opposite direction. She couldn’t avoid sensing the crowd’s feelings, but they weren’t directed at her, and that made them easier to ignore. Their curiosity was about the thing in the sky above.
As they crossed the street at the intersection, a fake cable-car tour bus parked nearby. Usually they kept to San Francisco’s tourist destinations, but since yesterday several of them had shown up in Reese’s neighborhood. A group of tourists poured off the bus, jabbering excitedly and pointing at the black triangle. They swarmed around her and Diana and the cops, paying them no attention. Reese tried to avoid touching them, but she couldn’t prevent them from bumping into her. Their excitement and confusion prickled all over her, and the effort to deflect their emotions made her feel like she was holding her breath underwater.
They were nearly through the crowd when someone accidentally rammed into her right shoulder. She winced and looked up to see a cardboard sign held way too close to her face. Giant block letters stated COLONIZATION IS COMING . She flinched away and tried to keep going, but the demonstrator was stuck to her. A button on his jacket had snagged on the strap of her messenger bag, and as he tried to tug himself free he saw her face. He was a boy perhaps a couple of years older than her, skinny and tall witha smattering of freckles across his face. He halted, his mouth falling open, and Reese knew that he recognized her. She froze. The crowd continued to move around them as if they were at the center of a whirlpool. She heard the police officer ordering people out of the way, but she was transfixed by the boy’s shocked gaze.
He reached out and grabbed her arm, and his emotions flooded into her: excitement fueled by adrenaline, layered over deep, dark anxiety. He was terrified of the ship, but his fear was tangled up with what Reese understood as yearning. He
wanted
the ship as much as he feared it. The end result was a tumult of feelings that made Reese dizzy.
He leaned into her space and demanded, “What did they do to you? Are they watching you? Did they experiment on you?”
Someone knocked into the boy, unceremoniously pushing him aside, and his hand fell away from her. Freed from her connection with him, Reese reeled as he was borne away by the crowd. He kept turning back to look at her, shouting things she couldn’t hear over the noise, and then in a blink he was gone.
The police officer was at her side. “Miss Holloway, we’re almost there.”
She felt his fingertips on her elbow, and she pulled away before she could sense any of his feelings. The edge of the crowd was only a few feet away and she pushed through, the memory of the boy’s desperate yearning like acid in her stomach. She saw Diana waiting next to a town car with tinted windows, and someone opened the door for her. She slid into the backseat, breathless.
David was inside. He reached out as if to touch her, but he hesitated at the last second and his hand fell to the leather backseat. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, but her voice shook.
The front door opened and closed as Diana Warner climbed in. “That wasn’t much fun,” Diana said grimly. She turned to the driver. “Let’s go.”
Reese reached for the seat belt as the car pulled away from the curb, trying to erase the disturbing trace of the boy’s feelings from her memory.
At Nordstrom, Reese, David, and Diana were ushered into a large, private dressing room outfitted in plush couches and several three-way full-length mirrors. It was so calm in comparison to the chaotic street outside Reese’s house that she felt as if she had entered an alternate dimension.
An energetic redhead named Bonnie offered them drinks as she pulled items of clothing off a rolling rack of clothes. Reese and David refused, but Diana accepted a small bottle of Perrier. Bonnie then showed Reese to a curtained dressing nook in one corner of the room, and took David to
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