Alana looked away from him. She knew what he meant, and just the thought of it made her suddenly feel that disconnection—that unbearable loneliness that all too often sent her into a rage.

  “No,” she answered. “No, I’ve never really felt close to anyone.”

  “I might not seem like it now… but I get very close to people. I’ve always had lots of friends. People always like me—they want to get to know me. Just like you.”

  “So… you’re saying I’m just like everyone else.”

  The corner of his mouth turned up in a grin. “No—you try harder.” And then the grin faded. “You know… they say you carry with you all the things that ever happened to you in your life—even the things you don’t remember. They’re all inside your head somewhere. It’s like that with people, too. All the people you know—they’re all rattling around inside your skull. You know what I mean?”

  Yes, Alana did know. Her own father had vanished from her life when she was five—but she still heard his voice yelling at her. She still felt the slap of his hand on her face. Yeah, you do carry people with you.

  “There are some people,” Garrett continued, “who can’t handle all those people telling them things in their heads. All those voices screaming at once, all out of control…” Until now, Garrett had kept his knees pulled up to his chin, but now he relaxed a bit, lowering one knee to the ground and turning his shoulders to face her. “I don’t lose my mind like that,” he said. “But I do have seizures.”

  “Seizures? What do you mean, seizures?”

  “Doctors say it’s a brain thing. Like epilepsy—only instead of my head getting all fuzzy inside, everything becomes super clear. Suddenly I see the faces of the people I know—the people I’ve gotten close to. I hear their voices, I sense their thoughts… until their thoughts are my thoughts.”

  A sudden gust of wind blew a spray of rain across their faces, and Alana couldn’t tell if the wetness on Garrett’s cheek was rain or tears.

  “See, I have these seizures,” Garrett repeated. “And when I come out of them… the people I know are gone….”

  Above them, the bowed plywood creaked from the weight of the rain—but Alana didn’t care about that. She was locked on Garrett’s eyes—those eyes that seemed so invasive, as if they could decode every ounce of her being. He was trying to tell her something major—something terrible—but her mind felt like a brick, unable to absorb what he was saying. She could only stare at him, her mind a blank. And then what few coherent thoughts Alana had in that moment were extinguished when he leaned forward and kissed her.

  There had been other boys who kissed her before. Usually they forced their lips against hers when she wasn’t expecting it, stealing the kiss rather than offering it. Usually she swatted those boys away like mosquitoes, flattening them against the wall. But this was different. The kiss felt huge and overwhelming, as if it would swallow her whole… as if she could disappear inside of it. But then he pulled away, and she was left looking into his eyes once more, feeling as if the rain would melt her like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  “I really like you, Alana. And so I tried to stay away from you. Do you see now why I told you about the seizures? I’ve gotten too close to you… and now you’ve got to get away from here—away from me—before it’s too late.”

  Suddenly the plywood above gave way, dumping on them its heavy load of rainwater. The deluge snapped Alana out of her trance. Surrounded by the here and now once more, she let the world around her take hold… and a familiar reflex took hold as well. The reflex to push away. The urge to put everyone and everything at an arm’s distance. She felt the rage build in her, like her own peculiar seizure, and rather than spewing her fury at Garrett, she hurried to the door, pounding it, kicking it, bashing it until the metal dented, until the doorjamb fractured and the lock sprung open, letting her back into the stuffy air of the stairwell.

  “Hate me, Alana,” she heard Garrett call after her. “Hate me and run away. Get out of this place! Go as far and as fast as you can. Maybe that way it won’t happen to you… the way it happened to the others….”

  * * *

  Alana didn’t run away… but she didn’t seek out Garrett’s company the next day either. Instead on that black-clouded Sunday, she snuck into the computer room, for although Harmony House didn’t have much contact with the outside world, it did have Wi-Fi. Alana spent the day scouring articles, and probing databases. She had already snuck an unauthorized peek at Garrett’s file in the main office—and although several key pages were missing, she knew he had come from the town of Cranston, which was clear across the state.

  Finally she found the article she was looking for. It didn’t have any direct links. In fact, every other reference to the town of Cranston on that particular day had been systematically deleted from the web, as if someone had done it intentionally. But this one article, from the local paper, had slipped through the cracks.

  BLOOM STREET MYSTERY, the headline read. The story was more like the kind of thing you read in the cheap tabloids, next to stories of alien sightings and three-headed babies. Only difference was, this story was real.

  Apparently, eighteen people on Bloom Street had vanished without a trace. All of them were neighbors. All friends. Even their pets were gone. In fact, only one person was left: a teenage boy. Although the article didn’t print the name, Alana knew who it had to be. She reached over to turn on the printer, but a hand grabbed hers before she could touch it.

  “What are you still doing here? Didn’t I tell you to go?” It was Garrett. The expression on his face was between anger and desperate fear, but there was something else there as well. He was sweating something terrible, and his eyes kept trying to roll back into his head, as if he was fighting to keep control over something. His seizures, thought Alana. He’s about to have one of those seizures!

  Alana was caught off guard. Her voice quivered. “The gates are guarded ever since those other kids ran away—”

  “You’re smart, you can find a way out!” he insisted.

  “Maybe I don’t want to go!”

  He grabbed her other arm, pulling her out of the chair so hard the chair fell to the ground behind her with a crack. In turn, she wrenched herself free and pushed him as hard as she could. “Get your hands off me!”

  He hit a bookshelf, jostling it, and sent a dozen books cascading down around him. The books pounded on his shoulders and lay sprawled at his feet. To Alana he looked worn and beaten. He kept his distance. He didn’t apologize, and neither did she.

  “What happened on Bloom Street?” Alana asked.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt!”

  “What happened on Bloom Street?” Alana demanded.

  “I can’t protect you from it!”

  “WHAT HAPPENED ON BLOOM STREET?”

  Silence from Garrett. He stared at Alana, reading her, grimacing as the sweat poured down his forehead. She swore she could see his temples pulse. And then he finally spoke. “When you were nine,” he told her, “you snuck out of here late at night and went to see a movie.”

  Alana shook her head, trying to hitch herself onto whatever train of thought he had just begun. She swallowed hard when she remembered that she had never told anyone about the midnight movie trip. “How did you know that?”

  “I know because Missy was with you that night.”

  “She told you?”

  “She didn’t have to. Just like Justine didn’t have to tell me about the time she was six and got hit by a car. Or the time she and Missy hid in the old storm cellar so that everyone would think they were missing—but nobody noticed. Not even you. I could tell you a million things about a hundred different people, Alana. Things that no one knows but them.”

  “You read their minds?”

  “No, I have their minds!” Garrett blinked hard to keep his eyes from doing those flip-turns in his skull. Then he took a step toward her. “I get too close to people, Alana. I get too close, and somehow they get pulled inside. They’re not dead, but they’re not really alive, either. My parents, my neighbors, all my friends from the last place I was at, and the first thirteen people I met here. I got too close to them… and now I carry them with me.”

  Alana could only shake her head, then her wall of resistance came crashing down. She was suddenly flooded by everything he was trying to tell her. Still, she couldn’t accept it. She would rather have heard that he had killed them all. But to think that his mind had latched on to the people it knew—on to Missy and Justine and the others—to think that his mind was powerful enough to wrap around them… and swallow them whole…

  The door flung open to reveal two men in dark suits, and two others behind them. They wasted no time. “That’s him,” one of them said. Then they grabbed him. “Garrett LeBlanc, you’re going to have to come with us.”

  All of a sudden it became clear to Alana. Why all the articles were missing about the people who had disappeared. Why Garrett’s file was incomplete. He had been under surveillance all this time. There were people watching, and waiting. Trying to piece together what he had done and how he had done it.

  So that they could use him.

  “No, you can’t have him!” yelled Alana.

  One of the men flashed a badge, as if she cared. “This is official business, miss, so why don’t you let us do our job.”

  “Yes,” said Garrett. “Take me away from here. Put me someplace that’s safe.”

  One of the men laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. We got a nice cozy place for you.”

  But Alana knew as well as Garrett what lay in store for him. Where would they put him? A chrome lab where they could run test after test after test? Even life at Harmony Home was better than that.

  She kicked one of them in the kneecap and grabbed Garrett. One of the others pulled a gun. Fine, thought Alana. I dare them to shoot. They didn’t, of course, and her momentum pulled Garrett out the door, with the agents right behind.

  But halfway down the hall, Garrett dug in his heels and stopped. “It’s too late,” he whispered desperately. “It’s happening.”

  Now Alana was certain she could see his temple throbbing. His teeth locked, his eyes began to roll again, and he forced his head to turn away from her to the four men, whom he had only just met. His body jerked once, as if he had been hit with an electric shock, there was a flash of light… and the four men were gone, leaving nothing but a pop as the air rushed to fill the space where they had been.

  Alana could have stared in shock for a good hour, but there wasn’t time. Not now.

  Garrett fell to his knees. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Run!” he said. But Alana still wouldn’t do it. There had been so many things she’d run from. So many people. And here, finally, was someone she didn’t want to leave. No matter what happened to her. Even if his gaze turned her into little more than a thumbnail in his mind, she would not leave. He was too close to her heart now. Too close to run from.

  “Quickly,” she said to him, helping him up and moving down the hall with him again. Several people stopped to look at them suspiciously. Alana ignored them. “Quickly—tell me how it works. Do you have to be looking at them? Do they have to be in the room with you?”

  “No. They can be anywhere nearby. I just have to know them. To have seen them, or heard them, or smelled them, or—”

  Garrett groaned, his body jolted, there was a snap of light and a series of pops. A few of the people in the hallway disappeared, followed by the sudden pops of air. The others who hadn’t vanished stood dumbfounded, voicing their shock at what they had just seen. Alana had to bite her own lip to make sure that she was still there.

  “Okay,” she said, keeping herself under control. “We just learned something. We just learned that it’s random. And that it doesn’t take everyone at once. Just a few at a time.”

  “They’re so frightened,” wailed Garrett, and it took a second for Alana to realize that he wasn’t talking about the people around them; he was talking about the people who were gone. The ones he had just pulled inside. “They don’t know how they got here. They don’t understand where they are. They’re so afraid….”

  “Don’t think about that now!”

  Another body jolt and another set of flashes. They were coming more quickly now, building in intensity. Would it take over his whole body? wondered Alana. Would he start convulsing right here on the floor, the air strobing around them in bright flashes until they were all gone? By now Garrett had met everyone at the home. When his seizures were done, no one would be left.

  “What’s its range?” she asked him. “If it only took eighteen people from your neighborhood, then maybe it only reaches a few hundred yards or so, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe if we got you out onto the street, away from here.”

  “No time.”

  Flash! Flash! Flash! Trays dropped to the ground in the cafeteria as the people holding them were drawn from their lives, sucked through the walls, captured by Garrett for all time.

  They paused for a brief moment, and something finally clicked in Alana’s mind. Through walls… The walls at Harmony House were practically paper-thin—but there were thicker walls nearby. Although Alana didn’t know the strength of Garrett’s soul-snatching seizures, she did know that the storm cellar had been turned into a bomb shelter many years ago, long before the mansion became Harmony Home. The man who had once owned this place was a doomsday prepper, and had lined the small underground bunker in lead, which was why it was off-limits. If lead could block radiation, maybe it could block other forces as well. All at once Alana knew where Garrett had to go.

  “Let’s go!” She pulled Garrett down the stairs. He didn’t ask where they were going—perhaps he already knew. If it was true that he now owned Missy’s and Justine’s memories, he would know all about the lead-lined shelter.

  She struggled with him out the back door, his body becoming stiff and rigid with each flash of hot, searing light. A basketball bounced on the court nearby. Instinctively Garrett looked over. A bunch of kids were playing a half-court game. Too late. The players and spectators were already beginning to vanish.

  “Chaysen… Omar… Dani… Dawn…” Garrett could only recite their names helplessly as they passed that barrier between matter and thought, becoming permanent residents of Garrett’s mind. Alana knew it was only a matter of time until one of his mental flashes struck her, turning her into a memory as well.

  Garrett fell to his knees, and a security guard took notice of their panicked activity. Alana tried to pull Garrett through the thick, muddy grass. She was strong, but she couldn’t move him fast enough. The storm cellar was still a dozen yards away, on the other side of the basketball court.

  “Get away from me!” Garrett gasped. “You have to go! Now!”

  The burning flashes of light came one after another now, like a strobe, as Garrett fell to the ground, his limbs jolting, his back arching, and only the whites of his eyes showing through his fluttering eyelids.

  She couldn’t get him to the shelter, she couldn’t stop his seizures… but there was something she could do. She could leave him. She could push herself away, as he had begged her to do. In so doing, maybe she could save the others.

  She turned from Garrett just as the security guard approached. For an instant he stood in her way, but then he dissolved in mid-stride, and Alana could swear she felt him pass through her as he was sucked into Garrett’s mind. She couldn’t think about that now. She had a mission to accomplish.

  She raced onto the basketball court, where kids were still reeling from the random disappearances. They all looked around, not sure what to think, not sure what to do. The younger kids who were watching the game all began to stand, confused and terrified, searching for someone older to explain what had happened. It was Alana who took charge.

  “This way,” she yelled, grabbing them, pushing them. “The shelter! Now!”

  She managed to get nine of them moving, but there were only seven left by the time they made it down the leaf-strewn steps of the lead-lined shelter. She herded them into the dark, musty room and slammed the door, shutting out the outside world, and Garrett’s inside world.

  “What’s happening?” one kid asked. But Alana didn’t answer. Instead she held the door closed, as if an invisible hand might tear it from its hinges.

  Then, as she stood there, she felt it. The room was dead dark, but tiny points of light came in from around the doorframe, which wasn’t a perfect seal. One of those points of light had come for Alana. It latched on to her, tried to swallow her; she could feel her whole self being drawn through that tiny gap in the door, smaller than a keyhole. A part of her wanted to go—to be with Garrett—to be part of his crowded mind. But she fought it, asserting her will to be separate and apart, to be—as she always was—alone. Garrett’s capturing light, robbed of its strength by the lead-lined room, lost the battle, and in a few moments the flashes of light shooting through the cracks came less and less frequently. Alana held the door closed, gripping the handle tight, feeling her knuckles grow numb and cold. Then, when she was absolutely certain it was over—long after the last flash—she released her grip.

  The world had not changed. The trees were still there, the basketball court was still there. But the people weren’t. The kids Alana had saved filed out of the shelter, not sure what to make of the silence, and for a long, terrifying moment, Alana thought that perhaps Garrett had pulled in the whole world. But no. She could hear traffic on the highway, full of cars and trucks between destinations. People whom Garrett had never met. No, everyone was still there. Everyone, that is, but the souls of Harmony House.

  Garrett was gone too. She found his muddy footprints leading away from the spot where she had left him—a random, haphazard set of prints, as if he had stumbled away into the woods in agony. She wanted to go after him, but realized that he didn’t want her to find him. The one thing he needed more than anything else in this world was distance from those around him—for he could only be happy if somehow he found his way, alone. And so Alana finally gave in to his lonely desire, allowing him the distance he so desperately needed.