The Survivors: Point of Origin (book 2)

The Human Trail, pt. 1

There was no time to waste. We spent the rest of Sunday preparing. I gave everyone assignments. Ginny handled all logistics for the trip. Everett and Mark discussed with Anthony who should come with us. I had a serious conversation with Patrick and Madeline about how Peter had disappeared and taken twenty-seven Survivors along for the ride with him. If we had that power, we'd be free of the constraints of human travel, and able to do exponentially more research in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Their goal on this trip was to find us this power.

This was the first time I had condoned acquisition. I should have felt guiltier about abandoning my principles, but that's the funny thing about abandoning principles, isn't it? It doesn't feel bad when you do it, and by the time you feel the sting of it, the crime has already been committed.

Lizzie was glad to have avoided my prying, and so she was content to help. She and Adelaide collected Sarah and Rebecca and spent the rest of the day and night in the apothecary, creating a notebook with the most pertinent recipes and incantations for me to take abroad. They packed a bag of all the essential ingredients they could find, and gave it to Everett.

And I sat upright and still on my bed, fingertips to the top of my head, noise-cancelling headphones in my ears. In my months of advanced mind reading and tracking, I had been able to deduce this: Most people were thinking about ten or twelve things at once, even if they didn't realize it. They were often feeling about fifteen things connected to those thoughts on varying levels. At that moment there were a little over six billion, seven hundred million people on the earth and about two hundred thousand supernatural creatures I could sense so far, whose thoughts were quieter but whose instincts were louder. In any given moment, I was scanning through roughly eighty billion thoughts and one hundred billion emotions, searching for elusive clues.

Three things happened: One, I came up empty. Two, the spot at the base of my skull that burned when I connected to Noah's mind would ache, as if it were tired of looking into other people's minds. Three, more often than not, when I would pull my fingertips away from my scalp, purpley-metallic, solid-smoke pieces were attached to my fingertips. They wouldn't evaporate, no matter what I touched them to, until I finally would put them back against my own head, and for a fraction of a second, I'd have all the thoughts I'd just had all over again, as if they were entirely new. Talk about déjà vu.

When I would get distracted, I'd retrace over the 156 tally marks on my arm, this time in thin Sharpie. To make them more real.

By nightfall, I had a few shaky leads.

Mark sat next to me. I pulled giant pieces of thoughts from my head and implanted them in his. I was still afraid to put my thoughts in anyone else's mind, but for some reason, I trusted Mark. I also trusted I wasn't going to hurt him, since I'd inadvertently "given" him one of my thoughts before without incident.

He was overwhelmed by the volume of thoughts and minds I was scanning through, but he picked out a few salient things here and there.

Quietly, when we were both ready to give up, we played with the fingertip-thought manipulation, and then, out of the blue, one time I pulled my hand away from his head, after having inserted a thought into it, and more shimmery, golden, glittering solid-smoke pieces dangled from my fingertips. They didn't burn the way my own thoughts did, but instead they tingled. The color was, undeniably, the exact shade of the Winters' venom.

"Whoa," Mark said, watching them dangle and swirl.

"What do I do?" I asked, fascinated.

"Put it in your head!" Mark boomed, his voice enthusiastic. I did as he said, and suddenly an image of Mark driving his R8 down 17-mile-drive in Pebble Beach popped into my head— a girl I'd never seen sitting in the passenger seat in a too-short red dress.