After the Storm, Gustav peed pure ammonium and Dr. Wainwright’s left thumbnail grew two inches a day.

And Shandra Emerson felt the psychic imprints that people left behind in anything they touched, in clothing or dishes or chairs.

She felt memories and urges, plans and appetites. She read your darkest secrets in the traces of your passing.

Sometimes she went weeks without feeling a thing, then an impression would overwhelm her. She rarely left her rooms in her parents' basement, afraid of the images she’d unwittingly uncover, the passions and the shames. Afraid she'd step into someone's footsteps.

So when she said, I felt them, and they feel like death, I listened.

She collapsed against my pickup. "They're after Dewitt."

"Get to Corene’s house," I told her.

"They feel," she said, "like evil."

"Go!" I shouted.

I slammed into the truck and roared away, touched by Shandra's fear. I drove fast and reckless, but I knew that road as well as I knew anything--the creak of the lobster boat, the shelves of the General Store, the scent of Maddie’s hair.

Fifty yards from Dewitt's house, I pulled into the roadside brush.

Dewitt lived with his parents in a rambling mansion on a hill above the coast, built in the 1920s by a wealthy socialite and set on fire in the 30s by the socialite’s ex-lover. With three decks stepping down toward the ocean, the place remained magnificent, if charred. And oddly patched-together; Dewitt's parents had started squatting there decades ago, making repairs with hay bales and duct tape.

I slipped from the truck and closed the door silently. The surf bucked and crashed, the half-moon set the wispy clouds glowing silver. I cut through a stand of white birch and stopped at the edge of the ramshackle lawn that was dotted with tree stumps and a broken potter’s wheel. Two hammocks swayed under an ancient willow tree, where Dewey and I lounged in the summer, drinking beer and watching the ocean.

No sign of life.

I lifted my T-shirt to my neck and revealed the three dark circles etched into my chest.

They looked like tattoos, inky black and slightly off-round.

They looked like blood blisters, shiny and engorged.

They looked like the suction cups of the undersea thing that had bored through my skin and sucked me dry.

One was to the right of my bellybutton, the diameter of a golf ball. The middle circle was a little larger--a racquetball, maybe--and the largest circle, just under my left clavicle, was about the diameter of a baseball.

I gave a twist of thought and the circles tore free from my skin and floated around me.

Three black moons in orbit: as strong as diamond, as elastic as waterballoons, and bonded to my brainstem on some subatomic level. They darted through the air with the quick grace of dragonflies, in answer to my thoughts and instinct.

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One orb rose higher, another streaked twenty feet ahead and the third nestled behind me, between my shoulder blades.

Nobody was around: I felt the vacancy not only through my own eyes and ears but through the impulses that the orbs filtered into my mind. Despite being featureless, they somehow detected motion, shapes, and sizes, with a vague and vaporous accuracy.

I saw what they saw, blurrily. I heard what they heard, faintly. And sometimes they fed me emotions, too. Like right now, a feeling tugged at me--a trickle of fear, a trickle of dread--but I didn’t know why.

Following the first orb across the lawn, I sent the second diving toward the wide oceanfront window. I felt nothing from that one. No tingle of caution, no tug of unease.

I edged through Dewitt’s front door, into the familiar scent of brewing beer and caramel corn. In a reversal of the normal order of things, Dewitt lived on the top floor, and his parents in the basements, which were better for the grow-lights and the hydroponics. I crossed into the kitchen, and felt a shiver of apprehension.

From where? From one of the orbs, flashing into Dewitt’s bedroom.

Although I controlled them with my thoughts, they also moved in response to subconscious cues. They were semi-autonomous, poking through the house, guided by my curiosity, and guiding me in return.

I shoved into Dewitt's room. Checked the rumpled bed and the stereo blinking beside the bed, with three towering stacks of books-on-CD. That’s what the Storm had brought Dewitt: he remembered everything he heard while asleep.

It didn’t sound like much, but he’d learned dozens of languages that way, and the complete works of Shakespeare. He’d memorized almanacs and textbooks. You could ask him the seventeenth word in the sixth Dortmunder novel, and he’d tell you. Ask him the atomic weight of molybdenum or the load-bearing capacity of the Ting Kau bridge in Hong Kong, and he knew.

I'd crept into his room a few times, and replaced a chemistry textbook with Tales of a Drama Queen, or a beekeeping manual with mpreg fanfic. He’d chased me halfway across the Rock after I’d slipped Our Bodies, Ourselves in his CD player. Yet a month later, returning from a weekend in Portland, he’d thanked me profusely.

I still didn’t know why--I’d been afraid to ask.

Nobody would call Dewitt handsome. He always said that he looked like a shaved gorilla who wasn't good at shaving. Still, he knew how to charm girls, which wasn’t one of my own personal strengths. In my defense, I’d already found the right girl, the only person who survived the Storm able to leave the island permanently. The rest of us were bonded to the island like my orbs were bonded to me, but not Maddie. She'd left more than a year ago for New Park City, and felt nothing. Lucky me.

Inside Dewitt’s bedroom, my attention pivoted toward a broken beer bottle on the floor, shards of glass in an amber puddle. Had there been a struggle?

I jogged outside, scrambled down the terraced lawn, and lost my balance. I reached into empty space, drew one of my orbs into my palm with a thought, and used it to steady myself.

Around the corner of the house, an orb flitted through the open window of Dewitt's parents' apartment. I felt no alarm, so I knocked on the door, then stepped inside.

Mr. Daugherty smiled at me from his La-Z-Boy, a newspaper opened to the crossword puzzle in his lap. "What has a papa, a mamma, and a baby?" he asked.

"Is Dewey here?" I asked.

"Twelve letters, ending with S."

Mrs. D's voice came from inside the house, "Is that Lark? I’ve got apple crumble."

"No, thanks," I called back. "I’m looking for Dewitt."

Mr. D raised his voice. "He’s worried."

"Over Dewitt?" Mrs. D called.

"Shandra’s worried," I said.

Mrs. Daugherty stepped into the room, wiping her hands on an apron that said, Never Trust a Skinny Cook. "Having one of her fits? He’s probably with--" She looked to her husband. "Do the Johns have guests?"

"A few," he said.

"Well, there you go," Mrs. D said. "That boy chases skirt like a three-dicked dog."

For once, Mrs. D didn't make me blush. "They’re both men," I told her. "And there isn't any wedding." Dewitt had an entire gay wedding strategy for meeting girls; he claimed there’s always a straight relative looking for a hetero-fling with a backwoods handyman. "You didn’t hear anything? Upstairs or outside--in maybe the past hour?"

They said they hadn’t.

"Call Gustav." I brought an orb to hover at my shoulder. "Tell him Shandra’s at Miss Corene’s house. Get in with your plants and lock the growing door behind you."

"You’re scaring me," Mr. D said.

"Good," I told him.

Mr. D tossed his newspaper aside and reached for the CB radio--our answer to cellphones, which didn't work on the island--but at some subliminal alarm, the orb streaked from my shoulder and punched him in the stomach.

He doubled over, and the window shattered.