The flames lit up the cave walls and gave us a good look at the interior. It was empty, save for a few spider webs and stacks of wood and kindling, but it fit us all and we’d have a safe place to sleep for the night.
Claire sighed. “Let’s just wait till this freak ice storm passes and then changes into the next world.”
“Yeah, let’s just stay here until the nine worlds pass us by,” said Reece, putting more wood on the fire.
Axel shook his head. “I don’t think it works like that.” He sighed. “It would be too easy.”
“I just want to go home,” said Noah, his voice croaking with emotion, before he curled into a ball on the dusty cave floor and faced a wall.
I moved to the entrance of the cave, wanting to be as far away from the flames as possible. Though I wasn’t afraid of a small fire, staring at the flames brought back too many memories.
The wind howled outside the cave and some white stuff blew in through the entrance, a piece of it landed on my finger. It immediately evaporated. I stretched my hand out and caught some more.
“Snow!” I said.
“Really?” Claire rushed to my side and crouched down beside me to catch some on the palm of her hand. The little snow drops melted as soon as they hit her skin and we both laughed.
It was coming down fast. A snowstorm. My first snowstorm. But then I realised, from all the movies I’d ever watched, that a snowstorm meant getting snowed under.
The fire blazed and kept us warm now, but what about after?
“How will we move through the snow after a snowstorm? If it snows all night, the cave entry will be snowed in.”
Axel visibly tensed and looked at me over the fire, his blue eyes blazing red with reflecting flames. “How should I know? I’ve never experienced dead people’s afterlives. I’m just as clueless as you.”
The others glared at me and I saw a grin on Reece’s lips, as though he was thinking, See, now your only friend has turned on you too. But I stared out into the darkness outside and concentrated on how great it would be to get Sam back and how he would be able to tell the others the truth about what happened the day he died.
I moved away from the entrance and the flames and settled against the wall beside Noah, who appeared to be sleeping already.
“You don’t like those flames do you, Amber?” said Reece. “Wonder why. Did you tell lover-boy here why? Or should I tell him?”
Axel glared at Reece and got up from where he was sitting to go sit in the entrance of the cave where I’d only just been. The wind continued to howl. He must have been freezing.
He sat stiffly, his back straight, and I wondered what he thought about me. If he would actually believe anything Reece said. I would have loved to know what went on inside his head. Was he thinking about the millions of men and women who had made this journey believing they were going to find their loved, ones only to fail?
I looked at Bruce, whose head was lolling against his shoulder, being lulled to sleep by the flickering flames and the warmth, and wondered why he would chose us kids. Everyone in the world had lost someone. There had to be another reason behind it. But I didn’t even finish that thought before I fell asleep.
When I woke up, maybe only a couple of hours later because it was still dark outside and the snow had built up a little more, revealing only a strip of black night, a few of the others were talking in hushed whispers. Bruce was snoring in the corner, Noah asleep in the foetal position. The others’ faces were softly lit buy the fire light.
“We can’t separate,” said Axel. “It’s not the way it’s done. If we separate, it’ll all be over. None of us will return.” He stared hard into the fire. “We’ll just add to the millions of lost souls trapped in everyone’s ideas of heaven.”
“Sounds like bullshit.”
“I didn’t know bullshit had a sound to it,” said Axel in an icy tone. He shook his head. “Think what you want. I’m not leaving.”
Claire looked to Reece, Reueben, and Kyle, but they all stared hard at the fire and said nothing.
Jacob was awake but sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest. He was staring at the shadows of the dancing flames, deep in thought. He must have felt my stare because he suddenly looked up and met my gaze but quickly looked away. I closed my eyes after that and just listened.
Someone moved to the cave entrance and said, “Still snowing.” There was a rustle of movement, as though the others had gone to see for themselves.
I must have dozed again because when I looked up, Axel and Jacob were asleep, as well as Claire. Bruce was awake, but Kyle, Reece, and Reuben were gone.
“They’re gone,” said Bruce with a shake of his head. He clenched his fists and his face turned a deep shade of red. “I’ll have to go and search for them now.”
“I’ll go with you.” I jumped to my feet.
“No.” Bruce shook his head. “You stay here, I’m taking these guys.” He nudged Jacob, Axel, and Noah, who sat up, rubbing their eyes and staring around like they’d just realised where they were.
“You stay and watch her,” Bruce said, frowning at Claire as though she were an inconvenience, when he, in fact, had chosen her and whisked her away from her normal life.
“Hey, wake up.”
Claire raised her head and said, “What?” before moving towards the doorway, still sleepy, and falling into a wall of snow. She screamed.
I dragged her back in and her eyes were wild and crazed. She hadn’t quite been awake before but now she was.
“You’re fine,” I said, slightly annoyed. I was cranky without my sleep. But when she started crying I felt sorry for her. I bent down and put an arm around her shoulder.
“It’s okay. Don’t cry.”
“That’s why I want you to stay,” said Bruce.
“We won’t be long,” said Jacob.
“How do you know that?” Claire said, her eyes glittering with tears.
“See you,” Axel said, his blue eyes piercing mine, and something fluttered in my stomach. I didn’t want him to leave. I didn’t want any of us to separate.
Jacob and Noah walked through the wall of snow at the entrance, into who knew where. Axel followed. I wondered if the Change had already occurred or if, in fact, the snow was the Change. Would there be so much snow that they suffocated beneath it? Poor Noah. He was so short. He might have to ride on someone’s shoulders.
Claire and I sat on opposite sides of the fire. Occasionally Claire would look at me, like she wanted to say something, but then she’d sigh and look away.
Eventually I got sick of it.
“What is it? If you’ve got something to say, then out with it.”
She sighed again. “I just don’t know anymore. I want to be friends again. But…I can’t help thinking back to what happened.” She sniffed. “I really loved Sam, you know. He was my favourite boyfriend.”
I almost laughed. So she loved Sam, girlfriend of twenty minutes, but me, sister, twin sister? How could I have loved him as deeply as Claire had? This was the kind of thing that made me realise that I was better off without her. I turned my back on her and moved to the cave entrance, where the boys had tramped some of the snow beneath their boots. It was so bloody cold out here by the snow, but another minute with Claire and I was going to do something I’d regret.
I punched my hand through the wall of snow that the boys and Bruce hadn’t knocked over when they’d left, and it left a perfectly shaped fist-hole. It was strong, mouldable snow, and I wondered if I should make a bit of a pathway, to make it easier for the boys to find us when they returned.
“What are you doing?” Claire shouted from inside the cave after I started hitting at the snow and stomping it beneath my boots.
“Making a path for the boys.” I stopped and caught my breath, my chest heaving with the exertion at working in the freezing temperatures, and stared at Claire’s face illuminated by the fire. “You can help if you’d like.”
She smiled and nodded. “Okay.
” And stepped out of the cave to join me in the dark.
“This is kind of fun,” she said breathlessly. I couldn’t see in the dark, but I knew she was smiling by the sound of her voice.
I smiled while I stomped. “It is.”
Snow continued to fall but we continued to stomp, until Claire accidentally stomped on my foot. I swore and hopped up and down and we both started laughing giddily, like we used to when we were best friends. Clinging to each other, we fell back and landed deep in the wall of snow we hadn’t yet crushed. We stopped laughing then, because it was a struggle to get up. Finally I rolled onto my knees, but when I reached for Claire I couldn’t find her.
“Claire!” I shouted, desperately feeling for her in the snow.
But my hands came away with nothing. My heart started to work faster.
“Claire!
Again, nothing. Maybe she’d gone back into the cave. I pushed my way through the crunchy snow and slipped, landing hard on the path I’d made. The flames continued to flicker inside the cave, but when I finally got myself to my feet and bent to step inside, I found it empty except for the dancing flames.
What the…? Surely she would have told me if she’d gone off to find the others.
I spun back around. I’d have to search the snow some more.
I started to scream for Claire again, but her name died in my throat when I saw that all the snow was gone.
Gone.
Replaced with the blackness of nothing.
Oh God.
The Change.
Chapter 20
I shut my eyes to the black nothingness in front of me. A ferocious wind pasted my fringe over my eyes and nearly bowled me over backwards. But I stayed my ground, my stomach churning and my heart racing. I didn’t want to see if the cave was there anymore. I didn’t want to know that there was blackness all around me. Axel had said that being exposed and vulnerable during the Change would mean certain death. And here I was.
Then the wind stopped.
I felt weightless and light for a moment, dizzy, and I had to open my eyes to steady myself. But when I did, I shut them tight again.
So much brightness.
I tried again, this time squinting at the light.
Green.
Everything around me was green, except for the blinding, sunlit sky above me, high above me, which was a bright blue.
Shiny green leaves were everywhere I looked.
I shielded my eyes with my hand, wondering if I was back at the pig-people’s farm. But the farm hadn’t had thick shrubbery like this. As I backed towards where the cave had been, something stopped me in my tracks.
I spun around and my eyes confirmed my worst fear.
The cave was gone.
Replaced by a ginormous garden hedge.
I was alone. Claire was gone, possibly swept up into nothingness during the Change, and I had no clue where the others were.
I stared at the hedge, at its shiny, dark green leaves, and followed it up to where it met the sky. It was high. Impossibly high. I wandered what it was separating me from.
I spun around and pressed my back against the hedge, and now that my eyes were adjusted, saw that it extended on either side of me, as far as my eyes could see, and when I looked up, the hedges appeared to be growing taller, until they blocked out the direct sunlight, casting me into gloomy shadows and leaving only a narrow strip of blue sky.
This was not happening. The Change did not just happen while I was alone.
“Claire!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.
Maybe she was lost in this hedge. I stepped forward, my fingers brushing against glossy leaves as I broke into a run for several hundred metres until I was met with a T-junction.
I’m inside a maze.
I counted back…until I realised this was the third afterlife. That was a good sign. That we’d survived three already.
My chest tightened as I thought about the others.
No, not we. Only me. I didn’t know where the others were or even if they were still alive.
But I couldn’t think about that right now. I had to survive. I had to get out of this thing. And not focus on the fact that I sometimes got claustrophobic and that I didn’t like big walls of shrubs fencing me in and that I hated not being able to see above the walls.
“Claire!”
I took a right and ran, building up a sweat beneath my chainmail, and stopping only when I reached a corner. Endless green walls greeted me. I turned right again, then took a left, screaming not only Claire’s name, but the others’ too. But I got nothing in return, only the eerie silence of the maze, which was a sound in itself.
I wondered if I was the only one trapped in this thing. Had the others already breezed through it?
Or are they frozen beneath twenty feet of snow in somebody’s afterlife?
I shook my head. I had to stop thinking negative thoughts.
“Claire! Jacob! Noah! Bruce!”
I ran on, my thighs burning, until I reached another dead end. This meant I had to run back to the initial T-junction and take a left instead of a right. When I did, it seemed that this time I’d taken the correct path as it opened up to more T-junctions.
My confidence began to build. Until I ran down an extra-long path, a seemingly never-ending path, only to be faced with another wall of hedge.
Another dead end.
Sweat beaded down my back and temples and my heart began to tighten in my chest. The thin strip of blue above me seemed to have lost its baby tones and was now a deeper, more purplish hue. It would get dark eventually and I did not want to spend the night stuck inside this thing.
More panic set in when I realised this afterlife might never end; that I might live out the rest of my days stuck in here until I was too weak from lack of food or water and just die here. I’d be the scary skeleton found at the dead end, ready to freak the life out of the next challenger who stumbled upon this version of heaven in ten years’ time.
Heaven. A cold chill prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. Who would want this for a heaven? What kind of sick person dreamed of living out eternity in this?
“Claire! Jacob! Bruce!”
No answer.
“Axel!” I didn’t know why it took so long for me to call his name. Perhaps it was the dark looks he’d kept giving me in the cave. As though I’d done something to offend him while drugged up at The Egg and Ham.
Nobody answered my cries.
I stuck my hands deep into the hedge and tried to pry apart the foliage to get a look at the other side, but it was far too thick and the green seemed to go on forever. There was nothing left to do except climb it.
I stuck my boot into the hedge and tested it for my weight while grasping onto some leaves above my head. The thin, bendy branches held surprisingly well. I did it with my other boot and I was up off the ground. Slowly I climbed, one foot after another, sometimes part of the hedge came away with my fingers and I’d slip a little, earning tiny scratches against my face, but eventually I came to the top.
Breathless, I pulled myself above and leaned forward on the thick top surface of the hedge, feeling on top of the world, deliriously so.
But what I saw turned my blood cold.
I was completely surrounded by a never-ending maze. It zigzagged its way around me as far as my eyes could see, until it resembled an ant maze it was so tiny. It spread as far as the horizon and with a sinking heart I saw the sun slipping behind it, turning the sky darker still. However, despite the darkness, the blaze of the setting sun seemed to light up a round gap in the middle of the maze. A dark hole. Perhaps it was a clearing. Perhaps it was the centre of the maze and the only way out for me. The others might be there, waiting for me. Maybe from there we could pass through to the next afterlife.
I screamed their names but nobody answered. I tried again and again until my throat was hoarse. I stayed up there, resting against the thick hedge, until the sun was completely gone, putting off the moment where I’
d have to jump back into the darkness of the maze.
Shutting my eyes, I tried to memorise the pathway the sun had illuminated to the clearing. One left, two rights, one left, four rights. Easy. I swallowed thickly and climbed back down into the maze.
The sky was pitch black now, so I had to rely on memory and feel.
But as soon as I set my feet down, I saw a flash of something. A light. Then…a leg. It looked like Axel’s shabby boot.
“Axel!” I started to run, but no matter how fast I ran, I only caught the heel of his boot as he disappeared around the corner. Why wasn’t he stopping for me?
“Axel!” I chased him until I couldn’t go any further and realised only then that I was lost and it was too dark for me to find my earlier position and take the correct turns to the clearing.
“Follow me, Amber.”
My heart stuttered at the sound of that voice. My blood froze. My breath held. Everything stopped for me in that moment.
It couldn’t be.
“Sam?”
A soft light grew before my eyes and at the far end of the hedge, Sam’s face lit up. I didn’t know how, because it was dark, but he was glowing as though a permanent light followed him everywhere.
“Sam?”
He smiled and beckoned me to him with a wave of his hand.
“Sam!” I ran to him, tears stinging my eyes as I threw my arms around him. But he disappeared as soon as I did, so that I was left hugging air.
“Sam?” I whispered, a cold draft causing me to tremble all over.
“This way,” he said, and waved at me from around the corner of another hedge.
“Please help me, Sam,” I cried out, stumbling along in the dark, keeping close to the hedge, running my hands along it so that I didn’t get lost. Every time Sam disappeared, it would get dark again and I’d feel cold and alone.
“I’m scared, Sam. Come back, please. I hate the dark.”
But I couldn’t see him anymore.
“Sam!”
“Amber!”
Wait…that wasn’t Sam’s voice.
“Axel?” He was calling from over the other side of the hedge.
Alive (The Veiled World Book 1) Page 17