“Different? Different how?”

“There was me, who could heal things or even bring things back to life. Ray Jensen could kind of move things around by thinking about it. And Alex, she could sometimes read your thoughts if no one else was around.”

“So you had this group of people among your friends, and you all discovered that you each had special powers?”

“Anna was there, too. Sometimes.”

My stomach knotted. Anna grew up on the neighboring farm, and to our parents’ mutual delight we married straight out of high school. We’d been married for one year and four days when the first of the armies assumed control. It had been one year, two months, and three days when roving Patrolmen shot her as she rode her horse through the hills, mistaking her for an insurgent. In the ten years since, I had neither forgiven nor forgotten.

I was skeptical. “You’re telling me my dead wife had special powers?”

She was growing weary of talking about it. “I’m telling you that she might not be dead after all.”