Kaleb didn’t say anything and it took Sahara a few seconds to realize she wasn’t touching the ground anymore, her body floating several inches off the grass. Eyes wide, she stood up, her feet on nothing, then, checking to make sure no one was watching, jumped up and down without ever hitting the ground.
“That was wonderful,” she whispered when he set her down, then felt bad she’d forgotten about his pain. “I’m sorry. Did it hurt you to do that?”
Shaking his head, Kaleb played a finger through the water of the pond, making the lazy fish pretend to move. “Your Silence is flawed for your age group.”
Suddenly aware she’d forgotten to fake Silence because he was nice even if he didn’t talk a lot, Sahara bit down on her lower lip. “Are you going to tell on me?”
“No.”
And he never had, Sahara thought, sitting on a corner of her bed, her back braced against the wall and her arms wrapped around her knees as she thought of the boy with such haunting pain in his eyes. Instead, he’d taught her how to be more careful . . . and he’d visited her.
“Hello.”
Surprised, Sahara looked up from the wide stump where she sat. No one ever came this way, her home backing onto a stand of trees that ended at the perimeter fence. Pretty cardinal eyes in an expressionless face met her own.
“Hi!” Knowing her father was busy in his study on the other side of the house, she put down the datapad that held her despised math homework. “Is that man here again?” She hesitated, then said what was in her heart, since Kaleb had kept his word and not reported her terrible Silence. “I don’t like him.”
Kaleb shook his head. “I came to see you.” A pause. “I don’t know any other children who talk to me.”
“That must be lonely.” She broke off half her nutrition bar, held it out. “I know you probably think I’m a baby, but you can be my friend if you like.” Shifting on the stump when he accepted the snack, she made a space for him.
“I don’t think you’re a baby.” He took a seat beside her. “I think you’re smart and you see things other people don’t.” This time, the pause was longer, his gaze focused on something she couldn’t see. “I don’t like him, either.”
Another thread pulling free of the vault almost before she’d assimilated the last, another memory, this one tinged with laughter.
Sahara poked out her tongue at the datapad on her lap. She might be eleven and much better at pretending to be Silent in public, but she still hated math. She’d tried to tell her teachers not to put her into accelerated lessons when it came to this one subject, but they kept pointing out the fact that her IQ scores placed her learning capacity in the gifted range. According to them, all she had to do was try harder. “Hah!”
When Kaleb appeared beside the stump where she always did her homework, she smiled in relief. “I have to finish this by Friday,” she told him. “Or I’ll be put into an after-school math tutorial.” It wasn’t the tutorial part that horrified her—it was the thought of doing even more math!
“Here.” He took a seat beside her, a greenish bruise below the curve of his left cheekbone.
Sahara kicked her heel back into the stump to force herself not to ask about the bruise, the impact painful on her bare skin. She knew the answer to her question and she knew there was nothing she could do about it, the knowledge bubbling acid in her stomach. “What’s this?” Putting aside her datapad and tightening her abdomen against the futile surge of anger, she took the hard-copy book he held out.
“You’re a tactile learner,” he said, as she opened the pages to see that it was a math textbook. “I thought this might help you remember the equations better.” Reaching into a pocket, he put two ink pens between them.
“Why don’t you just tell me the answers?” she asked brightly. “Then we can talk about much more interesting things.”
Kaleb simply looked at her with those beautiful starlight eyes that were too often an empty black these days, holding a numbness that made her chest hurt.
Sighing, but happy because he hadn’t gone away again, she picked up the blue pen and began to do the equations on the first page, making sure to write down her entire painstaking process. When she was done, Kaleb went over her work, showing her where she’d made errors of logic so she wouldn’t make the same ones again.
“Can you write down the correct processes, too?” she asked him. “I can use them as study aids while I do my homework.” No matter what the teachers tried, Sahara never learned as well at school as she did with Kaleb when it came to math. He knew exactly how to explain things to her.
Nodding, he went down the page with a black pen, his writing strong and neat. “Did you have a dance lesson today?”
She said, “Yes,” then ran over to the side of the house to peek at the window to her father’s study. He was still there, working on a paper for the Psy-Med Journal. Smiling, she ran back to Kaleb. “I learned a new step.” Bubbles of happiness in her blood. “Want to see?”
Closing the math textbook, he set it on the stump and nodded. Then, as the birds flew home to their nests and the sky turned a dusky orange, she danced, the grass soft beneath her bare feet and Kaleb her quiet audience.
Sahara’s heart warmed at the innocence of the memory, at her absolute trust in the boy-becoming-a-man who had understood that for her, dancing was like breathing, their friendship iron strong. It had only grown stronger as the years passed, but Kaleb had had to be so careful—Enrique had him on a very tight psychic leash, but the older he grew, the better he became at slipping that leash for small periods of time.
Secret, everything had been secret.
Her stomach clenched without warning at the whispered thought, bile coating her throat.
Staggering out of bed, she made it to the bathroom before falling to her hands and knees to retch, her abdomen and throat hurting from the force of the convulsive shudders that tore through her body to leave her shivering on the floor. When she could move again, she cleaned up the mess, brushed her teeth, then showered under a red-hot spray before wrapping a towel around her body and walking to sit back down on the bed.
Droplets of water trickled over her neck and between her breasts, but she made no move to mop them up, her mind on her fragmented past. It didn’t take a genius intellect to realize the bad thing that had happened to her was somehow connected to Kaleb, an event her mind continued to rebel against remembering, regardless of how hard she tried.
All it got her was the promise of another episode like the one she’d just suffered.
Frustrated but conscious she couldn’t expect absolute recall all at once, she gave up the fruitless exercise after twenty minutes and got up. Pulling on underwear, a pair of jeans, and a V-necked cashmere pullover in an azure blue shade that Faith had gifted her, the texture exquisite against her skin, she dried and braided her hair.
Her next task was to check on her father. Hearing that he was in a natural, deep sleep had her smiling after she disconnected the comm link. She could’ve gone for a walk under the moonlight, but what she really needed was to be close to Kaleb, her heart chilled by the malevolence that hovered over her.