It had been all over the news—Congress members’ summer town-hall meetings had been jam-packed with panicky pre-Shifters and their ghost paranoia. People wanted something done, especially after Flight 346. The DMP was happy to suggest mandatory service for all post-Shifters. I wondered if studying abroad would make me a draft dodger, and if I cared. After a claustrophobic summer, I was dying to live somewhere else for a while—and to be closer to Zachary.
Thinking of the way he’d looked after his captivity made me feel heavy with the weight of worry. I sat on the flat slate edge of the fountain, though it meant not being able to see the podium. Megan and Jenna flanked me, the latter linking hands with Christopher.
A microphone thumped, then made a feedback squeal. Our principal’s deep voice came from the speaker to our left.
“Good evening. I’m Albert Hirsch, principal of Ridgewood High School. Welcome, students and families. Thank you for coming tonight to honor Tammi Teller and all the victims of this unthinkable tragedy.”
It was hard to hear his speech over the splash of water in the fountain behind us. The cool mist soothed the heat at the base of my neck, exposed by my ponytail.
Principal Hirsch’s voice rose slightly. “As you probably know, our outgoing senior class president, Nikki Fowler, is already studying at Harvard. So filling in to give the main memorial address is our—well, our prom queen, who’s leaving for UCLA bright and early tomorrow morning. Ladies and gentlemen, Becca Goldman.”
Great. I’d thought I’d never have to see her again in my life.
Jenna and Christopher climbed up to stand on the edge of the fountain so they could see over the crowd to the podium.
“Wow,” he said. Jenna elbowed him, a jealous scowl on her face.
Megan scrambled to her feet to join them on the fountain edge, balancing herself with a hand on my head. “Yuck. How can someone so rich dress so tacky?”
I stayed seated, having no desire to set eyes on my arch-nemesis, who’d chased Zachary all last year and come this close to catching him on prom night.
Becca’s voice rang out from the speaker—unlike Principal Hirsch, she’d make sure every word was heard.
“My fellow Americans, good evening. My name is Becca Goldman, and I weep with all of you.”
I texted one word to Megan:
GAG.
She wrote back: MY NAME IS BECCA GOLDMAN, AND I SLEEP WITH ALL OF YOU.
I turned my croak of laughter into a fake coughing fit.
“What happened on June twenty-second was more than a tragedy,” Becca said. “It was an outrage. Ghosts may not have planted that bomb, but one of them inspired a post-Shifter to do it. Who knows what they’re whispering in the ears of our children? ‘Hate the living’? ‘Hate your own life’? They must be stopped before more innocent people die.”
A lot of older heads nodded, and a few pre-Shifters even clapped. A man whose giant video camera displayed the local news channel logo moved closer to the podium, along with a woman holding a microphone.
Becca continued, “I know that post-Shifters, like us pre-Shifters, dream of making the world a better place. Maybe some, like me, want to follow in their parents’ footsteps and become doctors or lawyers.”
Becca’s dad made the world a better place by performing “cosmetic enhancement” surgery on aging rich ladies.
“But it’s post-Shifters’ duty as Americans to devote their talents to protecting all of us. Only they can stop this plague of undead.”
A gasp rippled through the crowd at her last word. Three of the ghosts disappeared instantly, and the last one—ex-Jared, a former student who’d died in the war—started to back away toward the road.
“Undead?!” I jumped up on the edge of the fountain to let my voice carry. “They’re not undead, Becca, they’re dead!”
“Excuse me?” Becca said in a NutraSweet voice. “Aura, did you have a response?”
My stomach twisted as everyone stared at me. Drawing attention to myself was a dumb thing to do, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to let her, of all people, get away with this.
“I said, ghosts are dead. Like we’ll all be someday.” The way I wish you were right now.
“Oh my.” She let loose a gleaming, prom-queen smile and tossed her perfect sable hair behind her shoulder. “You sound like a ghost sympathizer.”
“And you sound like an idiot.”
“Ooh,” Megan said.
I kept going. “Becca, you have no clue what you’re talking about. How many people have you loved who died just like that?” I snapped my fingers. “If the answer is zero, then you’re luckier than most of us. If it’s more than zero, then I hope their ghosts have never heard you compare them to zombies.”
“Ladies.” Principal Hirsch stepped up and angled the microphone to his mouth. “This is not the proper venue for a political discussion. Becca, please wrap up now so we can move on to the candle lighting.”
“But I have this whole speech to—”
“I said, wrap it up.” Their angry gazes clashed for a long moment, then Becca collected herself and flipped to the last page of her speech.
Principal Hirsch pushed the microphone in her direction, then took one small step back, maybe ready to grab the mic again.
“In conclusion,” she said rapidly and without inflection, “please keep Tammi Teller, her mom, Iris, and the other Flight 346 victims in your thoughts. Thank you.”
Becca sent me a cold, hard stare before turning away from the podium. It took every scrap of self-control not to give her the finger.
Jenna and Megan leaned in to me and said, in stereo, “You rock.”
Amy Koeller led the gathering in a moment of silence. Then Tammi’s dad lit the first candle—a sky-blue one, for Tammi’s favorite color—and began to spread the light. One by one, the small white candles came to life, until it looked like a field of yellow fireflies.
A girl of about nine years old came over to the fountain to light our candles. As I bent to touch my wick to her flame, she beamed up at me.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “For what you said to that mean girl.”
I returned her smile, then thought about Becca’s fake-sweet demeanor at the podium. “How do you know she’s mean?”
The girl’s eyes shadowed. “I can tell.”
“You have a Becca at your school.”
She looked at the flagstones beneath her feet. “A bunch of Beccas.”
I touched her shoulder. “It gets better.”
Her face contorted with skepticism as she lit Jenna’s candle. “Tammi was my sister.”
Megan said, “Oh,” maybe just realizing where she’d seen the girl before. Jenna cooed sympathetically.
“I’m sorry,” I said. She didn’t seem to recognize me as the girl her sister hated for loving Logan. “About your mom, too. That must be hard.”
“Yeah.” The girl scratched the back of her neck. “If Tammi had stayed around as long as she said she was going to, she could’ve been here tonight.”
“How long was that?” Jenna asked her.
“Two hundred forty-seven days.”
I closed my eyes. As long as Logan had stayed. I hoped that no other follower would pattern their ghostly existence after Logan’s. He was so full of life, the last thing he would’ve wanted was to create some kind of death cult.
“I’m glad she left, though,” the girl said, “and that my mom wasn’t a ghost at all. It was bad enough.”
A low, mournful bleat sounded on the other side of the crowd. Bagpipes. I hadn’t noticed the piper when we’d come in from the parking lot.
Megan took my hand and squeezed just hard enough to give me the strength not to sob. I let the tears spill quietly, for Tammi and Logan, who’d lost their lives; and for Zachary, who’d lost a part of himself he might never regain.
Chapter Twenty-Three
After what felt like a thousand-hour day at school, I reunited with Zachary on video chat to discuss the results of our
research. Not most girls’ idea of a fun Friday night, but it was all I wanted to do.
“You go first,” I told him. “What’d Eowyn discover?”
He looked more fatigued than when we’d last spoken, his eyes red-rimmed and drooping at the corners. From late-night reading, I wanted to assume, but feared it was something more.
“She seems obsessed with the number three,” he said. “The three recesses, the triple spiral, three megaliths in the Boyne Valley—”
“But there used to be more than three megaliths there.”
“The three big ones, then, the ones that are still around.” He rubbed his forehead. “And there’s a great lot of material on this philosopher, Hegel.”
“Never heard of him.” Then again, my knowledge of philosophy consisted of Plato’s Cave and Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.”
“German fellow, so I can’t read it in the original language.” He spread out the pages. “The part Eowyn seems fascinated with is what people call his dialectic.”
“Is that the stuff in diet pills?” I said that out loud, didn’t I? “Sorry, that’s diuretic.”
“Right. Anyway, there’s this process: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”
I nodded, not wanting Zachary to think I was an idiot after my last remark.
“You have one thing: A.” He held out his left hand, then his right. “And its opposite: non-A.” He laced his fingers together. “Ideally you want to get to B.”
“A synthesis, you said. So like a combination?”
“Or something in between. A third thing.”
“Eowyn’s magic number three again.” I thought of our chemistry experiments, where two substances formed a third that had completely different properties. “What’s that got to do with Newgrange?”
“Ah.” Zachary looked around his desk. “Bugger it, where’d I put that part? Just a second.”
He pawed through papers I couldn’t see. I studied his face, noting the contrast between his exhaustion and his intensity. It reminded me of mad scientists in old movies, working obsessively to solve a problem while they slowly lost touch with reality.
“Here it is!” He lifted a blue spiral notebook with an orange sticky note poking out. “She says there’s evidence that Newgrange may have been built for two purposes.” He found the page. “ ‘To serve the dead, but also to separate them from the living.’ Then there’s a note on the side asking, ‘How to do both at once?’ ”
“The synthesis, right? The third thing?” My temples throbbed. “Do you actually know what she’s talking about and want me to guess?”
He put on a hurt look. “Naw, I wouldn’t play wi’ you like that.”
“What else is there?”
“That’s as far as I’ve read. The Hegel put me to sleep a few times. What about you?”
“My research wasn’t so much in the clouds.” I lifted a printout of an Irish Times article. “I did a web search on one of the school computers, in case mine is being monitored. Padraig Murphy and his mom, Brigit, died in a car accident in February.”
“How horrible.”
“Get this. Padraig’s daughter was driving. A post-Shifter, obviously, because she supposedly saw a ghost in the road. She panicked and swerved, then boom! Hit a tree. Killed her father and her grandmother.”
“Christ, that poor lass.”
“The article doesn’t give the driver’s name. Padraig’s obituary says he was survived by a wife and five kids. He was apparently employed by the Office of Public Works—they run national parks and stuff.”
“What did he do for them?”
“It doesn’t say. I’ll keep searching. Also, I need to check out this Children of the Sun cult, see if they’re still around.”
“Good.” His eyelids drooped, then he straightened up quickly. “Sorry.”
I wanted to ask him about his dad, but didn’t want Zachary to think that all this obituary talk had reminded me of Ian. Even though it had.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “You look, you know.”
“Like pure shite? Aye, I do know.” He slouched in his chair. “Tell me something good.”
“Like what?”
His gaze rose above the computer screen, searching the wall near the ceiling.
He can’t think of anything good.
“Guess what?” I blurted out the first thing I could think of. “On the equinox, I’m going to try to turn a shade back into a ghost.”
Zachary sat up. “Really? That’s fantastic.”
I felt warm inside. He was the first person not to tell me I was crazy for wanting to try.
“You’ll have someone with you, aye?”
“Megan and Dylan will be there.”
His jaw shifted. “Dylan? Is there another option?”
“We’re just friends.”
“Snogging friends at one point.”
“That was only once.”
“Twice.”
“Okay, twice. You hooked up with Becca,” I reminded him. Seeing her last night had torn open that old wound.
Zachary spread his hands. “And Becca’s not here. I’m no’ hanging out with Becca, like you are with Dylan.”
“I don’t know who you’re hanging out with. You’ll probably meet tons of girls in bars and clubs, and your friends who’re in college will know college girls.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want them.”
“And I don’t want Dylan!” I stopped. “Why are we arguing?”
“Aura, maybe it needs saying.” He planted his hands on either side of the keyboard, resting some of his weight on the desk. “This is real, aye? We’re going to do this?”
My heart pounded. “Do what?”
“Be together,” he whispered. “Officially. Because right now, and for all time, I only want you.”
“And I only want you,” I said softly. “For all time.”
Zachary had to sign off soon after to help his dad. I considered seeing if Megan wanted to go to a club, but it was raining, and we had Saturday night plans, so I decided to tackle my homework.
I started with AP Chemistry first, but the structure of the equations kept bringing me back to what Zachary had said about Eowyn’s research. Newgrange was built to “serve the dead” but also to keep the living and dead apart. Eowyn thought there was a way to do both at once.
I turned the page of my notebook and drew a set of mingling stick figures—purple for ghosts, black for people. Ghosts were always badgering post-Shifters for help, which we often gave them, even if only by listening to their stories. So clearly we were “serving the dead.”
Next I drew a heavy red line separating the ghosts and the living. It made me think of BlackBox. But how could this separation serve the dead? As far as I could tell, BlackBox helped only the living.
I stared at the red line until my eyes crossed, making it blur and waver. Then I blinked, and it hit me.
Zachary was a walking BlackBox, the ultimate red. I was the ultimate violet, able to save shades (at least Logan, and maybe others). I helped ghosts, Zachary repelled them.
We were the two faces of Newgrange. The power of the Shine split between his father and my mother.
But when we kissed, we changed. Was that the synthesis? Did we make something new in those moments when we were together, soul and body?
It was almost nine thirty—two thirty a.m. in Scotland. Zachary should’ve been asleep, but I had a feeling he wasn’t.
I switched on my computer, opened the video chat program, and saw that Zachary’s status was still set to “online.” I called him.
Less than ten seconds later, his face appeared on my screen.
“I think I’ve got it,” I told him. He listened carefully, taking notes while I rattled off my theory as coherently as I could, given my excitement.
When I was finished, he dropped his pen on his notepad. “You’re brilliant. And I’m no’ just saying that because I love you. You’re—” He smoothed his page of notes, gazing at it like it
was a rare document. “Just brilliant,” he finished in a whisper.
My whole body heated. “Thanks.”
“But what is it that we make? This thing that isn’t you or me. In those moments when we . . .” He drew in a deep breath. “Ah, I really want to kiss you right now.”
I grinned. “For science, right?”
“Aye, purely in the name of research.” He put his chin on his hand, his head obviously heavy. “Did I just change the subject?”
“I think you did.”
“Sorry, I’m—” He waved his other hand beside his head, then dropped it back to the table with a thud.
“Not sleeping?”
“Aye.”
“Why not?”
He tensed. “I don’t want to.”
We were inching closer to what he couldn’t tell me before. “Bad dreams?”
He pulled back from the screen, elbows sliding near the edge of the desk. “Sometimes.”
By “sometimes,” I could tell he meant “always.”
I pressed on, despite his sudden wariness. “Are they about what happened this summer, when you were—”
“Look!” He sat back in his chair so hard it squeaked. “I know you want to help, but stop asking about that time. I can’t talk about it.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Can you please be the one person in my life who isn’t trying to fix me?”
I stared at him, my jaw frozen open. He’d never spoken to me like that before.
He cringed at my expression, then covered his face. “I’m so sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Zach.” I touched the screen with a trembling hand. “What if I stay with you until you fall asleep? You could lie down, put your laptop on the bed so we could still talk.”
“No. No. It’d be too much like—like you’re my psychiatrist.”
He spit out the last word. I wondered if he resented psychiatrists in general, or someone specific.
“Not if I lie down with you.”
Zachary opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. “You’d do that?”
“For you, anything.”
He curled his arms around his waist, as if he had a stomachache. “Just this once. I’ll ring you back in a half hour.”
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