by Lauren Kate
This time, Daniel was the first one to come into view.
Even through the Announcer’s screen, it was heaven to see him. His hair was a couple of inches longer than he wore it now. And he was tan—his shoulders and the bridge of his nose were both a deep, golden brown. He wore trim navy swim trunks, snug around his hips, the kind she’d seen in family pictures from the seventies. He made them look so good.
Behind Daniel was the verdant edge of a thick, dense rain forest, lush green but bright with berries and white flowers that Luce had never seen before. He stood at the lip of a short but dramatic cliff, which looked down at a sparkling pool of water. But Daniel kept glancing up, toward the sky.
That laugh again. And then Luce’s own voice, broken apart by giggles. “Hurry up and get down here!”
Luce leaned forward, closer to the window of the Announcer, and saw her former self treading water in a yellow halter-top bikini. Her long hair danced around her, floating on the water’s surface like a deep black halo. Daniel kept an eye on her but was also still glancing overhead. The muscles on his chest were tensing up. Luce had a bad feeling she already knew why.
The sky was filling with Announcers, like a flock of enormous black crows, a cloud so thick they blocked the sun. The long-ago Luce in the water noticed nothing, saw nothing. But watching all those Announcers flit and gather in the humid air of that rain forest, in an image made by an Announcer, had the Luce in the forest feeling suddenly dizzy.
“You make me wait forever,” long-ago Luce called up to Daniel. “Pretty soon I’m going to freeze.”
Daniel tore his eyes away from the sky, looking down at her with a broken expression. His lip was trembling and his face was ghostly white. “You won’t freeze,” he told her. Were those tears Daniel was wiping away? He closed his eyes and shivered. Then, arcing his hands over his head, he pushed off the rock and dove.
Daniel surfaced a moment later, and long-ago Luce swam toward him. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her face bright and happy. Luce watched it all play out with a mixture of sickness and satisfaction. She wanted her former self to have as much of Daniel as she could get, to feel that innocent, ecstatic closeness of being with the person she loved.
But she knew, just as Daniel knew, as the swarm of Announcers knew, exactly what was going to happen as soon as this Luce pressed her lips to his. Daniel was right: She wasn’t going to freeze. She was going to combust in a horrifying burst of flames.
And Daniel would be left to mourn her.
But he wasn’t the only one. This girl had had a life, friends, and a family who loved her, who would be devastated when they lost her.
Suddenly, Luce was enraged. Furious with the curse that had been hanging over her and Daniel. She had been innocent, powerless; she didn’t understand a thing about what was going to happen. She still didn’t understand why it happened, why she always had to die so quickly after finding Daniel.
Why it hadn’t happened to her yet in this life.
The Luce in the water was still alive. Luce wouldn’t—couldn’t let her die.
She grabbed at the Announcer, curling its edges in her fists. It twisted and bent, contorting the swimmers’ images like a fun-house mirror might. Inside its screen, the other shadows were descending. The swimmers were running out of time.
In frustration, Luce screamed and swung her fists at the Announcer—first one, then the other, raining blows upon the scene before her. She struck out at it again and again, heaving and crying as she tried her best to stop what was going to transpire.
Then it happened: Her right fist broke through and her arm sank in up to her elbow. Instantly, she felt the shock of a temperature change. The heat of a summer sunset spreading across her palm. Gravity shifted. Luce couldn’t tell which way was up or down. She felt her stomach recoiling and feared she was going to throw up.
She could go through. She could save her old self. Tentatively, she stretched her left arm forward. It, too, disappeared into the Announcer, like passing through a bright, clammy sheet of Jell-O that rippled and widened as if it could just let her through.
“It wants me to,” she said aloud. “I can do this. I can save her. I can save my life.” She leaned back slightly and then thrust her body into the Announcer.
There was sunlight, so bright she had to close her eyes, and a warmth so tropical a sheen of sweat immediately broke out on her skin. And a nauseating scene of gravity tilting and upending, like at the height of a dive. In a moment she’d be falling—
Except something had hold of her left ankle. And her right. That something was pulling Luce very forcefully backward.
“No!” Luce cried out, because she could see now, could see, far below, a burst of yellow in the water. Too bright to be the halter top of her bathing suit. Was long-ago Luce already burning up?
Then it all vanished.
Luce was yanked roughly back into the cool, dim patch of redwood trees behind the Shoreline dorm. Her skin felt cold and clammy and her balance was all screwed up and she fell flat on her face in the dirt and redwood needles on the forest floor. She rolled over and saw two figures in front of her, but her vision was spinning so much she couldn’t even tell who they were.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
Shelby. Luce shook her head and blinked a few times. Not just Shelby, but Miles, too. Both of them looked exhausted. Luce was exhausted. She glanced at her watch, not surprised by now to see how long she’d spent glimpsing the Announcer. It was after one in the morning. What were Miles and Shelby still doing up?
“Wh-What … what were you trying to …,” Miles stammered, pointing at the place where the Announcer had been. She looked over her shoulder. It had splintered into hundreds of shadowy pine needles that rained down, brittle enough to turn to ash where they landed.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Luce muttered, rolling to the side and aiming behind a nearby tree. She heaved a few times, but nothing came up. She closed her eyes, racked with guilt. She’d been too weak and too late to save herself.
A cool hand reached around and pulled her short blond waves back from her face. Luce saw Shelby’s frayed black yoga pants and flip-flopped feet and felt a wave of gratitude.
“Thanks,” she said. After a long moment, she wiped her mouth and unsteadily got to her feet. “Are you mad at me?”
“What mad? I’m proud of you. You figured it out. Why do you even need someone like me anymore?” Shelby gave Luce a one-shoulder shrug.
“Shelby—”
“No, I’ll tell you why you need me,” Shelby blurted. “To keep you out of catastrophes like the one you almost just threw yourself into! Willy-nilly, might I add. What were you trying to do? Do you know what happens to people who go inside Announcers?”
Luce shook her head.
“Me neither, but I doubt it’s pretty!”
“You just have to know what you’re doing,” Miles said suddenly from behind them. His face looked paler than normal. Luce must really have shaken him up.
“Oh, and I presume you know what you’re doing?” Shelby challenged.
“No,” he mumbled. “But one summer my parents made me take a workshop with this old angel who knew how, okay?” He turned to Luce. “And the way you were doing it? Wasn’t even close. You really scared me, Luce.”
“I’m sorry.” Luce winced. Shelby and Miles were acting like she’d betrayed them by coming out here alone. “I thought you guys were going to the campfire behind the lodge.”
“We thought you were going,” Shelby shot back. “We were there for a while, but then Jasmine started crying about how Dawn had disappeared, and the teachers got all weird, especially when they realized you were missing too, so the party kinda broke up. So then I mention casually to Miles that I kind of sort of have an idea what you might be up to and that I’m off to find you and suddenly he’s Mr. Superglue—”
“Wait a minute,” Luce broke in. “Dawn disappeared?”
“Probably not,” Mil
es offered. “I mean, you know how she and Jasmine are. They’re just flighty.”
“But it was her party,” Luce said. “She wouldn’t miss her own party.”
“That was what Jasmine kept saying,” Miles offered. “She didn’t come to the room last night, and wasn’t at mess this morning, so finally Frankie and Steven instructed us all to go back to the dorms, but—”
“Twenty bucks says Dawn’s mugging down with some non-Neph greaseball in the woods around here.” Shelby rolled her eyes.
“No.” Luce had a bad feeling about this. Dawn had been so excited about the campfire. She’d ordered T-shirts online even though there was no way in the world she’d be able to convince any of the Nephilim kids to wear them. She wouldn’t just disappear—not of her own volition. “How long has she been gone?”
When the three of them came out of the woods, Luce was even more shaken up. And not just about Dawn. She was shaken by what she’d seen in the Announcer. Watching death close in on her former self was agony, and this was the first time she had seen it. Daniel, on the other hand, had had to watch it hundreds of times. Only now could she understand why he’d been so cold to her when they first met: to save them both the trauma of going through another gruesome death. The reality of Daniel’s plight began to overwhelm her, and she was desperate to see him.
Crossing the lawn to the dorm, Luce had to shade her eyes. Powerful flashlights were sweeping over the campus. A helicopter droned in the distance, its searchlight tracing the shoreline, sweeping back and forth along the beach. A wide line of men in dark uniforms walked along the path from the Nephilim lodge to the mess hall, slowly scanning the ground.
Miles said, “That’s standard formation for search parties. Form a line and leave no inch of ground uncovered.”
“Oh God,” Luce said under her breath.
“She really is missing.” Shelby winced. “Not good karma.”
Luce broke into a jog toward the Nephilim lodge. Miles and Shelby followed. The path, decked with flowers and so pretty in the daylight, now looked overgrown with shadow. Ahead of them, the campfire in the pit had faded to glowing embers, but all the lights were on at the lodge, inside each of the two stories, and all around the deck. The great A-frame building was ablaze and looked formidable in the dark night.
Luce could see the scared faces of a lot of the Nephilim kids who were sitting on the benches around the deck. Jasmine was crying, her red knit cap tugged low on her head. She was holding Lilith’s stiff hand for support as two cops with notebooks ran through a bunch of questions. Luce’s heart went out to the girl. She knew how horrific that process could be.
The cops swarmed around the deck, passing out blown-up black-and-white photocopies of a recent photograph of Dawn that someone had printed off the Internet. Glancing down at the low-resolution image, Luce was surprised to see how much Dawn did resemble her—at least, before she’d dyed her hair. She remembered talking the morning after she’d done it, how Dawn kept joking about their not being Twinkies anymore.
Luce covered her gasp with her hand. Her head hurt as she began to add up so many things that hadn’t made sense. Until now.
The awful moment on the life raft. Steven’s harsh warning about keeping it a secret. Daniel’s paranoia about “dangers” he’d never explained to Luce. The Outcast who’d lured her off campus, the threat that Cam had destroyed in the forest. The way Dawn looked so much like her in the fuzzy black-and-white photograph.
Whoever took Dawn had been mistaken. It was Luce they wanted.
TWELVE
SEVEN DAYS
Friday morning, Luce’s eyes blinked open and fell on the clock. Seven-thirty a.m. She’d barely gotten any sleep—she was a mess, worried sick about Dawn and still angry about the past life she’d witnessed the day before via the Announcer. It was so eerie to have seen the moments leading up to her death. Would they all have been like that? Her mind kept running up against the same roadblock over and over again:
If it hadn’t been for Daniel …
Would she have had a shot at a normal life, a relationship with someone else, getting married, having kids, and growing old like the rest of the world? If it hadn’t been for Daniel falling in love with her ages ago, would Dawn be missing right now?
These questions were all detours, which eventually flowed back to the most important one: Would love be different with someone else? Was love even possible with someone else? Love was supposed to be easy, wasn’t it? Then why did she feel so tormented?
Shelby’s head swung down from the top bunk, her thick blond ponytail dropping behind her like a heavy rope. “Are you as freaked out by all this as I am?”
Luce patted the bed for Shelby to scoot down and sit next to her. Still in her thick red flannel pajamas, Shelby slid onto Luce’s bed, bringing two giant bars of dark chocolate with her.
Luce was going to say she couldn’t possibly eat, but as the scent of the chocolate wafted to her nose, she peeled back the bronze foil and gave Shelby a tiny smile.
“Hits the spot,” Shelby said. “You know that thing I said last night about Dawn making out with some greaseball? I feel really bad about it.”
Luce shook her head. “Oh, Shel, you didn’t know. You can’t feel bad about that.” She, on the other hand, had plenty of reason to feel sick over what had happened to Dawn. Luce had spent so much time already feeling responsible for the deaths of people near her—Trevor, then Todd, then poor, poor Penn. Her throat closed up at the thought of adding Dawn to the list. She wiped a silent tear away before Shelby could see. It was getting to a point where she was going to have to quarantine herself, to stay away from everyone she loved so that they could be safe.
A knock on their door made Luce and Shelby both jump. The door opened slowly. Miles.
“They found Dawn.”
“What?” Luce and Shelby asked, sitting up in unison.
Miles dragged Luce’s desk chair over to the bed and sat facing the girls. He took his cap off and wiped his forehead. It was beaded with sweat, like he’d come running across campus to tell them.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” he said, turning the cap in his hands. “I was up early, walking around. I ran into Steven and he told me the good news. The people who took her brought her back around sunrise. She’s shaken up, but she’s not hurt.”
“That’s a miracle,” Shelby murmured.
Luce was more dubious. “I don’t get it. They just brought her back? Unharmed? When does that ever happen?”
And how long had it taken whoever they were to realize they had the wrong girl?
“It wasn’t that simple,” Miles admitted. “Steven was involved. He rescued her.”
“From who?” Luce practically shouted.
Miles shrugged, rocking back on two legs of the chair. “Beats me. I’m sure Steven knows, but, uh, I’m not exactly his first choice for pillow talk.”
The idea made Shelby hoot. That Dawn had been found, unharmed, seemed to relax everyone except Luce. Her body was growing numb. She couldn’t stop thinking: It should have been me.
She got out of bed and grabbed a T-shirt and jeans from her closet. She had to find Dawn. Dawn was the only person who could answer her questions. And even though Dawn would never understand, Luce knew she owed her an apology.
“Steven did say that the people who took her won’t be back anymore,” Miles added, watching Luce worriedly.
“And you believe him?” Luce scoffed.
“Why shouldn’t he?” a voice asked from the open doorway.
Francesca was leaning up against the threshold in a khaki trench coat. She was radiating calm, but she didn’t seem exactly happy to see them. “Dawn is home now and she’s safe.”
“I want to see her,” Luce said, feeling ridiculous standing there in the tattered T-shirt and running shorts she’d slept in.
Francesca pursed her lips. “Dawn’s family picked her up an hour ago. She’ll be back at Shoreline when the time is right.”
; “Why are you acting like nothing happened?” Luce threw up her arms. “Like Dawn wasn’t kidnapped—”
“She wasn’t kidnapped,” Francesca corrected. “She was borrowed, and it turned out to be a mistake. Steven handled it.”
“Um, is that supposed to make us feel better? She was borrowed? For what?”
Luce searched Francesca’s features—and saw nothing but levelheaded calm. But then something in Francesca’s blue eyes changed: They narrowed, then widened, and a silent plea passed from Francesca to Luce. Francesca wanted Luce not to show what she suspected in front of Miles or Shelby. Luce didn’t know why, but she trusted Francesca.
“Steven and I expect that the rest of you will be quite shaken up,” Francesca continued, widening her gaze to include Miles and Shelby. “Classes are canceled today, and we’ll be in our offices if you’d like to come by and talk.” She smiled in that dazzling angelic way of hers, then turned on her high heels and clicked down the hallway.
Shelby got up and shut the door behind Francesca. “Can you believe she used the term ‘borrowed’ to refer to a human being? Is Dawn a library book?” She balled her hands up. “We have to do something to take our minds off this. I mean I’m glad Dawn’s safe, and I trust Steven—I think—but I’m still thoroughly creeped out.”
“You’re right,” said Luce, looking over at Miles. “We’ll distract ourselves. We could go for a walk—”
“Too dangerous.” Shelby’s eyes darted from side to side.
“Or watch a movie—”
“Too inactive. My mind will drift.”
“Eddie said something about a soccer game during lunch,” Miles threw out.
Shelby clamped a hand over her forehead. “Need I remind you I am done with Shoreline boys?”
“How about a board game—”
Finally Shelby’s eyes lit up. “How about the game of life? As in … your past lives? We could do that thing where we track down your relatives again. I could help you.”