Gone

for longer.”
    Edilio still wanted the basics laid out. “The fire, here, this lightbulb thing, that’s three.”
    “First time was Tom,” Sam said. The name meant nothing to Edilio, but it did to Quinn.
    “Your stepfather?” Quinn demanded sharply. “Ex-stepfather, I mean.”
    “Yeah.”
    Quinn was staring hard at Sam. “Brah, you aren’t saying what you sound like you’re saying, right?”
    “I thought he was trying to hurt my mom,” Sam said. “I thought…I was asleep, I woke up, I come down the stairs, they’re both in the kitchen yelling, I see Tom with a knife, and there’s this flash of light shooting out of my hands.”
    Sam felt tears stinging his eyes. It surprised him. He didn’t feel sad. If anything, he felt relieved. He hadn’t told anyone about this before. This was a weight coming off his shoulders. But at the same time, he registered the way Quinn drew back a step, putting distance between them.
    “My mom knew, of course. She covered at the emergency room. Tom was yelling that I had shot him. The doctors saw a burn, so they knew it wasn’t a gunshot. My mom told some lie about Tom falling against the stove.”
    “She had to choose between protecting you or supporting her husband,” Astrid said.
    “Yeah. And Tom realized, once the pain was under control, he realized he would end up in the psychiatric ward if he kept talking about his stepson shooting beams of light at him.”
    “You burned your stepfather’s hand off?” Quinn asked, his tone shrill.
    “Whoa, back up. Did what?” Edilio demanded. It was his turn to be surprised.
    Quinn said, “His stepfather ended up with a hook, man. They had to cut his hand off, like, right here.” He made a chopping motion on his forearm. “I saw him, like, a week ago, over in San Luis. He’s got one of those hooks now, you know, with, like, two pincers or whatever? He was buying cigarettes and handing the clerk money with his hook.” He pantomimed it, using two fingers for the pincers of the prosthetic arm.
    “So you’re some kind of freak?” Quinn asked. He still seemed undecided whether he was mad or found it funny.
    “I’m not the only one,” Sam said defensively. “That girl in the fire. I think she started that fire. When she saw me, she panicked. It was like liquid fire came out of her hands.”
    Edilio said, “So you shot back. You did your thing at her.” Sam could see only the outline of his face in the darkness. “That’s what’s been dogging you. You think you hurt her.”
    “I don’t know how to control it. I don’t ask for it to come. I don’t know how to make it go away. I’m just glad I didn’t hurt Little Pete. I was choking.”
    Quinn and Edilio turned their attention to the little boy now. Little Pete rubbed sleep from his eyes and stared past them, indifferent to them, maybe not even aware that they existed. Maybe wondering why he was standing in the damp night air outside a nuclear power plant. Maybe not wondering anything.
    “He’s one, too,” Quinn accused. “A freak.”
    “He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Astrid said.
    “That’s not exactly reassuring,” Quinn snapped. “What’s his trick? He shoot missiles out of his butt or something?”
    Astrid smoothed her brother’s hair down with her hand and let her fingers trace the side of his face. “Window seat,” she whispered. Then, to the others, “‘Window seat’ is a trigger phrase. It helps him find a calm place. It’s the window seat in my room.”
    “Window seat,” Little Pete said unexpectedly.
    “He talks,” Edilio said.
    “He can,” Astrid said. “But he doesn’t much.”
    “He talks. Great. What else does he do?” Quinn demanded pointedly.
    “He seems able to do a lot of things. Mostly we’re good, the two of us. Mostly he doesn’t really notice me. But once, I was doing his therapy, working with this picture book we work on sometimes. I show him a picture and try to get him to say the word and, I don’t know, I guess I was in a bad mood that day. I guess I was too rough taking his hand and putting his finger on the picture like you’re supposed to do. He got mad. And then, I wasn’t there anymore. One second I was in hisroom, and then all of a sudden I was in my room.”
    There was a dead silence as the four of them stared at Little Pete.
    “Then maybe he can zap us out of the FAYZ and back to our folks,” Quinn said finally.
    Silence fell again. The five of them stood in the middle of the