Sam and Patrick ate lunch at the table, talking and laughing, while Elena sat with Michelle on the couch.

"I'm nervous about this," Elena said.

"He can change the colors of things," Michelle said. "Or, the colors we see."

Elena shook her head. "I don't think it's any kind of mind control. He seems to be focusing on the objects, not on us."

Michelle shrugged. "Okay. Still, I don't see anything dangerous in it. Or anything that Tech United would be interested in."

"But I don't understand it," Elena said

Michelle's eyes pierced hers. "And you may never. This might be enough to clear your name and show people you're not crazy. This nightmare could be over."

"It could be just beginning."

"How?"

Elena let her breath out. "What if he pushes colors up into the gamma range?"

Michelle's eyes widened.

A soft whimpering. Winter was sniffling at her feet. Elena picked her up and held her on her lap. "You can see why I'm still concerned."

"Yes, but no. He can control his powers."

"But he can't. He can control the area over which the effects take place. But the less area he spreads it over, the more intense the effects."

Michelle shifted her weight slightly. "You're saying the total amount of . . . power, or energy, or—"

"I think it would be called a flux."

"The total flux is constant."

Elena breathed in to say yes, but she hadn't run any tests. "I don't know. I'd like to do some calculations and find out."

Michelle stood to take her empty plate to the sink. "Do what you need to do."

Michelle went back to driving the camper, but not before Elena dug through their stores under the cabin for a few supplies. A measuring tape, her energy measuring device, her graphing calculator, her sodium-neon lamp, and a good notepad.

It took very little coaxing to get Sam to agree to help out. Now that they could put a name on his anomalies, it wasn't such a difficult thing to talk about. He sat at the kitchen table, and she held the sodium neon lamp at varying distances from him and asked him to shift the color of the light—but nothing further from him than the light.

It sometimes took him a little time to get the anomalies to a precise location. Each time he did, the light shifted in color, just a bit—a little more orange, or a little more green than its usual yellow.

She was hesitant to place the sodium neon light directly in front of him. Even if she could effectively shield him from any broken glass, this lamp was a lot more expensive than the little light bulbs they'd been working with earlier. So she went for larger distances instead. She held the lamp out beside the chameleon cage. "Right here?"

Sam squinted, and the light turned green. A bright green. Her chameleon, usually green when it wasn't in a mood, turned bright blue.

It also screeched, as if in pain.

Her hand that held the lamp stung, like she'd been sunburned. "Sam, stop!"

"Sorry, sorry!" He squinted again, but the lamp still looked a little too green, the chameleon a little too blue. Her skin still felt a little too warm, and the rest of the room felt a little too cool.

"Sam, you didn't stop."

"I did! I mean, I relaxed it. I'm not doing anything anymore."

Elena looked over at Patrick, who shrugged. She peeked out the window at the trees outside. Had the leaves on the trees always been that color? If there was any shift at all, the difference wasn't extreme. If she hadn't been looking for a difference, could she possibly have noticed anything was different?

She looked at the data on her device. There was a small spike on the reading from a few seconds prior. She could use that for her calculations.

Sam pulled his knees into his chest. "Can I be done now?"

Elena nodded. "I'm going to do some calculations. You want to play a game with Patrick on the couch?"

"You did good, man." Patrick came over and put a hand on his shoulder, but yanked it back. "Crazy static in here, I swear."

"That happens to me a lot," Sam said, sighing.

Elena sat at the kitchen table for a while afterward, first trying to figure out the best way to run her calculations. She used the total volume of space affected by the anomalies, and multiplied by the energy taken in by her sensor. That gave her a value for the flux.

The number she came up with for the first data point didn't mean much to her. It couldn't. There was nothing else she could compare it to her to give her a point of reference.

The presence of the energy probably explained why Sam had a lot of problems with static electricity, though. The difference in the energy present in the light all around him might interact with the surroundings in a weird way, and she could imagine it stripping electrons from his atoms, or from those of the atoms around him. That was why they all kept getting shocked.

She kept calculating for each number. The second was slightly higher than the first, but close enough to be random experimental error: less than one percent. She couldn't expect to get the exact same number for every trial. One percent error was excellent, much better than she had been anticipating.

But the third number was higher than the second, another two percent, and the fourth was higher than the third by a half a percent, and the fifth was higher than the fourth by a full eight percent.

It could have been her imagination, but she could have sworn that the whole time she sat doing calculations, the camper was growing brighter and colder.

Based on Elena's calculations, the further away from Sam she took her detector, the greater the flux was. It didn't sound right to her. He'd managed to burst a bulb by "pulling in," as he called it, and that would take more energy than her numbers were allowing for, if she followed the trend. It looked like "pulling in" would more or less cause the powers to disappear altogether.

Patrick came over to glance over her shoulder. "That's a lot of numbers."

Elena shrugged. She was used to being made fun of for being the person who loved math.

But he didn't tease. "How's it going?"

"Mm."

"Sounds serious."

Elena laughed a little, but she went back to her solemn expression directly after. "It's weird. I don't believe these numbers."

"Too much power? Too little?"

"Neither. I don't have a point of reference for how much energy I should be expecting."

"Enough to do this, I guess." Patrick held up his hand. A small red mark glowed on his finger.

Elena sucked in her breath through her teeth. "What did he do?"

"That was when I touched his shoulder. Do you think the shocks are from his ability? Because I got one from him earlier and it was okay, but this one hurt."

Elena wove her fingers into her hair and closed her eyes. She could look up ionization energies. Given the typical Voltage for an electric shock, and the dielectric breakdown strength of air . . .

She grinned. "This is awesome." She looked back at the mark on his hand. "I mean, sorry, Patrick. That looks really painful, and we'll have to be careful. But this is exactly what I needed."

Patrick held up his thumbs. "Glad to hear I could actually help with the math."

It wouldn't be enough information, of course. Her data seemed to suggest that Sam's abilities were building up the more he changed their radius. Maybe that made sense. He could be buidling up static charge, which could . . .

Which could what, exactly? Somehow, he was changing the energy present in light without changing its frequency. Because if her crazy quantum professor last semester had known what he was talking about, that was the real reason people saw colors: because of the differences in energy for each color of light. But there was no way to change that without altering reality itself.

So that's what Sam was doing. She had known that. It didn't come to her as any additional surprise. Somehow, she had lost the ability to be surprised.

She set aside her data. There was nothing she could do with it. She'd have to take a data point, then wait a few hours before taking another so that any residual effects could dissipate.

She glanced over at Sam and Patrick on the couch, laughing over their game. There didn't seem to be any residual effects changing anything at the moment, though the colors in the cabin did still seem a little off.

Elena walked up to the window between themselves and the cab. "Hey, Michelle. Where are we going?"

Michelle's eyes met hers through the rear view windows for just a moment. "Still just putting distance between ourselves and the camp. When we get far enough away, I'm going to stop at a grocery store. We're going to run out of supplies pretty soon if I don't."

Elena nodded. "Do we know where we're headed next?"

"I'm going to see if Patrick will ask Sam about the home he lived in before the Wilson's, but I'm not sure how helpful it's going to be. We're already getting some good information about his abilities." Michelle raised her eyebrows. "You get the flux?"

"Kind of." Elena sighed. "It looks like it changes when he moves around the effects too much."

"That could be an interesting thing to measure."

"It could be dangerous. The energy seems to be causing a lot of static. Patrick got a shock when he touched Sam's shoulder, it burned his finger."

Michelle let out her breath. "Well, maybe we should let it rest for a bit, then. There's not much we can do about it at the moment. I'm going to pull us into a rest stop for the night soon enough. Why don't you take a break?"

Elena breathed in to protest, but it wasn't worth it. Michelle was right. She'd done enough for one day. Sam would be tired of pushing the anomalies from one distance to another and holding tight reign over them. She turned from the cab and went over to the couch, where Sam and Patrick were still playing their game.

"Deal me into the next round?" she asked, and they both cheered.

They dealt out the cards. Elena tried to focus on the game, but no matter what she did, she couldn't shake the feeling that the diamonds and hearts looked just a little bit too orange.