Chapter 7: The Telling

She told them everything.

She told them about the first night of the outbreak, and the city that fell in three days.

She told them about the dead, and about the people who woke up with powers a few weeks later.

She told them about the four years that followed.

She told them she had died in a lab, and that she had woken in her bedroom with the calendar on October 31st.

Nobody interrupted her once.

When she stopped, the living room was so quiet she could hear the old house tick as it cooled.

Jethro was the first to speak. "Okay. So that's a lot."

"Jethro," Rhys said.

"I'm just saying, if she'd told me she was an alien I'd have bought it faster."

"You think I'm lying," Jessa said.

"No." Rhys had not moved from his chair, and his voice was careful.

"I think you believe it. I think something happened to you, and I think you're scared."

"I'm scared of one thing, and it isn't my head."

She held up her left hand.

Blue light crackled over her fingers, thin and weak, and she saw all five of them lean back.

"That's the lightning," she said. "It was level nine once. Now it's three."

She turned her right palm up, and needles of ice grew over it and caught the light from the window.

"That's the ice."

Emmett stood up slowly. He walked over, touched one needle with a fingertip, and drew his hand back.

"It's cold," he said. "It's actually cold."

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