Nose put his mask back on, and I pulled my glove back over my ghost hand, crouching next to Marcus.
There, just past my dad’s studio shed, was a heaping pile of charred remains, the two old brick chimneys of the fireplaces jutting up out of the black debris like alien monoliths, the only real landmarks of what had once been my home.
“So, that was your house?” Nose asked softly.
“Yeah,” I said, looking beyond it to the front yard area and the driveway. “But I don’t see my mom.”
“She may be parked where we can’t see her,” Marcus said, “or waiting for you to show yourself before she does. But we can’t wait. The CAMFers have probably zeroed in on us already.”
“So they know where we are, but we have no idea where they are,” I pointed out. How had this ever seemed like a good plan?
“Which is why we need to move fast,” Marcus said. “Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” I was measuring distances in my head. Our position was halfway between the shed and the old maple tree.
“Remember, we’re right here if you need us,” Marcus promised.
I exhaled, took a deep breath, and stood up. I stepped away from the guys, wading through tangled ivy and rotten leaves to the edge of my back yard. I was tempted to glance back to see if I could pick out the three teenage boys crouched in the shadows, but that might give away their position. And the CAMFers needed to think I was alone, that I had come by myself to meet my mother.
I stepped out on the lawn and realized I was shaking, my body grown suddenly cold and wobbly. This was where I’d barely escaped a fiery death, where the CAMFers had almost killed me, whether they’d been trying to or not. They had done that, and here I was, baiting them. This was stupid. Why had I ever agreed to this?
After a few calming breaths, I walked across the back yard and stood at the edge of the burnt back porch. The underporch was gone, reduced to damp, grey ash. I took a few more steps up the incline toward the front of the house, and stopped. I hadn’t expected to get this far. We’d thought the CAMFers would try for me as soon as I showed myself. And I still didn’t see my mother anywhere. Maybe she hadn’t come.
I walked along the side yard, coming even with the living room chimney, and something caught my eye—color, pattern, a familiar wisp of shape and face, a blue figure on black. It was my dad’s painting,
The Other Olivia
, tossed on top of what had once been our leather couch and looking only mildly scorched. My heart leapt with sudden, inexplicable joy. It had survived. I wouldn’t have to live in a world where I would never see it again. But why would anyone just leave it there, like trash, like nothing?
I glanced around, scanning the front yard and the street, my neighbors’ fences and houses. I strained, listening, but there was no one nearby. Not my mother. Not the CAMFers. Not even a stray cat or two. Nobody. The CAMFers hadn’t taken our bait. Maybe they weren’t even monitoring my mom’s e-mail. In all our planning, we’d considered every possible scenario except this one—the one where the bad guys didn’t even show up.
I let myself relax a little. I should go back. The guys were waiting. I knew that. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave
The Other Olivia
lying there like a piece of garbage.
I gave a quick, furtive look to the dark spot between the garden shed and the maple. Then I waded through soggy black gunk, stepped over several piles of melted something, and bent over my dad’s painting. The canvas was singed a little, but only around the edges. It didn’t appear to have any water damage, which was amazing. I could have it cut down and re-stretched over a new frame. It was salvageable. I was sure of it.
I grabbed the edges of the painting, hefting it in my arms.
A few feet to my left, a dark form emerged from behind the living room chimney and reached out for me.
“Got ya,” said Mike Palmer, grabbing at me.
I swung the painting out of pure reflex, knocking his hands aside.
He grabbed it, and we grappled, the painting between us. He was trying to rip it from my hands, but I hung on for all I was worth. This was not the plan. The plan had been for me to bolt and run at the merest sign of CAMFers. They would chase me back to the guys in the woods, where Nose and Yale would split off and lead them on a wild goose chase while Marcus and I went to get the blades. The plan had not included my father’s painting. I needed to let go of it and get out of there.
Instead, I kicked as hard as I could under the edge of the canvas, feeling my boot connect solidly with some softer part of Mike Palmer.
He bellowed and yanked the painting upward, pulling me off my feet. I didn’t let go. I was not going to let go. This was the bastard who had taken everything from me. He’d burned my house to the ground with me in it. He’d stolen the only personal possession I’d had left in the world, while I’d lain unconscious in an ambulance. And now he was trying to take something else, and I’d be damned if I was going to let him do that. I needed my dad’s painting. I was not leaving it behind. I was not losing one more thing.
I came back down on my feet, one of my ankles twisting, and I lost hold of the painting. At least that’s what I thought happened. One minute the painting was there, the fulcrum between me and Mike Palmer’s struggle, and the next minute it was gone.
We both fell backwards.
I crashed into the soggy couch behind me.
Mike stumbled back against the chimney. The painting wasn’t in his hands. It wasn’t on the ground. It wasn’t anywhere in the debris. It was as if it had gotten fed up with being fought over and simply blipped itself out of existence.
“What the—what did you do, you little freak?” The Fire Chief asked, fear in his eyes.
And that’s when I saw the handgun tucked in his belt.
The gun he was reaching for.
“Olivia,” someone called, and I looked up to see Marcus, and Nose, and Yale running across my back yard toward me, running toward us, toward the man with the gun.
“No!” I yelled, rising from the couch. This wasn’t the plan. I was supposed to lead the CAMFers to them. They weren’t supposed to run to my rescue. I hadn’t let them bring their guns. There weren’t supposed to be any guns.
Mike Palmer ignored all that, pulled out his weapon, and fired.
UNLOCKING THE BULLET
It was strange how things seemed to happen out of order.
Marcus, who was only a few feet away from me, suddenly jerked backwards and crumpled to the ground.
The weapon in Mike Palmer’s hand gave a tooth-jarring crack.
Nose let out a guttural yell, and leapt over Marcus, still charging Mike.
Mike took aim at Nose.
Yale fell to his knees beside Marcus.
I saw it all. Saw Marcus lying still and silent where he’d fallen, Yale bending over him. Saw Mike’s finger pulling back on the trigger again. Saw Nose coming, relentless, fearless, running straight toward the man who was going to kill him. I saw everything that shouldn’t happen. That couldn’t happen. That was happening. Everything that would be my fault and destroy what little was left to me.
I saw all this in the blink of an eye, and I threw myself at Mike Palmer, clipping him in the shoulder and knocking him off balance even as his gun discharged a second time. Mike tried to right himself, to swing the gun toward me, but he was too slow. I jumped on his back, arms locked around his neck, legs wrapped around his waist; clinging to him, I covered his face with my hands so he couldn’t see to shoot again.
He reached up with a meaty arm, knocking my hands away, but I clung to him with my legs.
I knew what to do.
I tugged at the edge of my glove, stripping it from my ghost hand and tossing it away. I grasped at Mike Palmer’s nose, his lips, his eyebrows, wherever my ghost fingers could find purchase.
He roared and tried to shake me off, bucking and spinning in a circle like a deranged bull. I could feel his entire body spasm in fear. He was afraid now. Afraid of my PSS touching his face. So afraid that he dropped his gun and reached up with both hands, trying to pry me off.
“Don’t move,” Nose barked from in front of us, pointing the gun at the Fire Chief’s chest.
But Mike Palmer was beyond reason. He charged backwards, ramming me into the chimney, pinning me between unrelenting brick and the hardness of his back. The air whooshed from my lungs. A cascade of cold, crumbling mortar trickled down the inside of my shirt. I was losing my grip on him.
But if I let go, he wasn’t going to stop. Nose was going to have to shoot him. That was the only way we were going to get out of here, and it was all because I hadn’t let go of my dad’s painting. A painting that was now inexplicably gone. If only Mike Palmer had disappeared with it.
And then he did.
One second he was there, as solid as the chimney he was grinding me into, and the next he was gone.
I dropped to the ground like a stone, my butt banging painfully as I landed at the base of the chimney.
“Holy shit!” Nose said, waving the gun back and forth wildly. “Where did he go?”
I just sat, curled in a ball of pain, trying to breathe again.
Nose scrambled over to me. “What the hell did you do?” he asked, awe in his voice.
“Don’t know,” I managed, sitting up a little and leaning back against the chimney. Police sirens howled in the distance. Someone had called in the gunshots already.
“We have to get out of here,” Nose said, grabbing my arm and pulling me up. He still had Mike’s gun in his other hand. Together we stumbled away, racing back toward Yale and Marcus. Yale rose up ahead of us, falling to one knee for a minute, then regaining his balance. He had something big slung over his shoulder, and it took me a moment to realize it was Marcus.
The sirens were getting closer. We all made it to the dark edge of the woods at the same time, but we didn’t stop there. I led the way, following a faint path by the light of my ghost hand. I could hear Nose and Yale laboring behind me, both carrying Marcus now. I knew where to take them. There was a place I had discovered as a kid, an old cement ice house that had once stored blocks of ice harvested from Bluefly Lake before the age of refrigeration. I had taken Emma there a few times, but mostly it was the place I went to be utterly alone, to hide from the world, to escape and think.
Yale and Nose didn’t ask where we were going. They just followed me, even when we began to descend the sharp incline that led down into the gulley where the ice house was. At the bottom I turned, holding up my ghost hand so they could see, gesturing toward the little building behind me.
The icehouse didn’t have a door anymore, just a cold cement floor, four walls, and a rusted tin roof. Nose and Yale set Marcus gently on the floor inside, both breathing heavily with exertion.
I crawled in next to Marcus, and looked down at him. His eyes were wide open and staring, just like in the cemetery. There was a bullet hole in the left front panel of his jacket, but there wasn’t any blood. I unzipped it and saw the same hole in his t-shirt, but still no blood. I couldn’t even see a wound. What the hell? Was he wearing a flak jacket? I tugged at the t-shirt material, pulling it away from his flesh. Then I stuck my fingers into the hole and yanked, tearing the shirt in two and exposing a hole in his chest the size of a beach ball.
I stared down at it, seeing the pebbly expanse of the cement floor right through his chest cavity.
“Oh my God!” I scrambled backwards, straight into Yale’s lap. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
“Olivia,” Yale’s voice came from a great distance, “It’s all right.”
“No!” I shook my head. “No. He’s dead. Oh my God, he’s dead.”
“Calm down” Yale said, wrapping his arms around me, “Marcus is okay.”
“Okay?” I echoed hysterically. “He’s not okay. There’s a huge hole in his chest. He’s dead. Dead is not okay.”
“Usually, that’s true,” Yale said, “but not with Marcus.”
From across the ice house, Nose voiced his agreement.
They were crazy. They had to be. Marcus was their hero, the one who had saved them from the CAMFers. He was their leader and they looked up to him. They were in shock, unable to admit that he was dead. Very dead. Extremely dead. How could Mike Palmer’s handgun make a hole that size in anybody?
And then I saw a spark of blue, like lightning, flash from the hollow of Marcus’s chest.
I jerked back even further into Yale’s arms, smashing him against the cement wall.
“Just watch,” Nose said.
The flash came again, and then again, pulsing almost like a heartbeat, a heartbeat of light and energy. It gained rhythm, flashing faster and faster, strobing the small interior of the ice house until I felt almost nauseous. The flashes began to run together, indistinguishable from one another until, at last, they became one steady PSS glow.
Marcus inhaled a gasping breath and suddenly sat up.
I stared at him—at his chest—his PSS chest, the cavity that I’d mistaken as a bullet hole now filled with it. Marcus had a PSS chest. How was that even possible? What about his vital organs, his heart and lungs? Even as I wondered, I saw them forming out of the swirling storm of PSS, taking shape, his blue heart pumping, his lungs expanding as he inhaled, frosty ribs solidifying around them like sideways icicles. It was like watching some kind of a medical hologram. Internal organs and bones of raw PSS energy. I had never heard of anything like that. My ghost hand didn’t have bones. What kind of control would it take to form physiological details like that?
“What happened?” Marcus demanded, scanning his surroundings. His eyes fell on me wrapped in Yale’s arms, and he frowned.
Yale dropped his arms to his side and said, “We’re safe. For now.”
“The CAMFer disappeared,” Nose added.
“What do you mean he disappeared?” Marcus asked. “Where’d he go? How do you know he didn’t follow us? That they aren’t tracking us.”
Both Nose and Yale glanced at me.
“She disappeared him,” Nose said. “One minute he was there. The next he wasn’t.”
Marcus looked at me. “You didn’t tell me you could do that,” he accused.
I lifted my chin and stared back at him. “Because I can’t. I didn’t. I don’t know what happened to him. And how dare you accuse
me
of not telling you something,” I finished, glaring pointedly at his chest.