“You sound like you’re in the mafia,” I commented, and Finn smiled crookedly. “Do you guys make people sleep with the fishes or something?”
“Persuasion is a very powerful ability,” he said and his smile disappeared.
“So you have persuasion?” I asked carefully. Something about it seemed to upset him, and as I expected, he shook his head. “Why not?”
“I’m a tracker. Our abilities are different.” He glanced over at me, and sensing that I would just ask more questions, he went on. “They’re more suited for tracking, obviously. Persuasion isn’t that useful in that arena.”
“What is useful?” I pressed, and he sighed wearily.
“It’s hard to explain. They’re not even real abilities in the sense of the word.” He stared out the windshield and shifted in his seat. “It’s more instinct and intuition. It’s easier for me to get a sense of who I’m following and stay on them. Like the way a bloodhound follows a scent, except its not actually something I can smell. It’s just something I know.” He looked over to see if I was getting it, but I just stared at him blankly. “For example, I knew you were at my door before I opened it. And when you went to visit that woman last night” (that woman being someone who I had thought was my mother my entire life) “-I knew you were far away and I knew something was distressing you.”
“You can tell when I’m upset? Even when you’re not around me?” My heart started to panic, realizing the implications of this. He could tell when I was distressed, he could tell when if I was happy, or maybe harboring feelings of lust.
“As long as I’m tracking you, yes,” Finn nodded.
“I thought you said you weren’t psychic,” I muttered.
“No, I said I couldn’t read minds, and I can’t.” Then with an exasperated sigh, he added. “I never have any idea what you’re thinking.” He noticed my discomfort, so he continued. “I can’t tell everything you’re feeling.
Just distress and fear. I need to be alert to situations when you’re in danger so I can help you. My job is to keep you safe and bring you home.”
“How do you know how to track me? Before you find me, I mean.
You said you only tune into my feelings when you’re tracking me. How does that work?”
“Your mother has things from when you were baby. A lock of hair usually,” Finn elaborated, and I felt an odd warm feeling inside. My mother had things from me. Kim had never treasured anything about me, but someone out there had. She had taken a lock of hair when I was born and kept it safe all these years. “I get a vibe from that, and they usually have a general idea about where you are. You were trickier, but most people are fairly easy to find. Then once I’m around you, I start to get a real scent of you, and that’s it.”
“Is that why you stared at me all the time?” I thought of the way his eyes were always on me, and the way I could never make sense of his expression.
“Yes.” There was something about his answer. He wasn’t lying exactly, but he was holding something back. I thought about pressing him further but there were so many other things I wanted to know.
“So… how often do you do this?” I returned to the question he had refused to answer before we left his apartment. I might have forgotten if he hadn’t seemed too reluctant to answer.
“Why do you want to know?” Finn asked.
“Why don’t you want to answer?” I challenged him. He thought for a minute, but apparently didn’t come up with something to counter it because he answered.
“You are my eleventh.” He looked at me to gauge my response, so I kept my face as expressionless as possible.
I was a little surprised by his answer. It seemed like an incredibly time consuming process, for one thing. For me, he had lived in the same town as me for over two weeks, set up an apartment, and somehow enrolled in high school.
He seemed fairly young to have done that eleven times. Plus, it was unnerving to think about there being eleven other changelings out there. Eleven other kids who had gone through the same things as me.
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked, trying to figure out how he had time for all of this.
“Since I was fifteen,” Finn answered, further shocking me.
“Fifteen?” I shook my head. “No way. You’re trying to tell me that at fifteen-years-old, your parents sent you out into the world to track and find kids? And these eighteen-year-old kids, they trusted you and believed you?”
“I am very good at what I do,” Finn replied matter-of-factly.
“Still. That just seems… unreal.” I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.
Admittedly, he did seem intelligent and determined, but at fifteen, I had no selfcontrol. If I had been given a credit card and sent across the country, I wouldn’t have come back. “Did they all come back with you?”
“Yes, of course,” he said simply.
“Do they always? With everyone, I mean?” I continued. I had considered not going with him, and I tried to imagine how I would’ve reacted if it had been somebody else other than Finn. I had never met any other trackers to compare him to, but it still seemed unlikely that I would’ve went off with just anybody.
“No, they don’t. They usually do, but not always.”
“But they always do with you?” I persisted.
“Yes.” Finn looked over at me again. “You did. Why do you find it so hard to believe?”
“No, it’s not that.” I took another drink from water and tried to think about what was bothering me. “Wait. You were fifteen? That means that you were never… you weren’t a changeling. Is everyone? How does this work?”
“Trackers are never changelings.” He rubbed the back of his neck and pursed his lips. “I think it’s best if your mother explains the changelings to you.
Its complex and I don’t know all the details.”
“How come trackers aren’t ever changelings?” I questioned.
“We need to spend our lives being trained to be a tracker,” Finn said.
“And our youth is an asset. It’s much easier to get close to a teenager when you are a teenager than it is when you’re forty.”
“A big part of what you do is building trust,” I remarked, eyeing him up with new suspicions.
“Yes, it is,” Finn admitted.
“So at the dance, when you were being a total dick to me. That was you building trust?” I asked him pointedly. For a split second, he looked pained, but his normal emotionless expression returned.
“No. That was me putting a distance between us.” His eyes were too fixed on the road and his expression hardened. “I shouldn’t have asked you to dance. I was trying to correct the error. I needed you to trust me, but anything more would be misleading.”
“I see.”
The nice things he said to me had been to gain my trust. Everything that had transpired between us had just been because he was trying to get me to the compound. He had been keeping me safe, getting me to like him, and when he noticed my crush developing, he had tried to put me in my place. It stung painfully, so I just swallowed hard and stared out the window.
“I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you,” Finn said quietly, noticing my distress. I could’ve lied to him, but that would’ve been pointless. He knew when I was upset, even if it wasn’t so clearly written on my face.
“Don’t worry about,” I replied icily. “You were just doing your job.”
“I know that you’re being facetious, but I was. I still am.”
“Well, you’re very good at it.” I crossed my arms and stared out the window. I didn’t feel much like talking anymore. There were still a million questions I had about everything, but I’d rather wait and talk to them with somebody else, anybody else.