciate your belief in me, but I haven't figured out how to control seismic activity quite yet.”

“No,” I snap. “I mean did you try to
warn
anyone?”

“ Yes, of course,” she snaps back. “Of course I did.” In a flash, Mara's mania and joy are gone; now her face is flushed and twisted with rage.

As I try to remain calm in order to calm
her
, I also try to imagine how a teenager would go about warning a foreign country that it's about to experience a devastating natural disaster. “So what did you do?” I ask. “Who did you tell? Your parents?”

“Are you kidding? If I told them that, they would have doubled my meds.” She rolls her eyes as if she's embarrassed by my stupidity. “I emailed the prime minister of Japan's office, like, repeatedly.” She shrugs. “No one answered. Apparently no one in his office was particularly interested in the earthquake forecasts of a kid from Oklahoma. And it wasn't like I was going to be able to stop it, so eventually I gave up and started painting it instead.”

Footsteps approach. When I glimpse the two unhappy guards entering our gallery, I link arms with Mara. Best to steer her out of the museum before we get booted. I'm hoping she'll chill out once we're back outside in the sunshine. She seems to have relaxed a little, though she's still far from serene. As we walk through the exit, she unwraps a gummy ginger candy and pops it in her mouth. When she finishes chewing it, she stops in her tracks and slips her arm from mine.

“ You know that I had an ulterior motive in inviting you here, don't you?” she says. Her voice is surprisingly calm.

Uh-oh.

Before I can utter a word, she states, “I want you to stay away from Pankaj.”

I almost laugh. “Stay away from Pankaj? What are you talking about?”

“Don't play coy, Kass; it's really unattractive on you.”

“Mara, you're insane.” I immediately regret my choice of words, but now I'm angry. My patience has worn thin. “I don't even like Pankaj, and it's pretty clear that he has a raging hate-on for me, so you don't have a lot to worry about on this one.”

“I'm serious,” she says. She's leaning so close to me I'm wondering if she might get violent. Only now do I see the dark circles under her eyes beneath some concealer.

I take a step back. “I don't even know why you're worried about this. If you like him, take him. He's all yours.”

“That's not the point.” She glares at me. “Just . . . just remember this conversation.”

“Not a problem. You've done a pretty good job of freaking me out here.”

“Good,” she says, her voice sliding into a grim whisper. “Exactly what I was hoping to do.”

CHAPTER NINE

I need to cool down, but I can't. There are so many feelings rumbling through me, I feel like a teakettle coming to a boil. The day is over, and I need to avoid everyone and everything until I can let off some steam. If I can make it up to the observatory and shut the door without Uncle Brian noticing, I think I might be okay.

“Kass?” Uncle Brian calls out as I attempt to sneak through the front door. “I'm in the living room. Come on in.”

Perfect.

I try to focus on my breathing, yoga-style, to get into a more Zen place before talking to him. But as per
always
, the exercise not only fails; it seems to make me more anxious. When I walk into the living room, I find my great-uncle sitting in his recliner with his feet up, a large photo album resting on his legs.

He smiles at me, looking over the rims of his glasses. “Did you have a nice afternoon?”

“It was . . . okay.” I can't get into what happened right now. “How are you doing?”

“Okay,” he echoes with a shrug. “It was a tough day.” He nods at the album. “I was asked to gather some personal effects from Graham's office to use in a memorial, and I found a scrapbook he'd kept since our time together as undergraduates at Princeton.”

I move to the arm of my uncle's chair to get a better look. He flips back to the front and points to a picture in the center of the page.

Three young men, all clean-cut and in suits, sit together on a staircase. The one on the left appears the geekiest—though among these three, “geeky” is a relative term—scrawny with black-framed eyeglasses, the kind now favored by hipsters and architects. His hands grip his knees. The boy in the middle appears the most relaxed of the three, like he's just aced a calculus test. And the guy on the right smiles widely and squints at the camera. It's hard to tell if that's because the sun is in his eyes or because he's stoned. I lean in and look at him more closely. “Is that you?”

Brian nods. “Terrible shot. The sun was shining directly in my eyes. The man in the glasses is Graham.”

“Wait a second,” I say. I step over to the mantel and point at the photo of the three colleagues, the one I noticed when I first arrived. “This is of the three of you too, isn't it?”

“That's right,” Brian says. “That was taken after we'd been working together for a while. But the picture in this album is where the story begins. It was taken when we were still undergraduates at Princeton, the day we three were tapped.”

He has my attention now. “Tapped? For what?”

“The CIA.”

“Ha!” I chuckle before realizing he's not joking. I look more closely at the shot on the mantel and squint to read the words on the seal behind the men:
Central Intelligence Agency.
“ You were a spy?”

“No,” he says calmly. “I was employed by the CIA as a scientist, as was Graham.”

I nod.

Although if my great-uncle
was
a spy, wouldn't he deny it? That has to be one of the first lessons you learn in Spy 101.

“Princeton always had strong ties to the Agency,” he says. “Allen Dulles, class of 1914, was one of its best-known directors. Several of the school's most distinguished professors were CIA consultants as well. When we were tapped, it felt like quite an honor.”

I nod again, my eyes drawn back to the photo of the three men at Princeton. “Wait, what's the name of the guy in the middle again?”

“Christopher Figg.” Brian closes the album. He takes a moment to wipe his glasses with a handkerchief.

“He was the one who ran the summer program here when I was a kid, right?”

“ Yes, Camp Dodona.”

The image of Mara in her tiny kiddie T flashes through my mind. “Speaking of that camp, can I ask you a question?”

“Certainly.”

I didn't want to bring up Mara, but now I can't turn back. I know I need to tread lightly; my uncle personally selected Mara to be here this summer, which means he must think highly of her and her “powers.” Still, for my own sanity, I have to get a sense of how dangerously cuckoo she really is.

“So,” I say, “Mara's kind of an ‘interesting' person, isn't she?”

Brian puts his glasses back on and straightens. “What did she do?”

“Well, she basically threatened me with bodily harm if I didn't stay away from Pankaj.”

“I see.” Brian nods. “I suppose there's a certain consistency to that. Even as a child she was terribly protective of him.”

“Wait . . . What?” I pause. “They knew each other as children?”

Brian smiles. “Of course. From Camp Dodona. Mara's always been a bit dramatic, and she tried to keep you away from him even then.”

My heart is pounding all of a sudden. “Pankaj was at that camp too?” I whisper.

“So was his sister, Nisha, though she wasn't in your group,” Brian adds. “She was in another program that Figg ran down the hall from ours—one for children with emotional and behavioral issues. I didn't know the other campers in that group; I only knew Nisha because she and Pankaj were siblings and she would occasionally come looking for him.” He shakes his head ruefully. “Quite a bully, that one.”

“But it's really weird,” I say out loud. “I have no memory of him being there at all. He hasn't mentioned it either.”

“ You were all quite young. And you weren't there for very long.” He shrugs. “Memory is slippery.”

My uncle is right about that. Memory
is
slippery, particularly if you don't
want
to remember something. Like being bullied. I think again about my only clear recollection of Camp Dodona—the day I left, the day my popsicle-stick house was destroyed and I punched the kid who did it. Then I think about this afternoon at the art museum. I wonder how much of this summer I'll recall in the future . . . and what my response might be if I'm provoked again.

Brian is smiling at me. “It really was a shame you left camp so early. We were just starting to get the first real glimmers of your talents. But that famous ‘hit first; ask questions later' streak of yours was also becoming more pronounced, and your father was not keen to let it develop further.”

“Me?” I counter reflexively, my hackles rising. “Maybe I was a little impulsive, but let's not forget, Mara's the nutty one.” I'm not sure why I'm so defensive about my behavior at that age, but I feel like he's suggesting I'm somehow responsible for provoking her. “She even told me it was
your
idea for her to go off her meds.”

I'm expecting Uncle Brian's jaw to drop. Or maybe I
want
him to be shocked and outraged by this revelation: that his handpicked HEAR is lying about such a dangerous act of negligence on his part, claiming that he deliberately told her to ignore her treatment.

When he nods, I start feeling sick. “That's true,” he confirms.

“Pardon?”

“With those drugs running through her system, her brain chemistry isn't what I need it to be. For my experiments to work, there can be no interference. I assume you now know that she forecasted the disaster in Japan?”

As he says this, the queasiness spreads. I start thinking about the others. Like how Dan knew his father would die, and how Alex knew about the mall shooting, that a Henley professor would be killed. “So it's not just that your geniuses are so smart; it's that they're all prophets of doom. They all foresee disasters, don't they?”

Brian takes hold of the scrapbook, clutching it firmly in both hands. “Finally a sign you might be smart enough to be here.”

I'm
fl
oating. As I
stare at the fake stars above me, I question everything from the reality of what I've experienced to what I believe—or rather, how much I'm
willing
to believe.

I excused myself after Uncle Brian's last comment and have been hiding out in the observatory ever since. Night has fallen. If I could stay in my room by myself for the rest of the summer, I would.

There's a knock on the door. I cringe.

“Kass, may I come in?” Uncle Brian asks.

“Give me a minute,” I reply, wanting a lot longer than that to compose myself. I struggle off the water bed, take a deep breath, then reach for the doorknob.

Standing in the dim light of the hallway, Brian looks anxious. My dad gets the same strained expression on his face when he's on edge. With all the stress of this week, I'm worried my great-uncle might give himself a heart attack, and I want to tell him to calm down. But having tried that line on Dad, I've learned the
last
thing you want to tell a high-strung person to do is to “calm down.” It's like lighting a bomb's fuse and then suggesting it not detonate.

When Brian enters the room, he walks directly to the window and scans the street below.

“Kass,” he says, “I need you to understand something. No one arrived here by mistake or through good fortune. In addition to being very bright, all the HEARs tripped the system in some way. Every one.” He turns around to face me. “Why do you think you're at Henley?”

I hold out my hands, palms up, with a resigned smile on my face. Is he really going to make me say it out loud? “Because Dad begged you.”

This makes Brian laugh for some reason I can't possibly fathom. “ You think it was your dad who got you here?”

“Uh, yeah? After I got into trouble and my acceptance to Columbia was revoked, he—”

“That you got caught by the police was simply fortuitous,” Brian interrupts. “Good luck on my part, really.” He must see the flash of anger and confusion on my face, because he gestures to my desk chair. “May I?”

I can no longer hold back. “My getting caught by the police was good luck for you? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

He sighs and remains standing. “Kassandra, I apologize. That came out less elegantly than intended. What I meant was that I have been asking your father to send you back here for quite some time now, but it was only after your run-in with the authorities that he relented.”

What?!
No. No way. I shake my head. “
You
wanted me to come here?
Dad
was the one who stopped it? That makes zero sense. It's”— I'm about to use the word “crazy,” but I stop myself, since crazy seems A-OK here—“wrong. Just wrong.”

“I must say, Kass,” he says, “I've been very gratified to see that in the last two years specifically you've started using your abilities in such a constructive way.”

I swallow. “What are you talking about?”

“I know about all of your exploits as the anonymous vigilante. ‘Ally X,' righter of wrongs. That's why I needed you back. That's why you getting caught was such a surprisingly good”—he pauses, a gleam in his eye—“roll of the dice for me.”

Though I've never fainted before, this could be my moment.

“What baffles me, though,” he continues, “is how the police were able to catch you. Why did you get caught this last time? Do you even know the answer to that yourself?”

My head shakes, involuntarily. I don't want to sound too full of myself, but it never occurred to me that I'd get busted. I think the realization that I'd gotten caught, that I'd slipped up somehow, was even more upsetting to me than getting handcuffed with those extra-strong garbage-bag ties and thrown in the back of the police cruiser.

“No one else knew I was responsible for the other stuff,” I finally manage. “I acted alone and anonymously, and I was always in and out before anyone noticed. That was something I was really proud of . . .”

“I would imagine.”

“So how do
you
know?”

Brian takes off his glasses and tucks them into his shirt pocket, glancing again at my desk chair. I relent with a nod. He sits, and I ease down onto the edge of my water bed, mostly because I'm not sure if my legs can support me for much longer.

“Let me ask you something first, Kassandra. Why is it, do you think, that you were able to get away with your shenanigans for so long? And how is it, do you think, that you've been able to slip in and out of so many places without being noticed?”

I lift my shoulders. “Because I've been really careful.” It's true: as a planner, I've measured distances, triple-checked schedules, kept detailed logs of people's comings and goings. “I spent a lot of time—” I stop at Uncle Brian's headshake.

There is, of course, another answer.

Every meticulous planner knows that despite all the hard work, shit happens. Regardless of how finely tuned your plan is, something can go wrong. Someone leaves his house a minute early or a minute late. There's a freak storm. Bad traffic. Gluten. Yet I always managed to stay one step ahead of the unexpected. It wasn't that I didn't make mistakes. It was something else. And what I think Uncle Brian is trying to get me to admit is that every time the risk of getting caught lurked, I got a feeling—literally, a physical sensation—that told me to get the hell out of wherever I was.

“Because I'm really lucky?” I offer.

Brian sighs. “Luck had nothing to do with it, and you know it. It's your ESP.”

I stare at him blankly. In this shadowy room, with the fake stars overhead and the oversize telescope and my body gently bobbing up and down on a water-filled mattress, I once again feel as if I've entered some hallucinatory dreamscape. I do not have ESP. Maybe the other HEARs do—I've allowed myself to accept that possibility, given the seemingly indisputable evidence—but
I
do not. I am here because my father called in a favor.

“ You felt the danger, am I right?” Brian presses. His voice is still calm, but I hear urgency. “ Your body was flashing
hazard
. Kass, everyone has moments of foresight. People know who's calling before they pick up the phone; mothers sense what their babies need through their coos. That expression, ‘Your ears must have been burning'? These moments happen occasionally for most people. But there are some who can channel that sensitivity much more precisely, and far more often. You showed great aptitude for this even as a child in our summer program. No one recognized your talent aside from me—not even you—which is why it's so lucky I have you back now.”