“LANA…”

The girl’s gaze had been trained on me, unblinking. Now she turned toward Roman, her eyes narrowing with a look of outrage.

Lana.

Roman used the tree to pull himself up from the ground. He staggered forward, his knees bobbing dangerously. His eyes looked glassy, almost feverish with pain.

Fury stormed through me, and I didn’t bother to stop it. She was going to kill him—she was going to kill him, and the only way to stop her was to kill her first.

Don’t make me do this, I thought, watching her.

“We had to go,” he said. “We had to. All of this time, we’ve been looking for you.”

The knowing, after all these days of guessing, slammed into me like a fist.

I was right.

She was shaking her head, backing away. “You’re the one who needs help. I’m trying to save you! I’m going to save you!”

Someone called out for her.

“Here!” she yelled back, ignoring the gun I had trained on her. “Here! I found him!”

“Don’t…don’t…” Roman’s voice was faint. “Solnyshko…”

Then I felt it. The twist.

It was like molten liquid pouring into my skull. A scream tore out of my throat. Every joint in my body strained, stretching and contorting. I hit the ground, banging my left side against the root of the massive tree. The gun slipped from my hand, spinning across the dirt and leaves.

Through the blur of tears and smoke, I saw one of the soldiers approach us, dragging a boy after him. Fear shot through me as I struggled to get my hands against the ground, to push myself up.

“Stop, Lana!” he begged. “I’ll come with you, all right? Please—don’t do this!”

“You’ll come with us no matter what,” Lana said. “This”—I screamed again as the boiling pressure increased—“is so you understand that there are consequences to your actions.”

A shot cracked out. The soldier was there, and then he wasn’t. A spray of blood burst from his neck, and he stumbled back, pressing a gloved hand to it. The shock of the hit made him release his grip on the boy, who bolted the instant he was free. Some of the heat in my mind eased enough for me to lift my head and look for Roman.

But the shot had come from the remaining section of the porch. The gun was still smoking in Priyanka’s hands as she lowered it, her eyes going wide.

“Lana!” The word broke from her like a joyful sound, only to be fractured by disbelief.

“Stay back!” I managed to shout through the agony. “Don’t come any closer—”

The girl turned, and I wished I could have seen her expression—if it was still that tight mask of rage, or if it mirrored Priyanka’s exhilaration as it faded into horror.

Priyanka looked first to Roman, then to me, before turning back to Lana.

“What are you doing?” Priyanka jumped down off the porch, her long legs quickly closing the distance between them. Lana tried to back away, refusing to look at her.

The distraction Priyanka provided was enough for the painful heat and pressure in my skull to momentarily ease. I drew myself up enough to try crawling across the ground, straining to reach the gun I’d lost.

“What do you think?” Lana spat. She looked between the three of us with all the feral suspicion of an animal that knew it was about to be cornered.

Priyanka stopped, and, like there was some magnetic force between them, Lana froze in place as well.

“I really don’t know,” Priyanka said softly. “Explain it to me while we get the hell out of here.”

Something switched off in her, and Lana’s tone went flat again. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re mine.”

“You’re damn right I am, Sunshine,” Priyanka said, trying for a pained smile as she knelt down beside Roman, checking his pulse.

Oh, I thought, putting that much together as well.

“That’s not…” Lana began. Her nostrils flared as she took in a heavy, uneven breath. “Don’t. You know what I meant.”

“I know a lot of things,” Priyanka said slowly, rising again. Roman tried to follow, but could only get himself onto his knees. “I know the Lana I loved wouldn’t hurt others, especially not her brother.”

“Just like Pri would never leave me, right?” Lana seethed.

Priyanka struggled to control her expression, but her eyes gave her away. “What’s happened to you?”

Lana clenched her fist, taking a step forward. “He made me stronger. No one, not even you, will hurt me again. He’s the one who took care of me. And now he’s the only one who deserves my loyalty.”

One word rose through the pain ratcheting up in my mind. Who?

“Who…the hell…is he?” I got the words out through gritted teeth. Both of them ignored me, wholly focused on each other.

Priyanka held out her hand. “Just…come with me. We’ve been trying to find you—this whole time, we’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Liar,” Lana whispered, but she didn’t back up again. She stared at Priyanka’s outstretched hand. It trembled where it hung in the air, and I could see in her face, no matter how hard she was working to disguise it, that Priyanka was halfway to heartbreak.

Still, she took another step toward Lana. “We have so much work to do, remember?”

Whatever daze had taken over Lana’s mind was ripped away. “No.”

The gun’s register sounded a split second after the bullet slammed into the tree inches from Lana’s head. Jacob had taken position on the porch and was already lining up his next shot. The boy I’d seen before hung behind him, tears streaming down his cheeks as he spoke, clearly explaining what was happening.

In the distance, helicopter blades sliced through the night air, growing louder by the second. Priyanka lunged for Lana in that moment of interruption, but the girl was faster, both on her feet and in processing her odds. She crashed through the underbrush, jumping over a downed log before disappearing into the trees.

“No!” Priyanka called, running after her. “Lana!”

My vision split in two as the band of pressure around my mind released with a hard snap of pain. Roman shuddered and gasped beside me.

Static roared through my mind, my ears, filling my veins. The welcome caress of power fired through me, erasing the terrifying silence in my mind.

“You all right?” Jacob called, jogging over.

I waited for the dizziness to pass before accepting his help up.

Roman had shoved himself up onto his feet, turning to follow the path Lana and Priyanka had taken through the woods.

“They still have Sasha!” the boy shouted from the porch.

Shit. I gripped Roman’s arm. “Go after Lana, I’ll—”

At that, Roman gave his head a hard shake, pulling away. “No, I’ll go. Can you find Priya?”

I was still just disoriented enough that it took me a second to comprehend his words, and by then, he was already running, stooping to pick up a different gun from the ground. Then he disappeared, too, wrapped in darkness and smoke.

Jacob put a hand on my shoulder, making me jump. “You okay?”

“Is it just Sasha?” I asked.

He nodded and the relief was so pure, it brought tears close to the surface again.

“Take him,” I said, angling my head toward the boy. “We’ll bring Sasha.”

“I’m taking that as your definitive vote for trusting them,” he said, wiping the sweat off his face.

I turned back toward the smoldering forest, scanning for any sign of movement. “I tend to find saving kids from being kidnapped and murdered pretty endearing.”

He clucked his tongue. “Makes it unanimous, then. She saved both my and Jen’s asses when she busted into the house. Consider her extra endearing.”

More than that, though, I finally understood what was going on. The darkness I’d sensed at their edges, shaping their lies, hadn’t been some horrible intention. It had been a person, and she was nothing I ever could have imagined.

Like us, but not.

I took off, calling out Priyanka’s name as I moved off the trail and into the woods. My mind raced. What Lana could do…the fact that she could affect our minds the way she had, suppressing our powers and driving stakes of pain directly into our nerves, made me think she might be Orange-classified. The only two I’d known, Ruby and Clancy, hadn’t had the exact same ability, after all. He could plant suggestions, manipulate feelings, and maneuver bodies, but only Ruby had been able to directly affect someone’s memory.

I slid to a stop at the sight of Priyanka coming toward me, her arms crossed tight against her chest, her head down. Her whole body shook, and her face looked as if every emotion had been wrung out of her.

“Are you all right?” I jogged toward her.

She shook her head, momentarily unable to find the words. Priyanka looked…not helpless, but lost. “I couldn’t…I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t make her stay.”

I didn’t know what to say other than “I don’t think anyone could have.”

“I could have. I should have. But I promised Roman not to take it too far.” Even though she didn’t repeat them, I saw the echo of the words on her face. I wasn’t enough.

“I thought she’d head back toward the lake for the helicopter extraction,” Priyanka explained, her voice betraying her exhaustion, “but it’s like she became the darkness. She must have gone a different direction. I couldn’t make her stay…I couldn’t make her stay.”

The words, how she kept repeating them, made Priyanka sound like she was drifting away. I gripped her arm, trying to steady her.

“Do you want to look for her?” I asked. “The ground’s damp enough that we can probably track her with better light.”

In truth, I didn’t want to go after the girl who had just tried to hard-boil my brain. But I couldn’t take the thought of her out there, doing what she did to another Psi. It hadn’t just been the way she’d hurt us. It had been the way she’d relished it.

“No. If we keep chasing her, she’ll run farther and faster,” Priyanka said miserably, rubbing her forehead. “We have to find a way to get her to come to us.”

When I didn’t answer, Priyanka must have read my thoughts on my face. “Listen…Lana is…She’s different.”

“I missed that part,” I said wryly.

She bit her lip. “She’s not herself. That’s not her. I don’t know what they’ve done to her, but that’s not the Lana I knew.”

“Let me guess, she’s usually a ray of sunshine.” I remembered the nickname Priyanka had used a second too late to stop myself. “Sorry.”

She lifted a hand, waving it off. When I started back toward the house, she followed.

“But clearly there’s a connection between her and the kidnappers,” I pressed. “So what’s the story there?”

Priyanka looked like she might be physically ill. “I…think that the kidnappers might have actually been after me and Roman. I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. I wasn’t sure until I saw Lana here. He…they must be trying to drag us back.”

I wasn’t sold on her theory. There were still too many pieces to this that didn’t fit together. The warning on the teleprompter, for one. And if the kidnappers were just after Roman and Priyanka, why stage a whole explosion? But a larger question loomed.

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked. “The Psion Ring? She mentioned a ‘he’ too. That ‘he’ made her stronger.”

Her expression was so distant, I wasn’t sure she’d heard me until, at last, she said, “I don’t know. Someone could have…someone could have taken over the Psion Ring. Changed things. They didn’t use to work with non-Psi, but things…they change. We weren’t supposed to leave. Ever. Someone wants us back.”

Priyanka seemed to be genuinely struggling to pull herself together enough to speak. “When we left, she didn’t come with us. We never should have left her, but it was unavoidable. It was, I swear.”

“I believe you,” I said, startled by how badly she seemed to need me to understand. Her eyes were haunted.

“We tried to make contact with her, but we couldn’t reach her. And in the meantime, they’ve done this to her….” Her hand slid up, clenching in her hair.

“Are you talking about her power?” I asked. “It seemed like she could be some kind of Orange, but how could she do that?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know—they’ve—Lana was a gentle, sparkling person, not—not whatever that was.” Priyanka looked near tears. “Somehow, they’ve trained her to hurt people. I shouldn’t have left her.”

I couldn’t keep my family together, Roman had said. I couldn’t save my sister in the end.

In a way, he’d tried to tell me the truth. As much as he’d been able to while still protecting her. At the time, I thought he meant that his sister had died, so I hadn’t pressed him on it, knowing the exact degree of pain that came with blaming yourself for another person’s death.

“She’s still in there,” Priyanka said. “I know she is. She hasn’t taken off my mother’s necklace—that little gold flower, did you see? I know she seems angry, but there’s still love in her. We can reach her.”

I hadn’t sensed any of this supposed love, and was covered with enough cuts and bruises to make a strong counterargument. But Priyanka’s feelings for Lana were unequivocal.

“Why did you want to come here?” I asked.

“Because we’d heard about Daly—about your friend, Ruby,” Priyanka said. “We’d heard that Lana might have left the Psion Ring, and we were hoping she’d be here, or your friends might have heard something. I was so stupid to think she could have gotten away from them.”

My thoughts were too tangled to put them into words.

“You were right to hope they would help,” I said. “They would have, no questions asked. But they’re not here. About two weeks ago, Ruby went missing on a run to pick up another kid.”

The wind ruffled the trees overhead.

“Holy shit,” Priyanka breathed out. “Seriously?”

Her voice was lost to the scream of a helicopter ripping through the air overhead—moving not toward the lake, but away from it. Priyanka and I exchanged a look.

We took off together, weaving through the forest back to the trail, only to find that Roman was already there. He ran up the dirt path at a steady clip, Sasha clinging to his back, her tear-streaked face pressed against his shoulder.

“It’s done,” he said quietly, then looked to Priyanka. She shook her head.

“We should go,” I said. But Roman had turned again to the forest, that hard look of determination back on his face. We didn’t have time to chase after someone who didn’t want to be found, not right now. “Come together, leave together. Right?”

His eyes found mine, but the prickling heat I felt at the base of my skull had nothing to do with that look, and everything to do with a familiar power signature nearby.

Drone.

I was running again, leaving the others to follow as I moved up the path. My feet slowed until, finally, I saw it. The spiderlike device whirred as it floated over the bodies of the soldiers, passing over the scene in slow, intentional passes. It lit the ground beneath it, which only would have been necessary if it was taking photos or video.

Miguel had destroyed the phone with the original set of photos—but if this device had photos of our attackers, I wanted it. As Mel always said, people want to believe, they just needed a narrative plausible enough to justify it. Mine, at least, had the benefit of being true.

I heard Priyanka and Roman catch up behind me, but didn’t turn. I began unraveling the silver thread of power in my mind, only to cut it off. It would be too easy to fry it and render it useless. So, instead, I raised the pistol. The drone was about as big as a cat, which was probably not a comparison I should have let my brain make as I tracked its movement and aimed.

“What are you doing?” Roman whispered.

The drone hovered low over the porch, scanning for something. I took a deep breath in, adjusted the angle of my arms, then fired.

The bullet tore through one of its wings. It bobbed, trying to adjust and forcing me to shoot out a second one. The drone crashed into the charred wood of the porch, skidding across it.

“Careful,” Priyanka warned as I approached it. “The camera’s probably feeding directly to someone.”

“Good,” I said, gripping the drone and turning it over. Glancing back over my shoulder, I found Roman watching me, his anxious expression fading. Priyanka knelt beside one of the soldiers, searching his pockets and belt, removing his flashlight and sliding something into the pocket of her jeans.

The drone’s propellers stopped spinning, but there was still a small red light on beside the glossy camera lens.

I brushed the dirt off it, just so it would have as clear an image as possible.

“I don’t know who the hell you are,” I said. “But if you come at me or my loved ones again, you better pray to God you actually kill me, because I’m right behind you and I’ve got nothing else to lose.”

The red light blinked off.