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failed to make me feel sick and so very angry.)
    “I can’t protect you if you’re going to hide things from me,” he added with a deep frown.
    The censure in his voice made my stomach ache. I hated disappointing him, this man who’d risked everything for me. “I wasn’t hiding it.” I swallowed hard, avoiding his gaze. “It was just…nothing.”
    He didn’t say anything, but his dark expression told me how “nothing” he thought it was.
    “It was over as soon as it started,” I added quickly. Like every other similar incident since my departure from GTX, though admittedly it had been almost a year since the last one (in which I might have turned a page in my English lit book without touching it) and this one was slightly higher profile. “Mr. Kohler made an announcement about it being a bad transformer, and no one thought anything about it.”
    “Were you in control?” my father asked.
    I hesitated and then said, “No.” Just like always, the barrier in my mind—the one that cut me off from the most powerful of my abilities—had fallen and then gone back up with no direction from me.
    “Are you sure?” he persisted. Clearly we’d reached the interrogation portion of this conversation.
    Yes, I’m sure, because if I’d had my way, there would have been a Rachel Jacobs–shaped hole in the wall instead of just a few broken lights. Not a good answer. “Pretty sure,” I said instead. “And I tried again when I was alone, a few minutes later. No luck.”
    Technically, I hadn’t been alone. Not completely. Jenna, the sole other occupant of the bathroom, had been in the handicap stall, sobbing too hard to let me in. The metal latch on a stall door is as simple a mechanism as they come. But with every bit of focus I could summon, to the point of making my head throb with the effort, I hadn’t been able to make that little metal bar rise up and drop away.
    Eventually I’d given up and simply knocked. Some super-secret weapon I am. Behold my ability to knock. Sometimes I wondered why GTX would even want me in my current condition. The mental wall that my six-year-old self had erected around my telekinesis as a self-protective measure was incredibly effective. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make that wall drop. I could still hear people’s thoughts and sense their emotions—those functions remained intact. But everything else? Gone.
    The ability to manipulate objects without touching them—throw, bend, deflect, speed up, slow down, summon from across the room, all of that—had once been as easy and simple for me as breathing. It hadn’t seemed magical or special, any more than a human would have been astounded by their brain translating electrical impulses into sight. It was just something I could do. A seeing person among the blind.
    Toward the end of my stay in the lab I’d progressed beyond controlling inanimate objects and moved on to bigger and better things. With enough concentration I’d been able to target specific muscles within the body, stop them from moving. I was that good…or bad, depending on how you wanted to look at it. I could keep the muscles in your legs from working, and hold you quiet and still while I did whatever I’d been commanded to do.
    I’m not sure anyone should ever have that kind of power.
    And now I didn’t. Not in a readily accessible or controlled manner, anyway.
    My father leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “You created the block, you should be able to bring it down,” he reminded me for the millionth time.
    “I know,” I said tightly. But knowing that didn’t seem to make a difference.
    After what had happened in the lab all those years ago, after what I’d done…it was as if that part of me had been lopped off or shut away behind an impenetrable wall. My father told me it wasn’t uncommon for human children to block memories of a traumatic event. He suspected my sudden inability to access that part of myself was a more severe form of