Touch

by Michelle Sagara

  Allison’s grimace was far more natural. “I told her as much of nothing as I could get away with. But apparently I look worried. Or not cheerful enough. And she noticed the bruising.”

  Emma wilted as Allison’s jaw snapped shut. Michael, however, said, “What bruising?” in exactly the wrong tone of voice.

  Emma and Allison exchanged a look that Michael couldn’t have missed had he been sleeping. And while Allison was a better liar than Michael, it was only by chance; anyone over the age of three who was still breathing was, after all.

  It was—it had always—been tempting to treat Michael like a child; it was also both unfair and a mistake. But it was Allison who made the executive decision as they walked the rest of the way to school.

  “Emma and I took Petal for a walk last night,” she told him quietly. “And we met two Necromancers just outside the cemetery.”

  Michael’s eyes widened. After a moment, they narrowed. “They hurt you?”

  “They tried.”

  “Bruises don’t—”

  “Yes, they hurt me—but not badly. I’m just bruised, and it’s not a big bruise, either.” The executive decision had clearly faltered.

  Emma picked up the slack. “They tried to kill her.”

  It was Michael’s turn to miss a step, but when he righted himself, he’d stopped walking.

  “Talk while we walk, Michael; you’ll be late if you don’t.”

  For once, the panicky prospect of being late didn’t move him, much. “What happened?”

  “Eric and Chase showed up.”

  He took a deep breath and began to walk again. “They killed the Necromancers?”

  “They did.” Emma watched him out of the corner of an eye; Michael didn’t like violence, much. To be fair, neither did Emma or Allison.

  This particular violence, however, didn’t shatter his equilibrium; he nodded as if he hadn’t heard. “Emma will need to learn how to defend herself,” he finally said.

  The girls exchanged a glance; this one had higher eyebrows.

  “But I guess she’ll have to be careful not to—not to be like them.”

  “Emma could never—” Allison began, hotly.

  “But, Allison, they couldn’t have started out that way either, could they?”

  “Why not?”

  Michael looked confused. “When they were born—”

  Allison lifted a hand. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “You’re probably right. They probably weren’t like that to start, but it doesn’t matter; they’re like that now, and Emma’s not.”

  “Of course she’s not.” His look of confusion deepened.

  Poor Michael. Emma caught his arm. “Ally and Chase had a very loud fight about me last night. Pretty much about this.”

  “Oh.” He turned to Allison. “I’m sorry.”

  Michael wasn’t Chase; Allison couldn’t be enraged at him if she spent all day trying. “It’s fine. We’re going to Eric’s after school today, though.” She paused. “Do you want to come with us?”

  It wasn’t clear that Michael had even heard the question until they reached the entrance of Emery. They were used to this. “I think I would like to go with you,” he told them, “if Eric doesn’t mind.”

  “I’m sure Eric won’t mind,” Emma replied.

  * * *

  “Are you crazy?”

  The lunchtime cafeteria was, as usual, loud enough to deafen—but not apparently loud enough to completely blanket Eric’s voice. People—a handful of whom knew Emma fairly well—swiveled in the lunch line to stare. Emma pretended he was shouting into someone else’s ear and kept both hands on her tray as she headed to the cashier.

  Eric recovered pretty quickly and followed, but he’d clearly lost all appetite for food. Since Michael was waiting at the emptiest table in the cafeteria, Emma slowed down to allow Eric to catch up with her.

  “Michael is not Allison.”

  “If it weren’t for Michael, I’d have disappeared at Amy’s party. I know he seems like a child or a simpleton to you,” she added, “but he’s not. He’s capable of very complex thought and action—just not complex social action. It’s just going to bother him, and he’ll have no outlet for it, otherwise.”

  “How, exactly, is it going to bother him? Never mind. Let me guess. You told him what happened.”

  “We didn’t plan on telling him, but it came up while we were walking to school. Sorry.”

  “Emma—”

  “He’s been a part of this since it started.”

  “I get that—but this isn’t a goddamn party. Allison almost died. Michael will be at risk in the same way. I don’t want to be responsible for—”

  “You’re not. Tell him the risks—when we get to your place—and let him decide. He may decide to bow out; there’s a lot of stuff he won’t join in on because he doesn’t like the possible consequences. But let him make that decision. He’s not four; you don’t have to make it for him.”

  Eric fell silent; it didn’t last. “He’s not four,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth, “but he still needs to be walked to school every morning.”

  Eric had saved Emma’s life not once, but twice—and at the moment she wanted to slap him anyway. She couldn’t recall being so angry with him before, not even when he’d discovered the truth about Andrew Copis and hadn’t cared enough to try to help the child. Her hands were full of tray, and she wasn’t close enough to the table to set it down. She embedded the edges into both of her palms and kept walking instead, trying to keep the momentary expression of murderous rage off her face, because Michael was watching.

  Eric didn’t seem to notice; he was looking pretty angry himself. That much anger at a cafeteria table wasn’t comfortable; Allison, watching them approach, fell silent, which was unfortunate because she’d been halfway through a sentence to Michael. Michael looked at Allison’s less than familiar expression, then looked at Emma and Eric.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “No,” Emma said curtly, as Eric said, “Yes.”

  They exchanged a glare, but Eric still waited until Emma was seated before he took a seat himself. This took about four minutes longer than usual and was followed by a tense silence, because the sound of chewing didn’t carry far in the uncarpeted acoustics of the cafeteria.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Emma finally said. “It’s our problem.”

  Eric said nothing, but he said it loudly. Allison started to push her food around her plate. When she wasn’t angry herself, she was quite uncomfortable around angry people.

  Rescue came from the outside. Two of Michael’s D&D friends—Connell and Cody—saved them by descending on the table and taking seats on either side of Michael, which forced Allison to move over. While they didn’t have Michael’s autism spectrum diagnosis, they were frequently socially clueless; silent, uncomfortable anger didn’t hit their radars at all. They were deep in the middle of a technical discussion about a game of some sort, which involved cards, numbers, and strategies that seemed far more like math and statistics than fun to Emma. Michael was drawn to the magnet of the game, though, and as he began to enter the state of animated compulsion that was most of his focused discussion, Emma felt her jaw relaxing.

  She still couldn’t have this conversation in front of Michael; she wasn’t certain she could have it at all at the moment. She was angry enough that her food now tasted like sawdust—undercooked sawdust; it caught in her throat.

  “He’s wrong, you know,” a familiar voice said. She looked up; standing just over Michael like a slightly ratty Angel stood Nathan. He was smiling down at the top of Michael’s head, and that smile deepened around the edges as he met Emma’s eyes. “Michael’s not a child. In some ways, he’s more responsible than most of us.”

  Emma
felt part of her anger cool. “I know he’s wrong. It’s just that—what if something happens—” Allison nudged her under the table, and she realized that she was, to all intents and purposes, talking to thin air, which wasn’t something she wanted to be seen doing. She grimaced as Nathan laughed.

  Nathan had never treated Michael like a child. It was one of the first things she’d noticed about him and one of the first things she’d appreciated. She bent her head over her lunch as Nathan began to walk around the cafeteria, occasionally passing through people as he looked around, hands in pockets that looked physical but couldn’t be.

  She wanted to leave lunch behind and walk with him, to hear what he had to say because Nathan was perceptive, and he could afford to be blunt at the moment; no one else would hear him. No one but Eric.

  She glanced at Eric and saw that he was watching not Nathan, but her. “I’m not wrong,” he told her softly. “It’s not his age. That’s not what it’s about.”

  “You didn’t say that about Allison.”

  “No. I didn’t.” He looked at Allison and then offered Emma a pained, lopsided grin. “She’d’ve killed me.”

  “I would have, too,” Ally said.

  Emma accepted this gesture of partial surrender. She was still angry, but what had she expected? Eric didn’t know Michael; he didn’t know what Michael was capable of. He did know that the posse of girls who’d all drifted from the same school kept an eye out for Michael; he did know that the teachers made allowances for Michael’s particular peculiarities.

  He could learn the rest. She told herself that firmly. He could learn.

  But she looked past him, through the crowds in the cafeteria that were slowly dwindling as the lunch hour passed, and she thought that Nathan had never had to learn; he’d just known. He’d just accepted.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  AFTER SCHOOL, Allison and Michael met Emma at her locker. They walked to Eric’s in silence; there was enough snow on the ground that Allison regretted her decision not to wear boots. Emma spoke very little, and Allison was too annoyed at Chase to try to carry a conversation without a lot of help.

  Annoyance was better, by far, than worry. Worry was better than all-out fear. She held on to her anger as if it were a talisman, noting that Emma wasn’t walking beside them; she was trailing behind. Michael, thinking, didn’t notice. Allison knew that Emma wasn’t alone.

  Michael didn’t. He accepted that the impossible had happened: Emma could see the dead. But he accepted it because he’d seen it himself, and he had no other reason to doubt his sanity. In that, he was practical. He was almost unswerving. If Michael believed something to be true, he had all the facts lined up, and it was nearly impossible to move him; social censure certainly couldn’t do it, and that was the lever most people tried to use.

  “Michael,” Emma called.

  Allison tapped his shoulder to get his attention, and he turned. So did she.

  Standing beside Emma, left hand in her right, stood Nathan, conspicuously dressed for summer when all the rest of the gang was in heavy November clothing.

  * * *

  “Hey, Michael,” Nathan said, when Michael failed to say anything.

  Michael nodded. He glanced at Emma, who was watching him with an uncertain smile on her face. “I promised you you’d be the first to see Nathan when he came back.”

  Technically, she had broken that promise, but best friends didn’t count.

  “Did Emma find you?” Michael asked, after a long thinking moment had passed. The sun was heading to the horizon, and it wasn’t getting any warmer.

  “I found Emma,” he replied.

  Emma began to move, and Nathan came with her.

  “Have you come to take her away?” Michael asked.

  Emma’s eyes widened in the silence that followed. Allison started to answer, but no words came out of her open mouth.

  Nathan, however, shook his head. To Nathan, it was one of Michael’s questions: the kind no one else would ask, even if they were thinking it. Some people found it off-putting; Nathan had always accepted it entirely at face value. It was one of the things that Allison had respected. Nathan wasn’t Mr. Popularity; he was low key, but he got along with pretty much everyone.

  “Emma’s alive,” Nathan said quietly. “Just like the two of you. I wouldn’t wish being dead on anyone I loved.”

  Michael slowly relaxed. “What is it like?”

  “Being dead?” Nathan asked.

  Michael nodded.

  Nathan frowned. “It’s hard to explain,” he finally said. It sounded lame to Allison, which surprised her. Nathan didn’t generally try to protect Michael by simplifying or hiding facts. For one thing, it was condescending, and for another, it didn’t work. Michael was young for his age in a lot of ways, but he had the base practicality of a much older person. He was certainly more practical than Allison on a bad day.

  “Do you remember what it’s like to be alive?” Case in point.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “How is dead different, then?”

  Nathan grimaced. From the expression on his face, he was trying to decide whether or not he wanted to answer the question; he wouldn’t lie to Michael, but he had very few problems declining to answer Michael’s questions if he felt they crossed a line. To Michael, the idea that a line could be crossed wasn’t natural; but he accepted it, although a gentle reminder was often in order. To be fair, there were very, very few questions that could offend Michael and very few he wouldn’t answer.

  “Dead is a bit like sleeping,” Nathan finally said.

  “Sleeping’s not bad,” was Michael’s hesitant almost-question.

  “Not regular sleep. Have you ever had an operation? In a hospital?”

  Michael shook his head. Hospitals were a source of morbid fascination, as long as there was no chance whatsoever that Michael himself would be the patient.

  Nathan grimaced. “Wisdom teeth? Did you have yours pulled yet?”

  “Not everyone needs to have theirs removed,” Allison added quickly, just in case.

  Michael, it appeared, was still in possession of those teeth.

  “Well,” Nathan continued, aware that as an example this was going to fall a little flat. “It’s like that. You go under. You wake up confused. It takes a while to get your bearings, and the waking is cold—very cold—and unpleasant. Once you’re awake, once you realize where you are and why you’re here, it’s fine.”

  “So you’re fine, now?”

  Silence.

  Emma, who’d been watching Michael, turned to look at Nathan; had they not been walking side by side, Allison might have missed it.

  “You don’t stay awake, do you?” Emma asked, in the quiet Hall voice that was loud in every way but volume.

  Nathan glanced at her, then away.

  She squeezed his hand. “Nathan.”

  Without looking at her he said, “No.” It was almost inaudible.

  Michael started to speak again; this time, Ally ran interference, leaving the question in Emma’s hands.

  “Do you get any choice in when you—when you fall asleep again?”

  “Em—”

  “Answer me, Nathan. Please, answer me.”

  “You already know the answer.”

  “Only because you won’t say it.”

  “Em, if I don’t want to say it, and you know what it is I don’t want to say, why is it important that I say it at all?”

  Emma fell silent then.

  But Michael said, “Why is it important that you don’t?”

  * * *

  The conversation came to a halt not because it was finished—although as conversations went, Nathan’s refusal to answer the question had kind of killed it—but because Eric’s house was now in view. I
n the daylight, it looked like a perfectly normal house. Nothing about it hinted at the occupations of those who lived within, but then again, did it ever, really?

  Nathan extracted his hand. Michael’s frown indicated that Michael, at least, could no longer see him.

  “Is Nathan still here?” he asked Emma, as they approached Eric’s door.

  Emma smiled stiffly and nodded. She pushed the doorbell and stepped back.

  Before Michael could speak again, someone opened the door. It was, to her surprise, Ernest—called the old man by Eric and Chase when he wasn’t actually present—looking much more modern than he usually did. The rustic and ancient jacket was gone; the button-down shirt had joined it. He was older than Emma’s father would have been, had he lived, older than her mother. He wasn’t as old as some of the teachers, nearing retirement, who taught classes at Emery.

  Emma had met him a grand total of once. He’d been on the wrong end of a gun he’d been pointing at her; he’d have fired it, too, if Eric hadn’t been standing stubbornly between them. She knew, however, that he was responsible for keeping information about both the Necromancers and their hunters from spreading; he could—and did—move corpses and somehow keep them out of sight of local authorities.

  At the moment, he looked like a normal parent, not a man who dealt with bodies and owned at least one gun.

  “Is something wrong?” His question was almost the definition of curmudgeonly.

  It was Emma who said, “You look—you look very different.”

  He raised a brow. “Do not ask me. If you want to pester someone with trivial questions, you have my leave to grill Margaret.”

  Emma dared a glance past him into the empty hall. Margaret Henney was one of the dead; a woman who had died sometime in her fifties, and who had the distinct advantage of intimate understanding of Necromancers, because she’d once been one.

  If she was giving Ernest fashion advice, she was doing it on her own time; the hall behind Ernest was empty.

  * * *

  Chase was in the living room, or what passed for the living room; he was arranging logs in the fireplace, but took a chair when they entered the room, slumping into the cushions as if he weighed about three times more than he should. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, although studded black leather adorned the arms of the room’s largest chair; he had nothing to do with his hands, so he fidgeted, in silence, with his keys.