Elena didn't bring up the anomalies for the rest of the night, and even when Michelle came to join them in the cabin, no one brought up the question of where they were going next. In some ways, it felt impossible to Elena that they had already spent two full days in the camper, on the run but without running Camp Universe.

At the same time, it felt like she had never lived anywhere else, like she had been on the run for her entire life and would be for the rest of her life. Like she was used to the adrenaline, the constant unknown, the fact that Tech United could catch them at any moment, like any moment could be her last moment of freedom.

Knowing that made it both easier and harder not to return to the problem of Sam's anomaly flux. If she were to be captured that evening, she didn't want to have spent her last free moments working.

Yet that was exactly what she wanted. Because if she were captured right now, she would never know the answer.

The ultimate deciding factor was that Michelle was right. At the moment, there was nothing she could do.

She awoke the next morning to a small cry. She threw off her blankets and only deployed the ladder halfway before scrambling down into the cabin.

"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry!" Sam knelt in front of the animal cages, hands over his face, rocking.

"Sam, what happened?" Elena placed a hand on his shoulder. "Ow!" She shook out her hand. The shock was worse than the one Patrick had given her with the Van de Graaff generator the week before, and that had been over a hundred thousand Volts.

Patrick pulled himself out of his sleeping bag from where he had been sleeping in the kitchen. "Hey Sam, you okay?"

"I'm sorry! I didn't mean to! I didn't know, I'm sorry!"

"Oh, we won't be mad at you! What did you do?"

Trembling, Sam raised one finger to point at the chameleon cage.

Elena felt her blood run cold. Numb, she forced herself to turn to look into Seamus's cage.

There the chameleon lay, white, unbreathing, on the floor of his cage.

Elena gasped, and her eyes stung. She opened the unlatched door of his cage and reached in for Seamus's body, but she could bring herself to pick it up.

"I'm sorry!" Sam cried.

She whirled on him. "What did you do?"

"I woke up a little earlier than all of you and I wanted to practice using my powers and I just—I think I pulled in, a little too much, because my powers were spread out too far, and—"

"You channelled all your power into him?"

"Not on purpose! I thought it wouldn't hurt him anyway, because chameleons can already change color, so he would have powers like mine!" Sam scooted backwards, covering his face and head. "I'm sorry!"

Elena's hand shook, still hovering over Seamus's body. She didn't trust herself to speak.

Patrick's gentle voice took over. "Come here, Sam." He placed an arm around Sam's shoulders, though he jerked back at first as a small snap! sounded. "I know, you didn't do anything on purpose."

"Elena's mad at me."

"Elena's sad. She loves these animals, you know that?"

"They're her pets?"

"They belong to the camp, but she loves them like they're hers. She takes care of them every day."

Hot tears streamed down Elena's face, and she turned her back on Patrick and Sam. She knew it should be a small loss. No person had gotten hurt. And Winter was still fine. But Seamus was always a favorite with the campers. She had to take special care of him, because he didn't like to be touched by the campers.

Sam hadn't had to touch him.

"Hey." A strong arm gripped Elena around the shoulders. Michelle. Elena turned to face her, but there was nothing she could say. Her eyes said everything.

Elena turned and melted into Michelle's arms. "I don't know how to do this."

"You're doing great."

"I mean, help Sam control his powers. He can't change the flux. And I can't train him."

"That's because you're trying to do something impossible." Michelle let go of her and held her shoulders at arm's length. "But you're making it happen."

Elena wiped her tears away and swallowed against the tightness in her throat. "Sam, are you okay?" she forced herself to ask.

He wiped his tears away as well. "I'm really sad."

"Me too." She took a deep breath and stepped closer to him. "But this is why we have to keep working on your powers."

He shook his head. "I can't control them, I can't do it—"

"It's okay." She knelt down to his level. "I'm not going to have you try to control the powers today. I'm just going to measure them."

He sniffed. "Measure how?"

"Just like yesterday. You can pull them in to wherever you want—maybe we go outside, so we're not putting the animals—" She stopped that sentence before it got away from her. "We'll go outside and take some measurements, okay?"

"Elena," he said, his eyes very wide, "what if I hurt you?"

She let her eyes fall closed. Whatever he was doing was dangerous. It was enough to kill a small animal, which would be more than enough to injure a larger one. She was surprised she hadn't felt anything that morning.

Or maybe that had been what had woken her up. Maybe his cry had just prompted her to get out of bed.

They stepped out of the camper, and Elena brought her equipment for taking measurements. Michelle and Patrick remained behind to take care of Seamus's body. Elena checked in on each one before she went, but couldn't bear to look again at the chameleon's lifeless form.

Sam's control was more erratic today than it had been the day before, and it was harder to get a consistent energy reading. The air felt too cool and her skin felt too warm, and this time, the leaves appeared too blue throughout her tests, even when he relaxed. Again, she couldn't imagine that anyone who wasn't looking for a difference could tell that the colors were off, but it was easier for her to detect them this time. And when he really pulled in his powers to a small area, the difference was big enough that anyone could see it.

It occurred to her that if he kept going the way he had been, her devices wouldn't work anymore.

Back in the cabin, Elena spent some time at the kitchen table with her notebook and a calculator. The numbers didn't make any sense. For one thing, they'd tested a few distances today, but not in any particular order. The day before, she'd started taking readings standing close to Sam, and gradually gotten further away. Today, she'd picked random points.

The day before, the flux had gotten bigger as she got further away, which meant it was also increasing with time. Today, it continued to increase with time, as if the distance didn't matter.

Elena tried plotting the flux against distance. There was no obvious relationship. It seemed like the flux took on different values at different times, and it didn't matter where Sam situated the energy.

Then she plotted the flux against time. The data acquisition device had stored the data from the day before, as well as time stamps for each one.

Her heart stopped when she saw the data. She stood.

"Michelle . . . can you come take a look at this?"

Patrick had taken a turn with driving, so Michelle was sitting and playing a game with Sam. She took out her phone and handed it to him, then lead Elena into her room.

"Did you find something?" she asked as soon as the door was closed.

Elena forced herself to pace her breathing. "The anomalies are getting stronger."

"As you get further away or closer?"

Elena shook her head. "No, I mean as time passes. The flux is bigger today than it was yesterday. It was bigger an hour ago than it was two hours ago."

The color drained from Michelle's face.

"Today, he killed Seamus. What's he going to be able to do tomorrow?"

"Can you extrapolate?"

Elena winced. "I can try." She pulled up her laptop, entered the data, and tried to perform a curve fit. As far as she could tell, the points curved upwards, the flux not only increasing, but increasing faster and faster as time passed. She clicked through a few different fits before she found a good match.

Exponential. It was exactly what she had hoped it wouldn't be. The greater Sam's flux became, the faster it grew.

That also explained why it had been relatively tame for so long. An exponential growth could remain small for a long time, increasing little by little, before exploding. The worst part was that there didn't even need to be a cause for the sharp increase. Mathematically, it was inevitable.

"Elena, talk to me."

"It's an exponential growth curve," Elena said.

"Refresh me."

"The anomalies are going to get worse and worse."

"Okay." Michelle let out her breath. "Then train him to push out all the time."

"It's not as simple as that. He's not pushing to an infinite distance, or else there'd be no effects at all."

"Then figure out how far he can push."

Pulled to the side of the road, Elena asked Sam to push out as hard and as far as he could without having to put in a lot of effort. That was the important part. It couldn't be a strain for him, or he wouldn't be able to maintain it.

It wasn't easy, but with her sodium neon lamp and energy measurement device, Elena finally managed to get a distance. It was a little under a hundred feet.

Back in the cabin, she ran the numbers given the flux and reported back to Michelle in the back room, out of Sam's earshot. "It should be okay, at his current level of flux. Not even enough energy to cause any static."

"Okay. At what point will the increase be a problem?"

Elena bit her lip and entered the numbers into her laptop, assuming Sam could keep his power as spread as possible. She ran a calculation for how much energy it would take to hurt them, then plugged the numbers into her curve fit to find how long it would take for Sam's flux to become strong enough to kill them.

She gasped and stepped back from the laptop.

"What?" Michelle placed a hand on her shoulder.

"A week," she said. "If we stay with Sam, the energy will be deadly in a week. And it will kill everyone in a hundred foot radius, including himself."

Michelle's jaw dropped, and she turned away. Michelle laughed without smiling. "Okay, what if we had him do the opposite? Pull his powers all the way in, tight enough that they don't touch anyone else at all?"

"Based on this model . . ." Elena shook her head. "If he did that right now, he would die."

Michelle shook her head. "Okay. Then let's run another calculation. Let's say we work with Sam a little more. Let's say we increase his ability to push out his powers. Maybe that's increasing, too, we never checked."

"Okay. But wait . . ." Elena increased the energy considerations, as well as the distance to which Sam would be able to push out the anomalies. She winced. "Exponential growth isn't doing us any favors."

"What?"

Elena's legs were numb. She sat down on the chair in the corner of Michelle's room. "If this is really the rate of increase, and assuming he can push out his powers further—but that everyone within that space would be affected by the anomalies . . ." The room swam, and her voice cut out.

"Elena, what is it?"

She squeezed her eyes shut, then she forced herself to look Michelle in the eyes. "Everyone on this planet would be dead in two weeks."