The chaos receded. Sound returned, noise exploding all around me: Tink’s excited shouting; an abrupt, booming crack. It took me a second to register that it was the slam of the baseball hitting Gideon’s bat. I glanced up in time to see the ball as it spun into the sky, sailing overhead before it disappeared from view. Then there was only wide blue above, hot, beating sun.

Tink went crazy. “Holy shit!” she shrieked, and then started jumping up and down on the bleachers.

I was still trying to slow the racing of my heart. I tasted blood and realized I’d bitten my lip. With effort, I cupped my hands around my mouth and did my best to cheer, waiting for Gideon to run the bases.

But Gideon didn’t run.

While José, who’d been waiting on first base, did a quick circuit and loped home with his arms in the air, Gideon walked hurriedly away from the plate and then scrambled behind the dugout.

Tink’s shouting ceased. She stared after Gideon. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said, but I felt a surge of alarm. An echo of my Knowing. My throat constricted. Icy dread clawed up my spine. “I’m going to see if he’s okay.”

“Is that allowed?” Tink asked.

I didn’t answer. Ignoring the unsteadiness in my limbs, I leaped down from the bleachers and rushed across the field toward where Gideon had vanished.

When I found him, he was leaning with his hands against the dugout, nodding to something his coach was saying. His entire body was shaking. His helmet lay in the dirt at his feet, and his hair was sticking up in damp clumps.

The coach was worried about heat exhaustion. He kept pushing a water bottle at Gideon, which Gideon finally accepted—though he insisted he didn’t need to go to the ER.

“I’m just sick,” he said. “I haven’t been feeling well all week.”

After a while, the coach seemed to accept this explanation but still made the decision to send him home. He clapped a hand to Gideon’s shoulder. “That was a hell of a hit, Belmonte. Straight into the stratosphere.”

Gideon only nodded again.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He turned and looked at me. His eyes were watery, his face slick with sweat. “I threw up.”

“You’re sick?” Tink asked, coming up behind me.

I stepped toward Gideon, but he flinched away.

“Don’t—don’t touch me,” he said. Then, after a moment he added, “Sorry.”

Worry gnawed at me. I wanted to comfort him, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know if it was possible. It wasn’t overheating that had caused his agitation, and it wasn’t illness.

He was afraid.

That panic I’d felt was his. It was in each word he uttered, each breath exhaled. It radiated out of him.

I knew then what had happened. Somehow, for the briefest of instants, the sleeper had stirred. Verrick had touched the surface. And Gideon might not understand what had occurred, but he sensed it. I thought of the swing I hadn’t seen, and the ball arcing above us. Whatever burst of strength he’d gotten in that moment, it hadn’t been human. It wasn’t natural, and Gideon knew it.

You’re Kin, I thought, closing my eyes, willing him to believe it.

“Sorry,” he repeated.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said. “You’re the one who’s sick.” Like it was the flu, I thought. In a week he’d be over it.

“Are you going home?” Tink asked. “Are you okay to drive?”

“I’m better,” he said, though he didn’t particularly look it. “I’m just gonna go home and take it easy.”

I stepped forward again, and this time he didn’t pull away. I wrapped my arms around him, hugging him fiercely. I could feel the bones of his shoulders, the rapid drum of his heart.

Tink hugged him next, sliding her slim arms around him and squeezing him tight. “Someone arrest this boy,” she said once she’d released him, reaching upward and ruffling his sweaty hair. “He just broke the law of gravity.”

He gave her a thin smile. Then, with a promise that he’d call us later, he turned and walked toward the parking lot. We watched him go.

“You think he’s all right?” Tink asked once he was out of earshot.

I kept my tone casual. “If not, we’ll invade his house and feed him chicken soup.”

“Annoy him into feeling better. Good plan.” She grinned, heading back toward the bleachers, where we’d left our belongings.

My eyes lingered on Gideon’s departing form.

It was only a trick of the light, I told myself, the way the sun glinted on the grass, that made it seem—just for an instant—as though the shadow he cast was red.

That Friday was the Fourth of July, and though the closest Mom got to being patriotic was eating one of the red, white, and blue cupcakes Leon brought home from the bakery, she insisted we attend the fireworks at Powderhorn Park that evening.

Fireworks were something of a Whitticomb family tradition. When we’d lived up north, Mom, Gram, and I would sit in the grass and light sparklers, watching them sizzle and burn while fireflies glowed all around us. Four sparklers, always: one for each of us, and one for my grandfather Jacky, who had died when Mom was fifteen. Later, once we’d moved to the Twin Cities, the three of us would take a blanket and a cooler of watermelon and go from suburb to suburb, viewing a different city’s display each year.

After Gram died, we switched to watching the fireworks in Minneapolis. But this year we had been expanded to include Mickey as well as Leon. And even though I reminded Mom of the disaster that had occurred the last time she’d forced me into a double date, she wouldn’t hear of us attending separately.

“Weren’t you just arguing against clinging to tradition?” I asked. “We’re supposed to be celebrating independence.”

“From the British, not your mother.”

I would’ve protested further, but Mom forestalled me.

“Next year, you can go ahead and give me the finger,” she said. “Until then, unless you sue for emancipation, I still get to order you around.”

“You never obeyed Gram. She told me all about it.”

“Fortunately, you’re a much better daughter than I was.”

Then, before I could come up with a response, she unleashed a mother’s ultimate weapon: guilt. “This is about family,” she said. “You’re the only family I’ve got.”

There wasn’t really a way out of that one, but I tried anyway. “There’s Aunt Thena,” I pointed out.

Mom shot me a look. We only heard from her father’s aunt Thena, who lived in Nebraska, once a year—when she sent us Christmas cookies that tasted like Saran Wrap.

“Well, there is,” I argued.

“When Aunt Thena agrees to take your place at festivities, you’re free to do what you will.” She paused, narrowing her eyes. “And dressing Gideon up in your clothes won’t work, either.”

The Christmas we were ten years old, Gideon and I had snuck out of our houses in the middle of the night and swapped places—a stunt which neither of our families had found nearly as funny as we did. But thinking about Gideon led to worrying about Gideon, and I’d been trying not to do that. I’d called him that morning, and he’d assured me he was fine. So all I said was, “He wouldn’t fit anymore, anyway.”

And then I resigned myself to an evening spent with my mother and her boyfriend—instead of just with my boyfriend.

Not that I thought the night would’ve been particularly romantic, anyway. I’d put on so much bug spray, it was likely to double as boyfriend repellant. Leon probably wouldn’t want to get within three feet of me, but I wasn’t willing to venture out of doors defenseless. I already had eleven—I’d counted them—tiny red welts from mosquito bites, and every one of them itched.