“I’m sorry about your brother,” he says.

I can’t speak. It’s my fault. I killed him. I did it.

Kitty begins to sob in earnest, her cries echoing off the bathroom walls more than making up for Jamie’s and my silence. Jamie leans his head back on the tub and tilts towards me. I lean and rest my head against his and Kitty strokes my hair. She begins to talk as she weeps, about how terrified Aiden was when he found her at the house in Joss Hill, how she warned him about what happened to me and how he begged her to go home, how she wore him down and the slow thaw over the next two days they had alone together. How careful he was to always keep his distance and how she wished he wouldn’t. How she noticed when he could finally meet her eye directly. How brave and funny and polite he was and how amazing it felt the first time she made him laugh. How he tried to shield her with his body in the attic when Benjamin started firing his gun, how he whispered her name over and over as he carried her to the stairs. How she wishes it could have been different. Then she gets too choked up to speak and eventually loses momentum. We sit in silence for a while then she asks, “Will there be a funeral?”

“No. Ethan and I had a sort of service at the compound. It was weird but nice. Davis came.”

“Bloody hell,” Jamie mutters.

I give a soft snort and nudge him with my head.

Kitty nods through her tears, her nose pink, her lips swollen. “Any news about Miriam?”

“No change.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know. Ethan’s not giving up. We’ll keep trying to reach her.”

“Oh, Evs.”

I close my eyes and whisper, “I don’t want to be alone.”

Kitty kisses the top of my head. “We’ll stay.”

TRUTH

I stand with Jamie at the side of my bed, Buffy purring and twining around our legs. He unloops the toggles of my coat, taking his time. I look at his face like looking at water and I’m parched, drinking in the strong lines, the angle of his jaw. “Your hair’s grown.”

He smiles softly, his grey eyes travelling up and over me. “So has yours.”

I wrinkle my nose. “I look like a boy.”

Slowly, drawing his lower lip beneath his teeth, he slips his wide warm hands inside my coat and reminds me of my curves. “I don’t think so.”

I close my eyes and lose time.

He brings his mouth to my ear. “Definitely … not … a boy.”

“Jamie, this is against the rules. It’ll show up on our readings.”

“I’m on a break from rules.”

“You’re on a break?”

“Well, they don’t have a Proxy to torture us any more.”

I can’t joke. Just thinking about her makes me shiver. “There’s plenty of other ways to torture someone.”

“That wasn’t quite the tone I was going for.” He does something with his feather-light touch that makes me catch my breath.

“Are you going to kiss me soon? Because if you don’t I might have an episode.”

His grin makes me want things.

“I’m afraid if I start I won’t ever stop and that might be awkward when my sister comes back with the food.”

“How long do you think she’ll be?”

He groans against my neck. “Not long enough.” He makes a slow and luxurious sweep up my body and slides the coat off my shoulders.

The memory blast is instant and horrible. Jamie’s hands on a blue blouse, the spill of sandy hair over delicate shoulders.

We both freeze.

That’s how I know I’ve Transferred it.

“I’m sorry.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter.”

“Was that me?”

“No.” I shudder. “I don’t know? It doesn’t matter.”

He leans back so he can look at me. “Was that Helena?”

“I think – I think that’s what the Proxy said.”

He frowns and closes his eyes.

I feel like crap. Like I’ve contaminated a perfect moment. “I’m sorry. She – she was trying to upset me, trying to manipulate me. She showed me things to be cruel.”

“Did she Transfer the pain?”

“What?”

“She put that image in your mind? Did she Transfer the pain with it?”

“I don’t understand.”

He draws his lips back from his teeth before pressing them together. “Deactivation is agonising. Physical touch with your Cooler produces blinding headaches and muscle pain. It’s like forcing the wrong ends of two magnets together. Everything fights against it. You have to inject yourselves with a drug to even be able to touch and then it’s this sickly, weird, dislocated state …” He makes a frustrated grimace. “What she showed you was a lie. It was nothing like this. Nothing like being with you, or touching you.”

“You don’t have to explain,” I hurry to assure him. “You had a girlfriend. It is totally none of my business what you did.”

Something flashes behind his eyes. “Don’t say that.”

“What?”

“It would matter to me.” He blinks hurriedly. “I mean if it were the other way round and I was forced to see you with someone. It would matter to me. Majorly.”

I squint at him. “So you’re jealous of my non-existent ex-boyfriend I didn’t have sex with?”

He leans his forehead to mine. “Blindingly. The whole Hulk monster, burn-the-world-down kind of jealous.”

“I see. Well … I am extremely confused and I’m fairly sure there’s some kind of violation of important feminist principles here but I have to tell you that I hate Helena. I get that it’s Synergist jealousy and all but I’m talking physical harm, hate her. And seeing that … even though I had no right to feel anything, and hearing the Proxy repeat her words …”

“What words?”

I don’t want to look at him. “The words of the sanction.”

“What?” He lifts my chin.

I sigh and cringe. “The Proxy told me what Helena was saying. She repeated the words of the sanction and sort of did my freaking head in.”

He widens his eyes. “We never said those words. I never said those words.”

“I saw her lips moving on-screen, the Proxy spoke in time, it matched.”

He shakes his head, his grip tightening on my waist. “We never said the words. I’m deeply sorry that you saw me with her but I promise you we never said those words.”

I remember the Proxy smiling afterwards. It’s hard to know what to believe. “She made it up.”

He looks pained. “Well, that part.”

“Why would she do that? Just to mess with my head?”

“I’m sorry.” He strokes my cheek and we stand there for a while, feeling the resonant hum of our signals, the tingling sweetness of shared electricity.

“You know, on the psych ward … we had to do this thing where we identify the lies we believe and replace them with the truth.”

He pulls back with a smirk. “Lessons from the loony bin?”

I narrow my eyes in warning. “I’m not very good at it, but say, as an exercise, we took the image of you touching Helena, and especially her words–”

“Which we have now established were fake.”

“Yes, fake, but it still made me believe you wanted her in the same way that you want me. Or worse, that you wanted her more, which technically is fine and none of my business because the past is the past, but–”

“It’s a lie.” He cups my face, his gaze intent.

“Then what’s the truth?”

He brings me close and presses his lips to mine, a kiss that softens and blurs and warms and unfolds. The taste of him is like a promise in my mouth, on my tongue. Slowly he draws the truth with his scent and heat, brings it rushing to the surface of my skin. In my head I hear the words of the sanction and I know what I believe.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to my Heavenly Papa who is lavish with dreams and a giver of good gifts.

To Angela Van Den Belt and Sue Whiting and the passionate Spark-enthusiasts at Walker Books Australia, my heartfelt thanks for your ongoing support and encouragement in bringing this series to life. Thank you to my editor, Nicola Robinson, for being a devoted caretaker of this work, you know these characters and this story inside out and love it as much as I do; working with you is a gift. Thank you to editors Mary Verney and Nicola Santilli for loving Stray and helping me make it all shiny. Thank you to my publicist Claire Smith for promoting all things Spark and for being a reassuring presence when I’m pretending to be fancy at bookish events. Thank you to the ridiculously good-looking marketing team who put so much effort into getting my books into the best possible places.