Holly nodded. “I can’t imagine why we would be angry or resistant. Kaylee, you had no right to drug us for seven years!”
“Yes, we did. Men with telekinesis or mind-changing ability, women with telepathy—they can settle into a trade, like your father, and Elijah’s mom, without causing too much trouble. We tread more carefully around male mind readers and female mind changers and levitators, because they’re so strong. What if you’d constructed your own magic act to compete with your father? It would have been catastrophic when you were fourteen. You would have tried tricks that were too hard just to outdo him. You would have wound up dead, possibly blowing the casino’s cover and threatening the lives of all our people along the way.”
Twelve hours ago, Holly would have sworn this wasn’t true. After her mishap with her dad that morning, she wasn’t so sure.
But she did know one thing: Kaylee had no right to play God, because she didn’t know what it felt like to be manipulated this way. “You were never drugged,” Holly said.
“No,” Kaylee admitted. “By fifteen I was at the Res. I finally escaped last year, and Mr. Diamond took me in. He chose me to lead his security team. That was right before you and I met.”
“Which wasn’t an accident,” Holly said sadly, heart sinking. “Mr. Diamond set us up to be friends so you could watch me. We were never really close. At least, not on your end.”
Kaylee’s eyes flickered. Holly thought she caught the tiniest glimmer of real feeling there.
But no. Stone-cold Kaylee didn’t even bother to deny their friendship had been a lie. She turned back to peer at the camera monitors yet again.
Holly asked, “What’s the Res?”
Kaylee nodded at the monitors. “The Res is what I’m looking for. If the casino is a safe haven for people with power, the Res is hell.” She looked over at Holly. “And very appealing to teenagers, which is the reason the casino started drugging young people in the first place.”
“Does the Res drug people like the casino does?” Holly asked. “Because if not, it does sound pretty appealing in comparison.”
Kaylee shook her head sternly. “The Res doesn’t have to drug you. The Res itself is intoxicating. People with power go there to test themselves and pit themselves against each other. Mind readers especially love it because they can read everyone and feel lots of powers at once. Levitators and mind changers may look the strongest, but mind readers will back you into a corner. They’ll blackmail you into using your power the way they want. Your power is your weakness, and it will be your downfall. Remember that girl who jumped off Hoover Dam last week?”
Holly nodded. It seemed like a million years ago now, but she remembered hearing about that girl on the news. She remembered feeling jealous of her.
“I knew that girl.” Kaylee squinted at the monitors. “But I don’t recognize anybody on these screens, which worries me. Where did they go? Elijah’s mom is a weak mind reader, but when she does sense something, she’s right.”
“So you think the Res is coming for me?” Holly asked.
“That’s somewhat vain of you.” Kaylee eyed Holly. “The Res was poking around already. We’d planned to keep you and Elijah on Mentafixol until you were thirty years old—”
“Thirty!” Holly squealed.
“Yes, because your powers would start to fade by then. I took you off early because I need your help. Putting teenagers on Mentafixol makes sense if we’re only trying to protect you from yourselves. But now we think the Res is trying to take over the casino. We have very few people who can fight them. We’re drugging the people who are strongest. It’s dangerous to wean people off the drug, so I have to release one or two at a time. I chose you and Elijah first. I hope you’ll come to work for me.”
Holly lifted her hand for silence. “When hell freezes over. I’ll go find this Res and save us all the trouble.”
“No!” Kaylee shouted.
She had never shouted at Holly before, ever, and the shrill sound of her voice rattled Holly’s already shot nerves.
“Why the hell not?” Holly yelled back. “It doesn’t sound so bad when I think about all the shit you and my parents have put me through. Just for starters, all the edamame, Kaylee. My mom brainwashed me into purchasing and steaming my very own edamame even now that I’m out from under her roof, just to keep my weight down. Do you know how many cookies I’ve missed out on in the last seven years, all in the name of pleasing my parents despite my fake debilitating mental illness? God!”
“Well, there’s some good news. Now you can eat all the cookies you want.”
“Damn straight!” Holly said. “My parents can kiss my big dimpled ass.”
“No, I mean you really can,” Kaylee said. “Using your power boosts your metabolism. You can eat anything you want. Mentafixol slowed your metabolism, which is why your mom made you take ballet and kept on you about your weight. It’s also why Elijah’s mom put him in lacrosse and got him a job here as a carpenter. I mean, really that was so the casino could keep an eye on him, but it didn’t hurt that we made him carry a lot of plywood.”
Holly knew Kaylee was trying to lighten the mood with a joke. It wasn’t working. Holly was speechless with anger.
“It’s not that everyone at the casino’s been trying to control you,” Kaylee said gently. “Everyone’s been trying to keep you safe. Those of us with power remember what it was like to make that discovery when we were fourteen. A lot of us were lured into the Res at that age. We wanted to protect you from that. Most people can see this when we take them off Mentafixol. I think you and Elijah would see it, too, if you hadn’t gone off on your own for the past few days. And that’s my fault. This is the first withdrawal I’ve been in charge of, and I’ve screwed it up. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you because of what I’ve done. I’m your roommate and your friend, and I care about you.”
“Bullshit,” Holly said.
Kaylee sat back in her chair, eyes hollow, as if genuinely disturbed that her relationship with Holly was ruined. Holly didn’t believe it for a second.
Then Kaylee put her elbows on the desk. “If you don’t want to be part of the casino right now, we’ll respect that. I’m very disappointed. You’re putting all of us in danger. I still have to respect it. But you’ll have to stay away from the Res”—she counted on one finger—“and stay away from Elijah.” She counted on a second finger. “Keep in mind how he manipulated you. That’s what he’ll do to you, times a hundred, if you end up at the Res together. They’ll make you turn on each other, and then they’ll use you both to take the whole casino down.” She glanced at a monitor and exclaimed, “Oh! Speak of the devil.”
Holly understood it wasn’t a good strategy to leap forward and dive halfway across Kaylee’s desk to get a glimpse of Elijah on the monitor, thus revealing to Kaylee how deep her feelings for him ran. However, this was what she did. She was rewarded with a low-resolution image of him crossing the casino floor and slipping onto an empty stool at his mom’s blackjack table.
If Kaylee hadn’t pointed him out, Holly might not have seen him—he could have been any tall athlete with a mess of wavy hair—but she recognized the way he walked and the familiar movements of his hands as he fingered the cards his mom dealt him. He wasn’t the domineering man shouting at her in Shane’s car anymore. He was the boy she’d always known. He was her high school sweetheart.
She and Kaylee both jerked to attention as the office door banged open.
“You need a haircut.”
Elijah stopped short in the middle of the casino floor. He’d just come through the door with his sights on his mom behind a blackjack table. He’d waded through the flashing lights and tinkling sounds of the slot machines and the usual morass of other people’s thoughts, which were giving him a worse than usual headache on top of the pain Shane had given him in the back of the head. Suddenly this very clear message drowned out everyone else.
He watched his mom. She swept up the cards, dealt another hand to herself and a man in blue scrubs at her table, and never glanced up at Elijah.
“Well, who do you think is talking to you in your own mind?”
Now she looked up at him and winked.
He took a few bills from his wallet, tossed them down in the box, and seated himself a careful distance away from the man in scrubs.
His mom dealt new cards to Elijah, the man, and herself. “Mind-readers can only read what’s at the front of someone’s mind, on the tip of the tongue,” she told him telepathically. “Form a thought as if you were going to say it, and I can pick it up. Be clear, though. Female mind-readers aren’t as strong as males, and everybody’s power gets weaker as we grow older. Sometimes I have trouble.”
Elijah was having trouble himself. The feel of the cards, the solid clicking of the chips, the scents of his mother’s perfume and lunch grilling in a restaurant nearby—all this took him back to his earliest memory. He was two years old, seated at the kitchen table in their apartment, eating a grilled cheese sandwich, watching cartoons on TV, and playing blackjack with his mother. He hadn’t been able to add, and he found the game repetitive and boring.
But this memory triggered his mother’s own memory, which flooded his mind with an explanation. She’d been practicing. She needed to read the minds of distracted customers while dealing a seamless game. She’d learned on Elijah, playing blackjack with him while tasting his sandwich through his toddler’s tongue and watching cartoons through his eyes.
She motioned to him to keep the game going.
As he split his pair and moved his money, he wondered why he suddenly felt he’d been punched in the stomach, like the throbbing pain in the back of his head wasn’t bad enough.
“It’s the smell,” she said almost as clearly as if her mouth had moved. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the restaurant. “You need to eat something. You’ve got four times the metabolism you had on Mentafixol. What’s the last thing you ate? Dinner last night in Colorado? Jeez, no wonder.” The house had beat both Elijah and the man in scrubs. She raked up the cards and chips. “Try it. Say something to me.”
Elijah intended to, but the room was full of distractions—sights, sounds, smells, and now the musings of the man in scrubs, who thought Elijah’s mother was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen. Nearly every morning when he got off graveyard shift as a nurse at the hospital, he came here just so he could sit at her table and watch the way her long black hair caught in the buttons on her uniform.
She gathered her hair in a ponytail and smoothed it behind her shoulders. “All in a day’s work, honey,” she said silently to Elijah. “Go ahead.”
Elijah looked down at his cards without seeing them. He asked as clearly as he could, “Who, besides you?”
“Mr. Diamond is a mind-reader,” she said. “Then there’s Holly’s father, obviously. A levitator, but a lot weaker than her, because he’s a man and he’s older. And of course Kaylee. She’s a very strong mind changer at the height of her power, which is why she’s Mr. Diamond’s second-in-command. A lot of her security guards, but that’s just what I’ve learned from reading them. Mr. Diamond knows who everybody is because he approves all the hires, but he keeps that information to himself for everyone’s protection. We don’t have potlucks and socialize together on the weekend. It’s not safe.”
“Shane?” Elijah asked.
“I never heard that he was. But you’ll run into more people in Vegas with power, no doubt. Vegas attracts us because we can get jobs here. And because we tend to seek each other out, feed off each other’s energy.”
Elijah felt that energy now. He could hardly sense the cards between his fingers because of his skin tingling as he read his mom’s mind. Her own skin tingled with the same energy, and he felt that too—an endless feedback loop. If she’d come within fifteen feet of him before he left for Icarus, he would have sensed this instantly. That must be why she’d left town.
“Which reminds me,” she said inside his head. “How was your trip?”
He looked down at the new cards his mom had dealt him and went through the motions of doubling down. If he’d ever had girl troubles—which he hadn’t, because he’d steered clear of girls altogether—he wouldn’t have discussed them with his mom. This was different. This was Holly.
And the trouble between him and Holly boiled down to the very essence of who they were—though this wasn’t who they’d been last week, or even yesterday. Now his heart sped up at the thought of what he’d almost had with her, and what he’d thrown in the garbage. She’d scared him, but he’d forced her into it by scaring her first.
Now he worried about her. He wondered where she was. He’d hoped when he walked in the front door of the casino, he’d find her hovering above the high-limit slots, pouring Singapore Slings with no hands for everyone in the vast room.
His mom winced and put her finger to her temple. “That’s real complicated, hon, and I’m not that good a reader.” She nodded at his hand, reminding him to signal his bet. “I don’t know what you did to that girl, but I can imagine. Be more careful with her. Both of you are at the height of your powers and very dangerous to the rest of us. We’d planned to keep you on Mentafixol until you were thirty, but Kaylee took you off to help protect us from the Res.”