Malinda Lo - Inheritance

Reese had to pull away. It was too much, and she couldn’t even manage to put up her mental walls. She was shaky and sweaty as she stood up, breaking contact with her dad.

“Reese? I’m sorry if I—”

“Dad, I can’t—you know I can feel how you’re feeling when you touch me. Don’t you?”

His face seemed to crumple. “I—no. I didn’t realize.”

She perched on the edge of the armchair, knees too wobbly to remain standing. “Well, I can. So can David. That’s what they did to us—the Imria.”

“I thought it was only between you and David,” her mom said.

“I think it works with anyone, if we’re touching them.”

Her parents sat in silence for a few minutes, absorbing what she had said. She couldn’t look at them—she was too conscious of her dad’s feelings—but she saw her mom reach out and put a hand on her dad’s knee.

“If that’s true, I’m glad you felt how I was feeling,” her dad finally said. His voice was husky, and Reese didn’t know what to say. Her dad didn’t act like this around her. He was funny and charming on his best days, and on his worst he might be distant or cold, but he was never vulnerable. Unless she had simply never noticed before.

She got to her feet. “I’d better call David and warn him about Highsmith,” she said, and fled the living room before her parents could respond.

Diana Warner had dark brown hair cut just above her shoulders in expertly sculpted layers—the kind of hair you saw on female senators and businesswomen—and her red-brown lipstick was applied so flawlessly it didn’t come off at all when she sipped the glass of water Reese’s dad brought her. Reese soon learned that Diana did everything with the same precise, purposeful conviction. Reese suspected that her father had spent a lot of money to hire her.

She had arrived at their house on Saturday morning at ten o’clock sharp to interview Reese and her parents about what happened in the time between her abduction and her return a week and a half later. Then she drove off to do the same with David and his family, coming back a few hours later to take Reese and David shopping for clothes to wear on camera. She looked a bit breathless upon her return, and as Reese grabbed her bag to follow, Diana said, “The crowd is feisty this afternoon. There are police outside who will escort us to my car, but why don’t you pull that hood over your head? And put on some sunglasses.”

Reese’s parents were standing in the hall behind her. “Are you sure this is safe?” her mom asked.

“We’ll be fine,” Diana assured her. “We’re just going to Nordstrom, and I have a driver. There’s no need to worry.”

Reese doubted a hoodie and sunglasses could do much to help, but she had watched the crowd through the cracks in her blinds upstairs, and she definitely didn’t want to go out there totally exposed. She tried to prepare herself for the onslaught of the crowd’s emotions by imagining a brick wall around her, blocking people off. “Let’s go,” she said.

“We’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Diana said, and she opened the door.

Outside, the crowd moved in a slow, continuous circle down Reese’s street, around the block and back again. Reese had heard on the news that the City of San Francisco was considering what could be done to clear the neighborhood, but there was no law against walking down a public sidewalk—only against lying down on one—and none of the gawkers lay down. Diana led the way down the front steps, where two uniformed police officers were waiting for them. “I’m parked two blocks north,” she told them.

The onlookers nearby had watched as Reese came outside, and she felt the tiny psychic jabs that accompanied their glances. She tried to focus on her imaginary wall as the cops told them to move on.

Most of the crowd was heading west to circle the neighborhood, but Reese and Diana had to go east to get to the corner, where they would turn north. They were forced to push against the tide of onlookers, and even though they had a police escort, it was slow going. Luckily, the pedestrians were so intent on keeping their eyes on the sky that most of them didn’t notice it was Reese trying to walk in the opposite direction. She couldn’t avoid sensing the crowd’s feelings, but they weren’t directed at her, and that made them easier to ignore. Their curiosity was about the thing in the sky above.

As they crossed the street at the intersection, a fake cable-car tour bus parked nearby. Usually they kept to San Francisco’s tourist destinations, but since yesterday several of them had shown up in Reese’s neighborhood. A group of tourists poured off the bus, jabbering excitedly and pointing at the black triangle. They swarmed around her and Diana and the cops, paying them no attention. Reese tried to avoid touching them, but she couldn’t prevent them from bumping into her. Their excitement and confusion prickled all over her, and the effort to deflect their emotions made her feel like she was holding her breath underwater.

They were nearly through the crowd when someone accidentally rammed into her right shoulder. She winced and looked up to see a cardboard sign held way too close to her face. Giant block letters stated COLONIZATION IS COMING. She flinched away and tried to keep going, but the demonstrator was stuck to her. A button on his jacket had snagged on the strap of her messenger bag, and as he tried to tug himself free he saw her face. He was a boy perhaps a couple of years older than her, skinny and tall with a smattering of freckles across his face. He halted, his mouth falling open, and Reese knew that he recognized her. She froze. The crowd continued to move around them as if they were at the center of a whirlpool. She heard the police officer ordering people out of the way, but she was transfixed by the boy’s shocked gaze.

He reached out and grabbed her arm, and his emotions flooded into her: excitement fueled by adrenaline, layered over deep, dark anxiety. He was terrified of the ship, but his fear was tangled up with what Reese understood as yearning. He wanted the ship as much as he feared it. The end result was a tumult of feelings that made Reese dizzy.

He leaned into her space and demanded, “What did they do to you? Are they watching you? Did they experiment on you?”

Someone knocked into the boy, unceremoniously pushing him aside, and his hand fell away from her. Freed from her connection with him, Reese reeled as he was borne away by the crowd. He kept turning back to look at her, shouting things she couldn’t hear over the noise, and then in a blink he was gone.

The police officer was at her side. “Miss Holloway, we’re almost there.”

She felt his fingertips on her elbow, and she pulled away before she could sense any of his feelings. The edge of the crowd was only a few feet away and she pushed through, the memory of the boy’s desperate yearning like acid in her stomach. She saw Diana waiting next to a town car with tinted windows, and someone opened the door for her. She slid into the backseat, breathless.

David was inside. He reached out as if to touch her, but he hesitated at the last second and his hand fell to the leather backseat. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, but her voice shook.

The front door opened and closed as Diana Warner climbed in. “That wasn’t much fun,” Diana said grimly. She turned to the driver. “Let’s go.”

Reese reached for the seat belt as the car pulled away from the curb, trying to erase the disturbing trace of the boy’s feelings from her memory.

At Nordstrom, Reese, David, and Diana were ushered into a large, private dressing room outfitted in plush couches and several three-way full-length mirrors. It was so calm in comparison to the chaotic street outside Reese’s house that she felt as if she had entered an alternate dimension.