We’re taken to some kind of ritzy clubhouse. It’s in the middle of an impressive-looking housing community. A house here must cost millions. I didn’t even know a place like this existed in Brooklyn—it’s more like something you’d expect to see in Miami. Such a lavish compound sort of makes sense, though; Readers should be able to find a bunch of creative ways to make money given their abilities. Or, more accurately, our abilities. I need to get used to the idea that I’m a Reader, I remind myself, remembering the snafu with Caleb earlier.

Inside the clubhouse are an indoor pool, a large fancy restaurant, and a bar. Caleb takes us further in, into what looks like some kind of meeting room.

A dozen people of different ages are here, looking at us intently.

“That really is Eugene,” says a hot blond woman who looks to be a few years older than Mira. “I can vouch for that.”

“I knew that much,” Caleb says, but finally lowers his weapon. “And this guy?”

“Never seen him before,” she says, looking at me. I do my best to keep my eyes trained on her face, rather than her prominent cleavage. Being polite can be a chore sometimes.

“He learned about being a Reader yesterday,” Eugene explains. Then he gives the blond woman a warm smile. “Hi Julia.”

The woman smiles back at him, but her expression changes back to one of concern quickly. “Are you sure he’s a Reader?” she says, sizing me up.

“Positive,” Eugene says. “You know my family history with Pushers. It was the first thing I checked.”

“You have to forgive me, but I must verify for myself,” Julia says. “You can be too trusting, Eugene.”

So these two somehow know each other. This must be what Eugene was talking about when he said things are less strict in modern New York than they were in Russia during his father’s time. Despite being ‘exiled,’ Eugene and Mira are not completely cut off from other Readers.

“Bring in our bartender,” Julia says to a short young guy to her left. He leaves and comes back with a young, extremely pretty woman a few moments later.

“Stacy, I just wanted to tell you about my new guest,” Julia says, gesturing toward Eugene. “Put his drinks on my tab.”

“Sure thing, Jules,” the woman says. She probably expected something more meaningful, being summoned as she was. Stacy begins to walk away when I’m suddenly in the Quiet again, and the woman who knows Eugene—Julia—is standing next to me.

“Now, Darren, I want you to Read Stacy,” she says. “Tell me something about her that no one else can know, and I’ll know you’re not a Pusher.”

This reaffirms what I surmised earlier: Pushers can’t Read at all. Otherwise, this test—and the test Eugene did when we first met—wouldn’t make sense.

Without much ado, I walk up to Stacy and touch her temple.

We’re walking into the room with Julia. Oh shit, he’s here, we realize, looking at Caleb. Of all the times we’ve made a fool out of ourselves, the time we got drunk with Caleb is hardest to forget for some reason. Probably because he’s a real man, unlike the rest of the guys here. It’s mostly a bunch of rich mama’s boys in this community. Well, except for Sam and the other guards.

I, Darren, try distancing myself from Stacy, the way I did in the now-dead Sergey’s mind earlier. I latch on to her memory of something involving Caleb, and try to remember what happened. I also notice that the feeling of lightness coming over me is overwhelming this time. If I feel any lighter, I might actually start floating.

“Caleb, you can’t drink that as shots. It’s sacrilege,” we say, watching our favorite customer down a shot of uber-expensive Louis the XIII Cognac like it’s cheap vodka.

“How am I supposed to drink it?” he says, giving us a cocky smile. “Show me.”

“Are you buying?” we say. “I can’t afford a three-hundred-dollar shot.”

“Sure,” he says. “How much for the whole bottle?”

We grin at him. “You don’t want to know. My suggestion would be to switch to good vodka.”

“What’s good?”

“Try this,” we say, pouring a couple of shot glasses of Belvedere, the better of the two pricey vodkas they stock in this place.

We take a shot glass ourselves and cross arms with Caleb, planning to have our shot poured into his mouth, and hoping he does the reverse. “How about a toast?”

When we see the expression on his face, our heart sinks.

“I’m sorry, Stacy. I wasn’t trying to hit on you,” he says, gently pulling away.

Goddamn it. Not this again. What’s wrong with the men in this fucking community? We know most others are probably just rich snobs, but Caleb is their security. What is his deal? And Sam’s? It’s like a girl can never get laid around here.

I, Darren, distance myself again. I feel a little gross. After all, I’m in the head of a girl who’s clearly lusting after this guy. What’s worse, from Reading her, I completely understood what it’s like to want to take a guy home. I need to get out of Stacy’s head, fast.

“Okay,” I tell Julia when I’m out. “I think I have something to convince you. She wanted to sleep with him.” I point at Caleb. I stress the word ‘she’ too much, and Julia smiles at my discomfort.

“You men and your homophobia,” she says, walking over to Caleb.

In a moment, Caleb’s double appears, the animated version of him looking at Julia curiously.

“He says that Stacy was interested in you,” Julia tells him.

“That’s his proof?” Caleb says, grinning from ear to ear. “That sounds more like an educated guess to me.”

“Right, because every woman wants you?” Julia says sarcastically.

“You tell me.”

“Not if you were the last man on the planet,” Julia retorts sharply.

“Louis the XIII Cognac,” I say, tired of their back-and-forth. “Three hundred dollars for a shot; vodka shots; turning the girl down. Any of that ring a bell?”

Caleb’s face turns serious. “I do remember that now,” he says, frowning at me. “But it doesn’t make sense. It was months ago.”

He stares at me intently, like he’s seeing me for the first time. Julia is also staring. Then they exchange meaningful looks.

“Okay, Darren,” Julia says, looking back at me. “You have to be one of us.”

She walks toward herself and touches the frozen Julia’s cheek.

The world comes to life again.

Julia looks from me to Eugene, then back to me, waiting for Stacy to leave the room. When the bartender is finally outside, the short guy who went to get her closes the door.

“Darren’s one of us,” Julia says. “I can vouch for that. He’s not Pusher scum.”

Everyone seems to relax. There had been tension up to this point, but that tension is gone now. They really dislike Pushers over here. Given what Pushers did to Eugene’s family, and what I suspect they did to my own parents, I can’t really blame them.

“That still doesn’t explain what that half-blood degenerate is doing here,” Sam—Caleb’s annoying doppelganger—says. A few people nod their heads and murmur their agreement.

“Watch it, Sam. Eugene is my personal friend,” Julia says, staring the guy down. Sam sneers, but keeps quiet. When Julia turns away, however, the look he gives Eugene is even more hostile than before.

“My sister has been taken,” Eugene explains, ignoring Sam. “And I think Pushers are behind it.”

This last statement gets everyone’s attention, even the asshole Sam’s.

“Why would Pushers be after Mira?” Caleb says, his eyes narrowing. It sounds like he knows her.

“They’re not after her—they’re after me,” Eugene explains.

“Is this a continuation of that story you told me about your parents?” Julia asks.

Sam scoffs. “You mean that crazy conspiracy theory—”

“Shut it, Sam,” Caleb cuts him off. “Let’s get the facts without needless commentary.”

I can tell Sam is dying to talk back, but decides not to. I guess that means Caleb outranks him or something.

“Please start from the beginning,” Julia says to Eugene. “Tell everyone what you told me.”

Looks like I was right earlier. There’s definitely some kind of history between her and Eugene.

“I believe,” Eugene says, giving Sam a hard look, “that my parents were killed because Pushers were trying to kill my father and me.”

“Why would they want to do that?” Caleb asks.

“Because of my father’s research. He was working on some things they would’ve found unnatural,” Eugene says, and there’s anger in his voice. “He was trying to figure out how Reading and Splitting into the Mind Dimension work in the brain.”

The room grows tense again.

“That kind of research is forbidden,” Sam says harshly, frowning.

“It’s not forbidden,” Julia corrects him. Like Caleb, she seems to have some authority around here. “As long as the research is never published and is only discussed with peers who are Readers themselves.”

“My father was very discreet. Very few people knew what he was working on,” Eugene confirms. “I believe something about his research made Pushers think that Readers would gain a big advantage if he succeeded.”

“And would we?” an older woman asks. She’s been quiet up until now, but from the way everyone looks at her, I can tell she’s important.

“I’m not really sure,” Eugene says. “I don’t know the practical applications of what he was doing—but I imagine so. Any good science has real-world benefits.”

“Eugene is more interested in theory, Mom,” Julia tells the older woman. “He’s above politics.”

“So they’re trying to kill you because you inherited the same research your dad was doing?” I decide to butt in.

Everyone looks at me with surprise. They probably assume I already know what’s going on since I came with Eugene.

“Exactly,” Eugene says. “When I used that first test on you to see if you were a Reader, I did it using the method Dad developed back in Russia. The fact that they tried to kill me today is extra evidence he was killed over his work. They missed killing me that day. I was shopping for groceries.” He stops and takes a deep breath. “For those of you who don’t know, my parents were murdered when their car exploded right in front of our house. My sister was coming back from school—she saw the whole thing.”

Julia walks over to him and puts her hand on his shoulder. Her mother frowns, and Sam looks furious. I wonder if he has the hots for Julia, or just hates Eugene because he’s a ‘half-blood.’

“Was there any proof of his words in the minds of those men you killed outside?” Julia’s mother asks.

“Kind of,” says Caleb. “Sam and I checked them thoroughly. There were signs of Pusher activity in the mind of the driver. He drove their boss someplace, and the Pusher made him forget what he heard when the boss spoke to the Pusher on the phone. We couldn’t get a visual on the Pusher, of course.”

“The fact that there’s a Pusher involved is good enough reason to help them as far as I’m concerned,” Julia says.

“Right. The fact that his sister slutted around the Russian mob has nothing to do with her capture,” Sam says, sneering again. I really don’t like this guy. If he wasn’t so big and scary-looking, I’d strongly consider punching him in the face.

“Mira was trying to find the people who killed our mother and father,” Eugene says defensively. “I told her not to, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Mira isn’t someone who’d be easy to control,” Caleb says, chuckling. Is that admiration I see on his face?

“Well, if you ask me, the simpler explanation for the kidnapping would be his sister’s gambling debt,” Sam says. “As to the original explosion, it’s more likely that his father’s ‘friends’ from Mother Russia had something to do with it. Isn’t that more plausible than some crazy theory about Pushers?”

“I think the Pusher used the Russian mob for that very reason—so that the police would think the explosion had something to do with what my dad did in Russia,” Eugene says, his face turning red with anger. “Only that’s bullshit; Dad was the most honest and peaceful man I’ve ever met.”

“Okay,” Julia says. “We can debate this until the cows come home, and it won’t solve anything. The only way to figure out what’s really going on is to rescue Mira—which is what I think we should do.”

“Julia, you need to consult your father on this,” Julia’s mom says, and Julia frowns at her.

“She’s right,” Sam says. “Jacob would never want to get involved in these exiles’ business.”

“Well, let’s find out, why don’t we?” Julia suggests, and walks over to a desk to get a laptop.