Page 35

“No.”

I turn on the sofa to face him more fully. “What did you do?”

Locke understands enough of the question to answer without making me explain it. He tells me they tried to find answers. Rachel searched first. Once everyone knew about him, others did too. They learned things about his body, the water he needs, how sunlight affects him, what happens when he is hurt. He learned to read. He learned what he could eat and that he did not need food.

All useful. None of it tells me why there is a Kell.

“So what have you been doing?” I hear the edge in my own voice after the words are out.

Locke does not answer immediately. He rests his forearms on his thighs and watches me. “Living.”

The word stops me. I had expected looking. Learning. Maybe trying. Something that meant he had spent all those months working toward the answer I invited him here to get.

Living is different. I study him. The clothes. The phone in his pocket. Rachel in Laura’s kitchen. All the things that exist around Locke now because he kept going without knowing why he was here.

“I learned to read. I found work I like. I make things and get paid for them. I have friends. I go places.” His voice stays calm. “Sometimes I spend an entire afternoon doing something that turns out to be a bad idea.”

That is not what I expected.

“You stopped finding out?”

“No. I stopped waiting for the answer before I did anything else.”

I do not like it. I thought Locke would be the answer.

He is not. Locke does not rush to fill the silence.

After a while, I ask, “Rachel made you?” Locke answers without hesitation. “No.”

The certainty of it makes me turn toward him fully. In the kitchen, Laura and Rachel are talking beside the coffee machine, their voices low enough that I cannot make out the words.

“Wish. Fire,” I say.

Locke nods. “Yes.”

I think about what I do know. Laura wished. There was fire. Then I was here. “Same?”

“Similar.”

I think about that. Laura wanted something enough to make a wish, and afterward I existed.

“Laura wished.”

“Yes.”

“She wanted something.”

“So did Rachel.”

Locke turns one hand palm-up on his knee. “Rachel’s wish told me something about what she needed. It didn’t tell me what I had to become.”

Laura wanted something enough to make a wish when no one else was there. Something she did not already have. Then I happened.

I know exactly what Laura wanted. What I had again.

I do not know what part of that is supposed to be me. The question I want to ask is about Laura instead of me. I do not ask it.

Rachel and Laura come back into the room with coffee for themselves and water for us. Rachel sits beside Locke. His hand rests palm-up on the cushion between them, and a moment later she puts hers over it. Neither of them looks down. They keep talking.