Carter looked at Lola, his eyes narrowing before shifting to meet my gaze. I maintained contact for five seconds before glancing down at my hands.

I picked the crust off the grilled cheese I'd barely touched, shredding the greasy bread into a pile of crumbs on my plate. Ever since I started talking about what was going on, just looking at food made me feel like I was going to be sick.

He'd been stone-faced since I'd told him the truth—that Lola and I could read minds. I hadn't even told him about what happened last night at the factory, but already, I wished I could retreat into a hole and hide.

I watched him out of the corners of my eyes. He frowned, a vein standing out on his neck as he clenched his jaw. I'd never seen him so tense—so unreadable. It was like he couldn't make sense of his own emotions.

Was it fear? Did he think Lola and I were freaks? Monsters?

Was it betrayal at the fact that I'd kept this secret from him for so long?

What if he hated me? Would he even want to be friends with me anymore? If he didn't, could I blame him? How could anyone feel comfortable around someone...like me?

"Just one more time," he said.

I chewed on my nails until they hurt as he continued the test he'd been conducting for the past three minutes.

"Seriously?" Lola ground out between her teeth. "Have we not proved it to you yet?"

I winced at the harshness in her tone. I would have been softer with him if she wasn't here, but I guess if she wasn't, I never would have told him at all. The fact that I still couldn't catch the emotions swirling around in his head made me feel like I was going to be sick. All I could hear were the single word thoughts he forced into his mind. He was so focused on them, they blocked out everything else.

"Last one," Carter said. "I swear." He closed his eyes, placing his fingers on his temples as he thought.

"Lingonberry," Lola said. "Now, can we please focus!"

For the first time since I'd told him the truth, a grin spread across Carter's face.

"Okay, that's wild!" he exclaimed. He drummed his hands on the galactic-black granite countertop. "I can't believe you got it every time!"

I pushed my hair out of my eyes, turning my gaze up to look at him. Was he actually...excited about this? He thought it was neat?

"You two could be superheroes or something, you know?" he said. "This is seriously the coolest thing ever."

Even though my stomach was still tying knots inside of me, a smile tugged at the corners of my lips. I hadn't realized how tense keeping this secret from him was making me. Despite everything else on my mind, having it out in the open was...a relief.

"So, how did you figure out you both could do this if neither of you can hear each other's thoughts?" Carter asked.

"That's what we were trying to get to before we ended up in this tailspin of guess what fruit I'm thinking of," Lola said.

"Carter, what's the last thing you remember from last night?" I cut in before he could come up with another obscure berry to make us guess. Even though I was dreading telling him, it would be better to just get it over with. Rip the bandage off.

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the counter as he pressed his chin to his hands. He took his thick-rimmed glasses off, staring at the smudges on the lenses as he thought aloud. "I don't know. I remember getting to the party. You made me that rum and cola that tasted like rubbing alcohol." He chuckled as he looked at me, putting his glasses back on. "Anyway, when you went over to hit on Lola, I started talking to a couple of girls from class. They wanted me to play some drinking game with them. It was actually really fun. Don't remember any of the rules, though." He paused, tapping his chin. "I'm not sure, I guess things got a bit hazy after that."

"You don't remember puking in front of the green house or us walking you home?" I asked.

"I sort of remember sitting in the grass outside. I remember you talking to me, but I don't know what you said. Then, you ran off."

"What about after that?" I asked.

"Just waking up in my room and feeling like my mouth was the Sahara Desert."

I pushed both hands back through my hair, breathing out heavily through my nose. "Okay, this is going to be a long story, so get comfortable."

I told him everything, starting from when I went out to check on him while he was puking. I told him about the woman I'd heard screaming, the red light glowing in the factory window, and how I'd gone to check it out.

I told him about finding the group of cloaked figures in the basement, chanting and marching around a burning pit of fire like they were participating in some bizarre ritual. I barely paused to breathe as I described how Lola found me and we ran out as they chased us. I finally caught my breath when I reached the part where we found Carter outside the green house.

"Then, I took you home and put you to bed," I finished, looking down at the counter. I'd shredded a paper towel to bits on my plate without even realizing I'd been doing it. I clenched my hands into fists as I met Carter's gaze.

His brown eyes stretched wide and his mouth hung ajar. "Are you fucking with me?" he finally asked.

"Do I look like I'm fucking with you?" My jaw clenched as the muscles in my neck tightened.

Carter shook his head. Holy shit. How do I not remember any of this? What the fuck? Jay doesn't look like he's lying, and that would be a crazy story to make up. No wonder he's been acting strange all morning.

Lola's stool screeched against the tile floor as she stood, cutting off his train of thoughts. She took the plates from in front of Carter and herself and dumped them in the sink. "Are you finished playing with your food, Jay?" she asked, her hazel eyes meeting mine as she reached toward my plate.

I nodded. "Yeah." I pushed it away. "I'm sorry. I can't eat right now."

She took it and scraped it over the garbage before tossing it into the sink along with the others. "You forgot something in your story." She pulled on the pair of red-cherry-patterned gloves hanging over the sink and began washing the dishes.

"What?" I asked.

"You told Carter about the girl we heard, but you didn't say anything about the man."

My stomach flipped over. Lola and I hadn't talked about that at all last night. Part of me had been hoping it was just me that heard him, that Lola had somehow been spared. Or, even better, that I'd just been imagining it.

It was what freaked me out the most as I'd laid in bed alone last night—what kept me up and made me fear each bang of branches against the window was a monster coming to pull me beyond some veil and into darkness.

"You heard him too," I whispered.

She turned the faucet off, her hands shaking as she removed the rubber gloves and placed them back over the rim of the sink. Finally she faced me and nodded, chewing on her bottom lip.

"What man?" Carter voiced the thought that had been tumbling around in his head for the past minute and a half. He tapped his fingers uneasily on the counter.

"Right as we were running out of that basement, I think we heard the thoughts of whoever was leading the cult," I explained. Or whoever had brainwashed them.

"What did he say?" Carter asked.

"He said he could use us," Lola replied.

"Use you...for what?"

Lola and I exchanged a glance as she leaned against the island countertop across from me. Her tan face had blanched pale as a ghost. The confidence and cockiness she'd had when she first arrived fizzled away. I imagined I looked the same. My hands iced up—cold and numb—like all the blood had drained from them straight to my core.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Lola said, turning her gaze away and looking back at the sink. It gurgled once, sucking the last of the water down the drain. "Jay, you were there before I was. Did you hear anything else?"

I shook my head. "Just the woman screaming." One more voice played back in my mind, a shiver running down my spine as I thought about it. "I did hear one more thing. Right before you got there, I heard that man thinking that someone like me might have been what he was missing."

"Missing..." Carter's voice trailed off as he thought. "Like missing for the ritual?"

"That's what I was thinking," I said.

"Me too." Lola met my eyes again. "I guess the question now is, what is the ritual for?"

"And who is the woman we heard screaming?" My mind kept going over the thoughts I'd heard. She was in pain. Constantly. Every minute we sat here, she was suffering. "We need to go back there and find her. We need to get her out."

"I've been thinking about it," Lola said. "And I'm wondering... What if she's a ghost?"

Chills ran up my spine. My grip tightened on the black granite counter in front of me. "What?"

"Think about it, Jay." Lola rested her elbows on the counter and leaned in towards Carter and me. "We were both in the basement of that factory, and neither of us saw her. Not to mention we both heard her clearly even before we went inside. Have you ever heard the thoughts of someone when you were that far away from them?"

I let out a breath through my nose and pushed a hand back through my hair, my fingers catching on the tangled strands. She was right. When I wasn't near someone, I couldn't pick up on their thoughts. I had a whole page in my stupid notebook dedicated to that fact. It was all proximity based. Something about that scream was different.

"You think the place is haunted?" I asked.

"With everything that happened there, I'd be surprised if it wasn't," Carter cut in.

My mind went back to what he mentioned about the accident at the factory on our walk to the party last night. I dismissed it at the time, but now, it felt like it was all related.

"What happened there?" I asked. I looked to Carter. "You said there was some sort of accident at that factory, right?"

Now, it was Carter and Lola's turn to exchange uneasy glances.

I really don't want to be the one that has to tell this story, Carter thought.

"When did it shut down?" I asked. "What was the accident? What happened?" I looked to Lola. If Carter didn't want to talk about it, I didn't want to make him, but someone had to fill me in. "Lola, what happened at that factory?"

"It was a fire," Carter finally said when Lola didn't respond. He grabbed an apple from the basket of fruit in the center of the counter and spun it around in front of him like a top. "My grandfather died in it, not that I ever knew him. It was before I was even born, but a lot of people from here lost someone in it."

I swallowed a lump in my throat as I thought about the fire burning in the center of the basement last night. I could feel his discomfort talking about it through his thoughts.

"It happened in the middle of the night," Lola continued when Carter didn't. "There were about a dozen or so workers there when it happened." A long pause. "All of them died."

"Why were they there in the middle of the night?" I asked, chills rippling across my skin. Something about it didn't seem right. The way Lola and Carter were acting...they knew more. "Late deadlines?" I asked. "What did the factory make?"

"It was just a metal mill." Lola shrugged. "Steel rods, bars, plates, you know?"

"They don't shut the furnaces down," Carter explained. "They man them in shifts, so there's always someone working there, even at night."

I nodded. "Okay, so then what's so strange about the fire being at night?" I asked. "Did one of the furnaces just get out of control?" But even as I said it, I knew there was more to it. The vision of the fire at the center of the basement last night burned into my mind.

"There are a lot of rumors about it," Carter said. "My grandparents lived in one of those old houses right outside the factory. Most of the workers did. My grandma used to talk about how she remembered my grandfather acting strange when he got back from the night shift the few weeks leading up to the accident—the fire."

My blood ran cold, the tiny hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. Carter stared at his hands, refusing to make eye contact as his thoughts clouded into a pool of anxiety.

"Anyway," he finally continued. "The fire started in the basement. They say something caught from one of the furnaces, and it took off—too quick and too hot for anyone to stop it."

Sweat prickled on my back as I thought about the fire I'd seen in the hearth last night, and the...ritual...going on around it.

"No one that was there lived through it," Carter said. "The owner of the factory, George Renson, was there when it happened. He didn't leave it to anyone in his will, and no one cared to buy it with the state it was in after the fire, so it went abandoned and condemned after that and never reopened."

"They say now," Lola picked up when Carter stalled out, "if you spend the night in one of those houses on Ninth Street, you'll hear the toll of the factory bell, calling the workers to a late night shift, even though there's no one there to ring it."

A tense stillness fell over the room, the drip, drip, drip of the faucet the only sound. Even Carter's thoughts had gone silent.

"So, do you think that woman you heard screaming is the ghost of a worker from the fire?" Carter finally asked.

"She said she was in pain constantly," Lola said. "It would make sense if she perished in a fire—"

"And she's still burning." I clutched myself at the elbows, imagining the agony of a fire like that, and the idea of feeling that pain with no end in sight. She was existing in a purgatory—some sort of harrowing space between Earth and Hell.

"We don't know anything for sure," I said. "We don't know she's a ghost. We don't understand any of the details about how this mind reading thing works, so for all we know, she might just be someone locked up there."

Lola bit on her bottom lip and nodded. "You're right," she said. "We don't know anything for sure."

"We need to talk to Christine," Carter suddenly cut in.

"Who?" I asked.

"Yes!" Lola exclaimed. "I knew there was a reason we told you about this, Carter."

"Who's Christine?" I asked.

"She's the librarian at the Sycamore Falls town library," Carter replied.

"More importantly," Lola continued, "she's the only one of them that still lives in town."

I narrowed my eyes. "Who do you mean by them?"

"Rumor is," Carter began, "about a decade ago, a group of teenagers tried to stay the night in the green house, drinking and partying, waiting to see if they would hear the factory bell."

"And what happened?" I asked.

"No one knows," Carter said. "None of them would say a word about it, but everyone knew something happened. After that night, they changed. They got all quiet and jumpy whenever anyone asked about it. They barely talked to each other anymore, and they'd been best friends."

"You forgot about the burns," Lola said.

"What burns?"

"The next day at school," Carter picked up, "all of them had second degree burns on their arms—from their hands all the way up to their elbows."

"Christine always wears long sleeves," Lola said, " like she doesn't want anyone to see the scars."

My thoughts immediately went to the fire we'd seen in the basement last night. My stomach flipped like I was plummeting down the drop on a roller coaster, and I felt like I was going to throw up the few bites of food I'd managed at breakfast.

"We need to talk to Christine," I finally said. "We need to find out what happened that night."