Siphoning gas, I realized. I’d heard about people doing this during the last gas shortage, but I’d never actually seen it done before. The liquid began to fill the can in a smooth pour, filling the space between us with a sharp odor.

“Gas crisis,” he said with an unapologetic shrug. “Times are a little desperate, and we were running on fumes for a while yesterday.”

“You’re Blue, right?” I said, nodding toward the hand guiding the gas into our red can. “Could you just move Betty along without it?”

“Yeah, but…not for long.” Liam sounded shy. When he pressed his lips together, they turned an unnatural shade of white and highlighted a small scar at the right corner.

When I realized I was staring, I squatted down beside him—more to hide my embarrassment than actually help. Stealing gas was, surprisingly, not all that complicated.

“I guess I’m just impressed you can use your abilities at all.”

A part of me wondered, then, if I hadn’t had it backward this entire time. The way things were at Thurmond…the camp controllers were so vigilant about making sure that we were terrified of getting caught using our abilities, and we were made to understand from the beginning that what we were, and what we could do, was dangerous and unnatural. Mistakes and accidents were not excuses, and punishment was not avoidable. There was to be no curious testing, no stabbing at limits to see if there was a way to push through them.

If Liam was so accomplished with his abilities, it probably meant he had taken years to practice, most of those spent outside of camp walls. It never occurred to me to think that other kids, safe at home, hiding out—that the others, who had never seen the inside of a cabin, experienced the grave and still nothing that was life at camp—might have managed to teach themselves amazing things. They weren’t afraid of themselves; they weren’t crippled by the weight of what they didn’t know.

I had the strangest feeling—like I had lost something without ever really having it in the first place—that I wasn’t what I once was, and wasn’t at all what I was meant to be. The sensation made me feel hollow down to my bones.

“The whole thing’s pretty straightforward for us Blues,” Liam explained. “You look at something, concentrate hard enough to imagine that object moving from point A to point B, and it just…does,” he said. “I bet a lot of the Blues at Thurmond figured out how to use their abilities. They just chose not to. Maybe something to do with that noise.”

“You’re probably right.” I hadn’t had enough interaction with the Blue kids to know.

Liam jerked the hose back and forth as the stream of gas slowed to a measly drip. I glanced up, searching the parking lot and motel doors for signs of life, and didn’t settle back down until I was sure we were alone.

“Did you teach yourself?” I asked, testing my theory.