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  “Move, Mana.” China’s voice is a hard thin thing.

  “What?”

  “Go!” He leans over and blares the horn—a loud horrible noise. Enoch starts barking, but Seppie and Lyle? They don’t respond at all. No jumping. No yelling. No smiling. If anything, their walk becomes more focused, harder, faster.

  “What’s wrong with them?” I do not accelerate. I sit there in the car, motionless, staring at Seppie and Lyle. Rigidity distorts their normally happy faces. Seppie’s hair is not perfect. Lyle’s shirt is tucked in. I am suddenly cold and horrified. “Something is seriously wrong with them.”

  “Go! I’ll explain,” China insists.

  “I’m not. I’m not going. They’re my friends; I have to take care of them.” Before he can say anything, I open the door and leap out of the Jeep.

  His voice is a growl of anger and outrage, but I ignore it and rush toward them. Enoch barrels after me, barking and growling even louder.

  I yank her back by her leash. “No, baby … no…”

  And in all that hectic wildness, I sort of lose track of what’s going on for a second. When I look back up again, China has jumped into the driver’s seat, which is not adjusted for him, and his legs are folded up and he’s yelling, “Get in the car! Get back in the car right now, Mana!”

  But Enoch is barking so loudly and straining, trying to get to Seppie and Lyle, that I can’t even imagine trying to get in the car again.

  “Lyle!” I yell. “Seppie! You guys okay?”

  And that’s when Lyle screams, dropping the crowbar. This makes no sense. Is he okay? What is going on? He grabs at his head like he has the mother of all migraines and I want to take care of him, but something holds me back. Fear? Seppie runs at me, silent. She lifts the crowbar like a weapon—like a weapon that she’s going to use against me.

  “No!” I duck and she misses. She tried to hit me! “Seppie!”

  Enoch leaps for Seppie’s arm and latches on. Her doggy teeth grab at Seppie’s bulky parka that Seppie always thinks makes her look too rugged, but her parents insist that she wear because it has a negative-fifteen-degrees cold rating.

  Seppie’s crowbar drops to the asphalt.

  “I have to get you,” she says. “I have to get you!”

  And her voice is a plea and a cry. But then there’s Lyle and he’s picked up the crowbar and he’s waving it in front of my face.

  “Mana, we have to get you,” he says, and his voice is not right either.

  “Lyle?” My own voice breaks when I say his name. Fear ripples through me. Something is terribly wrong with him. “Are you guys okay?”

  Enoch lets go of Seppie and growls, standing in front of me, guarding me from both of my best friends. Her fur stands up straight. Her ears flatten against her skull. Seppie’s coat is ripped, but it doesn’t look like she’s bleeding.

  “Guys … what are you talking about?” I ask.

  China’s hand grabs me and he’s shoving me into the backseat of the Jeep before I realize what’s happening. Slamming shut the door, he ignores my protest and spins around to confront Seppie and Lyle. But they are lunging at the car, trying to open my door and get to me.

  “Dog!” he yells and Enoch leaps into the front passenger seat. China rushes into the driver’s seat and slams the door, locking it.

  Seppie and Lyle bang at the window like zombie extras on an AMC prime-time show.

  “What is going on?” I pant out the words, scrambling to get away from the window, which Seppie is trying to break with the crowbar. China accelerates and the car lurches forward. The crowbar slams into metal between the windows. Enoch falls off the front seat with a yelp. I manage to pull myself through the space between the bucket seats and get shotgun. Enoch clambers onto my lap. I throw my arms around her so she won’t fall again.

  “Get your seatbelt on,” China orders.

  “I can’t, she’s in the way.”

  “Get your seatbelt on now!”

  “Why?”

  “They’re coming.”

  “Who? Seppie and Lyle?” Not even Lyle can run that fast.

  “Not Seppie and Lyle,” he says, jerking his thumb backward. “Everyone.”

  Craning my head, I peek behind us. There are people—people everywhere—filling the street. Grandmothers, children, police officers, firefighters, hospital workers. There are people in wheelchairs, people without their coats on and just in hospital gowns. There are people of all different races, but they are mostly white because New Hampshire is demographically mostly white—95 percent, I memorized that. Asians? 2 percent. There are people of all different ages, but they’re mostly over forty, probably because we’re by the hospital. The only thing that they all have in common is the expression on their faces—steely-eyed, determined, mouths open and demanding—and their movement. They are all rushing forward, toward us, toward the car.

  “China?” My voice is a squeak.

  “Hold on, Mana.”

  I turn to face the front and manage to finally get my seatbelt on despite my shaking hands and Enoch’s 125-pound presence on my lap. I grab her again. She doesn’t seem safe. None of us seems safe.

  “What is going on? Why are they chasing us?”

  “You. They are chasing you. That’s what Lyle said. He was ‘getting’ you.”

  “Why are they getting me?”

  “Don’t get hysterical.”

  “I am not hysterical and you are not helping.”

  “I’m trying to get us out of here.” He veers around two people wearing bright pink hospital volunteer vests and carrying electrical cords. “What the—”

  One of them throws herself on the hood of the car and rolls off. Enoch snarls.

  “What is happening?” I demand.

  China’s silent for a second. “Mind control. I can’t think of anything else.”

  Mind control? I look back again. So many. There are so many. Some of them are barefoot. Except—

  “But you’re fine. Why are you fine?” I stare at China as he speeds out of the parking lot finally. We careen down the access road to the hospital, past the man-made water retention pond and the hospital’s generators.

  “Not a good time to talk about this.” He frantically turns the wheel of the car to the right to avoid a police officer who is setting up a spike mat across the roadway.

  “It’s a pursuit termination device,” he says. “Damn it.”

  If we hit that, our tires will flatten instantly and China will lose control of the Jeep.

  Instead, he loses control of the Jeep anyway, up on the sidewalk, zigzagging one way and then another. He hits a garbage can.

  “That’s going to dent,” I say quietly.

  He growls again. Enoch leaps into the backseat.

  “I’m just saying. Do you own this Jeep or does my mom?”

  “When your mother wakes up, a little dent is going to be the least of her worries.”

  This is most likely true, but Mom is one of those people who hates anything ruining the perfection of her car, even if it is a Subaru. It already had the giant dent from the Wendigo. And then the event at the diner pretty much decimated it.

  China gets the Jeep back onto the roadway, safely beyond the police officer. The people here act … normal—just walking, not really looking at us. Going about their happy people business.

  “Is that it?” I ask.

  “I think so.”

  “Are all those people back at the hospital … are Seppie and Lyle still…” I struggle for the words because the words are too weird to utter. “Mind controlled?”

  “It wears off. Thankfully.”

  We go up on the highway, taking the ramp quickly. It’s just four and the sun is beginning to set, bringing down the cold, scary night sky. The snow is here now. The sky can’t give us any more warnings about what might come; no matter how hard I stare at it, I won’t see stars through the darkness.

  China clears his throat next to me. His eyes squint like he might be nee
ding glasses to drive at night. His grip on the steering wheel loosens and is no longer white-knuckled. Enoch sits in the backseat, perfectly content.

  I shift my gaze to the front window, then think better of it, pulling up my yellow Keds so that I can retie them. I should get the kind without laces. Someday something as simple as an unlaced shoe might be the end of me. I try to slow my breath down, bring calmness into my heart, but I’m barely handling this.

  Almost like he reads my thoughts, China says, “It’s okay to occasionally let it get to you.”

  “I’m trying to be better than that now,” I respond, tightening the knot as I reference the time before. The last big amount of time we were together, when my mom was missing, I had multiple freak-out moments when I realized aliens were real, that some were super-dangerous, that I was not normal, that my mom was kidnapped. It was not one of the shiniest times in the history of Mana. My heart twists; at least back then Lyle cared. “Explain to me about the mind control. Why are they coming after me?”

  “You must have something someone wants.”

  The crystal. It has to be the crystal.

  “Something who wants?” I ask.

  He lifts a shoulder like he doesn’t know.

  “It appears shoulders can lie.”

  “What?” He sniffs in like he has a cold.

  “You’re pretending with this nonverbal action like you don’t know who is mind-controlling everyone. But you always answer with words. Therefore, your shoulder is lying.”

  Enoch barks, which I take as agreement. Reaching back, I show her my hand. She slaps it with her paw, giving me five.

  “I need to be able to trust you, China,” I say after he doesn’t answer for a good thirty seconds. “I’m not even sure where we’re going.”

  “I’ve told you not to trust anyone,” he grumbles.

  “I’m doing a good job at that,” I admit, and even as I admit it, I know that it’s hard. I don’t like this world where there is nobody I can depend on. I don’t like this world in which I can’t just know what the hell is going on and where people’s hearts and intentions are. Lyle. Seppie. They tried to kidnap me.

  It’s almost like he’s reading my mind again because he says, “It wasn’t them. They weren’t controlling their actions.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You could see Lyle fighting it. He threw that crowbar down and grabbed his head in pain. He was trying, which is remarkable. Truly. You can’t blame them when they are under cognitive intervention and control.”

  “You aren’t.”

  He shrugs. The sky darkens even more. Car headlights switch on. Taillights resemble eyes, sinister eyes. I tilt my head back against the seat’s headrest. It’s too high, though. Enoch circles and resettles in the backseat.

  “Are you going to tell me why you weren’t?” I ask.

  China sighs. “When … when I joined the government, there were some … procedures that they did. It was to prevent this sort of thing from happening.”

  “Procedures?”

  “Just a tiny bit of brain surgery. No big deal.”

  I gasp and he laughs. “Aren’t you going to ask me the important question?”

  “The important question?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Well, that’s a decent one, ‘which is,’ but I meant, ‘China, how about why wasn’t I mind-controlled? Wouldn’t it have been more effective and efficient to just control me?’ Or maybe, ‘Who is doing this?’”

  “I asked the last one! You just didn’t answer.” I would pout, but that seems childish. So, instead, I focus on tying my other shoe. Today was the kind of day where running is important and tonight seems like it’s not going to be much better.

  I wait.

  He drives. He puts on the radio instead of answering. It’s a report about the Side Street Café exploding.

  “Investigators say a faulty gas main is likely to blame in an explosion that destroyed a local diner and took the life of a—”

  I click it off.

  He puts it on again.

  I turn the volume down.

  Enoch puts her head down on her paws and instantly begins snoring.

  I wait some more. And finally I lose my patience. “Listen, if you want me to trust you, you need to at least answer my questions.”

  “Listen, you already do trust me whether you admit it or not,” he says, mimicking my use of the word listen, which I use too much, admittedly. “And you need to actually ask me the questions.”

  “I did! I asked you before. I asked at least one of them.” I take a deep breath. “This is a ridiculous thing to bicker about. I’m going to ask the questions. One. Are Seppie and Lyle okay? Two. Why am I not mind-controlled? Three. Who is doing this?”

  “I don’t know if your friends are okay. I’m assuming that they are.”

  My heart twists. “They have to be okay. We should—we should go back.”

  “We both know they are long gone from there. Once they are no longer under the influence, they’ll go back to what they were doing before. If they stay under someone’s control, they’ll be looking for you.”

  I exhale. He’s probably right, but I still feel like I’ve abandoned them even though they were technically attacking me. My body buzzes from the tension and adrenaline. Horrible. There is nothing more horrible than seeing your friends taken away from you, their minds and actions distorted. They were not themselves, I try to convince myself. They were not Lyle and Seppie.

  “Life is not easy,” I announce.

  “True. Second question,” China continues. He is not the sort of person who dwells in the Land of Self-Pity. I try to respect this, but sometimes a little self-pity is sort of therapeutic. “I have no certainty about why you aren’t mind-controlled but I’m assuming it is for the same reason that I’m not. Someone made sure that you couldn’t be. If that was your mom, the government, the aliens who abducted you? I have no clue. Question number three. Who is doing this? That’s a good one. Question number four is even better. That is why.”

  “Sometimes you sound like a teacher—the bad kind of teacher—and you’ve already told me why: I have something they want or I am something they want or whatever,” I grumble, because even though this is interesting and important stuff, China is not my teacher or my parent and sometimes when he does these information dumps, I feel like he’s talking down to me, which could be—to be fair—my own insecurity, or it might just be that he actually is talking down to me. My adrenaline is too jacked up right now to do any real deep soul searching about this, and to be honest, I’m not sure the development of my self-awareness should be my primary focus when the excrement has just hit the fan, excuse my French, as Mom and Wharff would say.

  China does not respond to my teacher insult. Instead, he just clears his throat and keeps talking. “I’m assuming that they are trying to get you because they perceive you as a threat or a potential ally. Or you have what they want.”

  Sometimes, I swear, he just likes to hear himself talk.

  “And who is they?” I study his profile as he drives through the night. My words are hard and tough and match how I feel inside. Hard. Tough. Walled off. Detached from this. But I’m not detached, because this is about me. Someone is trying to get me. This isn’t about just the crystal. This isn’t about just my friends’ betrayal. This is specific to me because of who and what I am and what is in my pocket. This is a big-picture sort of thing.

  He swallows hard. “I’d rather not tell you.”

  “Seriously?”

  He gives a bit of a shrug. “You already have enough trust issues, Mana.”

  “You’re the one who told me not to trust!”

  “Exasperation does not become you.”

  “Well, then, don’t be a dick.”

  “Fine. It’s Pierce,” he says, turning in to a driveway or maybe a dirt road. The headlights illuminate trees as the car rumbles over the uneven surface. “The only one I know wh
o is powerful enough to do that much mind control is Pierce.”

  CHAPTER 9

  He stops the car in the middle of the darkness, turns it off, and waits. He knows me well enough by now to know that I’m going to have questions.

  “Pierce?” I unbuckle my seatbelt. All I can see in front of me is woods, woods, and more woods. “You are saying that Pierce just mind-controlled all those people in an attempt to get me? You are saying that Pierce isn’t actually dead?”

  “Possibly and yes.”

  He unbuckles his seatbelt as well while I attempt to wrap my head around the newest development. Pierce is Fae, an alien species that people explain away as fairies or pixies or magical folk, only they’re not little. Pierce, specifically, is beautiful and sort of sparkly (an embarrassing trait, I imagine, because of the whole Twilight thing with vampires) and she used to work with my mom and China. Lyle and I met her when everything went wrong last year. She noticed that I could hear aliens’ thoughts sometimes. That was because I could hear some of hers. Some. Not all. When my former crush/evil alien Dakota attacked us, we assumed Pierce had died. But when I used the crystal, it looked like Pierce was there in the background … but the Australian guy called her Fey, didn’t he? To be fair, I want so badly for Pierce to be alive that I could probably delude myself into thinking that was her, but I also want her to be a good guy, not a bad guy.

  Truth is, I want everyone to be good guys and sometimes I feel like there are no good guys at all.

  “Where are we?” I ask after we open the doors and stand outside of the car. The world is quiet, almost too quiet. No little forest animals are scurrying anywhere.

  China’s voice suddenly shouts out, “Mana, duck!”

  I dive down to the snow even as I hear the telltale “Exterminate.”

  The Wendigo lands right where I was standing. Its gaunt, emaciated body gives it an undead guise and hides how strong and dangerous it is. Its skin is ashy gray and the thing smells so bad—like decay and old garbage and mold—that it makes me gag.

  “Exterminate.” The mouth is full of scissor-sharp teeth. Its black eyes focus on me.

  “China…?” He must have an appropriate weapon for this.

  Enoch’s snarling body leaps into the air even as I scream for her to stay back. She snatches the Wendigo by its head and rips it off. By the time all four of her dog paws are back on the ground, she’s spat the head back out. It rolls, lifeless, across the snow.