Pulse

belongings. Hawk was there, too, busily tapping out code on his Tablet. He switched tasks immediately, searching for other Tablets in the area.
    “I’ve searched the perimeter and the roof. She’s not here,” Clooger said. He spied something along the ledge on the far side of the roof and moved toward it with lightning speed, something he rarely did. Clooger was like all the Drifters—he had a single pulse, not a second pulse—but he preferred traditional weapons of war. He’d take a grenade over throwing a car across a parking lot any day of the week. Explosions were his thing.
    “Hawk, anything?” Dylan asked, hoping Faith had taken her Tablet with her. He’d hated letting Hawk do it, but he hadn’t told her everything about its tracking. It was true that the State couldn’t track Faith’s Tablet any longer, but that didn’t mean Hawk couldn’t keep tabs on where it was.
    “Her Tablet’s on the roof,” Hawk said, looking up. “Could she have left it there?”
    The idea of going anywhere without a Tablet was so alien to Hawk that he couldn’t wrap his brain around it.
    “Found the Tablet,” Clooger said. “But no Faith. She left it here.”
    Dylan had a bad feeling. He never should have let her out alone in the state she’d been in. More than anyone else—even more than Faith herself—Dylan understood the wild power of her emotions. With only one pulse to rely on, she could get herself killed in a million different ways.
    “Check the messages,” Hawk said. “She had activity about eleven minutes ago.”
    Clooger tapped the screen, but Faith had set the security to her thumbprint. There was no getting inside without Faith. “It’s locked, set to thumbprint. You want me to bring it back or keep looking for her?”
    “Keep looking, I’ll be there in less than thirty seconds,” Dylan said. He turned to Hawk. “How long?”
    Hawk was typing furiously, working his way through a string of commands that would bypass Faith’s security. “Three minutes, maybe less.”
    “Call me when you have something.”
    Dylan was gone in a flash, out the door and flying across the parking lot. He tried to imagine who would have sent her a message. Who was he not thinking of? Did she have some other friends on the outside?
    When he arrived on the roof next to Clooger, his heart sank.
    “Left this, too,” Clooger said, holding out the spine of the book with all its pages missing. Both of them looked out over the empty sky and tried not to imagine the worst.
    “She’s probably just walking around,” Clooger said. “Clearing her head. It was a lot to deal with all at once.”
    “Where would she go?” Dylan asked, though he knew Clooger would have no idea. Then he had an intuition that seemed to make some sense. “Stay here in case she comes back.”
    Dylan ran for the other side of the building, his final step hitting the ledge, and leaped up in the air on his way to the old grade school. She’d destroyed one book; maybe she’d find some comfort in being surrounded by more of them. A minute passed before Dylan found himself standing in front of the ivy-covered building. There were large boulders next to the playground where kids used to climb, and picking up one of them with his mind, he hurled it into the front door, blowing it clean off its hinges. Dylan was already through the open door and into the abandoned library before the boulder came to stop in the principal’s office.
    “Faith?” he called out. It was dark in the library, so he set his Tablet to act as a light and held it out. Faith wasn’t there, and this so frustrated Dylan that he yelled her name again, sending every book flying off every shelf with the power of his emotions. “Faith! Where are you?”
    The room was alive with the sound of pages ripping and spines crashing into one another. Dylan stood in the middle of the storm of books, arms out wide, taking out his frustrations on the useless artifacts of the past.
    “Dylan, where are you?”
    Hawk was back, a small voice coming from the Tablet in the din of violence. Every book dropped to the floor at once, a carpet of pages surrounding Dylan as he answered. “The old grade school. Anything?”
    “She’s back, Dylan. It’s my fault. I didn’t even think—”
    “Hold on, who’s back? What are you talking about?”
    There was a short pause, then a breath of frustration on the other end. “Clara Quinn. She’s back. And I think she might know about