“Get up,” I tell the imp-thing—right, Kay. “Hitch a ride, however you do that. I’ve got to run.”
She vanishes, squeaking. I feel the eeriest rustling sensation against my leg, like a parasitic newspaper crawling on me. And then we’re off, charging down the hill with spangles of morning sun dashed into my eyes. The green world heaves and tilts. Maybe I’m not acclimatized to reality anymore, because it’s rougher going than it ought to be. I’ve always been a strong runner, but now I’m battered by waves of nausea. Dizzy with alternating light and shade as I race below the branches. My legs aren’t pumping like they should.
God knows how they’ll torture Josh. And Lexi—I’m picturing her captive, disoriented, maybe in some cage that’s even viler because, to glance at it, you might think it was the everyday world.
But if Kay knows what she’s talking about, it’s even worse than that. What happens from eating. What is it, anyway, that powers Prince’s realm?
How far is it to the gorge? More than two miles, I think, but even though I lived in this town for years I’m foggier than I should be on how to get there. It’s connected somehow to how sick I’m getting. I have this horrible feeling that I’m not all the way here. That my feet aren’t quite striking the ground.
Whatever. What I’m feeling is of zero importance. All that counts now is what I do.
The town is starting to look weirdly messed up. Lots of snapped branches, toppled poles, cars with their roofs staved in, as if a violent hurricane had passed in the night. But the sky is blue and golden, the breezes as soft and floppy as dog ears. Sirens wail in the distance, and I get a distinct sense that I’m looking at the trail of devastation left by a legion of changelings—with Josh in the lead. Is his army still here somewhere, now that he’s gone? Or did they go home, once they had Lexi?
I’m still racing as fast as I can, but the dizziness is making me swerve as I go. Out of nowhere, a dry heave doubles my body. I keep running, contorted with cramps. The view of our town arches into my eyes and then ebbs into darkness, over and over again. What is wrong with me?
But I think I recognize the street on my right. I think it ends at the woody margin by the gorge, so if I can just keep going straight, if I can just not fall on my face before I get there …
I pass a street sign, and the name flares up, horribly bright, before it collapses into darkness again. Whistler Drive. It’s not where I thought I was, not where I should be. All at once I’m not sure if I’m even heading in the right direction.
A face veers into mine, glaring like a headlamp. I see light brown curls and gray roots and a gaping mouth. Eyes so shocked they look like windows at the exact instant a rock ruptures their glass.
And yet I’m not thinking about who it is, not at first, because all at once I get it: I’m feeling like I’m not all the way here, not truly in this world, because I’m not here, not really. I ate their food. I did everything Josh asked me to do. Prince and them, they still have a hold on me.
The woman in my face screams wordlessly and swings a fist at me, sloppily. Misses, so I don’t feel the need to punch her back.
Then she starts adding discernible comments to her shrieking. “You ghost! You ghost! You vicious, nasty little ghoul! You bring him back! Do you hear me? Bring back our Joshua! Oh, where did you hide his body?”
She grabs hold of my dirt-smeared vest and then lets go, maybe in astonishment at my solidity.
“Hi, Emma,” I say. I was never under any illusions that my foster mother was all that crazy about me, but her reaction to seeing me alive still comes as a disappointment. Then her raving starts making a little more sense to me. Of course, it’s all about how much she misses Josh, not that he ever really gave a damn about her. “I’m trying to bring Josh back, actually. Maybe you could give me a ride to the gorge?”
Because with the way I’m swaying, I’m not all that sure I’ll make it there on my own.
Emma staggers back a few feet. “You murdered him. And then you came back to torment me.”
I don’t want to be cruel to her—don’t want to be anything except away from her, honestly, if I didn’t need a ride—but I still crack up at that. In a hysterical, unhinged, knee-rocking way. It’s just so preposterous.
“I’m the one who got buried. So, really, it might be more accurate to say Josh murdered me? On a temporary basis. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.” It’s true in a way. Josh helped set up my fake death, and he let that poor changeling keel over in my place. But from Emma’s glare, it doesn’t look like she’s buying my version of events. “Listen—I have to get to the gorge. I think there might be a way to get Josh back. But I’m feeling too sick to run.”
Not that I have anything like a plan for getting him and Lexi back. But if I can reach them, that will be a start.
I’ve always been a stranger—here, and everywhere else. I could never make myself love my foster parents, and I know I had no right to expect any love from them. But still, nothing has prepared me for seeing such hate on the face of someone I lived with for six years. I always tried, at least, to do the right thing. To be responsible and decent, even if I couldn’t be warm.
Her enraged face is dialing in and out, like a time-lapsed moon. My sense of the ground is getting more remote by the moment. And it’s really sinking in, now, that I need her help. Right now, with no more delay. How can I fight Unselle if I can’t stay conscious?
“I don’t care if you hate me,” I tell her. “Just give me a ride already. Then I promise you’ll never see me again.” I get a quick hit of inspiration. “If you won’t drive me to the gorge, I’ll haunt you till you die.”
A momentary snarl, then she nods at a nearby car. I hear the bleat of unlocking doors. It worked.
I’ve just made it into the passenger seat when the whole world falls away.
I come to with the door next to me hanging open and Emma yanking on my arm, my limp body sagging sideways into a border of grass and dandelions. “Get out! I did what you asked. Now get your scrawny, murdering carcass out of my life!”
I almost fight back, but then I remember: the whole point was to get here. I let myself topple out of the seat and onto the patchy turf, but I’m not sure I can stand.
“I didn’t kill Josh, Emma. I can’t tell you he’s fine, because he’s not. But I don’t think he’s dead.”
Emma is the one who’s dead; I see it now. Dead at heart. She used to be an okay person, probably even better than average. But now it’s like her insides have been steeped in poison until there’s nothing left in her but toxic rot.
That’s another consequence of everything we did, Josh and me. And of everything that was done to us too. Poor, pathetic Emma is another casualty of it all.
I see a single dandelion, growing bigger and more blaring than the sun. I hear the car pulling away, feel the gust of its departure. How was I dumb enough to think I could escape, that Prince and his scummy followers would just let me go? My body can’t survive in this world anymore. Sweat is pouring off my head and I grip fistfuls of grass to stop myself from plummeting into the sky.
There’s no way I can save Josh and Lexi.
Not while I’m busy dying.
“Sennie,” a horrible little voice pipes in my ear. “Sennie!”
God, how I hate that name. “Whatever you want, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the time for it.”
“Sennie, look!” The imp-thing—right, Kay—is waving something in my face. Garish red and yellow, shiny and rectangular, catching the sunlight in unbearable snarls. “Potato chips! From that car!”
The mention of food is enough to send my guts into violent spasms. I’ve never felt nausea like this before. “Jesus. Just leave me alone.”
“Sennie, no!” I hear the shrill crinkling of the bag ripping open; the sound fills my whole head, as if my skull was stuffed with crumpled, metal-voiced garbage. I can’t believe a sound can hurt so much. “You must eat!”
This dying business should really pick up the pace. My guts are made of sun-glaring tinfoil; the smell of those chips jabs in and turns into a fist crushing the foil. I gag so hard my throat feels torn, but nothing comes out. God, the vileness of that smell: sizzling dust, acidic grease, an ancient, stale wheeze of long-dead things …
I realize too late: Kay is straddling my neck. Her little folded-paper hand is shoving that oily, ashy spew into my mouth. I try to spit, and feel the chips snapping like dried spiders. I try to get ahold of Kay, fling her away from me, but somehow she slips through my hand.
And then a few fragments of chip claw their way into my throat. I heave again, my whole body bucking helplessly, with Kay riding my throat like some kind of flattened cowboy. Kay takes advantage of my twisted lips to shove in another mouthful.
Here’s the interesting thing: this time the potato chips taste a lot more like food.
I chew them on purpose, and the spasms stop throwing me around. I swallow, and it feels like an okay thing to do. It becomes clearer where I am: on my side, staring toward the woods where delicate spring trees spray up like emerald froth.
This ground I’m lying on: it’s my ground. The molecules flung from busted stars, the ones that made this planet? They made me too. The grass is so close to me that I can see the iridescence streaking up each blade of it, the waxy green perfection.
And when Kay offers me another handful of potato chips, I wolf them like a fiend. Because they’re real.
I almost feel like I can get up. And then I do, with Kay swinging off the ridiculous sliced-up tuxedo jacket Josh chose for me—last night, if that’s a concept that has any meaning now. I must have dropped my blood-soaked shirt somewhere.
Kay. As my mind comes back into focus, I realize what she just did. “You got me out. You broke—whatever the hell kind of hold they had on me.”
It makes sense; eating on the other side locks you in, eating on this side undoes it—with the savage repugnance I felt for food here as a pretty solid guarantee that nobody would try it on their own. I would have preferred starvation to eating those chips, if Kay hadn’t forced me.
She chirps happily. “See, Sennie? I helped you!” Then, wistfully: “Not enough, though.”
“You definitely did enough,” I say. “You saved my ass.” But even as I speak I’m staring into the woods; is that a stir of something white, something bloody? “Hang on to the rest of those chips, okay? I think we might need them.”
I walk in—a little light-headed still. But I feel more like I belong on the planet than I ever have in my life. If I’m a stranger, then I’m the one who carries a secret charge, a disguised power, and it doesn’t matter if no one recognizes that at first.
But I still have to reclaim the only two people who ever recognized me, years before I recognized myself.