“But that doesn’t tell me anything!” I said, more frustrated than ever. Everyone was acting like Angel had given all the answers, but all I had were more questions. “How do you know it was the Remedy? And what about the bombs, and the Horsemen?” I was shaking her now. “How do you know what you saw is even real?”

“Because I know!” Angel shouted, wrenching free of my grasp. “Because I saw it, just like I saw Fang’s death—before it happened!” She looked up at me with watery blue eyes, and in that moment, I finally saw Angel for what she really was.

Not just a psychic or a mind reader. A prophet.

She was also a seven-year-old who’d been carrying around the most terrible secret in the world, all by herself. I noticed the ragged cuts around her fingernails where she’d torn the skin away, the dark circles around her eyes, and realized how much I had failed her.

“Oh, honey,” I said. When I put my hands lightly on the outsides of her arms, she tensed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because,” she said, her small bow lips quivering, “you never wanted to listen.”

“Of course I—” An image of Fang’s face flashed in my mind, and I winced.

Fair enough.

“I’m listening now,” I said gently.

We walked to the edge of the clearing, away from the rest of the kids, and Angel sat back down on the stump and pulled her knees up to her chest.

“The visions started after they altered my eyes at the school.”

My chest tightened, remembering that awful time after Paris. We’d all believed Angel was dead for weeks before finding her in one of Jeb’s corrupt labs.

“At first I thought I was blind, like Iggy. But then I realized I could actually see more—stuff that hadn’t happened yet. I kept seeing these flashes, and it was so scary, Max,” she said, resting her chin on her knees to look up at me. “I could never see the whole picture, and I didn’t know if it would be this year or in five years or a hundred years.”

“Did anyone else know about all this? The meteor and bombs and apocalypse?” I asked, still trying to figure out where the Remedy fit into all this.

“The scientists did, and the world leaders,” Angel said. “I didn’t find that out until the day it hit, when I heard Dr. Martinez’s thoughts.”

“But my mom was worried about the H8E virus,” I said. I remembered her telling Fang and me about the plague the Apocalypticas had developed, how we should all be safe from it, on the island. “She didn’t mention the meteor.”