by Shaye Easton
“You can’t kill us.”
“But that’s where you’re wrong. See, I don’t have to kill all of you. I just have to kill one.”
Silence. Her smile curves wider.
“You will never kill me,” a voice responds at last. It’s coming from behind us. We all spin around. “You don’t have the means.”
And there, in the second row, half hidden in the crowd, stands a man whose demeanour doesn’t quite line up with the rest. There’s a subtle quirk of the mouth, movement in the throat, a rhythm of breathing that’s faster, less controlled. While the rest seems blank and void of individuality, this man is readable, distinctive, and gives off an aura of intelligent thought.
Sara’s onto him in a heartbeat. “Maybe not,” she admits, moving closer, meeting his shaded gaze. “But you do.”
She stops at the edge of the throng. He says nothing.
And then her voice takes on a strange, soothing quality like she’s speaking from our dreams, like she’s the voice in the back of our minds, influencing our decisions, propelling us to action.
“Kill them,” she says.
She’s still holding Lauren’s bat. She extends it to the man.
“Kill them all.”
The man takes it and swings.
Chapter Thirty-One
When it’s done, Sara takes one of their guns and shoots the man in the head, point blank. I don’t get enough warning to turn away or close my eyes, so I see every detail as the back of his skull is blown off, a chunk of bone and brain tissue spraying the wall.
His body falls to its knees, then topples over into the pile of dead lookalikes. Sara exhales and tucks the gun into the back of her jeans. For a while I just stare at her, speechless and horrified. Then I bend over and empty the contents of my stomach onto the blood-splattered floor. My gut rebels at the movement. I almost forgot I was shot.
“Jesus,” Caden says once I’m done. I keep my eyes up, terrified of letting my gaze drop to all the disfigured and bloodied bodies littering the living room floor.
“They were all clones of that one guy,” Sara says, looking around, unfazed by the violence.
“Form duplication,” Caden agrees sombrely. He doesn’t appear as traumatised by what we just witnessed as I am, but I can tell he’s still not half as okay with it as Sara.
I’m still staring at her. She rolls her eyes, pissed. “Don’t look at me like that. The one downside of form duplication is that you can’t remerge with your duplicates. He was going to have to kill them all anyway.”
“Speaking of,” Caden says, “how did you do that?”
“Do what?” But she knows exactly what he’s talking about.
“Persuade him to kill his duplicates.”
She shrugs, and maybe she says something else, but I’ve stopped listening. Because my eyes have drifted downwards, and amongst all the horror and death, I find one body that isn’t where it should be.
Or more accurately, that isn’t there at all.
I move slowly across the room, stopping at the spot I last saw Lauren, and staring in disbelief at the sight that confronts me. There’s a lot of blood, but she’s not there.
“They took her,” I say.
“Say again?” Sara calls over to me.
They join me by the dark puddle of her blood. Someone’s stepped in it, leaving a path of scarlet all the way to the back door.
“Would you look at that,” Sara laughs darkly. “One bastard got away.”
“Why would they take her?” I murmur.
“It was Kira,” Caden says. “She’s not here. She must have fled during the commotion.”
“Taking Lauren with her.”
Sara frowns. “I mean I get that Kira pretended to be her friend for a while, but this kind of sentimentality is just plain gross.”
Suddenly, Caden grabs my upper arm, turning me to him. “Melissa, your wound.”
“Hmm?” I look down, realising too late that I’ve taken the pressure off, and the blood has been gurgling out, dripping to the floor.
“It hasn’t healed yet.”
“Well, yeah,” Sara derides, “it’s a bullet wound, not a paper cut.”
“This isn’t a joke, Sara. She could die.”
“Isn’t she already dying?”
“My legs feel funny,” I say.
“You’ve lost too much blood. We need to get you to a hospital.”
“A hospital? Seriously, Caden? Don’t be so dramatic.”
“She needs a doctor.”
“What, so they can pump her body full of morphine and then call the police? Because in case you’ve forgotten, that’s what happens when you check into a hospital after getting shot!”
“What else am I supposed to do? She needs medical attention.”
“No, she needs a lie-down and a bedtime story.”
“You can’t just sleep off a bullet wound!”
“You can if you have regeneration, which she does!”
“It’s regeneration, not immortality!”
“Both of you, stop it! I’m fine!” But it’s a lie, and as they fall quiet, it’s clear they both know it. I’ve lost too much blood, and I sway on my feet. My legs give way beneath me. Caden quickly steadies me with a hand on either arm.
“We need to get her out of here.”
“Scratch that. We need to get out of here. Hear that wailing?”
They’re silent for a moment. Sure enough, there’s the distant wail of sirens, ever slowly growing louder.
“Wrap her arm around your shoulders,” Caden commands.
“Uh, no thanks.”
“Need I remind you what happens if she dies?”
She rolls her eyes. “She’s not going to die.” A pause. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Sara, I swear to god…”
“Okay! I’ll help her. Let’s just get out of here before we end up in jail.”
“You’re the one with your fingerprints all over that bat. If anyone’s ending up in jail, it’s you.”
“Which is why I’m bringing it with me, moron.” She promptly stomps over to the man she shot and tears the bat from his stiff grip.
Caden looks around. “You don’t suppose we’ve left any other evidence?”
“Somehow I think the police will be a little more preoccupied with the dead man. All two dozens of him.”
They carry me, much like we carried Sara earlier in the afternoon, past the dead clones and down the hallway. My eyes land on a family portrait hanging on the wall. This is meant to be Kira’s house, but everyone in the photo is blonde. And there’s no Kira.
My feet are barely working as we emerge out onto the porch, and they drag across the steps when we descend into the backyard. I can feel the blood soaking through my pants, making them slick and heavy. Amazingly, the pain is still absent. I’m betting it has to do with my dulled senses as it does with the shock, which has clung to me firmly, a parasite feeding off my emotions, sucking them dry.
I can hear the sirens clearly now, splitting up the night. As we move along the side of the house, I estimate that they’re probably only a couple blocks away. Soon we’ll be on the street, in clear view.
“We’re not going to make it,” Caden says, speaking all our thoughts aloud.
“Maybe not,” Sara says, “but we can still evade them. This way.” She leads us right into the bushland besides the house.
The light is minimal here. The thick trees stand like silent guards, blocking most of the streetlights, only partial rays managing to cut through the gaps in the trunks. Up above, the glow of the moon is completely lost to the foliage. We’re left to navigate blind.
It’s not too long before the sirens grow loud, screaming past us on the street. Everyone’s tense and silent as we find a path through the bush, stumbling over sticks and rocks and branches. I feel the blood stop flowing at my side. There’s a tingling in my stomach as the wound begins to clot.
My energy is returning. I get my feet under control, putting
my weight back on my legs. “I think I’m good to continue on my own now.”
“Are you sure?” I can’t see Caden in the darkness, but I can feel his concern, rippling outwards like radiation.
“I think so.”
“Good enough for me.” Sara extricates herself from me. The dim light shifts over her shoulders as she rolls them, smudging her movements into a blur.
Caden lets me go, albeit more reluctantly. I stand.
The sirens are distant echoes now, the sound sunken beneath the whispering leaves. But the loudest thing by far is the pounding—not just of my heart, but of my brain as well, of my entire body. My blood pulses through me in a steady rhythm; I can feel it everywhere. I am a single, giant wound, and I throb, throb, throb.
Speaking of blood… “Sara?”
“What?”
“You never told us how you got that guy to murder all his clones.”
The night falls heavily down, a cloak surrounding each of us, isolating us from the others. All around me the darkness looks red. It writhes, shapes and figures rising out of the gloom, transforming into mutilated corpses and screaming bloody mouths. I squeeze my eyes shut, reopening them after a second. The night is the night once more.
“Supernatural residue,” she says at last.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your supernatural gifts may be contained in your soul, but they leave a mark on the body aka, supernatural residue.”
“I don’t understand.”
She sighs. “Okay, fine. Think about it like this: if a body is designed to contain only one specific soul, the host soul, then it’s going to be tailored to suit that soul. If a soul is human, then the body just needs to be capable of holding its consciousness. But if a host soul is supernatural, like a spectre’s, then the body needs to be capable of transforming spiritual energy into physical power, as well as withstanding it.”
“Therefore, spectre bodies are fundamentally different to human ones; they’re equipped with pathways that transmute energy. As a human soul in a spectre body, I have access to your pathways—your residue. I can turn natural human instincts and built-in psychic aptitudes into power. So things that all humans can do to a certain degree like being persuasive, reading body language, sensing danger, I can suddenly wield like a preternatural ability. For me, these human skills become powers of persuasion, mind-reading, clairvoyance, body manipulation—”
“Improved healing,” Caden says, a note of awe in his voice. “Regeneration. It’s the reason you’re still alive.”
“Exactly. They’re called residue abilities. They aren’t drawn from the otherworld. Therefore, they aren’t as strong as your spectre powers, but they’re also extremely rare. I think Kathryn said there’s been only one other documented case.”
Beside me, Caden is fascinated. He asks more questions, propelled by an almost scientific curiosity. But I still can’t get past the blood. Lauren’s blood. Mine. The blood of two dozen clones splashed on the walls.
I’ve seen more violence, more gores, more deaths in one night than I have in my entire life. And I don’t know what to do with the images that keep playing themselves in my head.
We come to the edge of the woods. The streetlight washes over us as we step out onto the cement sidewalk, tinting the world orange. Just up ahead, Rand’s car is waiting. When Caden parked it, the street was full.
Now everyone’s gone.
“It’s no excuse, you know.” The words come out of nowhere. Caden and Sara stare. But now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. “Those powers you have? You can’t hide behind them and pretend what you did wasn’t murder.”
Sara shakes her head, forehead furrowed. “I never said I was. They were bad people, Melissa. Underwalkers. It was us or them.”
“That’s no excuse! You can persuade people to do whatever you want. You could have just made them leave! There was no reason to kill anyone.”
“They were underwalkers. If I didn’t kill them, who’s to say later down the track they wouldn’t have turned around and killed me?”
“No one gets to say that! And you know why? Because no one is a god. No one gets to decide what someone may or may not do in the future. You certainly don’t get to kill them for it.”
“Melissa’s right,” Caden says. “And even if you did have to kill them, there are much more humane ways to go about it.”
Sara looks back and forth between us, seething. “Like you’re such a saint!” she spits at me. “I saw you kill one of them.”
“I was acting out of self-defence!”
“So was I!”
I shake my head. “No. What you did was much different. You’re a killer. And the worst part is, you like it.”
Sara’s eyes reflect the streetlight, but the true glow comes from somewhere much deeper, somewhere red and broken and angry. “Who are you to decide what I am? You don’t know me. You don’t even care enough to try to. You’re just interested in what you can get out of me.”
“That’s not true. I do care.”
“Maybe you did,” she replies, “but not anymore.”
I open my mouth to deny it but nothing comes out.
She laughs once, and the sound is dark and bitter. “I hope I die before you do. The look on your face when you realise you’re doomed will be well worth it.”
She pushes past us, striding down the street, swinging the bat around and around in her hand. We watch her until she’s gone.
“Let’s get you home,” Caden says. I nod numbly, even if home is the last place I want to go. Right now, being with him—being out in the world—is a distraction. I can exist purely in my state of shock. I can pretend like the evening didn’t happen.
But I fear once I’m on my own, the shock will wear off, the truth will hit home, and the implications will start to thunder in. I fear the gruesome details of the night, plastered on the back of my eyelids, waiting for me to close my eyes. I fear the thought of Lauren. Whether she’s dead or not dead, she’s still undeniably gone, and it’s impossible to wrap my mind around the idea.
But mostly I fear myself, and what will happen to my beliefs now that I’ve seen Sara’s ruthlessness, her cold and cruel violence. Whatever girl I knew in my childhood is long gone. She’s left only a murderer in her wake and it terrifies me.
I don’t know if the underwalkers are right. I don’t know if humanity is a stain on the earth.
All I know is this: Sara’s the only one of us who’s truly human.
And she’s the most inhuman of us all.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The ride is silent: no radio, no conversation. I sit and watch the dark mess of shapes passes by the window. I wipe the dried blood off my hands without a word.
We eventually come to a stop out in front of a dark house that I vaguely recognise as my own. “How’s the wound?” Caden asks.
“It’s fine. It’ll be healed in a few hours.”
I look sideways at my house again. It feels like it’s been a century since I left it this morning. I stare at its shadowy form with a deep frown. It doesn’t look the same. It’s changed.
But that’s not true. I’m the one who’s changed. That house exists in a world where there’s no such thing as spectres or ghosts. Where I’m diseased, but not dying. Where I’m unusual, but not supernatural, not a prophet with a terrible fate.
In that world, nothing defies logic. It’s my parents’ world. It’s a world I no longer fit into.
And suddenly the shadows are morphing again, growing into figures with dark, flaming eyes and bared teeth. They weave in and out of each other and rise up, rise forward, reaching with clawed hands. There are dozens of them.
I whip my eyes away.
“Are you alright?”
When I didn’t answer, he rephrases, “Will you be alright?”
I look up. I look away. I don’t know. I don’t know.
“I’ll see you on Monday.” I say, and push open the door before I can stop myself, shaking violently
. Because if I had it my way, I’d never leave that car. I’d live in that moment permanently, safe from underwalkers and prophesies and my own death. I’d stay there with him forever.
“Melissa, wait.” He stops me with a hand on my arm. In the darkness, he accidently touches my skin. He yanks his hand back quickly, shaking it.
I stare. He closes it into a fist and tucks it away, looking back at me resolutely. “Come to Rand’s with me. There’s a spare room. You don’t have to be alone.”
“I won’t be alone,” I reply. “I’ll be with my family.”
“You know what I mean. You don’t have to deal with this alone. Not tonight.”
I shrug. “It’s the same either way to me.”
“What is?”
“Staying there. Staying here. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Why do you say that?”
Because I’m always alone. Because we all are. Because no amount of empathetic company can cure the isolation of our individual minds.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, shaking my head. I get out of the car. His words from last week are in my ears: We’re not friends. You’re just the job. And somehow they manage to hurt me like no bullet wound ever could. “Good night, Caden.”
I shut the door and walk away.
***
A hand on my shoulder, pulling me from sleep. Bright eyes pleading in a sea of darkness. And a face, half cast in a flickering light with no source.
“Five more minutes,” I say tiredly, rolling over.
“There’s no time,” the face says, “you must hurry.”
Another hand on my shoulder, pulling me onto my back. I swat at it.
“Your time is running out,” the face says, and I focus on the icy eyes that are so much like my own. Mum. “You must hurry before it’s too late.”
Brown shoulder-length hair growing a shade lighter. Light blue eyes morphing into black. Pale skin turning tanned. Prominent cheekbones rising from a fleshy valley. In front of my eyes, my adoptive mother transforms into my birth mother, but her message remains the same.
