by Lauren Kate
Luce chewed on her lower lip. Punching through that Announcer yesterday had seriously rocked her foundation. She was still physically disoriented, emotionally exhausted, and that didn’t even begin to address how it had made her feel about Daniel.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You mean, more of what you were doing yesterday?” Miles asked.
Shelby cranked her head around and glared at Miles. “Are you still here?”
Miles picked up a pillow that had fallen on the floor and chucked it at her. She swatted it back at him, seeming impressed with her own reflexes.
“Okay, fine. Miles can stay. Mascots are always handy. And we may need someone to throw under a bus. Right, Luce?”
Luce closed her eyes. Yes, she was dying to know more about her past, but what if it was as hard to swallow as it had been the day before? Even with Miles and Shelby at her side, she was scared to try again.
But then she remembered the day Francesca and Steven had glimpsed the Sodom and Gomorrah Announcer in front of the class. Afterward, the other students had reeled, but Luce kept thinking that whether or not they had glimpsed that gruesome scene didn’t matter in the least: It would still have happened. Just like her past.
For the sakes of all her former selves, Luce couldn’t turn away now. “Let’s do it,” she said to her friends.
Miles gave the girls a few minutes to get dressed, and they reconvened in the hallway. But then Shelby refused to go out to the forest where Luce had summoned the Announcers.
“Don’t look at me like that. Dawn just got nabbed, and the woods are dark and creepy. I don’t really want to be next, you know?”
That was when Miles insisted it would be good for Luce to try to practice summoning the Announcers somewhere new, like the dorm room.
“Just whistle and bring ’em running,” he said. “Make those Announcers your bitches. You know you want to.”
“I don’t want them to start lurking around here, though,” Shelby said, turning to Luce. “No offense, but a girl likes her privacy.”
Luce wasn’t offended. But it wasn’t like the Announcers ever really stopped following her, regardless of when she summoned them. She didn’t want the shadows dropping by the dorm room unannounced any more than Shelby did.
“The thing with the Announcers is demonstrating control. It’s like training a new puppy. You just have to let it know who’s boss.”
Luce cocked her head at Miles. “Since when do you know so much useful stuff about the Announcers?”
Miles blushed. “I may not always ‘apply myself’ in class, but I am capable of a few things.”
“So what? She just stands there and summons?” Shelby asked.
Luce stood on Shelby’s rainbow-colored yoga mat in the center of the room and thought about how Steven had coached her. “Let’s open a window,” she said.
Shelby hopped up to raise the sash of the broad window, letting in a fresh blast of chilling sea air. “Good idea. Makes it more hospitable.”
“And cold,” Miles said, pulling up the hood of his sweatshirt.
Then the two of them sat on the bed facing Luce, as if she were a performer on a stage.
She closed her eyes, trying not to feel on the spot. But instead of thinking of the shadows, instead of summoning them in her mind, all she could think of was Dawn and how terrified she must have been the night before, how she must be feeling even now, back with her family. She’d bounced back after the freakish incident on the yacht, but this was so much more serious. And it was Luce’s fault. Well, Luce’s and Daniel’s, for bringing her here.
He kept saying he was taking her to a safer place. Now Luce wondered whether all he was really doing was making Shoreline dangerous for everyone else.
A gasp from Miles made Luce open her eyes. She looked just above the window, where a large charcoal-gray Announcer was pressed against the ceiling. At first it looked like it could have been a normal shadow, cast by the floor lamp Shelby moved into the corner when she did her Vinyasa. But then the Announcer began to spread across the ceiling until the room looked as if it had been given a deathly coat of paint, leaving a cold, foul-smelling wake over Luce’s head. Out of her reach.
The Announcer she hadn’t even summoned—the Announcer that could contain, well, anything—was taunting her.
She inhaled nervously, remembering what Miles had said about control. She concentrated so fiercely that her brain began to hurt. Her face was red and her eyes were strained to the point where she was going to have to just give up. But then:
The Announcer buckled, sliding down to Luce’s feet like a thick bolt of dropped fabric. Squinting, she discerned a smaller, plumper brownish shadow hovering over the larger, darker one, tracing its movements, almost the way a sparrow might fly closely in line with a hawk. What was this one after?
“Incredible,” Miles whispered. Luce tried to let Miles’s words sink in as a compliment. These things that had terrorized her all her life, that made her miserable? That she had always feared? Now they served her. Which really was kind of incredible. It hadn’t occurred to her until she’d seen the intrigue on Miles’s face. For the first time, she felt pretty badass.
She controlled her breathing and took her time guiding it off the floor and into her hands. Once the large gray Announcer was within reach, the smaller one poured to the floor like a golden bend of the light from the window, blending in with the hardwood planks.
Luce took the edges of the Announcer and held her breath, praying that the message inside was more innocent than yesterday’s. She tugged, surprised to feel this shadow give her more resistance than any of the others had. It looked so sheer and insubstantial, but felt stiff in her hands. By the time she’d coaxed it into a window about a foot square, her arms were aching.
“This is the best I can do,” she told Miles and Shelby. They stood up, drawing close.
The gray veil within the Announcer lifted, or Luce thought it did, but then another gray veil lay underneath. She squinted until she saw the gray texture roiling and moving, realizing it wasn’t the shadow she was seeing anymore: The gray veil they were looking at was a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. Shelby coughed.
The smoke never really cleared, but Luce’s eyes got used to it; soon she could see a broad half-moon table with a red felt top. Playing cards were arrayed in neat rows across its surface. A row of strangers sat crowded at one side. Some looked jumpy and nervous, like the bald man who kept loosening his polka-dot tie and whistling under his breath. Others looked exhausted, like the hairsprayed woman ashing a cigarette into a half-full glass of something. Her gloopy mascara was wearing off her upper lashes, leaving a seam of black grit under her eyes.
And across the table, a pair of hands were flying through a deck of cards, expertly flipping over a card at a time to each person at the table. Luce inched closer to Miles so she could get a better look. She was distracted by the flashing neon lights from a thousand slot machines just beyond the tables. That was before she saw the dealer.
She thought she’d get used to seeing versions of herself in the Announcers. Young, hopeful, ever naïve. But this was different. The woman dealing cards in the seedy casino wore a white oxford shirt, snug black pants, and a black vest that bulged at the chest. Her fingernails were long and red, with sequins sparkling on both pinkies, and she kept using them to flick her black hair out of her face. Her focus hovered just above the hairlines of the players, so she never really looked anyone in the eye. She was three times as old as Luce, but there was still something between them.
“Is that you?” Miles whispered, trying hard not to sound horrified.
“No!” Shelby said flatly. “That broad is old. And Luce only lives to be seventeen.” She shot Luce a nervous look. “I mean, in the past, that’s been the deal. This time, though, I’m sure she’ll live to a ripe old age. Maybe as old as this lady. I mean—”
“Enough, Shelby,” Luce said.
Miles shook his head. “I have so muc
h catching up to do.”
“Okay, if it’s not me, we must be … I don’t know, somehow related.” Luce watched as the woman cashed out chips for the bald man with the tie. Her hands looked sort of like Luce’s. The way her mouth set was similarly serious. “Do you think it’s my mom? Or my sister?”
Shelby was scribbling notes furiously on the inside back cover of a yoga manual. “Only one way to find out.” She flashed her notes at Luce: Vegas: Mirage Hotel and Casino, night shift, table stationed near the Bengal tiger show, Vera with the Lee press-on nails.
She looked back at the dealer. Shelby was a stickler for the details that Luce never noticed. The dealer’s name tag read VERA in lopsided white letters. But the image was starting to wobble and fade. Soon the whole image broke apart into tiny shadow shreds that fell to the floor and curled up like the ash from burning paper.
“But wait, isn’t this the past?” Luce asked.
“Don’t think so,” Shelby said. “Or, at least, it’s not far in the past. There was an ad for the new Cirque du Soleil in the background. So what do you say?”
Go all the way to Las Vegas to find this woman? A middle-aged sister would probably be easier to approach than parents well into their eighties, but still. What if they made it all the way to Vegas and Luce choked again?
Shelby nudged her. “Hey, I must really like you if I’m agreeing to go to Vegas. My mom was a waitress there for a couple of years when I was a kid. I’m telling you, it’s Hell on earth.”
“How would we get there?” Luce asked, not wanting to ask Shelby if they could borrow SAEB’s car again. “How far is Vegas, anyway?”
“Too far to drive.” Miles spoke up. “Which is fine with me because I’ve been wanting to practice stepping through.”
“Stepping through?” Luce asked.
“Stepping through.” Miles knelt down on the ground and brushed the fragments of the shadow together in his palms. They looked almost tired, but Miles kept kneading them with his fingers until they formed a loose, messy ball. “I told you I couldn’t sleep last night. I sort of broke into Steven’s office through the transom.”
“Yeah, right.” Shelby balked. “You flunked levitation. You’re definitely not good enough to float in through the transom.”
“And you’re not strong enough to drag the bookcase over,” Miles said. “But I am, and I have this to show for myself.” He grinned, holding up a thick black tome titled An Announcer How-To: Summon, Glimpse, and Travel in Ten Thousand Easy Steps. “I also have an enormous bruise on my shin from a poorly planned exit through the transom, but anyway …” He turned to Luce, who was having a hard time not ripping the book from his hands. “I was thinking, with your obvious talent for glimpsing, and my superior knowledge—”
Shelby snorted. “What’d you read, point three percent of the book?”
“A very useful point three percent,” Miles said. “I think we might be able to do this. And not end up lost forever.”
Shelby cocked her head suspiciously but didn’t say anything else. Miles kept kneading the Announcer in his palm, then began stretching it out. After a minute or two, it had grown into a sheet of gray almost the size of a door. Its edges were wobbly and it was almost translucent, but when he pressed it away from his body a little, it seemed to take a firmer shape, like a plaster cast after being set to dry. Miles reached for the left side of the dark rectangle, feeling around its surface, searching for something.
“That’s weird,” he muttered, trolling the Announcer with his fingers. “The book says if you make the Announcer area large enough, the surface tension reduces by a ratio that allows for penetration.” He sighed. “There’s supposed to be a—”
“Great book, Miles.” Shelby rolled her eyes. “You’re a real expert now.”
“What are you looking for?” Luce asked, stepping close behind Miles. Suddenly, watching his hands rove, she saw it.
A latch.
She blinked and the image vanished, but she knew where it had been. She reached around Miles and pressed her own hand against the left side of the Announcer. There. The touch of it against her fingers made her gasp.
It felt like the kind of heavy metal latch with a bolt and hasp used to lock a garden gate. It was freezing, and rough with invisible rust.
“Now what?” Shelby said.
She looked back at her two very baffled friends, shrugged, fiddled with the lock, then slowly slid the invisible bolt to the side.
With its lock released, a shadow door swung up, almost knocking the three of them backward.
“We did it,” Shelby whispered.
They were gazing into a long, deep, red-black tunnel. It was clammy inside and smelled like mildew and watered-down cocktails made with cheap liquor. Luce and Shelby looked at each other uncertainly. Where was the blackjack table? Where was the woman they’d been looking at before? A red glow pulsed from deep within, and then Luce could hear slot machines ringing, coins clinking into pay baskets with a clatter.
“Cool!” Miles said, grabbing for her hand. “I read about this part, it’s a transitional phase. We just have to keep going.”
Luce reached for Shelby’s hand, gripping it tightly as Miles stepped inside the clammy darkness—and pulled the three of them through.
They walked only a couple of feet forward, about far enough to reach the real door of Luce and Shelby’s dorm room. But as soon as the cloudy gray Announcer door sealed shut behind them with a deeply unnerving pfffffft, their Shoreline room was gone. What had been a deep, glowing velvety red in the distance suddenly became bright white. The white light shot forward, enveloping them, filling their ears with sound. All three of them had to shield their eyes. Miles pressed ahead, drawing Luce and Shelby behind him. Otherwise, Luce might have been paralyzed. Both her palms were sweating inside her friends’ hands. She was listening to a single chord of music, loud and perfectly sonorous.
Luce rubbed her eyes, but it was the foggy curtain of Announcer that was obscuring the view. Miles reached forward and gently rubbed at it with a circular motion, until it started to peel away, like old paint chips flaking off a ceiling. And from each falling flake, blasts of arid desert air shot through the murky coolness, warming Luce’s skin. As the Announcer fell to pieces at their feet, the view before them suddenly made sense: They were looking down at the Las Vegas Strip. Luce had only seen it in pictures, but now she had the tip of the Paris Las Vegas Hotel’s Eiffel Tower at eye level in the distance.
Which meant they were very, very high. She dared a glance down: They were standing outside, on a roof somewhere, with the edge only a foot or two beyond their toes. And beyond that—the rush of Vegas traffic, the heads of a line of palm trees, an elaborately lit swimming pool. All at least thirty stories down.
Shelby let go of Luce’s hand and began pacing the boundaries of the brown cement roof. Three identical long, rectangular wings extended from a center point. Luce spun around, taking in three hundred and sixty degrees of bright neon lights, and beyond the Strip, a range of far-off barren mountains, lit up eerily by the city’s light pollution.
“Damn, Miles,” Shelby said, hopping over skylights to explore more of the roof. “That step-through was amazing. I am almost attracted to you right now. Almost.”
Miles dug his hands in his pockets. “Um … thanks?”
“Where exactly are we?” Luce asked. The difference between her solo tumble through the Announcer and this experience was like night and day. This was so much more civilized. It hadn’t made anyone want to throw up. Plus, it had actually worked. At least, she thought it had. “What happened to the view we had before?”
“I had to zoom out,” Miles said. “I figured it would look weird if the three of us stepped out of a cloud in the middle of the casino floor.”
“Just a tad,” Shelby said, tugging on a locked door. “Any brilliant ideas about how to get down from here?”
Luce grimaced. The Announcer was trembling in tatters at their feet. She couldn’t imagine
it had the strength to help them now. No way off this roof and no way back to Shoreline.
“Never mind! I’m a genius,” Shelby called from across the roof. She was hunched over one of the skylights, wrestling with a lock. With a grunt, she pried it open, then lifted a hinged pane of glass. She stuck her head through, motioning for Luce and Miles to join her.
Cautiously, Luce peered down through the open skylight into a large, opulent bathroom. There were four generous-sized stalls on one side, a line of raised marble sinks facing a gilded mirror on the other. A mauve plush settee was set up in front of a vanity, and a single woman sat there, looking into the mirror. Luce could only see the top of her black bouffant hair, but her reflection showed a heavily made-up face, thick bangs, and a French-manicured hand reapplying an unnecessary coat of red lipstick.
“As soon as Cleopatra’s gone through that tube of lipstick, we’ll just shimmy on down,” Shelby whispered.
Below them, Cleopatra stood up from the vanity. She smacked her lips together and wiped a stray red stain off her teeth. Then she marched toward the door.
“Let me get this straight,” Miles said. “You want me to ‘shimmy’ into a women’s bathroom?”
Luce took one more look around the desolate roof. There was really only one way in. “If anyone sees you, just pretend you went in the wrong door.”
“Or that you two were making out in one of the stalls,” Shelby added. “What? It’s Vegas.”
“Let’s just go.” Miles was blushing as he lowered himself feet-first through the window. He extended his arms slowly, until his feet hovered just over the high marble top of the vanity.
“Help Luce down,” Shelby called.
Miles moved to lock the bathroom door, then raised his arms to catch Luce. She tried to mimic his smooth technique, but her arms were wobbly as she lowered herself through the skylight. She couldn’t see much below her, but felt Miles’s strong grip around her waist sooner than she’d expected.
“You can let go,” he said, and when she did, he lowered her gracefully to the floor. His fingers spread out around her rib cage, just a thin black T-shirt away from her skin. His arms were still around her when her feet touched the tile. She was about to thank him, but when she looked up into his eyes, she got tongue-tied.
