Of the many strange things that had happened to Kess in the last few weeks, suddenly having friends was, if not the strangest, the most strangely strange. There were all these people who weren’t family and yet seemed to want to be around Kess (and she wanted to be around them too, even) and this shouldn’t feel unnatural in the same way as all the lightning and the lights, and yet…

Most of her days, these days, were spent out at the house-in-the-woods where that party had happened, where Kess had met Elias. It turned out to belong to Poor Dear—sorry, Samuel (Kess had noticed how annoyed the boy got when people called him “Sam” or “Sammy” and so she was guiltily trying to train herself out of thinking of him by her own, less well-intentioned nickname). His parents, he’d informed the rest of them, probably wouldn’t want to use the “cabin” until August. The Blues drove out to the woods in the day if they didn’t have jobs, in the evening otherwise, carpooling when convenient, sometimes spending the night if they could get away with it.

Kess called them “the Blues” after the color of their glowing haloes. Priya and her friends she called the Reds. The other Blues had picked up the terminology. There were a lot more of them now. Every few nights, the Signal would start up again, calling them out. They would end up somewhere random every time, though usually in the general vicinity of the watertower in the woods. Fortunately, you could get to that spot from the cabin in under ten minutes. Whoever was staying out there would go to meet the newcomers, and there would be one or two newly empowered teenagers each time. Now the Signal seemed to be slowing down—no one had felt it in four nights—and there were eight of them: Kess, Danny, Lorraine, Samuel, Samuel’s cousin Bradley, Samuel’s neighbor Greg, and two freckly girls named Marlie and Breanna who were not sisters even though they looked and acted like it.

“Now!” shouted Bradley from the next room.

“Left,” Kess shouted back. “I mean my left. You moved toward the door.”

“Yep,” came the reply. “Right again.”

“That’s amazing, Kess,” said Danny, beside her.

Kess grinned and popped up onto her tiptoes in a sudden burst of happy-wonderful.

Kess could see through walls.

She was getting better at cycling through the available electromagnetic frequencies and stopping at the one she wanted to see, though if she went too fast it made her dizzy and hurt her head. The frequency she was currently viewing showed only a very, very faint blue-green light coming through the ceiling from the general direction of the sun, like light under deep water. She could only see it if she cut off visual light, which was another trick she had learned (it had been disorienting, at first, standing in pitch darkness in the middle of the day, but she was getting used to it). The blue-green glow bounced off of metal things like cars and the cabin’s fancy stainless steel fridge, and off of people. Nothing was very detailed, in the light, especially the people, who were smudgy blue ghosts, but what did resolution matter when you could see through walls?

She blinked daylight back on.

Everyone was there for once, which felt nice. The… bonding, or whatever it was, didn’t make you like each other, exactly. Greg and Breanna obviously annoyed one another, and when Greg was out of the room Breanna would roll her eyes and make fun of him. But it made you feel like you belonged together, somehow, so that when all eight of the Blues were in the house it felt comfortable and, for lack of a better word, secure. And everything outside the house became a little more outside, a little scarier. (Though maybe that part was just Kess. None of the others ever mentioned feeling that way.)

Bradley came back in to the room with the others and flopped onto the couch beside his cousin.

“Impressive,” said Lorraine, from the couch. The blue-haired girl always had the same quirked almost-smile on her face no matter what she was feeling. She showed emotion with her eyebrows, which were like calligraphy strokes—sharp and black and elegantly expressive. Kess had been getting better at reading Lorraine’s eyebrows and she was pretty sure the other girl was jealous.

“Why do you think you got this power,” asked Lorraine, coolly, “and none of the rest of us?”

Kess congratulated herself for correctly deducing the meaning behind Lorraine’s expression. Having the unbearably cool Lorraine be jealous of anything about her—even if it was unexplained magic powers she couldn’t really take credit for—made Kess feel almost as good as seeing through walls. “I don’t know. Maybe because I was the first. None of you noticed anything weird until after the party, right? So maybe you’ll get the sight later. But anyway, the next test applies to everyone.”

“Do we have to do it right now?” asked Breanna. “I’m hungry.”

“It won’t take long, I promise. And it’s important. Without this test you won’t always be able to use your powers right.”

“Let’s do it guys,” said Danny. “Kess says it’ll be quick, it’ll be quick.”

“Yes. Can I get a volunteer?”

“Oh me!” said Marlie. Breanna gave her friend an annoyed look for further delaying dinner, but Marlie didn’t seem to notice.

“Alright,” said Kess. “Where did I put that crate… Yeah, that one. Marlie, send the current out of your hand.”

“Um, okay.” Marlie held her hand away from her body, spreading her fingers out parallel to the floorboards. A bright line of buzzing burning electricity snaked from her hand, though instead of hitting the floor like Kess expected it jagged to the side and hit the metal coffee table. Marlie must have been surprised as well because she jumped and squeaked and made the spectators laugh.

“Thanks,” said Kess. “Now step onto this and try it again.”

She took the blue plastic crate she’d found in the laundry room earlier and set it on the floor in front of Marlie, who hopped onto it.

“What is this going to show?” asked Greg, his voice thick with skepticism.

“We’ll see when it shows it,” said Breanna.

Marlie held out her hand again, flexed her fingers again. Nothing happened. She closed her eyes and tried once more. Nothing.

Kess beamed. “I was right. The plastic insulates you from the ground.”

“Um, so why can’t I lightning?”

“I told you, you’re insulated. When you shoot out a lightning bolt, the electricity goes to ground. You have to be grounded or it doesn’t complete a circuit.”

Lorraine was watching with her arms crossed and a general aura of hard-to-impress-ness. “Does this have anything to do with my favorite shoes getting ruined?” she asked.

“Yes, exactly. The metal on our feet tries to get to ground.”

Marlie was looking down at her hands, turning them over and over, when a thin white line of electricity formed between them. “Oh,” she squeaked.

“You said she couldn’t do that,” said Greg.

“I said she can’t make a circuit with the ground while she’s insulated. You can still complete a circuit between your two hands. That’s why if you touched someone with both hands, even if you weren’t grounded you could—” Kess suddenly flashed back to the moment she shocked Elias, one hand on his neck and one on his shoulder, the horrible look on his face. “You could shock them,” she continued, recovering. “The electricity would go through their body to get from one hand to the other.”

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Marlie hopped down off the crate and returned to Breanna’s side.

“See?” said Kess. “I told you it would be useful information. So for the next test—”

Everyone groaned.

“You did tell us that would be the last one, Kess,” said Danny. “Everyone’s getting hungry.”

“But this will be really cool. I want to see what happens if we hold hands in parallel or series. I bought a voltmeter!”

No one else was excited about her voltmeter. Kess finally relented and agreed to go eat, feeling the hollow hungry knot in her own stomach. And after all, this would be eating with friends, which would be different and better than normal eating. Somehow in the foodward-rush they ended up unevenly distributed between cars, with five in Samuel’s car and three—Danny, Lorraine, and Kess—in Danny’s.

“We really need to recruit someone with a van,” said Lorraine as they pulled out of the driveway.

“If you figure out a way to recruit people, let me know,” said Danny.

“It seems to spread like a disease, right?” said Kess. “You could probably just lick them. Or drink out of the same glass of water, that’s less gross.”

“I can’t believe we have to go back to school,” said Lorraine, charging forward with the conversation. “Really can’t believe it, I mean. Everything that’s happened feels more like genuine reality than school ever did. And what, are we going to hide our hands from the teachers? Are we going to sit in the same classes as Reds?”

“Maybe.” Danny glanced up at Kess’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “What were you going to say, Kess?”

“Oh. Just that… I had it first, and then it went to you and Lorraine, who are some of the only people in Greenlake I know, and then it went to Poor—, um, Samuel, who works with Danny, and then to Greg who lives by Samuel, and then to the girls…”

“That is what happened,” said Lorraine. Kess couldn’t see her eyebrows and so wasn’t sure how to take that statement. “We should make Kess club historian.”

“It moves between people who are around each other, that’s what I’m getting at. Which means it must spread in some understandable way, like a disease. If we understood how, we could do it on purpose.”

“We could cough on people,” said Danny.

“Or bite them,” said Lorraine.

“Exactly.” Kess nodded even though they couldn’t see her. “We just have to figure it out.”

“But where did you get it?” asked Danny. “You’re patient zero.”

“She was blessed,” said Lorraine, “by a pagan girl goddess of lightning. Who showed up out of nowhere and blew sparks in her face.” Lorraine looked around her seatback at Kess, and her eyebrows were arranged in a way that meant she was partly joking and partly putting words together for their own meaningless sake. “That was it, wasn’t it, hon?”

Kess hesitated. She’d been worried about sharing Elias’s findings with the Blues, but Lorraine and Danny seemed, well, smarter than the others, and more open to ideas.

“I don’t know where it came from, but I’m trying to find out. There’s this friend of mine, a kid from Lawrenceville. He’s trying to find out too. He found this company he thinks is involved somehow.”

“A kid from Lawrenceville?” asked Lorraine. “Is he a Blue? Is he turning into a Blue?”

“I don’t think so. He’s a normal, non-powered person. We mostly text.”

“You should bite him.”

“So what’s this company?” asked Danny. “What do they make?”

“That’s just it. We can’t tell.”

“That’s where the lightning goddess came from,” said Lorraine. “They manufacture false gods.”

“My friend did find an old newspaper article about the guy who founded the company. Vance Holifeld was his name, and way back in 1975 he’d inherited some money, so he started a business with it. But even back then he didn’t say what the company was actually supposed to do, just that it would ‘address many of the pressing concerns of the modern day.’ And the interesting part, the really interesting part—”

“You should pause for a second here,” said Lorraine. “To build suspense.”

“He was into magic. He traveled everywhere and collected objects that were supposed to be cursed or charmed or whatever. He was obsessed with hypnotism, too, and he even had this necklace charm he said would keep him from being hypnotized against his will.”

“You know, Kess,” said Danny, “you were very judgmental when I said it was magic.”

“I know. And I still think magic is silly. But I know Holifeld Company is connected to our powers, and when I read that article… It was freaky. He did spirit writing, which is when you hold a pen and go into a trance and the writing writes itself, supposedly. He wrote these long shaky treatises full of theories of magic and what he claimed were spells.”

“This Holifeld guy,” said Lorraine, “is the girl lightning god in disguise.”

Just then they reached the restaurant. The other car pulled in right behind them, and they all piled out to sit at one of the tables outside in the sun (Marlie and Breanna sat on the table). They ordered food to share and talked and laughed and Kess could get used to this, yes she could.

And then suddenly everything went quiet.

The Reds had just shown up. They had all come together in one truck, with most of them in the back.

They would thought Kess, scornfully.

That was a weird thought. They would what? Disobey seat belt laws? Kess didn’t care enough about seat belt laws to scorn people over them.

The Blue boys stood up from the table and turned to face the Reds as they jumped out of their truck. The Red boys—the redhead, that guy Rod, and two others—were at the front of the pack. There was a thin, singing tension in the air between the two groups, and it gave Kess goosebumps. “I think this is why gangs have territories,” she whispered to no one in particular. Though in this case…

She cycled through wavelengths until she could see the Reds’ halos. Ruby-red light streamed from their heads, their faces glowing at the center. They were broadcasting some sort of signal, and the Blues must be able to sense it while also sending out their own. The tension in the air wasn’t normal human rival-tension. It was more. It was… magic. And it was literally in the air.

“Danny!” said Rod, grinning. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

Danny frowned. “Did you follow us here?”

“You guys are paranoid.”

And what was Priya doing? She was standing beside and a little behind the redheaded boy and looking deeply, deeply annoyed. That was probably why she was hanging back and not saying anything—Priya didn’t like to speak if she was too irritated to speak convincingly.

“We were here first,” said Samuel.

“This is a public place,” said the redhead.

“Connor,” said Danny, “you don’t have to be like Rod. Seriously, did you follow us?”

“How could we have followed you?” asked the redhead, Connor, his voice rising with indignation. “We were hungry. Are we not allowed to eat?”

“Yeah,” said Rod, still smiling. Kess wasn’t good at seeing what was in other people’s eyes, but Rod’s eyes sparked with wild energy even she couldn’t miss. “Are we not allowed to eat, Danny? Huh? Huh? Huh, Danny? Huh?”

“Sure you can eat,” said Greg. “It doesn’t mean you can eat next to us.”

“You’re not the kings of us, Gregory.” Rod held his hands out to the side in an ambiguously aggressive gesture.

“Guys,” said Danny. “We don’t have to be stupid. You know you should leave, Rod. You know that’s best for everyone.”

“If you’re so noble,” said Connor, “why don’t you leave?”

“Because we were here first,” snapped Samuel.

“We won’t leave,” said Danny, raising his voice but not yelling, “because we’re not establishing that pattern. You guys can’t show up wherever we are, expecting us to leave. We don’t want any trouble, but we don’t want any trouble later, either.”

Rod stepped forward. Now he was very close to Danny, and though he wasn’t enough taller than the other boy to loom over him, there was definitely a looming quality to the way he stood. “Danny Boy, I think you’re being unreasonable.” He pronounced the word “unreasonable” as if it were made of sharp metal.

Kess felt something push at her. It felt almost like an actual, physical shove on her back but she knew it wasn’t. It was a push on her mind, telling her to step up next to Danny, to support him, so that if Rod even twitched she could reach out and grab him. Resisting the impulse made her dizzy.

But the others didn’t resist. They moved to stand around Danny, and it looked almost as if they were falling into formation. Kess could even sense how she should move to lock into place.

“Have you been practicing?” asked Connor, incredulous.

Lorraine lifted one hand, not all the way to full lightning-bolt stance, but noticeably. She waved her silver-tipped fingers as if to show how much energy was waiting behind them. More than the bristling boys, Lorraine had internalized the reality of their powers enough to know how Blues should intimidate people.

Kess raised her hand above her head.

It was Rod, of all people, who noticed her. He laughed a deep, wide laugh. “Oh lookit! Ya-Ya’s sister has an interjection.”

And then everyone was looking at her. Kess’s breath froze in her throat—she couldn’t even imagine speaking.

“Oh come on,” said Lorraine.

“Kess,” said Danny. “Say what you want to say. Really. Please.”

“Um… I think we should have territories.”

“Territories,” repeated Danny.

“Yes. Like when a Jet goes into the wrong malt shop, or whatever, and then everybody glares at him because it’s Shark territory. Territories. There should be some restaurants and stores and things that belong to the Blues—” (she indicated herself) “—and some that are the Reds’” (she waved at Rod and the others).

Rod laughed again. “Reds and Blues. Those are good names, Ya-Ya’s sister.”

“She’s right,” said Priya. She stepped up beside Connor and the other boys. “There should be some places we go and some they go, and we should set it up so we can avoid each other easily.”

Connor looked skeptical. “Didn’t we just say we weren’t going to let them tell us where to go?”

“They’re not going to tell us,” said Priya. “It’ll be negotiated.”

“It’s a good idea,” said Danny. He looked around at the crowd. “You all know it’s a good idea. You know if this keeps happening…” He sighed. “If this keeps happening someone will get hurt. This’ll help us live with each other.”

Everyone waited for Rod to say something, and the way he smiled he had to be deliberately dragging out the pause. “If we have territory,” he said, finally, “we can defend it. I like that.”

And so they negotiated.

Eventually, food came.