Shift

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  Zachary and I grabbed the scattered papers, then leaped out of the back of the van. We stumbled when our feet hit the road’s sloping shoulder. Steadying each other, we dashed into the dark woods.

  “Stop!” Jeffries shouted as Acker gagged and retched.

  “Don’t stop.” Zachary took my arm with his free hand. “Keep running, no matter what.”

  I ran into the darkness, clutching my mother’s words to my chest, hoping I wouldn’t fall into a hole or trip over a root.

  When the shots rang out, I ran even faster.

  I ran until my lungs couldn’t hold my breath, until my legs were so numb, they felt like part of someone else’s body.

  Finally I pulled Zachary to a stop. “Rest. For. A sec.”

  As I collapsed to sit on a fallen tree, Zachary put a hand to his ear. He’d barely broken a sweat.

  “Do you hear anything?” I pressed my lips together to quiet my breathing, but that just made it rattle in my nose.

  “Not yet.” He scanned the forest. “But they’ll be sending out a search party, maybe with ATVs or dogs.”

  “Why did they take us?” I panted. “What do they want?”

  “Probably these.” He held up the journal pages he’d grabbed, then folded them and put them in his back jeans pocket.

  “They were after Eowyn, so maybe they followed us from her office.”

  “And we led them right to what they wanted. Brilliant.”

  “But then why not just take the papers and let us go?” My throat tightened. “Why shoot at us?”

  “It was just a warning shot. Probably.” He helped me to my feet. “Let’s keep moving until we cross a stream, cover our trail. Downhill should take us to water.” Then he added, “Theoretically,” to himself.

  I looked at the sky through the trees. The leaves blocked most of the stars, but the waxing gibbous moon’s yellow-white glow shone through. At just past midnight, it would be starting to set in the west. “If we keep the moon to our right, we’ll head south, and if nothing else, we won’t walk in circles.”

  “Good idea.” He took my stack of journal pages, folded them, and put them in his other pocket. “Ready?”

  I hurried after him on aching legs, grasping saplings and rocks to steady myself as I crab-walked down the steepening hill. My feet slid on the damp leaves, slippery as ice.

  Eventually I got the hang of it, and as my confidence increased, so did my pace. I tried to catch up to Zachary so I could speak to him without yelling.

  To my left, an animal dashed out of the underbrush. I turned my head, taking my eyes off the ground at my feet.

  My toe snagged a root. I yelped as I pitched forward. I reached for anything to slow my fall, but I just rolled faster and faster. Rocks poked my gut and brambles slashed my arms and legs.

  I hit something hard. “Ooufh!”

  “Christ, that was close,” said Zachary, who had broken my fall. Before I could ask what he meant, he pulled me tight against him. I turned my head to see, in the glow of filtered moonlight, the edge of a boulder six inches from where he’d stopped me. Beyond that edge was at least a twenty-foot plummet onto a pile of rocks.

  “Aura, you could’ve been killed.”

  We held each other close as our breathing slowed. What if I’d died without telling Zachary how I felt? After a sudden accident I would’ve probably become a ghost he could never see.

  And what good would it do Zachary to know I loved him, when I’d be gone forever?

  I tried to pull back so I could look him in the eye. “Zach . . .”

  “Shh.” His grip tightened. “I hear something.”

  I listened over the pounding of my pulse. A distant rustling, as if the wind had stirred up a giant pile of leaves. But the night had turned heavy and breezeless.

  “I think it’s water,” he said. My tongue ached at the mere sound of the word.

  I only limped a little as we made our way down the rest of the hill—slower this time. The rustling grew more distinct, and soon we saw moonlight glisten off a small, slow river.

  “Thank God.” I ran forward, sank to my knees on the flat bank, and dipped my hands into the water.

  “Don’t drink it! It could be loaded with bacteria.”

  I sniffed the water in my cupped palms. “It smells clean.”

  “There’s a bacteria that loves clear mountain streams best. Giardia, I think it’s called.”

  “What could be worse than dying of thirst?”

  “Dying of diarrhea.”

  “You win.” I dropped the water and wiped my hands on my jeans.

  “Let’s hurry up and cross.” He took off his shoes and socks. I started rolling up the cuffs of my jeans. “No need for that. Here, hold my shoes, and be quiet.”

  “Okay, but—whoa!” I flailed as he lifted me into his arms.

  “Shh.” He strode forward into the river. “No sense in us both getting hypothermia.”

  “You hear me complaining?”

  “For once, no.”

  I resisted the urge to whap him with his shoe, and instead wrapped my other arm around his shoulders. I tried not to notice how little my weight seemed to sap his steady strength.

  To distract myself, I blurted the first dorky question that came to mind. “What do you charge for your ferry service?”

  “My fee’s negotiable.” He increased his pace, making the cold water splash around us.

  “The song says not to pay you until you get me to the other side.”

  “What song?”

  “From the eighties. ‘Don’t Pay the Ferryman.’”

  “How old are you? Forty?”

  “I like all kinds of music.” I grimaced as a wave of frigid water seeped through the seat of my jeans. “The cool kinds.”

  “So what kinds aren’t—ow!” Zachary lurched to the side. His arms tightened so hard I thought he’d crush me.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Aye.” But his eyes were wide, and his breath came quick and shallow. “Let’s keep going.”

  He limped faster, cursing quietly in Gaelic or maybe Glaswegian English.

  When we reached the shore, he set me down carefully, then collapsed onto the smooth, sloped riverbank.

  “What happened?” I knelt beside him.

  “Stepped on some driftwood, I think. Turned my ankle. I’m fine, really.”

  “You’re not fine, you’re bleeding.” I set down his shoes. “Give me your shirt or something so I can stop it.”

  “Let’s use yours instead.” His eyebrows popped up. “It could be my ferry fare.”

  My face warmed at the idea, and at the way his r’s rolled extra strong when he was trying to charm me. “Take it off or bleed to death.”

  “I won’t bleed to death.”

  I put my hands on my hips, examining him. “Are you shy about taking off your clothes?”

  “What, you’d rather I be an exhibitionist?”

  “You wore a kilt to the prom.” Not to mention had countless bouts of fifteen-minute sex with Suzanne. “You like people looking at you that way.”

  “Well.” He looked toward the river, but a fallen tree blocked his view. “As a lad, I was quite, er, doughy.”

  “Doughy? Like bread?”

  “Unbaked bread. Once when I was twelve, I lost a bet, and three of my so-called mates stole my shirt and made me walk a mile home, half-naked. The girl next door, the one I liked . . .” He paused. “She said I looked like a marshmallow. I hate marshmallows.”

  I winced. “That sucks.”

  “I was so crushed, I threatened to throw myself in the River Clyde.”

  “You poor thing.” I glanced down at his bleeding foot. “But I’m still not taking off my shirt.”

  Zachary looked hurt. “That wasn’t my point.”

  “But you wouldn’t have stopped me.”

  “Well, no. I’m not a complete bampot.” He paused, as if waiting for me to confirm that he was crazy, then pulled his black polo shirt over his he
ad and tossed it to me. Zachary definitely wasn’t a dough boy anymore.

  Forcing my focus, I held what looked like the cleanest part of his shirt against the wound. He scrunched his eyes at the pressure, and his lips parted in a soft, halting gasp.

  “Breathe.” I was reminding myself as much as him. “Sorry about your shirt.”

  “No, you’re not.” He gave me a cocky grin as he leaned back on his hands. I pressed harder on the wound. “Ow.” His grin vanished.

  Once the bleeding stopped, I said, “Wiggle your foot and see if it hurts.”

  He did as I asked, his neck muscles tensing. “Doesn’t hurt.”

  “Bullshit, you probably sprained your ankle.” I pointed to a tilted log behind him. “Rest it on that overnight so it won’t swell up like a balloon.”

  “We need to keep going.” He reached for his shoes, but I snatched them away.

  “Don’t be an idiot. If you walk now, it’ll get worse. And I can’t carry you.” I moved the log closer to him and adjusted the height. “Besides, I’m so tired I can’t think in a straight line. And when I do, the line leads to us stuck out here for days, with me watching you die of tetanus or gangrene, or, I don’t know.” I smacked a mosquito on my arm. “Malaria.”

  “I promise I won’t die,” he said with a chuckle, which faded when he saw my face. “Sorry. I can’t believe I said that.” He shut up and propped his heel on the log.

  I tied his shirt around his ankle as a makeshift compression bandage. Then I sat with my back to him and his bare chest, keeping an eye out for dumpers on the far shore—as much as I could, from our secluded spot.

  Zachary let out a long breath, making a cheek-puffing noise. “So what do we do now?”

  After a review of our inventory, we determined that we had, in total, jackshit and sod-all.

  In other words, nothing. So we moved on to the much bigger version of “What do we do now?” “Now,” as in, the rest of our lives. Knowing what we knew.

  “What my mother did with my father—” The F-word felt strange in my mouth, connected to a real person. “You think the Shine made that possible?”

  “Maybe. After all, my father and your mother couldn’t have children, not before that light filled them up at the solstice.”

  “First him, then her. Making you the Last and me the First.”

  “Last, First, and only. No one else was born in our minutes.”

  “And we each have special powers to go with it.”

  “Right.”

  “So maybe it’s destiny. We were put here to do . . . something with ghosts.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So what if my mom had said no? What if she and my dad had hesitated, like Logan and I did, and there hadn’t been enough time to make me?” I hugged my knees to my chest, despite the stiffness of my damp jeans. “I never would’ve been born. No Shift, no post-Shifters. The world would’ve stayed the same, with just a few people seeing ghosts.”

  “Maybe you did have to be born, or someone had to be born to your mother, to do whatever the First is supposed to do. But maybe your father didn’t have to be a ghost.” Zachary sat forward, almost touching me. “Maybe the Shift was only about ghosts because your father was one.”

  “So if he’d been a plumber, the Shift would’ve been about toilets?”

  “I’m only saying, you can get all tangled up in talk of destiny. Anyone wouldn’t have been born if their parents hadn’t met. Or they would be born, but to other parents.”

  “But then they’d be different people.”

  “Genetically. Their soul would be them.”

  I’d never heard Zachary talk like this. “You believe in souls?”

  “Sure.” He gestured to the sky above us. “I think they’re all queued up out there, waiting for the next person in the world to be born, and when that life begins, they hop into that body. Like a taxi stand at a railway station. They take the next available car.”

  “Seems pretty random.”

  “A lot less tragic than a person never existing because their parents never met or because they decided not to have children.”

  I remembered what Megan had said, after our four-way meeting with Logan, something about me and Zachary being like those VIPs who don’t have to wait in line at a club, the ones the bouncers unhook the red velvet rope for.

  Had we jumped the line when the club of life was temporarily closed?

  “My mom said something about solstice meaning ‘sun standing still.’ And that at some exact moment, the sun stops leaving and starts returning.”

  “Which might have been when she and my father stood in that light.”

  “She wished that people did that, too, instead of just leaving. And then it happened—my dad came back so she could see him.” I spoke faster, before the thoughts escaped me. “Maybe that’s what the Shift is all about—giving people who died suddenly a chance to say good-bye.”

  I thought of Logan’s twisty, turny road to peace and was filled with a sudden, aching sense of purpose—not just for me, but every post-Shifter.

  I spun to face Zachary. “And that’s why me and everyone younger can see ghosts.”

  He furrowed his brow. “Why?”

  “It’s hard for a pre-Shifter to understand.”

  “Then help me.”

  “Ghosts need to pass on. Some of them do it on their own, but others might never if not for us.”

  “Like your aunt’s clients, the ones you translate for.”

  “Obviously,” I said, “but lots of other ghosts don’t need anything that drastic. They just need to talk, or be seen.”

  “But wouldn’t it have been easier to let everyone else already in the world see and talk to ghosts? Why wait for all these children to be born?”

  “Because we weren’t afraid of them. Babies always smile or laugh at ghosts—they think they’re pretty. They don’t know yet that they’re supposed to freak.”

  He gazed at me for a long moment. “I don’t know if your theory is the least bit true, but it’s pure beautiful.”

  I felt my eyes crinkle with joy. He might not understand what it meant to be a post-Shifter, but at least he appreciated it.

  I twitched my shoulder in an attempt to shrug. “It just popped into my head. I’m still working out the kinks.” I remembered that we now had access to more answers than ever. “Hey, let’s reread my mom’s notes. Maybe there’s important stuff on one of the pages I skimmed.”

  Zachary got up on his knees and reached into his back pockets. “Oh, no.”

  My heart stopped. “Are they gone?”

  “No.” He struggled to pull out the pages, and for a second I thought his panic was a joke. Then he unfolded them.

  The sheets were soaked through, the blue and black ink smeared beyond recognition.

  “Aura . . . oh God, I’m sorry.”

  I grabbed the papers and pulled them apart, trying to find one entry that hadn’t been destroyed. But the journal was now a giant wad of wet pulp.

  A keening noise started at the back of my throat. I smothered my mouth with my hands to keep from screaming. If I released all the anguish I felt, the DMP would be able to hear it from Pittsburgh.

  Zachary wrapped his arms around me. “Aura, I’m so sorry.”

  I pressed my face to his chest, the soggy pages clamped between us. My hands formed useless fists, opening and closing with the rhythm of my sobs. He stroked my hair, murmuring the word “sorry” again and again.

  Finally my shudders eased into shivers. “It was all I had of my father.”

  “I know. I was so stupid.”

  “Not your fault. I didn’t think of it either.” My sob hitched into a hiccup as I clutched the papers, wringing out a cascade of water.

  “Listen.” Zachary touched the mass of white in my hand. “Now no one will ever know but us. Agent Acker only read a few pages.”

  “But we don’t know how far he got.” I turned away to wipe my face, wishing for a box of tissues. I didn
’t want to get snot on my sleeve, or use some random leaf that might end up being poi-son ivy.

  “Here.” Zachary started to unwrap the shirt from his ankle.

  “No, you need it.”

  “And you can wrap it back up after you’ve used it. Unless your tears are made of acid.”

  “Feels like it.” I sniffled and wiped my face with the shirt. “I was going to destroy the journal pages anyway. But not until after I memorized them.” I blotted my eyes before they could overflow again. “Now they’re gone forever.”

  “No. We’ll re-create what we can remember.”

  “With what?” I started rewrapping his ankle. “We have no paper, no cell phones. We don’t even have a pen to write on our arms.”

  “Come here.” He lay on his back and patted his bare shoulder. “There’s something you should see.”

  I eyed him warily. Just because we probably wouldn’t destroy the world with a single kiss didn’t mean I was ready to cuddle. Part of me still ached with humiliation at the memory of his voice sighing Becca’s name.

  “If you don’t believe me,” he said, “look up.”

  I lifted my chin, then gasped. The moon had disappeared behind the mountain, and a section of clear, dark sky stretched out above the riverbank. It held more stars than I’d ever seen, even in the field we used at home. The Milky Way was no longer a white blur, but rather a giant arm with sinews and veins.

  For the first time, a sky full of stars didn’t make me feel small. No longer a mere tapestry suspended above us, the universe felt close at hand. We were part of it.

  “We’ll talk about everything we read in the journal,” Zachary said, “and write it in the stars.”

  I tightened his ankle wrap with one last tug. “You’re so cheesy.”

  “Yes. Play along. We’ll start from the beginning.”

  I gave in and lay down on my back beside him, resting my head on his shoulder. Maybe it was the change in position, or maybe it was the warm, rich scent of his skin, but my thirst- and tear-induced headache began to ease.

  “No,” I said. “Let’s start from the end.”

  I woke the next morning on my side facing the river, my head propped on Zachary’s arm. My own arm was curled beneath me, still fast asleep.