Ashes of Foreverland (32 page)

“You do the honors, Jonathan.”

A single icon shone beneath the glass. He put his thumb on it and looked around. On eyes on him. Two hundred and four latches simultaneously thrummed. The doors released.

Movement stirred.

Jonathan didn't feel Julie take the control from him. He didn't see the team spread out and watch the doors, one by one, slowly open. No one moved, everyone waited, collectively holding their breath.

The warehouse grew quiet again.

Water dripped.

And then the first door swung open. A pair of large eyes peeked out. A child, a girl about the age of twelve, blonde hair damp and matted, stepped out.

Foreverland

T
here was sky.

Danny didn't recognize it as sky. He was on his back, looking into the endless blue canvas. It could've been the glassy ocean at daybreak, but his mouth was dry and the air warm.

Pain flashed across his forehead.

He closed his eyes until the tension relaxed. His skin was warm and damp with sweat, tight where the sun had turned it pink. The grass crunched as he lifted his arm.

His elbow struck something hard.

It lay in the tall weeds, a half-buried circle with raised numbers. He pulled the grass aside and scraped the algae and matted leaves away.

A sundial.

The pain returned when he sat up, almost dragging him back into unconsciousness. He rode out the splashing white flashes inside his skull. Birds scuttled in the trees behind him. The briny scent of the ocean was strong.

Something is missing.

A three-storied dormitory was across the field, the windows punched out, vines clawing the walls. Beyond that, just above the trees, the cylindrical outline of another building was set against the cloudless tropical sky. The windows, once reflective, were now dull and chalky. It listed slightly to the left.

He knew where he was.
How did I get here?

Something rustled in the grass.

Danny jumped up, regrettably, and fought the spots stabbing his vision, the pain lighting up his head as he scanned the trees and sky for predators. The tall grass was still matted where he was lying, the edge of the sundial—weathered and cracked—still exposed.

A path led away from it.

The sun reflected off the trampled grass. Danny bent down to pick up a disc—just one disc, the side smooth and reflective and perforated with a galaxy of tiny holes. And then the memories surfaced.

The three discs, the ash-covered world, the final beam of light. And then this.

The island.

A shiver trickled down his back, clinked in his stomach like cold cubes. It was just like he remembered when he woke up that first day with the old man telling him he was somewhere special, that they were going to help him. It smelled green and new. White birds soared with promise.

But the buildings were abandoned, the field overgrown. There were no old men, no boys being marched to the haystack. And something else was missing.

The lilac is gone.

The ever-present scent of lilac that had followed him for the past year had been replaced by the ocean.

He turned the disc over. The pattern of holes was the same as the others, but he didn't expect to find them. They wouldn't be hiding in the grass. This disc was different. The edge was red.

A moan behind him.

Danny spun and saw a depression ten feet away, the curve of a bended knee. Cyn lay on her back, her head cradled in a nest of bundled grass, her skin slightly pink. He fell on his knees and took her hand. Her repose was undisturbed, her hair fanned over the ground.

Her eyelids fluttered. Eyes unfocused, she gazed into the cloudless blue for several moments.

“Hey.” Danny squeezed.

Her breath came in long, cool strokes. She started to sit up and scrunched her eyes. Folds wrinkled across her forehead. Danny could still feel a dull ache between his eyes, but the pain had faded. Hers was fresh out of the box.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“An island.”

“How...” She swallowed. “Island?”

She lay still, eyes closed, breathing through the settling ache. He could see the subtle hints of memory returning, the details of Times Square covered in ash, running at Alessandra...
and then the light.

“How'd we get here?” she muttered.

He held up the disc. She shook her head. Confusion clouded her pained eyes.

“
Where one to another is three, in the dark there is now light to see
,” he said, quoting the last poem found at the Institute. “The discs he sent, they were colored on the edges; each one matched the gown we were wearing.”

A touch of vertigo swirled in his belly, the jiggling trapdoor threatening to drop him into a pit of reality confusion. They were in a Foreverland world looking at their bodies in the Institute that he presumed were representations of their
real
bodies.

“
Our bodies,
” he said, “were wearing those gowns: blue, yellow and green. Three of us, just like the last poem said,
where one to another is three, in the dark there is now light
. And Alessandra was the light.”

He held the disc above her, the shadow falling on her stomach, a small galaxy of pinpoints.

“When the three discs were together, they vibrated. And then I noticed that these little holes dispersed the light in a way that made the shadow disappear, like the discs were just an illusion, like they weren't really there. Like the poem said,
look inward, for you are the bridge.
Only it meant all three of us.
We
are the bridge.”

Cyn sat up and rested her arms on her knees. Her hair hung over her face like curtains. “But we were together before that.”

“
There is now light to see
.”

Alessandra wasn't the light when they walked into the Institute. That was the missing element. The pieces were in place so that when the time came, when Alessandra pulled down the Nowhere, when she'd brought the Investors back and transformed herself into a beam of light, there was a way for them to escape.

“She saved me,” Cyn said.

“She saved all of us.”

“Barb.” The blonde curtains shook. “
Barb
saved me.”

Danny sat next to her and gave her several seconds.

“Barb was...she was an Investor.”

He thought so, but couldn't understand why Cyn was hiding her face from him. Why her voice quivered. The old woman had helped them become the bridge. She stopped Cyn until Danny arrived. Like she knew.

But she was the only Investor clothed.

“We all had an Investor,” Danny said.

“Mine was different.” She sighed heavily. “I never told anyone this, but something happened in Foreverland that was...different than everyone else when, you know, the time came for her to take my body.”

She swallowed. Hard.
My demon is different than yours.

“That cloud in Times Square,” she said, “the gray coming down, I remember that, Danny. I remember the Nowhere. I know what it's like to be out there and pulled into a billion pieces. I remember having no body, no mind, just this...this shattered something...spilled all over the place like a...like a nothing.”

She sniffed.

“And then I just got pushed out, like someone pulled me back together and shoved me back into my body. All of the others were still in the Nowhere and I was back, but...” She exhaled. “Barb was already there—I'm sorry, I don't like to...it's all weird and confusing. I know it sounds all, you know, impossible but, it's just...no one ever came out of the Nowhere except for me, I think. And, I don't really know why.”

She quivered and stifled a sob.
Why me?

She'd been in the Nowhere, tasted it. Danny was there, too, as a tourist. He didn't feel the separation, didn't dissolve. Maybe it would all sound impossible if she didn't say someone had
pushed her out.
Danny knew someone that survived the Nowhere, someone that could come and go as she wished.

Lucinda.

Reed's girlfriend came to Danny when he first went to Foreverland. She was the one with candy red hair, the one that knew the Nowhere, the one that took Danny out there to see and hear. She destroyed herself when Foreverland crashed.

But not before she found Cyn.

“Was Barb the one you were talking to?” Danny asked. “At the Institute?”

She nodded. “I'm not crazy, Danny.”

“I know.”

“She's been in my head since Foreverland ended. Every day was a battle. Until you showed up.”

He remembered how it felt when he held her hand the first time, the way his body shook with relief, how his nightmare went away.

“When you showed up, she just went away, sort of. For the first time, I couldn't hear her voice. But she didn't disappear. When you were gone, she came back, she poured the pills down my throat, tried to take back my body. If you hadn't showed up that night...”

She took several cleansing breaths.

“But then she changed,” Cyn said. “Said Reed was behind it all.”

“Told you about Alessandra.”

She nodded. “And when I saw Times Square and the sky falling, I thought she was sending us all to the...”

She sighed and didn't finish.

“I don't think that's what she was doing.”

“That was the Nowhere. She was pulling it down, I could feel it. I can't go back there, Danny. I can't.”

“We're not going back. I promise.”

“How do you know?” She looked up, eyes wide, red and glassy.

He didn't want to lie to her, not ever. She didn't deserve that. He didn't know where they were going; he could only tell her what he thought Alessandra did, what made sense.

She destroyed Foreverland.

It was more than that. Somehow, Alessandra brought the Investors back and made them pay. How she did it, he couldn't explain. He even wondered if they were real, maybe they were just illusions. It was impossible to tell if anything was real.

Their fear, though, that was real. They stood with wide-eyed panic on the sidewalk as the ashes fell around them, cries lost in the descending static that ate up the world. And all those voices intermingled with that tortuous noise, all those fragmented voices that haunted the Nowhere. And just before Danny and Cyn hit Alessandra, just before the light swallowed them, he heard the voices go silent.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Head starting to hurt again.”

Danny's forehead had settled, but there was still a throbbing knot between his eyes that he massaged with his thumb. Her headache appeared to go away, too, but now it was coming back. She rubbed tiny circles between her eyes.

“Where is she?” Cyn asked. “Where's Alessandra?”

Danny eyed the path. Maybe she woke up before they did and went exploring. Judging by their pink skin, he and Cyn had been lying in the sun a while.

“Where are we, Danny? If Alessandra destroyed Foreverland, where are we?”

“We're not awake.”

“Why?” Her eyes pleaded, still wide, panic on the rims, reality confusion nipping at her heels. Thoughts of the Nowhere lurked behind her eyes.

He exhaled sharply, searching the sky.

If Alessandra was no longer a host and this wasn't reality, then where were they? Who was hosting
this? And why the island?

A warm breeze rushed over the field. The grass rustled and brushed against them. Blonde strands stuck to Cyn's damp cheeks. Danny brushed them away, her face warm.

Once again, the smell of the ocean was strong, like they were bathing in it, breathing the salt spray, the taste lingering on his lips, stinging his eyes. And yet they weren't close enough to hear the waves.

And not a hint of lilac.

He searched the blue sky in the disc's reflection, the pinpoints dotting his eyes. The blood-red edge on his fingers. It wasn't blue or yellow or green. It was a different color.

Then he realized.

Something about the ocean, something about the red edge told him where they were.

Like we're breathing the ocean.

The path led to the beach. That was where Reed spent all his time when they were on the island. That's where they buried his body.
And this is what he smelled like.

Maybe Alessandra didn't walk away from the sundial after all. Or maybe someone led her away while they slept. Danny knew where the answers would be.

“Let's go this way.” He walked several steps down the trampled path. “I think we'll find something on the sand—”

She was gone.

Danny ran back. The grass was still matted, the bundled pillow still in place. There was no path leading away from it, no footsteps or broken stems. Cyn was just gone.

His smile faded, and he took a deep breath.

He walked in a large circle, looking through the grass like she was an object that fell out of his pocket. He tripped over the sundial.

This was the center of Foreverland when they were on the island, where everything started. Danny pushed away the debris and placed his hand on it. There was no tingling, no surge of power.

It was cold and dead.

Danny's head began to throb. The sky was still blue, the air still salty. If this was still a dream, if his physical body was still in the Institute, then he hadn't awakened.
And maybe Cyn's opening her eyes.

“She's all right,” he told himself. Then, “Please let her be all right.”

He waited in case she reappeared. He couldn't stand the thought of her coming back alone. When the sun was directly above him, he decided to follow the path to the beach. He crossed the dunes out to the hardpack, where a set of barefooted tracks still dented the sand, slowly melting in the sliding waves.

The footprints walked straight into the ocean.

Danny stared at the crisp line of the horizon, remembering a time when he sat with Reed, when everything was bleak and hopeless, wondering what was out there. He took off his boots and socks, dug his toes into the ground, the water cool around his ankles.