Ghost Hope

by Ripley Patton

  The brightness was too much. Spots flashed on my retinas, so I glanced down and away, my eyes landing on Olivia’s ghost hand.

  She followed my gaze and lifted her hand, flexing and turning it different directions in relationship to the tank. But she couldn’t see what I saw. She couldn’t see how bad the blur had gotten since she’d inadvertently dipped that hand into the tank. Her PSS was stretching away from her in misty wisps, slipping through the air toward it and disappearing into its overwhelming glare.

  For a moment, I felt suddenly dizzy and clammy, like I might throw up.

  Olivia couldn’t see what was happening to her, but she must have read my expression because she caught my eyes and shook her head ever so slightly. We’d both known the risks of coming down to the tank, and she didn’t want me to alarm the others when there was still a chance we could stop it.

  We need to hurry, I said, looking at Mike. The PSS glowing from the muscles across his shoulders was strong and steady, completely unaffected by the pull of the tank. Where is the machine?

  “This way,” he said, leading us around to the other side of the room.

  I bent over the blinking device, carefully inspecting each dial, meter, and slider, but they meant nothing to me, and I felt a panic rising in my chest. Mike expected me to know what to do. They were all sure I could save them. If I were the heroine of a book, I would know exactly what to do, but I wasn’t, and I didn’t.

  I don’t know how this works, I confessed to Mike. We’ll have to experiment.

  “I trust your instincts,” he said.

  What were my instincts? I wasn’t a creature of machines, I knew that much. But Samantha had said she might be able to use it, to tune it like one of the many instruments she played.

  Samantha should adjust the dials, I told them. If they control the resonance of the PSS, she will be able to hear it, and I will be able to see it. Perhaps we’ll discern a pattern we can work with. I was making it up, just guessing like any of them could have. But I had to believe in our ability to solve this. There was no other option.

  “Okay,” Samantha said, stepping up to the machine, laying her hand gently on the first slider, and tilting her PSS ear toward the tank. “Let’s see what this one does.”

  Wait. I turned to David and Olivia. Go stand over there. It will be safer.

  It was a lie, and probably my best so far. I already knew in my gut there was no safe distance for me or Olivia. Still, I’d directed them to a slightly darker part of the room where I would be able to see more clearly the rate at which my sister’s PSS fled her body. That was the only real way I could think of to gauge the effectiveness of what we were about to do. I couldn’t look at the tank too long or discern anything about its resonance, not the way it was pulsing. And for some reason, I couldn’t see my own PSS streaming away from me, though I knew it must be. But I could watch the effect on Olivia get better, or worse, and adjust accordingly.

  She and David moved away, into the darker shadows near a hatch-like door, his chest glowing through his shirt like a beacon. They were standing side by side, awkwardly, their shoulders touching a little. I could tell David was warming up to my sister again, his heart already remembering what his head could not. Even if the tank had wiped his memories from the eight ball, the two of them would be okay. I wanted them to have another chance together.

  I turned back to Samantha and said, Okay. Now.

  As she moved the first slider up, slowly, carefully, the speed and brightness of tank’s pulsing increased. Within seconds the flashing was so fast and intense, it was as if the world was cut into black and white shards of moment.

  There was Sam, her face pinched.

  Black.

  There was Mike, frowning at me.

  Black.

  There were David and Olivia, her ghost hand’s PSS streaming away from her toward the tank like a shooting star.

  NO! Turn it down! I yelled at Samantha, and the flashing stopped, the pulsing returning to its original pace and intensity. That’s not the one, I reiterated, my stomach churning with anxiety. It’s not working. It’s too dangerous.

  “Kaylee, it’s okay,” Mike said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “You can do this. Maybe we got the worst one out of the way.”

  “That sounded very soprano to me,” Sam said. “Almost like the whistle of a firework, so if high is bad, maybe low is good. Let’s try this one.”

  I braced myself, terrified, but this time the pulsing slowed and deepened. It had a heavy thrum to it, a vibration I could feel coming up through the floor into my bones. And the tank looked all wobbly like I was seeing it through the waves of heat that often rose off the desert outside the dome.

  I turned and looked at Olivia, hope against hope, but what I saw was even worse than before. Her PSS was looping away from her in great fat ribbons of energy flowing from her fingers. Even as I watched and yelled at Samantha to stop, my sister slumped against David, her face pale and drawn.

  “This isn’t working,” David said angrily, as the pulsing went back to normal. “Olivia almost fainted on that one.” He was holding her up, his arm around her waist.

  “It was just a moment of light-headedness,” she insisted, propping herself against him. “I’m fine. We can try again.”

  This isn’t working, I said, mind-speaking only to Mike. That was worse than the first one. I was beginning to feel sick as well. I wasn’t sure if things looked blurry because of the tank or because I was growing faint. Mike, please, we need to go back upstairs.

  “It’s up to you,” he said, looking down at me, earnest and trusting. “I think we should try one more, but it’s up to you.”

  I knew he was right. If we gave up now, I’d just made Olivia and myself much worse for nothing. We would still die. We would just die faster. And Mike couldn’t lose Chase. I understand what his brother meant to him. We had to try again. No, we had to keep going until we found the answer. Or until we couldn’t keep going anymore.

  I turned to David and Olivia. Get ready, I said.

  I looked at Samantha and said, Go ahead.

  This time, the room felt bigger around me, the air heavier and thicker, and everyone’s movements seemed to slow down like time was spiraling away from us.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Mike slowly raising his arm to point at the tank, his mouth open with strange, garbled sounds coming from it. In the background, Samantha was just standing at the machine, her hand frozen on the slider.

  When I tried to turn my head to look at Olivia, it seemed to take forever. Halfway there, my eyes traveled across the tank and I saw what Mike had been pointing at. The artifacts had come swimming out of the swirling blue, pressing themselves up against the inside wall, their outlines and details as clear as if they were right in front of me. There was Major Tom’s knife, which I’d stabbed into Anthony, and next to it the PSS-severing device Dr. Fineman had created, and finally, the small metal bullet I had seen shining from Jason’s pocket the moment I’d met him.

  I stared at them, transfixed, completely forgetting for a moment that I needed to check what was happening to Olivia.

  And then everything sped up.

  Not to normal speed.

  No, this was much faster.

  The artifacts flew backwards and the wind rushed toward me, the room sliding back, my feet slipping.

  People were yelling, but it was chipmunky and just as garbled as before.

  I slammed into the tank before I understood it had pulled me to itself, my face pressed against its cool, pulsing surface. My head started to phase through, and I tried to jerk my neck back, but the pull was too strong. Suddenly, my right eye went all blurry, like I was seeing underwater, and I realized half my face had phased into the tank. I started to panic, to try and scramble away, but then a strange calm came over me and I looked up toward the light, the beautiful streaming light.

  The top of the tank was a desert sky full of stars. Millions and millions of stars flashed toward
it in amazingly fast sparks of PSS energy. I could see up and up, past the contents of the tank, through the ceiling of the round room and all the floors of the compound above, and out into the wide world where all those sparks were coming from because they were coming from everywhere. A spark from every person camped outside the dome in the desert, except the rare few who didn’t have PSS. A spark from every pronghorn and burrowing owl and red ant. From every resident of Hermiston and the other nearby townships. Every living creature on the planet that possessed a hint of PSS was slowly losing it to the pull of the tank. The closer to Umatilla they were, the faster the sparks flew, coming from every direction, as far as I could see and beyond the horizon.

  Then the artifacts floated into view, the two knives and the bullet pulsing with my sister’s PSS resonance, and I could see the tiniest strands of energy flowing away, up and out of the tank, back into the world.

  At the same time, while I was seeing all that with the eye that was in the tank, out of the corner of my other eye, I could see David and Olivia. He was holding onto the hatch-like door of the room with one bulging arm, his other wrapped around Olivia’s waist. And she was bent in half over it like a rag doll, her arms flailing out like banners in the wind, her legs being pulled under it, the expression on her face one of determined agony. The blur from her PSS was like a solid column of light beaming straight into the tank.

  Then I blinked, and the pull stopped, and I was hurled to the ground at the base of the tank, my head slamming against the floor, my ears ringing.

  “Kaylee, are you all right?” Mike knelt down next to me, his face a shattered mask of concern. “I’m so sorry. I should have listened to you. We never should have tried another one.” He pulled me against his chest, cradling me like a baby. “I’m so sorry, little one. I’m so sorry.” I felt something wet drop on my face and I looked up, bewildered, to see that he was crying.

  Then the darkness took me, and Mike slowly faded from view.

  40

  DAVID MARCUS

  “Olivia is asking for you,” Pete said, looking down at me. Mrs. Black stood behind him, her eyes desperate and devastated, a woman facing the imminent loss of both her daughters, and I wondered if she’d survive that.

  I wondered if I would.

  I stood up and followed Pete, leaving the library where we’d gathered for our vigil after we’d rushed Olivia and Kaylee back up to the infirmary and handed them over to Pete and Reiny’s care. That had been hours ago and Olivia had finally regained consciousness, which Pete said was a good sign, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. I’d seen Olivia transform from a vibrant, healthy girl to a walking corpse after only twenty minutes of messing with that fucking tank. When I’d visited Kaylee’s bedside in the infirmary earlier, she’d looked just as bad, and she still hadn’t regained consciousness. And it was my fault. I’d brought Kaylee here when I could have kept her at the reservation, safe and sound. It was just like Danielle. Perhaps I was destined to relive this one deadly mistake over and over, whether I remembered it or not.

  I knew I was in shock. Probably, we all were. My body moved, following Pete through the dimly-lit dome to the far side where we’d moved Olivia’s bed so she could rest undisturbed. I stepped between two privacy screens and my eyes saw her and my brain said, There she is, barely alive, looking at me with those gorgeous, haunting eyes, and I will never forgive myself for this. But I didn’t feel any of it. I was just there, watching it happen.

  “I’m going to check on Kaylee,” Pete said, disappearing behind the screens and leaving me there to fend for myself. To face Olivia alone.

  She was hooked up to an IV just like Kaylee was. It was administering fluids, plus a dose of Passion’s plasma, though we all knew that was a long shot. Pete and Reiny had told us they had no idea how to stop the tank’s effects. All they could do was make Olivia and Kaylee comfortable. There wasn’t anything any of us could do.

  And it was even worse than that.

  On the way back up from the morgue, Olivia limp in my arms and Kaylee limp in Palmer’s, Kaylee had regained consciousness briefly and begun to speak in a horrified whisper straight into our minds.

  It’s taking the whole world, she’d said. All the PSS, like stars, rushing toward it, and when it can’t hold anymore, it will destroy us all.

  Palmer had stopped, leaning against the nearest wall, but she was already unconscious again.

  He’d looked at me and Samantha and said, “She hit her head when she fell. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  Both of us had just nodded.

  And none of us had said anything to the others about Kaylee’s rant.

  Why would we? Even if it was true, what could we possibly do about it?

  “Don’t look so depressed,” Olivia said, her weak voice still strong enough to draw me back to reality. “I’m not dead yet, you know?”

  “You’re not going to die,” I told her, wanting to believe it. I sat down in the chair next to the bed and took her ghost hand in mine, stroking my fingers across the soft flesh of her inner wrist. Her PSS was faded, her hand so thin I could barely see it.

  She closed her eyes and a slow smile crept across her bluish lips. “Some part of you remembers how much I like that,” she sighed.

  I didn’t remember, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to make her feel better. I couldn’t lose Kaylee or Olivia. I couldn’t be responsible for another death. It would break me.

  “Marcus,” she said, squeezing my hand, and I looked up to see her eyes drilling into mine. “Don’t you dare give up on me. I lost you to the bottom of a river, and I didn’t give up. I lost you to lies and torture by the CAMFers and I didn’t give up. I lost you to your own recovery, and I didn’t give up. You don’t get to give up. Not ever. Even if I die, you go on with this and execute the plan I laid out for you and Chase before we went down to the tank. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” I held her gaze and nodded. “I understand.”

  “How are Kaylee and Chase?” she asked. “Pete and my mom wouldn’t tell me. They just kept saying they didn’t want me to worry. Of course, that just made me assume the worst.”

  I was tempted to evade or lie to her. In fact, that’s what I’d been instructed to do. And I was good at lying. It was pretty much my default mode of communication. But after the leadership and determination Olivia had demonstrated over the last forty-eight hours, she deserved to know the truth.

  “Kaylee is still unconscious,” I said. “Pete thinks she might have a head injury. And Chase’s PSS is showing signs of the effects now.”

  “How is Mike taking that?”

  “Not great,” I said, keeping it simple. There was a difference between straight-out lying to her, and leaving out the details of what a frantic mess Palmer was. He blamed himself for the disaster in the tank room—for using his influence over Kaylee to nearly destroy her. Whatever we’d done down there had actually increased the rate of the effect on Kaylee, Olivia, and Chase. So, that was on him too, and the man was desperate. He’d had T-dog and Chase at their computers all night, searching the Umatilla database for anything on the tank that might help us stop it. And he hadn’t left his brother’s side, other than to check in on how the girls were doing.

  “My mom told me you showed the movie,” Olivia said, smiling. “She said people cheered so loud you could hear it in the dome.”

  “It’s gone viral on the internet too. It has half a million hits and counting.”

  “That’s good.” Her fingers twined with mine as she lay her head back on her pillow. “I’m so cold,” she said, trembling, “And you are always so warm.” She pulled her hand from mine and patted the edge of the bed. “Come here.”

  As soon as I understood what she meant, I glanced around self-consciously. What would Pete think if he came back and found me in bed with his patient? What would Olivia’s mother think if she caught us like that?

  “You’re going to deny a girl her dying wish?” she teased, but there was an
edge of desperation to it I couldn’t ignore.

  So, I got up, pulled the blankets back, and slid into the bed next to her. She smiled the hugest, most radiant smile I had ever see, and rolled straight into my arms, nestling her head under my chin against my chest.

  “Thank you,” she sighed, clinging to me. “It makes me feel better, you know, because I could never die, here, in your arms. Not with you to hold onto.”

  I think she fell asleep, even as she said it. I felt her relax against me, and her breathing slowed, the palm of her ghost hand pale against my chest, and I tried to imagine that I could feel my strength, vitality, and energy flowing into her.

  I must have been pretty tired myself, because a minute later, I was asleep too.

  Later, much later, a strange rattling woke me, and I opened blurry eyes to see Kaylee and Samantha standing at the side of the bed.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded, guilt washing over me. I should have been at Kaylee’s bedside, not sleeping with Olivia. “Kaylee, you should be in bed.”

  “I told her the same thing,” Sam said, “but she wouldn’t listen.”

  I know what to do, Kaylee said. I know how to stop it and save Olivia and Chase and everyone.

  Olivia stirred in my arms and opened her eyes. She turned her head and saw the girls too. “What’s wrong?” she asked groggily.

  I know how to stop the tank, Kaylee said again. But I need the three of you to come with me, and we’ll have to use the artifacts and the cubes. She reached down to the floor, hefting up the faraday cage and setting it on the edge of the bed. That had been the rattle I’d heard earlier.