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into a tall, thin man wearing a long black coat and a badge that indicated that he was a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
    “Hello, Jessica,” Cyrus Krantz said to me, with a smile that I’m sure he meant to be reassuring, but which was actually merely sickening. “Remember me?”

C H A P T E R
5
    I t would be hard to forget Cyrus Krantz. Believe me, I’ve tried. He’s the new agent assigned to my case. You know, on account of me being Lightning Girl and all.
    Only Cyrus Krantz isn’t exactly a special agent. He’s apparently some kind of FBI director. Of special operations, or something. He explained the whole thing—or at least he tried to—to my parents and me. He came over to our house not long after Mastriani’s burned down. He didn’t bring a pie or anything with him, which I thought was kind of tacky, but whatever. At least he called first, and made an appointment.
    Then he sat in our living room and explained to my parents over coffee and biscotti about this new program he’s developed. It is a division of the FBI, only instead of special agents, it is manned by psychics. Seriously. Only Dr. Krantz—yeah, he’s a doctor—doesn’t call them psychics. He calls them “specially abled” individuals.
    Which if you ask me makes it sound like they must all take the little bus to school, but whatever. Dr. Krantz was very eager for me to join his new team of “specially abled” secret agents.
    Except of course I couldn’t. Because I am not specially abled anymore. At least, that’s what I told Dr. Krantz.
    My parents backed me up, even when Dr. Krantz took out what he called “the evidence” that I was lying. He had all these records of phone calls to 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU, the missing children’s organization with which I have worked in the past, that supposedly came from me. Only of course all the calls, though they were from my town, were placed through pay phones, so there was no real way to trace who’d made them. Dr. Krantz wanted to know who else in town would know the exact location of so many missing kids—a couple hundred, actually, since that day I’d been hit by lightning.
    I said you never know. It could be anybody, really.
    Dr. Krantz made this big appeal to my patriotism. He said I could help catch terrorists and stuff. Which I admit would be pretty cool.
    But you know, I am not really sure that is something I would like to subject my family to. You know, the vengeful wrath of terrorists, peeved that I caught their leader, or whatever. I mean, Douglas gets freaked by call-waiting. How much would terrorists rock his world?
    So I politely declined Dr. Krantz’s invitation, all the while insisting I was about as “specially abled” as Cindy Brady.
    But that didn’t mean Dr. Krantz had given up. Like his protégés—Special Agents Smith and Johnson, who’d been pulled off my case and whom I sort of missed, in a weird way—Dr. Krantz wasn’t about to take no for an answer. He was always, it seemed, lurking around, waiting for me to mess up so that he could prove I really did still have my psychic powers.
    Which was unfortunate, because he was neither as pretty as Special Agent Smith, or as fun to tease as Special Agent Johnson. Dr. Krantz was just …
    Scary.
    Which was why when I saw him there in that cornfield, I let out a little shriek, and must have jumped about a mile and a half into the air.
    “Oh,” I said, when I’d pulled myself together enough to speak in a normal voice. “Oh, Dr. Krantz. It’s you. Hi.”
    “Hello, Jessica.” Dr. Krantz has kind of an egg-shaped head, totally bald on top, only you couldn’t tell just then, because he was wearing a hat pulled down low over his eyes. I guess he thought this made him look like Dr. Magneto, or something. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d want to be compared to the
X-men’s
Dr. Magneto.
    His gaze flicked over Rob, whom he’d met before, only not in my living room, of course.
    “Mr. Wilkins,” he