Nick slow-clapped. “So he does know the words.”

“There’s a reason we tried standing in a circle, sending prayers up to a ceiling fan first,” Arthur said. “I knew this wouldn’t be fun, but I also had a feeling it would work.”

“And it did.” My hands were still trembling and my voice came out thin and broken, but my body was abuzz.

Energy crackled along the life lines on my palms.

I looked past Arthur to the light over the kitchen sink.

It was different this time.

I knew what it was I was looking for in myself, as if I’d found a new muscle—a slew of them—that I hadn’t known before. They were—the closest word I could find—sore, distressed from exertion, but that made it easier to locate and engage them again.

I felt them spiraling down my center: at the crown of my head, in my throat, and under my sternum, all the way down to my crotch, and when I focused on them, it was like they could reach outside my body.

The more I focused, the farther I felt them extending. Though I saw nothing, I felt when they reached the bulb over the sink, and a second later, soft, golden light swelled to life from it.

“Holy—” Nick whispered, and the others turned to the sink, going silent, as if any noise would break my concentration, and it might have.

From the bulb, I pushed onward and felt the energy extending both left and right, branching out to travel through the underside of the cabinets on the wall.

The light fixtures set into them lit up one by one as I felt the energy reach them. When they were all lit, they pulsed faintly, light rising along with an audible buzz.

That’s me! I thought of the sound. I felt it inside my body, and I heard it with my ears, and I knew the two things were the same.

I was hearing myself, my energy, pass through something else. The others were silent, holding their breath.

I held my focus on each of the connections I’d formed and moved slowly around the corner, back toward the living room, seeing how far behind me the trails of energy could stretch.

The others stuck close to me, moving in a silent pack. Tentatively, I reached out for more: lit up the lamp on the floor beside the coffee table, the overhead lights, a box fan propped against the wall. I felt myself stretching thinner, starting to shake, but I could take it further.

I turned to the stairs for the second floor, and the not-quite muscles in me pulled tighter as the energy reached up.

If I’d had a marker, I could’ve traced the wiring hidden within the ceiling. I could feel the hidden veins of the house like they were an extension of me. The light over the carpeted steps eased on, and I started climbing, taking the buzzing energy all the way to the second-floor hallway.

The farther I spread myself, the more I felt the strain. I was shaking from it, like I was holding a metal bar over my head while someone added more weights. It was a new kind of pain I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe, like there was an invisible layer to the human body that usually lay sleeping around us, an inactive shell.

That didn’t make it any less real.

I sucked air through my teeth as the weight built, the light unfurling into the bedroom where the piano sat as we slowly edged into it.

I couldn’t hold it much longer. I needed to release my grip, little by little; dropping it all at once seemed as risky as if it had actually been a dumbbell.

I closed my eyes and pictured the kitchen below us, traced the outreached energy all the way to its farthest point until it was like I was holding that bulb over the kitchen sink in my hand.

I released my grip, and the feeling of the energy drawing back was a relief. I checked the other bulbs, loosened my hold on them, the pressure lifting, the hum lessening as the not-muscles retracted into me.

At the bottom of the stairs, the living room went dark, and then the stairs, and then the hallway where we stood, and the bedroom right in front of us, my eyes splotching as they adjusted.

“Oh my God,” Sofía whispered. “It’s real.”

Nick laughed uneasily. “My Gah, indeed.”

A shiver passed through me as I met Remy’s dark, worried gaze. It was real, and it was really inside me.

“Think about everything we can do with this,” Arthur whispered.

“Everything Franny can do with this,” Sofía said.

“We could make money off this,” Nick said.

Levi had his camera out, trained on me. “Not to mention, be famous.”

“It’s bigger than all that,” Arthur said. “We’re going down in history. People are going to remember our names. We’re doing something important.”

“We still need to keep this to ourselves until we understand more,” Remy said tensely, looking away from me.

I understood his anxiety, but I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to bask for a second, to pretend this was as exciting as the others seemed to think it was, without worrying about what the thing in me might do, or any of Bill’s warnings, or anything else.

“We’re going to have bank vaults we can dive into,” Nick said.

“We’re going to win awards,” Levi said.

“Only if we actually figure out what’s going on here,” Sofía said.

“This is like . . . like power,” Arthur went on. “Like purpose.” He lit up a cigarette in the house. “After everything that’s happened to us, it’s like . . . we’re finally getting something. We finally are something, that matters. An alien chose us, for something important.”