The Untouched (The Unseen #2) - Piper Sheldon Page 0,1

run my thumb over the bumpy leaves.

This is it. This time I will release the sickness without hurting the plant. If I learn to control myself then maybe I can live a normal life. Maybe I can stay in this strange little town that instantly felt like home. I won’t need to always be on the run …

But then, as always, Grandma Sue’s voice is in my head: It’s too dangerous to stay, my jewel. We would if we could.

My equipment bag drops to floor. I slide off my sneakers and pull on tap shoes from my bag. I warm up and stretch.

Tap. Tap. Like always, I’m instantly drawn back in time to one of my first lessons with Grandma Sue. She would have loved how each test step reverberated around the cavernous room. Chills prick my arms and I take a deep breath in and out. I’m not sure how or when we discovered that the exertion of dancing triggered the light to come, but once we did, the dance lessons were a regular occurrence.

The room is perfect for what comes next.

Well, perfect would be dancing with Grandma Sue again in the basement of the current house we lived in, not hiding in a creepy factory that could collapse on me any second. But needs must and all that.

I place an earbud in my right ear, leaving the left out so I could still hear the satisfying taps from my feet, and start the music.

With eyes closed, I slip back into the familiar routine of my dance.

In my mind Grandma Sue is smiling happily at my side. She taught me everything she knew from her days in the chorus line in New York. Everything from traditional tap to the waltz and jitterbug. When she could no longer dance with me, I took to transforming her tap routines to something a little more contemporary. The joy on her face when she watched me dance was all I needed to feel the light grow within me. That joy is what I picture when the loneliness creeps in.

Right foot extended … toe tap. Heel tap. Flap. Slide.

The tip-tap, tippy-tap of my shoes against the solid stone floor. The satisfying slide of the metal against concrete as I swirl my foot out and around. It all feels like chugging ice-cold water after a walk in the desert; satisfying to the core. I move to the routine I’ve practiced a hundred times. All the while the sickness grows, burning and licking under my skin, begging to be freed.

Sweat prickles my forehead but I’m smiling. My heart rate picks up, and my internal temperature starts to climb. The heat doesn’t burn me or my clothes. It just seems to radiate out of me and onto anybody near me. Or anything.

I lose myself in the song. Though my grandma started me off in classical tap performance, my own style is far more contemporary. I’m proud of this unique routine I’ve created. My rapid tapping mixes with the electronic, dream-like moodiness of Billie Eilish’s “Ocean Eyes.”

Light flashes against the walls like lights of a nightclub as I dance and twirl. The glow in my hands is so bright as rays of light shoot out of my palms, crisscrossing around the room like stage lights. I’ve only ever seen what happens next from my own point of view. Grandma Sue learned the hard way that it was best to leave me alone for this part. Everything around me goes dark and my internal dimmer switch cranks to the max. Already the aching pain starts to melt away, like sinking into a hot bath after a long workout.

After the next twirl, I glance to the plant in the corner. She sits unchanged, alive as ever. So I won’t name her but I can give her a gender? Sure. Welcome to my illness, where the rules don’t make sense and the points don’t matter.

I fall back into the music and lose myself. The steps come to me as easily as breathing. I send out the surge of light just enough to feel relief but not too far that it overtakes me.

Look at me go!

But the second I think about the illness taking control, fear grips me and the tables turn.

The world turns white. The heat boils over all at once. My vision changes to a black and white version of reality, like the screen of an old security camera. The relief comes unexpected and dreaded. I’m frozen in place as