by Dan Rix
My face flushed. “It doesn’t go on over clothes,” I muttered, eyes still dripping. “It’s not like you can see me.”
“Right, because this leaves so much more to the imagination.” His palm skimmed up my spine, leaving a wake of goosebumps before it froze on the nick in my shoulder. His body tensed.
In about two more seconds, he found the scab on the side of my rib cage where Ashley had jabbed me with the fireplace poker—I winced at his touch—and then the wound on my neck. “What happened?” he growled.
“Stop it . . . nothing,” I lied, burying my face in his chest to escape his prodding.
“Leona,” he warned.
“Can you please not ask about that right now?” My voice came out muffled. “Or ever?”
We lapsed into strained silence.
“I love you,” I whispered into his chest, trying to shut it all out, my cheek slippery against his bare pecs. Then I cringed, realizing what I’d just said. Can you not be pathetic for five seconds?
He pet my hair, said nothing. His chest rose and fell under my face. Probably wondering how to deal with the crazy, desperate, naked, invisible girl who’d snuck into his bedroom—
He sighed and reluctantly breathed into my hair, “I love you too.” Like it was barely true, or only true now and wouldn’t be later, or he didn’t want it to be true.
But true.
At his words, my heart floated up inside me like a helium balloon . . . before it popped and my body went rigid in horror. Uh-oh.
What the hell was wrong with me? What was I thinking?
“No, no, you can’t,” I gasped, pulling away. “There’s . . . there’s something you need to know . . . about me. Before I fade away completely.”
“You’re not going to fade away. I’m not letting go, okay? As long as I can touch you—”
“Just listen to me,” I said. “Please. Just listen. You’re . . . you’re going to hate me.”
“Yeah, that’s what you said last time. I’m still waiting.”
I choked on a swallow and started breathing really fast. “It’s about Ashley . . . about what happened to her.”
“Uh-huh. What is it?”
The moment had come.
I stared at his waiting face, horrified. I couldn’t even hear myself think over my pounding heart. This was my chance. I was in his arms, he loved me, confessing would never be safer.
Or harder.
“What is it, Leona?” he said, his voice stern.
I killed your sister. I hid her body. It was me. That was all I had to say. I opened my mouth, hesitated.
Now. Do it now.
“I . . . I can’t,” I whispered.
His arms passed through me and closed on empty air.
“NO!” I reached for him desperately, trying to feel him again, trying to cling to his touch. Just empty air. I lost my balance and fell through his torso, crashing to the floor behind him. The warmth of his body was suddenly gone, leaving only cold.
“Leona?” He glanced around the room, felt along the walls. “Leona, where’d you go? Leona!”
“I’m right here,” I whimpered. “I killed your sister. I did it. I murdered her!”
“Leona, you just vanished. I don’t know if you can hear me or not, but I’m going to get my dad. We’re going to fix this, okay?”
I shook my head, horrified.
I’d missed my one chance.
“Shit.” He returned to the middle of the room and rubbed the back of his neck, face pained. “Shit, shit, shit.”
That was the last time ever, Leona, said the voice in my head.
The room blurred out of focus.
Emory’s face melted into a fuzzy blob, the windows smudged to the side, the glowing LED on his speakers bled into a splotch of red ink, like I was looking at everything through a steamed up glass. I watched it all fade, too scared to breathe.
I was going blind, too.
After a moment, it came into focus again. But not completely, not as colorful as before, not as vivid as before . . . still foggy.
Emory barged into the hall, shouting, “Dad . . . Dad!”
I followed him down to the kitchen, still reeling from my failure and furious at myself. My only chance to confess . . . and I’d missed it, possibly forever.
I couldn’t fathom what that meant.
I was going to burn in hell, that was what that meant.
“Dad, Leona’s in trouble.” Emory said, bursting into the breakfast nook.
John Lacroix set down an iced coffee. “Leona?”
“In my room, I heard her voice, I could touch her. She was there, Dad.” He planted his palms on the table. “She said dark matter made her invisible—dark matter—and then she just vanished, right out of my arms. Poof. Does that make any sense to you?”
His dad peered intently at him, and the corner of his lip twitched.
“My God, that’s a yes.” Emory leaned in. “Look, forget nondisclosure for five seconds. You know I respect all that, but I actually care about this girl, okay?”
I scooted closer so I wouldn’t miss a word, wedged myself right between them. The table seemed to sever me at mid-thigh.
Why had I never thought to shadow his dad while invisible? He had answers.
“Leona . . . Leona Amber Hewitt!” His dad snapped his fingers, breaking out of his trance. “The girl from the San Rafael site. I knew that name was familiar.”
“She was invisible . . . Dad, she was invisible!”
John cursed and scrambled for his cell phone. “She touch you, Em? Any contact at all? Anything feel sticky?”
“Dad, come on—”
“Emory, did she touch you?”
“Yes, she touched me. We hugged. Then she was gone.”
His dad squeezed his jaw. “Dark matter . . . it saturates an object, fuses to it, conducts light through it, eventually it just erases it completely . . .” He bit his fingernails, eyes shifting. “My God, I just realized . . . we had Leona over for dinner . . . she touched our food . . . Ashley—”
“Dad! Where did she go? How do we bring her back? How does she get it off? I swear to God, she was right here, she was literally right in my arms. She’s my friend, okay? I just . . . I need to know she’s safe.”
Guilt squeezed my chest.
Had I infected the rest of his family too?
John Lacroix licked his lips. “Listen, Em, that’s uh . . . that’s what Rincon Systems, NASA, and half the Air Force are working on right now . . . how to stop it from spreading. We encase it in concrete. It leaks through, though. We encase it in more concrete. It crawls out. We burn the stuff, we bury it, we dissolve it in acid. Nothing works. The whole thing’s a crap shoot.”
“And yet the Defense Department insists on weaponizing it,” said Emory, throwing up his hands. “Why am I not surprised?”
“No, no, no, we’re not weaponizing it, Em. God no. It’s already weaponized. What we’re trying to do—what I’m trying to do, what AFSPC is trying to do, what NASA is trying to do—is work out a scenario where we don’t lose everything. That’s what we’re trying to do.”
Emory pressed his lips together. “I was literally holding her in my arms. She was just about to tell me something really important.”
“I need to call someone.” John tapped through his contacts. “There’s an Air Force Major, Rod Connor . . . with the Security Forces, best we got. He’s going to come and clean up, okay? Strip the place down. Nothing else we can do at this point.”
Inside, I cheered.
Rod Connor was coming to clean up! I’d just camp out here until he came and stripped the stuff off me. I’d be invisible for an another hour, tops.
“And he’ll bring her back, right?” said Emor
y. “I mean, she can’t just be gone—”
Everything went quiet.
His clipped statement hung in the air, unfinished, like someone had hit the mute button.
I glanced between them, startled. Their mouths kept moving, but no sounds came out. I exhaled sharply, and the rough sound of air exiting my throat broke the eerie silence. I heard my heartbeat too, so loud it seemed to pound against my ear drum.
“Hell . . . hello?” I muttered.
My words tumbled out into the stillness.
I could hear my own voice, but nothing else.
Then, as I watched their conversation unfold in deathly silence, the colors began to blur together. The late-afternoon sun glared through the window, its rays washing out and bleaching everything in sight like an overexposed photo. A white fog coalesced out of thin air, reducing visibility to ten feet, then five feet, then inches.
Emory’s face sank into the haze.
Deaf and blind and unable to feel, I stumbled forward, groping blindly, and was only vaguely aware of passing through the walls and sprawling headfirst into the garden. I crawled on hands and knees, choking on fear.
“Help,” I cried. “Somebody help . . .”
I crouched over the soil, trying to see details, anything, but only vague, blurry shadows shifted in the fog.
“No, no . . . please,” I moaned as a suffocating terror took hold deep in my abdomen.
What was happening to me?
Erased . . . I was being erased.
If Major Connor ever did come by, I wasn’t aware of it at all.
The sun set around me, tinting the haze gold, then orange and red. Little by little, even those colors blanched to an indistinct gray. Everything was vanishing. Sobbing, I curled into a fetal position and pressed my jaw against the soil, clinging to the one thing I had left—the texture of sand and wood chips against my tear-soaked cheeks.
Then the ground dropped out from underneath me, and I fell, screaming, into oblivion.
My stomach rushed up my throat, and my panic gave way to a startled gasp—falling.
But I wasn’t falling. I was floating. Weightless. Going nowhere.
An ocean of blurry silver light engulfed me from all directions. Nothing in sight—no shadows, no lines, no figures—nothing but a cold, fluorescent luminosity that came from everywhere at once.
Still, the terrifying sense of hurtling downward sent tremor after tremor through my abdomen, threatening to pull my insides right out of me. Battling nausea, I swallowed them back down.
Just like that, the world had vanished. I was . . . gone. Truly gone.
The end.
I had come to the end.
A universe of white fog, zero gravity . . . endless silence, broken only by the throaty rasp of my lungs chocking down oxygen, my heart thumping in dizzy terror, my eyelashes beating furiously to resolve shapes in the mist.
The oblivion stretched to infinity.
No, this couldn’t be right. I still had a body, I felt a body.
I swung my arms to be sure. Though invisible from head to toe, I could still feel my shoulder blade pivoting in response, the joint popping and cracking near my ear. I made a fist and punched forward, sending a very real whiplash down my spine.
My limbs had weight, they could move. Which meant I still had a body . . . right?
Unless it was all an illusion.
My teeth began chattering again, the clack-clack-clack almost deafening in the silence. More proof that I was real. Instinctively, my palms went to rub my arms, but they passed right through me. Proof I wasn’t real.
Which one was it?
Still nothing but white. Nothing below me, nothing above me.
Think. I had to think.
Where was this? What was this?
Death. Not heaven or hell, somewhere in between. Purgatory. Somewhere people weren’t supposed to go. I’d slipped through the cracks into purgatory.
Or none of the above.
Dark matter had swallowed me, and now I was trapped inside its stomach, where I would hang in limbo for all eternity. A suffocating cold closed around me, racking me with shivers.
I was trapped inside dark matter.
But why was I still alive? Why could I still think and feel things and remember? I should be dead by now, aware of nothing. That would have been better. Not this.
I craned my neck to look behind me. The same faintly glowing mist reached in all directions. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, or touch or smell or taste . . . except the salty taste of my own mucous, coating the inside of my mouth.
So none of my five senses counted for anything. Basically, I was just a floating consciousness. But . . . but what was I supposed to do out here? How long would it be like this? An answer crept up on me.
Not . . . not forever?
The thought sent a quiver through my heart.
“Nuh-uh, no way,” I spat, verging on panic. “I’m not staying here forever.” Growing desperate, I reached out as far as I could into the white space and sort of kicked off with my feet, seeing if I could touch anything out there. My fingers swept through air. Farther. I had to reach farther.
Maybe I could swim. A butterfly stroke or something.
I performed the motion awkwardly, stretching out and cupping my palms and pulling them down to my sides while I kicked with my legs. Please, please, please let it not be forever. As I lunged and thrashed, my body jerked forward and backward in space. Going nowhere.
The effort fatigued me after a few minutes, and I paused to catch my breath. A thin sheen of sweat evaporated off my skin. As I floated in space, panting heavily, the salty taste in my mouth intensified to a sting.
Absently I ran my tongue along my gummy teeth, my chapped lips, the dry roof of my mouth. I was thirsty.
I hadn’t drunk anything since last night, almost twenty hours ago. Or eaten. I hadn’t eaten breakfast. A good thing considering anything in my stomach would have forced its way up my esophagus by now.
Would I starve to death out here? Die of thirst?
At least that put an upper limit on how long I could suffer. Three agonizing days without water, bored out of my mind, and then I would dry out like a prune.
No, Leona, said the voice in my head. Your hunger will be everlasting.
An icy tingle rose up my spine as the words echoed into the silence, sounding closer than ever.
“What do you want?” My voice tumbled out into the emptiness. “What do you mean, everlasting?”
Lower jaw trembling, I waited for a reply.
Silence.
“What . . . what are you?” I said. “Are you real? Is this real?”
The voice in my brain stayed quiet.
I listened, trying to hear above my jackhammering pulse. I shut it out, projecting all my focus to out there, amplifying the stillness in my mind until it seemed to whoosh by me.
And then I did hear something.
Something way out there, so faint it could almost be my imagination. But it wasn’t.
I knew it wasn’t.
It was the sound of wind howling, whistling, screaming . . . as if rushing by at enormous speed. The eerie sound raised goosebumps on my forearms.
But almost at the edge of awareness, a tiny niggling in my inner ear told me it wasn’t what was out there that was moving.
It was me.
I was moving, along with all this white light.
And I was moving fast.
I was moving mind-bogglingly fast.
Chapter 3
“Five thousand three hundred and twenty-one,” I croaked, my voice hoarse from counting. “Five thousand three hundred and twenty-two . . .”
Hours had passed. Nothing had changed. A world of pur
e white.
I was going crazy.
“Five thousand three hundred and twenty-three . . .”
My tongue darted across my lips, but rather than wet them, my sticky saliva only dried them out further. God I was thirsty.
“Five thousand three . . .” The words scratched at my throat and wheezed out in a painful, raspy cough. I continued counting in my head, sinking deeper into despair.
Five thousand three hundred and twenty-four . . .
I estimated I’d started counting thirty minutes in, although it was impossible to tell. It could have been five minutes. Or an hour. Who gave a crap? All I could ever do was float here like a dumb helium balloon. I was sooooo bored.
There were 3,600 seconds in an hour. I’d been counting slowly, taking two or three seconds to say each number, which meant I’d been here for something like four hours.
Four hours down.
Only forever to go.
So we were moving. The howling had kept up the whole time, rising and falling like a hurricane. I felt the movement deep in my inner ear, almost in my brain, like a tiny compass needle getting tugged this way and that. But somehow, I sensed we weren’t moving up or down, or left or right, but in a different direction altogether, a direction I couldn’t even point in. Deeper. We were moving deeper.
Five thousand three hundred and twenty-five . . .
For the past twenty minutes, an itch had been building on the tip of my nose. Now it was almost unbearable. I tried again to get it with the tip of my tongue, but it was out of reach. I’d heard some people could touch their noses with their tongues. Not me, apparently.
I scrunched up my nose, but that only made the itch flare up. My eyes began to water. Oh God. Maybe I could get my hair to do the job. I tilted my head back and snapped it forward, and my invisible hair sailed around and whipped me in the face . . . and lingered there, making my whole face itch.
I shook it off, wanting to scream. Fuming, I raised my hand to my face and made an aggressive motion of scratching, even though my fingers passed uselessly through my face. It wasn’t even vaguely cathartic.
