“Ah. You played too well.”
I closed my eyes and opened them again—same airport, same plastic chairs and blank televisions. But everything looked wrong, like when a hotel elevator opens on a new floor, and the carpet and furniture and potted plants are the same, but different.
“This isn’t really the airport, is it?”
“Not quite. This is where the dead walk—beneath the surface of things. You thought your way here.”
I remembered lying there playing dead, that feeling of falling through the floor. “A man walked through me and your sister. Because we’re . . . ghosts.”
“Yami is. She died a long time ago.” Yamaraj lowered the cloth and peered at my forehead. “But you and I are something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re . . .” He stared at me a moment, an expression of longing on his face, and I was transfixed again at how beautiful he was. But then he shook his head. “You should forget this ever happened.”
I didn’t answer, looking down at my hands, at the familiar whorls on my palms and fingertips. My skin had the same shine as Yamaraj’s, but it was still me. I felt the way my tongue slid along my teeth, and swallowed the taste of my own mouth. Everything was perfect in detail, even the way my feet felt in my sneakers.
I looked up into his brown eyes. “But this is real.”
“Some part of you knows that, for now. But once you’re safe in your own home, you can put it out of your mind, like a dream.” He said it softly, with a kind of knowing sadness, but to me it sounded like a challenge.
“Are you saying I’ll be too afraid to believe this happened?”
Yamaraj shook his head. “It’s not about courage, Lizzie. It’s about the world making sense. You may not even remember the attack, much less me and Yami.”
“You think I’ll forget this?”
“I hope so.”
Part of me wanted to agree with this beautiful boy, to let everything I’d seen fall into some dark hole of memory. But for a moment my mind went back to when my father left home. My mother lied to me for the first few months, saying he was just working in New York, that he was coming back soon. And when she finally told me the truth, I was angrier at myself than at my parents, because I should have figured it out on my own.
Hiding from the truth was worse than being lied to.
“I’m not very good at fooling myself,” I said.
“Believing won’t be easy either.”
Something like a laugh pushed its way out of me. “You think things are going to be easy? After this?”
The look of longing crossed his face again, but then he shook his head. “I hope you’re wrong, Lizzie. Believing isn’t just hard, it’s dangerous. Doing what you’ve done, crossing over, can change you in ways you don’t want.”
“What does that even—” I began, but Yamaraj was staring past me, beyond the metal gate. I turned, and saw something that made the inky cold rise up in me again.
Walking through the mist were dozens of people—eighty-seven, as the news kept repeating later—their faces gray, their clothing torn by bullets. They shuffled together in a mass, crowding around Yami, as if they all wanted to be close to her. They didn’t touch one another, except for one little girl holding both her parents’ hands. She was staring at me, her expression clearly wondering, Why does that girl get to stay?
Yami knelt and touched the tile floor, and a darkness began to spread out from her, as if some slow black liquid were bubbling out of her hand. The dead people looked down at their feet. And then they began to sink. . . .
A bitter taste rose in my mouth. “This isn’t fair.”
“Close your eyes,” Yamaraj said.
My heartbeat pounded in my wounded head, and the world started to shift around me, normal colors shimmering through soft gray. The mass of ghosts flickered for a moment, transparent, and through them I could see the flash of gunfire. The hideous roar grew sharper in my ears.
Yamaraj grasped my hand. “Stay with me here. Just a little longer.”
I shut my eyes, but only for a moment, willing my heartbeat slower. When I looked again, the gray world had steadied, and I could see the crowd of ghosts perfectly, Yami at its center.
“Where’s she taking them?”
“Somewhere safe.” He squeezed my hand again. “We’re here to guide the dead. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay!” I pulled my hand from his, my voice breaking. A single teardrop squeezed from my left eye. “Those men with guns . . . they had no right.”
Suddenly the thick glass between me and my panic was gone, shattered by anger. I could smell blood and gun smoke, and an acid scent that made the back of my throat tickle. The real colors of the airport were bleeding into the grays around us.
“Something’s happening,” I tried to say, but my throat closed on the words. The air itself had begun to burn my eyes and skin. As my grasp on the afterworld failed, the gas was leaking through to me. I could feel my cheek burning where the single tear had squeezed out.
Yamaraj stood up. “I have to take you back.”
He took my hands in his, which suddenly weren’t warm and living anymore. I felt a coldness rushing into me. I realized that he wasn’t taking me back to the real world, but to the dark place I’d passed through while playing dead.
“Wait,” I tried to say.
“It isn’t safe here, Lizzie.”
I tried to protest, but my lungs stilled once more. My eyelids fluttered closed, and I felt myself falling away, spiraling back down toward the silence.
I’m dead again. I’m dead.
I had a vague sense of Yamaraj lifting me from the airport chair and carrying me back the way we’d come. I could see and hear nothing, but felt him watching over me.
Finally, a long time later, he whispered in my ear.
“Believing is dangerous, Lizzie. But if you need me, call me. I’ll be there.”
His lips pressed against mine, and a wave of heat flooded into me. Not only warmth, but energy, a force that stirred every muscle in my body. The cold inside me turned sharp and buzzing. Electricity coursed through my nerves and across my skin.
The heat built, pushing against my heart and lungs, the power of it coiling around me and squeezing tight. My eyes sprang open, but there was only darkness rushing past me, and then something sharp and jagged burst from my lungs . . .
I was breathing, coughing and sputtering, spasming on cold hard ground. There were spinning lights in all directions—the metal flash of badges, the dull glint of body armor.
I was lying on the sidewalk outside the airport. Fluttering yellow tape marked off the sidewalk around me, a corral of motionless bodies under white plastic sheets. Red and blue lights pulsed from every vehicle, sending shadows swinging, as if the bodies were twitching beneath their covers.
There was so much color in the world, everything bright and alive. The crackle and hiss of radios electrified the air.
I became aware of people suddenly gaping at me—two paramedics, a police officer with a hand on his holstered gun and terror in his eyes. A plastic sheet was wrapped tight around me, its edges fluttering in the freezing wind, and I wanted to yell at them to set me free. But it was all I could do to keep breathing, to keep that fire that Yamaraj had relit inside me burning.