Blue straightened. “Idoknow what to do.”
“The ramp,” Enzo said. “You’ll need to?—”
“I know.” Blue cut him off. “Let me have my moment of knowingness. I just started believing in myself again.”
Charity sat back and buckled her seatbelt. The vision had worked. They would make it out of the city.
Enzo continued driving down the street, picking up speed. The ramp slid away from the men who’d been hauling it. They stumbled back and watched in astonishment as the ramp skidded along the ground toward the hole. Even the man who’d been yelling at the driver stopped to gawk as it bumped over the ground, smashing into rocks and weeds.
“This is so much easier than lifting a car,” Blue said.
The ramp draped over the rubble pile and came to a halt. The men’s startled faces turned from the ramp to the approaching car. They’d noticed it wasn’t slowing.
Enzo gunned the engine. They tore through the hole, went over the ramp, and flew for a couple of seconds. They landed with a jarringthunkonto the ground. A weed-strewn field sprawled out in front of them, and beyond that, the black line of the interstate.
They bumped and rattled across the field. Charity turned in her seat to see if anyone followed them. She only saw the men who’d been near the truck, peering out at them with puzzled expressions.
32
Mile after mile stretched by. Whitney Farms was three hours from Kansas City. In two and a half, they’d be close to Springfield, an outpost that had once been a town and still had some services.
Charity hoped, in desperation, that they would come upon some medical facility or an ambulance that happened to be sitting on the side of the road. Someone who could help her father. Nothing like that occurred.
Blue asked Enzo how a police officer ended up rescuing Empowereds, and he gave her a condensed, child-appropriate explanation of his time with Charity.
“Oh,” Blue said when he’d finished. “So that’s why you didn’t know your wife was a psychic. You probably don’t even know her middle name.”
Enzo’s eyes found Charity’s in the rearview window. “You never did explain how you just became a psychic.”
Charity’s gaze went to her father yet another time, checking for any changes. “He passed his power on to me a little while ago.”
“Psychics can do that?” Blue asked.
“I don’t know about all of them,” Charity said. “But some apparently can when their body is shutting down.” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word dying.
Enzo considered this for a moment. “How many people know that psychics can do that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. We never made a habit of talking to other people about psychics.”
“I wonder if telekinetics can do that,” Blue said. “Give away their powers.”
“Would you give them away?” Enzo asked Blue.
“Yes,” she said like it was a ridiculous question. “Do you think I want to be a freak? I didn’t try to become this way. I was minding my own business, like everyone else. Then one morning when the alarm woke me up, I wished I could throw my phone at a wall, and it just did.” She smacked her lips in annoyance. “I got in a lot of trouble for that.”
“You didn’t tell your parents what happened?” Enzo asked.
“Nope. They’re not Empowered fans, and I didn’t feel like ruining my life. I planned on never using my powers, and then no one would ever know.”
“What went wrong?” Enzo asked.
She sank down into her seat. “Stuff like the alarm clock. You want something and there it is, flying toward you. It happened once at school. I said someone was playing a practical joke on me, but after that everyone began to talk, began to watch me more carefully.”
“That’s rough,” Enzo admitted.
“Yeah, well, that’s when you find out how loyal your friends are.”
“Were they?” Enzo asked.