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“What happened?” I whispered quietly, for my head’s sake.

“You either got the high score, or you broke it. One of those two.” He looked from the screen to me. “It was like you were—a machine. You were racing through levels I’d never reached, and the screen kept going black, and?—”

My own body felt so small now, so constrained.

“I don’t really have words for what it looked like—other than fucking amazing. You—you were doing a perfect run. Can you teach me how?”

I caught my breath and settled back into real-reality, no matter how much more real the video game seemed, and gave him a half-hearted smile. “Only after you get hit by lightning.”

The TV screen flickered and both of us snapped to attention.

Servers going down for reboot. All current stats will be lost.

“Ooooooh shit!” Darius said, half-laughing.

I pointed at the screen. “See!”

“No! You just need to practice more—something easier that you can’t break—like Juicejam.”

“Ugh!” Juicejam was what my little sister played whenever my mom would let her use her phone. It was an addictive matching app with a slot-machine component, using different fruit you squished.

“Seriously. It’s a small world, simple rules, easily confined. If you can manage that, then you know you won’t break things anymore.”

“Maybe.” It made a certain amount of sense. “Or ever get angry.”

“That too.” He leaned backward to look at me appraisingly. “You’re like the Hulk. Only with electricity.”

I found him on one of the posters by Darius’s bed, large and green. “The Hulk, eh?”

“He’s—”

I looked back at him. The way he was looking at me now—it was unfamiliar and it made me uncomfortable. “I know who the Hulk is, Darius,” I said, a little stronger than I meant to.

He seemed to ignore it. “Control your emotions, and control your power.”

I rubbed my palms on the thighs of my Shax uniform. I’d been holding the controller long enough to make them sweaty and I needed Tylenol like yesterday. “You make it sound so easy to fix.”

“Maybe it is.” He stood. “Come on, I’d better get you home.” He offered me his hand. I didn’t take it, pretending not to seeit, and then he pretended not to have offered, and we were both back to pretending things, all the way up from his room and out the front door.

CHAPTER 18

We settled into his car together and the engine turned over on the first twist. It was almost dark outside—and then the clock on the dashboard came on. “It’s eight?” How had it gotten that late? We’d just left the Shax fifteen minutes ago, at seven.

“Yeah,” Darius said, backing up his car.

“But—that means I was in there for at least thirty minutes.” It’d only felt like a few seconds on my end. How had I lost that much time? I’d just been sitting here on his couch alone with him for half-an-hour? “You just sat there watching me?”

His skin went a shade darker. “No. I was watching you destroy the entire game on the screen. Everything that I could see was like on fast-forward times a hundred—and you skipped all the cut scenes.”

I had absolutely no memory of that time in my body at all. It was like I’d been abducted by aliens, instead of killing them.

I wrestled with the implications of that all the way home. Where had I been, if not in my body? Where had my mind gone? And how vulnerable was the rest of me while I was out of it? Maybe I could control my powers now, a little, but how scareddid I need to be about being sucked away again? What if my mind went somewhere and it couldn’t get back?

“You’re being awfully quiet,” Darius said.

“What if they rebooted the servers while I was still inside?”

He put his car in park outside my trailer. My mom’s car was still in the driveway, Barbara must’ve given her a ride, and there was still a light on in Allie’s room, tsk tsk. “It was pretty clear they were rebooting them because of you. But—yeah—I don’t know. What was it like?”