Chapter 17
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“The Flood” by Katie Melua
Bas slides out of the booth, heading toward the back of the diner.
He passes the emergency exit for the men’s bathroom with his head down, half his face hidden behind his gray curls, nose in his phone and pretending to text.
I aggress my poor pancakes, smashing strawberries into bloody smears, cutting patterns with the edge of my fork.
I eat as much as I can, shoveling sawdust mouthfuls I can’t taste past the salty drone of panic welling in my mouth, the ocean shoving at my ribs.
After a while, counting off the minutes in my head, I push my plate away, lean my head against the cool glass of the window like I’ve got a headache.
Closing my eyes, I slip into my party trick. Without meat to muffle the sound, my ocean roars, dogging my silent footsteps across the diner. Sound bombards me from all corners—people laughing, cars pulling in, a train rumbling in the distance. I force myself to focus, concentrating on my goal.
The alarm box sits above the door, higher than I can reach, but wires run through the wall under a covering of PVC. Shaking out my hands, I bounce on my toes, psyching myself up. Waiting.
To my right, Bas shoves the bathroom door open as far as it will go, handle clacking against the white tile wall. Now.
Lunging forward, I grab the wires. The alarm barks a single startled yelp before its electricity floods away, down my arm, straight into my brain, a blue raspberry migraine.
My outline hazes, swelling, billowing up and into the hallway.
My vision sparks; still I hold on. The power line surges, lights flickering in the diner, but more energy floods the line, replacing it faster than I can drink it.
It’s not enough. Our plan won’t work if I can’t short the system.
Biting down panic, I wedge my whole arm deeper into the wall, following the circuit down, flowing into the cement foundation, the ground beneath.
I become massive. Vast and strange, I bloom from my abandoned body, swelling through the roof, and I can see everything.
There in the distance, cradling the massive flea market field, intersecting ley lines stir far beneath the sleeping soil. Their awareness pulses under the dirt, a massive, ancient eye blinking awake.
Looking at me.
Hell is where we are, Bas said and he’s not wrong—the dead, the asphodel, hell creeping in our footprints. Hell is empty and all her ghosts are here. And that knowledge—that responsibility, an overwhelming surge of grief-loss-fear, drives me forward. The ley line stirs, reaching back.
Distantly, I taste copper. My faraway nerve endings scream, fingernails gouging the table in a quickly failing attempt to keep myself upright.
I glance down at my body, propped against the window and slumping fast. A worsening tremor climbs its—my spine, forehead shuddering off the glass, and I realize—I can’t.
Somehow, I know my body won’t survive a brush with the ley line.
And I don’t know if I should still care about that, if I have a right to, but it scares me enough I find my humanity again.
Seizing on that bright shard of panic, that glimmer of my small teenage self, I jerk backward.
My god body screams in protest, melting like a wicked witch, every fiber of my un-being aflame.
Straining, I drag myself out of the ground, haul myself out of the sky, and slap one burning palm to the alarm box.
With a push, a surge, I fry its circuits.
Just as the lights wink out, Bas leans sideways into the emergency exit, hoodie muffling the click of the bar depressing, and slips outside without even an electronic cough to betray him. In the door’s closing gap, his back flickers between an auction house and a staff building and disappears.
The bathroom door completes its arc, settling shut with a rattle that muffles the final sound of Bas’s escape.
But before I can drag myself back into my body, figure out how to shave myself down into something small and mortal-shaped again, a waitress swings around the corner, way too close to my party trick for comfort.
“Oh, it got cold in here,” she says, shivering. “Let me check the heat.”
She aims herself at the tiny back corridor my soul is standing in and my eyes snap down her trajectory, the furnace controls smack between the emergency exit and the men’s restroom.
Oh no, oh shit, I can’t let her touch me—I don’t know what would happen.
But time warps around me and I’m stuck, staring stricken at the finite spark of her soul shivering against the bonfire bulk of my distorted divinity.
I can’t stop remembering the way Mr. Snider’s soul burned against the back of my fingers as I peeled ghosts away.
My hands tremble. In that moment, I’m wildly grateful to remember I have hands at all.
It would be so easy, too easy, to break something—someone—irreparably.
Lightning crashes into my ocean, a bright-sharp current of fear. I close myself, snap off the projector, and back into my skin.
Hands clenched to stop the tremors, fingers tingling and numb, I take a breath before haltingly pulling two twenties from Cain’s wallet.
Still swollen with electricity, wedged crooked inside my skin, it takes me a long minute to figure out the trick of having feet again.
I work myself standing by increments, fussing with my bag to hide the fact I can’t be sure my burnt-out knees will hold me.
At last, I wander over to the counter, schooling my face carefully flat.
I ask the hostess, “Can I pay here?”
My breath snags in my chest. I grip my carpetbag hard against my side, cross my fingers around the strap.
Don’t notice me, I whisper in my head. I’m a completely different girl. Look, I’m not even smiling.
“Sure, honey, let me just get your table number.” She glances over my shoulder at our abandoned plates, long fingernails clacking on the computer screen.
Barely a hiccup between numbers—she hesitates. Her eyes flick to my face and away.
“You know, you look kind of like that girl on the news.”
I swallow hard. Still hopped up on stolen energy, the noise in here is damn near unbearable, every overlapping conversation shredding my nerves. A helicopter passes low overhead, and it takes an iron-shod effort to tip my head, eyebrows arched, curl my lip in just the slightest breath of a laugh.
People see what they want to. My cover isn’t blown yet.
“I know, right?” I manage. “Wish I had a sweet scar like that, though.”
I draw a line across my throat with the edge of my phone, sticking my tongue out with a little death gargle. The hostess’s eyes snap to my screen. Ever so slightly, not enough to be obvious, I tip the screen her way. Just enough so she can read the name on the top of the text log: Mom.
See, I’m fine. I’m just some random emo kid whose mother knows she’s here. Nothing to worry about. I flash a quick smile, stare her dead in the eyes.
“Wonder how she got it.”
The hostess hesitates. She glances at the TV screen, but they’ve moved on to other topics.
“I think it was makeup.”
“Was it?” I shrug. When she reaches out to hand me my change, I wave her off. “Oh no, that’s your tip. You keep that. I just want the receipt. I have this app on my phone—scan enough receipts and it’ll give you a gift card.”
Like I said, it’s not a complicated plan.
It’s not even a good plan. But Amber Alerts mean kidnappings and no one expects a kidnapped girl to text her mom, to admire a throat wound, to collect receipts for a stupid app.
Look—I’m not afraid. I’m making perfect eye contact, even as my whole soul rebels at the way she scours my face, hunting for weakness, for some clue I’m the person she thinks I am.
Internally, I scream. My party trick thrashes and threatens.
But in the world of the living, I smile like my mother, vague and disinterested.
I’m so ordinary, weaponizing normality too bland to remember.
Her attention wavers. Already, I can see her forgetting what I look like, how I differ from the girl on TV—was she smiling or dour? Was it a scar or a slash of lipstick?
In any case, it probably wasn’t me. I’m alone, after all. Kidnapped girls don’t run around cheerful and unattended.
I push my advantage. “Hey, you know what, I have a code I can give you. If you sign up, we both get a dollar.”
The hostess smiles. She hands me my receipt.
“I’m good, but thank you,” she says.
I wish her a nice day. I wave. And then, in five seconds flat, I fucking evaporate.
I power walk out of that little diner as fast as I can without looking like I’m running, plunge between the rows of vendors.
Eyes stab into me from every angle, scraping across my spine.
Radios blare. I feel too big for my body, massive and clumsy.
My cheeks burn. Is everyone staring at me?
I dodge between two beat-up old cars selling blankets and wooden furniture, dogged by the tick tick tick of personal heaters plugged into the pillars that mark each seller’s stall.
Someone laughs. Someone tries to sell me sunglasses.
Another helicopter swoops overhead, dipping so close I feel its engine vibrating in my clenched teeth.
I force myself to breathe. Anonymous in the rows upon rows of people—old teacups and tools and battered children’s toys—I slow to a crawl. No one knows me. And out here, no one is probably watching the news. Not closely enough to pick out one unattended teenager in a whole throng.
I buy those sunglasses, after all. Big, like a 1960s movie star, with white rims and heavy shade. They hide half my face but in an ordinary way, stealing a page from Cain’s book. I’m not a girl on the run, just one hiding from the blazing October sun.