Chasing Before

by Lenore Appelhans

  “Couldn’t a demon have been responsible for the bombings and the murder of the healers?” I am genuinely curious, so I don’t even mind that he’s changing the subject.

  “No. Demon hunters have got a protocol on how they open their portal to and from Earth. If a demon does get through, they always catch it immediately and bring it here.”

  “So that pit down there, where Nate threw the demon, where does it go?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell anybody, but since you saw it, I’ll tell you. This hill and the chamber below have been here since Level Three’s creation. That hole is a one-way passage to the negative levels.”

  I shudder. “Negative levels? Like hell?”

  Brady nods. “I don’t know much about it, but there’re rumors. You ever hear of Dante’s Inferno?”

  “Of course.”

  “I reckon it’s like that, nine circles of suffering. But like I said, I don’t know. The demon hunters always try to get the demons who have made it up to Earth to talk about what the negative levels are like, but it turns out demons aren’t that cooperative.” Brady guffaws. “Who would have thought, huh?”

  “Well, thanks for talking to me.”

  “Anytime.” Brady gets up and dematerializes his chair. “Oh, and with your ability to sneak up on people and disarm them like that, you have to try for the seraphim guard.”

  “So I’ve been told. Numerous times,” I say wryly.

  “If you do feel like trying out, the last open call of the term is tomorrow. Gym Three.” Brady smiles as he helps me up. He bows, eliciting a scowl from the samurai poser.

  I grit my teeth and reluctantly head back to my dorm room. I can’t believe I have to leave Julian in such dire circumstances. He could barely crawl! What condition will he be in after spending the night locked up in there? And how can I hang out safe and sound in my room while he suffers? The look on his face will haunt me every time I close my eyes.

  Once I’m inside the dorm, I push the day’s events out of my head. I would check on Neil, but he made it clear he wanted time alone. I sigh and open my door.

  Neil jumps up from where he was sitting on the end of my bed. He shoots me a look that’s half-accusatory, half-hurt. “Where have you been?”

  fifteen

  I SWEAR I’M ABOUT to break out in hives, and then I immediately realize that there’s no reason for me to have such a physical reaction. I need to learn control. “Uh, I went for a walk. To clear my head.” Which is not false, but is exactly the kind of half-truth that Julian would tell. “I didn’t think you’d be ready to see me again so soon.”

  “You shouldn’t have broken curfew.” He cocks his head and narrows his eyes, like he doesn’t quite believe me but he doesn’t want to call me on it either. Then he sighs and slumps back down onto my bed. “I was pacing back and forth and berating myself for being so stubborn with you. If someone like Kiara could be killed, well, it made me think about priorities and how I need to make the most of my afterlife while I have the chance.”

  “Yeah?” I hope he’s here to help me get our memories back, or to reveal to me what he has repressed. “So what does that mean exactly?”

  “I shouldn’t have shut you out. When I’m upset, I guess I prefer to be alone.”

  “But you don’t have to be. You can share stuff with me. That’s what I’m here for.” I sit down on the edge of my bed, facing him.

  He nods. “I like what you did to your wall.” He points at my crazy photo collage. “And I have something to add to it.”

  “Really?” I don’t like that he’s changing the topic, but I do like presents. I touch the skep charm in my pocket. If I tell him about the charm—which would have been his first present to me if he’d been able to materialize it—I’ll have to tell him where I got it, and I’m not ready to do that yet.

  He slides a package out from under my pillow. It’s about the size of a book, wrapped in a brown paper bag. “Remember when you told me you used to be in Girl Scouts? And then later you gave me a photo of you in your green uniform as proof?”

  I laugh. I didn’t learn anything useful from my short stint in the Scouts, not even how to tie a proper knot, so Neil teased me and said he doubted my story. I told him my troop was mainly occupied with sleepovers and selling cookies. “Yeah, and then you claimed I Photoshopped it.”

  “Anyway, this is your third birthday gift.”

  I pull away the paper to reveal a framed five-by-seven of Neil in his Boy Scout uniform. He’s not exactly smiling, but he looks friendly all the same. The photo makes me want to reach back in time and meet the boy he was then.

  “That’s me at fifteen. Right after I got serious about it,” he says.

  “You look cute.”

  “I look like a dork.”

  “If that were true, would I give you a place of honor?” I spring up and hang his photo smack dab in the center of my wall, moving a few snapshots of Autumn and me to the corner.

  “Thanks.”

  I sit down again, this time closer to Neil but still not close enough to touch him. “So what was it you wanted to tell me?”

  “Libby came by to drop off the information for our muse apprenticeship auditions, so we could start practicing.”

  He’s still keeping me at arm’s length. I should have known. He’ll never tell me the truth about Gracie. And forget about getting back our lost memories.

  “Libby has taken quite an interest in you,” I remark.

  “She’s generous with her time,” Neil enthuses. “She said she could tell that the two of us were special, and she wanted to tell us about the accelerated muse program.”

  “What’s that exactly?” I cross my legs.

  “Muse 101 is a prep course. It’s designed for students with little or no performing arts experience. But when I told her that I’m a singer and you’re a semiprofessional pianist, she told me we didn’t even have to go to the first weeks of class if we didn’t want to. We should spend our time preparing our audition instead.”

  That means we don’t even have to leave our rooms. “What do the auditions entail?”

  “There’s a solo portion and then a group portion. So for solos you can play piano and I can play guitar and sing, and then we can do a scene together from a play.” Neil leans back against my headboard. He’s perfectly in his element now.

  “I’ve never been in a play. I’m probably not a very good actress.” With my fingers I pull at the bedspread, forming little molehills of fabric all around me.

  Neil shakes his head. “But listen. I still think we should be muses. Eventually.”

  “Eventually?”

  “I mean, we should practice, for when things go back to normal. But right now we’re at war.” His voice gets dead serious. “I can’t act like everything’s normal when people I care about are dying around me. I have to do something to help.”

  He’s right, of course. And this is exactly why Neil will always be too good for me. His first inclination is to think of others, and mine is to think of myself. The Morati have already caused too much pain while I stood selfishly by, not wanting to get involved. Libby told me I should join the seraphim guard to develop my skills so I’ll be able to face down the Morati killers and bring them to justice. It’s time for me to step up, and Brady said the last open call is tomorrow. “I do too. I’m going to train with the seraphim guard.”

  Neil takes my pledge in stride, not batting an eyelash. “You should. And I’ll train to be a healer.”

  A lump wedges in my throat, and I throw my arms out toward him. “But, Neil, that’s like painting a bull’s-eye on your chest!”

  He leans forward and puts his hands over mine. “I couldn’t save Kiara. She died right in front of me. I can’t let something like that happen again.”

  I know what it’s like to feel helpless, so it must be a thousand times worse for Neil. “But you’ll be careful.”

  “And even though we’ll be in separate classes during the day, we’ll still
be together every evening,” he says.

  But not every night. I don’t say it out loud, though, because it will make me sound petty. There’s so much more at stake than our relationship at the moment.

  “Right.”

  “Now that we’ve settled that, shall we practice for our muse audition?” He lies down on his side, propping himself up on his elbow.

  “So what scene do you want to do?” I ask.

  “I thought we could do something from Our Town. I know that play well. And I could teach you via my memories of it.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” It’s something to pass the time until tomorrow.

  Neil holds out his palm to me, and I press mine against his without hesitation. He’s chosen to show me a memory of a dress rehearsal instead of a performance, so it’s easier for me to concentrate on Emily’s lines.

  After we surface from the memory, we discuss which scene to perform and decide on the middle of act two, where George walks Emily home from school, starting from where George asks if Emily is mad at him.

  The choice is kind of ironic, because Emily insists that George should be perfect, and George counters that men aren’t naturally good, whereas women are. Obviously Emily needs to meet Neil.

  I materialize a spiral notebook and a pen to write down all the lines I can remember. Neil has all of George’s lines memorized, and most of Emily’s, too, so he helps me. We enter the same memory several times before I’m satisfied that I have everything written correctly.

  We do a read-through, and Neil performs the part of the stage manager as well. The stage manager has only a few lines, but they’re important ones.

  Neil puts so much emotion into his reading, especially in the part where George decides to stay in town for Emily instead of going off to college. But my favorite line is when George says, “I’m going to change so quick—you bet I’m going to change.” That’s something I could never imagine Neil saying for real, though I wish he would.

  We spend half the night practicing the play and some duets on piano and guitar. Finally I say, “You realize you’re essentially staying the night, right?” I lie on my side and poke him in the ribs.

  “It’s called pulling an all-nighter.” Neil settles in beside me and stretches out. “A perfectly acceptable practice for college kids.” The need to rehearse isn’t exactly urgent, since the audition won’t be for weeks or months, if ever, but I don’t argue with him. I want him to stay.

  “Can you teach me how you get to sleep?” I still haven’t figured out how he or anyone else is able to do it, and I yearn to zone out for a while. To forget that Julian is in jail right now, foaming at the mouth. That Neil and I will be going down dangerous paths tomorrow, apart. And that the Morati are out there, somewhere, waiting to strike.

  He shifts positions until we are lying with our knees interlocked and our foreheads touching. “Back when I was on Earth, I used to count sheep. Now I count goats.” The corners of his mouth twitch upward.

  I splay my fingers on his chest and push him gently. “Shut up! You do not.”

  He hides his face behind his elbow. “I do! And the goats have these bells that play a melody when they prance. . . .” I can’t see his smile, but I hear it.

  “And that puts you to sleep?” Neil likes to revisit that memory with me, of the time I went with my father to the Turkish hills to find a special goatherd and his musical goats, but I can’t fathom how he could use it to meditate his way to sleep.

  He moves his arm so that he’s touching my hip and scoots back slightly. Our eyes meet. “I focus on one detail and let it run through my mind over and over. Eventually it all runs together and I blank out. If you can call that sleeping, that’s how I do it.”

  “Is that what you did after Kiara healed you?”

  “No. There I think I passed out from exhaustion.” He shrugs. “When I was in Level Two, I liked to relive my memories of sleeping. Times when we were like this, in bed together.”

  “Me too.” I sigh. “I even had a top ten of best stretches of sleep. You were in most of them.”

  “Most of them?” He gives me a look of mock chagrin. “Why not all of them?”

  “There should have been so many more memories of us sleeping.” And I’m reminded yet again how unfair it all is. If stopping the Morati is my main goal, getting my memories back is not far behind. It must be possible to do both. “All those memories are lost to us now. Doesn’t that make you sad? Doesn’t that make you angry?”

  Neil crashes down on his back and blows air up at the ceiling. “You really want to start with that again? I thought we were letting it go.”

  “But what if I can’t?” I ask in a small voice. “I have a pathological need to know what comes next.”

  “Getting your memories back would only show you what the future held for that version of you. The living version. It doesn’t matter now that we’re dead.”

  “It does matter.” I materialize a throw blanket and tuck my legs under it. “And I’m going to prove it.”

  He rubs his eyes as if I am exasperating him. “Whatever.”

  Ugh. He can be so unsupportive sometimes. It’s because he’s hiding something about Gracie. “Didn’t you come over to tell me why you shouted Gracie’s name?” I blurt.

  He goes completely still. “When did I do that?”

  “When Kiara pulled you out of your coma.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Gracie anymore.” He hops off the bed. “She’s in my past, and that’s where she’ll stay.”

  “Just tell me!” I say stubbornly.

  Neil shakes his head on the way to the door. “Good night, Felicia. I hope you can get some sleep.” Then he leaves.

  sixteen

  I SLIP BACK UNDER my blanket and pull it up to my chin. Neil has no problem talking about other people’s problems, but when it comes to talking about himself, he can’t seem to do it, which frustrates me. My brain is too full and I’d like nothing more than to shut it down until morning. I might as well try Neil’s prancing goat method for meditating your way to sleep.

  In Level Two, using the net architecture, I could call up any memory I wanted to as long as I plugged in. But it doesn’t work that way without the net. Without someone else’s palm to touch, I can’t access even my own memories in full, only the snippets that remain archived in my mind, faded like old photographs. By now I’ve visited the goat memory enough, so I call it up and picture the black goat with the white spot on its chest. I watch it jump, over and over and over.

  Soon enough the morning bells ring, and I stretch my arms out, satisfied. I actually did it! I meditated my way to sleep, even if it was for only a few hours. I remove the skep charm from my pocket and fix the clasp on the chain so that I can wear it around my neck for luck today.

  I get up quickly and materialize a pair of pale pink yoga pants and a pink T-shirt, because I assume that seraphim guard training will involve some sort of physical activity. But I’m not ready to commit to black. Not yet. I tuck the skep charm under my shirt.

  Smoothing my hair, I open the door and run smack into Neil’s knuckles, raised in the process of knocking.

  “Hey,” he says sheepishly. “You look good.”

  “Thanks.” But I can’t return the compliment. Because he looks terrible: dark circles under his eyes, rumpled shirt with spots of blood, grass stains on his khakis. He looks like he was on the losing end of a fight with a lawn mower.

  He rubs at a grass stain, materializing it away. “Nate visited me after I left your room. He wrestled me down outside. Made me break curfew and eat grass.”

  “What? That’s horrible.”

  Neil bursts into laughter. “Can’t say I didn’t deserve it. I was kind of hysterical, and I punched him in the face. Surprised him so much that his nose actually bled.”

  “Yeah, I can tell.” I touch each spot of blood on his shirt with my finger, making them disappear as I do. “Why did you fight?”

  “I plead the fifth.” His
breezy tone of avoidance hints that Gracie was the topic. But I’ve had enough arguing for a while, so I don’t press him. In fact, maybe if I am supernice, it will make him comfortable and he’ll confide in me.

  Several other doors open, and fellow students join us in the hall, making their way toward the stairs.

  “No big deal.” I cram as much sunshine into the statement as I can. “Maybe I can pick up some useful tips from Furukama in my training today. Like how to turn into a statue.”

  It wins me a half smile. “Ooh, then you can teach me.” I bet turning into a statue would be something Neil would be good at. He’s got the art of stonewalling down already.

  We head out of the dorms and walk until we hit the avenue. “I’m supposed to find Gym Three. Do you have any idea where that is?” I ask.

  “I have a map.” He pulls out a crinkled map from his back pocket and stretches the paper out by the edges until it is readable. “Gym Three is up here, near Assembly Hill, but across Eastern Avenue.”

  Because I’m heading farther north than usual, we take a different route. I’m anxious about Neil and me going our separate ways today, because something terrible could happen while we’re apart. I try to cover it up with small talk.

  “Have you ever tried to materialize food and then eat it?” I ask.

  “No, have you?”

  “We should. After class. It could be a fun experiment to see what happens. Maybe start with gazpacho. Then move on to escargot.”

  “Snails? Gross!” Neil makes an exaggerated gagging sound.

  “Have you ever had them?”

  “No way.”

  “They’re really good. I always ate them in Paris with my dad when we went.”