Out Of Time (Book 0): Super Unknown by Donna Marie Oldfield Page B

that.”
    “And
so do you,” Neelam added.
    “Neelam!”
Dylan sighed. “Cor, why do you two have to go right ahead and scare Scarlett by
telling her everything straight away?”
    “Don’t
you remember?” Lucy asked, ignoring him.
    “Girls!”
Dylan was very cross with them.
    Scarlett
didn’t quite know how to respond to that. Sure, Neelam had talked in her head,
but there had to be a rational explanation, surely? They were having a laugh,
right?
    She
giggled.
    “Scarlett
it’s true,” Jay insisted.
    She
looked earnestly at Dylan, who seemed to be the group’s leader.
    “Are
they winding me up?” she asked him.
    “Nope.
Sadly not,” he replied. “Jay here can run faster than a high-speed train,
Neelam is telepathic, Lucy can do some very impressive things with electricity
and I manipulate water, which means I can freeze things…”
    Scarlett
stared at Dylan as though she didn’t believe a single word he was saying.
    “Watch,”
he said. He placed his finger on Scarlett’s mug and instantly froze the hot
chocolate inside.
    “Hey!”
she protested.
    He
smiled playfully and touched the mug again, this time heating it back up until
it bubbled. “I can make them hot too.” He smiled and pushed the cup towards
her, but Scarlett jumped back and screeched her chair away from the table.
    “Don’t
be scared,” Neelam urged.
    “That’s
how I saved you earlier,” Dylan explained. “I used the water in the air to
freeze the Detectobot and that caused it to explode. That’s a trick I’ve
learned recently.”
    Scarlett
smiled at him. “You can really do all this?”
    Dylan
nodded.
    Scarlett
looked around the group and hutched her chair towards them a little to show she
was warming to them.
    “You
guys have got to understand that you’re freaking me out a bit. You say we’re
friends right?”
    They
nodded.
    “And
yet I’ve never met you. You tell me you have super powers and you thought I was
dead? You did say that, didn’t you?”
    “Yes,”
Neelam agreed. “We thought you’d been killed in a collapsed building four weeks
ago.”
    Four
weeks? That was how long the nurse said she’d been unconscious for. That was a
weird coincidence, if indeed it was a coincidence at all.
    “We’re
so shocked to see you, but over the moon to have found you alive,” Neelam
added.
    “I’m
sorry, but I really do think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” Scarlett
protested for what felt like the millionth time.
    “We
haven’t, we know you,” Jay insisted.
    “But
I don’t know you . And I definitely don’t have any fancy powers.”
    They
all started trying to convince her at once, chattering over each other. It was
suffocating.
    “I
need the loo,” Scarlett said, making an excuse to leave the madness of the
table. She needed time to take this all in. As she stood up, her eyes were drawn
to a huge poster that was peeling off the tiles on the café wall.
    “Wanted!”
shouted its headline. And there below it was a picture of the four teens she
was sitting with. They were criminals.
    She
pushed her chair aside, knocking the table in the rush, and ran out of the
café.
    “Scarlett,
no!” she heard Jay shout.
    “Let
her go,” Lucy said.
    She
paused around the corner and considered going back. They seemed OK. Nuts, but
OK. And Dylan was certainly more than OK. But then, you never could tell these
days, could you? She started walking again.
    “Scarlett
wait,” said a voice in her head.
    “What
was that?”
    “Sshhh,
it’s OK. It’s me, Neelam. I promise I won’t hurt you or poke around in your
mind. Please just wait while I catch up with you, I want to help.”
    Scarlett
stopped walking, hopefully of her own free will and Neelam soon appeared.
    “I
can sense you’re afraid at the moment, so it would be wrong of us to make you
stay,” Neelam said aloud. “I don’t know what’s happened, but I believe you when
you say you don’t remember us.”
    “Well,
you can read minds.”
    She
laughed.