When Lightning Strikes

"You're right, Michael," she said, blinking at him shyly from behind her glasses.

So much for those people skills I mentioned.

"They're not going to make Jess do anything she doesn't want to," my dad said. "We're talking about the U.S. Government, here. Jessica is a citizen of the United States. Her constitutional rights are guaranteed. Everything will be all right."

And the sad thing is, at the time I really thought he was right.

I really and truly did.

C H A P T E R

14

Crane Military Base, located about an hour's drive from my hometown, had been one of the many Army bases closed by the government during the eighties. At least, it was supposed to have closed. But, somehow, it never did—at least not all the way, in spite of all those stories in my hometown paper about all the locals who worked there as maintenance men and cooks who ended up losing their jobs. The military jets—the ones that were constantly breaking the sound barrier—never quite disappeared, and we still had uniformed officers showing up for lunch and dinner in all three of my dad's restaurants long after the base was said to have been shut down.

Douglas, when he was at his most paranoid, had insisted that Crane was like Area 51, that place where the Army swears there's no base, but over which people always see these flashing lights late at night.

But when I arrived at Crane, it certainly didn't look as if anyone was trying to keep the fact that it was still open a secret. And it didn't look as if it had been neglected, either. The place was pretty clean, the lawns neatly mowed, everything looking like it was in its place. I didn't see any giant hangars where spacecraft might have been hidden, but then again, they could have been keeping those underground, like in the movie Independence Day.

The first thing Special Agent Johnson did—after introducing me to Special Agent Smith, a lady officer with pretty pearl earrings who had apparently replaced his former partner, Special Agent Davies (out on disability … oops, my bad)—was show me and my dad the room in which I'd be staying—a nice room, actually, like a hotel room, with a TV and a phone and stuff. No soda fountain, I was relieved to see.

Then he and Special Agent Smith took us to a different building, where we met some Army guys, this one colonel who squeezed my hand too hard, and this pimply-faced lieutenant who kept looking at my jeans like they were thigh-high boots or something. Then the colonel introduced us to a bunch of doctors in a different building, who acted really excited to see me, and assured my dad I was in the best of hands. My dad, even though I knew he was itching to get back to his restaurants, wouldn't leave, in spite of the doctors' assurances. He kept saying stuff like, was Special Agent Smith going to be on call in case I needed something in the middle of the night, and who was going to make sure I got enough to eat? It was kind of embarrassing.

Finally, one of the doctors, whose nametag said Helen Shifton, told my dad they were ready for me, and that I'd call him as soon as I was back in my room. After that, it was sort of obvious that they wanted him gone, so my dad left, saying he'd be back to pick me up next week. By then, we hoped that all the hoopla with the reporters and everything would have died down, and I could come back home.

He hugged me right in front of everyone, and kissed the top of my head. I pretended not to like it, but after he left, I couldn't help feeling a little bit …

Well, scared.

I didn't tell that to Dr. Helen Shifton, though. When she asked how I was feeling, I said I was fine.

I guess she didn't believe me, though, since she and a nurse gave me this complete physical, and I mean complete, with blood drawn and stuff poked into me—the whole thing. They checked my blood pressure, my cholesterol, my heart, my throat, my ears, my eyes, the bottoms of my feet. They wanted to do a gynecological exam, so I let them, and while they were down there, I asked them about birth control and stuff … you know, because I might need some, someday, when I'm like forty.

Dr. Shifton was totally cool about it, unlike my family doctor would have been, and answered all my questions, and told me everything looked normal. She even examined my scar, the one the lightning had left, and said it looked as if it was fading, and that someday, it would probably go away altogether.

"When the scar goes, do the superpowers go, too?" I asked her, a little hopefully. Having superpowers was turning out to be more of a responsibility than I liked.

She said she didn't know.

After that, Dr. Shifton made me lie down in this big tube and keep really still while she took photographs of my brain. She told me not to think about anything, but I thought about Rob. I guess the pictures turned out okay anyway, since after that Dr. Shifton made me get dressed, and then she left and this little bald man came in and asked me a lot of really boring questions, like about my dreams and my sex life and stuff. Although my sex life had, in recent days, shown signs of improving—albeit all too briefly—I didn't really have anything to tell him, and my dreams were all pretty boring, too, mostly about forgetting how to play the flute right before my challenge with Karen Sue Hanky.

It wasn't until the little bald man started asking me a bunch of stuff about Douglas that I got annoyed. I mean, how did the U.S. Government know about Douglas's suicide attempt?

But they did, and when they asked me about it, I got defensive, and the little bald man wanted to know why.

So I said, "Wouldn't you be defensive if someone you didn't know started asking you stuff about your schizophrenic brother?" But he said no, he wouldn't—not unless he had something to hide.

So then I said the only thing I had to hide was the fact that I wanted to give him a big old knuckle sandwich, and he asked if I always felt so much aggression when discussing my family, and that's when I got up and left his office and told Dr. Shifton that I wanted to go home now.

You could tell Dr. Shifton was totally mad at the little bald man, but she couldn't show it, since she's a professional and all. She said to him that she thought we'd talked long enough, and he slunk away, giving me all these dirty looks, like I'd ruined his day or something. Then Dr. Shifton told me not to worry about him, that he was just a Freudian, and nobody thought much of him anyway.

After that, it was time for lunch. Special Agent Smith took me to the cafeteria, which was in yet another building. The food wasn't bad, better than at school. I had fried chicken and mashed potatoes. I noticed the little bald man eating there, too. He looked at what I was eating and wrote it down in a little book. I pointed this out to Special Agent Smith, and she told me to ignore him, he probably had a complex.

Since there was no one my age to sit with, I sat with Special Agent Smith, and asked her how she came to be an FBI agent. She was pretty cool, answering my questions. She said she was a distinguished expert in marksmanship, which I guess meant she was a good shot, but she'd never killed anyone. She'd pulled her gun on people plenty of times, though. She even took it out of the holster and showed it to me. It was cool, really heavy. I want one, but I'll wait until I'm eighteen.

Another thing I have to wait for until I'm eighteen.

After lunch, Dr. Shifton sent me into this other doctor's office, and we spent a boring half hour with him holding up playing cards with the backs facing me and asking me what suit they were. I was like, "I don't know. You're holding them away from me," and he told me to guess. I guessed right only about ten percent of the time. He said that was normal. I could tell he was disappointed, though.

Then this weird skinny lady tried to get me to move stuff with my mind. I felt so sorry for her; I really tried, but of course I failed miserably at that, too. Then she took me into a room that was like our language lab at school, and I got to wear headphones and I was kind of excited, thinking there'd be a movie.

But the doctor in charge, a very nervous-looking man, said there'd be no movie, just some photos. I was supposed to look at the photos, and that was all.

"Am I supposed to remember what these people look like?" I asked, after the doctor got the ball rolling and the photos started flashing up onto the screen in front of me. "Like is there going to be a quiz?"

He went, "No, no quiz."

"Then I don't see the point." I was already bored with looking at the pictures. The pictures were totally uninteresting. Just men, mostly white, some faintly Arab-looking. A few black. A few Asian. Some Hispanic. No names underneath, nothing. It was almost as boring as detention. Through the headphones came some piped-in Mozart—not very well-played, I might add. At least the flutist sucked. No life, you know?

After a while I took the headphones off and was like, "Can I take a break?"

Then the doctor got way nervous and asked if I had to go to the bathroom or something, and I wanted to be like, "No, this just blows," but I didn't want to insult his experiment, so I said, "I guess not," and I went back to looking at the photos.

Middle-aged white guy. Middle-aged white guy. Middle-aged Asian guy. Kind of hot-looking Arab guy, like that dude from The Mummy, only no facial tattoos. Middle-aged white guy. Middle-aged white guy. I wonder what they're serving for dinner. Old white guy. Serial-killer-looking kind of guy. Middle-aged white guy. Middle-aged white guy. Middle-aged white guy.

Finally, after what seemed like a year, Dr. Shifton came out and told me I'd done great, and that I could take the rest of the day off.

Actually, after that, there wasn't a whole lot of day left. It was around three o'clock. Back home, I'd just be going into detention. I felt a wave of homesickness. Can you believe that? I actually missed detention, Miss Clemmings, the Ws … and Rob, of course.

But when Special Agent Smith took me back to my room, and asked if I had a swimsuit, I forgot all about Rob, because it turned out there was a pool on the base. Since I hadn't brought a swimsuit, Special Agent Smith took me to a nearby mall, and I bought a kick-ass suit and a Sony PlayStation on the government's tab, and went back to the base and went swimming.

It was plenty hot out, and the sun was still coming down hard, even though it was so late in the day. I lounged around on a deck chair and watched the other people at the pool. It was mostly women with young children … the wives, I guessed, of the men who worked on the base.

Some of the older kids were playing Marco Polo. I leaned back on my deck chair and closed my eyes, feeling the sun burning my skin. It was a nice feeling. I started to relax.

Maybe, I told myself, everything would be all right after all. The smell of chlorine was tangy and pleasant in my nose. It smelled clean and sharp.

Things usually work out for the best.

The sound of the children shouting filled my ears. "Marco!" Then a splash.

"Polo!" Then another splash.

"Marco!" Splash.

"Polo!" Splash. Laughter.

"Marco!" Splash.

"Polo!" Splash. Screaming. Hysterical laughter.

I guess I must have fallen asleep, because I had a weird dream. In it, I was standing in an enormous body of water. All around me were kids. Hundreds and thousands of kids. Big kids. Little kids. Fat kids. Skinny kids. White kids. Black kids. Kids of every describable kind.

And they were all of them screaming "Polo," at me.

"Polo!" Splash. Scream.

"Polo!" Splash. Scream.

And I was swimming around, trying to catch them. Only in my dream, it wasn't just a game. I wasn't Marco. In my dream, if I didn't catch these kids, they would be swept away by these rapids, and tossed over the side of this like two-hundred-foot waterfall, and fall screaming to their deaths. Seriously.

So I was swimming and swimming, snatching up kid after kid, and moving them to safety, only to have them get caught in the current and get sucked away from me again. It was horrible. Kids were slipping past my fingertips, plunging to their deaths. And they weren't shouting "Polo" anymore, either. They were screaming my name. They were screaming my name as they died.

"Jess. Jess. Jessica, wake up."

I opened my eyes. Special Agent Smith was looking down at me. I was lying in a deck chair by the pool, but something was wrong. I was the only one there. All the mothers and their kids had gone home. And the sun was almost down. Just a last few rays lit the pool deck. And it had gotten quite a few degrees cooler outside.

"You fell asleep," Special Agent Smith said. "It looked like you were having a pretty bad dream. Are you okay?"

I said, "Yeah." I sat up.

Special Agent Smith handed me my T-shirt. "Ooo," she said, wincing. "You're all burnt. We should have gotten you some sunscreen."

I looked down at myself. I was the color of a mulberry.

"It'll turn to tan by tomorrow," I said.

"That must have been some dream. Do you want to tell me about it?"

"Not particularly."

After that, I went to my room and practiced my flute. I did the usual warm-up, then I practiced the piece Karen Sue Hanky had declared she was going to challenge me on. It was so damned easy, I started doing some improv, adding some trills here and there to jazz it up a little. When I got through, you could hardly recognize it was the same song. It sounded much better.

Poor Karen Sue. She's going to be stuck in fourth chair forever.

Then I did a little Billy Joel—"Big Shot," in honor of Douglas. He won't admit it, but it's his favorite.

I was cleaning my flute when someone tapped on the door. "Come in," I said, hoping it was room service. I was starved.

It wasn't, though. Room service, I mean. It was that colonel guy I'd met at the beginning of the day. Special Agents Smith and Johnson were with him, along with the nervous little doctor who'd made me look at all those pictures of middle-aged guys. He looked, for some reason, more nervous than ever.

"Hi," I said, when they'd all come in and were standing around, staring down at my flute like it was an AK-47 I was assembling or something. "Is it time for dinner?"

"Sure," Special Agent Johnson said. "Just let us know what you want."

I thought about it. Why not, I thought, ask for the best? "Surf and turf would be good," I said.

"Done," the colonel said, and he nodded at Special Agent Smith. She took out her cell phone and punched some numbers, then spoke softly into it. God, I thought. How sexist. Here Special Agent Smith is, an FBI agent, who put herself through school and is a distinguished expert markswoman and all, and she still has to take the food orders.

Remind me not to be an FBI agent when I grow up.

"Now," the colonel said. "I was told you had a little nap today."

I was bending over, putting the different pieces of my flute in their individual sections in the velvet-lined case. But something in the colonel's voice made me look up at him.

He, like all the guys in the photos, was middle-aged, and he was white. He had what they call in the books we are forced to read in English class "ruddy features," meaning he looked as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. Not tan, like me, but sun-damaged and wrinkly. He had bright blue eyes, however. He squinted down at me and went, "You wouldn't, during your little nap, happen to have dreamed about any of those men whose photos you saw today in Dr. Leonard's office, now, did you, Miss Mastriani?"

I blinked. What was going on here?

I looked at Special Agent Smith. She had hung up her cell phone, and now she looked at me expectantly.

"You remember, Jessica," she said. "You told me you had a bad dream."

"Yeah," I said, slowly. I think I was starting to catch on. "So?"

"So I mentioned it to Colonel Jenkins," Special Agent Smith said. "And he was just wondering if you happened to dream about any of the men whose photos you saw this afternoon."

I said, "No."

Dr. Leonard nodded and said to the colonel, "It's just as we suspected. REM-stage sleep is necessary for the phenomenon to occur, Colonel. Nappers rarely achieve the level of deep sleep necessary for REM."

Colonel Jenkins frowned down at me. "So you think tomorrow morning then, Leonard?" he rumbled. He looked very forbidding in his uniform, with all its medals and pins. He must, I thought, have fought in some pretty important battles.

"Oh, definitely, sir," Dr. Leonard said. Then he looked down at me and went, in his nervous little voice, "You tend only to have these, er, dreams about the missing children after a complete night of rest, am I correct, Miss Mastriani?"

I went, "Uh. Yeah. I mean, yes."

Dr. Leonard nodded. "Then we should check back with her tomorrow morning, sir."

Colonel Jenkins said, "I don't like it," so loudly that I jumped. "Smith?"

"Sir?" Special Agent Smith snapped to attention.

"Bring the photos," he said. "Bring them for her to look at tonight, before she goes to sleep. So they'll be fresh in her memory."

"Yes, sir," Special Agent Smith said. Then she got back on the cell phone and started murmuring things into it again.

Colonel Jenkins looked down at me. "We have high hopes for you, young lady," he told me.

I went, "You do?"

"We do, indeed. There are hundreds of men—traitors to this great nation—who have been running from the law for far too long. But now that we have you, they don't stand a chance. Do they?"

I didn't know what to say.

"Do they?" he barked.

I jumped and said, "No, sir."

Colonel Jenkins seemed to like the sound of that. He left, along with Dr. Leonard and Special Agents Smith and Johnson. A little while later, this guy in a chef's uniform delivered shrimp scampi and a perfectly grilled steak to my door.

I wasn't fooled. There may not have been a soda fountain in my room, but I knew what was going on. The book of photos arrived shortly after the food did. I flipped through it while I ate, just for the hell of it. Traitors, Colonel Jenkins had said. Were these men spies? Murderers? What? Some of them looked pretty scary. Others didn't.

What if they weren't murderers or spies? What if they were just people who, like Sean, had gotten into some trouble through no fault of their own? Was it really my responsibility to find them?

I didn't know. I thought I'd better talk to somebody who might.

So I called my house. My mom answered. She told me that Dougie had been released from the hospital, and that he was doing so much better now that he was back in his own room and "all the excitement had died down."

All the excitement, I knew, had moved to the gates outside of Crane, where all the news vans and stuff had gone as soon as they learned I'd been brought there. Even so, my mom kept complaining about how the whole thing had been triggered by Dad making Dougie work in the restaurant, until finally I couldn't stand it anymore, and I said, "That's bullshit, Mom, it was because of me and all the reporters," and then she got mad at me for swearing, so I hung up without having talked to my dad—which was who I'd called to talk to in the first place.

To cheer myself up, I started flipping around the channels on my big TV. I watched The Simpsons, and then a movie about some boys who do a beauty makeover on this girl who looked just fine before they got their mitts on her. This movie was so boring—although Ruth would have liked it, because of the beauty makeover thing—that I started flipping again. . . .

And then froze when I got to CNN …

Because they were showing a picture of me.

It wasn't my dorky school picture. It was a picture one of the reporters must have taken when I wasn't looking. In the picture, I was laughing. I wondered what I'd been laughing at. I couldn't remember laughing too much these past few days.

Then my picture was replaced by another one I recognized. Sean. A picture of Sean Patrick O'Hanahan, looking much as I'd last seen him, baseball cap turned around backwards, his freckles standing out starkly from his face.

I turned up the volume.

"—irony is that the boy appears to be missing again," the reporter said. "Authorities say Sean disappeared from his father's Chicago home yesterday before dawn, and he hasn't been seen, or heard from, since. It is believed that the boy left of his own volition, and that he is heading back to Paoli, Indiana, where his mother is being held without bail on charges of kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a minor—"

Oh, my God. They'd arrested Sean's mom. They'd arrested Sean's mom, because of me. Because of what I'd done.

And now the kid was on the lam. And it was all my fault. I'd been lounging around a pool while Sean was God knew where, going through God knew what, trying to get back to his incarcerated mother. And just what, I wondered, did he think he was going to do when he got back to Paoli? Bust her out of jail?

The kid was alone and hopeless, because of me.

Well, all that was going to change, I decided, switching off the TV. He may have been alone for now, but come tomorrow, he wouldn't be. Want to know why?

Because I was going to find him again.

I had done it once. I could do it again.

And this time, I was going to do it right.

C H A P T E R

15

When they came for me the next morning, I was already gone.

Oh, don't get your panties in a wad. I left a note. It went like this:

To Whom It May Concern,

I had to run out to do an errand. I'll be right back.

Sincerely,

Jessica Mastriani

I mean, I didn't want anyone to worry.

What happened was, I woke up early. And when I woke up, I knew where Sean was. Again.

So I showered and got dressed, and then I went out into the hallway, down some stairs, and out a door.

No one tried to stop me. No one was even around, except some soldiers, who were practicing drills or something in the yard. They just ignored me.

Which suited me fine.

Yesterday, when I'd been coming back from the pool, I'd noticed a little minibus that had pulled up to a stop outside the base's family housing units, where the officers with spouses and children lived. I walked over there now. Again, nobody tried to stop me. After all, it wasn't like I was a prisoner, or anything.

The minibus, the people at the stop said, went into the nearest town, where I'd bought my swimsuit and Sony PlayStation … and where I happened to know there was a bus station.

So I waited with all the other people, and when the minibus finally pulled up, I got on it. It chugged away, right in front of all the news vans and reporters and stuff. It rolled right along past them and the soldiers guarding the entrance to the base, keeping the reporters out.

And as simple as that, I left Crane Military Base.

The town outside of Crane isn't exactly this booming metropolis, but I still had trouble finding the bus station. I had to ask three people. First the minibus driver, who gave me the lamest directions on earth, then the kid behind the cash register of a convenience mart, and finally an old guy sitting outside a barber shop. In the end, I located it thanks to the fact that there was a bus sitting outside of it.

I bought my round-trip ticket—seventeen dollars—with the money my dad had given me before he'd left. "In case of an emergency," he'd said, and slipped me a hundred bucks.

Well, this was an emergency. Sort of.

I had breakfast at the bus stop. I got two chocolate fudge Pop-Tarts and a Sprite from the vending machines. Another dollar seventy-five.

I figured I might be bored during my ride, so I bought a book to read. It was the same book I'd noticed in Rob's back pocket the last time I'd seen him. I thought reading the same book might somehow bring us closer together.

Okay, I admit it: that's not true. It was the only book on the rack that looked the least bit interesting.

My bus pulled up at nine o'clock. I was the only person who got on it. I got a window seat. Have you ever noticed that things always look better when you look at them out of one of those tinted bus windows? I'm serious. Then you get off the bus and everything's all bright and you can see the dirt and you just think, "Ugh."

That's what I think, anyway.

It took us more than an hour to get to Paoli. I spent most of it looking out the window. There's not a lot to see in Indiana, except cornfields. I'm sure that's true of most states, however.

When we got to Paoli, I got off the bus and went into the station. It was bigger than the one outside of Crane. There were rows of plastic chairs for people to sit in, and a bank of pay phones. Still, I could pick out the undercover cops easy. There was one sitting by the vending machines, and another sitting near the men's room. Every time a bus came in, they'd stand up and go outside, and pretend to be waiting for someone. Then, when Sean didn't get off the bus, they'd go back and sit down again.

I observed them for over an hour, so I know what I'm talking about. There was also an unmarked police car parked across the street from the bus station, and another one in front of the bowling alley, a little ways away.

When it came time for Sean's bus to arrive, I knew I had to set up a diversion so the cops wouldn't snatch Sean before I had a chance to talk to him. So this is what I did:

I started a fire.

I know. People could have been killed. But listen, I made sure no one was in there first. I just lit this match I got from a pack I found, and threw it into the trash can in the ladies' room, after first checking to make sure all the stalls were empty. Then I went and stood by the pay phones, like I was expecting a call. Nobody noticed me. Nobody ever notices me. Short girls like me, we don't exactly stand out, you know?

After a few minutes, the smoke was billowing out really good. One of the ticket sellers noticed it first. She went, "Oh, my God! Fire! Fire!" and pointed toward the ladies' room door.

The other clerks totally freaked out. They started screaming for everyone to get out. Somebody shouted, "Dial 911!" One of the undercover cops asked if there was a fire extinguisher anywhere. The other got on his cell phone. He was telling the guys waiting outside in the unmarked cars to radio the fire department.

And right then the eleven-fifteen from Indianapolis pulled up outside. I sauntered out to meet it.

Sean was the fifth person to get off. He had on a disguise—or what he thought was one, anyway. What he'd done was, he'd dyed his hair brown. Big deal. You could still see his freckles from a mile away. Plus he still had on that stupid Yankees cap. At least he'd tried to pull it down low over his face.

But, I'm sorry, a twelve-year-old kid, who was small for his age anyway, getting off a Greyhound by himself, in the middle of a school day? Talk about conspicuous.

Fortunately, my little fire was really plugging away. I don't know if you've ever smelled burning plastic trash can before, but let me tell you, it isn't pleasant. And the smoke? Pretty black. Everyone who got off the bus looked, in a startled way, toward the station. Thick, acrid smoke was really pouring out of it now. All the ticket-takers were standing around outside, talking in shrill voices. You could tell this was the most exciting thing that had happened in the Paoli bus station for a while. The undercover cops were rushing around, trying to make sure everybody had gotten out. And then the fire engines showed up, sirens on full blast.

While all this was going on, I stepped up to Sean, took him by the arm, and said, "Keep moving," and started steering him down this alley by the station, as fast as I could.

He didn't want to come with me at first. It was kind of hard to hear what he said, since the fire engine's siren was so loud. I shouted into his ear, "Well, if you'd prefer to go with them, they're over there waiting for you," and I guess he got the message, because he stopped struggling after that.

When we'd gotten far enough away from the station that the sound of the sirens could no longer drown out our voices, Sean snatched his arm out of my grasp and demanded, in a very rude voice, "What are you doing here?"

"Saving your butt," I said. "What were you thinking, coming back here? This is the first place anybody with brains would look for you, you know."

Sean's blue eyes flashed at me from beneath the brim of his baseball cap. "Yeah? Well, where else am I supposed to go? My mom's in the city lockup," he said. "Thanks to you."

"If you had leveled with me that day," I said, "instead of acting like such a little head-case, none of this would be happening."

"No," Sean shot back. "If you weren't a nark, none of this would be happening."

"Nark?" That got me mad. Everyone had been going on about what a wonderful "gift" I had. How it was a miracle, a blessing, blah, blah, blah.

No one had ever called me a nark.

Little brat, I thought. Why am I even wasting my time? I should just leave him here. . . .

But I couldn't. I knew I couldn't.

I walked on without saying a word. It wasn't very pleasant, the alley we were in. There were Dumpsters brimming with trash on either side of us, and broken glass beneath our feet. Even worse, in about five yards, the alley ended, and I could see there was a busy street up ahead. If I was going to make sure Sean wasn't caught, I had to keep him from being seen.

"Anyway," Sean said, in the same snotty voice, "if anybody with a brain knew I'd be coming here, how come none of them found me?"

"Because I'm the only one who knew which bus you'd be coming in on," I said.

"How'd you know that?"

I gave him a bored look. He said, in a very sarcastic way, "You dreamed I'd be on the eleven-fifteen from Indianapolis?"

"Hey. Nobody said my dreams were interesting."

"Well, so what was all that about back there? You said they were waiting for me. Who's they?"

"Bunch of undercover cops posted in the bus station, waiting for you. They must have suspected that was how you'd try to get here. By bus, I mean. I had to create a diversion."

His blue eyes grew wide. "You started that fire?"

"Yeah." We were almost to the street. I put my arm out and stopped him. "Look, we have to talk. Where can we go around here where we can … you know, blend?"

"I don't want to talk to you," he said. He sounded like he meant it, too.

"Yeah, well, you're going to. Somebody has to get you out of this mess."

"And you think you're going to do it?" he asked with a sneer.

"Like it or not, Junior," I said, "I'm all you've got."

That earned me an eye-roll. Well, it was progress, anyway.

We ended up going where everybody goes when they don't know where else to go.

That's right: the mall.

The mall in Paoli, Indiana, is no Mall of America, let me tell you. It was two stories, all right, but there were only about twenty stores, and the food court consisted of a Pizza Hut and an Orange Julius. Still, beggars can't be choosers. And since it was lunchtime, at least we weren't the only kids around. Apparently, the sole place in Paoli where it was possible to get a pitcher and a pie was the Pizza Hut in the mall, so the place was jammed with high school kids, trying to squeeze a meal into the fifty minutes they had before they had to get back to campus.

I told Sean to try to sit up tall in his seat. I was hoping he could pass, maybe, for a scrawny freshman.

And that I could pass for a loser who'd date a freshman.

"Whoa," I said, as I watched him attack his pizza. "Slow down. What, is that the first thing you've eaten all day?"

"Two days," he said, with his mouth full.

"What is wrong with you? You didn't think to steal any money from your dad before you took off?"

He said, chugging down a few swallows of Pepsi, "A credit card."

"Oh, a credit card. Smart. It's easy to buy stuff at McDonald's with a credit card."

"I just needed the bus ticket from Chicago," he said defensively.

"Oh, right." So that was how the cops knew he'd be there. "But no food."

"I forgot about food," he said. "Besides." He gave me this look. I can't really describe it. I guess it was the kind of look you would call reproachful. "I was too worried about my mom to eat."

I'll admit it. I fell for it. I got all weepy for him, and kicked myself for like the hundredth time.

Then I saw the size of the bite he took out of his last piece of pizza.

"Oh, cut the crap," I said. "I said I was sorry."

"No, you didn't."

"I didn't?" I blinked at him. "Okay, well, I'm sorry. That's why I'm here. I want to help you."

Sean shoved his empty plate at me. "Help me to another pizza," he said. "This time, no vegetables."

I sat there and watched him down a second individual pizza. I was only having a soda. I can't eat Pizza Hut. Not because it's gross or anything. I'm sure it's very good. Only we've never been allowed to eat pizza from anywhere but our own restaurants. Both my parents treat it like this huge betrayal if you even think about Little Caesar's, or Dominos, or whatever. It was a pie from Mastriani's, or nothing.

So I was having nothing. It's not easy, having parents in the restaurant business.

"So," I said, when Sean seemed well enough into the second pie for conversation. "What, exactly, were you planning on doing when you got here?"

He looked at me darkly. "What do you think?"

"Busting your mother out of jail? Oh, sure. Good plan."

His dark look turned into a glower. "You did it," he pointed out, and there was admiration in his voice. Grudging, but there just the same. "With the fire in the bus station. I could do something like that."

"Oh, yeah. And all the guards would come rushing outside, and leave all the jail cells open, and you could just sneak in and grab your mom and go."

"Well," he said. "I didn't say I actually had a plan. Yet. But I'll come up with something. I always do."

"Well," I said. "I think I have one."

He just looked at me. "One what?"

"A plan."

"Aw, Jesus," he said, and reached for his Pepsi.

"Hey," I said. "Don't swear."

He looked at me very sarcastically. "You do it."

"I do not. And, besides, I'm sixteen."

He rolled his eyes again. "Yeah, that makes you an adult, I guess. Do you even have a driver's license?"

I fiddled with my straw. He had me there. I had my learner's permit, of course, but I had sort of accidentally flunked my first try at the driving test. It wasn't my fault, of course. Something weird seems to happen when I get behind a wheel. It all goes back to that speed thing. If no one else is on the road, why should you only go thirty-five?

"Not yet," I said. "But I'm working on it."

"Jesus." Sean flopped his eighty-pound body against the back of the booth. "Look, you are not exactly trustworthy, you know? You busted me once already, remember?"

"That was a mistake," I said. "I said I was sorry. I bought you pizza. I told you I have a plan to make things right again. What more do you want?"

"What more do I want?" Sean leaned forward so that the cheerleaders at the next table wouldn't overhear him. "What I want is for things to go back the way they were before you came along and severely messed them up."

"Oh, yeah? Well, no offense, Sean, but I don't think things were exactly swell before. I mean, what's going to happen when one of your teachers, or your friends' moms, or your Boy Scout leader, goes to the grocery store and sees your face on the back of a milk carton, huh? Are you and your mom going to pick up and run every time someone recognizes you? Are the two of you going to keep running until you're eighteen? Is that the plan?"

Sean eyed me angrily from beneath the brim of his baseball cap. "What else are we supposed to do?" he demanded. "You don't know … My dad, he's got friends. That's why the judge ruled the way he did. My dad got his friends to put the squeeze on the guy. He knew exactly what kind of guy my dad is. But he awarded him custody anyway. My mom didn't have a chance. So, yeah, we'll keep running. No one can help us."

"You're wrong," I said. "I can."

Sean leaned forward and said, very deliberately, "You … can't … even … drive."

"I know that. But I can help you. Listen to me. My best friend's dad is a lawyer, a good one. Once, when I was over at their house, I heard him talking about this case where a kid sued to be emancipated—"

"This," Sean said, shoving his empty plate away, "is bullshit. I don't know why I'm even listening to you."

"Because I'm all you've got. Now, listen—"

"No," Sean said, shaking his head. "Don't you get it? I've heard about you."

I blinked at him. "What are you talking about?"

"I saw on the news how they've got you up at that place, that military base."

"Yeah? So?"

"You're so stupid," Sean said. "You don't know anything. I bet you don't even know why they got you there. Do you?"

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. "Sure, I do. They're doing some experiments on me. You know, to figure out how it is I know where people like you are. That's all."

"That isn't all. They've got you lookin' for people, don't they?"

I thought about those photos, all those middle-aged men it had seemed so important to the colonel for me to look at.

"May be …"

"So, don't you get it? You're not helping anybody. You don't know who those guys were. Some of those people they want you to find might be on the run for a reason, like me and my mom. Some of them might actually be innocent. And you're servin' 'em up to the cops like big old plates of chocolate-glazed donuts."

I don't like to hear the police disparaged, especially by someone so young. After all, the police provide a vital service for our society, for little pay and even less glory. I said, my voice sounding lame even to my own ears, "I am sure that if someone is wanted by the U.S. Government, he must be guilty of something. . . ."

But the truth was, he wasn't saying anything I hadn't already thought of myself. For some reason, he reminded me of my dream. Marco. Polo. Marco. Polo. So many people, so many voices.

And I couldn't reach a single one of them.

Sean's face was white beneath his freckles. "What about The Fugitive, huh? He hadn't done anything. It was that one-armed man. For all you know, one of those people they want you to find for them might be just like Harrison Ford in that movie. And you're Tommy Lee Jones." He shook his head disgustedly. "You really are a nark, you know that?"

Nark? Me? I wanted to wring the little twerp's neck. I was totally regretting having come after him like this.

Marco.

"Nark's not even the word for it," he said. "You know what you are? A dolphin."

I gaped at him. Was he kidding? Dolphins were friendly, intelligent animals. If he was trying to insult me, he'd have to try a little harder.

"You know what the government used to do?" Sean was on a roll. "They used to train dolphins to swim up to boats and tap them with their noses. Then, when World War I started, they strapped bombs to the dolphins' backs, and made them swim up to enemy boats and touch them with their noses. But this time when they did it, what do you think happened? The bombs went off, and the enemy ships—and the dolphins—were blown to smithereens. Oh, sure, everybody says, 'Think how many people would have been killed by that boat, if it hadn't been blown up. The dolphin gave its life for a worthy cause.' But I bet the dolphin didn't feel that way. The dolphin didn't start the war. The dolphin had nothing to do with it."

He narrowed his eyes at me. "Do you know what, Jess?" he said. "You're the dolphin now. And it's just a matter of time before they blow you up."

I narrowed my eyes right back at him, but I had to admit, the story about the dolphins gave me the chills.

Polo.

"I'm no dolphin," I said. I was beginning to regret having found Sean Patrick O'Hanahan. And I definitely regretted having bought him two individual pizzas and a large Pepsi.

Unfortunately, though, the more I thought about it, sitting there in the restaurant, with the Paoli High cheerleaders giggling in the next booth, and the mall Muzac playing softly around us, the more I realized that was exactly what I was … or rather, what I'd almost let myself become. I'll be right back. That's what I'd said in the note I'd left that morning. Had I really meant that? Had I really meant to come back?

Or had I actually meant hasta la vista, baby, this tuna is dolphin-free?

Marco.

"Look," I said to Sean. "We aren't here to discuss my problems. We're here to discuss yours."

He eyed me. "Fine," he said. "What am I supposed to do?"

"In the first place," I said, "stop using your dad's credit card. Here." I dug around in my pocket, then pushed what was left of my dad's hundred dollars at him. "Take this. Then we're going to get you into a cab."

"A cab?"

"Yeah, a cab. You can't go back to the bus station, and we've got to get you out of Paoli. I want you to go to my school—" I'd reached into my backpack and brought out a pen. I was scrawling the address of Ernest Pyle High School on a Pizza Hut napkin. "Ask for Mr. Goodhart. Tell him I sent you. He'll help you. Tell him he needs to call Ruth's dad, Mr. Abramowitz. Here, I'm writing it down for you. Quit grabbing my hand, I'm writing it down for you."

But Sean kept on pawing at my hand. I didn't know what the kid wanted. The pen? What did he want the pen for?

"Cool it, would you?" I said, looking up at him. "I'm writing as fast as I can."

But then I got a look at his face. He wasn't even looking at me. He was looking just past me, at the door to the restaurant.

I turned around, just in time to make eye contact with Colonel Jenkins. When he saw me, his big hands balled up into fists, and I was reminded, inexplicably, of Coach Albright.

And that wasn't all. Marching behind him was a whole pack of meaty-fisted guys in army fatigues and crew cuts, who just happened to be armed.

Polo.

"Shit," I said.

The colonel nodded at me. "There she is," he said.

Sean may only have been twelve, but he sure wasn't stupid. He whispered, "Run!"

And even though he was only twelve, that sounded like pretty good advice to me.

C H A P T E R

16

Colonel Jenkins and his men were blocking the doorway, but that was okay. There was a side door that had the word Exit over it. We dove through it, and found ourselves right in front of JCPenney.

"Wait," I said to Sean as he was preparing to flee. I had had the presence of mind to hang on to the napkin I'd written on. I reached out and grabbed him by his shirt collar, then shoved the napkin in the front pocket of his jeans. He looked a little surprised.

"Now go," I said, and shoved him.

We split up. We didn't discuss it or anything. It just happened. Sean took off toward the Photo Hut. I headed for the escalators.

Back when I'd first started having to defend Douglas at school, and I hadn't known too much about fighting, my dad had taken me aside and given me a few pointers. One of the best pieces of advice he gave me—besides showing me how to hit—was that if I ever found myself in a situation where I was outnumbered, the best thing to do was run. And, specifically, run downhill. Never, my father said, go uphill—or stairs, or whatever—during a chase. Because if you go up, and the people after you block the only way down, you have no way of getting out—except by jumping.

But I had Sean to think about. Seriously. Thanks to me, there were armed men chasing us, for Christ's sake. I was not going to let them get hold of a little twelve-year-old kid, a kid who'd only gotten involved in this in the first place through my own fault.

So I knew that I was going to have to let myself get caught in the end … but, in the meantime, I had to make this chase last as long as possible, in order to give Sean a solid chance at escaping. I was going to have to create another diversion. . . .

And so I headed for those escalators.

And, by God, they followed me right up them.

It was still lunchtime so, except for the food court, the mall wasn't that crowded. But what few people there were I managed to weave around pretty good. The soldiers chasing after me weren't quite so nimble: I heard people screaming as they tried to get out of the way, and things like a vending cart called the Earring Tree, which I whizzed by with no problem, crashed to the floor as the soldiers stumbled into it.

I knew better than to dive into any stores in my efforts to ditch these guys. They'd just corner me there. I kept to the main corridor, which had plenty of stuff to dodge around—a big fountain, cookie vendors, and, best of all, a giant traveling diorama, featuring life-size robotic dinosaurs, meant to teach kids and their parents about prehistoric earth.

I am not kidding. Well, okay, maybe about the life-size part. The tallest dinosaur was only about twenty feet tall, and that was the T. Rex. But they were all crowded into this hundred-foot space, jammed in there with fake ferns and palm trees and jungly-type stuff. Weird jungle sounds, like shrieking monkeys and birds, played over these speakers designed to look like rocks. There was even, in one area, a volcano from which actual fake lava was spewing—or made to look like it was spewing, anyway.

I looked behind me. My pursuers had untangled themselves from the mess by the Earring Tree, and were now gaining on me. I glanced to my side, over the balustrade that looked out across the main floor, a story below me. I saw Sean dodging past Baskin-Robbins, Colonel Jenkins close at his heels.

"Hey," I yelled.

Heads everywhere whipped around as people turned to stare at me, including Colonel Jenkins.

"Here I am!" I shouted. "Your new dolphin! Come and get me!"

Colonel Jenkins, as I had hoped, stopped chasing Sean and headed for the escalator.

I, of course, headed for the dinosaur diorama.

I hurdled across the velvet rope separating the display from the rest of the mall, followed closely by a half dozen of Colonel Jenkins's men. As my sneakered feet sank into the brown foamy stuff they'd sprayed on the mall floor to look like dirt, I was assaulted by the sound of jungle drums—apparently the makers of the diorama were unaware that dinosaurs predated man (and drums) by several hundred thousand years. There was a lonely wail, which sounded mysteriously like a peacock to me. Then a roar—distinctly lion—and steam sprayed from the T. Rex's nostrils, two dozen feet above my head.

I dodged behind a couple of velociraptors, who were feasting on the bloody carcass of a saber-toothed tiger. No good. Jenkins's men were on my heels. I decided to really screw with them, and leapt into the shallow water they'd set up to look like a lake, out of which both the fake volcano and the head of a brachiosaurus reared. I sank into the artificially blue water, the water hitting me about mid-shin, soaking my sneakers and the bottoms of my jeans.

Then I started wading.

Jenkins's men, apparently thinking that catching me was not exactly worth getting their feet wet, halted on the rim of the artificial lake.

Okay, so I knew they were going to catch me eventually. I mean, come on. Even if I got out of the mall, where was I going to go? Home?

Not.

But I didn't have to make it easy on them. So, when I saw them elbow each other and split up to opposite sides of the lake, ready to catch me wherever I tried to come ashore, I did the only thing I could think of:

I climbed the volcano.

Okay, my sneakers were kind of squelchy. And okay, the volcano wasn't all that sturdy, and groaned beneath my weight. But hey, I had to do something.

And when I reached the top of the volcano, it was just in time for it to start spewing again. I stood up there—some fifteen feet in the air—and looked down at everyone, as all around me steam hissed out, and the lava, made of scarlet plastic with a bunch of little lights inside it, started to glow. The diorama's bogus sound track made a noise like the earth splitting, and then a thunderous rumble shook the so-called lake.

"Be careful!" shouted an old lady in jogging shoes, who'd watched from the velvet rope as I'd climbed.

"Don't slip in those wet shoes, dear," cried her friend.

The soldiers looked at them almost as disgustedly as I did.

From my perch, I could see down to the mall's main floor. As I watched, another six soldiers stormed by—and as soon as they passed, Sean darted out from between some racks of clothes in the Gap and headed, a streak of blue jeans and badly dyed brown hair, toward the Cineplex.

I knew a secondary diversion was necessary. So I teetered on the rim of the volcano and shouted, "Don't come any closer, or I'll jump!"

Both the old ladies gasped. The soldiers looked more disgusted than ever. In the first place, they'd clearly had no intention of coming any closer. In the second, even if I did jump, that fall wouldn't exactly be fatal: I wasn't all that high up.

Still, I suppose it looked very dramatic. There I was, this young virgin (unfortunately), poised on the edge of a volcano. Too bad my hair was so short, and I wasn't dressed in flowing white. Jeans spoiled the effect, in my opinion.

Then Colonel Jenkins strode up, pointing at me and bleating at his soldiers in a manner that more than ever put me in mind of Coach Albright.

"What's she doin' up there?" he demanded. "Get her down right now."

I glanced down at the Cineplex. I could still see Sean, cowering behind a life-size cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The soldiers were milling around, trying to figure out where he'd disappeared to.

Hoping to get their attention long enough for Sean to be able to make another run for it, I shouted, "I really mean it! If anyone comes near me, I'll do it! I'll jump!"

Bingo. The soldiers looked up. Sean slithered out from behind the cardboard Arnold and made a break for the concession stand.

"All right, Miss Mastriani," Colonel Albright called out to me. "Fun's over. You come down here right now before you hurt yourself."

"No," I said.

Colonel Jenkins sighed. Then he flicked a finger, and four of his men climbed over the velvet rope and began wading toward me.

"Get back," I cried warningly. Sean, I could see, had only to duck past the ticket-taker, and he'd be in. "I mean it!"

"Miss Mastriani," Colonel Jenkins said, in a tone of voice that suggested to me that he was trying very hard to be reasonable. "Have we done something to offend you? Have you been mistreated in any way since your father left you in our care?"

"No," I said. The soldiers were coming closer.

"Isn't it true, in fact, that Dr. Shifton and Special Agent Smith and everyone else at Crane have gone out of their way to make you feel comfortable and welcome?"

"Yes," I said. Below, the ticket-taker caught Sean trying to sneak into the theater. She grabbed him by his shirt collar, and said something I couldn't hear.

"Well, then, let's be rational. You come on back to Crane, and we'll talk this out."

The ticket-taker raised her voice. The six soldiers watching me started to turn their heads, distracted by the commotion at the Cineplex.

I looked at the two old ladies. "Call the police," I shouted. "I'm about to be taken against my will back to Crane Military Base."

"Crane," the old lady in the jogging shoes said. "Oh, but that's closed."

"Goddammit," Colonel Jenkins said, apparently forgetting his audience. "Come down from there right now, or I'll pull you down myself!"

Both of the old ladies gasped. But the soldiers had spied Sean. They began jogging toward him.

And the soldiers Colonel Jenkins had sicced on me were almost at the base of my volcano.

"Oh, nuts," I said as I watched Sean get nabbed. That was it. It was over.

But there was no reason to make it easy on them.

"Let the kid go," I threatened, "or I'll jump!"

"Don't do it, honey," one of the old ladies shouted. They had been joined now by some of the high school kids, who'd come out to see what all the commotion was.

The high school kids yelled at me to jump.

I looked beneath me, down into the center of the volcano. I could see a circle of bare mall floor there, ringed by bars of metal scaffolding, which was holding the volcano up. They'd drag me out, of course. But it would take them a while.

I looked up again. Colonel Jenkins's men were still struggling to climb up the side of the volcano. They were hampered by the fact that their wet boots couldn't gain much traction on the slick plastic surface.

Down below, Sean was being dragged, kicking and screaming, from the Cineplex.

I unfolded my arms, perching on the edge of the volcano.

"No!" Colonel Jenkins cried.

But it was too late. I jumped.

C H A P T E R

17

It took them almost half an hour to get me out. The hole in the top of the volcano wasn't that wide. None of the soldiers, let alone Colonel Jenkins, could reach me through it. All my jumping into it accomplished was that it made Colonel Jenkins really mad.

It was worth it.

I sat down there, pretty much comfortably, while they tried to figure out ways to get to me. Finally, someone went over to Sears and bought a power saw, and they cut a big hole in the side of the volcano. They dragged me out, and the people who'd stuck around to watch applauded, like it had all been some big stunt for their benefit.

Special Agents Johnson and Smith were there when they finally dragged me out. They both acted like it was this big personal affront, my taking off the way I had. I did my best to defend myself.

"But I left a note," I insisted as we took off in the carefully nondescript black government vehicle (with tinted windows) that was going to drive us back to Crane, Special Agents Johnson and Smith in the front seat, Sean and I in the back.

"Yes," Special Agent Smith said, "but you took several things with you that led us to believe you weren't coming back."

I demanded to know what those things were. In reply, Special Agent Smith held up the book of photos Colonel Jenkins had left in my room, in hopes of my discovering the whereabouts of a few of its subjects. She'd fished it out of my backpack, which they'd confiscated from me as soon as they'd dug me out of the volcano.

"I was just going to show that to somebody," I said, truthfully. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I'd had this idea—way before Sean had ever called me a dolphin—of taking the book of photos to my brother Michael. I had hoped that, with all his computer skills, he might have been able to find out who the men in it were, using the Internet, or something. I wanted to make sure they were really wanted criminals and not innocent lawyers, like Will Smith in Enemy of the State, or something.

Dumb idea, maybe, but then, I'd learned a lesson or two since that morning I'd woken up knowing where Sean was.

"I was going to bring it back," I said.

"Were you?" Special Agent Smith turned to look at me. She seemed particularly disappointed. You could tell she no longer thought I'd be good Bureau material. "If you were planning on coming back, then why'd you take this with you?"

And she pulled my flute, in its wooden case, from my backpack, which she had with her in the front seat.

She had me there, and she knew it.

"When I saw this was missing," she said, illustrating some of the cognitive abilities that had earned her special agent status, "I knew you weren't planning on returning, despite your note and the fact that that bus ticket you bought was for a round-trip."

"Is that how you figured out I was in Paoli?" I asked. I was genuinely interested in learning what my mistakes had been. You know, just in case there was a next time. "The bus ticket?"

"Yes. Clerk at the bus station back by Crane recognized you." Special Agent Johnson, much to my disappointment, drove at exactly the speed limit. It was sickening. All these semis were passing us. With the exception of the band of cars behind us, carrying Colonel Jenkins and his men, ours was the slowest car on the highway. "You aren't exactly an anonymous citizen anymore, Miss Mastriani. Not when you've had your photo on the cover of Time magazine."

"Oh," I said. I nodded toward the convoy behind us. "All that firepower, just for little ol' me?"

"You were carrying highly classified data," Special Agent Johnson said, indicating the book of photos. "We just wanted to make sure we got it back."

"But now that you have it back," I said, "you're going to let me go, right?"

"That isn't up to us to decide," Special Agent Johnson said.

"Well, who's it up to?"

"Our superiors."

"The smoking man?"

The agents looked at one another. "Who?" Special Agent Johnson asked.

"Never mind," I said. "Look, can you just tell your superiors that I quit?"

Special Agent Smith looked back at me. She was wearing diamond stud earrings today.

"Jess," she said, "you can't quit."

"Why not?"

"Because you have an extraordinary gift. You have a responsibility to share it with the world." Special Agent Smith shook her head. "I just don't understand where all of this is coming from," she said. "You seemed perfectly happy yesterday, Jess. Why is it that, suddenly, you want to quit?"

I shrugged. Claire Lippman would have been jealous of my acting, I swear. "I guess I'm just homesick."

"Hmmm," Special Agent Johnson said. "I thought the whole reason you changed your mind about coming up here was that you were concerned about your family, that you felt they were being tormented by the media. I thought you felt that leaving them was the only way to give them back some of the privacy they so craved."

I swallowed. "Yeah," I said. "But that was before I got so homesick."

Special Agent Smith shook her head. "Your brother, Douglas. I think they only just released him from the hospital. Seems like, if you went back now, he might just end up there again. All those cameras, flashbulbs going off everywhere—that really shook him up."

That was a low blow. My eyes filled up with tears, and I began seriously to consider flinging myself out the car door—we were certainly going slowly enough that I wouldn't be badly hurt—and making a run for it.

The only problem was that the doors were locked, and the button to unlock them didn't work. The controls were all up in the front seat, by Special Agent Johnson.

And, anyway, I had Sean to think of.

Special Agent Smith was still going on about my responsibility to the world, now that I had this extraordinary gift.

"So I'm supposed to help evil men be brought to justice?" I asked, just to make sure I was clear on things.

"Well, yes," Special Agent Smith said. "And reunite people like Sean here with their loved ones."

Sean and I exchanged glances.

"Hello," Sean said. "Don't you guys read the papers? My dad's a jerk."

"You never really got a chance to know him, now, did you, Sean?" Special Agent Smith said in a soothing voice. "I understand your mother took you from him when you were only six."

"Yeah," Sean said. "Because he'd broken my arm when I didn't put all my toys away one night."

"Jeez," I said, looking at Sean. "Who's your dad, anyway? Darth Vader?"

Sean nodded. "Only not as nice."

"Oh, good job," I said to Special Agents Johnson and Smith. "You two must be real proud of yourselves, reuniting this little boy with a dark lord of the Sith."

"Hey," Sean said, looking appalled. "I'm not little."

"Mr. O'Hanahan," Special Agent Smith said in a tight little voice, "has been declared a fit parent and Sean's rightful guardian by the Illinois state court."

"It used to be legal to have slaves in Illinois, too," Sean said. "But that didn't make it right."

"Courts make mistakes," I said.

"Big ones," Sean said.

I was the only one in the car, I was pretty sure, who heard his voice shake. I reached out and took his hand. I held it the rest of the way, too, even though it got a little sweaty. Hey, the whole thing was my fault, right? What else was I supposed to do?

They split us up when we got to Crane. Sean had already given everyone the slip once, and I guess they wanted to make extra sure he didn't do it again, so, since his dad wasn't due to pick him up until sometime the next day, they locked him in the infirmary.

I'm not kidding.

I suppose they picked the infirmary, and not, say, the brig, where I think they locked naughty soldiers, because later, they could say he wasn't being held against his will at all … after all, they'd given him the run of the infirmary, hadn't they? They'd probably say they locked him in for his own safety.

But even though it wasn't exactly a jail cell, it might as well have been. The windows—there were four of them—were all barred from the outside, I guess to keep people from breaking in and stealing drugs, since the infirmary was on the first floor. And I happened to know, from having been in there the day before for my physical, that all the cabinets with the cool stuff in them, like stethoscopes and hypodermic needles, were locked, and the magazines and stuff were way out of date. Sean wasn't going to have much to keep his mind off his dad's impending arrival.

Me, they locked back into my old room. Seriously. I was right back where I'd started from that morning, with one difference: the door was locked from the outside, and the phone, strangely enough, no longer worked.

I don't know what they thought I was going to do—call the police or something?

"Officer, officer, I'm being held against my will at Crane Military Base!"

"Crane Military Base? What are you talking about? That place closed down years ago!"

No phone privileges for me. And no more trips to the pool, either. My door was very firmly locked.

Marco Polo is locked down for the night. Repeat. Marco Polo is locked down.

Or so they must have thought. But here's the thing:

When you take a kid—who is basically a good kid, but maybe a little quick with her fists—and you make her sit for an hour every day after school with a lot of not-so-good kids, even if she isn't allowed to talk to them during that hour, the fact is, she's going to pick up some things.

And maybe the things she's going to pick up are the kind of things you don't necessarily want a good kid to know. Like, for instance, how to start a really smoky fire in a bus station ladies' room.

Or how to pick a lock. It's pretty easy, actually, depending on the lock. The one to my room wasn't very tough. I managed to do it with the ink cartridge from a ballpoint pen.

Look, you just pick these things up, all right?

They caught me right away. Boy, was Colonel Jenkins mad. But not as mad as Special Agent Johnson. He'd been viewing me as a thorn in his side since the day I'd broken his last partner's nose. You could tell I'd really done it this time.

Which was why they threw the book at me. They'd really had it. They intended to shut me up for good this time.

Dr. Shifton did some pleading on my behalf, I overheard her insisting that I obviously have issues with authority figures, and that they were going about this all wrong. I would come around, she said, when they made it seem like it was my idea.

Colonel Jenkins didn't like the sound of that. He went, "Dammit, Helen, she knows the location of every single one of those men whose photos we showed her. I can see it in her eyes. What are we supposed to do, just wait around until she's in the mood to tell us?"

"Yes," Dr. Shifton said. "That's exactly what we do."

I liked Dr. Shifton for that. And, anyway, I did not know where every single one of those men were.

Just most of them.

I happened to overhear all this because Dr. Shifton's office is right next to the infirmary, and that's where they put me after I escaped that second time: in the infirmary, with Sean. . . .

Exactly as I'd wanted them to.

Don't start thinking that I had any sort of plan or anything. I totally didn't. I just figured the kid needed me, is all.

That he didn't happen to agree is really beside the point.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, looking up from the bed he was stretched out on. His tone implied he was not pleased to see me.

"Slumming," I said.

"My dad's going to be here first thing in the morning, they said." His face was pinched and white. Well, except for the freckles. "He couldn't make it tonight because of some board meeting. But he gets a police escort tomorrow morning, as soon as he's ready to leave." He shook his head. "That's my dad. Work always comes first. And if you get in the way of that, look out."

I said, gently, "Sean, I said I was going to make it up to you, and I meant it."

Sean looked pointedly at the locked door. "And how are you going to do that?"

"I don't know," I said. "But I will. I swear it."

Sean just shook his head. "Sure," he said. "Sure you will, Jess."

The fact that he didn't believe me just made me more determined.

Hours slid by, and no one came near the infirmary—not even Dr. Shifton. We passed the time trying to figure out ways to escape, listening to talk radio, and doing old People magazine crosswords.

Finally, around six o'clock, the door opened, and Special Agent Smith came in, holding a couple of McDonald's bags. I guess my days of surf and turf were over. I didn't care, though. The smell of those fries set my stomach, which I hadn't noticed up until then was quite empty, rumbling noisily.

"Hi," Special Agent Smith said, with a rueful smile. "I brought you guys dinner. You guys okay?"

"Except for the fact that our constitutional rights are being violated," I said, "we're fine." Special Agent Smith's smile went from rueful to forced. She spread our dinner out on one of the beds: double cheeseburger meals. Not my favorite, but at least she'd super-sized it.

Sean practically inhaled his first burger. I admit to stuffing far more fries into my mouth than was probably good for me. As I stuffed, Special Agent Smith tried her hand at reasoning with me. I guess Dr. Shifton had been coaching her.

"You have a really special gift, Jess," she said. She was practically ignoring Sean. "And it would be a shame to waste it. We need your help so desperately. Don't you want to make this world a safer, better place for kids like yourself?"

"Sure," I said, swallowing. "But I don't want to be a dolphin, either."

Special Agent Smith knit her pretty brow. "A what?"

I told her about the dolphins, while Sean looked on, silently chewing. I'd given him one of my cheeseburgers, but even after three of them, he didn't seem satisfied. He could put away an alarming amount of food for such a small boy.

Special Agent Smith shook her head, still looking perplexed. "I never heard that one before. I know they used German shepherds for similar missions in World War I—"

"German shepherds, dolphins, whatever." I stuck out my chin. "I don't want to be used."

"Jess," Special Agent Smith said. "Your gift—"

"Don't," I said, holding up a single hand. "Seriously. Don't say it. I don't want to hear 'about it anymore. This 'gift' you keep talking about has caused me nothing but trouble. It sent my brother over the edge, when he'd been doing really well, and it put this little boy's mother in jail—"

"Hey," Sean said indignantly. I'd forgotten about his objections to my use of the word "little" as it related to him.

"Jess." Special Agent Smith balled up the empty bags from my meal. "Be reasonable. It's very sad about Sean's mother, but the fact is, she broke the law. And as for your brother, you can't drop the ball just because of one little setback. Try to keep things in perspective—"

"'Keep things in perspective'?" I leaned forward and enunciated very carefully so she would be sure to understand me. "Excuse me, Special Agent Smith, but I got struck by lightning. Now, when I go to sleep, I dream about missing people, and it just so happens that when I wake up, I know where those missing people are. Suddenly, the U.S. Government wants to use me as some sort of secret weapon against fugitives from justice, and you think I should keep things in perspective?"

Special Agent Smith looked annoyed. "I think you should try to remember," she said, "that what you call a dolphin, most Americans would call a hero."

She turned to throw my empty McDonald's wrappers in the garbage.

"I really didn't come in here," she said, when she turned around again, "to argue with you, Jess. I just thought you might like this back."

She handed me my backpack. The book of photos was gone from it, of course, but my flute was there. I grasped it tightly to my chest.

"Thanks," I said. I was oddly touched by the gesture. Don't ask me why. I mean, it was my flute, after all. I hoped I wasn't beginning to suffer from that thing hostages get, when they start sympathizing with their captors.

"I like you, Jess," Special Agent Smith said. "I really hope that while you're in here tonight, you'll think about what I said. Because you know, I think you'd make a fine federal agent someday."

"Really?" I asked, like I thought this was an enormous compliment.

"I do." She went to the door. "I'll see you two later," she said.

Sean, over on his bed, just grunted. I said, "Sure. Later."

She left. I heard the door lock behind her. The lock on the infirmary door was one that even I, with my extensive knowledge of such things, could not penetrate.

But that didn't matter. Because Special Agent Smith had been right when she'd said I'd make a fine federal agent:

While she'd been throwing out the trash from my meal, I'd reached over and swiped her cell phone from her purse.

I held it up for Sean to see.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I'm good. Real good."

C H A P T E R

18

It took us a while to figure out how Special Agent Smith's cell phone worked. Of course there was a password you had to use to get a dial tone. That's what took the longest, figuring out her password. But most passwords, I knew from Michael—who gets his thrills figuring out this kind of thing—are four to six digits or numbers long. Special Agent Smith's first name was Jill. I pressed 5455, and, voilà, as my mom would say: we were in.

Sean wanted me to call Channel 11 News.

"Seriously," he said. "They're right outside the gates. I saw them as we drove in. Tell them what's going on."

I said, "Calm down, squirt. I'm not calling Channel 11 News."

He quit bouncing and said, "You know, I'm getting sick of you calling me squirt and talking about how little I am. I'm almost as tall as you are. And I'll be thirteen in nine months."

"Quiet," I said as I dialed. "We don't have much time before she notices it's gone."

I called my house. My mom picked up. They were eating dinner, Douglas's first since he'd gotten out of the hospital. My mom went, "Honey, how are you? Are they treating you all right?"

I said, "Uh, not exactly. Can I talk to Dad?"

My mom said, "What do you mean, not exactly? Daddy said they had a lovely room for you, with a big TV and your own bathroom. You don't like it?"

"It's okay," I said. "Look, is Dad there?"

"Of course he's here. Where else would he be? And he's as proud of you as I am."

I had been gone only forty-eight hours, but apparently, during the interim, my mother had lost her mind.

"Proud of me?" I said. "What for?"

"The reward money!" my mom cried. "It came today! A check in the amount of ten thousand dollars, made out to you, honey. And that's just the beginning, sweetie."

Man, she had really gone round the bend. "Beginning of what?"

"The kind of income you'll be generating from all of this," my mom said. "Honey, Pepsi called. They want to know if you'd be willing to endorse a new brand of soda they've come up with. It has gingko biloba in it, you know, for brain power."

"You have got," I said, my throat suddenly dry, "to be kidding me."

"No. It's quite good; they left a case here. Jessie, they're offering you a hundred thousand dollars just to stand in front of a camera and say that there are easier ways to expand your brain power than getting struck by lightning—"

In the background I heard my dad say, "Toni." He sounded stern. "She's not doing it."

"Let her make up her own mind, Joe," my mother said. "She might like it. And I think she'll be good at it. Jess is certainly prettier than a lot of those girls I see on the TV—"

My throat was starting to hurt, but there was nothing I could do about it, because all the drugs in the infirmary, even the mouthwash, were locked up.

"Mom," I said. "Can I please talk to Dad?"

"In a minute, honey. I just want to tell you how well Dougie is doing. You're not the only hero in the family, you know. Dougie's doing great, just great. But, of course, he misses his Jess."

"That's great, Mom." I swallowed hard. "That's … So, he isn't hearing voices?"

"Not a one. Not since you left and took all those nasty reporters with you. We miss you, sweetie, but we sure don't miss all those news vans. The neighbors were starting to complain. Well, you know the Abramowitzes. They're so fussy about their yard."

I didn't say anything. I don't think I could have spoken if I'd wanted to.

"Do you want to say hi to Dougie, honey? He wants to say hi to you. We're having Dougie's favorite, on account of his being home. Manicotti.

I feel bad making it when you aren't here. I know it's your favorite, too. You want me to save you some? Are they feeding you all right up there? I mean, is it just army food?"

"Yeah," I said. "Mom, can I please talk to—"

But my mother had passed the phone to my brother. Douglas's voice, deep but shaky as ever, came on.

"Hey," he said. "How you doing?"

I turned so that I was sitting with my back to Sean, so he wouldn't see me wipe my eyes. "Fine," I said.

"Yeah? You sure? You don't sound fine."

I held the phone away from my face and cleared my throat. "I'm sure," I said, when I thought I could speak without sounding like I'd been crying. "How are you doing?"

"Okay," he said. "They upped my meds again.

"I've got dry mouth like you wouldn't believe."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Doug, I'm really sorry."

He sounded kind of surprised. "What are you sorry about? It's not your fault."

I said, "Well, yeah. It kind of is. I mean, all those people in our front yard were there on account of me. It stressed you out, having all those people there. And that was my fault."

"That's bull," Douglas said.

But it wasn't. I knew it wasn't. I liked to think that Douglas was a lot saner than my mom gave him credit for being, but the truth was, he was still pretty fragile. Accidentally dumping a tray of plates in a restaurant wasn't going to set off one of his episodes. But waking up to find a whole bunch of strangers with film equipment in his front yard definitely was.

And that's when I knew that, much as I wanted to, I couldn't go home. Not yet. Not if I wanted Douglas to be okay.

"So, are they treating you all right?" Douglas wanted to know.

I stared out between the bars across the windows. Outside, the sun was setting, the last rays of the day slanting across the neatly trimmed lawn. In the distance, I could see a small runway, with a helicopter sitting near it. No helicopters had taken off or landed since I'd been watching. There were no UFOs at Crane. There was no nothing at Crane.

"Sure," I said.

"Really? Because you sound kind of upset."

"No," I said. "I'm okay."

"So. How are you going to spend that reward money?"

"Oh, I don't know. How do you think I should spend it?"

Douglas thought about it. He said, "Well, Dad could use a new set of clubs. Not that he ever gets a chance to play."

"I don't want golf clubs," I heard my dad yelling. "We're putting that money away for Jess's college."

"I want a car!" I heard Michael yell.

I laughed a little. I said, "He just wants a car so he can drive Claire Lippman to the quarries."

Doug said, "You know that's true. And I think Mom would love a new sewing machine."

"So she can make us some more matching outfits." I smiled. "Of course. What about you?"

"Me?" Douglas was beginning to sound even farther away than ever. "I just want you home, and everything back to normal."

I coughed. I had to, in order to cover up the fact that I was crying again.

"Well," I said. "I'll be home soon. And then you'll wish I wasn't, since I'll be barging in on you all the time again."

"I miss you barging in on me," Douglas said.

This was more than I could take. I said, "I … I have to go."

Douglas said, "Wait a minute. Dad wants to say—"

But I had hung up. Suddenly, I knew. I couldn't talk to my dad. What was he going to do for me anyway? He couldn't get me out of this.

And even if he could, where was I going to go? I couldn't go home. Not with reporters and Pepsi representatives following me everywhere I went. Douglas would completely lose whatever fragile grip he had on sanity at the moment.

"Jess?"

I started. I had almost forgotten Sean was in the room with me. I threw him a startled glance.

"What?" I said.

"Are you …" He raised his eyebrows. "You are."

"I'm what?"

"Crying," he said. Then his eyebrows met in a rush over the bridge of his freckled nose. He scowled at me. "What are you crying for?"

"Nothing," I said. I reached up and wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist. "I'm not crying."

"You're a damned liar," he said.

"Hey. Don't swear." I began hitting buttons on the phone again.

"Why not? You do it. Who are you calling now?"

"Someone who's going to get us the hell out of here," I said.

C H A P T E R

19

It was a little after midnight when I heard it: the same motorcycle engine that I'd been straining my ears to hear on and off for the past couple of weeks. Only this time, it wasn't roaring down Lumley Lane, the way it had in my dreams.

No, it was roaring through the empty parking lots of Crane Military Base.

I leapt up off the bed where I'd been dozing and rushed to the window. I had to cup my fingers over my eyes in order to make out what was going on outside. In a circle of light thrown by one of the security lamps, I saw Rob. He was riding around, his face—hidden by the shield of his motorcycle helmet—turning right and left, trying to figure out which building I was in.

I pounded on the windowpane, and called his name.

Sean, curled up on the bed beside mine, sat bolt upright, as fully awake as he'd been soundly asleep just a second before.

"It's my dad," he said in a choked voice.

"No, it's not your dad," I said. "Stand back while I break this window. He can't hear me."

I knew I only had a few seconds before he thundered past the infirmary. I had to act fast. I grabbed the nearest thing I could find—a metal trash can—and heaved it at the window.

It did the trick. Glass went flying everywhere, including back over me, since a lot of the shards ricocheted off the metal grate. I could feel tiny slivers of glass in my hair and on my shirt.

I didn't care. I yelled, "Rob!"

He threw out a foot and skidded to a halt. A second later, his foot was up again, and he was tearing through the grass toward me. It was only then that I noticed that behind him were about a half dozen other bikers, big guys on Harleys.

"Hey," Rob said when he'd thrown down his kickstand and yanked his helmet off. He got off the bike and came toward me. "You okay?"

I nodded. I can't even tell you how good it felt to see him. It felt even better when he reached through the metal grate, wrapped his fingers around the front of my shirt, dragged me forward, and kissed me through the bars.

When he let go of me, it was so abrupt that I knew he hadn't meant to kiss me at all. It had just sort of happened.

"Sorry," he said—only not looking too sorry, if you know what I mean.

"That's okay," I said. Okay? It was the best kiss I'd ever had—even better than the first one. "Are you sure you don't mind doing this?"

"Piece of cake."

Then he went to work.

Sean, who'd observed the whole thing, said in a very indignant voice, "Who's that?"

"Rob Wilkins," I said.

I must have said it a little too happily, however, since Sean asked, suspiciously, "Is he your boyfriend?"

"No," I said. I wish.

Sean was appalled. "And you're just going to let him get away with kissing you like that?"

"He was just glad to see me," I said.

A particularly hairy face had replaced Rob's in the window. I recognized his friend from Chick's, the one with the Tet Offensive tattoo. He snaked a chain through the grate, then secured the other end to the back of one of the bikes.

"Stand back, y'all," he said to us. "This here's gonna make a helluva racket."

The face disappeared. Sean looked up at me.

"These are friends of yours?" he asked, in a disapproving voice.

"Sort of," I said. "Now stand back, will you? I don't want you to get hurt."

"Jesus," Sean muttered. "I am not a baby, all right?"

But when the biker gunned his engine, and the chain rattled, theh went taut, Sean clapped his hands over his ears. "We are so busted," he moaned with his eyes closed.

I had a bad feeling Sean was right. The grate was making ominous groaning noises, but not budging so much as an inch. Meanwhile, the motorcycle engine was whining shrilly, its wheels kicking up a ton of dirt, throwing it and bits of grass back through the grate and into the room, already carpeted with glass.

For a minute, I didn't think it was going to work—or that, if it did, the noise would rouse Colonel Jenkins and his men, and they'd be after us in a heartbeat. The grate was simply too deeply embedded into the concrete window frame. I didn't want to say anything, of course—Rob was trying as best he could—but it looked like a hopeless cause. Especially when Sean dug his fingers into my arm and hissed, "Listen. . . ."

Then I heard it. Above the shriek of the motorcycle's engine, the sound of keys rattling outside the infirmary door.

That was it. We were busted.

What was worse, I'd probably gotten our rescuers busted, too. How long would Rob end up in jail because of me? What was the mandatory sentence for trying to break a psychic free from a military compound?

And then, with a sound like a thousand fingernails on a mile-wide chalkboard, the entire grate popped out from the sill and was dragged a few feet until the biker slammed on the brakes.

"Come on," Rob said, reaching for me over the crumbling sill.

I shoved Sean forward. "Him first," I said.

"No, you." Sean, in an effort to be chivalrous, tried to force me through the window first, but Rob got hold of him and hauled him through.

Which gave me a chance to grab my backpack—which Special Agent Smith had so graciously brought me—then vault over the window sill behind them, just as the dead bolt on the infirmary door slid back.

Outside, it was a humid spring night, silent and still … except for the thunder of motorcycle engines. I was astonished to see that, in addition to Rob's friends from Chick's, Greg Wylie and Hank Wendell, from the back row of detention, were also there, on majorly cherried-out hogs. I have to admit, I got a little teary-eyed at the sight of them: I had no idea I was so well-liked by my fellow juvenile delinquents.

Sean, however, was not so impressed.

"You have got to be kidding me," he said when he got his first good look at his rescuers.

"Look," I said to him as I pulled on the helmet Rob handed to me. "It's these guys or your dad. Take your pick."

"Boy," Sean said, shaking his head. "You drive a hard bargain."

Hank Wendell shoved a helmet at him. "Here ya go, kid," he said. He made room on his seat for Sean's eighty-pound frame, then gave his engine a rev. "Hop on."

I don't know if Sean would have gotten on if, at that moment, an eardrum-piercing siren hadn't begun to wail.

One of the guys from Chick's—Frankie, who had a tattoo of a baby on his bicep—called out, "Here they come."

A second later, some military types came running up to the barless window, shouting for us to stop. Headlights lit up the parking lot.

"Hang on," Rob said as I swung onto the seat behind him and wrapped my arms around him.

"Halt," a man's voice bellowed. I glanced over my shoulder. There was a military jeep coming toward us, with a man standing up in the back, shouting through a megaphone. Behind him, I could see lights turning on in the buildings all across the base, and people running outside, trying to see what was going on.

"This is U.S. Government property,"'the guy with the megaphone declared. "You are trespassing. Turn off your engines now."

And then the night air was ripped apart by an earth-shaking explosion. I saw a ball of flame rise up in the air over by the airstrip. Everyone ducked—

Except Frankie and the guy with the Tet Offensive tattoo, who high-fived one another.

"Oh, yeah," Frankie said. "We still got it."

"What was that?" I shouted as Rob accelerated.

"A helicopter," Rob shouted back. "Just a little diversionary tactic, to confuse the enemy."

"You'll blow up a helicopter," I said, "but you won't go out with me?" I couldn't believe it. "What is wrong with you?"

I didn't have a chance to complain for long, however, because Rob sped up, and suddenly we were whipping through the darkened lots that made up Crane, heading for the front gates. The night sky behind us was now filled with an orange glow from the burning helicopter. New sirens, evidently from fire engines sent to put out the flames, sliced through the night, and searchlights arced against the low-lying clouds.

All this, I thought, to bust a small boy and a psychic put of an infirmary.

We hadn't managed to ditch the guy in the jeep. He was right behind us, still shouting through the megaphone for us to stop.

But Rob and his friends didn't stop. In fact, if anything, they sped up.

Okay, I'll admit it: I loved every minute of it. Finally, finally, I was going fast enough.

Then, a hundred yards from the front gates, Rob threw his foot out, and we skidded to a halt. His friends followed suit.

For a moment, we sat there, all six bikers, Rob, Sean, and me, engines roaring, staring straight ahead of us. The glow from the fire on the airstrip clearly lit the long road leading to the base's front gates. There were guards there, I remembered from when I'd gone by them on the bus to the mall. Guards with rifles. I had no idea how Rob and the others had gotten past these armed sentries to get onto the base, and I had no idea how we were going to get past them getting off of it. All I could think was, over and over in my head, "Oh, my God, they blew up a helicopter. They blew up a helicopter."

But maybe it was a good thing they did. Because there was no one blocking our path. Everyone was heading toward the airstrip to help put out the fire.

Except for the guy in the jeep behind us.

"Turn off your engines and put your hands up," the guy said.

Instead, Rob lifted up his foot and we lurched forward, heading straight for the gates.

Which were down.

Then someone in a bathrobe came striding across the road, until he stood right in front of the gates. It was someone I recognized. He lifted a megaphone.

"Halt," Colonel Jenkins's voice boomed through the night, louder than the motorcycle engines, louder than the sirens. "You are under arrest. Turn off your engines now."

He was standing directly in front of the gates. His robe had fallen open, and I could see he had on pale blue pajamas.

Rob didn't slow down. If anything, he sped up.

"Turn off your engines," Colonel Jenkins commanded us. "Do you hear me? You are under arrest. Turn off your engines now."

The gatehouse guards appeared with their rifles. They didn't point them at us, but they stood their ground on either side of Colonel Jenkins.

No one turned off their engines. In fact, Greg and Hank let out whoops and started racing even faster toward the gates. I had no idea what they thought was going to happen when they reached the men standing there. It wasn't as if they were simply going to move out of the way and let us by. This was no ordinary game of chicken. Not when the other guy was holding a high-powered rifle.

I guess Colonel Jenkins figured out that nobody was going to turn off his engine, since suddenly he put down the megaphone and nodded to the two guards. I tightened my grip on Rob's waist, and ducked my head, afraid to look. They were only, I was sure, going to shoot into the air, to get our attention. Surely he couldn't mean to—

But then I never did find out whether or not they would have shot at us, because Rob gave the front of the bike a violent jerk. . . .

And then we were sailing off the base. Not through the front gates, but through a wide section of the chain-link fence that had been carefully peeled back to one side of the gates. This was how Rob and his friends had gotten past the sentries. All it had taken was a little determination, a pair of wire cutters, and some experience in breaking-and-entering.

Once we were off the base, the only light we had to see by were the bikes' headlights. That was all right, though. I looked behind me, and saw that the jeep was still behind us, intent on stopping us somehow.

But when I told Rob this, he only laughed. The road that led to Crane was little used, except for traffic to and from the base. All around it were cornfields, and beyond the fields, wooded hills. It was toward these hills Rob plunged, the other bikers following him, veering off the road and into the corn, which this early in spring was only ankle-high.

The jeep bounced along behind us, but it was rough going. The colonel must have gotten the message out, since that single jeep was soon joined by some SUVs. It didn't matter, though. We were darting between them like fireflies. No one could have kept up, except maybe the helicopter, and, well, that wasn't happening, for obvious reasons.

And then we lost them. I don't know if they simply gave up, or were called back to the base, or what. But suddenly, we were on our own.

We had done it.

Still, we stuck to back roads, just to be safe. I'm pretty sure we weren't followed, though. We stopped several times to check, in sleepy little towns along the way, where there was one gas pump attached to a mom-and-pop general store, and where the noise from the hogs' engines caused bedroom lights to turn on, and dogs chained up in yards to bark.

But there was nothing behind us, nothing except long, empty stretches of road, winding like rivers beneath the heavy sky.

Marco.

Polo.

We were free.

C H A P T E R

20

Rob took us to his house.

Not Greg and Hank and those guys. I have no idea where they went. Well, actually, that's not true. I have a pretty good idea. I think they went to Chick's to pound back a few, and to celebrate their successful penetration of a government facility thought by many to be as impenetrable as Area 51.

Obviously those who thought that had never met anybody from the last row of detention at Ernest Pyle High School.

Sean and I, however, did not join in the festivities. We went to Rob's.

I was surprised when I saw Rob's house. It was a farmhouse, not big—though it was kind of hard to tell in the dark—but built at around the same time as my house on Lumley Lane.

Only, because it was on the wrong side of town, no one had come and put a plaque on it, declaring it a historic landmark.

Still, it was a sweet little house, with a porch out front and a barn out back. Rob lived there with just one other person, his mom. I don't know what happened to his dad, and I didn't want to ask.

We crept into the house very quietly, so as not to wake Mrs. Wilkins, who had recently been laid off from the local plastics factory. Rob showed me his room, and said I could sleep there. Then he gathered up a bunch of blankets and stuff, so that he and Sean could go sleep in the barn.

Sean didn't look particularly happy about this, but then, he was so tired, he could hardly keep his eyes open. He followed Rob around like a little zombie.

I was a little zombie-like myself. I couldn't quite believe what we had done. After I'd gotten undressed, I lay there in Rob's bed, thinking about it. We had destroyed government property. We had defied the orders of a colonel in the United States Army. We had blown up a helicopter.

We were going to be in big trouble in the morning.

Still, I was so sleepy, it was kind of hard to worry about that. Instead, all I could think about was how weird it was to be in a boy's room. At least, a boy who wasn't my brother. I'd been in Skip's room—you know, over at Ruth's—plenty of times, but it was nothing like Rob's. In the first place, Rob didn't have any posters of Trans Ams up on his walls. Nor did he have any Playboys under the bed (I checked). Still, it was pretty alarmingly manly. I mean, he had plaid sheets and stuff.

But his pillow smelled like him, and that was nice, very comforting. I can't tell you what it smelled like, exactly, because that would be too hard to describe, but whatever it was, it was good.

I didn't have a whole lot of opportunity to lie there and enjoy it, though. Because almost as soon as I'd crawled into bed, I fell asleep.

And I didn't wake up again for a long, long time.

When I finally did wake up, it was about noon. It took me a minute to figure out where I was. Then I remembered:

I was in Rob's room, at his house.

And I was wanted by the FBI.

Not just the FBI, either, but the United States Army.

And I wouldn't have been surprised if the Secret Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Indiana State Highway Patrol wanted a piece of me, too.

And, interestingly, from the moment I woke up, I knew exactly what I was going to do about it.

It's not every day a girl wakes up knowing she's wanted by the federal law enforcement agency of the most powerful country in the world. I thought about lying around, relishing it, but I was kind of worried about the impression that would make on Mrs. Wilkins, who could, if I played my cards right, be my mother-in-law someday. I didn't want her thinking I was this big slacker or something, so instead I got up, got dressed, and went downstairs.

Sean and Rob were already there, sitting at the kitchen table. In front of them was one heck of a lot of food. There was toast, and eggs, and bacon, and cereal, and a bowl of some white stuff I could not identify. The plate in front of Rob was empty—he was apparently through eating. But Sean was still putting it away. I don't think he'll ever be through eating. At least, not until after he's done going through puberty.

"Hi, Jess," he said when I walked into the kitchen. He sounded—and looked—a good deal perkier than he had during the last twenty-four hours I'd spent with him.

"Hi," I said.

A plump woman standing by the stove turned and smiled at me. She had a lot of red hair piled up on top of her head with a barrette, and didn't look a thing like her son Rob.

Until a shaft of sunlight, coming through the window above the sink, lit her face, and I saw that she had his eyes, so light blue they were the color of fog.

"You must be Jess," she said. "Pull up a chair and sit yourself down. How do you like your eggs?"

"Um," I said, awkwardly. "Scrambled is fine, thank you, ma'am."

"The eggs are fresh," Sean informed me as I sat down. "From the henhouse out back. I helped gather them."

"Your friend Sean's turning into a real farmhand," Mrs. Wilkins said. "We'll have him milking, next."

Sean giggled. I blinked at him. He'd actually giggled.

That was when I realized, with a shock, that I had never seen him happy before.

"There you go," Mrs. Wilkins said, setting a plate down in front of me. "Now you eat up. You look as if you could use a good hearty country breakfast."

I had never had fresh eggs before, and I was kind of worried they'd have some half-formed chicken fetus in them, but they didn't. They were really delicious, and when Mrs. Wilkins offered seconds, I gladly took them. I was pretty hungry, I discovered. I even ate some of the white stuff Mrs. Wilkins glopped onto my plate. It tasted like the Cream of Wheat my father always made us eat before school on really cold days when we were little.

But it wasn't Cream of Wheat. It was, Rob informed me with a little smile, grits.

If Ruth could only see me now, I thought.

After I'd helped Mrs. Wilkins wash the breakfast dishes, however, the fun was over. It was time to get down to business.

"I need to use a phone," I announced, and Mrs. Wilkins pointed to hers, hanging on the wall by the refrigerator.

"You can use that one," she said.

"No," I said. "For this particular call, I think I better use a pay phone."

Rob eyed me suspiciously. "What's up?" he wanted to know.

"Nothing," I said, innocently. "I just need to make a call. Is there a pay phone around here?"

Mrs. Wilkins looked thoughtful. "There's the one down the road, over by the IGA," she said.

"Perfect." To Rob, I said, "Can you drive me over there?"

He said he could, and we got up to go. . . .

And so did Sean.

"Nuh-uh," I said. "No way. You stay here."

Sean's jaw dropped. "What do you mean?"

"I mean there are probably cops crawling all over the place, looking for a sixteen-year-old girl in the company of a twelve-year-old boy. They'll be on to us in a second. You stay here until I get back."

"But that's not fair," Sean declared, his voice breaking.

I felt of bubble of impatience well up inside me. But instead of snapping at him, I grabbed Sean by the arm and steered him out onto the back porch.

"Look," I said softly, so Rob and his mother wouldn't hear. "You said you wanted things back the way they were, didn't you? You and your mom, together, without your dad breathing down your necks?"

"Yes," Sean admitted, sullenly.

"Well, then let me do what I have to do. Which is something I have to do alone."

Sean was right about one thing: He was small for his age, but he really wasn't little. He wasn't even all that shorter than me. Which was how he was able to look me straight in the eye and say, accusingly, "That guy really is your boyfriend, isn't he?"

Where had that come from?

"No, Sean," I said. "I told you. We're just friends."

Sean brightened considerably. He said, "Okay," and went back inside.

Men. I swear I just don't get it.

Ten minutes later, I was standing in front of a little general store, the handset to an ancient pay phone pressed to my ear. I dialed carefully.

1-800-WHERE-R-YOU.

I asked for Rosemary, and when she came on, I said, "Hey, it's me. Jess."

"Jess?" Rosemary's voice dropped to a whisper. "Oh, my goodness. Is that really you?"

"Sure," I said. "Why?"

"Honey, I've been hearing all sorts of things on the news about you."

"Really?" I looked over at Rob. He was refilling the Indian's tank from the single pump in front of the store. We hadn't watched the news yet, and Mrs. Wilkins didn't get any newspapers, so I was eager to hear what they were saying about me. "What kind of stuff?"

"Well, about how last night, a group of Hell's Angels tore up Crane Military Base and kidnapped you and little Sean O'Hanahan off of it, of course."

"WHAT?" I yelled, so loud that Rob looked over at me. "That's not how it happened at all. Those guys were helping us to escape. Sean and I were being held against our will."

Rosemary said, "Well, that's not how that fellow—what's his name? Johnson, I think. That's not how Special Agent Johnson is telling it. There's a reward out for your safe return, you know."

This sounded interesting. "How much?"

"Twenty thousand dollars."

"Each?"

"No, that's just for you. Sean's father posted a hundred thousand dollar reward for his return."

I nearly hung up, I was so disgusted. "Twenty thousand dollars? Twenty piddling thousand dollars? That's all I'm worth to them? That loser. That's it. This is war."

Rosemary said, "I'd look out if I were you, honey. There's APBs out all over the state of Indiana. Folks are looking for you."

"Oh, yeah, I bet. Listen, Rosemary," I said, "I want you to do me a favor."

Rosemary said, "Anything, hon."

"Give Agent Johnson a message for me. . . ."

Then I carefully stated the message I wanted Rosemary to relay.

"Okay," she said, when I was through. "You got it, honey. And, Jess?"

I had been about to hang up. "Yes?"

"You hang in there, honey. We're all behind you."

I hung up and told Rob about Special Agent Johnson's bogus kidnapping story—not to mention the crummy reward out for my capture. Rob was as mad as I was. Now that we knew there was an APB out on me, and that Hell's Angels were being blamed for what had happened at Crane, we agreed it wasn't a good idea for me to be seen tooling around on the back of Rob's bike. So we hurried back to his mom's place—but not until after I'd made one last call, this one from a pay phone outside a 7-Eleven on the turnpike.

My dad was where he usually is at lunchtime: Joe's. They get quite a noon crowd from the courthouse.

"Dad," I said. "It's me."

He nearly choked on his rigatoni, or whatever the special for the day was. My dad always taste-tests.

"Jess?" he cried. "Are you all right? Where are you?"

"Of course I'm all right," I said. "Now, anyway. Look, Dad, I need you to do me a favor."

"What are you talking about?" my dad demanded. "Where are you? Your mother and I have been worried sick. The folks up at Crane are saying—"

"Yeah, I know. That a bunch of Hell's Angels kidnapped Sean and me. But that's bogus, Dad. Those guys were rescuing us. Do you know what they were trying to do, Special Agents Johnson and Smith, that Colonel Jenkins guy? They were trying to make me into a dolphin."

My dad sounded like he was choking some more. "A what?"

Rob poked me hard in the back. I turned around to see what he wanted, and was horrified when an Indiana State Police patrol car eased into the parking lot of the convenience store.

"Look, Dad," I said, quickly ducking my head. "I gotta go. I just need you to do this one thing for me."

And I told him what the one thing was.

My dad wasn't too thrilled about it, to say the least.

He went, "Have you lost your mind? You listen here, Jessica—"

Nobody in my family ever calls me Jessica, except when they are really peeved at me.

"Just do it, please, Dad?" I begged. "It's really important. I'll explain everything later. Right now, I gotta go."

"Jessica, don't you—"

I hung up.

Rob had drifted away from me, distancing himself and his bike from the teenage girl at the pay phone, in case the cops made a connection. But it didn't look as if they had. One of them even nodded to me as he went into the store.

"Nice day," he said.

As soon as they were inside, Rob and I made a mad dash for his bike. We were already at the turnpike by the time they realized what they'd missed and came hurtling out of the store. I looked back over my shoulder and saw their mouths moving as we tore away. A few seconds later, they were in their car, sirens blaring.

I hung onto Rob more tightly. "We've got company," I said.

"Not for long," Rob said.

And suddenly we were off-road, brambles and sticks tearing at our clothing as we plunged down a ravine. Seconds later, we were splashing through a creekbed, the Indian's front wheel kicking up thick streams of water on either side of it. Above us, I could see the patrol car following along as best it could. . . .

But then the creek made a bend away from the road, and soon the cop car disappeared from view. Soon I couldn't even hear its siren anymore.

When Rob finally pulled out of the creekbed and back up the ravine, I was wet from the waist down, and the Indian's engine was sounding kind of funny.

But we were safe.

"You all right?" Rob asked me, as I was wringing out the bottom of my T-shirt.

"Peachy," I said. "Listen, I'm sorry."

He was squatting beside the bike's front wheel, pulling out sticks and weeds that had wound into the spokes during our flight down the ravine. "Sorry about what?"

"Getting you involved in all this. I mean, I know you're on probation and all. The last thing you need is to be harboring a couple of fugitives. What if you get caught? They'll probably lock you up and throw away the key. I mean, depending on whatever it is you did to get on probation in the first place."

Rob had moved to the back tire. He squinted up at me, the afternoon sun bringing out the strong planes in his face. "Are you through?"

"Through what?"

"Through trying to trick me into telling you what I'm on probation for."

I put my hands on my hips. "I am not trying to trick you into doing anything. I am merely trying to let you know that I am aware of the great personal sacrifice you are making in helping Sean and me, and I appreciate it."

"You do, huh?"

He straightened. One of the sticks he'd wrenched from the Wheel had flicked drops of water up onto his face, so he pulled the bottom of his T-shirt out from the waistband of his jeans and scrubbed at them. When he did this, I happened to get a look at his bare stomach. The sight of it, all tightly muscled, with a thin band of dark hair down the center, did something to me.

I don't know what came over me, but suddenly, I was on my tiptoes, planting this big wet one on him. I have seriously never done anything like that before, but I just couldn't help it.

Rob seemed a little surprised at first, but he got over it pretty quickly. He kissed me back for a while, and it was just like in Snow White when all the woodland animals come out and start singing, and Prince Charming puts her up on the horse. For about a minute it was like that. I mean, my heart was singing just like one of those damned squirrels.

Then Rob reached up and started untangling my arms from around his neck.

"Jesus, Mastriani," he said. "What are you trying to do?"

That broke the spell pretty quick, let me tell you. I mean, Prince Charming would never have said something like that. I would have been mad if I hadn't heard the way his voice shook.

"Nothing," I said, very innocently.

"Well, you better cut it out," he said. "We've got a lot do. There's no time for any distractions."

I mentioned that I happened to like that particular distraction.

Rob went, "I'm in enough trouble right now without you adding to it, thanks." He picked up one of the helmets and shoved it down over my head. "And don't even think about trying something like that in front of the kid."

"What kid? What are you talking about?"

"The kid. O'Hanahan. What are you, blind, Mastriani? He's got it bad for you."

I tilted the helmet back and squinted at him. "Sean? For me?"

But all of a sudden, all the questions he'd been asking about Rob made sense.

I let the helmet drop back over my face. "Oh, God," I said.

"You got that right. He thinks you are one dope girl, Mastriani."

"He said that? He sure doesn't act like he thinks that. He really said I was dope?"

"Well." Rob swung onto his seat and gave the accelerator a kick. "I might be allowing my own feelings to cloud the matter a little."

Suddenly, all the birds and squirrels were singing again.

"You think I'm dope?" I asked dreamily.

He reached out and flicked my helmet. It made a hollow echoing sound inside my head, and brought me right out of my reverie.

"Get on the bike, Mastriani," he said.

When we got back to Rob's, Sean and Mrs. Wilkins were shelling peas and watching Ricki Lake.

"Jess," he said when I walked in. "Where have you been? You totally missed this guy. He weighed four hundred pounds and got stuck in a bathtub for over forty-eight hours! If you'd been here sooner, you could have seen it."

It was love. I could totally tell.

This was going to be harder than I thought.

C H A P T E R

21

The marching band was playing "Louie, Louie."

And not very well, I might add.

Still, Sean and I stayed where we were, sitting on the same metal bleachers that a week or so before I'd been electrocuted under. Before us stretched the football field, a sea of luscious green, upon which marched a herd of musicians playing for all they were worth, even though it was only an after-school rehearsal, and not the real thing. Football season was long over, but graduation was coming up, and the band would play at commencement.

Just not "Louie, Louie," hopefully.

"I don't get it," Sean said. "What are we doing here?"

"Wait," I said. "You'll see."

We weren't the only spectators in the stands. There was one other guy, way, way up at the top behind us.

But that was it. I wasn't sure if Rosemary had failed to get my message to Special Agent Johnson, or if he'd chosen merely to ignore it. If he was ignoring it, he was making a grave mistake. The guy up in the stands would make sure of that.

"Why won't you tell me what we're doing here?" Sean demanded. "I think I have a right to know."

"Drink your Big Gulp," I said. It was hot out. The late afternoon sun was beating down on us. I didn't have any sunglasses or a hat, and I was dying. I was worried Sean might be getting dehydrated.

"I don't want my stupid Big Gulp," Sean said. "I want to know what we're doing here."

"Watch the band," I said.

"The band sucks." Sean glared at me. Most of the brown had washed out of his hair when he'd showered at Rob's. It was a good thing he'd let Mrs. Wilkins give him a trim, or the bits of red sticking out of the back of his baseball cap would have been a dead giveaway.

"What are we doing here?" he wanted to know. "And why is Jed waiting down there?"

Jed turned out to be the name of Rob's friend from Chick's, the one who'd been in Vietnam. He was sitting in a pickup not far from us, parked over behind the bleachers … almost exactly, in fact, in the place where I'd been struck by lightning. It was shady where he was. He probably didn't feel sweat prickling all along his hairline, the way I did.

"Just cool it, will you?" I said to Sean.

"No, I will not cool it, Jess. I think I deserve an explanation. Are you going to give me one or not?"

Something caught the sunlight and winked at me. I shaded my eyes and looked toward the parking lot. A black, nondescript sedan had pulled up.

"Louie, Louie" ended. The band started a spirited rendition of Robert Palmer's "Simply Irresistible."

"How come you aren't in Band?" Sean wanted to know. "I mean, you play the flute and all. How come you're not in Band?"

The car pulled up to a halt. The two front doors opened, and a man and a woman got out. Then a back door opened, and another woman got out.

"Because I'm in Orchestra," I said.

"What's the difference?"

"In Orchestra, you play sitting down."

"That's it?"

The man and woman from the front seats moved until they stood on either side of the woman who'd gotten out of the backseat. Then they started walking across the football field, toward Sean and me.

"The Orchestra doesn't play at school events," I said. "Like games and stuff."

Sean digested this. "Where do you play, then?"

"Nowhere. We just have concerts every once in a while."

"What's the fun in that?" Sean wanted to know.

"I don't know," I said. "I couldn't be in Band, anyway. I'm always in detention when they practice."

"Why are you always in detention?"

"Because I do a lot of bad stuff."

The trio moving across the football field had gotten close enough for me to see that they were who I was expecting. Rosemary had gotten my message across, all right.

"What kind of bad stuff?" Sean wanted to know.

"I hit people." I reached into the back pocket of my jeans.

"So?" Sean looked indignant. "They probably deserve it."

"I like to think so," I said. "Look, Sean, I want you to take this. It's for you and your mom. Jed's going to drive you to the airport. I want you guys to get on a plane—any plane—and take off. Don't make any calls. Don't stop for anything. You can buy whatever you need when you get to where you're going. Understand?"

Sean looked down at the envelope I was holding out to him. Then he looked up at me.

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"Your mom," I said. "You two are going to have to start over, somewhere else. Somewhere far away, I hope, where your dad won't be able to find you. This will help you get started." I tucked the envelope into the front pocket of his jean jacket.

Sean shook his head. His face was tight with emotion. Conflicting emotions, from the looks of it. "Jess. My mom's in jail. Remember?"

"Not anymore," I said. And then I pointed.

The three people approaching us were close enough now that I could make out their features. Special Agent Johnson, Special Agent Smith, and between them, a slim woman in blue jeans. Sean's mother.

He looked. I heard him inhale sharply.

Then he turned to stare at me. The conflicting emotions on his face weren't so hard to make out now. There was joy, mingled with concern.

"What did you do?" he whispered. "Jess. What did you do?"

"I cut a little deal," I said. "Don't worry about it. Just go get her, and then go and get into the pickup with Jed. He'll take you to the airport."

Even as I sat there, looking down at him, his blue eyes filled with tears.

He said, "You did it. You said you'd do it. And you did it."

"Of course," I said, as if I was shocked he could ever have thought otherwise.

And then his mother saw him and broke away from her escorts. She called Sean's name as she ran toward him.

Sean leapt up and began hurtling down the bleachers. I stayed where I was. Sean had left his Big Gulp behind. I reached over and took a sip. My throat really hurt, for some reason.

They met at the bottom of the bleachers. Sean flung himself into Mrs. O'Hanahan's arms. She swung him around. Special Agents Johnson and Smith stopped where they were, and looked up at me. I waved. They didn't wave back.

Then Sean said something to his mother, and she nodded. The next thing I knew, he was running back toward me.

This had not been part of the plan. I stood up, alarmed.

"Jess," Sean cried, panting, as he hurried to my side.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, more sharply than I should have. "Go back to her. I told you to take her to the pickup. Hurry up, you don't have much time—"

"I just …" He was breathing so hard, he had to fight to get the words out. "I wanted … to say … thank you."

And then he threw his arms around my neck.

I didn't know what to do at first. I was pretty surprised. I looked down at the football field. The agents were still standing there, looking up at me. The band launched into a new song. The Beatles' "Hard Day's Night."

I hugged Sean back. My throat hurt even worse, and my eyes stung.

Allergies, I thought.

"When am I going to see you again?" Sean wanted to know.

"You're not," I said. "Not unless things change. You know, with your dad. Don't you dare call me otherwise. They'll probably be tapping my phone forever."

"What about—" He broke away from me and looked at me. His eyes were streaming as badly as mine. "What about when I'm thirty? You'll be thirty-three. It wouldn't be so weird, would it, a thirty-year-old going out with a thirty-three-year-old?"

"No," I said, giving the brim of his baseball cap a tap. "Except when you're thirty, I'll be thirty-four. You're only twelve, remember?"

"Just for nine more months."

I kissed him on his wet cheek. "Get out of here," I said.

He managed a watery smile. Then he turned around and ran away again. This time when he got to his mother's side, he took her hand and started dragging her around the side of the bleachers, to where Jed waited.

Only after I heard the engine start up and the truck pull away did I make my own way down the bleachers—making sure I'd wiped my eyes first.

Special Agent Johnson looked hot in his suit and tie. Special Agent Smith seemed a bit cooler in her skirt and silk blouse, but not by much. Standing there together like that, in their sunglasses and nice clothes, they made kind of a cute couple.

"Hey," I said as I sauntered up to them. "Do you two have an X-Files thing going?"

Special Agent Smith looked down at me. She had on her pearl earrings today. "I beg your pardon?" she said.

"You know. One of those Scully/Mulder things. Do you burn for one another with a passion that must be denied?"

Special Agent Johnson looked at Special Agent Smith. "I'm married, Jessica," he said.

"Yes," Special Agent Smith said. "And I'm seeing someone."

"Oh." I felt strangely let-down. "Too bad."

"Well." Special Agent Johnson peered at me expectantly. "Do you have the list?"

I nodded. "Yeah, I've got it. Do I have your word that nobody is going to try to stop Sean and his mother at the airport?"

Special Agent Smith looked offended. "Of course."

"Or when they get to where they're going?"

Special Agent Johnson said, impatiently, "Jessica, nobody cares about the child and his mother. It's the list we want."

I gave him a very mean look. "I care about them," I said. "And I'm sure Mr. O'Hanahan isn't going to be too happy when he finds out."

"Mr. O'Hanahan," Special Agent Smith said, "is our problem, not yours. The list, please, Jessica."

"And nobody's going to press any charges?" I asked, just to make sure. "About the whole Crane thing? Against me or anybody else?"

"No," Agent Johnson said.

"Even about the helicopter?"

"Even," Agent Johnson said, and I could tell his teeth were gritted, "about the helicopter."

"The list, Jessica," Special Agent Smith said, again. And this time she held out her hand.

I sighed, and dug into my back pocket. The band launched into a particularly corny version of "We're the Kids in America."

"Here you go," I said, and surrendered a crumpled sheet of paper into the agent's hand.

Special Agent Smith unfolded the paper and scanned it. She looked down at me disapprovingly.

"There are only four addresses on here," she said, handing the paper to her partner.

I stuck out my chin. "What do you think?" I demanded. "I'm not a machine. I'm just a kid. There'll be more where those came from, don't worry."

Special Agent Johnson folded the sheet of paper back up and stuck it in his pocket.

"All right," he said. "What now?"

"You two go back to your car and drive away," I said.

"And you?" Special Agent Smith asked.

"I'll be in touch," I said.

Special Agent Smith chewed her lower lip. Then she said, as if she couldn't help it, "You know, it didn't have to be this way, Jess."

I looked at her. I couldn't read her eyes behind her dark glasses.

"No, it didn't," I said. "Did it?"

She and Special Agent Smith exchanged glances. Then they turned around and started the long walk back to their car.

"You know," I called after them. "No offense to Mrs. Johnson and all, but you two really do make a cute couple."

They just kept walking.

"That was pushing it, don't you think?" Rob asked, as he crawled out from underneath the bleachers, where he'd been stationed the whole time.

"I'm just messing with them," I said.

Rob brushed dust off his jeans. "Yeah," he said. "I noticed. You do that a lot. So are you going to tell me what was in that envelope?"

"The one I gave to Sean?"

"The one you gave to Sean after you made me pick it up from your dad. Who, by the way, hates me."

I noticed there was some dust on his black T-shirt, too. This gave me a good excuse to touch his chest as I brushed it off.

"My dad can't possibly hate you," I said. "He doesn't even know you."

"He sure looked like he hated me."

"That's just because of what was in the envelope."

"Which was?"

"The ten grand I got as a reward for finding Olivia Marie D'Amato."

Rob whistled, low and long. "You gave that kid ten grand? In cash?"

"Well, him and his mother. I mean, they have to have something to live on while she finds a new job and everything."

Rob shook his head. "You are one piece of work, Mastriani," he said. "Okay. So that's what was in the envelope. What was on that sheet of paper you handed to the Feds?"

"Oh," I said. "Just the addresses of some of America's most wanted. I said I'd give them up in return for the charges against Mrs. O'Hanahan being dropped."

"Really?" Rob seemed surprised. "I thought you didn't want to get involved in all of that."

"I don't. That's why I only gave them the addresses of the guys from that book of theirs who happen to be deceased."

A slow smile crept over Rob's face. "Wait a minute. You—"

"I didn't lie or anything. They really will find those guys where I said they'd be. Well, what's left of them, anyway." I wrinkled my nose. "I have a feeling it's not going to be pretty."

Rob shook his head again. Then he reached out and put an arm around my shoulders. "Jess," he said, "you make me proud to have sat by you in detention. Did you know that?"

I smiled sunnily at him. "Thanks," I said. Then I looked up at the lone figure still sitting in the bleachers, high above our heads.

"Come on," I said, taking Rob's hand. "There's still one more thing I have to do."

Rob looked up at the guy in the stands. "Who's that?" he asked.

"Who, him? Oh, that's the guy who's going to set me free."

C H A P T E R

22

I probably don't have to tell you the rest. I mean, I'm sure you've already read about it, or seen it on the news, or something.

But just in case, here goes:

The story came out the next day. It was on the front page of the Indianapolis Star. Rob and I had to pick up a copy from the Denny's down the highway from his mother's house. Then we ordered a Grand Slam breakfast and ate while we read.

Lightning Girl Claims to Have Run Out of Juice, the headline ran. Then there was a story all about me, and how I had tragically lost my power to find people.

Just like that, I'd told the reporter that day in the bleachers. He'd been so excited about his scoop, he'd eaten up every word, hardly even asking a single question.

I just woke up, I said, and it was gone. I'm a normal girl again.

End of story.

Well, it wasn't quite the end, of course. Because the reporter asked me a lot of searching questions about what had happened at Crane. I assured him that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding, that the alleged Hell's Angels were actually my friends, and that after my special power had disappeared, I had gotten homesick, so I'd called them, and they'd come to pick me up. I had no idea why that helicopter had blown up. But it was a good thing nobody had been in it at the time, wasn't it?

And the O'Hanahan boy? the reporter had asked. What had happened to him?

I said I had no idea. I'd heard, just as the reporter had, about Sean's mother being mistakenly released from jail. Yes, I could imagine Mr. O'Hanahan had been plenty mad about that.

But wherever Sean and his mother were, I told the reporter, I wished them well.

The reporter didn't look as if he believed this, but he was so excited to be breaking the story, he didn't care. The only conditions I gave him were that he didn't mention Rob's or his mother's names.

The reporter didn't let me down. He got the story exactly the way I wanted it, and even put in some quotes from the people at Crane, whom he'd called after interviewing me. Dr. Shifton he reported as being relieved I was all right. It wasn't at all unusual, she said, that my mysterious power had vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared. It often worked that way with lightning-strike victims.

Colonel Jenkins wasn't quoted anywhere in the article, but Special Agent Johnson was, and he said some nice things about me, and about how I had used my special gift to help others, which was admirable, and how he hoped that if my powers ever came back I'd call him.

Ha. As if.

Finally, the reporter interviewed my parents, who sounded bewildered, but happy to know I was all right. "We just can't wait," my mother said, "to have our baby back home, and everything back to normal again."

You'd be surprised how fast everything did go back to normal. The Star broke the story, and by later that night, every newscast mentioned something about the "lightning girl" and how she'd lost her special missing-child finding skill.

By the next day, the story had moved to the "Lifestyle" section of most papers, in the form of reflections on the part of columnists on the hidden powers of the brain and how all of us have the potential to be a "lightning girl," if we just pay attention to what our subconscious is trying to tell us.

Yeah, right.

By the day after that, the reporters in front of my house had packed up and left. It was safe. I could go home.

And so I did.

Well, that's pretty much my "statement." My hand is really tired. I hope this "statement" is long enough. But if it isn't, I don't really care. I'm hungry, and I want dinner. Mom promised to make manicotti, which is Douglas's favorite, and mine, too. Also, I have to practice. Monday after school I have to defend my chair in Orchestra from Karen Sue Hanky.

My one regret about all this is that there are only a few weeks of school left, and since detention is the only place I'll ever see Rob, this is a problem. In spite of everything, I still haven't been able to convince him that going out with me would not be a crime.

I haven't given up, though. I can be very persuasive when I put my mind to it.

Now that I've read back over this statement, I'm not so sure anymore that all of this is Ruth's fault. The fact that I got struck by lightning, maybe. On the other hand, Ruth never would have wanted to walk home that day if it hadn't been for Jeff telling her she was as fat as Elvis. So maybe it's all Jeff's fault.

Yeah, I think it is. Jeff Day's fault, I mean.

Signed:

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM

WARNING:

HIGHLY CLASSIFIED MATERIAL

ONLY THOSE WITH LEVEL ALPHA CLEARANCE

MAY VIEW THIS DOCUMENT.

To: Cyrus Krantz

Special Operations Division

Fr: Special Agent Allan Johnson

Re: Special Subject Jessica Mastriani

What you have just read is the signed personal statement of Special Subject Jessica Mastriani. According to Miss Mastriani, her psychic powers ceased functioning on or about April 27—coincidentally, the morning after her escape from Crane. It is the opinion of this operative, however, that Miss Mastriani maintains full possession of her extraordinary powers, as illustrated by the following.

In the six weeks following Miss Mastriani's return to private life, 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU has received approximately one anonymous tip per week that has led to the successful recovery of a missing child. All of these calls have been received by Mrs. Rosemary Atkinson, a receptionist with whom Miss Mastriani seems to have developed a relationship during her initial contact with the NOMC. Mrs. Atkinson denies that the anonymous caller is Miss Mastriani. However, all of the calls have been made from pay phones within Indiana state lines.

Additionally, the day after the completion of the attached statement, Miss Mastriani received at her home a single postcard, bearing on it a photo of several dolphins. The postmark indicated that the card was mailed from Los Angeles. When questioned by her mother as to the identity of the anonymous sender, Miss Mastriani replied, within hearing of our positioned operative, "It's from Sean. He just wants to let me know where he is. Which is stupid, because I'll always know where he is."

It is the feeling of this operative that Miss Mastriani continues to maintain full possession of her psychic ability. I am hereby requesting authorization to continue monitoring Miss Mastriani, including tapping of her home telephone as well as the telephones of her father's restaurants. Should Miss Mastriani be proved to have been less than truthful in her submitted statement, this operative suggests utilizing her relationship with the mentally disturbed sibling as a form of persuasion in enlisting her aid on our behalf.

I look forward to your positive response to this request.

About the Author

Jenny Carroll

Born in Indiana, Jenny Carroll spent her childhood in pursuit of air conditioning - which she found in the public library where she spent most of her time. She has lived in California and France and currently resides in New York City with her husband and a one-eyed cat named Henrietta. Jenny Carroll is the author of the hugely popular Mediator series as well as the bestselling Princess Diaries. Visit Jenny at her website, www.jennycarroll.com