“No. It’s fine. This won’t come back to me.” April will make sure any possible traces of my presence in the penthouse are erased. “I miss him. He had a good heart, and I wish he’d had a chance to use it the way he wanted to.”
Ezekiel puts his arm around me, letting me sag against his shoulder. He’s not my father, but he’s the closest thing I can ever remember having, and we’ve done well together.
“Youhave a good heart,” he says, which only makes me swallow back new tears. I’ve felt broken for such a long time, and with the power simmering beneath my skin, I feel more fractured than ever. “I know the last few years have been hard. If I could change it, I would. But you remember what I said when your mom died?”
I do. It’s the thing that’s kept me going. “That the best thing we could do was help the people who are still here?”
He squeezes me, and I’m getting tears and snot on his suit jacket, but he doesn’t seem to care. “Exactly. And we can do that for your friend too. What was his name?”
“Jasper.”
“Jasper.” Ezekiel gives me a reassuring pat. “If he was a good person trying to help others, then we can do that for him too. Our work is going to change the world.”
“It’s going to save it,” I say, heaving a big sigh as I sit up again, grounding myself in the speech we’ve given each other over and over.
“It is.” Ezekiel smiles. “How about I order in some food and we can talk about the presentation?”
I roll my eyes. “We’ve been over the presentation.”
“Maybe.” He pulls off his jacket and loosens his tie. “But it can’t hurt to look again.”
“Clarissa will be pissed if we make any changes,” I say. My smile feels false, but that happened after Mother died too. Eventually you get used to it.
We order sushi. We go over the slides. They’re fine. The colours, the wording. I talk through my introduction, and Ezekiel paces the living room like a ringmaster, telling anyone who will listen—just me and my ghosts in this case—about how the Ziro Machine will accelerate our recovery from the effects of global warming and save at-risk communities around the world. It feels good. Normal. I applaud when he’s done and he winks his appreciation.
Except I’m not normal. Somehow, only a few hours later, I’m back in bed, because it’s night and that’s what normal people do at night. They sleep. But I can’t. Maybe it’s because I slept all day. Maybe it’s because my mother hardly ever slept, so our house was never quiet. Hard to fight evil if you keep nine to five hours, she’d say.
But I can fight evil now. I press a fingertip to the nightstand. At first, nothing happens, just like it always does. I think back to the penthouse, trying to recall the sequence of events. What was different that time? It was real, for one. Truly life or death. Most of the time, I’m focused on the object I touch. A laptop battery. Power cables behind a monitor. Last night I thought instead about the man touching me and somehow that meant not only could I push the energy out of me, I could channel it. Direct it. I kept it away from me and Jasper, even though the flow from the man standing above me and through my body was like an overflowing river.
I open my eyes, and a tiny ring of frost has formed around my finger. I gasp, pulling my bottom lip between my teeth. As I imagine the river, the little ring gets wider and my pulse picks up. I have to breathe through my mouth to stay calm. If I stay focused. If I keep thinking about the man above me and Jasper’s desperate gasping next to me, then?—
Something like a shock zaps through me and I yelp as I pull my hand back. The frost recedes, disappearing on the mahogany veneer. My phone is lying face down next to the ring of small water droplets that remain. It’s been on the charger all day, so I unplug it and turn it on. There are about a half million emails and missed calls from Ezekiel and Clarissa. They start with polite cheery requests for proof of life and get increasingly frantic the longer I don’t reply.
As I clear emails, a notification pings on the screen.
New text message from unknown sender
I go to delete the text, but my thumb falters when the screenshot of Jasper’s face appears where words should be. He’s the unknown sender. Of course he is. Just over twenty-four hours ago, I was waiting to meet a stranger for a blind date I was sure would be a disaster. Why would I have saved his number in my phone?
My hand shakes as I get the video to play. The shaking gets worse in the first few seconds as Jasper looks at me from the screen. He’s in bed, shaggy hair in his face, head nestled in the pillow, looking relaxed and a little self-conscious.
“Hey,” he says, glancing to the side for a moment before he comes back to the screen. “You’re in the shower right now, so I’m hoping you can’t hear me. I don’t know if you’ll actually ever see this since I’m going to set it to send twenty-four hours from now. If you don’t, I guess it means we screwed up and the day started over. Sorry about that. Hope it didn’t hurt too much. But if youdo see this, then maybe we survived. That’s what it would mean, right?”
My throat hurts because he can’t have known how wrong he’d be.
“Anyway, there’s some things I want to say to you, and if I say them to your face, you’ll get flustered and pick a fight rather than hearing what I’m trying to tell you.”
I wrinkle my nose, the instinct to protest strong, but he’s not here for me to argue with, and aren’t I proving his point anyway?
“I need to tell you that I see you. I see how hard you’re trying, and how brave you think you have to be all the time. Even before you remembered our dates, I could see it. I remember, trust me.” His smile softens. “I know there’s things you haven’t told me about who you are. And I know you don’t like me and the choices I’ve had to make. But Morgan, I think you’re amazing. You’re so smart and so dedicated to what you do. I wish I stuck to what I thought was right as much as you do.”
He did, though. That’s the thing. He gave up everything to protect his family. That’s so much more than I’ve done.
Jasper rolls over, the pillow wrinkling under his head. I’m still in his T-shirt, and his lumber scent makes me want to curl up in a ball and cry until I’m all dried out. Instead, I hold the phone close and listen as he says, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad we got stuck here. Obviously not the dying part. But even when we’re fighting, I’d rather fight with you than be with pretty much anyone else. There are so many things I need to tell you, and there are so many dates that I remember that you don’t, and I want to tell you about those too.” He sighs, running his free hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face. I have to smile because I miss his scruffy persona so much and it’s only been a day. “Anyway, I’ll probably be super embarrassed when you see this, but if you do see it, that means we found a way out, and that’s the important part. I’ll get over the embarrassment. But ifwe did find a way out, I hope you’ll let me take you on another date. I promise it will go better than this one.”
I cough on a sob that is fifty percent laughter as he grins at the screen. Jasper glances to the side again. “You turned off the water, so you’re probably coming back out. I’m sure you’ve been thinking of ways to start an argument while you were in there, so I’m going to sign off. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
Then the screen shifts, showing the blank wall next to the bed, before the video freezes.
