Chapter 15 #2
“That’s why the RV,” I realize, a horrified anger twisting in my gut.
“Why Mom always forces me on some random road trip before we move. I’m bait.
She’s luring the ghosts away from our next house.
Luring you away. Because when you get too close—when it’s us, together, you hunting me—that’s what causes the ghosts to swarm in huge numbers like this?
” I spin, glaring between the seats. Bas’s eyes snap to mine and dart away.
Lightning strikes the ocean in my chest. The storm breaks.
“You did this? It’s all because of you? You’re the reason we’ve been running?
Why I can’t stay in the same house for a whole school year? Why I never have any friends?”
That forces his head up, finally.
“You have me,” he snaps, defensive.
“Since yesterday, Bas!” My fist slams into the door, an unsatisfying strike muted by the mauve shag carpet.
“Do you think twenty-four hours makes up for a whole fucking lifetime? Mom always hiding in the basement or at work, constantly moving, the weird new girl in every school? Oh, and just so you know, there were a metric fuck ton of those.” I can’t breathe, the pressure in my chest rising and a storm threatening overhead, my seams straining, my soul sizzling against the metal door handle.
“I have been alone my entire life,” I say through my teeth, the words trembling shamefully close to tears. “I never had anybody but myself. So tell me what was worth all that—tell me why.”
Finally, finally, Bas meets my eyes.
“You were,” he whispers. “I was looking for you.”
The pain in his voice catches me sideways. He stares at me, hard and haunted, his arms folded tight across his chest. Caught between his hurt and my fury, tears bloom in my eyes. I can’t face it. I turn away, curling in my seat, hiding my sudden weakness behind my hoodie sleeve.
“Cut him a break,” Cain says. “He can’t help what he is. It’s your mother’s fault, not his.”
But easing up to a stop sign, his shoulders go stiff.
Catching his tension from the corner of my eye, I jerk my head up, following his gaze down the main road we’re waiting to turn onto.
Another black SUV barrels past. This time, in the weak flare of our headlights, I catch the inverted caduceus on its side, the copperplate of its insignia.
Department of Necromantic Research. Government.
“That’s three,” Bas says.
Three? A cold current of fear sweeps through my body, nerve endings jangling warning. I only saw two.
“Yeah.” Lips pursed, Cain swears. “They’re scrambling. Highways are out. They’ll have agents monitoring at every speed trap and tollbooth.”
“Why is DNR here?” I demand, voice shaking. “Why are you here?”
Cain pulls out onto the main road, face grim.
“Making up for past mistakes,” he says. “If DNR finds either of you, you will disappear into the guts of the government and never be seen again until they figure out how you can best serve them, then deploy you in some soon-to-be-shithole country as the weapon they always wanted.”
“I am not a weapon.” I hate the way my voice shakes, the waterworks threatening in my throat, but the words tumble out one after another.
“I’m just a random teenager. And you’re, what?
Helping me? After you just told me I’m some kind of fugitive, apparently?
Why? Why would you do that? What does it matter to you if I disappear? ”
Voice dark, Bas says, “It matters to me,” with the finality of a coffin closing. Like that’s all the answer I need. Like it even makes sense.
“That’s no kind of excuse for—for whatever this is! Kidnapping? Aiding and abetting? Treason?”
Staring out at the encroaching night, Cain sucks in a deep breath. His mouth folds in a determined line.
He says, “Seventeen years ago, I worked asset protection for the government. Deep government. As in, I officially no longer exist government. I was assigned to something called Project Demeter. I don’t know what it was for, what they were trying to build or do.
My job was to protect the incoming shipments and later, the scientists. ”
Cold dread washes over me. I scan Cain’s face but can’t parse his empty expression.
I spin around to look at Bas. Still he won’t look at me.
Hunched forward, arms tight across his chest, he stares out the window.
Every line of his body screams tension, grief, dread—a dead man waiting for the formality of the ax.
“Shipments of what?” I ask.
Cain glances at me. Something flickers across his face, faster than I can place it, but he doesn’t stare through me like my mother, aiming believability like a brick to the head.
He watches me because he wants to, moves his gaze back to the road only because he has to.
Not an excuse to look away but a… regret.
The way he looks at me—it feels like an apology.
“Officially, I don’t know. If the government asks, I was a good little soldier. I signed for shipments and asked no questions.”
“And unofficially?”
A muscle flickers in his jaw. He forces it still.
“At first, they started out as donated cadavers, medical school stuff. Came in official morgue transports. But time went on and they got younger and younger, started arriving in unmarked containers. I signed for… for kids. Then toddlers, infants.” When he breathes in, I hear the catch in it, his eyes on the road distant.
“Their transport freezers were so small.”
I don’t know what to say, what to ask. I’ve spent so long demanding answers but now, faced with a deluge of them, I can’t break my head above water. The ocean in my chest seeps into my lungs. My soul doubles over my hands. I feel like I’m drowning in my own flesh.
“Bas and I were experiments?” I whisper. “So when you say weapons…?”
“We worked skeleton crews at night. Only asset protection was supposed to man the facility between midnight and 0600. One night, Chloe showed up with a couple other scientists after-hours, carrying some kind of homemade transport. She had a body with her I never signed for, started up the machines.”
The steering wheel creaks under his fingers.
“I knew better. I knew—” He bites the sentence off, pauses, resets his face to smooth stone and starts again. “I should have stopped her. I should have called it in, but it was three in the morning. Nobody answers for glorified bodyguards, and I didn’t have the authority to act alone, to stop her.”
Cain sneers, lips curling in disgust, but in that second, he’s not here with us—he’s staring backward in time, glowering at his past self.
“No—that’s not true; that’s just a convenient excuse for the paperwork.
I knew what I was doing. What I thought I was doing.
Chloe was grieving, she was a wreck—and I knew it wouldn’t work, it never had before, so what was the harm in turning a blind eye to a bastardized science experiment of a funeral?
I thought I could grit my teeth and bear it and by the next day it’d be over.
We could put that little body in the ground and put it behind us. ”
“‘This is some Pet Sematary bullshit,’” I choke, voice cracking, and Cain’s whole body jerks. “That’s what you said. What you told her when the ceiling came down. ‘This is some Pet Sematary bullshit and that is not your daughter.’”
Suddenly, Cain can’t look at me. He faces the road, shoulders bowed, jaw locked.
My chest hurts. I swivel in my seat to look at Bas, seeking his eyes across the distance and the darkness.
Now, finally, I catch him staring back, his black eyes so sorry, one hand open on his knee and halfway reaching—forever reaching, never getting close enough to grab.
My throat spasms, choking on a sob. I force it down.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know what I am.
You are my daughter, my mother swore to me, so vehement. But when she said it, was she looking me in the eyes? I can’t remember. My head spins, scrambled, half out of my body, bobbing along like a hot-air balloon on a flimsy tether.
You are my daughter, and they called it the Demeter Project—Demeter, Persephone’s mother, stealing her back from the underworld. You are my daughter.
But I…
I don’t think I am. I’m not the soul she went fishing for. I’m something much bigger, older, worse. And pulling me out…
I started the Ghost War. It wasn’t a bomb, wasn’t terrorists or pollution, no enemy nation at fault—it was me. I’m the thing that broke the world. And I’m breaking it even wider now with every mile, asphodel blooming in the gutters, streaking across the yards.
“No ghost lamps,” Bas says quietly, pointing ahead, down a side street with houses from the ’80s in the gentle, middle-class disrepair that comes with long, begrudging hours and little energy left for lawn care.
Cain nods, agreeing. “No budget for new lamps; no budget for traffic cameras.”
He turns down the street and winds us deep into the warren, to the very back streets of the cul-de-sac.
We stop outside a house with grass longer than its’ neighbors and a for sale sign in the yard.
As soon as the engine flicks off, Bas pulls a license plate and screwdriver from his backpack, passes it to Cain through the gap.
“You found a derelict?” Cain asks.
“Better. It had an old tarp, but new tires. Must have used it this summer, so they probably won’t notice the plate missing until next.”
“Current registration.” He nods, approving. “Cops won’t think twice if they run it. Good man,” he says, and hops out.
Alone with Bas in the RV, I… I don’t know what to do. My guts distort in a hundred directions, ripping me apart. And I know him—he’s my other half, the man in my memories, my missing piece—but I’m not the massive, ancient thing I used to be. I’m seventeen and I’m afraid.
He stares at me, still reaching—God, would he just stop reaching—and my throat swells shut. My eyes sting, burning with all the venom of my rotting stomach, my exposed ribs, my burning flesh and bone hands.
“Jenny,” he starts.
“Don’t.”