Chapter 9 #2
God, it’s such an ugly word. All sharp edges and expectations and mockery. Too small for the thing we have and, at the same time, way too big. So I kissed Bas yesterday—that doesn’t mean I expect anything. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
But then, how could it not mean everything when our lips touch and the world folds itself inside out? When I remember another self, another time? When I put my hand on his bare, empty chest and a flower bloomed in the ground between us?
Sullen, I shove the thoughts away. Mad he brought it up and mad I’m still thinking about it, I yank my books out of my carpetbag and pretend to start the work my teachers assigned me in crooked handwriting on the whiteboard.
I refuse to sit here worried whether a boy likes me back or thinks I’m weird.
Won’t catch me writing his name in hearts in the margins of my notebook.
Still, even staring at algebra—the most unromantic homework possible—I can’t concentrate.
A nauseous headache gums up my gears. My head feels swollen, ready to pop.
Every time I manage to focus for a second, it shatters on the next whisper, the next distant stirring.
I glance at the substitute, Mr. Snider, whose problem I am today, but he sits unmoving, squinting through big aviator bifocals at an old paperback with his feet up on the desk; he clearly doesn’t hear a thing.
So why do I keep hearing someone calling?
Dropping my pencil, I close my eyes, press my hands to my head, and concentrate. I try to listen, to track where the noise is coming from, whatever it’s saying, but all I feel is pressure—and a sudden alarm.
My phone screams from my bra. I scramble for it, swearing. Did I hit snooze so many times it’s going off now?
Luckily, the teacher doesn’t seem to care.
“Turn off your phone,” he drones without looking up, frowning when his starts screaming too.
I look at my screen. It’s not an alarm at all—it’s the dull, pulsing drone of the Remnant Alert System, reporting we’re at a Level 4 and advising an immediate order to shelter in place. Distantly, I hear Mr. Snider’s loafers hit the linoleum, his hand snatching for the telephone on his desk.
This is bad. They usually don’t ever call a Level 4 for the ghosts of animals. Even two schools ago when the meat-packing plant near Columbus, Ohio, missed its monthly iron salting and a whole herd of ex-cows went wandering the countryside, they only called a 3 and a ghost day off school.
The classroom door creeps open, the school nurse sidling inside. She flashes me a smile as she crosses the room. At Mr. Snider’s desk, she leans down to murmur something low and urgent to him, glancing once at me, like she’s afraid I’ll leave.
I’d be offended, if I could think straight.
My ears ring with the pressure, head pounding with that calling-calling-calling sensation, the words I can’t make out.
I stand up while the adults are distracted, sliding out of my seat and drifting over to the window.
Before I mean to, I’m pressing my overheated forehead to the glass, staring out into a sea of roiling thunderheads, as violent as the storm inside of me.
I’m so close. If I closed my eyes, left my body, I know whatever it is would be right there waiting. It needs me. It’s suffering. I have a responsibility…
An arm crosses my body, tugging me back. I startle away, stare up into the nurse’s face. She smiles at me again, but it feels fake, all teeth, the face of a woman managing a crisis.
“Away from the window,” she says gently, but the hand on my arm brooks no argument as she leads me from the room. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” I demand, snatching my carpetbag from beside my desk.
The nurse doesn’t answer. She steers me out into the hallway, the sudden barrage of noise a worse bombardment, the dull roar of teenagers being herded unexpectedly anywhere.
Panic laces the air, hot and acidic. The nurse cuts through them, leading the way up the stairwell, but too many bodies crowd me from every side, jamming me up against the rail until I spill out onto the second floor gasping for air.
Up here, teachers swarm, shouting instructions. “Report to your designated room—just like our drills, no reason to panic. This is why we practice.”
The nurse drives through them all.
“That’s my room,” I protest, but she keeps dragging me along.
“You’re with me today,” she instructs as I trail behind her, a tattered kite ricocheting between frantic bodies. “I need to have a word with you.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch her gesturing at other teachers, assigning tasks with short commands and slashing hand gestures. I have just enough wherewithal to wonder why the nurse is in charge when the sound of sobbing catches my attention.
I turn. A group of girls struggles to tug their friend along. She’s choking, shaking, inconsolable, gasping over and over, “They’re inside. They got inside the fence.”
What? I freeze in the river of bodies. People crash into me from behind, launching me forward with just enough momentum to break the nurse’s grip on my arm. I twist away, ping-ponging into a wall and then backward. Ignoring the nurse’s voice slicing after me, I swim toward the voice I heard.
“That’s not possible.” I hear her friend’s voice rising and spin toward the sound, locating the girls in the maelstrom. “They can’t get past the iron.”
“And they just salted the yard,” a boy adds, scoffing, trying to shame away her fear. “You probably just saw somebody with a flashlight or something.”
He’s not wrong—they build schools in the middle of empty, iron-crossed fields for a reason, only after they’ve scoured history books and town records for accidents or old graveyards.
For a ghost to be inside the fence, it would have to travel.
Not just a few feet toward an electrical source, or even the couple blocks yesterday’s cloud followed my and Bas’s bioelectricity home. This kind of distance…
They could only have gotten here with deliberate and sustained intent.
Intent that’s supposed to be impossible.
“I saw them,” she hiccups. “I was in the art room—I saw them open the gate.”
I shove my way through stragglers, grab the girl by the shoulder.
“They’re people?” I demand. “You saw human ghosts?”
She grabs me back, anchoring on the one person who believes her. In a rush, she blurts, “They got into the gatehouse. There were too many—Mr. Mason tried to block the doorway, but they just walked through him. They killed him. How could they do that? He was wearing his suit!”
My mind lurches. I remember the basement, the terrible pain.
Iron hurts. But iron didn’t stop me.
“The electricity,” I blurt. “They shut off power to the gatehouse, but everything’s still connected by power lines.
They probably found an access point, sucked the energy out like a straw.
Absorbing that much electricity would definitely make them strong enough to overpower iron,” I tell her, a terrible realization dawning.
“We’re not safe here. The school’s power lines are connected to the gatehouse. If they follow the wiring—”
One of her friends shoves me away. “Leave her alone, freak!”
Another girl grabs her friend, prying her clawed fingers off my arms. The boy sneers at me, shaking his head. “Go be weird somewhere else. We don’t need your creepy Addams Family bullshit right now.”
Together, they drag her away, her fingernails streaking red lines down my forearms. I don’t mind it; the pain grounds me, settles me in my body and distracts me from the sensory onslaught.
Reminds me that I’m a human girl in a human body, even if my heart doesn’t beat and I don’t have to run when ghosts call me.
Even so, this is a slightly bigger hurdle than a human girl can face. If the ghosts are already in the power grid, we have only minutes before they start seeping in through the outlets and light sockets. The same way I escaped the basement—they’ll get in.
I need to be more than human now. I need Bas.
Swelling halfway outside my body, I stand on my own shoulders while propelling my physical feet forward. Glassy-eyed and strange, the current of my ill-fitting energy parts the crowd like an ocean. I sail between bodies, people steering away from me without even realizing.
From up high, I catch Bas doing the same.
He shoves between people, headed unerringly my way, following the compass that only ever points at each other.
We slam together like magnets meeting, hands gripping forearms. I melt back into my body.
The anxiety from before—boyfriend, and the small-bigness of that word—stops mattering when his black eyes meet mine.
All my messy fear and insecurities are just human residue, some little teenage thing; but I’m more than that.
I’m something bigger, something worse. I’m a monster in sheep’s clothing and barely wearing my skin.
In the din of the crowd, our voices lost in the current, I ask him, “Am I crazy? I think they’re calling me.”
And Bas says, “I hear it too.”