I lace my fingers with hers. “Come on. Come out of the bathroom. Your mom’s worried. Luka and Jackson are worried. Dee and Kelley must be freaking by now. Come on.”
I tug lightly on her hand, but she doesn’t move. She just sits there on the bathroom floor staring at the carpet.
“The nightmare was bad enough. But you know what’s worse?” she asks.
I stop tugging. She isn’t ready to budge; there’s more to the story. Unease slithers across my skin, raising goose bumps. “Tell me.”
“When I looked in the mirror . . .” She pulls her hand from mine. “When I looked in the mirror, the nightmare was still there. My eyes—”
I gasp. I can’t help it. I know what she’s going to say even before she says it.
“My eyes were like theirs.” She shudders. “Gray and scary. With slitted pupils instead of round ones. Not human. Like theirs.”
My turn to shudder.
Carly’s describing the Drau’s slitted pupils, but she never saw the Drau that killed her. It hit her from behind. She saw Jackson’s eyes when he did his Drau trick, but his pupils are human; they’re round.
My thoughts shift while I try to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle. I stare at the top of her bowed head, more than a little freaked out, trying to make sense of everything she’s saying.
She said she cried herself to sleep on the bathroom floor. . . . “Wait, when did you have the nightmare? Here, on the floor? After you locked yourself in the bathroom?”
She shakes her head. “I fell asleep on my bed. It was so weird.” She’s picking at the carpet again. Faster. Rougher. A thread pulls free and she throws it down, then pulls out another and another. “One second I was getting ready for the dance.” She pauses, her whole body motionless; then she starts pulling out threads again, even faster. “Then I was waking up on my bed. I don’t even remember lying down on the bed. I came in here. Washed my face. Looked in the mirror, and—”
I need to see her eyes.
“Look at me,” I order. And when she doesn’t, my unease ramps to full-on fear.
What if this isn’t Carly? My Carly. What if this is a different Carly, a shell?
No. That’s not possible.
Could they even have cloned her and made a shell so quickly?
Or maybe it wasn’t quick. Maybe the whole time-jump thing worked in their favor. Time passes differently inside the game and out.
But she’s acting like Carly acts when she’s upset. Would the Drau know that? Would they be able to program it into a clone?
Adrenaline spikes, sensitizing my skin, making my pulse gallop, my breathing harsh.
She balls her hand into a fist and presses it against her stomach, like she’s feeling sick.
That’s my opening. Only one way to be sure.
“Feeling queasy?” I ask, laying my hand just below hers.
I need to know if Carly’s a shell.
I curl my fingers a little, searching for proof. My index finger finds her navel.
She slaps at my hand. “What are you doing poking in my belly button?”
“Sorry,” I mutter, grinning like a Cheshire cat because the spandex clings to her and I can still see the indent. Shells don’t have umbilical cords, so they don’t have navels. One question answered.
“Freak,” Carly says without venom. She nods and sniffs, then scrubs her nose with the back of her hand. I unroll a few squares of toilet paper and hand them to her.
“I’m scared to look at my eyes,” she says.
Yeah . . . I might have a harder time explaining that away. I need to see them. See how bad they are. I don’t even want to begin trying to figure out how or why her eyes are Drau gray.
Is it because Jackson healed her? Fixed her? And now she has some connection?
But then why didn’t my eyes go gray when I healed him?
Because the flow of energy was in the opposite direction?
And if Jackson healed her, why hasn’t the Committee pulled him to face the repercussions of that?
My brain’s hurting from trying to figure this out.
One thing at a time.
“That’s why you locked yourself in? You didn’t want your mom to see your eyes?”
She gives a harsh laugh. “You’re giving me credit for actually thinking of a reason. I didn’t. I just freaked out and hid in here.”
“Show me,” I say.
“I’m scared,” she says, sounding young and lost and forlorn.
“I know. Let me see.” I cup her cheeks, tipping her face up so I can see exactly what she saw.
Carly’s hazel-green eyes look back at me, mascara streaking her cheeks in lurid black stripes.
Relief is like a hydrogen-filled balloon, floating up, up, up. “You’re nuts, you know that, right?” I ask.
“What?”
Laughing, I bound to my feet, grab her makeup mirror off the shelf, and hold it up so she can see.
“There’s nothing wrong with your eyes. It was just part of the nightmare.”
“Oh.” She moves closer to the mirror and stares at herself. Then she smiles. “Oh!”
I put the mirror down and hold my hand out to her. “You freaked yourself out for no reason.”
She huffs a short laugh. “I swear I’m never going to eat a giant Hershey bar in one sitting again. Ever.”
She grabs my hand and I yank her to her feet.
And for a millisecond, I swear her eyes flash Drau gray.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WE DON’T GO TO THE DANCE. CARLY JUST WANTS TO COME TO my place and chill, so she heads into her room to change while Jackson and Luka and I sit on the front step, waiting for her. The screaming match between her and her mom carries to us through the walls and the glass of the closed windows, muffled but still audible.
None of us says a word. I can feel the tension radiating from Jackson like heat from a fire.
Luka glances over at me, lifts his brows. I lift mine back. I’m not sure what message he takes from that, but he says, “I can’t sit here.” He slaps his palms against his thighs and stands. “I’m just gonna walk to the end of the block.”
I watch him go.
“Thank you,” I say to Jackson, once Luka’s out of earshot.
“For what?” He doesn’t look at me, just hunches forward, his forearms on his thighs, his hands loose between his spread knees.
“For what you did for Carly,” I say.
“I didn’t do it for Carly,” he says.
I nod. He did it for me. And for Carly, though he’s not the type to admit the last part.
“Truth is, I don’t think I did anything at all,” he continues, straightening and tipping his head back, his face toward the night sky. “There wasn’t time for me to do any kind of energy exchange. And if I’d succeeded, the Committee would be having a field day with me right now.” He drops his chin and turns his head a little toward me. “I wouldn’t be sitting here with you.”
Everything he says is true, but hearing it out loud makes me afraid. Because if Jackson didn’t fix things . . . “You think they saved her?” The Committee.
“Something did.” He offers a hint of a smile. “I don’t get to take credit for this one.”
I take a deep breath, hating myself for what I’m about to ask, needing to ask it. “Do you get to take credit for lying to me again?”
The smile vanishes. He’s quiet for a bit; then he asks, “Which lie are we talking about here?”
“There’s more than one?” I shake my head. “No, don’t answer that. Of course there’s more than one.”
“I don’t consider them lies.”
“Because they’re omission rather than commission?”
“Something like that.” He rests his forearms on his thighs again and dangles his hands between his legs.