Before I Disappear

by Danielle Stinson

  My face burns. “I’m not falling for anything,” I lie. “I’m just saying we can’t afford another incident like the one earlier. Maybe Jeremy’s changed since you knew him.”

  “People don’t change. Some things can’t be fixed, Rose.”

  I frown at him, because suddenly, I’m not sure what we’re talking about.

  “I can feel it,” Ian says after a moment. “All the shit stirring inside of me.” He meets my gaze head-on, revealing the swirling black at the center of his pupils.

  A reminder that the true danger in the Fold isn’t the storms in the sky.

  It’s the storms inside of us.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The wind cuts straight through my blankets.

  I wake up inside the cavern opening, where I spent most of the night scanning the woods. Blaine showed up to relieve me around midnight, but I was never leaving this spot.

  Not while Charlie was out in that dry lightning alone.

  My heart lifts at the sight of clear sky outside. Charlie would’ve had to wait for the weather to turn before he tried to track us.

  We made it nice and easy for him.

  Blue tape marks the trees all the way here to the caverns. A trail of fluorescent breadcrumbs that will lead him right to us.

  A wheezing sound draws my gaze to the right, where Blaine is snoring loudly enough to disturb the local wildlife.

  I reach down and pat a scrawny shoulder.

  Blaine groans and rolls over. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “For starters, you’re a lousy lookout.”

  Blaine rescues his glasses from the long slide down his nose. Between his slightly glazed expression and his gravity defiant bedhead, he looks like he’s been chewing live wires. “Sorry.”

  “We survived the night without your help.” I smile at him. I can’t help it. Charlie is alive, I have a plan to bring him in, and for once, the weather in the Fold is cooperating.

  Morning rays pierce the cavern. My eyes land on something lying inside the corridor.

  The water dripping down the cavern walls. The birdsongs outside. They all fade to white noise.

  I push past Blaine and come to a grinding halt beside Becca.

  She’s lying in the middle of the passageway. Her oversize pants are bunched around her calves. The too-long sleeves of her sweatshirt swallow her hands. I drop to the ground, push back her hair, and recoil.

  Becca’s cheekbones protrude like razors from a skeletal face. Another ten pounds have melted off her during the night. Now there’s nothing but bones held together by loose skin and too much fabric.

  Blaine makes a strangled sound over my shoulder. He’s looking at me like Charlie used to look at me when he was little, and hungry, and Mom was too sad to get up. Like he’s waiting for me to do something, to fix this. Only I don’t know how.

  I don’t know how.

  Becca moans. Helpless tears burn their way up my throat. I force them back behind the wall inside of me and I focus on what needs to be done.

  “Go.” Somehow, the word comes out dead-even. “Get Jeremy.”

  Blaine takes off for the main cavern.

  I lay Becca down and place my ear over her heart. The beat is too sluggish. Her shallow breathing barely lifts her chest. The only lively things about her are her eyes, twitching restlessly behind her lids.

  Her whole body starts to tremble in my arms.

  Footsteps in the corridor. Jeremy freezes when he sees Becca lying on the floor.

  “What do we do?” My voice bounces off the cavern walls.

  Jeremy doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even move. He just stands there, staring at what’s left of his little sister.

  I get off the ground and move until I’m blocking his view. “We might be able to help her, but I need you to tell me what to do. Tell me, Jeremy.” I grip his shoulders.

  Becca moans again. A whispery, pitiful sound.

  Jeremy’s muscles go rigid under my hands. He drops to his knees beside Becca. When he looks up at me again his mouth is set in a hard line. “We need to get some liquid into her,” he says.

  “Will this work?” Blaine tosses him a bottle of Gatorade we picked up at the camp.

  Jeremy tears off the cap and raises it to Becca’s lips. The red syrupy drink runs down her chin. It comes right back up again in a burst of breath and spittle.

  Blaine squeaks, and steps out of range.

  Sticky droplets of saliva cover Jeremy’s face. He doesn’t pause to wipe them off.

  The bottle is a few inches from Becca’s lips when her eyes fly open. Her pupils are two black holes that swallow the light. My insides squirm away from that darkness. Like it’s somehow contagious, but I think of the little girl on the stone floor in front of me. The one who wears ridiculous ball gowns and stuffs cereal in Ian’s shoes. I hold my ground.

  A violent shudder racks Becca’s body. Her spine arcs off the cave floor, and for a few seconds, the world stops spinning.

  She slumps back down.

  “What’s happening?” Blaine cries.

  “She’s seizing.” Jeremy’s calm is quickly surrendering ground to fear.

  Another seizure grips Becca. This time, Jeremy manages to slip his arm under the back of her head, cushioning it. He doesn’t move, not even when he takes a flying elbow to the face. Sorrow shines in his eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

  My throat is raw from holding back tears. One streaks down my cheek. I swipe it with the back of my sleeve. “It’s the dark pulse,” I say. “It has her.” I’ve seen that ocean of blackness before. That’s how I know there’s nothing Jeremy or anyone else can do to help Becca now.

  Yes, there is, says a voice at the back of my head.

  I stare down at my hand on Becca’s sweater. Slowly, I roll up her sleeve, revealing skeletal white fingers.

  “What’re you doing?” Blaine asks over my shoulder.

  I don’t bother trying to explain. The black ocean I saw when I touched Becca on the riverbank still doesn’t make sense to me. All I know is that the dark pulse is pulling Becca away from us. Just like it is pulling Charlie.

  And there may be just one chance left to save them.

  We have to meet the darkness where it lives and fight to get them back.

  The next seizure has Becca’s body arching like a bow about the snap. Arms shoots out, catching Jeremy across the mouth.

  “We’re losing her,” he says brokenly. Blood drips from his lips, down onto her curls where they’re matted against his chest. He cradles her to him. The sight tears at me.

  I held Charlie like this once. Like he was my axis when the world was spinning around us. I still remember the slippery feel of his blood on my hands. The way my entire existence hung on every rise and fall of his chest. Fragments of that night still cut me whenever I try to get a deep breath, and Charlie survived. What happens to Jeremy if Becca doesn’t survive this? Because she won’t.

  Not unless I stop watching for once in my life, and actually do something.

  I reach for her fingers. The moment our hands touch, the muscles in my chest coil into a hook of pain and pressure. It conducts me down a power line into a world without Color. Without Light. Without any Sound but one.

  Dark pulse.

  It roars through my head, splintering me apart from the inside until there is only pain and darkness and a noise so huge, it leaves no room for thoughts.

  Wave after wave smashes into me. It gnaws at me with a need that feels almost like hunger. I rear back, but the undertow has me now. A scream tears through my head as it pulls me down the side of a cliff, into the black abyss waiting down below.

  The darkness rises up over my head. My lungs scream for air, but there is only emptiness. Thicker than air and harder than water. I am drowning in it when a soft glow reaches me from somewhere down below. A person illuminated against the black.

  Becca.

  She’s sitting on a ledge carved out of the dark, hugging her knees and rocking back and
forth like a child trapped in a nightmare.

  Becca’s face goes out of focus. The already faint glow around her starts to fade. Just like in the visions I’ve had. The ones of Charlie. Only this isn’t a vision.

  Everything about this is real.

  I reach down to her, but my arms don’t budge. They don’t budge because they aren’t here. My mind might be stuck in this black world with Becca, but my body is still sitting on the cave floor. I can feel a thread tethering me to it like Ian’s safety cord. It’s keeping me from falling over the edge into the dark ocean below, but it’s also holding me in place so I can’t reach Becca. And there’s nothing I can do to fight it, because whatever this place is, it’s solid for Becca in a way that it isn’t for me.

  That’s because this isn’t your darkness. It’s hers.

  The thought marches through my mind uninvited. Right on cue, the hook of fire flares to life inside of me.

  No! I resist it with everything I’ve got, but still, it reels me in like a fish on a line.

  I start to fall out of the dark.

  “Becca!” I don’t know whether I think her name or say it. Either way, the word shimmers. A drop of brilliant light. I watch it glitter down a gossamer line in the dark. That’s when I realize.

  There’s another thread. A pink thread linking me to Becca. It’s thinner, weaker than the one trying to pull me back to my body, but it’s real, and it’s there, and it means Becca’s not completely out of reach.

  I concentrate every bit of my focus on the rosy thread between us. All at once, a dozen images dance up the blushing line into me.

  A little girl with black curls and hazel eyes, blowing out the candles on a strawberry cream cake. Her parents too preoccupied with their phones to notice. She’s allergic to strawberries.

  That same girl wedged between them at the dinner table, listening to them talk about her as if she isn’t there.

  Sitting on a bus in a blue ball gown, alone even though every other seat is taken. Wondering how she can feel so conspicuous, and at the same time, be completely invisible.

  Clutching a pen as she writes page after page of letters to her brother. Letters that never receive an answer.

  Watching Gone with the Wind a thousand times and waiting for a happy ending that will never come.

  Because she is invisible.

  Because she will never know what it’s like to fall in love. To be cherished. To be seen.

  The images stop coming, and then it’s just Becca, rocking below me on a ledge here in this black nothingness, her outline so muted I can barely make it out.

  The tug on my mind yanks me hard. I start to slip back to my body and the real world. In slow motion, I watch Becca grow smaller and smaller in the distance until she’s almost gone.

  A scream builds in my mind. I’m going to lose her. I’m going to watch her disappear right in front of me. Like the town. Like Charlie. Like my dad and everything else that has ever mattered.

  Something snaps inside of me.

  Remember. Help her to remember.

  The words drifts through my mind like smoke. Remember what? I don’t know what I’m supposed to remember, or how I’m supposed to save Becca, or beat this unbeatable dark.

  Without the dark, there are no stars, Rosie.

  And then I’m not alone. I can’t explain it, but I can feel someone else in here with us. Giving off a frequency that somehow cancels out the dark one in my head. Lending their song and their light to mine so that it plays just a little bit louder. Shines just a little brighter. Bright enough to catch on the thread shimmering between me and Becca.

  Showing me a way where before there was only darkness.

  I focus in on the thread between us. A wisp of color in a colorless world. The last bit of something holding me to this place. To her. I might not be able to swim to Becca, or grab her, or even speak to her. But maybe I don’t have to do any of those things. If I can see what’s in her head, maybe, just maybe, she can see what’s in mine.

  Becca’s light gutters as I pour myself into the thread and watch as all the words I can’t say turn into notes of music that are somehow also images. They vibrate and shimmer down the blushing line into her.

  I show her the look on Jeremy’s face when he heard Becca’s voice at the gulch. His desperate love as he rocked her and begged her to come back.

  Ian watching her sleep in the cabin. The way he smiled when he talked about her, like the world was that much brighter because she was in it. Maybe even bright enough to be bearable.

  I let her see herself through my eyes. A survivor clinging to a boulder in the middle of a raging river. The girl who watched Gone with the Wind a thousand times, and fell in love with her brother’s best friend, and never once stopped believing in happy endings.

  Strong. Alive with hope. Beautiful.

  Not invisible.

  Never invisible.

  The thread between us blazes. Rosy fire shoots between us. Solid. Real. And then Becca isn’t hiding in the darkness.

  The darkness is hiding from her.

  I’m here, Becs. I’m right here.

  Until I’m not anymore. The tether to my body yanks me back. There’s a moment of mind-numbing pain before my eyes snap open to blinding light.

  I take in the scene around me in rapid blinks.

  Cavern walls painted silver by the rising sun.

  Scrawny arms around my waist. Blaine. The tear tracks on his cheeks and the blood vessels in his eyes as they widen on me.

  Jeremy, cradling his sister’s body.

  Ian. Standing in the corridor, face frozen and arms loaded down with firewood.

  And then nothing matters but the little girl in Jeremy’s arms. Because she’s awake, and she’s looking at me with wide, hazel eyes. I scan her from head to toe. There’s more flesh on her bones than there was a few minutes ago. It’s almost like the thread between us fed her more than light.

  It fed her some of her life back.

  Becca smiles, and the pink thread between us—the one I can no longer see but can somehow feel—forms a knot deep inside my chest. Permanent. Irreversible.

  “You came,” she says. “He told me you would come.”

  My entire body goes still. “Who?”

  “The boy,” she says. “The one singing in the dark.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Charlie was there. Charlie was in the abyss.” My voice is way too loud in the small space. I jump to my feet, every muscle in my body coiled tight.

  I don’t know how it’s possible. I don’t know how I felt Charlie in there with me in that dark place, but I did and it was real and what Becca just said proves it.

  “Abyss?” Blaine blinks at me. “What abyss?”

  I tell him exactly what I saw when I went after Becca. Just now and a few days ago, on the riverbank. The ocean of darkness. The threads. Everything.

  “You saw it too?” Blaine asks Ian.

  “When I touched their hands back at the river.” Ian stacks the wood on the ground. “Any idea what it was?”

  “The Black Nothing.”

  Everybody turns to Becca. She shrugs. “That’s what Charlie called it.”

  My heart is suddenly so high in my throat, I swear I can taste it beating. “What else did Charlie say?”

  Becca frowns. “At first, there was just darkness and noise. I could feel it taking away my good memories, leaving the bad. I thought I was alone until he came.” She takes a shuddering breath. “He touched my hand, and it was like … a song flowed through his fingertips. One that kept the dark pulse out.” She marvels at her hand. “He gave me pictures to chase away the bad ones in my head.”

  A shiver runs through her. “He showed me a woman. She was lying on the ground and … I wanted to look away but then you were there, Rosie. You kept telling the woman that it would be okay. And that’s when I knew you would come for me just like you came for her. I just had to hold on.”

  Jeremy shifts beside me. I turn away from th
e speculation on his face only to find Ian staring right at me.

  “What happened next?” I ask, to shift their attention away from me.

  Becca’s mouth goes soft. “Then he showed me the stars and all the threads between them.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “He wanted me to know.”

  Every hair on my arm stands straight up. “Know what?”

  “That we don’t have to be afraid. Not of the dark.”

  “Are you afraid of the dark?” I asked you, pressing my shoulder into yours.

  You shook your head. “Without the dark, there are no stars, Rosie.”

  “Then what are you afraid of?” I asked.

  What are you afraid of?

  “And when he left, you were there. Really there,” Becca says, cutting into my thoughts. “And I could see the thread shining between us like all the webs between the stars.” She looks right at me. “He knows you saw him yesterday. He wants to come to you, but he can’t.” Her expression turns fierce. “You have to come to him.”

  My pulse starts to pound. Watching Charlie run away from me yesterday in the woods almost broke me, but a part of him must have known me. That means his mind isn’t completely lost to the dark pulse. I can still save him.

  I can still save him.

  “Okaay,” Blaine says, yanking me out of my own head. “Since all three of you saw it, this Black Nothing has to be a real place. I’d bet money it’s the same place my uncle unlocked with the DARC. A hidden dimension beyond the ones we can sense.”

  “And this hidden dimension is where the dark pulse lives,” I say, my mind scrambling to keep up with my racing thoughts.

  Blaine nods. “The dark pulse is blending the line between the physical and the metaphysical. It’s separating our consciousness from our bodies, drawing our minds into the Black Nothing before the wormhole can finish the job. And if we’re right, it’s been living right next to us this whole time, just out of reach.”

  “Until your uncle sent our town into the Black Nothing and unleashed its dark pulse on the world,” Jeremy says.

  Blaine snaps a response, but I’m not listening anymore. His explanation has me sailing back in time. Not just over the last three days. To that night three weeks ago.