The current of blood pounding through her veins made Fana dizzy. She was going to do it. After years of fantasies and wishes, she was going to leave.
“Come on, help me pack,” Fana said. “If we’re going, we have to go tonight.”
Glow had transformed Caitlin into a revolutionary, Fana realized.
She heard her friend crying softly, but the sobs were only quiet, huffing exhalations as she trotted behind Fana, keeping perfect pace. Caitlin was focused on escape.
The darkened schoolhouse appeared in front of them at the edge of the eastern woods, the small brick building where Fana had studied before Teka had become her sole teacher. Fana had enjoyed many happy moments in this building, when she’d finally felt like she’d had a normal life like Caitlin and the kids outside.
The school building was her last piece of home before the woods.
Fana grabbed Caitlin’s arm, ducking them around a corner where they would not be seen from houses, nor by the sentries who lay in the darkness ahead of them. Fana leaned against the wall, slowing her breathing, and Caitlin followed her lead. Fana had stuffed only a few clothes and snacks into her Miami Dolphins duffel bag, but it was heavier than she had expected.
Caitlin’s fear and grief smelled bitter in her perspiration.
“He’ll be fine,” Fana said again. “They’re not cruel.”
Caitlin sniffed hard to clear her nose. “Right.”
They couldn’t worry about Caitlin’s father now.
Before they left, Fana had drawn out a map for Caitlin in her bedroom, showing her the route she’d used to escape the colony three years ago. The firefence was sure to be different now—its patterns changed several times daily—but their general route would be the same, ending on a mile-and-a-half dirt road that would take them to Toledo. They would have to stay clear of the paths, even the horse trails, because they would be more easily spotted there.
“Remember…,” Fana whispered. “I run, I find cover, and crouch. It takes me time to sense what’s around us, and I have to be still. If we get separated, go to the nearest cover and don’t move. That’s the most important thing. Just don’t trip the firefence. I’ll find you.”
Caitlin nodded, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her Berkeley sweatshirt.
“What happens if I trip it?” Caitlin said.
“Best-case scenario, they know exactly where and who you are. Worst case…I don’t know. There’s a charge. It might just knock you out, or it might do worse.”
Caitlin nodded, accepting. Her life was full of danger now. “What else?”
“It’s a workout. Your legs will burn from crouching,” Fana said. She had been shocked at how tough the exertion had been last time.
“‘If you are tired, keep going. If you are hungry, keep going,’” Caitlin whispered.
Harriet Tubman’s words, the conductor of the original Underground Railroad. Scholars said the words were a fiction created by one of Tubman’s biographers, but Fana knew they captured Tubman’s spirit. Fana clasped her friend’s unsteady hand, finishing the quotation: “‘If you want to taste freedom, keep going.’ We’ll be free, Caitlin. We’ll free the world.”
Her only answer was another quiet sob in the dark.
Fana was afraid, too. Sometimes dreams and premonitions guided her, but she didn’t know what would happen to Caitlin’s father. She didn’t know what the Life Brothers would do once they realized she was gone. And now she would have to spend all of her days in hiding, always expecting to be found.
Fana felt Caitlin’s resolve in their clasped hands, and she knew Caitlin could feel hers. Their belief in their mission burned through their skin, a fire to warm the lonely night.
“Let’s move,” Fana said.
As Fana launched herself from the wall to sprint toward the woods, she ran headfirst into someone walking around the corner. Her arms and legs tangled with another’s, and she heard a woman gasp with surprise as they lost their balance and fell in a heap.
Fana knew her peppermint smell even before she sorted through her startled thoughts.
“Lord have mercy…,” Aunt Alex said. “Fana?”
“Oh, sh—Aunt Alex, I’m so sorry,” Fana said. Her mouth moved on its own, because her mind had come to a standstill from seeing Aunt Alex in such an unexpected time and place.
“‘Oh, shit’ is right. What are you doing back here so late?”
A flashlight beam glared into Fana’s eyes, and she shielded her face. How hadn’t she noticed an approaching flashlight from around the corner? Why hadn’t she sensed anything at all? “Caitlin? You’re out here, too?” Aunt Alex said.
“Just taking a walk, thinking things through,” Caitlin said. She shoved her hands in her pockets. Although Caitlin’s face glistened with tears and mucous, she sounded amazingly nonchalant. Glow had turned her into an actress, too.
Fana recovered her mind and voice. “What are you doing up so late, Auntie?”
“I came back to grab my lesson plan before morning. The older kids are reading Lord of the Flies, if you must know, and I haven’t studied it since high school. But you’re not the one asking the questions. I hope you girls aren’t trying to do something stupid.”
Aunt Alex knows. Fana lost her voice again. Even without telepathy, her mother and aunt had such sharp maternal perceptions that Fana was still startled by it.
“We’re just talking,” Caitlin said in a young-girl voice. “We wanted some privacy.”
Aunt Alex’s voice softened as she stroked Caitlin’s hair. “Honey, I know you’re worried about your father. But like I told you before: And this, too, shall pass.”
Fana’s heart raced. A plan that had seemed within their grasp before now felt ridiculous. They’d already been caught, and they hadn’t made it as far as the cedar fence! Teka was deluded to think she had any valuable powers. She had only been lucky to make it through the property’s hundreds of acres the first time.
But Caitlin’s desperate look said DO something, and Fana knew she had no choice.
Her heart still pumping hard, Fana suddenly leaned over to kiss her aunt’s cheek. Aunt Alex looked pleased but wary. “Unh-hnhhh. What’s that all about?”
“Thank you for caring, that’s all,” Fana said.
“Of course I care—”
“But we have to go now, Aunt Alex. I won’t see you for a while, and I’ll miss you.”
Fana jabbed gently at her thoughts. Aunt Alex scowled at her, stepping back.
I HOPE I HEARD THIS GIRL WRONG
“You didn’t hear me wrong. Good-bye.” Fana held her aunt’s cheeks between her palms.
Fana pried at the stream of Aunt Alex’s thoughts again, easing herself into the flow of incoherence Teka called noise. The sound was at turns shrieks and babbles. Most people would never hear noise or know it existed. Even for people who studied a lifetime, the ability to see auras was the closest they would experience to visiting someone else’s mind. Noise was well beyond the auras, and noise was only the beginning.
Aunt Alex stiffened, pulling away. Her eyebrows lowered in puzzlement, then alarm.
Damn. Maybe she’d pushed too hard, fighting to separate her aunt’s thoughts from Caitlin’s. Fana tried to nudge her consciousness into her aunt’s, past the squall of sounds. The noise suddenly separated into streams that Teka had taught her could be comprehended with thought “languages,” the mental creation of meaning from the sounds. Suddenly, her aunt’s thoughts were a loud drumbeat: WHATINTHEWORLDISGOINGON
Navigating thought streams was painstaking and difficult even when Fana had time to concentrate. Now, she felt herself jabbing and tugging, fumbling past the sound to the endless banks of images flying in her aunt’s conscious and unconscious minds. Some of the neural pathways were familiar and easy to wade through, but most were foreign.
Finally, the solid world vanished, and Fana was swallowed in the surge of her aunt’s myriad memories. Pigtails in the mirror. A red Radio Flyer wagon. Her father’s gap-
toothed grin. Why did childhood memories always bubble so close to the surface, never gone?
Tonight, Fana thought, willing herself to discard what she didn’t need.
She saw Chestnut, one of the horses, leaping over a fallen tree trunk. The dinner table. Aunt Alex at the Council Hall with her father, bringing Caitlin out of the holding room.
Now, Fana thought.
Suddenly, she saw through her aunt’s eyes as she swung her flashlight, climbing down the back porch’s steps. Fana sliced off the end of the stream, leaving only a white space. With more time, she might have constructed an alternate fantasy, but under the circumstances, this was the best she could do. Aunt Alex would remember climbing down the porch, and then…nothing.
But Aunt Alex will be fine. She’s lost a minute’s worth of memories, or two at most.
“Come on,” Fana whispered, grabbing Caitlin’s arm. “We have to go.”
But Caitlin was staring, wide-eyed, as Aunt Alex stood frozen. Even in the dark, Aunt Alex’s face showed the tendrils of alarm that had emerged when she’d felt Fana’s intrusion in her head. She stood like a statue, hardly breathing. Caitlin waved her hand in front of her eyes.
Had Fana been too clumsy in her aunt’s mind?
“Is she okay?” Caitlin whispered.
I’m so sorry, Aunt Alex. I hope you can hear me. I’m sorry.
Fana yanked Caitlin’s arm harder. At the periphery of her awareness, she realized that her mental scent had caught Berhanu’s attention as far as the Council House. If she stayed any longer, he might see through the decoy marker she had left in her room.
“Let’s go,” she said over the new lump in her throat. Aunt Alex’s vacant face made her stomach knot, but there wasn’t time to mend the damage now. She would be fine. If Caitlin had to leave her father behind, Fana could leave her aunt. Mom would take care of Aunt Alex. Teka would take care of her.
This time, the sob Fana heard was her own. “Come on, Caitlin. Hurry.”
The woods waited.
The cedar fence that circled the colony’s buildings kept the horses from getting loose, and its quaintness gave the appearance of a gentle commune in the woods, bothering no one and not expecting to be bothered. Fana often let herself forget that she lived in an outdoor fortress.
The firefence was the colony’s true defense system.
Fana had first seen the firefence long before she’d been old enough to understand what it was; she’d been lost in her head, spending hours staring out her window. When it had been dark, she’d noticed a faint orange glow in the woods, so fragile she’d had to stare hard to know if it had been real. When she’d been older—after her mind set her free to roam in the physical world like other children—she’d studied the woods and the light while she’d leaned across the colony gate.
The closer she got to the woods, the more crisp the light became, as fine as countless orange-gold laser beams. She had always been able to see the firefence. She’d confided this to Teka once, and he’d been incredulous until she’d gone outside with him after dark and pointed out its patterns one by one with the tip of her sneaker. Teka had been excited, claiming that her ability to see its rays had been further proof of her gifts. And it is fortuitous for us, dear Fana, that the firefence is not intended to keep you in—only to keep others out.
The Life Brothers had brought the technology for the firefence from the Ethiopian colony’s House of Science, in addition to weapons that were hidden from the eyes of the others. Fana had often wondered whether Aunt Alex and Gramma Bea would sleep better at night, or perhaps not at all, if they knew the true power of the arsenal in their midst. Her father said the security measures were to protect everyone, but Fana knew they were to protect her.
She was the reason most of the Life Brothers had come, and she was leaving them.
But it was long past time for all of them to release their illusions about who or what she was. She wasn’t worthy of worship. She might not even be worthy of forgiveness.
Fana felt renewed sadness as she squatted behind the swathing, feathery fronds of the bracken ferns with Caitlin panting beside her. They had already been running for an hour, and Fana could still see a faint glow from the Duharts’ backyard solar light, as if they hadn’t made any progress. Fana’s upper thighs throbbed with pain.
And the farther they got from her house, the worse she felt about Aunt Alex. What would her mother think? And Gramma Bea? And Teka? What if she had harmed her aunt far worse than she knew, like so many people she had harmed when she was too young to remember?
She should turn back. With each passing minute, Fana was more sure of it.
But she couldn’t.
Fana wiped tears and perspiration from her eyes so she could see. For an instant, the woods was all darkness. Even with a full moon that evaded the thick treetops above them, it was hard for Fana to separate one tree from another, and the firefence was nowhere in sight. Patience, she told herself when she felt panic rising. Her mother’s mantra. So far, she was almost sure they had been undetected. That was something, at least. There was still a chance.
“How can you see a damn thing out here?” Caitlin said.
“Just can.” Fana peered hard into the blackness, waiting.
“What about the flashlight?” Caitlin had liberated Aunt Alex of her flashlight so deftly that Fana hadn’t noticed until Caitlin had confessed later. So much for Caitlin’s concern about her aunt.
“You might as well send up a flare. Shhh. Ouch—”
Fana lost her balance in her crouch, and when she flung her palm back to catch herself, a jagged exposed root sliced into her skin with her pitching weight. She snatched her hand away and struggled not to yell out, but it was the worst pain of her life.
“You okay?” Caitlin whispered.
Fana breathed deeply, pulling her hand close to examine it: A pencil-thin root fragment had pierced her like a knife, missing her tendons but slicing a hole clean through the web beside her thumb. Runny blood seeped on her palm. Fana’s eyes flooded with tears.
“Holy mother of shit,” Caitlin said. She could see the blood even in the dark.
Gritting her teeth, Fana yanked out the wood sliver and tossed it to her feet. Another searing flash of pain. One…two…three…four…five…six…
Gone.
“Let me look at that,” Caitlin said, grabbing her wrist. The flashlight flared in Fana’s face.
“No light,” Fana hissed, turning it off. “What’s wrong with you?”
“You really hurt yourself,” Caitlin said.
“I did, but now I’m fine. It’s done.”
Tingling overtook Fana’s hand, and her fingers trembled. Instead of pain, Fana felt a cold-hot immersion, as if her hand had been beneath water with a shifting temperature. Her cells were knitting back together. Fana shoved her arm beneath her sweatshirt to wipe the blood away. She didn’t want Caitlin to see the way her skin squirmed when it healed.
“Done?” Caitlin said. “You mean?…”
The blood wiped clean, Fana raised her hand to Caitlin’s face, wiggling her fingers. The hole the wood had made was gone. Her palm was slightly numb, but that would pass within ten or fifteen minutes. It always did.
Caitlin grabbed Fana’s wrist with both hands, staring. Fuck-eyed, as Caitlin would say.
“I told you I heal fast,” Fana said. “Magic show’s over. Let’s get out of here.”
While Caitlin muttered “Holy shit” in repetition, Fana stared into the dark for the firefence.
The moon grew brighter, and trees and brush leaped into focus. Fana could suddenly see every tiny pinnae on the fronds of the ferns in front of them. She also saw the delicate slivers of light that pierced the air in countless patterns. The woods was a light show of hexagons, polygons, triangles and Xs, with precious few untouched spaces between them for shelter. The lights stretched as high and far as she could see.
It was an effective system. The firefence was invisible even to infrared detecto
rs, but no one was invisible to the firefence except the sentries. If one of the beams sensed her or Caitlin, the sentries instantly would know exactly where they were, how many of them there were, their size, how fast their hearts were beating, and a slew of other data. The firefence could also deliver a jolt of energy to knock them unconscious, or worse.
Fana didn’t want to touch the firefence.
She breathed slowly, concentrating on the dark havens between the lines, looking for the biggest gaps, the ones closest to cover, the ones they could pass through. There weren’t many. The best cover, a large juniper she could smell ahead of them, was twelve yards through a gauntlet of stabbing lights. But as Fana focused, she saw a winding polyline emerge, a path to the tree’s base. Very narrow, but possible.
“This one’s tough,” Fana warned.
“Shit, what else is new?”
“Follow the leader,” Fana said as she slipped from their cover.
Fana’s first steps took her knees within four inches of the firefence, so she moved more slowly, encouraging Caitlin to mimic her creeping slide. So far, Caitlin had been keeping her shoulders low and angling her tiny body with enough precision that she avoided even what she couldn’t see. Thank goodness Caitlin was five-two and small-boned. Mr. O’Neal never would have gotten through. They had been right to leave him.
“Watch your head,” Fana whispered, eyeing a twig of light two inches above her.
Fana crept on, stooping. She jumped when her duffel bag hit her hip and swung toward the firefence’s glow to the right of her. She clamped her arm down hard against the bag, whispering a curse. She should have left the bag, too.
At last, they reached the juniper tree. This time, they sat as they hid behind the trunk, resting. But they wouldn’t be able to sit long. It was already 1 a.m. The property was five hundred acres, more than three-quarters of a square mile. Luckily, they didn’t have to travel from end to end—just to the northwest corner—but their pace was too slow. At this rate, they wouldn’t get to the road until afternoon. Fana wiped away the perspiration bathing her face and peered around the trunk to scout again, the routine she would repeat countless times tonight.