Read Levitating Las Vegas for Free Online Page B

you’re just blatantly coming on to me,” Holly teased him.
    Kaylee leaned into Holly’s good-bye hug, then watched her bop away with Rob in tow, toward the lush theater where she would perform with her parents in a few hours. Holly had confided to Kaylee that she worried a lot about her mental illness, and Kaylee yearned to tell her the truth. But at the moment, Kaylee could have sworn there was nothing heavier on Holly’s mind than food, shoes, a party, and her hot date with Rob.
    Kaylee hoped it stayed that way.
    Rounding the corner, she stepped onto an employee elevator and pressed the button for the fortieth floor. The doors slid shut, closing her inside alone with the poster of Mr. Diamond. She jumped when she saw her reflection in the protective plastic, her blurry image superimposed over his clear one, as if she aimed to take over the casino.
    That wasn’t what she wanted to do. She was glad Mr. Diamond could read her mind so he would know her intentions. She only questioned his policy of using Mentafixol to suppress the powers of the very people who were potentially the casino’s strongest allies.
    Las Vegas had long attracted people with power because they could use their talents to make a living without being detected, and because they blended in with the other eccentrics. But over time, with so many in one city, the teenagers discovering their own powers inevitably found each other. Tested each other. Experimented on each other. Bullied each other. They became more and more withdrawn from their parents. They stopped coming home altogether, forming their own compound that moved from cheap hotel room to abandoned house to big brother’s basement faster than their parents could keep track of it. They called it In Medias Res, or Res for short, because they went there to get in the middle of all the things their parents never wanted them to see.
    For a while, their parents put up with the behavior, saying it was hard to be an adolescent with power, and the kids would grow out of their dangerous needs eventually. But when three of their bodies were found in the desert, Mr. Diamond stepped up to become the parents’ leader. He set up the casino as a safe haven for people with power and started drugging the teenagers, preventing the casino’s young people from hurting themselves or their parents, and keeping them away from the Res, where they would be lost for years, if not killed.
    But Kaylee recognized the catch-22 this created. Power faded with age, so the casino was suppressing the abilities of the group most able to protect it. In the past decade, the casino hadn’t needed much protection. The Res had seemed stable, only occasionally murdering its own and spitting out the body in the desert. But Mr. Diamond had warned Kaylee they shouldn’t take the stability of the Res for granted. Sooner or later someone would head the Res who tired of toying with the other people there and thought bigger. Kaylee was afraid her ex-boyfriend Isaac was that person. He was brilliant, cunning, impatient with the teens’ petty dramas, and determined to amass a fortune before he grew older and his power started to fade.
    Like Mr. Diamond. Only evil.
    With youth and strength and the sadistic power of the Res behind him, he could conquer even the casino—and then, who knew what he could do?
    Judging from the Res’s visits to the casino in the past few days, it seemed Isaac was about to make a move. Kaylee had warned Mr. Diamond that she and her aging guards would be no match for a group of Isaac’s most powerful twenty-somethings. The casino needed to take some of its own young people off Mentafixol to face down the Res and protect them all.
    Mr. Diamond had balked, but at least he’d agreed to discuss the idea over pad Thai. She hoped he would show her the list of people the casino currently drugged so she could get an idea of whom she could train to help her.
    The elevator doors slid open. She stepped quickly onto the