Pulse

dark enough that she couldn’t be sure.
    “What’s it going to take to get you to stay with me?” Dylan asked.
    Faith was so angry and scared that she wanted to scream. Dylan had slipped something into her water glass or who knew what he’d done. All she knew was that none of it could be real, and it would only get worse. She was so mad, all she could think about was shoving Dylan off the roof. And as she had this thought, Dylan reeled back, lost his balance, and fell out of view.
    “Dylan!” Faith yelled. The nightmare was going deeper inside her, and for a flash of a second she saw bodies flying into lockers in the abandoned high school building—a flashback of a lost memory with Wade—and then it was gone. She was going crazy; that’s what it was. She felt this with more certainty when Dylan’s voice rose up from behind her.
    “I don’t think you’re going to believe me, are you?” he said.
    She wheeled around, putting her hands against the low wall around the roof.
    “Please, Dylan. Just take me home. You’re really scaring me.”
    Dylan looked visibly wounded, like he’d made a horrible mistake he wished he could take back.
    “You’re special, Faith,” he said. “And important. More important than you know.”
    “Stop lying to me!”
    Faith climbed up onto the ledge and carefully stood up. There was a breeze that made her wobble, and Dylan reached his hand out toward her.
    “If you jump, I’ll make sure you don’t land badly. You can count on it.”
    She wasn’t thinking about leaping off a building; she’d only wanted to get as far away from Dylan as she could. She wanted to run away, but couldn’t. Looking back and forth as her hair tangled in the breeze, she began to cry. Glancing down, Faith realized she wasn’t standing over the ladder, which would have put her fall only ten feet away to the first landing on the fire escape. What she saw instead was a long drop into darkness. The wind kicked up without warning, and she leaned in toward it, losing her balance as she tried to correct.
    “I wish you hadn’t done that,” Dylan said as he watched her arms flail, and she disappeared over the edge, screaming her head off. He closed his eyes and lowered his head, then he returned to the table and sat down. He could hear her screaming as she rose up in the air, far over his head. Faith flew across the expanse of the building some twenty feet up into the darkness, then she stopped directly over her chair and hung in the air.
    “Let me know when you’re ready to come down,” Dylan said.
    Faith kicked and screamed in the air, which made her flip and pitch in different directions. When she finally stopped, she was breathing heavily, a soft wind blowing through her blond hair. She looked like a ghost.
    “I’m going to lower you slowly now. If you start kicking you might hurt yourself, so please, stay calm until you’re sitting again. You can still run away if you want to.”
    Faith didn’t move a muscle or say a word. She was still afraid, but she was starting to feel Dylan’s calm confidence in the air all around her. She felt, in a strange way, as if he was holding her in the air, like he had his arms wrapped around her. “Dylan,” she said as she slowly lowered toward the chair she’d sat in.
    “Yeah?”
    Faith didn’t speak again until her feet were on the ground and she was sitting in the chair. She breathed a sigh of relief at not being dead, then looked directly into Dylan’s eyes.
    “I believe you. Now tell me what the hell is going on.”
    Dylan couldn’t help but smile at her. Faith’s hair was all over the place, and her shirt had twisted around just enough to look like she’d been sleeping in it all night. Faith reached across the table and took his hand. She wanted to be sure this wasn’t a dream or a nightmare she was trapped in; and feeling the soft skin of his palm, she felt a little bit more certain that it was all going to be okay.
    “Promise not to freak out anymore?” Dylan asked.
    “I do. Or I mean I’ll try. Let’s not have me flying around anymore. That’ll help.”
    “Done,” Dylan said.
    And then he told her some, but not nearly all, of what she needed to know.

Chapter 13
Hotspur Chance
    Once Dylan had established the minimum-required trust, he told Faith the first of many secrets.
    “You can move things with your mind. Not with any kind of precision or skill, but you can do it.”
    Dylan let this information sink in while he tried to