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Moony handed back the punch card and swigged straight from the bottle. At the cabin door, Evie turned back. “Just one more question, please, Mr. Runyon? The machine that reads these cards—we’re desperate to find it, but we don’t even know where to look. Please, can you help us?”
“If there’s a machine to read it somewhere, the person who’d know would be Jake Marlowe. After all, he probably built it.” Moony snickered. “But good luck trying to get into any of Marlowe’s strongholds. You might as well try to get into Fort Knox.”
Evie took the wheel on the way back to the city. She watched the rutted road appear like a surprise in the headlamps’ glare. Everything looked sideways to her now. The car bounced as it hit a bump, and Sam grabbed hold of the door handle. “Holy moly! You always drive this fast?”
Evie hadn’t realized how fast she was going. “Slow is for chumps.”
“Well, I’d like to be a live chump. Take it easy, will ya?”
Evie eased her foot off the accelerator and the car settled into a healthy purr. “Sam, could all of that be true? Do you think we’re… test subjects?”
“Pretty sure I am,” Sam said. “That would explain why Rotke Wasserman kept coming around to see me.”
“But that could have to do with your mother, too. Didn’t you say she was a Diviner? They probably wanted to know if you’d inherited her talents.”
“Maybe. Except that I can’t remember any of that stuff. When you read my mother’s photograph, that was the first time I knew of it.”
Evie thought about what she’d seen then: A beautiful room full of paintings, books, and fancy chandeliers, like a museum or a palace. Will’s fiancée, Rotke, asking Sam if he could read cards. But Sam couldn’t. He didn’t seem to have any powers. And then there were all those children on the front lawn crying about the sinking of the Lusitania seconds before it was known. What if those children had been part of Project Buffalo? If so, where were they now?
“What if they had a way of erasing my memories?” Sam said from the passenger seat, bringing Evie back. “Say, do you remember anything about your childhood, anybody testing you?”
“No. Never,” Evie said. But just because she couldn’t remember it, did that mean it had never happened? Unnatural. Created. The thought of it made Evie’s skin crawl. And something else had been nagging at Evie for the entire drive back. “Sam, what Moony said, about strengthening Diviners’ powers. What if…”
“What if Sister Walker and Will aren’t on the level about this ‘coming storm’ business? What if they’re using us for something else? Yeah. I thought about that, too. I think until we know more, we gotta keep pretending that everything’s jake.”
They’d reached the city’s shiny edge, smears of neon sharpening into tall window blocks of light.
“What does any of this have to do with all these ghosts showing up?” Evie said.
“I don’t know. My head feels like it’s been twirled on a merry-go-round.”
“Mine, too.”
“First things first: We gotta find this card reader if we want answers. Doesn’t Jake Marlowe have some kinda house upstate?”
“Yes. An estate. I heard Will say it belonged to his family.”
“Seems like a good place to start.” Sam let out a long, hard sigh. “Aww, how we gonna get into Marlowe’s house anyhow?”
“I know somebody who could.” She turned the car toward the Bennington.
“Coast is clear. The professor’s room is empty,” Sam said, letting Evie into the apartment.
Jericho stepped out of the bathroom, startling them all into shrieks. He was shirtless, with a towel wrapped around his waist. Evie pretended to be interested in Jericho’s painted battle figurines on the kitchen table while stealing sideways glances at the impressive muscles of his broad back.
“I didn’t know we had company,” Jericho growled at Sam as he ducked back into the bathroom. A moment later, he emerged in trousers and an undershirt.
“I’m mostly decent,” Jericho said. “What’s got you both so excited?”
They sat at the table while Evie and Sam told Jericho all about their meeting with Moony Runyon.
“The samples,” Jericho said when they’d finished their tale. “In all of Will’s letters to Cornelius, Will mentioned collecting samples from
the Diviners they were testing. Wait just a minute.” Jericho disappeared into his room and returned with a cache of bound letters.
Sam snorted. “You kept those and I’m the bad guy?”
“Sam, you steal from people all the time.”
