Lightning

Food was amazing. I hadn't realized how much I missed real food after living off of canned, dried, and preserved stuff until it was put down in front of me. I couldn't remember ever having it—the entirety of my memory was devoted to surviving on next to nothing, completely cut off from anything resembling civilization—but I knew I missed it. The plate steamed in front of me, the smell alone enough to make me never want to touch another can of anything for the rest of my life. I didn't even care that the pot roast they'd given us was cafeteria-quality, it was the best thing I'd ever eaten.

"Whoever the cook is here," Blue said as she speared a carrot, "I want to marry them."

Rowan had her eyes closed as she chewed slowly. "I'll join you," she replied when she finished.

Blue's green eyes gleamed. "How about you, Lightning?"

I just laughed, shaking my head. "Polygamy's not my thing, sorry. Feel free to invite me over to dinner as much as you like, though."

They both grinned and I marveled at how different it was here. I'd been awake for only a few hours—I hadn't even gotten a full explanation of where we were or what was going on yet—but it seemed like the ghost town and all the horrors that had come with it were a hundred years away. All that was left were harmless memories and the two girls sitting across from me. Blue, brilliant beyond belief but strung tighter than a guitar string, though she seemed relaxed now. She looked almost foreign after a shower and being given a very un-Blue-like but nonetheless clean and nice-looking dress, her dirty-blonde hair turned dark and curly by the water and her cheeks red, revealing a spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose that had been all but invisible in the cold near-winter we'd been surviving in until now. And petite, pretty Rowan, her golden hair in a fresh braid that hung halfway down her back and her crystal-blue eyes lit up. Even after all that had happened she retained a type of innocence and optimism the rest of us sorely lacked.

They had both woken up before me, though I hadn't seen either of our other companions yet, and were evidently as enlightened about our situation as I was. Allegedly Griffin had shown up briefly only to run off in search of Fox before anybody had gotten to talk to him much. Blue had passed on this information to me with a knowing quirk of her brows, like we were co-conspirators reveling in their less-than-secret relationship. It was hard to keep things hidden for long when you only had four other people in the world. I'd found that out for myself.

"Where do you think Fox is?" Rowan asked after a long stretch of silence while we all savored our first cooked meal in memory.

I shrugged. "Probably a patient room somewhere, same as us."

"When do you think she'll wake up?" I knew what she was getting at; one of the nameless doctors who'd brought us here from our rooms had announced that once we were all together somebody would come talk to us.

I hesitated to answer, and Blue spoke up before I could. "She was in pretty bad shape," was all she said, but it was enough. Rowan shivered, staring down at her plate.

I didn't remember the details of what had happened to us in the forest fire which destroyed our makeshift home and led us here—it was all a blur of smoke and adrenaline—but I knew that much. I remembered the burnt and bloody mess that had been her face, her shallow breathing, her leg bent at an impossible angle as she lay helplessly on the ground between the rest of us. I would have thought she was dead already if she hadn't been making noise, pathetic little whimpers of pain that were so unlike her. But I wouldn't be surprised to find she was the only one of us who hadn't made it. I'd seen some weird things happen so far that I had no logical explanation for, but not enough to make me believe in miracles.

"It's Fox," Blue continued after a tense pause, like she was answering my thoughts. "We all know how Fox is. There's no way a fire could take her out."

Rowan nodded mutely but clearly wasn't sure that was the case. Her dark expression seemed to suck away the hope I was trying to hang onto; she'd been the one to insist we'd be safe despite the fire, that the flames couldn't kill us, only hurt us. If she gave that up that was it. And the last thing I wanted to think about, after everything else that had happened, was one of us dying.

Blue was looking down again, stabbing listlessly at her food. "She'll be fine," she said again. "If they healed Griffin they can heal her." Tipping her cup back quickly, like taking a shot of alcohol, she stood up and glanced towards the closed door. "I'm going to find somebody to tell us what's going on, with Fox or without. She and Griffin will just have to hear the repeat."

She was just pulling open the door when it was opened from the other side, making her jump back a step. Griffin was the first through, Fox at his heels. They both looked a million times better than they had the last time I'd seen them, Griffin healed from the injuries Rowan had chastised him for a dozen times and Fox without a trace of her burns. I couldn't help but stare, taking in her perfectly unscarred and healthy-looking skin, as if the fire had never happened. Even so I hardly recognized her now; she stayed close to Griffin, eyes lowered, whereas before she would have been snapping some quick, sarcastic remark at each of us or waving a knife around, carefully distancing herself from anybody who might be perceived as a protector. It was the first time I'd seen her without her hair up, too, and with it all falling down in her face, long and midnight-dark, she looked smaller and more delicate than I ever would have thought possible.

Blue caught her in a hug quickly, neither of them speaking but Fox unexpectedly returning the embrace. As Blue was pulling away a third person stepped through the door, somebody I had seen only in the blurry, fragmented memories that had been almost all I could think about since waking up. Other than where we were and what condition we were all in they had been taking up my mind entirely. None of them had been helpful and I didn't know what any meant, but I knew this was one of the people who showed up frequently in them. And I suspected we were about to find out why, and exactly what part he had played in what had happened to us.

He was an older man, maybe in his fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and steely gray eyes. He towered over all of us, much more intimidating than the vague figure from my memory, and was dressed in a dark suit, clean and professional. An uncomfortable sort of power and prestige radiated from him, enough that I shifted slightly away from him in my seat without fully realizing it. This all seemed much more serious than it ever had before, and that was saying something.

Without saying a word he gestured to the long table, waiting for Blue, Griffin, and Fox to take their seats before he took his at the head of the table, folding his hands neatly in front of him. We all exchanged looks and I saw my own wariness reflected back at me.

"My name is Dr. Jason Osborne," he said, his voice as imposing as his appearance. "I'm sorry to greet you under such circumstances. I'm sure after your ordeal all of you would prefer to relax and recover before getting to the serious things. But we have serious things to discuss, and I believe I'm right in assuming you would like some sort of explanation." Most people would have said it like a question, but he didn't. Despite that we all nodded. "We'll get right to it, then. Rowan tells me none of your memories extend past waking up alone in an empty town. Is that still true for all of you?"

Dr. Osborne had a way of looking into you that seemed to pull every thought straight from your head. He gave each of us the same steady look until we confirmed that Rowan's information was in fact true. "She also tells me you were in communication with somebody named SAM?" Once again we all nodded. The dread in the pit of my stomach was getting worse with each passing minute, wondering where this was all going.

"Do you know who SAM is?" Griffin asked finally. "And what they were doing to us? Or why?"

He held up one hand to him to silence him. "I'm afraid I don't know why the things you experienced in the past week happened. I don't know how you came to be left there. But I do know who SAM is."

"Who?" I asked, impatient. SAM took us in enough circles, I wanted somebody to just tell us something for once.

"SAM was a name sometimes used by my partner, Dr. Sarah Marsh. She passed away the same day the five of you disappeared."

The silence that dropped into the room was so heavy and thick it felt crushing. None of us spoke. None of us so much as looked at each other. All I could do was sit there and replay the words over and over—SAM was dead. How could SAM be dead? We'd seen them—her—we'd talked to her, she'd screwed with us over and over. She couldn't have been dead.

Were ghosts supposed to be real now, too?

Dr. Osborne continued, answering the questions that were unspoken but written all over our faces. "Dr. Marsh was like all of you. She was a very talented psychic, even beyond any of you in power—I hope you don't take offense. There was a terrible accident the same day you all disappeared from our care and she was killed. And yet you say you spoke with her."

"We did," Blue told him in a hollow voice. "She left us notes, she talked to us..." She trailed off into silence and we all sat there for another minute, nobody daring to speak.

"What happened to our memories?" Rowan asked finally.

"I can't say for sure, but I believe Dr. Marsh may have locked them away from you to protect you."

Griffin's voice was stiff and dangerous when he spoke. "Protect us from what?"

"Yourselves. Each of you holds more power than you can understand and so much power in a young body is dangerous. Just before the accident Dr. Marsh indicated to me that she believed you all may have been in danger of becoming unstable, which would make you each a danger to yourselves and others around you. I think she altered your memories in an effort to restart your teaching and avoid that, but clearly something went very wrong."

I hardly heard what he was saying, stuck on several minutes back in the conversation. "You said SAM is a psychic," I managed to get out. He'd said she was like us—a psychic.

We'd thrown the word around before, in the ghost town. Sometimes it had been half-joking, sometimes it had been serious, but it had never fully wedged itself into my brain before. It had never seemed really possible, even with everything that had happened. But now here he was, somebody who looked like he belonged at some sort of legal business meeting instead of sitting in a hospital meeting room with a group of teenagers, calling us psychics with a straight face.

"Yes," he replied with a brisk nod. He spoke calmly, clinically. It set every part of me on edge. "As are all of you. There are countless people with psychic abilities throughout the world, ranging from minor, almost unnoticeable talents to ones strong enough that they must keep themselves controlled. The five of you are some of the strongest we have ever encountered, and you've spent most of your lives working with Dr. Marsh and I to test, record, and control your abilities."

We all looked around at each other again, letting that sink in. I felt nothing but a numb sort of emptiness; maybe I was too in shock for it to fully hit me and it would strike with a vengeance later. But Griffin wasn't having any of it. "You're saying we're psychics and this is some kind of sick human testing?" he demanded.

"No, not testing. A program to protect the five of you and ensure that you could control yourselves. A program your families put you into by choice, I assure you, and that you each chose to continue."

"Well, now I'm choosing not to, and I'm leaving." He shook his head and stood, heading for the door. The was a sharp, quiet click and the doorknob rattled in his hand. I had to stare for a second to process that we were locked in. Despite what he said we weren't going to have much choice in the matter, I knew.

But did we have much of a choice, anyway? We were in a completely unfamiliar, unknown place with no money, no food, no memories, no idea what to do. What could we do but rely on the one person who seemed to know us?

"Let me out," Griffin said evenly.

"Please sit down, Griffin."

"Let me out."

"Griffin." Osborne managed the same distanced, icy tone Griffin used. "I asked you to please sit down."

"And I asked you to let me out." His dark eyes turned on Osborne and I saw even Blue flinch away even though none of us were in their path. They stared off for several long, breathless seconds before Osborne looked away, though the door remained firmly locked.

"You will be free to go once we've finished our conversation. I'd like to discuss what exactly SAM said and did to you."

Nobody spoke. Griffin hovered by the door, his anger palpable, and the rest of us looked anywhere but at him or Osborne. Fox was huddled in her chair at the far end of the table, staring off into some point in the distance. Rowan was intently studying her hands in her lap, gnawing on her lower lip again. Blue and I exchanged a glance and I saw fear and confusion clear in her wide eyes. Finally Fox broke the tense silence.

"Dreams," she whispered.

Osborne's heavy eyebrows lifted. "Dreams?"

She nodded slowly. "SAM came to us in dreams. She told me to keep my wits about me. She told Griffin to know the difference between bravery and stupidity. He didn't listen so she hurt him. She was mad that Lightning lost his part of the map, so she went after him, too. And she started the fire."

"How do you know she started the fire?"

"We dreamed it," I answered for her. "We all had the same dream, about us getting caught in a fire. There's something about the dreams she causes, they're different. More vivid than normal dreams. And then it started." I didn't want to think about certain details of that particular dream again, but I figured he didn't need to know them anyway. He didn't need to know the oh-so-subtle signal of a flash of lightning starting the fire that had almost killed us all. He didn't need to know that SAM had forced me to stand frozen and watch my friends burn to death, screaming for me to help them.

"Psychic power cannot be used once a person has died," Osborne told us with the simple, logical tone of somebody explaining a basic fact to a toddler.

"She was there," Blue told him. "I felt her there. She let us escape, she helped us find where to go."

"Where was that?"

I thought of the place Blue had taken us to at SAM's command, the place that somehow, through some logic that made no sense, had saved our lives. The place of living lights that could lead you to a thousand different places. The place where if you stepped off the path you stepped off into nothingness, into empty air, but you never stepped off the path. The place SAM had wanted to lead us from the beginning, through all her cryptic clues, waiting for the moment when we would either follow her there or die trying.

"The Otherworld," I told him.