Adaptation (37 page)

Afterward, she went to the sink and scrubbed the blood off her hands, wincing as her fingers rubbed against the shallow scrapes on her palms from sliding across the desert ground. She was struck by déjà vu. How many times had she cut her hands since she had last been in this place? The thought made her dizzy, and she retreated to the bed, curling up on top of the blanket with her knees drawn to her chest.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Amber running across the desert toward her, the triangular spacecraft hovering in the distance. She saw Amber’s mouth moving, and she heard David shouting, and then Amber knocked her down, the thud of impact swallowed by the eruption of pain tearing through her body—no, it was Amber’s body. She had felt the bullet strike Amber just as
surely as if it had struck herself. She had never been able to sense Amber’s feelings—not the way she could sense David’s. Had she?

She remembered the night in Dolores Park on the swing set, the way it felt as if she could breathe through Amber’s lungs when they kissed. The memory of it shot through her in a gut-wrenching pang. Everything with Amber had been so magnified. Was it because of this ability she had acquired? Maybe some of those emotions hadn’t been her own. That would mean that Amber truly hadn’t lied about the way she felt.

But as seductive as that thought was, something didn’t add up. The bullet tearing into Amber’s body—
that
had the same all-encompassing, wholly immersive feeling that she had with David, as well as that time with her mom. But the rest of her experiences with Amber weren’t like that.

No. All those feelings had been hers. Amber was still a liar. It still hurt.

Reese woke up with a start. The room was dark except for the marginally lighter square of the window. An unfamiliar sensation crept through her, like someone whispering inside her brain. She shivered.

She rolled onto her side, gazing toward the window. She wondered what time it was and how long she and David would be locked in these rooms.

David.
She wished she could talk to him.

Last December, after they had won their first tournament as debate partners, they had hugged each other ecstatically on the stage during the award ceremony. Someone had snapped the
photo of them that she had pinned to her bulletin board at home. She still remembered his arm around her, squeezing her close. She had felt his touch burning all the way through to her toes. That day she had dismissed her feelings as a fluke. But maybe the only person she had fooled was herself.

David. I hope you’re okay.

She heard it again: the whispering in her brain. Her spine went rigid.

Reese.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. The hairs on her arms stood straight up.
David?
She closed her eyes and tried to picture him in her mind: the shape of his eyes and mouth, the way his hair fell across his forehead when he turned his head. The rhythm of his heartbeat, matching hers.

She felt like she was being dragged down into quicksand. She let herself sink.

David?

She could sense his physical presence forming at the edge of her perception. Pulse. Breath. Flesh and bone. A dull pain in his head where he had been injured. His hands, clenched against the thin blanket just like hers. He was in the next room.

I can hear you.

Five days later

Reese stepped out of the airplane onto the top step
of the rolling staircase. Down below on the tarmac of Travis Air Force Base, a cluster of people waited behind a rope, their faces turned toward her. She saw at least two television cameras, several photographers pointing their glinting lenses in her direction, and dozens of uniformed military personnel lined up to create a path across the runway.

She had been awakened that morning by Agent Forrestal. He walked with a slight limp, and she wondered if that was the only injury he had sustained when the bunker exploded. He informed her that due to unforeseen circumstances, she and David were to be released to their parents later that day. But first he gave her a towel, a stack of clean clothes, and a small toiletry kit, and told her to make herself presentable. There had even been a mirror,
and as she combed out her wet hair in the bathroom, she wondered what all this to-do was for.

Now she knew. The press was here.

Their curiosity pricked at her like birds pecking at worms in the ground, and as she descended the staircase, it only got worse. She clutched the railing, keeping her gaze down so that she wasn’t blinded by the strobe effect of dozens of cameras flashing in her direction.

“Reese!” a woman cried. It was her mom, and Reese looked up to see her break through the cordoned-off area and run across the tarmac. The crowd behind the rope burst into excited chatter, their attention temporarily diverted. But when her mom reached the bottom of the stairs, they all turned back to Reese. Her breath was knocked out of her by the strength of their interest. She forced herself to focus on her mom, shutting out the cacophony on the tarmac. Her mom’s face was pale, with rough red spots on her cheeks and dark shadows beneath her eyes. She looked as if she wasn’t entirely convinced it was her daughter emerging from that plane.

Reese took the last few steps quickly and pulled her mom into a tight embrace. “I’m all right, Mom,” she said, pressing her face into her mother’s wavy brown hair. Something inside herself that had been knocked off center by five days in that hospital room finally shifted back into place. For the first time in days, it felt safe to let herself relax. But when she did, she wasn’t prepared for the result.

Her mother’s emotions were a riot of anxiety and exhaustion and relief. It was almost suffocating to experience. Beyond that, the shouted questions of the reporters were like stones striking her.

“How does it feel to be back?”

“What were the last few days like for you?”

“Will you be pressing charges?”

She stiffened and pulled away.

“Reese?” Her mom looked alarmed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, gasping. Her shoulders hunched defensively as she tried to block out all the mental noise.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw David coming down the stairs, heading for his parents. During the time they had spent locked in those rooms at Project Plato, their only contact with other people had been when meals were delivered by an armed guard. That had left the two of them plenty of time to practice their newfound ability. At times it had felt as if she only existed on a level of disembodied consciousness, connected to David by an invisible cord. But now, with all her defenses up and pushing against the crowd, she couldn’t sense him at all. She was herself alone again. It was strange: as if she were separated from the world by a glass wall.

Before her accident, this was how she had always lived. She had never been aware of that glass wall until today.

Her mom reached out and smoothed Reese’s hair away from her face. This time, she felt only the simple, physical touch of her mom’s hand. “Welcome home, honey,” her mom said.

Reese smiled faintly. “Hi, Mom.” She was startled to recognize the man hovering behind her mom’s shoulder. “Dad?”

“Hi, sweetie.” Rick Holloway had the kind of square-jawed, craggy face that aged well on men, but Reese had never realized his dark hair was turning gray. She let him hug her. He smelled faintly like the tea-tree soap in her mom’s bathroom, and to her shock it made her want to cry.

“What are you doing here?” she mumbled into his shoulder. “I mean—”

“I think your mom should tell you that,” he said as she pulled away.

She was about to ask him why when she saw another familiar face waiting behind her father. “Julian?”

Julian squeezed her into a hug and said, “Welcome back.”

“What is going on?” she asked as he released her. “Why are all of you here?” She looked around at the gathered group. David and his parents, Winston and Grace Li, were nearby, along with his twelve-year-old sister, Chloe, who was watching everything with barely contained excitement.

A vaguely familiar-looking woman in a navy-blue suit stepped forward, escorted by Reese’s mother. “Reese, David, let me introduce you to Senator Joyce Michaelson,” her mom said.

“Hello, Reese,” the woman in the suit said, extending her hand. Her dark blond hair was styled in a short, wavy cut, and she wore a triple strand of pearls around her neck.

“Hi.” Reese shook the woman’s hand as the cameras flashed.

“Hello, David,” the senator said.

David looked wary but polite as he also shook her hand. He was wearing the same outfit that Reese was: khaki pants and a long-sleeved blue T-shirt. She wondered who had picked out their clothes, even managing to get their sizes about right. It would have looked pretty bad for them to be on camera in the stinking, bloody clothes they had been wearing for the last five days. Now they looked like they had come straight from a Gap store.

“Senator Michaelson helped us get you home,” Reese’s mom explained. “We’re very grateful to her.”

“I’m so happy I could be of assistance,” Senator Michaelson said, a concerned look on her face. “I was so worried when Cat contacted me with your story. Let me be the first to extend apologies to the both of you on behalf of the United States government for any distress you may have been caused in the last few days.”

Distress?
Reese had no idea how to respond to that. The reporters, the cameras, her family—it was all overwhelming.

Her mom put an arm around Reese’s shoulders, steering her away from the reporters. “You ready to go home?”

“Please,” Reese said. “But what about David?”

“He’s coming too. I’ve already arranged it with his parents.”

The reporters followed them to the edge of the tarmac, where several cars were parked. Reese heard her father saying, “We’re not taking any questions now. We’ll issue a statement later.” Then he and Julian closed ranks around her, and she couldn’t see the reporters anymore as they herded her toward her mom’s car.

They left Travis Air Force Base with a police escort, blue lights whirling with the occasional blip of the siren to cut through traffic. David’s car was directly behind theirs.

“How are you feeling, honey?” her mom asked as she drove. “How did they treat you? Senator Michaelson wasn’t clear on where you were being held.”

“I’m just… tired,” Reese said. She didn’t want to discuss it yet. “Can we talk about it later? What’s been going on? Why were you all here to meet us?”

Her mom glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “The day you were taken, I came home to find a letter from the Air Force
Office of Special Investigations stating that you were being removed for additional testing—a follow-up to your accident. I called the number on the letterhead, but nobody would tell me anything. That’s why I contacted Senator Michaelson. I knew her from when I worked for her fresh out of law school at the DA’s office. She agreed to look into it. I was still waiting for an answer when Julian called me on Saturday morning.”

Julian was sitting next to Reese in the backseat. “That’s when a video was posted on the Hub,” he said. “Things went crazy when it hit, and Bin 42 got a billion links to it, so Keith asked me to reformat it for the site in case it was taken down.”

“Why would it be taken down?”

“Because it was surveillance-camera footage from a classified military base. It had location data embedded in it that corresponds exactly to the coordinates for Area 51. And it had you and David on it.” He looked at Reese and hesitated.

“What?” she prompted him.

“It also had Amber on it.”

She braced herself and asked, “What does the video show?”

“It shows the desert, and in the background this spaceship is landing. And then you see you and David running toward it, and suddenly Amber knocks you over, and—are you okay?”

Reese rubbed her clammy hands over her new khaki pants. “I’m fine. What else is on the video?”

“It shows these silver things coming out of it—they look like robots—and they come and take Amber into the ship and then it lifts off.” Julian couldn’t hide his excitement. “It’s amazing, Reese. It’s freaking amazing. It’s evidence of extraterrestrials.”