Afterimage

by Naomi Hughes

  Kyle slings one leg through the doorway and onto the top rung. His earring glimmers when he glances down at me. “Keep moving, I don’t think—”

  The bomb explodes.

  With a sound like the end of the world, a wall of force and fire roars past the hatch. The explosion flings me down, bounces me off the walls like a pinball machine. The hatch slams shut.

  Crack. Splash. My head smacks hard against the ladder and then I hit water. I go under. The roar of the explosion cuts to silence. I’m blind and deaf.

  And alone.

  I claw my way to the surface and drag in a breath. “KYLE!” The scream is serrated, tearing its way out of me.

  No answer.

  I scrabble at the wall and find the ladder. I can’t pull myself up. Something is wrong with my arm, and my back, and my head. The silence is pounding and ringing, and my vision is a wall of shifting shadows. The darkness pulls at me and I can’t stop shaking.

  Concussion. Shock. Loss of consciousness, shutdown, blackout. I cling to the rung, try to focus, try to pull myself back. If I go under, I’m dead.

  But the darkness is relentless, and I hurt everywhere, and it’s so quiet.

  Quiet. I haven’t had quiet in ages, not even in my own head. The isolation of it is sudden and sharp, like lightning. I try to swallow down the name, but the silence is too much and I can’t hold it back on my own. “Quint?” The whisper bounces off the narrow walls.

  Nothing. The shadows shift, the silence pounds. Then: “I—I’m here.” His voice is wrung out and garbled, like someone shouting through a bad connection.

  I try to ask him if he can see my brother and how deep is the water and please, talk to me because I think I’m going to die and I don’t want to be alone, but the shadows push in against my eyelids and the pressure is too heavy. My fingers slip on the rung.

  “Hey! Hold on, you have to hold on!” Quint shouts.

  “You can see me?” I slur, squinting. Water creeps into my mouth. I gag and spit it out, but more seeps in behind it. I’m going to go under soon.

  Quint’s voice echoes against the tight walls. “The cell phone’s still on, it’s at the bottom of the tunnel. The water’s not that deep but you have to stay awake, okay?”

  “Children can drown in two inches of water,” I recite. Swimming Safety 101. Summer at the beach. Dad holding me up in the water, when I was small and afraid and wanted my floaties.

  The ladder is sliding out of my grip. I clutch at it, but it’s so slick and my fingers are so clumsy.

  A long pause. “Can you not see? You—your head, it’s …”

  “Kyle,” I shout again, but it only comes out as a whisper.

  Another silence. “I’m sorry,” Quint says, and the sincerity is final, irrevocable. And that’s when I remember: you’re going to kill your brother just like you killed her.

  Oh God, oh God, he was right. And I hate him for it.

  I drift.

  “Cam, stay awake. Please. Talk to me.”

  I don’t respond.

  He tries again. “Look, I don’t know what happens to me if you die, but I have no intention of finding out.”

  “Selfish,” I murmur before I can stop myself. The word is fuzzy at the edges, half a dream.

  He laughs, a jagged sound of relief. “Yes. And—and a little bit not, maybe.”

  The shadows flicker and fade into a wall of black.

  I try to stay conscious, try to find something to hang on to, but the thoughts float through my mind like mist and I can’t grasp any of them. Quint is shouting again, I think. It fades, weaving in and out like a radio trying to find a signal.

  My fingers slip off the rung. Letting go is easy, and the water is cradling me.

  I take a breath.

  I let it go.

  Lights out.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THREE WEEKS AGO

  TWENTY MINUTES LATE, AND I’VE made it as far as the fountain.

  The marble is cool beneath my fingers. I’ve got it in a death grip, trying hard to beat the panic down. The initial attack died out a few minutes back, allowing me to make it through the gate, out of the car, and halfway across the base, but then another one started up and now I’m stranded. Even if I do manage to make it the rest of the way to Mom’s office, I might end up with permanent indentations in my palm from this.

  Who am I kidding? I’m not going to make it. I should’ve stayed in bed, stuck to my safe spots, not tried to challenge something that’s impossible to beat. If I stay here, the anxiety will never go away. Maybe I wasn’t meant to go to college, wasn’t meant to get a medical degree. What kind of doctor would I make anyway?

  The me from last year believed I’d be a great one just like my parents. The new me has to be more realistic. Maybe I can go to community college, take online classes, find a degree that lets me work from home where I feel safe. It’s not my dream, but maybe the new me doesn’t have the luxury of dreaming anymore.

  I glance at my hand, knuckles white around the fountain’s rim. Mom would tell me this is all phobic self-talk, that I need to stop fighting the panic and accept my feelings and act anyway, that the attack won’t last forever—but my phone is useless and she’s not here to help me and there’s no way I can do this without her.

  I let go of the fountain and turn back toward the gate.

  Boom! The noise is low and ominous like thunder, and the ground ripples. Someone in a lab coat reels into me, sending me farther off balance, and I grab at the fountain to catch myself. With my other hand, I reach out to steady whoever bumped into me. He half-turns and I get a glimpse of light hair and black glasses, and then—

  CHAPTER TEN

  I WAKE UP DYING.

  There isn’t any air left, not anywhere in the world, and my body is screaming for it. I manage to choke in half a breath. Air goes in and water comes up.

  Drowning. I drowned. Or … almost did?

  I roll onto my side on the rough cement and curl into a ball, holding my head, which feels like it’s being split open with a rusty axe. My vision is blurry. Someone is kneeling over me. Worried face and blonde hair and green eyes and you’re going to kill your brother.

  I jerk away. I squeeze my eyes shut. If I don’t see him, if I don’t see where we are, it won’t be real.

  Rubble. Soot. Ash. Silence. Every time I look at him. And now this too: a tunnel in the dark. A trainmaster with empty eyes. A wall of force and fire.

  “Camryn,” he says softly, and the word floats through the darkness like he’s making a wish he doesn’t want anyone else to hear. That tone, that uncertainty, he said something that same way earlier. What was it?

  Selfish, I’d accused. Then he’d replied: And a little bit not, maybe.

  Rage boils up. Violence clouds my vision. He has no right to those words, to that feeling. He has no right to pretend to care about me after what he’s done. “Get away from me,” I hiss. Then, like a dam breaking: “GET AWAY FROM ME!”

  My words echo and roil, churning through the narrow tunnel, surrounding me with a wall of sound. My head splits open a little further. I groan and open my eyes.

  Quint is kneeling in front of me. One hand is half reached out but he lets it fall, and I don’t recognize the stark helplessness on his face until he shuts it down into his normal composed mask.

  “That’s okay,” he says, and his voice is back to smooth-calm-calculated. “Use that. You’re going to need it to get us out of here.”

  I sit up, still clutching my head, something warm and sticky trickling over my fingers. Running on autopilot, my mind tallies up my situation and presents it to me in a neat little list: I have a head injury. A cell phone is flickering in the corner next to a tablet with a cracked screen. My soggy clothing clings and drips, forming a puddle on the otherwise bone dry ground. We’re in an elbow shaped tunnel whose only two openings are straight up or out into the darkness.

  Phone. The phone. I scramble across the floor and sweep it up, but there’s no s
ignal. I’m too far underground. Buried in the dark, beneath a mountain of debris, with a head injury and no one else around except a hallucination I can’t bear to look at.

  I try the tablet. It powers on but then flickers right back off, damaged from its fall.

  I stuff it into my waistband, then stand on shaky legs and turn the phone outward, sweeping its light across the wall. There was a ladder. If I can find the ladder, I can get back to the hatch, and maybe Kyle is up there, maybe the blast wasn’t as bad as I thought, maybe there’s already a rescue team searching for us. I swallow down the rage and fear, push them away so I can breathe.

  But there’s no ladder. And no water, even though I was drowning just seconds ago.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” Quint says from behind me.

  I ignore him, because the white noise in my head is getting louder and I think it has a name and I’m scared it might be shock. If that happens to me down here, I’ll be nothing but another body for the cadaver dogs to dig up.

  Another body. Another. If that tablet meant what I thought it did, if this was all a trap set for me, how many people died for it? Not Kyle. Please, anyone else, the trainmaster, the guard, civilians, anyone but Kyle. I will not lose another family member this month, he told me. I won’t either. I can’t. Not like this, not again. So until I have proof that he’s gone, until someone shows me the … the body—I’ll just have to assume he’s still alive. It would be just like him, to survive an impossible explosion, to have some snarky one-liner ready for whoever digs him out.

  My cheeks are wet. I ignore the frantic tears and continue sweeping the phone’s light across the wall in search of the ladder, but I’ve been over the whole “room” twice now and it’s not there. There’s only the unreachable hatch twenty feet above.

  Quint follows me, trying to make me look at him. “Camryn, stop, listen—”

  I whirl on him, drop the phone and swipe my hand through his chest in a savage gesture. I feel nothing, not smoke or mist or a hint of life. That’s all he is: nothing. “Shut up,” I snarl. “Just shut up. Go away. You shouldn’t be here.” They’re the words I’ve bottled up for a week, and once I let them out they’re a runaway train, impossible to stop. “Don’t you dare give me some damn lecture about Galileo and living in the world and losing people you love. What the hell do you know about any of it? Who even decided you get to be the one to stay when they have to go? How is it fair, that I get you instead of them? And didn’t I tell you to get the hell away from me?”

  His face is stone. He looks down at his chest, at the spot where my hand swept through him. “This is not how I imagined our first conversation would go,” he says, too calm.

  “What did you think would happen?” My voice is honed, spiteful. I want him to hurt the way I’ve been hurt. I know it’s not really his fault, I know he might not even be real, but at the moment he’s all I’ve got.

  He lifts one shoulder. “That I would say something,” he says, “and you would hear me.”

  The words are quiet and small and they echo around us—not a wall this time, but a plea. I’m all he’s got, too.

  The fury blinks out. The emptiness from before, from when I was living half-asleep at the hospital, returns. I sag with it. I squeeze my eyes shut. I open them. I brush a hand across my cheeks and finally acknowledge the tears there, and then I flop back against the side of the tunnel, unable to stand on my own. The oxygen burns when I force it into my lungs. “You always know what to say.”

  He goes tense, sensing the dangerous shift in my tone. “What?”

  I drag in another breath. “Everything you say … it’s always got a purpose. An intention.” My mouth twists. “You’re the one who suggested I steal the tablet. Then you talked me into taking my brother’s ID, and you knew exactly how to convince me. And just now, what you said about wanting me to hear you—it sounded sincere and maybe it was, but it was as calculated as everything you ever do. You want to disarm me, want me to trust you, want me to do whatever you need me to do so you can figure out what you are, and you don’t care that I’m the one taking all the risks in the meantime. I think,” I tell him, the realization dawning as I speak, “I think, Quint, that you might be a manipulative bastard.”

  He puts his hands in his pockets. Takes them out. Then he sighs a long sigh, and his shoulders droop. “Yeah,” he admits. “I’m starting to think that myself. If it helps, I don’t like it any better than you do. I don’t know who I am, but I’m not sure I’d like myself if I did.”

  I exhale and bend down and scoop the phone up, my bones aching like I’m a hundred years old. “You know the worst part? I can’t help but swallow it all anyway. I know what you’re doing and it doesn’t even matter, because if you are a manipulative bastard, you’re a very, very good one.”

  He tries a smile. “Does that mean you like me?”

  I look at the unreachable hatch. I look out into the darkness of the adjoining tunnel. I look back at the boy I’m stuck with, the closest thing I have to a potential ally—if I could trust him. “Tell me something,” I say in answer.

  “Like what?”

  “Something true. Something I could hurt you with, if I wanted.”

  His gaze drops to the glowing phone in my hand, the only light in the pitch black of our tunnel, and his smile turns bitter and ironic. “I’m afraid of the dark,” he tells me. And I hear it: the truth. It’s raw and fragile, and he’s giving it to me like a gift. Like a peace offering.

  “Afraid,” I repeat. So we do have something in common.

  “I’m afraid of quite a lot of things, actually. Being dead. Being imaginary.” He lifts one shoulder. “Being trapped in your head forever.”

  The tears have slowed now and the anxiety from before, from up above in the train station, is gone. I don’t know if it’s because this situation is now so far beyond panic or if it just naturally dissipated the way Mom said it always will no matter what I do or don’t do.

  “I had a dream,” I tell Quint, and my words sound a bit steadier now. “I think you were in it.”

  His vulnerability drops away and he leans in. “What?”

  I tell him about the half-memory, the reclaimed snippet of lost time from the day of the accident. I couldn’t quite tell whether the person I’d knocked over was really him, but the glasses and hair made it likely. Which means … what? That he had been alive and was now some kind of disembodied spirit? Or merely that, after a traumatic experience, I started hallucinating about the last person I’d met during it?

  He frowns, absorbing. Then he glances up at the nonexistent ladder. “There’s something you need to know too. I was gone,” he says.

  I pull the front of my shirt off my stomach and wring it out. I’m already shivering and the temperature in the tunnel is hovering somewhere around subarctic, and if I don’t get dry and warm soon it won’t help my odds of survival. “What?”

  “You were sinking, drowning. I was yelling but you couldn’t hear. You landed right on top of the phone, and then—I was gone. I reappeared, woke up, whatever, just a few seconds before you did. That’s why I don’t know what happened to the water and the ladder.”

  I drop my shirt and stare at him. Quint’s never disappeared, never slept, never gone farther than a few yards from me. I have no idea what happened or what it means, and suddenly I’m so exhausted, so cold and tired and empty and alone, and I can’t bear to spend another minute standing here wondering what the hell is going on.

  “Okay,” I reply. Then I turn toward the tunnel that extends into the darkness, hold the phone out in front of me, and take a step. My legs are wobbly and weak but they hold my weight. For now, at least.

  “What are you doing?” Quint calls, following as he must.

  I grit my teeth at the pain that shoots through my skull with every footstep. “I’m getting us out of this godforsaken hole in the ground,” I reply. “I’m going to find my brother. I’m going to get the tablet working and prove Dr. Lila wr
ong. And then I am going to suppress the hell out of this whole damn day.”

  He snorts. “Suppression? And here I thought your mom specialized in acceptance techniques.”

  I stop, turn around. “How do you know that?”

  He’s blinking, a look on his face like he’s seen a ghost. “I … I don’t.”

  I take a painful step closer. “Are you remembering things? Did you know her? Were you a psychiatric intern or something?” If he remembers that day, maybe he can remember what happened—what Mom was doing, what he is, how to get him back into his body or to Heaven or wherever and out of my life.

  He shakes himself and strides past me farther into the tunnel. “I don’t know,” he says, but the words are clipped.

  I raise my eyebrows. If I know anything, I know what scared people look like, and right now, he’s petrified. By what? His returning memories? Or by the fact that he’s accidentally revealed he does remember something?

  He gets to the end of his ten-foot range and stops. I open my mouth—but the phone in my hand chirps, interrupting me. I glance down. Low power, it proclaims. One percent remaining. There’s still no signal and the flashlight app is sucking the life out of the battery. At this rate, we’ll run out of juice long before we get close enough to the surface to get a call out.

  “Turn it off,” Quint says. The words are cold and brittle, a thin sheet of ice to cover whatever it is he doesn’t want me to hear in his voice. But it’s too late; he’s already told me what he’s afraid of.

  I hesitate. “But you said—”

  “Turn it off. You said you wanted to hurt me, right?”

  I look down, lift the phone. Press the power button. It leaves a red smear on my brother’s screen. “No,” I correct, and my voice is softer than I thought it would be. “I said I wanted to be able to hurt you.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  The phone warbles sadly to itself, flashes the company logo, and dies.

  “Intention,” I whisper to the dark.