by Anthology
Gemma. Something about Gemma.
Across from me, her face looked beautiful as ever. I reached for her, and my wrist throbbed, yanking me back to reality. Not Gemma. The smoke. I yanked my shirt up over my mouth and nose and took shallow, slow breaths.
“What do you want with us?” I asked.
Gemma’s hand shot forward and grabbed my bad wrist. I felt Gemma’s finger bones grind as it curled them ever tighter. I nearly lost my balance but managed to stay upright and keep my face covered.
“The answer to that,” the thing said, “lies in the final card.”
It yanked my arm toward the card. I tried to pull away, but it barely had to squeeze to keep control. I’d never thought of myself as weak, despite the objective truth of my weakness. But now I finally felt the absence of strength. I threw every ounce of will and hope and atrophied muscle into getting away. Useless.
With my free hand, I clawed at the thing holding me, used the sharp edges of long nails filed down to blades. I didn’t need strength to slice through fragile skin. I didn’t know how much awareness Gemma had, if any. I just hoped she couldn’t feel her skin shredding layer by layer, or her own nails used against her will to cut crescent moons into my wrist. I screamed, loud. Louder even than the time Mom accidentally dropped the branding iron on my thigh when I was little. Oh. The branding iron. The smoke is wrong. I let go, snatched the nearest candle, and welded the flame to the back of Gemma’s hand. A desperate move. The flame should’ve died immediately, small as it was, but Gemma’s skin blistered and white wax dripped down her hand like pus, and the thing finally let go, jerking back.
It writhed in pain. Whimpered. It pulled the burned arm to its chest, and I couldn’t help smiling at my small victory. This ghost could be hurt—and by its own poison.
It screamed again. “Flip the card, you fucking little bitch!”
“Why?” I shot back. “I’m sure you stacked the deck. You know what it is.”
The sound it made was almost a laugh before dissolving into a hiss-yowl like a pissed-off cat in heat. I didn’t know the human voice could make that noise. “Don’t presume, Eloise. Thinking for yourself isn’t your strong suit.”
“You knew the first two cards.”
“Yes, because everyone takes the same path to reach me. It’s always the leap and the fall. The future is the only unpredictable element. And, frankly, the only one I care about.”
“Why do you care about my future? What do you want from me?” I screamed. Spit filled my mouth, acidic. Swallowing burned. I needed to focus. I stared at Gemma’s arm. Candle wax had hardened in drips down the forearm like icicles. I imagined peeling it slowly from the freshly burned skin.
“Oh, Eloise. I want what all lonely ghosts want: to consume you. But it’s not your body I desire. It’s your fucking future. The destiny you would have had if you’d managed to avoid this moment, had you ignored that foolish urge to jump.”
It leaned across the table and, truly injured, hissed at the effort. Its face—Gemma’s face, but vacant of any trace of her—an inch from mine. “I did everything right. Followed every fucking rule. Ignored every goddamn out-of-line impulse. I wasn’t a fucking fool like the other girls, and they killed me anyway.”
Every atom in me craved flight. My skin tingled with longing for the bite of cold air that would mean freedom, but I was trapped. Worse, so was Gemma, and not just trapped but possessed. This monster with the sob story. Nothing could justify what it—she, I knew now—was doing.
“Who killed you?” I asked, voice soft. Hopefully reassuring. If I could get her to trust me …
For a moment the ghost’s stolen face crumpled. The sight would have been moving if that face wasn’t my Gemma’s. But then it sneered, smile tinged spiteful and gaze cruel. Expressions Gemma had never worn, would never have worn. I hated knowing her face was capable of such. Hated more not knowing if I’d ever see her in that face again.
“Flip the fucking card, Eloise!”
“What was Gemma’s card? What’s her future?”
“The Lovers.” It smiled again, happy to be back on subject. “I told her to point me toward the second half of the pair. It’s a rare treat to have the complete set. Now flip the fucking card so we can find out if she listened.”
This close, I could see the curl of Gemma’s short eyelashes, the flecks of dandruff in her brows, the cracks in her chapped lips. Her face, not this monster’s. And she was still in there somewhere. I’d seen it when she’d said she didn’t have a choice. I moved only my eyes to the card. Gemma had pointed to me, had thought I would complete the set. Complete her future. This I longed to believe; that when told love was ahead of her, she thought of me. She’d never said anything, but then, neither had I.
If she was still in there, maybe she did know what was happening. Maybe I could at least say good-bye. I grabbed the back of her neck, got a fistful of hair to anchor myself as well as I could. I didn’t have long. My grip was as weak as the rest of my body. I leaned closer.
“Thank you, Gemma,” I said.
Her lips were rough against mine. The ghost was startled, which granted me a few more precious moments. Her teeth scraped mine, and a chill raced along my spine.
I thought of the nights we’d spent stargazing with the horses. Of how she’d pull her sleeves over her hands, even in May, to warm her freezing fingers. I thought of her slowly sipping warm, fresh milk because it grossed me out, and because she liked to tease.
The thing sighed against my mouth. No, she did. Gemma did. I pulled away, but she reached up and placed her good hand against my cheek. “Don’t. I can’t…”
“What?”
“I can’t fight it without you. I can barely fight it with you.” She leaned forward and gasped. “It … My arm hurts more now that I’m fully here again.”
I rested my forehead against hers, stroked my fingers over her collarbone. “I’m sorry, Gemma. I’m so sorry.”
“You had to.”
“Not the arm, just … just everything. I’m sorry this is happening.” My voice broke, rasped into nothing, an apology as substantial as fog.
She touched her lips to mine, soft as falling dogwood petals. “I’m sorry I never kissed you before now,” she said. “Don’t turn over the card. You can still get away as long as you don’t touch it.”
A spasm shot through her and she screamed. Fought. I held her face and swiped at the tears streaming down, but they didn’t stop. “Eloise, go. You have to go now. I can’t—”
“We have to go. Can you walk with your arm the way it is? Is that a silly question? I don’t know how walking works.”
She shook her head and huffed out a pained laugh at the familiar joke. “I’m not going. It’s got me. I turned my card. You haven’t. Go.”
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t obey.
“Eloise,” she said. “You can’t save me. Please. I’m selfish. I can’t die knowing I’m responsible for killing you, too. Please. Kiss me again, then go.”
I hovered close enough for our lips to brush with each breath. If I could wait—keep our mouths apart for a few more heartbeats—maybe I could fix this. Maybe I’d find a way.
But then she whispered, “Kiss me, Eloise,” and how could I not?
This time, our kiss was aching. We both tasted of salt and blood. Of missed opportunities and wasted desire. I wanted more. I wanted to trace her collarbone, her shoulders, trail my hands down her chest, her stomach, lower. I wanted time. Because even if I never flipped the damn card, even if I crawled through this candy-colored graveyard and made it home, this thing still would have stolen my future. It would have stolen Gemma.
“I won’t leave you,” I whispered against her lips, dropping one hand and snatching the last burning candle from the table. I held it above the deck of cards. If this was going to work, I had to be prepared. And very, very lucky.
Before she could protest, I let go of her.
She screamed as soon as I broke contact, a banshee
and a scared girl at once. Two scared girls, maybe; one of whose fear had curdled into hate. Gemma couldn’t fight it much longer without me. I waited. I listened to the girl I loved wailing, fighting for her own mind, and I waited. I didn’t close my eyes or tune out the waves of agony cresting and crashing around the tent. I bore witness.
Her body finally collapsed, and when her face lifted toward me, Gemma was gone again. Something inside me recognized that I should be afraid. But I wasn’t. I was ready.
“Flip the fucking card, Eloise.” Its voice was raw, maybe from the screaming or maybe because it didn’t feel the need to pretend anymore.
“I will. You’ve won. She can’t fight you, and I won’t leave her.”
It smiled, and my stomach churned with too much acid. My body telling me again, Run, Eloise. Run!
I swallowed, tightened my grip on the warm candle. “But you need to take me first.”
Its eyes narrowed, suspicious of this last request. “Why?”
“Because I’m selfish. I can’t watch you … take her.” I steadied my breathing but let the tears I’d trapped until now finally fall. “I can’t. But you don’t care about what I want, so maybe the better reason is because paper—even thick paper—is fragile. Flammable.”
I tilted the candle, let the wax run over my fingers and onto the third card, still facedown, but not for much longer. The monster gasped and whined, quieter than I would have liked, but this was only the appetizer.
“Stop. Stop, you little bitch.”
“Gemma was right,” I said, straightening the candle. “Your power’s tied to the cards somehow. You possessed them like you possessed her, is that it? You can lead me here, taunt me, belittle me, threaten me, but until I touch that card, that’s all you can do.” Candle still in one hand, I lowered the other to the future—Gemma’s and mine. The wax was smooth and soft. One thin layer separating my skin from the card’s surface.
“Come and get me,” I said, “or we’ll find out how quickly ghosts can burn.”
I flipped it. The Lovers, smiling and content, stared up at me.
The monster left her slower than I expected. I waited for Gemma to scream again. I needed her to scream, to let me know it was out. And then, all at once, she did. She screamed. She was her, and I was me, and you can’t see ghosts after all.
Before it could make the leap into me, I dropped the candle, and then the card was on fire, and then the table and all the other cards, too. The fire spread fast, so fast. It couldn’t be only wood and paper burning. Beneath Gemma’s frightened, pained shouts was something else. It was the shatter of wind against a cliff and the howl of trapped dogs. It was a sharp ringing and the slice of a million shallow cuts. It was exactly what I’d hoped to hear.
Gemma was already trying to crawl from the flames, but she wouldn’t make it far with her arm. My driving arm still killed, but my fingers gripped my joystick, and I drove around the table so Gemma could use my chair to stand.
The empty carnival waited for us outside. Something crashed behind me as we bolted. I turned my head as far as I could without turning my chair, too. That would slow us down. The tent was in flames. The fire jumped to the twine lacing the air above. From the twine to the wood poles, to the other tents, and soon the carnival would be ash. Once again, I begged my chair to move faster, to somehow break the barrier of human engineering and drive faster. Gemma ran beside me, gasped each breath. Smoke filled my consciousness. It was headed toward the entrance, too, and the wind carrying it was swift. The smoke would get us before the fire, at least.
We wouldn’t burn.
I didn’t know my way back through the woods. I couldn’t see the path in the dark, and I hadn’t paid attention to anything but Gemma’s fingers on my wrist earlier. My other wrist was a mess now, but I couldn’t think about that. Gemma was behind me, hands grasped onto my handles, letting me lead her—trusting me to lead her. I moved by instinct. Focused all my awareness on my tires. Let every too-hard jolt to my shocks guide me back to smoother ground.
As suddenly as before, the trees fell away and we crossed onto the road. The transition from dirt to pavement was instant and obvious and the most welcome sensation I could have imagined. I should have kept moving, but I collapsed back in my chair, my hand slipping from the joystick with a piercing ache. Gemma stumbled beside me and fell to her knees. She leaned forward, her forehead against my armrest. I rested my hand on the back of her head. It was quiet here, but not silent. Leaves whistled; critters rustled in bushes; owls and coyotes called to their kin. Way off in the distance, a car on I-75. Normal nighttime sounds. And it had snowed since we left. Actual snow, not almost snow. Powder fresh.
“Eloise.” Her voice wasn’t even as loud as a whisper, only a breath in the shape of sound, but it was everything I needed to hear and everything I was no longer afraid to say.
“I love you too, Gemma.”
I sat forward, then gently raised Gemma’s chin. She leaned against me. Her face, wet with snow and tears, pressed against my neck. I felt her mouth curve into a smile. Not a kiss, but almost.
As we moved farther from the woods, I focused on the shuffling of her feet in the snow, my motor’s steady hum, the scent of pine, the clouds of our breaths, our bodies side by side, this exact moment.
And we went home.
Per Aspera Ad Astra
KATHERINE LOCKE
IN THE DARK of the bedroom, the computer screen hummed at a slightly different wavelength than the tablet Lizzie held beneath her bedcovers. She swore she could feel the difference between the two wavelengths plucking some cord beside her heart, making it beat erratically. But when she paused her game to check her vitals on the tablet again, her heart was elevated, yet still rhythmic. As it always was.
She hoped they wrote that on her metallic coffin. Elizabeth Abernathy. Elevated, but rhythmic. If that didn’t describe her life, she didn’t know what would. When she died, they would jettison her body from Amula, a planet with very little usable land for burials. Space provided an infinite expanse to fill with bodies, dead satellites, and waste.
Lizzie drew her finger from three dots at the top of her screen through a maze to the three dots at the bottom of her screen. It was the first game she’d coded, and it felt comfortable, like coming home. She’d played it enough that it always had the same results. She’d found every variable, every possibility. It was, admittedly, simplistic, but she wanted simplicity right then. Something mindless and safe.
Just before she released her finger, completing that level and moving on to the next, an alert popped up on her screen. Her score dropped to zero, and she groaned. She’d spent most of the morning since her first alarm went off playing the game, and she’d been so close to the next prime number, 101, which was also a mirror to itself, making it a particularly superior prime number.
School: 15 minutes.
She dismissed the alert. Fifteen minutes. That meant she had two more alerts before she actually had to get out of bed. The thought pressed down on her chest, and her tablet blinked another alert.
Heart rate increase.
Duh. That alert was supposed to help her ward off panic attacks.
Footsteps pounded in the hallway outside her bedroom. Then the sound of feet screeching on the smooth tile—and the thunk of a person, dark and amorphous, against the textured glass that made up her bedroom wall. Her six-year-old brother, Bennett.
“SEVEN FEET!” he crowed. He’d been trying to slide farther and farther every day. His shoes left scuff marks down the hallway that would drive their mother into space. But she hadn’t been home in days, so Mer, the family’s cook, maid, and part-time nanny, kept cleaning them. She could hear him take another flying leap, complete with sound effects like the blasters on the old shuttles in movies. Despite her pounding heart, Lizzie smiled.
She listened, waiting, letting her heart come back down to a reasonable rate, and, like clockwork, her sister stopped at her door. She knocked twice and called out when Lizzi
e did not respond. “Liz? Are you coming with us to school today?”
She’d asked that every morning for the last four months. And Lizzie loved her for it, for believing that on any day, Lizzie might be able to attend school in person instead of through a screen again. As if Lizzie had a cold and tomorrow, maybe, she’d be better. But the question turned a dark knife inside Lizzie’s chest. She’d let her family down in so many ways, and every day the question reminded her that she was a failure. That she couldn’t conquer the wires and electrodes and signals flaring through her own brain, her own body, her own networking. And so her siblings went to school alone. And her father had to spend time away from his duties to take them to school for her. And their mother wasn’t here because Lizzie was …
“Not today,” she made herself say. “I’m sorry, Darcy.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” Darcy said.
This was their routine. Lizzie wished it was as comforting as most routines were.
“Come on!” called their father from somewhere down the hallway. “Darcy, Bennett, into the shuttle.”
Ten minutes.
She inhaled and slid from beneath the covers, her bare feet hitting the cool tiled floor. It hummed, bursting to life and warming at the first sign of movement. The color shifted from pale crystalline blue to a soft red, the sunset she’d seen in pictures of other planets. Some mornings, she curled up in the pink glow on the floor, letting the warmth radiate through her.
But if she lay down now, she wouldn’t get back up again. She’d stay there until the next five-minute increment on the clock, and then she’d run out of time to do what she needed to do before school started. And if she didn’t make school, then everything would spiral. The crush of the anxiety she always felt had nothing on the crush of anxiety of actually failing to live up to expectations.