Page 70 of All Her Ghosts

And I didn’t love him, didn’tknowhim—didn’t have the chance—but he remembers himself younger, and it hits me across the face like an open palm. His unlined brow, his wry mouth, his gray eyes and black hair—

Like buried archaeology uncovered by a storm, I find a bitter history.

In his face, I find pieces of myself.

“We gotta run,” he urges when I hesitate. “This asshole made sure everybody saw the direction this bird went. They’ll be on us in under a minute.”

He’s right. I shake it off, swallow it down. It doesn’t matter now.

Reluctantly, eyeing the pilot’s hands in case he goes for his gun, I back out of the helicopter, hand outstretched and threatening every step. He watches me go, his eyes cold behind his visor, but doesn’t so much as twitch until the second I clear the runner board. Immediately, his hands fly across the dash, flicking dials, jamming the controls. The bird spins up and away so fast it knocks me over, leaving me behind on my ass in the dirt.

I watch him go with teeth bared, glowering. Scared of me? Or outrunning his own people’s trap before it springs?

Reaching down a hand, Bas drags me distractedly to my feet. Alone now and so close to the wreckage of the city, a weird noiselessnessswallows us. Not true silence—even gaining altitude and speed, the sound of the helicopter’s motor still peppers us—but a kind of grasping emptiness. A city without movement, without life, an in-drawn breath muffled on the dampening bodies of the dead, the endless blanket of asphodel.

Distinct in the eerie silence, several car engines start in the distance. We need to move, need to get off this stupid road, but we… don’t. I feel the presence of the others at my side, all of us struck still and staring up at the dome, but I can’t move. My soul dangles from my empty hands, hanging like the sleeves of a ragged sweater. My feet feel a hundred miles away. My eyes fix on the giant gate glowing at the end of the bridge.

An inexorable riptide grips me by the throat; I can’t tear myself away. An electric push-pull. An irresistible beckoning, cold and empty and… familiar. Why do I know this sensation? Why do I recognize the way every cell in my body screams to back awayandto touch it? It speaks to me, urging in wordless whispers. I hear a music in it, like it knows my name, knows the answers to all my questions, the balm to all my hurts. It’ll give me everything if I go to it. It sings to me, promising—

Pain.

Animal instinct sears me awake.

“Gotta get off the road,” Cain whispers, but his voice fragments, distant, his eyes also drawn unerringly to the eerie, emerald light, summoning us like a fishhook in the gut.

For the first time, I notice the scene before us: leading down the bridge, ghost lights flicker in a terrible parade, marching toward the glowing wall, caught in a tide. They don’t see us as they pass—don’t seemewhen they havealwaysseen me. Unable to stop.

My mouth opens but I can’t make my throat work, can’t scream a warning, can’t make myselfheard. The drowning silence steals every gasp from my lungs, devours meaning from my dry lips. Lurching forward, I seize Cain and Bas by the hands, shoving their stricken outlines sideways. I throw myself toward the exit ramp sign, straining against their inertia until all at once, the magnet releases and we go stumbling, falling headfirst over the far side of the embankment.

Gravel skinning my palms raw, I curl around my bag, belatedly protecting my head. The bone-jarring thumps go on forever, knees and elbows flying until at last we end in a heap at the bottom of the hill. Bas stirs weakly, one hand lifting—toward the fence? Toward his father? I don’t stop to check. Scrabbling in my bag, I rip out my tangled headphone cord and jam an earbud in his ear.

“Don’t listen to it,” I manage to croak. Knees aching, blood trickling down my shin and palms, I snag Cain by his fragmenting ankle. “Listen to me—look at me. If you touch it, it’ll suck you in. I’ve seen this before. My mom had one in the basement. She…” Stricken, I stare up at the spire of the distant gate, this wound in the world, still bleeding and barely bandaged. “She must have built it. Builtthis.”

Fresh horror swallows me.

Why? Why would she do this? Surely, a daughter whose whole life she spent ignoring couldn’t possibly be worth breaking the world this badly? And maybe she tried to patch it after—but did she really?

Trusses jut up into the sky, scaffolding supporting missing pieces that were never installed, glassy edges gone green with age and algae, buzzing with that same sick kind of electricity. All that genius, spent on this—on becoming something monstrous, a tormentor to, what?A hundred thousand souls? A million? And for what? What did she buy with all this suffering?

What could possibly cost so much?

Bas’s warm hands cup my frozen cheeks, coaxing me back to reality. His fingers brush my ear, offering me a red earbud and the other half of a song.

“Together,” he promises, grim but smiling, the crinkle behind his eyes as much grief as it is love. “Together or not at all.”

Outside our culvert, the engines grow ever closer. I don’t know how he’s manifesting so easily despite everything, but Cain shakes his ghostly head, his features abruptly coalescing.

“Down!”

Bas flings himself backward, carrying me with him. On our bellies in the underbrush, hiding behind scrub bushes and skunk cabbage, we watch from the bracken as black SUVs roar down the road. They split at the exit ramp, half flooring it across the bridge, the others cutting down the ramp. Across the river, something metallic bangs louder than a train crash. Through the music blaring in my ear, I can just pick out a change in the energy warping around the gate, a noise like a winch laboriously cranking something into place. The fingers tugging in my chest release, ever so slightly. The last SUV passes.

Cain spins. “Go, now!”

And we’re running again, with hands and ears bound together. We scramble through a strip of woods. The red string of fate strains between us, earbuds tugging painfully in ear canals. Scraping my palms on fallen logs, clambering over bracken and down another hillside, I don’t have time to worry about anything other thango, now. I concentrate on theblasting music instead, let it wash away that awful summoning, its lie—its siren song offering me all the names I lost seventeen years ago.

“They opened the gate,” I gasp. “They must have. There’s nowhere for those cars to go otherwise, right? If we can get back up there, we can sneak in behind them.”

Cain surges forward, barreling through trees without even a flinch. “Tempting you with an obvious opening. We can’t go that way.”