Perfect Lies (Mind Games 2)

Her eyes narrow.

“Ah, okay. Well, sorry about that. But look!” I raise both hands in the air and smile at her. “No chairs!”

I tap tap tap tap my foot on the floor. Calm. I am calm. I am calm and bored. I am the ocean. I am the yacht in the middle of the ocean. I am nothing.

I am flames.

Not yet. Not yet.

“Get to work,” she snarls.

The first sheet is handwritten, dated almost three years ago. Something about the writing feels familiar.

“What is this?” I ask, trying to buy time, needing to calm myself down. The ocean. The ocean. The ocean. Nothing.

“We found them cleaning out storage bins at the school.” The Feeler smiles, and I am glad I can’t feel what she is feeling right now. “Clarice’s notes on visions she had for potential students. A bit of a treasure trove.”

I let a giddy burst of something twisted flare up as I laugh, my smile broken glass. “Awesome. How great. Clarice comes back from the dead to help us out! That’s just like her. She was always so thoughtful.”

I tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap on the paper. James says it’s okay to give them reactions they expect. It’d be okay for me to feel disturbed, or guilty, or sad about this reminder of Clarice.

If I start that, I can never, ever stop.

So instead I wash it all away and just read. Most of it is incomprehensible. I scowl, flipping through pages describing locations and people without names. “Seers are useless,” I mutter, tossing away a page describing, at length, a woman’s color of nail polish as she waves good-bye from the back of an unidentifiable bus.

I blink, eyes frozen to the next page and the name on it.

Sadie.

“I thought we wrote off Sadie as lost after what happened in Des Moines?” I say as casually as I can manage. It’s okay to feel anxious about that name. There’s a lot of baggage. I can feel a little anxious.

I can still hear Clarice, the way her mouth twisted into a smile around Sadie’s name as she recommended that I do something to make sure the girl’s family wouldn’t come looking for her. I can still remember how in control I felt as I said no, how sure I was that they could never make me do anything like that again.

I can still remember what it felt like to go out a month ago to bring Sadie in, making Clarice’s death even more pointless. I can still remember the blood on my hands from that trip. The look on Annie’s face. No. Annie is dead. The look on Eden’s face, horrified, judging me.

I hated Eden.

“Turn the page. There are additions. We’ve got a new location that a Seer found yesterday.” The Feeler is staring intently at me, feeling everything I feel. I am sad. I am tired. I am lost. This is all wrong, every bit of it, everything. I am wrong.

I am not any of those things. I am fine. They found Sadie again. I am excited. See how excited I am? “Let’s bring her in.”

ANNIE

Six Weeks Before

A GIRL, TWIRLING IN A DRESS, THE LIGHT SPINNING around her as she laughs. She stops, staggers to the side, dazed.

Then she’s older, and Fia is walking with her down a hall, talking and smiling and nodding.

The hall they’re in is at the school.

Another girl, hair in hundreds of intricate braids, sitting next to a crashed bike, crying. But she isn’t hurt, her friend is, skinned knees raw and bleeding. The girl with the braids keeps crying.

Then she’s older, and Fia is sitting in a small room on a couch across from her and an older man, nodding and smiling and drinking tea. Fia’s wearing a dress jacket and a skirt, and she looks false, she looks so false I want to scream, want to tell them that it’s a lie. This Fia is a lie.

Another girl, dressed all in black, hands pulled into her sleeves, sitting curled in a ball in the corner of the couch. An older woman who looks tired and drawn signs a paper, her eyes devoid of hope. James and Eden, older than she was when I saw her in a vision years ago, watch. Fia leans against the wall, staring out the window, then turns and smiles at the girl. She taps on her leg, tap tap taps, but no one notices. “You’re going to love the school,” Fia says. There is something wary and terrified in Fia’s eyes.

Another girl, tiny, barely to Fia’s shoulder, looking at her with hope and desperation. Fia smiles, but there’s no life in her face. “It’ll get better now, Amanda,” she says. James pats the girl on the head. “She’s going to love it there, Ms. Lafayette,” he says. A woman hugs the girl, crying, and the girl starts crying, too, looking at Fia like Fia can make it stop. Fia nods.