Each day, the drip, drip, drip of the intravenous feeding tube marked time for the family. His younger sister went off to college, graduated, married, and had a son that she named for him. Milos was an uncle, but he would never know.
From time to time, when the sight of him brought too much pain, his father would suggest they turn off the feeding tube so that he could quietly fade away. No one would ask questions, and maybe it would be best that way. Each time it was suggested, however, Milos’s mother would flatly refuse. This, she knew, was her penance; her punishment for allowing Milos to play with those boys on the roof that day. And so she would change the bedpan, and sponge him down, and clip his nails, and treat the bedsores, always holding on to the faint, faint hope that one day her boy might wake up.
Eight a.m. A Baltimore boulevard lined by low-rise apartment buildings, and covered with a fine dusting of snow that threatened to stick. Trash trucks already rolled down the street, pounding a week’s worth of waste in their hoppers, and collecting dry Christmas trees from the curb. It was the first Monday of the New Year, and at the very same moment that Mary and her horde waited in the streets of Odessa for a gas explosion, Allie and Clarence stood on a Baltimore street corner, on the brink of a very different mission.
Clarence wore a long cashmere coat, looking like a million bucks. His stylish leather gloves hid the burns on his left hand, and protected Allie from his touch. While his retro fedora didn’t exactly hide his facial scars from the living world, it cast them behind a bold new fashion statement. Beside him Allie inhabited a FedEx delivery girl, whose flimsy coat did not protect her from the cold. She held a small package.
“I know I’m here for moral support,” Clarence told Allie. “But I wish there was something more I could do.”
Allie offered him a slim, shivering smile. “It’s all right,” Allie told him. He had been invaluable in tracking this place down, but she knew from the beginning that she’d have to go in alone.
“Do you want to tell me what’s in the package?” Clarence asked.
Allie looked at the small package in her hands. She had gone to a lot of trouble to secure its contents, and she didn’t really want to talk about it. “Tools of the trade,” she told him. “Does it really matter?”
“I guess not,” Clarence said. “I’ll be waiting for you when you get back.”
Allie found the first step forward was the hardest, but the next was easier. One step at a time, she made her way down the street in the borrowed body of the delivery girl and went to the front door of an apartment building she wished she never knew existed.
Mrs. Vayevsky always jumped at the sharp, loud buzz of the apartment intercom. Who would be buzzing up at this time of the morning? She reached to the intercom and pressed the button, leaning close as she spoke.
“ Da? Who is it?” Perhaps her husband had forgotten his key. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time… but an unfamiliar voice came back at her through the squawk box.
“I have a delivery for the Vayevsky family.”
Delivery? The woman thought, Since when do they deliver at eight in the morning? “Fine. I buzz you. Apartment 403.” She concluded it must be a late Christmas gift from overseas. Relatives back home never seemed to remember that getting packages halfway around the world took many weeks.
She waited by the door until she heard footsteps reach the fourth-floor landing, then opened before the knock.
“For the Vayevsky family?”
The delivery girl stepped in, which surprised the woman. FedEx always lingered at the threshold. The intrusion unsettled her, but then perhaps this girl was just new. She handed the package to Mrs. Vayevsky.
“Do I have to sign?”
“That won’t be necessary,” said the girl.
Then suddenly Mrs. Vayevsky felt her mind spinning into an unfamiliar place. Her hands now held the small package, yet it felt as if she didn’t have control of her own hands or any other part of her body anymore. Something is wrong here, she said in Russian, but only in her mind, for her lips couldn’t form the words.
Then another voice in her head said something in very clear English,
“Sleep.”
Mrs. Vayevsky felt herself obeying the command, spiraling away from consciousness into sudden slumber.
Allie took full control of Mrs. Vayevsky, and as she did, the delivery girl collapsed to the ground. Allie had knocked the girl so deeply unconscious, nothing could jar her awake. Allie gathered the sleeping delivery girl, and tried to put her into a chair-but now, in the body of Mrs. Vayevsky, Allie found picking the girl up very hard to do. The woman had knee troubles, she had back troubles, she was weak and worn and carrying a little too much weight. In the end, the best Allie could do was to drag the girl across the floor, and prop her up against a wall.
Allie estimated Mrs. Vayevsky to be in her mid-fifties. She had salt-and-pepper hair, and lined, careworn eyes. Allie had thought she might be a bit younger, but perhaps she had gotten old before her time because of the things she had been forced to endure.
Allie straightened up her stiff back and had a look around. The furniture was modest; worn but still livable. A TV with color issues played a morning talk show. Allie turned it off. A hallway led off toward three bedrooms.
First the master bedroom came into view, with a queen-size bed that had not yet been made. The second bedroom had been converted into a sewing room. And the third bedroom sat behind a closed door at the end of the hallway.
Allie took a deep, shuddering breath, reached for the knob, turned it, and then slowly pushed the door open.
The curtains were half-closed and a wide swath of morning light cut across the room. There were pictures on the wall, each one featuring a smiling boy whom Allie recognized, although the pictures all showed him younger. There was a desk clean of all dust which held several books between marble bookends: Catcher in the Rye, Ender’s Game, and all three Lord of the Rings volumes. It proved that this room once belonged to a very real, very normal boy, before that boy became what he became.
Allie continued to let her eyes move around the room. Concert posters on the wall. Trophies on shelves. She forced her eyes to look everywhere but at the center of the room. Then, when she had nowhere else to look, she zeroed in on an intravenous stand which held a bag of milky fluid. She lowered her eyes from the bag and followed the tube which snaked down into an arm. The hand at the end of that arm was bent back at the wrist, with fingers that curled in on themselves, fully atrophied from years of disuse. Then she took a deep breath and raised her eyes to see his face.
Allie gasped at what she saw.
In the bed lay a sallow-faced, sunken-cheeked man. Not a boy, but a man. Beard stubble covered him, four or five days of growth, for regular shaving was not a priority under the circumstances. His lips were stretched, his mouth slightly open, and above his pale forehead, his hairline had begun to recede.
Allie’s first instinct was to think that there had been some mistake, that this couldn’t be Milos-yet she knew it had to be. While Milos had remained sixteen in Everlost, his comatose body had not. He had been in this coma for almost eleven years. Milos was a man pushing twenty-seven.
She had to look away, and when she did, she caught her own reflection in a mirror. But it wasn’t her reflection, it was that of the woman whose body she had stolen. The woman whose son now lay in the bed before her.
Allie looked down to the package in her trembling hands. Before she could change her mind, she ripped the package open and pulled out the syringe.
If someone had told Allie that she would commit a premeditated act of murder, she would not have believed it. She would have spouted off all the reasons how she could never be capable of such a thing-that no matter how dire the circumstances, she would find a better way. She was so naive, so arrogant to think that the laws of necessity and unthinkable circumstance could not apply to her. She could tell herself that this was an act of mercy, but that would be a lie. This was an act
of war. An act of terrorism. It was nothing less than an assassination.
If I do this, Allie told herself, I am no better than Mary. I will have sunk to the worst possible place a person can go. After this moment, I will be a cold-blooded killer and it can never be taken back.
So the question was, did Allie Johnson have the strength to sacrifice all that was left of her innocence if it meant she might save the world?
The answer came to her like a burst of courage from a wellspring deeper than she knew she had inside herself.
I would sacrifice everything I am, everything I believe, to save the living world.
And so, with tears filling her eyes, she took the cap off the syringe, found a vein in Milos’s arm, and injected a massive dose of poison into his withered body.
Mrs. Vayevsky opened her eyes to see the delivery girl looking down at her.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” the delivery girl said.
Mrs. Vayevsky was now lying on the couch with no memory of how she got there. She sat up feeling weak and light-headed. “What happened?” she asked. “Have I fainted?”
“You’re fine,” the delivery girl said. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.” She offered Mrs. Vayevsky the faintest of smiles and a glass of water, which she drank with a shaky hand. “You should rest,” the delivery girl said and she clasped Mrs. Vayevsky’s shoulder a little too hard, for a little too long. “I’d better be going now.”
“The package…,” said Mrs. Vayevsky.
The delivery girl pointed. “It’s on the table there. Like I said, there’s no need to sign for it.” Then the delivery girl left, quietly closing the door behind her.
When Mrs. Vayevsky felt strong enough to stand, she went to the table to find the package had already been torn open. Had she done that before she fainted?
Inside, of all things, was a Russian nesting doll. Its familiar shape-like a squat bowling pin-and brightly painted surface, made her smile. It was the kind of simple wooden toy she had played with in her youth, a reminder of a much simpler time. On the outermost shell was the painted figure of an old man, but each shell opened to reveal a smaller, younger man inside, until finally in the very center was a wooden baby no larger than her pinky. The gift came with no card, no return address, no clue as to who sent it, or why. All the same, she knew exactly where it needed to go.
She headed to her son’s room and set all six shells of the nesting doll side by side, smallest to largest, on Milos’s desk, admiring the colors and the workmanship it had taken to create the lacquered figurines. Then, when she turned to glance at the bed, her expression changed.
Without even touching him, she knew. Without holding a mirror to his lips to check for breathing, she knew.
She sat in the chair beside the bed, wrapped her arms around her chest, and began rocking back and forth, sobbing his name over and over. She wailed with the deepest grief she had ever known… and yet somewhere within that grief was secret gratitude that after so many years, she had finally been given permission to cry.
CHAPTER 37
Skinless
I t happened in an instant. One moment Milos was skinjacking a worker, preparing to blow the entire gas main, and the next moment, he wasn’t skinjacking at all. He was just standing on the plant floor, slowly sinking into the living world.
Something had changed.
He could sense it-a sudden lightness, a sudden disconnection. The living world, which always seemed a bit blurry and faded, seemed even more so now-one step further removed. There was a panic in Milos, and with it came a sense of irretrievable loss that he could not put into words. He tried to deny it, refused to even think about what it might mean, and he attempted to skinjack the worker again. He stepped right through the man, and out the other side. Milos did not feel flesh, nor did he hear a single thought.
“No!”
He leaped again and again, but it was like leaping at shadows. Finally Jill and Moose peeled out of their hosts, and stared at him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jill asked.
“Nothing,” Milos insisted. “Get on with the mission.”
But neither of them moved. Now the other skinjackers were peeling out of their hosts as well, wondering what was going on, and Milos was at the center of their attention. He screamed in fury, and leaped at every living blur that moved around him, but it was hopeless.
“I’m stopping the mission,” said Jill.
“No, you can’t stop the mission. I’m the lead skinjacker. I give the orders.”
“Sorry,” said Jill, “but you can’t be the lead skinjacker if you can’t skinjack.”
Mary’s children were overjoyed that the disaster was prevented. Mary, however, was not-but she was wise enough not to show her disappointment. If Milos had been able to rupture the gas main, the resulting explosion would have taken out several residential blocks. The story would have been much different. The fact that he could no longer skinjack posed a whole set of problems she would have to quickly address.
Yet even though this mission had been botched, Mary was a girl with a positive outlook. In spite of her frustration, she couldn’t help but see the glass as half full. She looked out at her huge cumulus of Afterlights, and quickly came to realize that far from being a failure, the morning had, in an unexpected way, been a grand success. Her children all believed that the disaster had been averted because of the skinjacker’s efforts-which meant they now believed fully and completely that Mary had the power to see and to change the future. After today, they would trust her decisions even more than before, and follow her guidance without question. In this case “failure” made her stronger. Thinking about it lifted her spirits, and left her ready to prepare the next mission-which she knew would be a resounding success. She would make sure of it.
For eleven years, Milos had taken his ability to pop in and out of the living world for granted. To do something as simple as grab himself a burger if he wanted to, or, if the whim struck him, to ski down a white, powdered slope in the body of a fleshie who actually knew how to ski.
Deep down he knew it couldn’t last forever, but Everlost has a way of making one dismiss tomorrow as just another version of today. He never considered what existence without skinjacking would be like, so he wasn’t prepared for the shock of his body dying.
For Milos, it was nothing short of horrific. The constant hunger, with so little food to satisfy it. The slow drift of memories being lost. The relentless chiseling away of one’s identity. How could ordinary Afterlights stand it? What made it worse was the speed at which a skinjacker reverts-as if making up for lost time. Memories didn’t just fade, they were sucked out into a vacuum. Milos suddenly realized his mind, which had been so sharp, was now an open box, and if he took out a memory to treasure, or even to just ponder, it was lost by the mere act of thinking about it. In just one day, he had forgotten his last name-which he had remembered all these years-and he quickly came to realize with increasing dread that he had no yardstick with which to measure the depth of the things he had already forgotten.
“Get over it,” Jill had told him, clearly thrilled at the prospect of his misery. “Learn to be ordinary, I’m sure you’ll excel at it.”
But it was more than just being ordinary. When one knew the exhilarating power of dual citizenship in two vastly different worlds, losing connection to one of those worlds was like losing one’s limbs. It had never occurred to Milos before, but to the “ordinary” Afterlight, the living world might as well have been the moon, for it was just as unreachable. How could anyone exist with such disconnection?
Milos went to Mary, knowing that she would have some wisdom and some comforting words for him, as she always did… but when he went into the press box to talk to her, he found that she already had company:
Rotsie.
The two of them sat facing one another. Rotsie was all smiles and Mary laughed at a joke that Milos hadn’t heard. A vending machine that had crossed with the arena was still pa
rtially stocked, and so the two of them were sharing a can of Coke, passing it back and forth between them. Watching Mary’s lips touch the same can that Rotsie had just drank from made Milos’s afterglow falter. It felt like his body was dying all over again. Rotsie noticed him first.
“Hello, Milos,” he said, seeming both arrogant and self-conscious at the same time. It made Milos feel uncomfortably off-balance. He had to remind himself that Rotsie was the intruder here, not him.
Mary took a moment to gather her thoughts, then stood, smoothing out her shimmering gown. She sauntered to Milos, and took one of his hands in both of hers, clasping it tightly.
“Milos, I am so, so sorry.” She didn’t move to embrace him, she just held his hand. “I know you’re strong, I know you’ll get past this.”
“Yes,” said Milos. “We’ll get past this together.”
Mary’s smile became a little slim, then she squeezed his hand, and let go.
Rotsie, who still hadn’t stood up, said, “I just want you to know, I have every respect for you.”
Milos had no response to this.
“What Rotsie means,” Mary explained, “is that it won’t be the same without you on his skinjacking team, but we’ll all have to manage.”
“ His team?”
“Well,” said Mary, turning her eyes to Rotsie and offering him a smile that should have been aimed at Milos. “I had considered putting Jill in charge, but she doesn’t exactly work and play well with others. Then I considered Moose, but he’s much more of a follower than a leader, wouldn’t you agree? Rotsie, on the other hand, already has the respect of the new skinjackers.”
“But… but I can still lead the team,” Milos insisted.
“Denial doesn’t help anyone,” Mary told him. “Circumstances have changed. Your body has died, and we all need to face that.” Then Mary sat back down, took the can from Rotsie, and took a long sip of soda, savoring the flavor. That’s when Milos realized that this was more than just a shared can of soda. It was like a champagne toast between the two of them, to celebrate a decision that had already been made in Milos’s absence.
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