“Jamie didn’t let me drink! I didn’t know … Kitty had champagne in her room while we were getting ready. She didn’t know … and he didn’t know what we were doing in there. When he realised, he was very concerned. He didn’t want me to go to the dance. He wanted to bring me straight home.” I hope this detail might divert some of her hostility before she goes downstairs and begins the decapitation.

“And did he?”

“Um, no. I wouldn’t let him, but he did bring me home early.”

“This is the problem with Synergist Coding; it makes you irrational and reckless … then alcohol on top. You could have hurt someone!”

My face flushes.

She covers her mouth. “You hurt someone?”

“No! It was a misunderstanding. Jamie stopped me.”

“Tell me. Now.”

“There was a girl, apparently. A cheerleader or something. Touching Jamie. I – I overreacted.”

She makes an infuriated noise. “You have no respect for the seriousness of your condition or the impact of Synergist Coding. It doesn’t simply amplify your signal. Your connection amplifies everything you feel about each other – lust, jealousy, protectiveness … Don’t you have any idea how easily you could kill someone or get someone killed? Goddamn it, you two are determined to ruin your lives!”

“Jamie didn’t do anything! It was me!”

“This is exactly why we don’t drink, Evangeline. You cannot afford slip-ups. What if you had exposed your gift?”

“Gift!” My volume triples. “You call this a gift?”

She sighs, hands falling from her hips, then she pulls out the old wooden chair from my desk and slumps into it, rubbing her face as she speaks to the floor. “Drunk, disorderly and probably pregnant.”

“I-am-not-pregnant!”

She eyes me like a child who has just said something very stupid. “How many times do we have to go over this? Your body is in overdrive. Your DNA is made for reproduction. Every cell in your body is designed to respond to his signal. It’s for a reason!” She makes a spluttering noise. “Did you think to use protection?” She glowers and heat floods my face. “Not that it would make much difference for you two.”

“We did not have sex!” I am too angry to care that Jamie will hear us.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care! We didn’t!” My ears ring and spots pop in my peripheral vision. “And for what it’s worth, even if we had, it’s none of your business. I am not a child!”

She gets to her feet. “You are my–” She stops herself. Unable to look at me, she inhales and exhales through her nose, lowers her voice and tries again. “Responsibility … you are my responsibility. And you know how dangerous it is for you to be with him. There is no such thing as safe sex for you two. Why can’t you understand it?”

“I understand just fine!”

“You think there won’t be consequences for this? There are always consequences. Always a cost. A price you can’t afford.”

“This is my life!”

“You want to end up like me?” Her voice drops low, almost a whisper, and my chest constricts. The story of Miriam’s cataclysmic love affair. Apparently, the worst thing that could have happened was producing Aiden and me.

My thoughts shift to my brother in Roxborough Detention Centre and coming doom. I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry about Jamie sleeping over. I was hammered. He brought me home early so that I could sleep it off. He was only going to stay until you got home.” I wave at her like she’s somehow a contributor to the outcome but hurry on at her expression. “He stayed because I asked him to. He was a total gentleman – believe me, a saint. If things had gone my way last night, then you’d be entitled to your rant. I don’t know what your problem is with Jamie, anyway. He’s only ever treated me with respect.” I finish in a gust, “And I love him.”

And they’re out there, words I haven’t said to Jamie yet, travelling through floorboards and down hallways to his highly attuned ears. I burn with defiance and embarrassment at having blurted something so precious and fragile and secret to Miriam who looks like she wants to take a sledgehammer to each word. Her face works. Her mouth opens then clamps shut again. Finally, she says, half-strangled, “My problem with Jamie is his selfishness.”

I’ve heard this speech before.

“What it will mean for you,” she says, “being with him. What it will mean for him, being with you. Especially when he has an out.”

I push the thought of Helena away and say it again, putting strength in my voice to spite her. “I love him.”

“You think you love him.”

“I do love him!”

She holds up her hand. “You are seventeen. You don’t know what love is.”

My fury is instant, a bolt of hostility eclipsing reason. The sound I make verges on a roar. The vase I take from the dresser drawers hurtles at the wall behind my headboard. The powdered shards collect on my pillow and all I can hear is thunder in my ears.

Miriam flinches. “Real love – it isn’t always getting what you want. Real love … is sometimes sacrifice … doing what’s right, no matter how hard it is, whatever the cost to yourself – even if it means tearing your own heart out to do it.”

A shudder ripples through me and my rage dissipates like phosphor after a lightning strike. I bite down on my lips and hug myself, emptied of air and argument. My head swims at the layered implication of her words as they touch on her and me and Aiden; as they touch on the impossibility of a future with Jamie. I’m finished. I pad around the bed past her to the door. “I’m going to have a shower.”

She stops me with a hand on my arm, her voice quiet and restrained. “You’re grounded – for a month. No phone. No dates. You go to school, you come home, that’s it.”

I say nothing. I slip out into the hall and into the bathroom, closing the door behind me, turning the shower faucet so the water streams full force, before burying my face in a towel and letting myself cry.

SIGNALS

It’s quiet when I shut off the faucet. I stand dripping in the tub, breathing steam like it might heat the cold place Miriam’s warnings have hollowed in my chest, listening for voices down in the kitchen. At least she’s stopped yelling. I deliberately took my time, keeping my head under the flow of water, humiliated at the thought of overhearing any conversation about the sex Jamie and I never had. Part of me hopes he slipped out before she got down there but that isn’t Jamie’s style. He would wait, own it, tell it like it is without whining or excuses and apologise for the mistakes that aren’t even his.

I towel off, twisting inside with guilt and frustration. Miriam was my go-to person from before Mom – April – got sick; hopes and fears, dreams and in-betweens, we talked about everything. Now there’s pollution in the air, debris piling up, trenches separating us.

I knot my damp hair at the base of my neck and tuck the towel tight around my chest, determined to be calm, rational. I’ll dress, go down to the kitchen and I won’t shout.

I pause at the sound of Miriam’s voice rising in question, alarm in Jamie’s response followed by the sudden scrape of chairs and the scuff of heavy feet coming up the back steps. I strain to hear. The back door clacks, a deep voice, recognition, surprise and demand. Miriam argues. Jamie challenges. I yank the bathroom door – my third crushed handle in less than twenty-four hours – and skid out onto the landing with slippery feet. A surge in static erupts in the bandwidth. I stumble back, stunned by the confusion of noise in my head, like a loud, badly tuned radio or a packed room where everyone shouts at once. It’s nothing like sensing a Stray and nothing like the annoying but normal static I pick up in a crowd of civilians. I usually feel Jamie’s signal like a resonant note and Miriam’s is as familiar as my own heartbeat, but this, this is something else, something foreign, something bad.