“No!” Noa cried. “I know you saw it too! This place isn’t right! This isn’t who we are—”
“You’re wrong!” he shouted, almost like a child. “I’m the protector, the Otec!”
Noa wanted to leap to her feet, to run to him and shake him, but her screaming leg would not obey. He grasped his temples, shook his head, his whole body, as if to make it all go away. “I don’t know how you’ve done this, but I won’t let you destroy what I have built!” He finally looked at her, eyes wild, hard, bestial with fear.
“Callum, no,” Noa cried, skittering backward. With her injured leg she couldn’t flee, could barely fight. She had no way to resist the Man with White Hands—who was the Otec who was Judah’s brother who was Callum, Callum, Callum.
Callum grasped her by the shoulders, hauled her toward the picture frame. He faced it, wrapped her struggling body with one arm, held out his other palm, fingers splayed. The wall inside the frame opened into a howling tunnel, shining green, sizzling sparks and hissing like an animal opening its jaws—hungry for Annabelle.
Noa scrabbled against Callum, bit and kicked and wriggled until finally she slipped from his one-armed hold and crashed onto the floor. Knowing she couldn’t run, she grabbed the nearest leg of the examination table. The vortex roared to suck her back, pry her from the table bolted to the wall.
“You’re too dangerous!” Callum cried. “You must be cleansed!”
“Callum—”
“Otec!” Callum tried to pry her loose, to shove her back. Her grip slipped, her fingers on fire—Callum was too strong, the suck too brutal. One of Noa’s hands came off, and on impulse, Noa thrust it onto Callum’s chest.
“Mermaid hearts,” she cried against the howl, finding his eyes, pressing her fingers into his pounding heartbeat. “My mermaid heart to yours!”
Callum froze, words breaking through; the frame roared more loudly, sparks multiplying in anger. Callum fell, skidded toward the tunnel’s jaws. He reached and caught the same table leg Noa held, his hands on hers, anchoring them both with his strength.
“Noa…” he said painfully, in torment, “I remember … loving you?”
Noa nodded numbly, eyes watering in the whipping wind. The metal table groaned against its bolts.
“But … did you love me? I think … I hurt you….”
The bolts whined; Noa knew they were sliding free. “Callum, please—”
His face twisted, confused. “I can’t, I’m the protector—”
“We’re not supposed to be here, Callum, please—”
“Are we supposed to love each other?” He was pleading, so confused, so scared—
“Noa!” Judah’s voice broke through the noise, followed by repeated slamming against Ms. Jaycee’s door.
Noa’s mind surged with memories, color on touch on taste: sitting with Judah in the library, lying with him in the sun, his fingers in her hair, her hands in his curls, kissing him kissing him kissing him—but the other memories flooded too, pushing and fighting to be seen: swimming with Callum in the sea, sitting with him in the rain, tangled with him sharing secrets—
Two of the table’s wall bolts flew out like machine-gun fire and were sucked into the frame. The vortex roared and spat, voracious now, as the metal table twirled almost into its jaws, hinged on one last bolt.
“Callum!” Noa shrieked. “The table!”
But Callum was somewhere else. “You have feelings for him, too?” he demanded, so lost and so confused.
“Callum, please—”
“You want me to throw it all away when you cry out for someone else?”
“Throw what away? We don’t belong—”
“I belong! I belong!” Callum screamed. “It’s my duty—”
“Noa!” Judah shouted, shaking the wall, frantic to get through.
“Promise me!” Callum burst in frenzy as the final bolt began to screech. “If I give it up, fail it all, promise at least you will be with me! That I won’t be alone!”
“Noa!” The door splintered, little chunks finally giving way—
“Promise me we’ll be together! The way we saw! Whatever happens!”
The last bolt detached; Noa shrieked as their anchor careened backward into the screaming frame. “I promise! I promise to try to love you!”
Like lightning, Callum had her whole body wrapped inside his; he rolled them both sideways, still skidding back, but he’d pushed them far enough that they slammed into the wall, just adjacent to the opening in the frame—
“Noa…” A wail this time. Close. And hurt.
Noa squinted toward the door, where Judah stood. He had finally broken through, was standing in debris.
“Jaycee!” Callum yelled at him, the vortex now sucking both him and Noa sideways. “Jaycee now! Or Noa dies!”
Judah flew into Jaycee’s office, reappeared with the vice headmistress, bound and bloody.
“Free her! Now!”
Judah hesitated, and one of Noa’s shoes was sucked into the void, her legs stretched so hard she knew her tendons would soon snap. “Judah, please!”
Judah ripped Ms. Jaycee’s bonds, and Callum called, “Your duty!”
Ms. Jaycee didn’t argue, didn’t cry. She saluted Callum, brave and even proud—and ran and leapt into the vortex. She hovered there a moment, body flashing and flickering within the frame as every bit of essence drained—and then she exploded into virulent green sparks.
Sated, the vortex growled, then sealed back into white wall.
Noa had seen none of it, felt none of it. Wrapped in Callum’s arms, tangled with him on the floor, she could look only at Judah—at Judah’s shattered, broken eyes.
Olivia and Miles rushed in.
“Miles rescued me and punched Jeremy out!” Olivia crowed, then gasped. “Ohmygod, Noa, are you okay? Holy crap, is that the Otec?”
No one answered as Callum jumped to his feet and pulled Noa up. He held her fast; her leg could not support her, but Noa somehow knew his grasp meant more than that. She looked agonizingly at Judah, still planted, face and body completely closed—
Callum pulled Noa to the dormant picture frame, held out his spread palm again.
“No!” Noa shrieked. “You said—”
“It’s okay,” Callum, gritting his teeth in fierce determination. Sweat beaded at his temples as he splayed his fingers wide. “I’m telling them to make it different.”
“Telling who?”
“The atoms,” Callum groaned harshly. “To send us back to the place we saw—”
“Yoooo … is the Otec cray?” Olivia murmured. Again, nobody answered.
The picture frame vibrated, and then the wall inside opened once again, this time blue and rippling, a curtain of pure water.
The moment it opened, the floor beneath them all started shaking violently. The walls vibrated, howled and groaned—
“It’s angry!” Callum cried. “It’s angry I’ve betrayed my duty! We have to go fast. I don’t know how long this exit will last, how many it will take—”
“My friends first,” Noa said immediately. “Olivia! Miles!”
“No!” Callum said, cracks exploding in the walls. A crevice started to split the floor. “Us first, before the whole place crumbles!” He shoved her forward toward the plasma-blue. Noa tried helplessly to resist—then felt someone adding his strength to hers.
Judah.
“You heard her! Her friends first!” Judah spat at Callum. He pulled Olivia and Miles with him.
“Uh, what are we doing? Where is this going?” Miles protested weakly. “Surely I get a life vest or—”
“Geronimo!” Olivia shrieked, cutting him off, grabbing Miles and jumping them both through.
When they vanished, the room shook harder. The crack in the floor widened into a chasm, split across the room beh
ind them—
“Us now!” Callum cried to Noa. “Before it’s too late!”
“Judah, come on!” Noa cried, reaching for him.
He stepped away from her.
“Judah!”
“Leave him, then! It’s safer with two—”
But Noa’s eyes were on Judah’s. She couldn’t look away.
“I heard your promise,” he told her.
Their side of the chasm fell several feet; above the picture frame, the wall began to crumble.
“Noa, now!” Callum urged, pushing at her.
But Noa couldn’t look away from Judah, wishing for words that did not exist. Suddenly Judah grabbed her, kissed her hard and deep. When they finally broke apart, Noa gasped, and Judah’s eyes were hard on hers. Saying nothing, he took her other hand.
A chain of three—Callum, Noa, Judah—they faced the blue, just as the ceiling fell.
And Noa saw it—a glimmer of brown curls in the corner of her eye. The Girl, her Girl, running away from the blue exit, back into the collapsing world.
“Noa, no!” Judah and Callum yelled together as Noa spun after the Girl, shielding her head from falling shrapnel, breaking both their holds. Her leg was somehow steady now, as if healed by her conviction that she must always follow the Girl. That she must always find her, no matter what.
“Noa, no!” the brothers shouted again, as Noa leapt up to the other side of the widening chasm, clambered over the rubble that had once been Ms. Jaycee’s door. But the office was gone, completely gone, nothing more than an empty floor being swallowed by a black tidal wave of oblivion. It roared, rose toward Noa from where the rest of the school no longer was.
Judah and Callum stumbled in after Noa, then skittered backward from the wave. “Noa, get away from there!” Judah yelled, pulling back on one arm as Callum grabbed the other.
But Noa didn’t hear them, barely felt them; she stood her ground, suddenly serene. She watched the Girl, a toddler really, smile her impish smile, laugh a pealing laugh— and dive into the tidal wave, as easy as slipping into a lake.
Noa walked forward, pulling the boys with her as easily, as lightly, as dandelions to keep for future wishes. She heard nothing but a quiet calm, felt nothing but certainty, saw nothing but the faint sparkling white where the Girl had dipped from sight. Noa smiled, eyes wide open, scar shining the way like a golden beacon—
—and walked them all into the dark.
When they woke up in Aurora, they remembered everything.
PART II: THE TUNNELS
At first, there was only the crash: Noa existed completely within it, her whole existence the reverberation of bones against steel. Or not steel, but something just as cold and hard—something broken and uneven, knots and twists of … stones and roots? She slammed against them like a human tuning fork, her whole skeleton shuddering into some strange night.
Noa lay in that night, unmoving, as jagged feelings put themselves together. She was outside, the ground was sharp and cold, but the air wrapped her tight with muggy heat. Darkness wound around her like a shroud—sticky, cloying, clogging—suffocating, except for the ice-cold ground. But below her, beneath her, the wood and leaves had bite as well as chill—raised tree roots grooved with sharp-edged bark, leaves ringed with tiny teeth. Noa could feel them, every thorn and every spine. She felt everything, each barbed particle of dirt, each razored mote of dust as it settled, sizzled on her skin. The air here hurt.
She didn’t want it in her lungs.
“Sasha.” The name came out with dirt, with bile, swords, and knives. Noa coughed, lifted her head, and for the first time, opened her eyes. Around her, shapes and shadows lingered in light so pale it was almost silver, almost lavender. She looked up: twin sickles of mirrored moons. The air—so hot—was spicy on her lips. Like raw ginger, but thicker, sharper.
Noa sat up, straining against her still-vibrating limbs. “Sasha…” she wailed again, softly, to the eerie night. The night answered with the sound of nearby movement, a sort of scuffling, and the little bits of voices weaving to her ear.
“Need to move…”
“Don’t know where we are…”
Noa swallowed, tried to wet her throat. Breathing in this air felt like not getting air at all. She pushed up to her feet.
“Noa?”
Noa blinked, tried to focus. The darkness had opened its eyes, had spoken. The eyes were dark and stormy, like Judah’s—
Noa gasped: two different kinds of memories crashed upon her consciousness at once: sitting against Judah in their secret corner of Lamont Library, trading kisses while he tried to braid her hair … and at the same time, but somehow somewhere else, Judah screaming on his knees, deranged, tearing at his curls because she’d said she could never love him—
Judah now stepped into the lavender light, reached out to her, and it was like three Judahs all at once: Judah Before and Judah After and Judah Now, three hands in one. Noa wanted to kiss him and slap him, run from him and to him, take his hand and break his hand and stab him and hold him. Instead, she felt herself wrenched backward and away. Judah’s dark eyes flickered in all three faces; three became one, clouded with anger—
“Noa, we have to move. We’re too exposed here.” It was Callum, Callum turning her around. Taller, lighter, more assured; calm and gentle, kind—but now he was doubling, tripling, too: Callum Before and Callum After and Callum Now. Noa slammed her eyes shut, shook her head.
“What’s wrong with her?” Judah’s voice.
“She’s in shock. She doesn’t make Light here like we do; her mind has to recover on its own. If it even can. Mortal minds were not meant for the In Between. Come on, there’s a cave over there.”
Noa heard angry, stalking footsteps fading fast. But the steadying, guiding hand remained. Callum’s, she knew, from the gentleness. Judah was the one who’d sped away, crunching leaves into the night.
Callum guided Noa, became her eyes, her mind, until she could slowly lift her lids again. Every step steadied by his hand let Noa’s mind focus and recover; her body slowly stretched within his gait. Every muscle ached with soreness, but nothing felt broken or out of joint.
Noa’s eyes slowly adjusted to the silver-purple sickle moonlight. Trees and vines coalesced from shadow-clay around her, some familiar and some in spiny-textured shapes Noa had never seen. In the distance, on every side as far as Noa could glimpse, these tangled thickets rose upward in endless towers to the sky. As if at the boundaries of this world, the wilderness somehow swallowed upward and devoured the horizon, yawning wide-toothed and ravenous into the sea of stars.
Callum led Noa into the shelter of a cave, but her mind had begun spinning, firing jumbled memory-pieces into place. No sooner had the stony walls reached out to take them than Noa shook off Callum’s hand, recoiled. Judah looked hopeful and reached out, but she cringed from his touch too.
She stumbled backward, tensed to flee like a hissing cat.
“We’re in Aurora, aren’t we?” she asked, eyes darting from brother to brother.
Callum stepped toward her, pleading: “It wasn’t me in there. It wasn’t any of us. It was the In Between—” Her flinch made him freeze. Noa watched his every movement but heard Judah chuckle low.
“That place, that Harlow, it was the In Between?” she asked.
Callum nodded slowly, trying not to spook her. “The Portal was devouring our Light, holding us between the worlds while it slowly … ate us all. It made the In Between so we would stay there, so we wouldn’t know—”
“You knew!” Judah scoffed. “You ran the place!”
Callum tensed. “I didn’t know. I thought that world was real, just like you.”
“It was a mind trap,” Noa realized slowly. “The Portal made us think the In Between world was real, put us there to occupy our minds….”
“So Callum could serve us
up on a silver platter,” Judah sneered, shoving Callum backward.
“I didn’t know!” Callum insisted, shoving back as Judah growled.
“Stop it!” Noa commanded. “Just let me figure this out!”
They both stopped, seething, and turned to her, distorted mirror images.
Noa swallowed as anger flushed through her—nebulous, murky anger she knew was for them both. But before she could deal with that, she just needed to understand. “So the Portal created a world where our minds wouldn’t protest—the In Between world we thought was Harlow—so that we would let it drain our Light, our life, until we…”
“Died,” Callum finished softly, looking down.
“More like until we were murdered, drained, disintegrated,” Judah sniffed. “If we’re being accurate.”
Noa ignored him, ignored them both. “So the Portal needed us to accept that the In Between was real, so we wouldn’t fight free. That’s why the arts—poetry, drawing, dreams, anything that tapped into our subconscious—were forbidden. Because they could stir memory, feeling … awareness.”
“I think so,” Callum said softly.
“But there was more, wasn’t there?” Noa accused, glaring at him, forcing him to meet her eyes. “There was more to it.”
Callum looked away. “Seems that way.”
“What?” Judah demanded.
Noa waited, but Callum just shook his head, unable or unwilling to explain. She didn’t need him to. “It sweetened the pot, Judah. Made the world a place where we wanted to stay, don’t you see? By giving each of us something we wanted.”
Judah’s eyes flashed defensively. “What do you mean?”
Some of Noa’s anger cooled. “Think about it,” she told him more gently, “how it changed everyone’s reality. Olivia had freedom. She could do whatever she wanted with her hair, her style, even her tattoos, all with her parents’ approval. In real life, she has to hide all that, hide who she is, because they’d never support her. And Miles—in the In Between he was popular, a huge lacrosse star, when in real life he rides the bench because of his asthma, and he’s not exactly part of the ‘in crowd.’ Ms. Jaycee was vice headmistress, so she had power without having to make decisions—and she got to feel like she was really saving kids while still lording over us. That wall of success stories! Jeremy got to date Olivia, with peer approval”—Noa broke off, swallowed hard—“and I had Isla back, alive…”
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