by Shaye Easton
I end up on the grass behind the central building, under my solitary tree, clouds looming overhead. Back at the beginning. From here I can pretend that last month didn’t happen. I lean against the trunk and close my eyes, letting myself sink into the bark.
Sometime later, there’s a rush of cold. I know the ghost is there before I even open my eyes, but I don’t expect it to be so close. It stands before me on the lawn, barely three metres away. I swallow my fear. “If you’re here to spy on me, don’t bother,” I tell it. “There’s nothing interesting happening.”
It tilts its head to one side, the movement so exaggerated that it looks unnatural.
My fear verges on anger. “Go. Leave. Report to your underwalker friends.”
It doesn’t move. It doesn’t blink. It doesn’t speak.
“Fuck off!” I yell, chucking one of my books. It passes right through the ghost’s grey corpse. “I’m going to die! Don’t you understand? I’ve got nothing for you! There’s nothing to learn, nothing to kill! There’s no one here except me!”
The ghost doesn’t even move. I wrap my arms around myself, shivering in its radiated cold. It’s my own personal air conditioner, and I think, Maybe this isn’t too bad. At least around the ghost, I can feel. At least I have company.
And so, of course, it fades into the air.
A hand comes down on my shoulder, making me jump. “What were you doing?” It’s Caden, kneeling at my side. “You just sat there.”
I frown at him. “It wasn’t doing anything. It was just watching.”
“It was preying.”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters that it’s getting closer. It’s with the underwalkers. For all you know, it could be building up to an attack.”
“And what if it is?”
Caden looks horrified. “Why would you say that?”
I fiddle with the grass beside me. “I spoke to Sara today.”
He leans back, eyes brows knitting. “What did you speak about?”
“She wanted me to ask her questions. About her. About her life.”
“And did you?”
I look back up at him. “Yes. She didn’t tell me everything though.”
“What did she tell you?”
I shrug. “A little about her childhood, about why we don’t burn each other, about how she blends in. She made Lauren leave us.” Caden’s looking at me, but I can tell he doesn’t understand. “She made Lauren leave.”
“You’re saying by force?”
“I’m saying with—,” I search for the word, “—some kind of persuasion. It was uncomfortable. Like it was almost supernatural.”
Caden gets off his knees and comes to rest cross-legged under the tree. The wind is blowing through the grass, through bushes and plants, making them chatter. I can’t tell if it’s me or not.
“She’s human,” he says. “She wouldn’t have any powers.”
“Is there a way for humans to get powers?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. They’d have to build a connection to the otherworld somehow, and the only way I know of—for humans, that is—is through death. And she’s clearly not dead.”
“What about a near-death experience?”
“Maybe. I’ve never heard of it happening, but I suppose theoretically it could work.”
“She’s survived a lot longer than you expected her to, right? What if she’s close enough to death to form a link to the otherworld?”
Caden runs a hand through his hair and shakes his head. “I don’t know, Melissa. It all sounds a little far-fetched.”
I chew on my lip, puzzling it out. I could be overthinking it. It could just be that she’s very convincing. Or that Lauren was scared. There’s no way of really knowing.
“Did she tell you anything else?”
“She wants me to stay away from her.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I don’t know why.”
“Well, did you ask?”
I let my gaze fall into my lap. “No. Maybe she just doesn’t want to get too close to everything.”
“She’s grown up as Kathryn’s daughter. She’s already too close to everything. Speaking of, did she tell you why she was here?
“She said Kathryn wanted her to be near me—to protect me. I think it’s a safety precaution in case one of us, you know…”
“But Sara doesn’t want to be near you.”
I stop fiddling. “No.”
There’s a moment when both of us are silent and it’s only the wind whistling through the air, the sound of birds crying from the sky, the distant babble of students in other parts of the school. The world feels darker than it did when I sat down. The clouds are thicker, heavier. Suffocating. When I breathe, the air is tinged with the smell of wet dirt. It’s like we’ve stumbled into a parallel reality—into earth’s dark side.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Caden asks after a long moment of studying me.
Now I meet his eyes. “You said there was a way to swap back. Well, Sara doesn’t want to. She won’t.”
He stares for a second. “I don’t understand. She’ll die—both of you will. Why would she want that?”
“I don’t know. But listen, could we figure out a way to do it anyway? Go behind her back maybe? I honestly don’t even know how the whole ‘swapping back’ thing works.”
Caden shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t know either.”
I let my mouth fall open. “Say what?”
Caden looks up at the spindly tree limbs, whipping back and forth in the wind, shivering in the wintry air. “No one does really. We only know it’s been done before.”
“You’re joking. Why tell me it’s possible if you don’t know how it’s done?”
“I was hoping we could figure it out.”
“Does ‘we’ includes the Ring?”
“Not if you don’t want it to.”
“I don’t.”
“Then do you have any ideas?”
I’m about to laugh, to tell him that of course, I don’t. But then I remember. “In my memories, Davion kept me in a dark room. When he swapped me, he had this black disc-shaped device. He put it up to my chest. It was excruciating.”
Caden nods, although curiosity has made his eyes bright as lights. “And you think maybe that same device could be used to reverse the situation.”
“That’s what I’m hoping. I had a dream the other night that Sara put the same device to my chest to swap us back. We just need to get our hands on it.”
He exhales. “A device that removes your spirit from your body. How does such a thing even exist?”
“Ask Davion,” I say bitterly.
“You really think it’s him.”
“I know it’s him.”
“Asking him would be pointless.”
“Obviously.”
“And even if we managed to get a hold of it, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll know how to use it—or be able to.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s clearly got a supernatural element built into it. There’s every chance it would need a certain type of person to use it.”
“Like a spectre.”
“Or it could be more specific. An underwalker. Or someone with the right ability.”
My hope deflates.
“We know nothing about this thing, Melissa.”
“People before me have been swapped. Did this device always exist?”
“No, but the process of swapping spirits has always been a mystery. Even the Ring barely knows anything about it.”
He’s not looking at me—he’s gazing off across the field, deep in thought—but I look at him. In this dim, shadowy light, he almost appears grey like a ghost. Like even if I were to reach out and touch him, all I’d feel was air. The thought scares me, the feeling rising up from some deep, tucked away place. I brush it away.
“Not everyone in the Ring,” I say eventually.
Caden’s response is immedi
ate and assured. “We’ve been over this. Davion will tell us nothing. He’s an underwalker on the Ring. There’s no way he’d risk such a position to start telling the truth. I mean, think about it, if he swapped you in the first place, swapping you back is the last thing he wants.”
“That’s what I don’t understand. Why did he swap me? He’s my mother’s brother. Why would he do that to her only child?”
“The Ring has always figured you were swapped by an underwalker because they realised you were the Final Prophet. And he’s Davion Eller, as in, Maxwell Eller, the previous prophet. No underwalker would have a better idea of who you’d turn out to be than him.”
“There’s that term again,” I exclaim. “The ‘Final Prophet’. What is that?”
“I didn’t explain that to you?” I shake my head. “Well, the first prophet was Maxwell Eller, and a part of the prophecy claims that you, too, will have a vision of the war, making you the Final Prophet.”
I frown, thinking it all over. “I just—this doesn’t make any sense. If Davion knew when I was a kid that I’d become the Final Prophet, why swap me and wait to kill me now, years later? Why not just kill me then?”
Caden stares at me for a while, his dark eyes consuming mine. Slowly, he begins to shake his head. “I don’t know.”
I sigh loudly and lean back on my arms, tilting my head up towards the sky. Through the gnarly fingers of the tree, I watch the dark sky churn, clouds forming and bulging and crashing into each other. “We have to speak to Davion,” I muse. “He’s the only one.”
“He won’t—”
“He won’t say anything, yeah, I know. But we have to try. He’s the only one who will know anything about all this. And he’s my uncle. That’s got to count for something. Maybe it’s the reason he swapped me in the first place. Maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to kill his only niece.”
Caden rips several pieces of grass out of the ground, spinning them back and forth between his fingers. “I can get in contact with him, organise a meeting. We’d have to use false pretences—I definitely wouldn’t tell him you were coming. I don’t think being the Final Prophet and accusing him of being an underwalker has earned you any brownie points.”
“Could we do it tonight?”
“I can’t tonight.”
“How come?”
He rips out some more grass and mutters offhandedly, “I’ve got this thing with Lauren.”
My initial response is to gape at him, but I pull myself together. “Lauren?”
“Yeah, she . . . it doesn’t matter.” He waves a hand, and I want to tell him: Yes, it does matter, I want to know. But I don’t tell him. And I don’t think I really want to know.
We decide on Wednesday after school. The wind is still thrashing, but now I know it’s not me. A storm is coming, descending like a beast hungry to devour the afternoon light, to turn the morning sun into a memory—a faraway dream.
The lunch bell rings and we head off to class. The day grows darker and ends. At night it storms, the earth beaten by snow, the flakes lit up every now and then by harsh, jagged lightning. The wind rages, throwing the storm against my windowpane. But nothing is louder than the thunder—magnificent roars that make the windows rattle, that shudder through the ground like earthquakes, shaking me in my bed. When I finally get to sleep, the clash of thunder follows me, and I dream of the Twelve Original Spirits making war in the skies.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There’s no more sloshy mud and slick streets the next day. All that has been submerged beneath a couple feet of untouched, puffy snow, which was tinted grey in the overcast morning. From my window, it appears that the colour has been wiped from the world. It’s not black and white, like in old films—it’s just a sea of the same, pallid colour, like a song that plays only one note, droning on forever and ever. Wisps of dull snow glide gently down to the ground, which from a distance give the impression of a thick fog hanging low over the town.
The news goes on and on about the bizarre weather all morning, calling last night’s storm a “thundersnow,” reporting all the businesses that will be closed until further notice and instructing people to rug up and stay home. They show a montage of photos sent in from people across Corven Lake—photos of the snow-covered beach, of landmarks painted white, of kids making snow angels and snowmen in their front yards. Soon, they start running through all the disaster: people who’ve been separated and trapped, homes and shops whose roofs have fallen in, familiar streets littered with fallen branches and scraps of wood and broken road signs. I switch it off after that.
I walk to school. The streets are eerily deserted. I’m used to the sound of engines back-dropping my walks, and the quiet left by their absence unsettles me deeply. It almost feels like an end-of-the-world scenario: waking up one morning to everyone gone, the final survivor, the last of humanity, with nothing better to do than to trudge down the dead silent streets, hitting up old haunts and imagining them filled with people, the memory people like ghosts following you across town.
No one in Corven Lake is equipped for so much snow. Even the council workers don’t have the tools to clear the streets right away. Some people in big-wheeled vehicles have it okay, ploughing through the mounds covering the roads. One such person drives past while on my way to school, and they slow down to offer me a lift. They’ve clearly been picking up walkers on their way to wherever, as the car is brimming with people who don’t seem to fit right together, like strangers on a bus. But I decline, happy to walk the last couple blocks to school in silence. And afraid of what they’d think or say or do if they were to discover all this snowfall is my fault.
School is understandably quiet when I arrive. There was an email sent around to all parents this morning announcing that classes would continue as normal, minus a dress code. It struck me as ridiculous, considering majority of the school body will probably follow the news’ instructions and stay at home.
My suspicions are proved as I walk down the halls. Students mill around here and there, but it’s a few minutes before the bell and there isn’t half as many as usual. With so few people around, the air seems to hold a silence that pushes everyone to whisper. It’s like a giant hand has come down over the morning, smothering us. I keep even my movements soft and quiet, not wanting to disturb the quiet.
My daily heat surge comes as I’m on my way to first period, and I’m suddenly grateful for the near-empty hallways. I duck off into a small, desolate corridor and strain to keep my gasping breaths soundless as I wait, in agony, for it to pass. Then it’s getting up, dusting off, and moving on, heading into class like nothing happened and sliding swiftly into a back row seat.
I don’t know why I’m surprised when Caden doesn’t show up for a class we share. He lives much further from school than I do, and he doesn’t exactly have a truck to get him through the snow. But still I feel strange and off-kilter as I get through the first two periods, like I woke up without a limb and now everything is a study in staying upright, staying moving, staying functioning. We’re not friends, I know that—I won’t forget it—but somewhere between meeting him and now, he became a wall to lean on, and now the snow, like a magician, has made him vanish. Every time I go to lean on that wall—to ask him a question, to talk to him, to find comfort in our shared knowledge—I end up tripping over myself, forgetting that there’s nothing to stop my fall.
The day is almost like a dream. Moments don’t play out properly, missing beats, failing to hit their mark like life got a new writer and this one isn’t half as qualified for the job. I keep expecting things to happen a certain way—the normal way—and am repeatedly startled by the strange turn they take instead. Like a teacher who’s normally prompt arrives nearly twenty minutes late. Like our half-full class sits around and waits in quiet instead of taking advantage of the situation and starting a riot. Like the recess bell rings, and for a full two seconds no one gets up from their chairs, as though they’ve forgotten what the loud trilling means.
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The school is so empty at recess that I claim a table—usually taken by groups of six or eight—for myself. In the dim, grey day, everything looks like a ghost: ghost table, ghost food, ghost students shivering on their way to the school hall. Every time my eye catches on the thick, unmelted snow, it’s like another blip in the script of life, a flaw the rookie writer has forgotten to edit out. This is Corven Lake. This is Southlake High. There shouldn’t be snow.
Right on schedule—or right off schedule, I should say—another strange thing happens. Lauren, alone, a glittery red thermos of something warm in her hands, plonks down opposite to me without a word. At once I recall passing Levi in the science wing. I should have figured that if he were here, she would be too.
“Nice day,” she remarks after a minute of unscrewing the cap off her thermos. She pours a creamy green-yellow liquid into the cap and slurps it down. Soup.
“Why aren’t you sitting with Levi?”
Lauren berates me with her eyes. Dumb question, her gaze says. “There’s no way I’m sitting with that traitor-arsehole after yesterday. Besides, he’s already sitting with his traitor of a girlfriend, Kira, and I don’t feel like third wheeling. Have you seen Caden today?”
I shake my head. “He wasn’t in class.”
She sighs dramatically, tipping back her head. “I hate this weather.”
“Why do you ask?”
She shrugs. I eye her as she sips her soup, innocuous, casual, unaware of my gaze. I can’t help myself. I have to ask—
“So what did you get up to with Caden last night?”
Lauren’s head snaps upwards like a deer’s at the sound of danger, eyes round and staring, transfixed as the danger draws nearer. “A science project. But how did you know I was with—oh.”
“What?”
“He told you.” Her energy melts, her face sliding downwards. The corners of her eyes, the edges of her mouth, the plumpness of her cheeks: it all wilts.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” she says curtly. She twists the lid back onto her thermos and gathers her things, piling them haphazardly.
