Jamie shook his head. "No pawnshops. No credit cards. No ATMs. We're going to have to figure out an alternative. But let's wait till we get inside."

The three of us basically watched the minute hand tick by as we waited for the pub to open. My stomach was downright angry. When the clock struck eleven, I practically dove into the pub, which was entirely plastered with dollar bills. They hung from the ceiling, papered the walls-every inch of every available surface was covered with them, except for the tables. The woman from the dock showed us to a table near the back.

"What can I do you for?" She handed us three menus. "Any drinks?"

"Water," Jamie and I said at once. My mouth felt spoiled after the beer. Stella ordered water too, and the waitress disappeared.

Jamie glanced at the menu. "I'm starving. I want everything."

"Co-signed," Stella said. "Maybe the key shrimp pizza?"

"Treif," Jamie said, not looking up.

Stella raised an eyebrow. "Gesundheit?"

"It's not kosher, I mean. No shrimp."

"Oh," Stella said. "The Hawaiian pizza, then?"

Jamie shook his head, still looking at the menu. "Nope. Ham."

"Pepperoni?"

"Same."

"Okay, you're impossible."

"Vegetarian and plain cheese. That's what I can have."

The waitress returned, and we placed an order for two pies with extra cheese. Before she left, Jamie asked her, "Is there, like, any way to get a cab or anything from here?"

She laughed heartily. We guess that meant no.

"Can't go back the way you came?"

"Not exactly," Jamie mumbled.

"How'd you get out here?"

"We came with . . . friends. On a . . . boat. We took a ride out to an island to . . ." He was floundering.

"Camp out under the stars," Stella said. She was good at this game. It would come in handy.

Charlotte tucked her pencil behind her ear. "That's romantic."

"It was supposed to be," I said, lying smoothly, "but then they stole away in the night with our things."

"Practical joke," Stella added.

"Some joke." Charlotte shook her head. "I've got a phone. You can call your parents to come and pick you up, and you're welcome to stay here until then, as long as you need to. Sodas on the house."

"That's the thing-we're not from here," Stella said.

"Where are you from?"

"New York," Jamie said. I raised an eyebrow at him. What was that about?

"Well, you're a long way from home," Charlotte said.

She had no idea.

The waitress left us and I thought we might eat each other in the time it took her to bring our order. The three of us reached for the pizzas at once; the slice in my hand was steaming, but I was so hungry, I didn't care. I couldn't remember the last time I'd tasted food. I had no memory of eating at all in Horizons, and I didn't know if it was because the drugs were messing with my memory or because I actually hadn't eaten at all.

Jamie held a slice in each hand and was looking back and forth between them. "I want to double-fist the shit out of this pizza."

Stella paused from blowing on her slice. "That's not going to work out the way you think it will."

I didn't even bother blowing on mine. I just took a huge bite, burning my tongue and throat in the process. But that wasn't what made me gag.

"Mara?" Stella looked worried.

"I'm okay," I said after I caught my breath. The aftertaste was like cement. "I can't-I can't taste it or something? It tastes weird. Doesn't it taste weird?"

Two pairs of eyes stared at me.

"It doesn't taste weird to you?"

They shook their heads.

"You should try to eat," Stella said gently.

"Yeah, you look pretty terrible," Jamie added, not at all gently.

Stella's brown eyes were warm. "You've been through a lot. More than us, probably."

Jamie took alternating bites of pizza. "I'm reserving judgment until I hear your story."

I supposed it was time to tell it.

I looked over my shoulder, eyeing the other people in the pub. There was a woman wearing a fanny pack, and her husband in a golf shirt. A man with a handlebar mustache wearing a Hawaiian shirt sat at the bar, following the fishing channel with an abnormal amount of interest. It didn't look like anyone was listening to us, but even if they were, no one in their right mind would believe what I was about to say.

15.

I TOLD JAMIE AND STELLA everything, from the Ouija board to the asylum, from Rachel to Jude and Claire. From Mabel's shitty owner to Morales. Jamie's brows drew together as the words left my mouth.

And then I told them about Noah. Why he couldn't be dead.

"Because he can heal," Jamie said.

"Himself or other people?" Stella asked.

"Both." I told them about Joseph, and how he'd been taken by Jude and rescued by Noah, and about my father, and how he'd been shot because of me but had survived because of Noah. I didn't mention the "love him to ruins" thing. That wouldn't exactly help my case. And it felt too private to share.

"But you're not saying he could survive a gun to his head, right?" Jamie asked.

Stella elbowed him sharply. "Jamie."

"I'm not trying to be insensitive-"

"No, you're not trying," I said.

"I'm just saying-"

I leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands flat against it. "I know what you're just saying. I know. But there's too much we don't know to just decide that he's-" I didn't want to say the word. "Have you guys even seen proof that Horizons collapsed?"

They shook their heads.

"But there was still the fire," Jaime said.

I clenched my jaw. "He wasn't there when it happened."

"Then where is he?"

That was what I was going to find out.

Stella shared her tale of woe next. Once upon a time she was a gymnast and a swimmer. Then puberty hit, and her hips and breasts grew, and when she was sixteen, she stopped eating-because of her coach and her mother, her psychologists said. But they didn't know about the voices.

To her they sounded like other people's thoughts. But that was impossible, obviously. She grew more and more panicked, and the voices grew louder and louder in response-keeping her awake at night and distracted during the day. She couldn't swim or train or eat, but then she noticed something curious. The longer she went without eating, the weaker the voices became. She was down to ninety pounds and losing her hair by the time her father finally overrode her mother (who had insisted Stella was just "watching calories") and forced Stella to get help. And she got it. After months of therapy and several stints in rehab, her doctors finally seemed to settle on a wonder drug that helped her-until it was suddenly recalled by the FDA. She backslid fast, but Dr. Kells contacted her parents just in time.

"Lucky me." Stella took a bite of pizza. "But I had a feeling there was something up with you guys the moment you walked into the program. Like when we were together for group stuff, I couldn't hear either of you, even when I could hear everyone else-but my meds make it sort of confusing. They shut out most of the voices most of the time, but when I'm stressed or anxious, it gets worse."

"Or angry?" Jamie said.

"Is that how it happens with you?" I asked him.

Jamie shrugged and avoided my eyes. "Before I was expelled and shipped off to Crazytown, I would notice sometimes that if I told people to do things, they would actually do them. But not like, 'Hey, man, would you mind handing me the keys to your Maserati?' It's more like, 'Tell me that secret' or, 'Drive me here.' It seemed so random, and the stuff I was telling people to do wasn't crazy. Like, it could have been a coincidence," he said, "except that it didn't always feel like a coincidence. Sometimes it felt real." He met my eyes, and I knew he was thinking about Anna.

Anna, our former classmate, who had bullied him since fourth grade, and whom he had told to drive off a cliff. She drove drunk off an overpass after that.

"And I felt crazy for thinking it," Jamie said.

I looked up at him. "We all have that in common."

"What in common?" Stella asked.

Jamie got it. "That what's wrong with us, the gene thing, G1821 or whatever-the symptoms make us look like we're crazy."

Or maybe it actually made us crazy. I thought about my reflection. About the way it talked back to me.

"That explains why no one's discovered the gene," Jamie said, refocusing my attention. "If someone appears to be hallucinating, or delusional, or is starving themselves, or hurting themselves, the most obvious explanation would be mental illness, not some bizarre genetic mutation-"

"Mutation?" I asked. "We're mutants now?"

Jamie smirked. "Don't tell Marvel. They'll sue us. But listen, though. Genes don't just appear in a few people. It just doesn't happen. Genes change over centuries. They degrade, they alter-"

"They evolve," I said.

"Exactly. So what we have-whatever we are, we've evolved into it."

"Superman or Spider-Man," I said quietly.

Stella looked back and forth between Jamie and me. "Explain?"

I remembered the conversation I'd had with my brother, when I'd told him I needed to fictionalize my problems for a fake Horizons assignment, so I could get him to help me without knowing he was helping me.

"So she could be a superhero or supervillain," my brother had said. "Is it a Peter Parker or a Clark Kent situation?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like, was your character born with this thing la Superman or did she acquire it like Spider-Man?"

I didn't know the answer then, but I knew it now. "Spider-Man acquired his ability from a radioactive spider bite," I said. "Superman was born with it-"

"Because he's really Kal-El, an alien," Jamie said.

I was Superman. Just like I'd thought.

But when I'd told Noah about Daniel's theory, he'd been convinced that we had to have acquired what was wrong with us.

"How many times have you wished someone dead, Mara? Someone who cuts you off on the highway, et cetera?"

"I've probably wished a lot of people dead a lot of times," I said now, and repeated Noah's words.

"Everybody does that," Stella assured me.

"And Noah's parents would've noticed that he healed abnormally fast when they took him to the doctor for shots, right? So why is everything starting to happen now, if it's something we were born with?"

Jamie slapped his palm on the table. "There's a trigger. It's like cancer. They can screen you genetically to see if you're at risk for developing it, because there are markers. But just because you're at risk-"

"Doesn't mean you'll actually get cancer," I finished, as the missing puzzle piece clicked into place.