She shoots me a funny look.
“I’m serious,” I say. “I think we have a pretty normal friendship.”
Instead of answering me, she says, “Did you two ever”—she waves a hand at nothing—“date?”
“What?” My eyes widen. A traitorous heat floods my body. “No.”
“Never?” she says, her smile slow.
“Never. I swear. Not even close.”
“Okay.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with him,” I hurry to add. “Kenji is wonderful. The right person would be lucky to be with him.”
Nazeera laughs, softly.
She carries the stack of pillows and blankets over to the row of airplane seats and begins reclining the backs. I watch her as she works. There’s something so smooth and refined about her movements—something intelligent in her eyes at all times. It makes me wonder what she’s thinking, what she’s planning. Why she’s here at all.
Suddenly, she sighs. She’s not looking at me when she says, “Do you remember me yet?”
I raise my eyebrows, surprised. “Of course,” I say quietly.
She nods. She says, “I’ve been waiting awhile for you to catch up,” and sits down, inviting me to join her by patting the seat next to her.
I do.
Wordlessly, she hands me a couple of blankets andpillows. And then, when we’re both settled in and I’m staring, suspiciously, at the vacuum-sealed package of “food” she threw at me, I say—
“So you remember me, too?”
Nazeera tears open her vacuum-sealed package. Peers inside to study the contents. “Emmaline guided me to you,” she says quietly. “The memories. The messages. It was her.”
“I know,” I say. “She’s trying to unify us. She wants us to band together.”
Nazeera shakes out the contents of the bag into her hand, picks through the bits of freeze-dried fruit. She glances at me. “You were five when you disappeared,” she says. “Emmaline was six. I’m six months older than you, and six months younger than Emmaline.”
I nod. “The three of us used to be best friends.”
Nazeera looks away, looks sad. “I really loved Emmaline,” she says. “We were inseparable. We did everything together.” She shrugs, even as a flash of pain crosses her face. “That was all we got. Whatever we might’ve been was stolen from us.”
She picks out two pieces of fruit and pops them into her mouth. I watch as she chews, thoughtfully, and wait for more.
But the seconds pass and she says nothing, and I figure I should fill the silence. “So,” I say. “We’re not actually getting any sleep, are we?”
That gets her to smile. Still, she doesn’t look at me.
Finally, she says, “I know you and Warner got theabsolute worst of it, I do. But if it makes you feel any better, they wiped all of our memories, in the beginning.”
“I know. Emmaline told me.”
“They didn’t want us to remember you,” she says. “They didn’t want us to remember a lot of things. Did Emmaline tell you she’s reached out to all of us? You, me, Warner, my brother—all the kids.”
“She told me a little bit, yeah. Have you talked to any of the others about it?”
Nazeera nods. Pops another piece of fruit in her mouth.
“And?”
