“Try again. One more time, Amana.” Nessa Raeborn lowered her hand to the girl’s wrist and tested her pulse.

              But Amana shook her head. The hospital bed beneath her rattled a little as she squirmed. “I can’t! I can’t!” she insisted yet again.

              “You can, Amana.” Nessa released the girl’s wrist and looked her steadily in the eyes. “Remember that day in the clinic when you were with me and your sister? You suddenly got a bad feeling, remember? You became very upset about Arius. Do you remember?”

              Amana’s eyes grew wide and sober. She nodded.

              “Why were you upset about Arius, do you remember?” Nessa questioned.

              For a long moment, Amana was silent, large eyes trailing up at the ceiling contemplatively. She shook her head. “I don’t remember,” she squeaked.

              Nessa sat down on the edge of Amana’s bed and took the girl’s hand in hers. “Amana, we think you might have felt that way because something bad happened to Arius that day. See, Arius and Gabriel ran away from the clinic, and now Arius isn’t safe because he doesn’t have his medication. We’re afraid he might get sick.”

              Amana’s eyes grew still larger, and her lower lip began trembling.

              “Arius and Gabriel are still missing, Amana. We need you to tap into that feeling that told you something bad was happening to Arius and help us figure out where he is so we can help him.”

              “But I can’t,” Amana explained, her voice shaking with threatening sobs. She spread out her hands uselessly. “I’m not magical.”

              Nessa smiled faintly. “You are, kind of.” An absent look came over her eyes, and for a moment, the doctor almost seemed to forget where she was as she stared at the girl in front of her.

              Amana slowly shook her head. “I’m not a fairy,” she whispered. “I used to think I was, but then I grew too big to be a fairy. And Mommy says I’m allergic to pollen.” Then, in case Nessa might not know, “That’s the dust flowers make. So I can’t be a fairy.”

              “You don’t have to be a fairy,” Nessa replied. “You just have to be yourself. You have a very special bond with Arius that you two formed at a very young age, Amana. A very strong, powerful bond. You can use it to help us find him, you just have to tap into it.”

              Amana shook her head again. “I can’t. I can’t.”

              “Do you believe me, Amana? About the bond?”

              “Yes,” Amana told her seriously. “Mommy says it, too.”

              Nessa hesitated. “Dr. Aeirsah told you about the bond?”

              “Mommy says Ari and me are very special, and that family always loves each other no matter what.”

              “I see.”

              The door to the small room opened, and Dr. Peter Welles leaned in. “Nessa. A word, please?”

              She stood up from Amana’s bedside and walked over to the door. Nessa gave her patient a faint smile before exiting the room. Outside in the hallway, standing in front of the one-way glass to watch the girl in the room, Nessa let out a heavy sigh. “I’m not getting anywhere with her, Dr. Welles. And—are we sure we want to do this? Aren’t we asking her to unravel a lifetime’s worth of medication and trials if we ask her to access her bond? I—I don’t know how much to tell her, Dr. Welles. We’ve taken painstaking efforts to protect her from the truth for nineteen years, and now suddenly we’re just telling her everything?”

              “It’s a matter of priorities, Nessa,” Dr. Welles replied. Arms crossed casually over his chest and a clipboard grasped in one hand, he smiled confidently at the glass. “Psychics with crazy ideas are not dangerous to this world. Unhinged essentials are.”

              “We won’t find him in time like this.” Nessa shook her head. “Amana doesn’t know how to access her bond. She doesn’t even know what her feelings mean. She hardly remembers her mood swings after they happen, and she responds to premonitions like a toddler would—she throws a tantrum. A bad feeling crawls over her mind, and rather than interpreting it, she pitches a fit until it goes away!”

              “Believe it or not, that would count as success in our books,” Dr. Welles commented mildly.

              “She could have been normal. We did this to her for the purpose of protecting her from the truth, and now we’re undoing all that.”

              “No, no.” Dr. Welles shook his head, smiling at Nessa like she was a mere child he was teaching. “She could never have been normal. From the day she met Arius, she was cursed with a paranormal bond with the power to mentally, emotionally, and physically devastate her. The life we gave her is as normal as she ever could have had. We freed her from what would have tortured and killed her.”

              “And now—now, we want her to get back in touch with this bond? It won’t even work. She can’t find it in herself, and she doesn’t understand it. She’s nineteen. She should have been growing with it her whole life, how can she suddenly come to understand it to the point that she can use it?”

              “It’s alright, Nessa. She doesn’t need to.” Dr. Welles was still smiling. “If you had let me talk a little sooner, I would have told you there is no need to try anything further with Amana. We have located her essential.”

              Nessa looked up quickly. “You found Arius and Gabriel?”

              Dr. Welles nodded. “They boarded a bus for Cincinnati at 6 A.M. this morning. We’ll intercept them when the bus arrives and keep the incident to a minimum.”