by Shaye Easton
This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.
I don’t move until my blood has stopped pounding in my ears. By then, I know for sure it isn’t Black Suit because now I can actually hear the second voice. And it’s far from unfamiliar.
I launch myself down the rest of the steps and vault around the corner, heat blossoming in the pit of my chest and pushing me forward. Three heads look up upon my arrival. My mother’s. My father’s.
And Caden’s.
And I’m in my goddamn pyjamas! God-freaking-dammit. My anger boils up and over, and I have to bite down on my tongue until it bleeds.
“Melissa,” Mum says, smiling, “you didn’t tell us you’d made plans with your new friend today.” Then she adds, perhaps a little sourly, “You didn’t tell us you had any friends.”
“I made plans, did I?” I raise an eyebrow. If my eyes were laser beams, Caden’s eyes would be two smouldering pits.
“I told you she’d forget,” he tells my parents. Then he turns to me. “We agreed we’d go to see that new movie, remember? The one about the alien invasion?”
“Oooh!” Mum exclaims delightedly. “Is that the one with Tom Cruise?”
Caden grins, dazzling my family with his pearly white teeth. I want to knock them from his dumb mouth.
“I don’t particularly like aliens.”
Caden angles his face so my parents can’t see it. His eyes are both exasperated and imploring. “Then you’ll love it when humanity comes together to fight them off.”
“Well, they’ll have to do it without me. I’m not interested.”
“But it’s supposed to be a great movie, honey,” Mum insists, completely oblivious to our subtext. “The reviews are excellent. I’m sure you’ll love it.”
“Look at that even Mrs. Croft endorses it. How could you say no?”
I want to glare at him, but I’m all too aware of the disadvantage I’m at: my parents can’t see his face, but they sure as hell are staring at mine.
Instead I plaster a fake smile across my face. “Mum, Dad, can you excuse us? Caden and I need to go over the details of this plan. I don’t entirely remember making it.”
“Sure, Mel,” Dad says.
Mum gets up from the table, eyes wide as she realises what she’s forgotten. “Oops! I better finish making my breakfast.”
I gesture for Caden to follow me. As he stands, I start down the hall, in no mood to wait up for him. I stride all the way to the back door and emerge into our small, unused backyard. I wait by the sliding door until he steps onto the veranda and closes it shut behind us.
As soon as I have, I round on him, all my pent up rage erupting in one burst. “What the hell, Caden? I thought I told you to leave me alone!”
He looks a little taken aback by my ferocity, but not entirely shocked at my anger. “I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important,” he says in a surly tone.
“And you think that’s an invitation to invade my home? You think you can just canoodle with my parents and use them to drag me into your stupid ghost-people war? I told you I wanted nothing to do with this.”
“It doesn’t matter what you want, don’t you see? You were a part of this even before you were born; it’s your fate. I’m not trying to drag you into my war, Melissa, because it’s already your war—it’s more yours than it is anyone’s.”
It doesn’t even come close to swaying me. I cross my arms. “Bullshit. I’ve lived for seventeen years undisturbed, uninvolved. What’s to say I can’t live the same way for another seventeen more?”
“Your condition, that’s what,” he replies, and I realise I laid my own trap and then proceeded to stumble into it. Idiot. “You’ve been swapped. You don’t have seventeen years. You have three at best.”
“And you’re saying I should use those final three years to stop a war? If that’s all the time I have left, I want to enjoy it. I don’t want to have to end a fight between people I don’t even know, let alone care for.”
Caden takes a step toward me. I step back instinctively. And maybe I’m just imagining it, but I swear I see a dim flicker of hurt in his eyes. “Then get to know them,” he says, and buried under all the surliness is a hint of desperation. “The Ring is convening today at noon. All the Summoners in Corven Lake will be there. If you don’t want to help us after that, then I’ll leave you be. You have my word.”
“You want to take me to the Ring?” I ask, the question saturated in disbelief. “I thought I wasn’t even supposed to know they existed and now you want to bring me? Won’t you get in serious shit for that?”
He won’t meet my eyes. “Actually, it was, well, it was their idea.”
For a second I just stare, mouth open, eyes wide. Then the anger kicks back in and takes the wheel.
“For Christ’s sake, you’re here on orders, aren’t you?” It takes tremendous effort to keep my voice at a normal volume. There’s a scream in my chest and it’s tearing me apart in its attempt to get out. “I mean, Jesus, of course, you are! Perfect. That’s just fucking perfect! And here I was thinking you came over because you wanted to mend things between us. I can’t believe I was so naïve!”
I take a step back, my hand closing into a fist. My eyes are swivelling over everything around me even before I realise I’m looking for something to punch. But there’s nothing. I blow out a long breath.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Why am I so desperate to make a friend out of Caden? Why do I let him hurt me again and again?
“Melissa—”
“I get it. This is your job. We’re not friends. Yada, yada, yada. Whatever. I won’t be fooled again.”
“I was going to say,” he begins, and how can he be so calm? So detached? “Regardless of how you’re feeling about me right now, you have an obligation to come to the convening of the Ring. It’s bigger than just you and me.”
And now I see it. He doesn’t care at all that I’m angry at him, or that he’s hurt me. He views it as irrelevant. All these hopes I’ve had he’s crushed under his careless boot like ants.
“Fine,” I acquiesce, because as much as I can’t stand the prospect of being around him for a moment longer, he’s right. This isn’t about us. I shouldn’t let it colour my judgement. “I’ll to go the Ring, but I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for the people who were so unfortunate as to be stuck with you as their representative. And make no mistake, whether I decide to stick around afterwards or not, we’re done. You’ll come nowhere near me. Have you got that?”
Caden just looks at me, his face unreadable. It’s like bouncing ideas off a brick wall.
“Brilliant. Now I’m going upstairs to change, seeing as you ambushed me in my freaking pyjamas. I’ll meet you out front when I’m done.”
And for the second time this week, I swivel on my heels and stride purposefully away from him, despite the fact that my heart is breaking behind the cage of my ribs.
***
When I first arrived at Corven Lake, the town had more tourists than actual residents. It was filled to the brim with city slickers, eager to escape their humdrum existence, if only for a weekend. The population would rise and fall, a new horde of people filling its streets each week.
Corven Drive, right by the beach, was the most popular spot in town, with an array of boutiques, cafes, fast food outlets and restaurants, several ice cream and gelato stores, two Surf Dive ‘n’ Skis and one rather overlooked and frequently empty bookstore named Better Be Books. During the summer, a fair was held every other weekend on the nature strip by the beach. Tents, jumping castles and demountable rides would rise up out of the landscape, forming a miniature makeshift city, bursting with bright colour and flashing lights that, after sunset, could be seen from both ends of town.
The second hottest attraction was Lake Corven. Connected to the ocean by a long but narrow winding river, it’s the size of a football field and nothing overly special. The surrounding trees were labelled National Parkland years ago to stop developers f
rom taking advantage of the prime real estate and throwing up eight or eleven story apartments. What had been allowed was a tangle of nature walks, a picnic ground, a car park and Corven Club, a large cabin consisting of a lakefront café, a disco hall, a rental kayak and paddle-board store, one swimwear outlet, another ice cream shop, and a perpetually busy McDonald’s.
During the warmer months, it was always packed with families, kids splashing in the lake, crawling over the picnic ground play equipment, shrieking and licking ice cream and chasing each other in circles by the water. The air would be wild with the squawks of seagulls and the ground rampant with pigeons picking at dropped chips and chicken nuggets. Adventurous types would kayak around the lake. Couples would stroll down the nature paths and dine in the café, laughing and clinking wine glasses, or conversing over coffee and sandwiches. It was eternally loud with the sounds of happy and carefree life.
Now, as Caden pulls into the car park, Lake Corven is dead silent. Hopping out, I’m hit with a fierce wind that flattens the grass and blows dirty and deteriorating litter from last summer around the empty grounds. The trees shake and shiver around us, air whistling as it whips through the branches and stirs the leaves. A swing in the playground squeaks as it’s blown back and forth, and the surface of the lake ripples with the force of the air. The whole place is dark and deserted, the shops closed, the lights off.
As we make our way to Corven Club, the absence of life is so intense I start hearing things in the wind: the ghost of a laugh, the whisper of splashing water, the resonant echo of a child’s delighted scream. It’s like the place has recorded and remembered the sounds only to spew them back to me now, tiny and unreal and stuck on a loop, a poor attempt at reviving the life it has long since lost.
It’s ten in the morning and we’re way too early for the meeting, but Caden doesn’t seem at all perturbed. He also doesn’t say anything, walking several metres on my left. And I have to remind myself that this is what I wanted: distance between us, both spatially and emotionally. But I’m so used to never getting what I want that it feels wrong. I want him to give me something to get angry at, something to fight, something aside from this smooth blankness he wears. All my anger leaves me as fire, but it slides right off him as water. And all it does is make me feel like a ghost trying to interfere with someone on the other side of the veil.
Which is to say, it makes me feel pathetic.
The Club has two dark oak doors, one covered with white glue and paper residue where a poster has been torn down. Caden pushes one open, and I push open the other, but we walk in separately.
Inside there’s a reception desk but no receptionist. A series of plastic stands filled with informative pamphlets sit across the counter, and all the cream walls are hidden behind framed photos of the lake and the surrounding attractions. All the colour and brightness in the room have been leached away by the grey morning. If Caden and I were on speaking terms, I’d note how horrible and deserted the place is. But we’re not, and there’s an unspoken agreement, however childish, that the first person to speak loses.
And I’m not going to lose. Psychopaths are already one up on the scoreboard. There’s no way I’m letting them get to two-nil.
I fall behind Caden as he leads us around the reception desk and into the stairwell beyond. Corven Club only has three levels. The bottom is filled with shops. The middle is taken up by the café. And the top floor is a large hall which was used for public discos on summer nights or can be rented out for parties and conventions. It doesn’t take a genius to guess we’re heading for the third floor.
As we start up the stairs, I’m struck by an intense fear that it’s not going to be the Ring greeting me when we reach the top. It’ll be the underwalkers. It’ll be Newman and Black Suit. I rack my mind, trying to remember what complex I saw in my vision.
Have I just walked into a trap?
I recall Caden’s menacing smile. Black Suit’s polished voice. My blood pounds. They’ll capture me, strangle me and torture me and—
I cut the wheels off my train of thought. I’m being ridiculous. This is just my nightmare rising up out of the depths of my mind to torment me. I’ve been to the Club before, and the complex in my vision was completely unfamiliar to me. It certainly wasn’t anywhere near Lake Corven.
But Black Suit’s voice is still in my head, the same words repeating over and over again. There are no overwalkers, he’d said. It’s just us. He sounds so painfully familiar. Like I’ve known him all my life. Like I’ve—
Every other thought is shoved from my mind. My eyes go wide, my jaw falls open, and I must have gasped because Caden pauses in his ascent to look at me, a question mark on his face.
I have known him all my life, I just didn’t remember it. But I do now.
Black Suit is the man from my returning memories. He’s the man who swapped me in the first place.
We reach the top of the stairs, emerging into a hallway of cream walls, worn carpeted floors, and an old table holding a vase of dust-covered plastic flowers. But when Caden starts down the hall, I don’t move.
He looks back at me, one eyebrow raised. “What is it?” he asks, violating the no-speaking agreement. I won—the scoreboard is now tied—but I couldn’t be further from caring.
I shake my head. I’m still angry at him, and I have to remind myself of this fact as I move past him down the corridor. From now on, my discoveries are just that—mine.
“Not speaking, are we? Real mature.”
I round on him. “We’re only here right now because of your orders. I said we were done, and I meant it.”
“No, you didn’t. You may be angry right now, but you’ll get over it.”
My anger has mutated; it has grown and sharpened and sliced right through my heart. And now the pain I feel is in my eyes, making them well with tears. “I can’t trust you, Caden! You lie and keep secrets and torment me with everything I don’t know. How could I possibly get over it? How can you expect us to move past this?”
“The way everyone does: with acceptance, with forgiveness.” He steps around me and moves several meters down the hallway, stopping at last before a pair of swinging frosted glass doors. “You’re going to get over this,” he says, turning back. I hate him for even thinking it.
And I hate him even more because he’s probably right.
He pulls open the door and heads inside.
Chapter Eighteen
There’s already a handful of people in the hall when I enter, even though the Ring isn’t set to convene for another hour.
The hall is just one large expanse of scratched wooden floorboards and plain walls. Plastic chairs are stacked at the back of the room, left to gather dust, and at the head of the room is a small, wooden stage with steps on either side. Currently, a long white table as has been set up on top, with five of the plastic chairs waiting behind it.
Just as I spot Caden across the hall, already greeting people I don’t know, Rand steps into my line of vision, a warm smile on his face.
“Melissa. It’s good to see you again.”
I nod, nowhere near as enthusiastic as he appears to be. “You too.”
“Caden tells me you’re handling things well.”
I swallow a laugh. Firstly, ‘things’ doesn’t even come to close to summing up what I’ve been through. And secondly, since when does Caden think I’m handling things well?
Rand chuckles at my surprise. “He informed the Ring yesterday that he’d told you everything, and assured them you’d taken it in stride. It’s the whole reason you’re here today because he swayed them. He made them believe you were ready for more.”
He what? Why didn’t he just tell me that?
“You look shocked,” he observes.
“I just—I didn’t think he thought…”
“Let me guess: he told you about his orders and you freaked out on him.”
I stare at him. “That’s actually . . . that’s exactly what happened. How did you know?”
/>
“Because I saw it coming a mile away. And so did Caden. Why do you think he was so hesitant to tell you anything?”
“Because he had orders.”
The corners of Rand’s mouth twitch upwards with amusement. “Kids,” he mutters. “Follow me. I’ll introduce you to a few people.”
We join a small crowd and he introduces me to a raven-haired Katie, followed by a shaven Denny, and so on, and so forth. After the fourth name, they all start to blur together. I hear about an assortment of powers too: mind reading and night vision and faunal communication and cloning. It all blends together in my brain, becoming one indistinguishable blob of impossibility.
The hour passes faster than I expected, the time filled with introductions and questions. I’m the shiny new toy and everyone wants a turn quizzing me. Before long the room is swarming with unfamiliar faces, and I can’t get over how off everyone looks. I meet one girl who’s only fourteen, and a man going on ninety. I meet university students and professors, shop owners and doctors, the self-employed and the unemployed. And yet, somehow, in some way, none of them exactly looks normal.
And the more that I think about it, the more I realise that neither does Rand. Neither does Caden. On their own you’d be hard-pressed to see it. It’s such a subtle quality that it’s only visible in large numbers, in large crowds like now, when the strangeness is amplified and suddenly eerily obvious.
I look again, and I realise with a start what it is.
Everyone’s eyes are black.
Now I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner. Everywhere I look, I’m confronted with black irises. Black stares. It’s like falling into the snare of a dozen miniature voids.
It’s like staring through the veil, directly into the otherworld.
Rand leaves me talking to a man with thick black glasses and a woman with her hair in several braids. I try not to look as freaked as I feel as my last vestige of familiarity disappear into the crowd. I’m a blue-eyed outsider here and I throw a glance over the woman’s shoulder while she speaks, trying to catch sight of Caden. But the spectres around me are like an ocean, shifting and changing, heads bobbing up and down and disappearing. Any chance I had of finding anyone is dragged away by the current.
