Face of Death

She couldn’t think about this. She rolled again and tried to crush herself into sleep, squeezing her eyes so tightly shut that her whole face wrinkled inward.

Sometime later, she must have slept. She must have, because her mother wasn’t here in Kansas, and therefore there was no way that she could have been standing over Zoe’s bed.

“Mom?” Zoe whispered, her voice coming out small and high, the voice of a child.

“Why didn’t you pray for forgiveness?” her mother asked, harsh and stinging. “I told you, devil child. You have to beg God to change you.”

“I did pray, Mom,” Zoe protested. She had. Every night, her knees raw with kneeling on the wooden floorboards by her bed, asking God to change her.

“Then what is this?”

Zoe felt the weight of something thrown down on the covers beside her and flinched. She knew what it was already. It was evidence—signs that she had still been using her power, still seeing the numbers. She should never have written anything down. She had just wanted to remember the calculations, use them to build something of her own maybe. Jenny was the only one in her class who could afford a toy robot, but Zoe had seen all the pieces inside and known how it worked. If she could just get the pieces together—

“You are a wicked child,” Zoe’s mother said, her breath hot on Zoe’s face. “Zoe, you get out of that bed right now and you pray with me. We’re going to pray all night long, do you hear me? We’ll pray for you not to shame and disgrace us again. Get down here on your knees.”

Zoe struggled out of the bed, feeling the hard wood on her tender skin with a whimper, and clasped her hands together.

And it was almost an unnoticeable change into another day when she began to pack her things, getting them all into two single cardboard boxes, everything she had in the world.

“You can’t just walk out like this,” her mother hissed, flinging words like vipers from the doorway. “We are your family, Zoe. Who ever heard of a child doing this to her poor mother?”

“You are not my mother anymore,” Zoe said, taking a dress down from a hanger in her wardrobe. “At least, not legally. I can do what I want.”

“I bought that dress,” her mother said, stepping forward and snatching it out of her hands. “That is mine. You can’t have it, devil!”

“There is no devil,” Zoe said, tired of this conversation, tired of the same thing over and over again. “There is just me.”

“You are the demon.” Her mother pointed into her face, stepping forward, broaching her personal space. “You are the devil, you are the evil thing. There never was a child of mine. You were birthed from me a demon. And demon, you will steal from me no more!”

Zoe’s mother swiped the box from her hands, sending it crashing to the floor. Clothes and books spilled out, the small number of items Zoe had gathered herself over the years and actually liked. Small, bright pieces of candy scattered in a Fibonacci spiral around everything. Photographs of dead girls spilled out from the pages of books. She itched to reach and pick them up, to turn them over and see what might be written on the back, but they were part of her mother’s household now. And this was no longer Zoe’s home.

She stared at them for a moment, knowing her mother was going to have to win at least a part of this fight. Legally emancipated or not, Zoe was not going to resort to physical violence. So long as she was away from here, that was enough.

“Okay,” she said, and turned and walked out, and that was all.

And she woke sweating, feeling the weight of her mother’s hand across the back of her head, reeling for a moment before she realized she was still in a motel in Kansas.

***

The buzz of a text alert lifted Zoe out of her fitful nap for a second time, forcing her eyes open. Her face was pointing toward the digital clock, and she read the display with a sense of dull inevitability. Of course, she had not made it all the way through to the morning. It was only a little after five a.m., just a short few hours since she had put her head on this rock-hard pillow.

Zoe reached out and lifted her cell phone. She was not properly sleeping anyway, not really, and on a case like this an agent didn’t ignore a message. Whatever it was could be crucial, timely. The kind of information you needed to know right away.

She read the message, and felt her heart sinking even lower than she had thought it was possible for it to go.

“No,” she said, out loud. “No, no, no!”

Shelley stirred on the other bed, her eyes flickering open. “What is it?” she asked, the drowsiness of sleep disappearing as she kicked herself into awareness.

“State troopers,” Zoe said, holding back a lump of something in her throat that threatened to overwhelm her. “Two of the fair’s employees have been reported missing by their families. They woke up this morning and realized that they never made it home last night. They’re putting out an APB for their description and launching a manhunt. Looks like all hands on deck.”