HAS IT GOTTEN darker?
I was in Ori’s cell with the door shut on me for a few minutes, and now the large space outside is flooded with blackness, warm and tacky like tar, making me sweat and my clothes stick to my already sticky skin. I can feel the thick droplets slink down my spine, pooling in the small of my back. The dampness leaks down out of my hair, stinging as it reaches my eyes. I’m embarrassed at how I acted in there, how I screamed. Plus, my neck is sore from where I walked into the hard bunk, my hip aches from where I hit the wall, and there’s a pulsing swell on my shin.
“Tommy? Sarabeth?”
There’s a distant sound, a far-reaching echo, but it may just be my own voice battling against the walls.
No Tommy. No Sarabeth.
Though I kind of hate myself for it, I yell for him.
“Miles?”
I’m disturbed I even thought for one single beat of a second that he might kiss me, and, worse, that I was about to kiss him back. That I wasn’t even considering shoving him away.
There’s no answer. Nothing. No Miles. No Sarabeth, no Tommy. No anybody.
I start walking, the flashlight on and out. Now it decides to start working again.
I can’t trust my ears. I keep hearing these whorls of sound, but when I stop, and try to listen, they’re gone. Is that Sarabeth shouting? Tommy? No, too much noise for it to be just one person. And those gashes of windows give barely any light, and my flashlight shows only the smallest, dimmest circle. All I can do is keep going down this corridor.
A Beyoncé song comes into my head randomly, and I don’t even like Beyoncé. It takes hold of me, and then I lose it, the melody, the lyrics. I don’t even know what song it was.
The walls in this section of hallway have fallen. There are shelves, knocked over and spilling onto the floor. It takes me a moment to realize that the squishy, mossy ground I’m walking on isn’t grass but is made of damp, rotting paper. These are books. A piece of furniture blocks the way forward like a fallen tree—another bookshelf—and I have to scale it. My sandal gets caught in a mound of waterlogged books, and what had once been a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s sticks to the sole of my shoe. I kick it off. It’s not until I’m past all that when I realize the flashlight isn’t in my hand anymore, that I must’ve let it fall.
I hear Tommy. He’s shouting that he’s found the power supply—he’s always had a thing for playing with plugs and coming dangerously close to getting himself electrocuted—and he’s trying to see what will happen if he hits the switch. I call out to him, around that corner or the next, to quit messing around, but it’s too late. He’s gone and flipped the switch. He’s made the power come on.
A whole series of lights blaze. But the glow is sick-green and soupy, and the sound is blaring, earsplitting—an air-raid siren, like we’re under attack.
I hear cursing. Tommy’s screwed something up. Lights flash and bulbs seem to pop and there’s a charred, throat-burning stink in the air. There’s a spark in the room, quick and gone, like lightning. My gold charm bracelet catches the light.
I feel for the bracelet around my wrist. It’s still there. Ori didn’t crave expensive things, but she always had her eye on this bracelet. She liked to tinker with the little ballerinas hung all around the chain, dancing them on my wrist. She knew I got a new charm each year from my dad for my birthday, 24 karat, and she knew I wouldn’t miss a charm or two, because by now there were so many, but I never detached one and let her have it. I never let her borrow the bracelet, either, to try on her graceful wrist, not even in the safety of my bedroom so she wouldn’t lose it.
I’m in a wide-open space. It’s quiet now. My eyes have adjusted enough so I can make out what’s on the walls: patches of graffiti and crumbling dust and hanging pipes and dangling pillows of what’s probably asbestos. I lift my hand to cover my mouth and nose.
Then I’m hit. Something rushes through me. A shock of cold, face-first, and then gone. This is another thing that makes no sense. And I know that I can’t tell anyone, not Sarabeth, not Tommy, especially not Miles, because none of them would believe me, and I don’t want to be questioned. I don’t want to question myself.
The thing is, I see her. Or someone. I swear on my life that I see someone who wasn’t there just two seconds before. I step forward. I know this doesn’t make any sense, but I say her name. I say, “Ori? Is that you?” And she doesn’t say anything back, but there’s this shuffling, this shift-and-shuffle in the dark, and then quick movement, fast, faster, a dance I can’t keep up with, and I’m the one who can always keep up.
She’s coming for me, the pieces and particles of her are connecting together in a hazy shaft of gray light, the particles and pieces are walking on human legs. She’s wearing green. She’s seen me, and she’s coming down the stairs toward me, and she’s wearing green, and she’s come out.
She’s reached me now, is inches away, and says, in a low voice, almost a growl, “Who are you? How’d you get in here?”
And then I see all these things at once: The green is army-drab, not a bright, happy color that Ori would like, not at all. The figure isn’t as tall as Ori used to be, since she’d always been taller than me, by a couple inches at least. The figure isn’t as thin as Ori—whoever this is, it’s thick and barrel-chested, practically a bulldozer. The voice sounds nothing at all like hers.
I don’t know who this is. Or what.
I step back, sputtering. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
I’m trying to communicate with a ghost.
My legs take over, the way they do after I’ve memorized a combination and there’s my cue. They know what they’re doing, my legs. I’ve trained them well. Here they go, but not in a pas de bourrée or a pas de chat or any quick-moving step my feet could shuffle through from memory. They do what I need them to do, the most basic action. They run.