by Heidi Lang
His mom could say what she liked, but he’d seen the truth for himself. He was nothing but a poor substitute for his more powerful, talented brother.
“Then what are you trying to do?” Caden asked harshly.
“I’m trying to help you find the boundaries of your power while there’s still time.” She looked up, and there was something in her eyes, an emotion she’d managed to keep hidden from his inner senses.
Fear.
And abruptly he was afraid too. “What is it? What’s going on?”
She studied the rose quartz in her hand, turning it over and over as if it held the secrets of the universe within its soft pink walls. “Do you know why the Other Place was created?”
Caden couldn’t hide his surprise. “I didn’t think you’d want to talk about that.”
“I’m not going to ignore everything about that dimension just because it causes me grief. I can’t afford to. Guarding the boundary between our world and that space is the most important job us Prices have.” For a second her sorrow rose up, a deep-blue wave cresting around her and then smoothing out like the tides of the sea. She swallowed, composing herself. “I told you that the first Price came to Whispering Pines in the 1650s, right?”
“After fleeing the Hartford Witch Trials,” Caden remembered. “She made a deal in order to escape, promised to oversee the line between our world and the Other Place.”
“Good memory.”
“It’s not really the kind of thing a person forgets,” Caden said wryly. “Cosmic family obligation and all that.”
His mom laughed. “True. Well, that isn’t the whole story.”
“Oh?” Caden sat up straighter.
“I’m not going to bore you with the details.”
“I don’t mind.”
She gave him a small, secretive smile. The kind that told him the story would be anything but boring… but that she wasn’t about to share it anyhow. “Maybe someday,” she hedged. She held the rose quartz out to him, and he took it in his hand, the stone warm against his skin. “For now, you just need to know that part of her deal was to help create the Other Place.”
“How?”
Again the small smile.
“Fine,” Caden grumbled. “Then why? It’s an awful place.”
“It’s meant to be. It’s a prison.”
Caden frowned. “For who?”
She met his eyes, her own deadly serious.
“Or… for what?” Caden guessed.
She nodded. “That would be more accurate. She is many things. Evil, certainly. Destructive. Greedy. Ravenous. But human?” She sighed. “Maybe once, a long, long time ago.” She ran her thumb over the amethyst in her ring. “And she is restless. Very restless. I could feel her this past week when I searched the Other Place for signs of what happened to your brother. She is testing the walls of her cell. And I know they have grown weaker.”
“Then why keep her imprisoned? Why not destroy her?”
“True evil can never be destroyed. The best we can do is contain it and stop it from spreading.”
Caden wasn’t sure he believed that. He squeezed the rose quartz in his palm and felt the energy inside. Love, and protection. Maybe the problem was that destruction itself was an evil act. So trying to destroy something evil would be like trying to put out a fire with more flame. But there had to be another way.
“I—” he began, then froze. He’d sensed something. A disruption. It felt almost like a hole where a tooth should be. He poked at it with his awareness, trying to feel out the size of the gap.
“What is it?” His mom sat up very straight, and he didn’t need any special powers to notice the alarm stamped all over her.
“I think… something has broken our warding circle.” Caden poured salt in a ring around their house every week as part of a ritual of protection, a way to warn them if anything supernatural tried crossing over it. Ever since the Unseeing incident, he’d widened that circle to include their yard as well.
His mom pressed her lips together, transforming her face into a series of sharp, worried lines.
“Want me to check on it?” Caden asked.
“I’ll go.” She rose abruptly to her feet and walked out of the study, leaving Caden to scramble down the hall after her.
He caught her just as she reached the front door. “Wait, Mom—”
She yanked the door open like she was snatching something hot from a fire.
Caden flinched, but nothing flew at them, and all he could see through the open doorway was his empty front yard. He relaxed.
“There’s someone out there,” his mom whispered.
“What?” His relief evaporated immediately. “Where?”
“Over there. See?”
Like most of the houses in this part of Whispering Pines, their yard bordered the edges of the Watchful Woods. Sometimes Caden swore the trees that ringed their yard were stealthily creeping closer, and one day he would wake up and discover that the forest had reclaimed all of their land.
He followed his mom’s gaze over to those trees. A person stood in front of them. A tall, slender person with a buzzed head, wearing a bright green uniform. He looked lost. Or maybe drunk? Caden frowned, feeling uneasy as the stranger stumbled closer. Casually he let his awareness drift outward.
At first he couldn’t sense anything from the intruder at all. And then he felt a gentle tug, as if he had brushed against something sticky.
Caden tried probing that sticky spot. He concentrated, and pain lanced through his brain like he’d just eaten something very cold way too fast. He gasped, instinctively pulling inward again. His hand went to the pendant around his neck, the one he always wore for luck and protection.
“What’s wrong?” his mom asked, gripping his shoulder.
The figure stepped out from beneath the trees, and now they could see him clearly: large, dark eyes, a sharp nose, full lips, hollowed-out cheeks. It was a handsome face. A familiar face. His eyes were a little too big, his lips chapped, and he moved strangely, as if he’d been out at sea for months and was just getting used to walking on land…
But still Caden recognized his older brother.
Caden felt the surprise from his mom, an explosion of bright yellow lanced through with worrying squiggles of black. But his own emotions were as flat and empty as a brand-new notebook.
This wasn’t real.
Caden knew that. It was a dream. Any second now and his brother would vanish, melting away like ice cream left out in the sun.
As Aiden staggered toward them, Caden felt his mom’s grip on his shoulder tightening, her fingers digging in painfully. He focused on that sharpness. It grounded him much more effectively than imagined roots.
His brother was gone. Exorcised. Destroyed completely. How could he possibly be standing here now?
“Please,” Aiden said, his voice a harsh rasp, his thin body swaying. “Help me?” He held his hands out toward them. “They’re looking… for me. I need… hide…” His eyes rolled up in his head, and he collapsed at the edge of their yard in a tangle of limbs.
3. RAE
Rae was suffocating, her breath rasping through her helmet, filling her ears, competing with the sound of the alarm still blaring overhead. The flashing lights made her head pound, turning the whole scene into disjointed pieces like shards of a broken mirror.
“Hurry!” Doctor Nguyen shouted above the noise.
Rae tried to hurry, but her hazmat suit was heavier than it looked, and it felt like she were wading through sand.
“—not a drill. Green On! has been sealed for the protection of the citizens of Whispering Pines. This is not a drill. You cannot leave the premises. All employees must be in their designated safe rooms at this time. This is not a drill. Green On! has been…”
Rae tuned out the alarm, focusing on Vivienne in front of her. Or maybe it was Becka? Rae couldn’t tell. They all looked pretty much the same in their matching Green On! hazmat suits. Only Doctor Nguyen stood out in her
flimsy lab coat, looking small and vulnerable, her mouth a thin, determined line. She’d spent several tedious moments helping them all into their suits, which were specially made by Patrick. She’d shouted that they had upgrades only he knew about and might provide some protection. Meanwhile, she had nothing for herself. They’d checked the eighth locker, but it was empty.
Not that Rae believed any hazmat suit, regardless of how well made it was, would help them in the event of a nuclear meltdown. But getting suited up was better than sitting there, waiting to die.
Don’t think about dying.
She wondered what her older sister, Ava, would do without her. Would Ava still attend college out here and then follow through on her plan to go looking for their dad? What about their mom? Rae pictured her, with her sad eyes and messy hair, how she would often drift in and out of conversations like part of her had been taken away too. Would Rae’s death take the rest of her?
Would it hurt? To die in a nuclear accident…
Don’t think about dying!
But it was hard to think of anything else. Rae gasped, her breath turning into a long, awful wheeze. She was having an asthma attack, and she didn’t have her inhaler. She needed to calm down, try to slow her breathing on her own. Panic only made it worse.
“… not a drill! I repeat…”
Rae was definitely panicking. She staggered, almost falling, her entire world narrowing to a thin tunnel of flashing light. Blood roared through her ears like an oncoming train, blocking everything else out. Dimly she watched Doctor Nguyen frantically trying each door they passed, using her key, tugging, pounding her fist. It didn’t matter. Everything was sealed except this impossibly long hall.
Rae didn’t want to die like this, hot and afraid, everything chaotic around her. She longed for cool darkness, for quiet, for fresh, clean air. She thought of Caden telling her I’ve got your back. Would he be sad too? Or would he feel like she’d brought this on herself by joining this internship? She couldn’t picture him smug and vindicated.
He wasn’t like that. She knew he wasn’t.
Someone had Rae by the arm and was dragging her down the hall. Rae didn’t know who it was and didn’t care. Her lungs were sandbags in her chest, heavy and useless. She tried breathing through them anyhow, tiny sips of air.
They were at the end of the hall now, standing in front of the final doors, tall and intimidating and very firmly closed. Doctor Nguyen lifted her key card again in one trembling hand. Rae felt bad for the scientist. She had been saddled with babysitting duties, and now she was doing her best to save them all, and it wouldn’t be enough.
Rae mentally got a grip on herself. She had survived a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a monster. She was not about to give up now. She forced herself to take a slow, careful breath, counting like she’d done in the elevator. She only managed to get to two, but it was something.
The doors popped open.
Doctor Nguyen leaped back, then froze, staring at the empty rectangle beyond before shaking herself. “Go, go, go!” She started shoving at the kids, nudging them through. Rae stumbled forward with the others, and the door slammed shut behind them.
Immediately the constant noise of the alarm went soft and manageable, as if someone had taken it off the wall and stuffed it under a pillow. Rae gasped, the high wheezing of her own lungs even louder in this relative quiet.
They were at the end of another hall, this one lined with cement: floor, ceiling, and walls. Overhead, several long electric lights flickered, casting a pale-blue glow that was a welcome relief after the angry red from before. Rae couldn’t see any doors, just the corridor extending a good twenty feet in an unbroken line before turning a corner.
“That door should have been sealed.” Doctor Nguyen frowned.
“Are we safe in here?” Blake asked.
“I don’t know,” Doctor Nguyen said. “This part of the lab was newly built to house our most sensitive experiments. So… maybe?”
“Well, that sure is reassuring,” Alyssa muttered.
Rae wanted to agree with her, but she was too tired to respond, her eyelids heavy. Only the hand under her arm kept her standing.
“You okay?” Becka whispered, and Rae realized she’d been the one dragging her along.
“Asthma… trouble,” Rae wheezed.
“I figured. You sound like my little brother when he’s having one of his attacks. Do you have your inhaler?”
Rae shook her head.
Becka sighed. “Owen forgets his a lot too. Of course, he’s ten. Not sure what your excuse is.”
“Left it… in my other… hazmat suit,” Rae managed.
Becka stared at her, eyes wide behind the glass front of her helmet. Then she grinned. “You might be okay after all, Rae Carter.”
“Can we take off our helmets?” Matt asked.
“Absolutely not!” Doctor Nguyen said.
“What kind of experiments?” Alyssa asked abruptly.
“What?” Doctor Nguyen looked confused.
“You said this was a new lab for the most sensitive experiments. What are they?” By the tight, high-pitched tone of her voice, Rae knew Alyssa was thinking of Jeremy and the other Unseeing victims. But surely Green On! wouldn’t keep a bunch of injured kids deep below the ground, hidden inside cement walls. They’d be somewhere with fresh air and sunlight and twenty-four-hour care. Wouldn’t they?
“They are secret, is what they are,” a woman at the other end of the hall said. She had black hair sprinkled with a few white streaks, several strands escaping from her otherwise tight bun, and her cheeks were pink as if she’d been running. She smoothed a hand down the front of her lab coat as she walked toward them.
“Mom!” One of the lime-green shapes hurtled forward, almost knocking the woman over, and now Rae recognized her as Mrs. Matsuoka, Vivienne’s mom.
Mrs. Matsuoka hugged her daughter, pressing her face into the hardened outer shell of the hazmat suit. “I forgot the internship was meeting here today,” she said, finally letting Vivienne go. “I’m so sorry.”
“What’s going on? Is everyone okay?” Vivienne asked.
“Yes, what’s going on?” Doctor Nguyen asked. “Why are you down here and not in your designated safe room?”
Rae could have sworn Mrs. Matsuoka looked a little guilty, but then that expression was gone, hidden neatly away beneath a mask of professionalism.
“There was a malfunction in our alarm system,” Mrs. Matsuoka said. “I came down here to check on the labs.”
“A malfunction?” Alyssa asked. “So we’re safe?”
“You’re safe.”
“But… how did it happen?” Doctor Nguyen asked.
“We were running a few tests and accidentally triggered this response. But it’s nothing for you to be concerned about.”
Doctor Nguyen’s mouth fell open. “Nothing to be concerned about?” She waved her hands around like agitated birds. “The meltdown! The children! There is a lot to be concerned about!”
“These children signed their waivers.” Mrs. Matsuoka crossed her arms. “They knew what they were getting into when they came here.”
“Like heck we did,” Becka whispered behind Rae.
She wheezed in agreement.
“Fine,” Doctor Nguyen said, biting the word out. “I’ll take this up with Patrick later.”
“Oh, I’m sure you will.”
“He’ll probably want to know about this door, too.”
Mrs. Matsuoka frowned. “The door?”
“They are all supposed to be sealed during an alarm, only this one wasn’t.” Doctor Nguyen glanced at the door behind them.
“I don’t see any reason why we need to involve Patrick in a simple malfunction. He is so busy.”
Doctor Nguyen crossed her own arms. “But you know how he feels about things not working properly. He’ll definitely want to look into it. Personally.”
Rae couldn’t tell what was going on, just that there seemed to be a whol
e secret conversation silently creeping beneath their words. It was hard for her to focus, everything fading around her.
“Maybe you and I can discuss this later?” Mrs. Matsuoka managed a tight smile. “I think these children have been through enough for one day. Perhaps we should call the end of the tour and get them all home. That one”—she pointed right at Rae—“looks like she’s about to collapse.”
Rae realized she was leaning against the wall and pushed herself up straight. Immediately the world blackened around her in a rush.
“… needs her inhaler,” Vivienne’s voice said. She sounded small and scared. Rae wanted to tell her it was all fine. She was okay. They weren’t going to die, and it was only relief that had made her weak. But it felt like way too much energy to say anything, so she lay there silently.
Lay there?
Rae blinked, becoming aware of the hard ground under her. Maybe she was worse off than she’d thought. Caden had probably been right about this internship, Rae decided. Signing up had definitely been a bad idea.
4. CADEN
Caden sprinted around the house, checking that all of the windows were closed and locked, the blinds pulled firmly over them.
“Unplug everything too,” his mom called. “And turn out all the lights.”
“What?” Caden paused in the kitchen. “Seriously?”
“Just in case. I’ll light candles.”
In case of what? Caden didn’t trust Green On! either, but their family had opted out of the Green On! energy monitoring system. And anyhow, even if Green On! were somehow still tracking their energy usage, it wasn’t like they could use that to spy on them inside the house.
Or… could they?
He stared at the coffeepot, his eyes following the wire as it looped along the counter before connecting to the wall. It wasn’t possible. But then, he really didn’t know what Green On! was capable of. He thought of Patrick, the new senior consultant and the one in charge of the student internship program. Patrick, who had appeared friendly and ordinary, with his magazine-ready smile and cool blue eyes. But underneath, Caden had sensed something… other.