Free Night Sky by Suzanne Brockmann Page A

crazy lady as they lay unconscious in front of us. At least the guard was unconscious. I could see him breathing. But Little Miss Sunshine was not moving at all. “Dude.”
    Motorcycle Chick reemerged from aisle seven and headed back toward us. Her basket was already filled to the brim. I spotted at least six huge jars of peanut butter as she walked past us on her way to the deserted registers.
    â€œHey!” I finally got my feet to move again as I followed her. I also managed to find my voice, but it sounded thin and tiny—as if I were Sasha’s age. “How do you know my name?”
    The girl looked up at me and said, “Oops,” before taking a wad of cash from one of her many pockets. She threw it onto the register. The tinny music from the overhead speakers echoed through the empty store.
    â€œHey!” I said again.
    She didn’t pay attention to me as she swung herself over to the other side of the checkout counter. She picked off a couple of plastic bags and started packing her food. Only then did she say, “I’m in your class at school?” But she said it as a question, as if she knew I wouldn’t buy it.
    Cal spoke up from behind me. “If you went to our school, we definitely would have noticed you.”
    â€œCaught by the bullshit police,” she said without looking up. “And speaking of police, they’re gonna be here soon. The real ones. You should go. Girl like you doesn’t want to draw too much attention to herself.”
    â€œA girl like me ?” I repeated. The heavy incredulity in my tone made me sound a little older now. Maybe twelve or even thirteen.
    â€œDon’t play games.” She double-bagged the pile of peanut butter jars and then knotted the bag with deliberate, almost aggressive precision. “I saw what you did with that Taser.”
    â€œI didn’t do anything with the Taser. I mean, I tried to tase the crazy lady, yeah. But it didn’t work, obviously—”
    â€œI’m talking about your abilities.” The girl looked up at me then as she enunciated the word with four crisp syllables. Her eyes were the color of crystal, heavily rimmed with charcoal-colored liner, and I couldn’t look away.
    But then what she said sunk in. My a-bil-i-ties ? The word made me uneasy. “I don’t know what you’re—” I started.
    â€œYour powers.” She nodded toward the woman on the ground behind me. “Tits McGee over there? She could smell it on you. Destiny addicts sense it sometimes, when they joker. Kinda the way one G-T can recognize another.”
    One G-T can wha …? I looked at Calvin and he looked back at me, equally lost. Clearly Motorcycle Girl wasn’t speaking some kind of Floridian street code that I, a nonnative, couldn’t decipher.
    â€œWas that even a sentence?” Cal asked her. “When Destiny addicts joker ? What does that mean? Can you try again, please, in American English?”
    â€œI’m pretty sure that lady couldn’t smell anything over the disgusting fish stank,” I added, and now they both looked at me.
    â€œFish stank?” the girl repeated, as incredulous as if I’d just announced that I pooped rainbows and diamonds.
    â€œAnd now you’re freaking me out,” Calvin said as he pointed to me. “First the weird sewage smell in Sasha’s room—”
    â€œYou smelled sewage in Sasha’s room?” Motorcycle Girl demanded, skewering me again with those odd blue eyes.
    But I was the one who got up into her face—so much so that Calvin grabbed on to one of the belt loops of my jean shorts to hold me back. “How do you know Sasha?”
    She looked away first, and when she met my eyes again, her expression was almost apologetic. Almost.
    â€œI’m sorry for your loss,” she said, and for the two seconds that it took her to say those words, I actually believed her.
    But then she took