The Year of Shadows (27 page)

I felt Jax beginning to understand, to remember.
The war
, he thought.
There was a war.

“What war?”

And there was . . . I was making something.

Overhead, a low, wailing sound roared out of the sky.

Me-Jax and Henry-Tillie threw ourselves to the ground and covered our heads.

“Jax, what are you doing?” I hissed, choking on a mouthful of dirt and ash.

Quiet
, Jax said.
The planes! Oh, no.
I could feel him curling up into a ball in my mind.

When I peeked up, I saw others around the courtyard doing the same thing we were: crouching in the dirt. Then everything was quiet, and we waited—one minute, two—and then everyone got up and went back to their business, like nothing had happened.

“I think you’d better explain what’s going on, Tillie,” Henry-Tillie said.

“Here, Tillie, you explain to Henry, and Jax’ll explain to me,” I said.

Well, walk around and act like you’re talking to each other or something,
Jax suggested.
Otherwise everyone’ll think it’s weird if you’re both just standing there in silence, staring at nothing.

He had a point. “Come on,” I said, grabbing Henry-Tillie by the arm. “Can you feel that, Jax? I just grabbed Tillie’s arm.”

No
, Jax said mournfully.
I remember what it felt like, though, to grab her arm. Like everything would be okay, and no one could hurt me.

“So, explain,” I said. I kept holding Henry-Tillie’s arm as we circled the courtyard.

Basically, this is the end of the world,
Jax began.
Or at least, that’s what everyone said to us. I don’t actually know what happened after we . . . well, you know. After we died. But there was a war, and it was bad. There were these dangerous weapons that destroyed pretty much everything.

“Is that why everything’s so gray here?”

Yeah. The weapons created these clouds that blocked out the sun, and people kept getting sick and dying from the inside out, and it was winter all the time, but the war didn’t stop. Why didn’t they stop? I didn’t understand it.

I felt sick to my stomach. I’d never seen war before. It was just one of those things that I pretended to read about (and that Henry actually did read about) in history class.

“Jax?” I ran my fingers across the fence we stood beside. Something here was not right—besides the fact that I was inside a dead person’s memories. “Where exactly are we?”

Jax frowned.
It’s so hard to remember . . .

“The future,” Henry-Tillie blurted. His eyes widened, like he couldn’t believe what he’d just said. “That’s what Tillie says. We’re in the future.”

I had to hold onto the fence beside me to keep from falling down. “But how is that possible? You’re
ghosts
. If you died in the future, before me and Henry were even alive, how can you be ghosts with us now, in the present?”

Jax shrugged.
Time works differently for ghosts. Once you start heading toward Death, all the rules change. All we know is, we’re drawn to our anchors. Somewhere, in your present, are our anchors.

“But you’re older ghosts than Frederick was,” I said. “Even though you died way after he did. How can you be older than him, then? Shouldn’t you be the youngest of all?”

“Tillie says,” Henry said after a second, “that they
are
older than Frederick, because they’ve been ghosts for longer, even though they died later, when you look at it in normal time. But in ghost time, it’s just about how long it
takes you to become a ghost. So, Tillie and Jax died in the future, but they’ve been ghosts for longer than Frederick, even though he died in the past, because it took him longer to become a ghost after he died than it did for them.” Henry paused. “Does that make sense?”

“Not really,” I said. In fact, my head hurt. “But enough for us to get this over with. How do we find your anchors?”

Jax shivered inside me.
There was a hiding spot. I remember that. There was a hiding spot where the organ used to be.

“You mean the pipe organ?” I shook my head as if by doing that I could clear out my confusion. “This used to be the Hall, didn’t it? That’s why you can’t leave the Hall in my time. Because this is where you died—in this camp, which is where the Hall used to be.”

“Tillie says she doesn’t remember the whole Hall being here when they were alive,” Henry-Tillie said. “It was just this camp that some people set up for survivors. And some of the Hall is old walls.”

There was a hiding spot, and a tree,
Jax whispered.
Please, Olivia. Can we go find it?

“Sure. Jax is saying something about a hiding spot . . .”

“Tillie is too, and she says they each had their own spot, separately.”

“Well. That’s a place to start, I guess.”

It was over here.
I could feel Jax’s memories pulling me, like invisible strings.
This way, Olivia.

But Henry-Tillie was walking the other way, and it gave
me a bad feeling in my stomach. I didn’t want to leave him.

“Henry?” My voice, Jax’s voice, sounded so small.

“It’s all right,” Henry-Tillie said, smiling at me. “We’ll meet back here in ten minutes, okay?”

Then he turned and walked away. I watched Tillie’s braids swing until they disappeared at the other side of the camp.

We found Jax’s hiding spot in a ditch strewn with pipes and sludge. Shiny aluminum foil wrappers littered the ground. A deflated basketball, black with grime, sat against a gigantic old tree with bark scraped off its trunk.

“It doesn’t seem safe to be crawling around in this junk,” I said.

Well, just be careful, then.
Jax sighed.
I love this spot. I liked to come here and think, or when Tillie was on duty.

“On duty?”

We all had duty shifts. Just patrolling the fences with the grownups, you know. It was good to have lots of people watching the borders for raiders.

I wasn’t even going to ask him what that meant. I didn’t want to think about raiders and fence patrols; I just wanted to go home. This place was giving me the creeps.

Stumbling over a rusty pipe, I sliced my hand.

“Ouch!”

Oh!
Jax started spinning around in happy circles.
My treasure chest!

I sucked on my finger. Jax’s memory-blood had no taste. “Your what?”

Open that box, that metal one with the jagged edge.

As carefully as possible, I tugged on the handle of a metal box shoved beneath a drainpipe—a drainpipe that looked strangely familiar. Maybe a pipe that had once been in the Hall’s basement or our crummy bathroom.

“This is too weird.”

Open it up! What’s inside?

“You don’t remember?”

I remember there were rocks.

“Seriously, rocks?”

The weapons did neat things to some of the stuff in the ground. The rocks would glow purple and green sometimes.

“You pick weird things for toys.” I pried open the lid of the box, using the ends of Jax’s shirt sleeves to protect my fingers. When the lid snapped open, I did see a bundle of rocks. A plastic sherriff’s badge. A whistle, the boxcar from a model train, a few bars of something wrapped in foil.

Some scraps of . . . tree bark? And braided twine.

That’s it.
Jax was practically beating on the sides of my skull in his excitement.
Olivia, that’s it!

“You know, it’s pretty hard to keep my balance with you shoving yourself around in my brain like that.”

Sorry, but Olivia, this has to be it. I feel it in my . . . well, I’d feel it in my bones if I had bones. I was making this for Tillie—this has to be my anchor!

I gathered up the braided twine and the tree bark.
Someone had peeled away pieces of the bark into thin strips. “You were making her a bracelet?”

We were each working on one. Friendship bracelets, you know? Oh, I remember now! Olivia, this is wonderful. I remember everything. I remember so much.

I tried to hug him through my brain, which was a very wobbly sensation. “Keep going.”

We wanted to make bracelets for each other so that if I was on duty and I got scared, I could hold the bracelet or rub it, like for good luck, and it’d be like Tillie was right there with me. And she was going to make one for me, and we were going to switch them, so it’d be like we had pieces of each other all the time, no matter what.

“And you think this is your anchor?”

Positive. It reminds me of Tillie. And I never got to give it to—

That low wail sounded again from the skies, louder this time, louder than thunder.

“Jax?” I could barely hear myself shouting over the racket. I clamped my hands to my ears, but it didn’t help. The wail turned piercing, shrill.

Run
.
Hurry, run! Where’s Tillie?

In the middle of camp, something exploded. Several shacks shattered. Dirt and rocks rained down on the heads of people running for cover.

I was one of those people, except I wasn’t running for cover.

I was running for Tillie. And for Henry.

Find them,
Jax sobbed, as the sky swarmed with black
planes. Explosion after explosion rattled the ground, throwing us down into the dirt. But every time, we pulled ourselves back up.

The half-finished friendship bracelet dangled from my fingers; the twine was turning dark.

I stared down at myself. Tiny red wounds dotted Jax’s body, but I couldn’t feel them. It was like my body was shutting down.

Run faster!
Jax screamed. Together we ran, pushing aside anything that got in our way. We wouldn’t be able to find her in time. I knew that. That was the point, that was why ghost-Tillie and ghost-Jax couldn’t see or hear each other.

They hadn’t been able to find each other before they died. They had never been able to give each other their bracelets or say good-bye.

Tillie?
Jax’s fingers were scraping my insides, digging for a way out.
Tillie! Where are you? Don’t leave me here!

In the split second before it happened, I saw a girl with braided hair running straight for us through the smoke. A bracelet dangled from her fist.

The next instant, the loudest noise I’d ever heard popped my eardrums. The ground between me and Tillie—and Henry—exploded. A red-hot light blinded me.

It wasn’t like being stabbed to death; I didn’t feel much.

W
HEN WE CAME
to, gasping on the floor of the stage, Henry pushed himself to his feet, grabbed his backpack off the floor, and ran away.

“Henry?” I shook my head, trying to blink the fuzz from my eyes. My skin tingled. I had
exploded
. I felt sick and torn open. “Henry, where are you going?”

Igor was licking my neck.
Let him go. Meow. I was scared with you sitting there all frozen like that. Meow. I hate these sharing sessions. Look at me, I’m so upset I can’t even speak properly. Meow, meow.

Tillie and Jax were sad blobs of gray smoke near the back of the stage, but I had just been blown up for them; they could handle themselves for a few minutes. Something had to have been seriously wrong for Henry to just rush out like that.

So I followed him.

It was a bad idea. First of all, it was almost one in the morning. Twelve-year-old girls shouldn’t be running around cities at one in the morning, unless maybe they have superpowers, and even then it’s questionable.
Second, it was freezing cold, even through my jacket.

But I had to find Henry. I pushed myself faster than I’d ever run before. My throat burned with the cold, but I didn’t care. I caught the tail end of Henry’s legs racing around the corner onto Tenth Street and pushed myself to run faster. Moonlight shone on the black streets and the white traffic lines and the glassy skyscrapers. Everything was the colors of ghosts—except for Henry’s red hair.

After running for ages, a stitch pinching my side, I followed Henry onto a smaller, quieter street I didn’t recognize. His backpack jangled. I bet it was that jar he always kept with him, the dirty, rattling one from the séance.

“Henry!” A car raced by with people yelling out the windows. Henry had turned past a brick stoop and was climbing up a black iron gate. “Henry, wait!”

He froze, halfway up the gate.

“Why’d you leave so fast?” I said, bending over to catch my breath. “Are you okay?”

“You shouldn’t be here.” He jumped to the ground, trying to push me back the way I’d come. His voice sounded strange and closed-off. “Get out of here, Olivia.”

“But why’d you—?”

“
Leave.
Why won’t you listen to me?”

I stepped back. Henry had never talked to me like that before. Not since we’d become friends, anyway.

Before I could say anything, the porch light turned on, and five people piled out onto the porch. Two grown-ups
and three kids. Only the grown-ups looked like each other, and none of them looked a thing like Henry. I realized then that I’d never actually paid much attention to Henry’s parents before. They’d always dropped him off places from the car. I’d never seen them face-to-face.