Free Miles to Go by Laura Anne Gilman

reach ‘em on your cell?”
    “It goes straight to voicemail. All three of them.” She let a little more worry creep in. “You don’t think anything bad happened to them, do you?”
    “Bad things can happen,” the guy said. “But no, I suspect you’re right, they just flaked, and you can kick their asses all the rest of the year for it. But hey, hang on. Justin!”
    The kid by the ovens turned, and she saw that he was younger than she’d thought, maybe sixteen at most. “Yeah?”
    “C’mere,” the guy said, and swung his arm. “This is my son, Justin. He notices faces better than I do, especially at that age. Maybe he saw ‘em.”
    Ellen started, her mind suddenly going blank. “I—”
    “Here,” and Danny was next to her, his hand sliding the sketch across the counter. “Visuals help better – El’s been known to forget what color her own eyes are, much less someone else’s.”
    “Hey,” she protested, and felt his arm reach around her waist, pulling her close. It should have felt awkward, but it didn’t: she was reassured, and warmed in a way that had nothing to do with the air temperature, or the sweat already on her skin.
    “You know it’s true,” Danny was saying. “Anyway, nobody’s seen them, so if this is a dead end too, I think we’re going to have to admit defeat.”
    The pizza guy had looked up at Danny, then back at her, and he looked like he was going to say something, and then shrugged. Ellen could guess – Danny wasn’t that much older than her, maybe a decade? – but it was enough to raise a few eyebrows, the way Danny was playing it. Definitely not “older brother” style, or tagalong not-quite-partner.
    “Nah,” the kid, Justin, said. “I didn’t see ‘em. Sorry.”
    Out in the distance, over the water, there was a flash of heat-lightning, zigging from one cloud to the other, less a threat of rain than a reminder that it was still summer, that changeable forces still loomed overhead. Ellen didn’t see the flash behind her; she didn’t have to. She felt it, knew exactly where it was, how far away, how powerful, although she had no science training or instruments to measure it. She knew because the vision hit her like an icepick, bypassing her walls and digging right into the softest part of her brain.
    Genevieve had taught her how to make it easier, how to let the visions in rather than having them knock her barriers over. It helped, a little: like diving into a tornado instead of being swept off your feet, she supposed, and then there wasn’t any time to think, her mind sorting through what she Saw, trying to put it into some kind of order.
    She felt Danny grab her arm, leading her away from the noise and bustle of the booths. Her body followed automatically, but the rest of her was inside a room filled with shadows. Her visions didn’t have smell, and rarely sound – when they called it Sight they weren’t kidding. So she looked , and the shadows became distinct shapes: boxes, and tables, mostly. She was in a storeroom of some kind.
    Then one of the shadows moved, coming toward her, and there was a hand reaching out to her, pale and slender, palm turned up. There was webbing between the fingers, and something glittered faintly on the skin, even in the dim light.
    Then the scene changed, wrenching Ellen along with it, and she was in the middle of a street, dark and abandoned. Rows of neat little houses sat along either side, with cars parked at the curb. She looked up, all the way down the street, her sight telescoping in a way that made her want to throw up, and she saw the beach, and the ocean. Too far away. Too far away to be safe.
    “Safe from what, Ellen? Safe from what?”
    She tried to walk toward it, but something had her by the ankles, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t step forward, only back, the weights pulling her back into the shadowed room, and she knew if she went back there she would never escape.
    “Ellen?”
    She made an irritable noise,