Ghost Heart

by Ripley Patton

  I slowly turned and stared at Mr. James.

  “Olivia,” Mr. James said, ‘You know you can’t trust this man or anything he says. You know what he is. How he twists everything.”

  “How I twist everything?” Fineman laughed. “So, you deny that you took this girl from her hospital crib and brought her here to live in this dome, never to experience freedom, never to step outside, never to know her family?” He turned to me. “If you don’t believe me, ask her,” he said, pointing to my sister.

  Our eyes met again, Kaylee’s and mine, and she nodded.

  I turned back to Mr. James. “You lied to my parents,” I said. “You told them you were looking. You pretended to try and find my sister when you knew where she was all along, because you had taken her.”

  “Everything I did was for her protection,” he said, no guilt in his eyes. “Your parents had no idea what to do with her or how to protect her. Here she’s been safe, neither side able to exploit or use her. She’s not a prisoner. No one has experimented on her. She’s had everything she could need or ask for. You have to understand, this was the only way to keep the peace between the two factions. From the moment she was born, both sides were bent on annihilating one another for control of her. And I wasn’t in charge of The Hold then. I did what I was ordered to do. Even so, I knew it was the only solution. By bringing her here where neither side could use her, we’ve saved thousands of lives, including hers. And the peace has held for over two decades.”

  “Peace?” I said, choking on the word. “You call this peace?”

  “It was,” he argued, talking quickly. “But then nine months ago, Kaylee began to manifest her powers. He knows we can’t hold her here much—”

  “Silence him,” Fineman ordered, and the guard holding Mr. James pulled out a ball gag and shoved it over Alex James’s head, strapping it tightly. Even with a red clown nose in his mouth, the man still somehow managed to look dignified, and his eyes were on me, as if he expected me to save him. As if he expected me to save them all.

  Next to me, I felt Grant tense up, bracing himself for me to pull out the cube, but what could I combine it with? The CAMFer soldiers were too far away. They’d stop me before I got to them. They’d shoot me, or worse yet, they’d shoot one of the other hostages. I was too afraid. I was shaking. I couldn’t do it.

  Fineman was looming over Mr. James. He thought he’d won.

  I turned and found my sister’s eyes, calm, accepting, and hopeful.

  Palmer was looking at me too with a bit of regret, almost an apology, as he raised the bladed knife, still humming, and pulled it across my sister’s throat.

  Her head fell back and she slumped in his arms, blood and PSS welling from her neck and flowing down the front of her robe.

  “No!” I cried, and Grant grabbed me, holding me up, pulling me to his chest.

  Mr. James thrashed against the CAMFer holding him, moaning loudly around the ball gag in his mouth.

  “You see, now no one will have her,” Palmer said, looking down at the limp form in his arms. “Not the CAMFers. Not the Hold. Her powers were manifesting far beyond anything anyone could control. She was too dangerous. It was only a matter of time before we couldn’t hold her at all.”

  What had he done to her? Oh, God, what had he done?

  Her PSS wasn’t going into the knife. It was running down the front of her, dripping to the floor, pooling with her blood. She was dying. Mike Palmer had pretended to be my ally so I wouldn’t stop him from killing my sister right in front of me.

  On. I thought, sinking my ghost hand straight into Grant, my glove flopping to the floor. It was all one motion. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t even need to feel for the cube. I knew exactly where it was, and I had it out in a second, tossing it to my left hand. Then I pulled back the front of my robe and slipped my ghost hand into my own chest.

  What do you feel when you reach into yourself? Your own strength, and weakness, and humanity. Your own frailty and might. Your own life-force, pulsing and eternal. You feel light and you feel darkness, darkness you must embrace and find and use, because it’s a part of you, a crucial part of you. You cannot exile the darkness. You must cup it in your hand and know it.

  I felt something, my fingers touching my own burden, grasping it, holding it.

  I pulled my ghost hand from my chest, and I looked down at what I held.

  It was a stone, small, rounded, and smooth, and etched across it was my father’s name, Stephen Carlton Black, followed by the dates of his birth and his death.

  It was a marker. The gravestone he’d never had. The span of a good man’s life nestled in the palm of my hand.

  Dr. Fineman was yelling. He was waving for his men to take me. He could see what I’d done, and what I was about to do. He was staring at my ghost hand, terror in his eyes.

  But it was too late. He couldn’t stop me.

  I pressed Grant’s cube and my father’s stone together. But what did I want? What could I possibly wish for that would correct the great mess my life had become?

  I wished for a different world. One where the CAMFers and The Hold didn’t need to exist. One where my sister and my mom and I could be together without fear. One where Marcus could trust and love someone. One where kids like Nose, and Yale, and Jason, and Passion could live unmolested, and free, and empowered. I wanted to know, without a doubt, who I could trust and who I couldn’t. Wanted to have the people who truly cared about me surround me like a family. I wanted the most ridiculous, outrageous, unrealistic justice for myself and everyone I cared about, and I honestly didn’t think that was too much to ask.

  But nothing was happening.

  Two of Dr. Fineman’s men charged me.

  I banged the cube and the rock together like a cavewoman, feeling some great terrible pressure of desperation building inside of me.

  I looked over at Grant, frantic, and he opened his mouth to say something, but I never heard the words. I never heard them because something pulsed out of me, a wave of energy like an explosion or a tsunami, rolling through the air away from me in all directions, hurling Grant into the distance and sucking the sound right out of him.

  One minute he was standing next to me, the next he was gone, winked out of existence.

  And it wasn’t just Grant.

  It was everything.

  I turned, looking for my sister, for Palmer, for Marcus, but no one was there. Not Fineman. Not his CAMFers.

  I was standing in the middle of the dome in the center of the tile mosaic alone, and all the furnishings and trappings and contents were completely gone. Without the lamps and inner lights, it was dark and growing darker by the minute. I looked up, through the glass dome, and realized that even the stars were fading, winking into darkness from the outer edge of the sphere inward, as if some great telescope was shuttering closed over the entire universe, over me and all I’d ever known.

  And then everything went dark. Including me.

  28

  OLIVIA

  A rock pressed into my cheek, and another smaller one dug into my back. I sat up, but it was too dark to see my surroundings clearly. In fact, it was pitch black except for the glaring white light in the distance, which made it even harder to see anything else.

  Was I dead? Was that the light at the end of the tunnel everyone talked about? Was I about to see my dad, or God, or the poor sister I’d just let die?

  No, I didn’t believe in any sort of afterlife except becoming dirt. And I definitely wasn’t dirt yet.

  The ground under me was gritty like sand though, and the air was cool and unmoving. There wasn’t any sound either, which was creepy, like being in a tomb or a cave. Yes, it felt exactly like being in a cave, all still and enclosed and deep.

  When I was ten, my parents had taken me to Meremac Caverns in Missouri, and we’d gotten a tour of the caves. In one of the deepest chambers, the guide had made us all turn off our helmet lights and stand there in the darkest dark any human being has ever
experienced. I remembered that feeling well. I must be in a cave, and that glaring light was the opening in the distance. But how the hell had I gotten here?

  I sat up slowly and carefully, my head spinning a little. The last thing I remembered was being in the dome at the compound at Warm Springs.

  There was a rustling sound behind me and I freaked out, scrambling back, pressing myself against the rough, cool wall of the cave.

  I heard the snap and hissing flare of a match being struck, and there was Mike Palmer’s face lit up in its glow. He cupped his hand around the match and the light grew in intensity and size until he was suddenly holding a large torch. He held it out, sweeping it back and forth, revealing dark forms strewn across the cave floor, lumpy rounded shapes, not rocks, but bodies. Shit. What was I doing in a cave full of dead bodies with Mike Palmer?

  This had to be a nightmare. Wake up. I told myself. Wake up now, Olivia.

  Palmer swept the torch my direction and stopped, his eyes landing on me.

  For a minute he just stared, as if he wasn’t sure what to say.

  I moved to a crouch, preparing to flee toward the cave entrance if he made a move toward me.

  “For God’s sake, turn on your hand,” he said. “Help me find your sister.” He gestured at the bodies. “She’s here. She has to be here.”

  “Fuck you,” I spat. “You killed her.” He’d also just made me feel like an idiot. I’d completely forgotten I could turn my new ghost hand on and off. Apparently, it defaulted back to off when I was unconscious. But I didn’t turn it on yet, just to spite him. And I still wasn’t sure this wasn’t a dream.

  “I didn’t kill her,” he scoffed. “We just made it look that way. It was all part of the plan to free her. We couldn’t just escape. The CAMFers and The Hold had to believe she was dead, or they’d never stop looking for her. We had to make it look like the end of her and when we did, I knew you’d use your hand. It would be the only thing left to you. What did you wish for, though? What did you think of?” He bent down and flipped over the body nearest him. I could see by the light of his magic torch it wasn’t my sister. It was Passion.

  “Oh, God.” I moaned. “Is she dead?”

  He put a finger to her neck. “No,” he said, already up and moving to the next body. “She’s just knocked out like we were from the displacement. You didn’t kill anyone. Your power doesn’t do that. But this is very important. I need you to tell me exactly what you wished for when you used your hand.”

  What had I wished for? I’d been so conflicted and confused and desperate. The moment seemed like a blur. It had been an ache in my heart more than any coherent thought. It had been a messy tangle of numerous needs and wants. “I don’t know,” I stammered as Palmer shone his torch down on Grant, lying face up, and bent to check his pulse. He’d said I hadn’t killed anyone, but I guess he wanted to be sure. “There were so many things. I wanted the world to be different. I wanted to be safe. I wanted to know who really cared about me.”

  “Did you wish for your sister to be safe, to be with you?” he drilled me as he stepped away from Grant and on to another form.

  “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Dammit! I need you to know, girl. If she isn’t here, we’ve lost everything. Do you understand? She is everything. I was counting on you to get this right, this one thing I couldn’t do. If you’ve messed it up—” he stopped, looking down at the form he’d just turned over with his dusty booted foot. It was my mother.

  “Oh my God,” I said, jumping up and scrambling across the rocks and dirt to her. “Mom.” I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her head into my lap. “Is she okay?” I asked, looking up at Palmer. “Please, tell me she’s okay.” I brushed my left hand across her head, feeling the soft downy prickle of the stubble there. Her hair was starting to grow back. Why had she ever shaved it?

  Palmer crouched next to her, across from me, and put his big, dirty fingers on her pale, slender neck as he held the torch over us. “She’s fine,” he said, after a moment. “Just unconscious. But we have a problem. She wasn’t in the dome with us. She shouldn’t be here. If you displaced your mother here, with us, that means you could have displaced Kaylee somewhere else. And that’s bad.” He stood up and resumed looking around the cave, waving his torch back and forth frantically. “Wait a minute,” he said, and my eyes followed his, seeing the slender feminine form tucked in a corner at the back of the cave.

  He rushed over to it, his torch shining down and revealing Samantha James’s face. He didn’t even bend down and check her pulse, as if he didn’t care. He turned to me groaning, “What did you do? How could you bring her, but not your sister?”

  “This is a dream, isn’t it?” I said to him. “Your match turned into a torch. My mother is here. And you keep telling me I’ve messed up, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “No, it’s not a dream.” He rubbed his free hand across his face. “You were supposed to displace us. Me, and you, and Kaylee. That was the plan to get her to safety. She told me it would work. She was sure. But she’s not here,” he gestured around the cave.

  There were no more forms. We had Passion, Grant, my mother, and Samantha, but not my sister. I had sent her somewhere else. And what about Marcus and Jason and Mr. James? What about all the other people in the dome and the compound? When I’d displaced people before, I’d always been touching them. That’s how I’d displaced Palmer the first time I’d ever done it. That was how I’d displaced a whole group of us when we’d escaped Dr. Fineman’s lab back in Greenfield. But I hadn’t been touching anyone this time. They could have been scattered to the four winds for all I knew. Fuck. What had I done?

  “She could be outside,” Palmer said, hope in his voice as he strode past me and walked toward the mouth of the cave, his body blocking out much of the light. Between that and him taking the torch, I was thrown into darkness again and finally had the wherewithal to light up my ghost hand. It cast a gentle glow across the face of my mother and she moaned, her eyes fluttering open.

  “Olivia,” she sighed, her eyes opening wider, welling with love and relief. “You’re all right.” She reached up and stroked my cheek. “I love you so much. And I’m so sorry—so sorry for everything.”

  “It’s okay, Mom.” I smiled down at her. “Everything’s going to be okay.

  * * *

  “So, you’re saying my other daughter is alive. Kaylee is alive?” my mother asked, the firelight dancing across her shocked face. “And Mr. James was the one who took her? And she was at the compound, but now you don’t know where she is because Olivia can teleport people en masse and move them through time, but she can’t control exactly where they go?”

  We were all sitting around a campfire Palmer had built on the rocks just outside the cave. He hadn’t found Kaylee anywhere nearby. He’d searched for an hour. And then the sun had set, which meant I’d probably displaced us in time as well as distance. Unless we’d been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours.

  After Palmer had returned from his search, there’d been a lot of helping people get oriented and trying to explain where we were and why. Then, he’d built the fire, all the while throwing me passive-aggressive looks of disappointment, which I was getting fucking sick of because I already felt bad.

  “That pretty much sums it up,” Palmer said, sitting down on a rock.

  “But how did you ever gain The Kaylee’s trust?” Samantha asked. “And why help her if you’re a CAMFer?”

  “I’m not a CAMFer,” he said, sounding insulted. “I’m a free agent. I work for whoever pays me, and both sides have been paying me for a long time. I was assigned to the dome when Kaylee first arrived. Before that, it was just a job, you know, I figured if I could make a decent paycheck on other people’s hate and distrust, why not? But that girl, she gets under your skin. I’ve never met anyone like her. So, I kept going back to the dome between assignments. Then I was gone for a long time, in Greenfield.” He glanced at me and my
mother. “And I began to understand where Kaylee had come from, and how I might be able to help her.”

  I looked around the fire, wondering if anyone was buying this. Mike Palmer the nice guy. Mike Palmer with his heart on his sleeve. Really?

  “After I left Greenfield,” he continued, “I was assigned back to the dome, with occasional assignments elsewhere.”

  Like Indy and the McMansion, when he’d left us the matchbook. The magic matchbook he still hadn’t explained to me.

  “But mostly I was at the dome, and things were beginning to get dicey. Kaylee was manifesting powers, and she wasn’t very good at hiding them. She doesn’t understand deceit. So, I knew I had to get her out. I had to get her free from both groups before they figured out what was going on. That’s where Olivia and her hand came in. I knew what she could do. I’d experienced it myself. And Kaylee has an innate sense of how PSS works, and how it can be manipulated. But we never imagined Olivia would displace the entire population of the compound randomly. We thought the closest people to her would end up in the same place.”

  “I’m sorry, okay?” I said, looking around the fire. “I did it wrong. I lost my sister.”

  “It’s not your fault,” my mother said, stroking my back. “You did the best you could.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t random,” Grant said, from across the fire. “There might be a pattern we’re just not seeing yet.”

  “Maybe,” Palmer said. “I just hope to God Kaylee didn’t end up with a group of CAMFers. The Holders would be better, though not by much.”

  I saw Samantha cringe at that comment, but she didn’t try to dispute it.

  “You have to understand,” Mike said, “Kaylee is completely innocent. She’s never set foot outside the dome. She knows nothing of the outside world or how to survive. She can’t even speak. If she’s with others, she won’t be safe. But if she’s displaced alone, somewhere out in the wilderness like we are, she won’t even survive.”