Page 30 of All Her Ghosts

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 thenurseis 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 sustainedintent.

Intent that’s supposed to be impossible.

“I saw them,” she hiccups. “I was in the art room—I saw themopen the gate.”

I shove my way through stragglers, grab the girl by the shoulder.

“They’re people?” I demand. “You sawhumanghosts?”

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. Theykilledhim. 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 beforethey start seeping in through the outlets and light sockets. The same way I escaped the basement—they’ll getin.

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.