“Look, Lucky’s been having a shit time of it,” C-girl said. “I
know you’re all holier-than-thou and don’t follow gossip-”
“I am not!” Wendy protested.
“But she’s been kind of miserable for weeks now,” C-girl
continued, ignoring her. “Did you see the way she was holding
that doll? I think she snapped.”
“Snapped?” Wendy said, turning the idea over in her head.
She didn’t know a whole lot about the more esoteric side of the
reaping business—her overprotective mom had kept her in the
dark half the time—but every now and then Mom’d let slip about
a wily ghost who broke the rules in a righteously awful way.
“Yeah. Look, if you breathe a word of this to anyone I will
personally eviscerate you,” C-girl swore, “but Lucky had to go
up to Planned Parenthood a bit back.”
Wendy nodded, keeping her lip zipped. She had enough
trouble handling the drama of the dead, there was zero room for
opinions about living decisions that didn’t concern her.
C-girl paused, waited for Wendy to comment, and when she
didn’t, smiled briefly. “She tried to hide it from everyone but
I’m— we’re—not stupid. It’s been eating at her. It wasn’t a hard
choice, it’s not like she’s mourning it, but still … Lucky’s got a
very ‘what if?’ kind of brain. She broods even when she doesn’t
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realize it.”
Wendy cleared her throat. “You think she’s off to do
something drastic?”
“She was holding that thing like a baby,” C-girl said flatly.
Wendy thought of the Walker hanging over Lucky’s
shoulder, a grey and rotting shroud urging her to flee as soon as
Wendy’d turned their way, and bit back her own theory. Lucky
might be brooding, sure, depression was an easy way for certain
ghosts to worm their way in, but the only reason a Walker would
have to drive her like a donkey toward the City was for personal
gain.
Skinwalker,
Wendy
thought
bitterly.
She’d
never
encountered one, but they were just as nasty as the name
implied—a Walker soul who’d found an abandoned human shell
to ride around in, working the body from the inside like a grisly
puppet. The flesh protected them from the likes of Wendy and
her mom, and once they were in a shell, it was nearly impossible
to pry them out again. Skinwalkers had no compunctions about
killing anyone they could get their hands on, tearing humans and
souls alike into shreds for the fun of it all.
If Wendy didn’t get to Lucky before the Walker found a way
to convince her to abandon her body, then they were all very
screwed.
*
The wind was cold. It was nearly Thanksgiving, the weather
wasn’t that big a surprise, but I worried that the little girl would
catch a chill.
“Keep going,” Joyce whispered from my arms, her huge eyes
opening and shutting sleepily. She was tired, I could sense it. Of
course she was, it’d been a century of silence and pain, of sorrow
and loss for her.
I couldn’t remember when the figure at my side had vanished
into the doll, but they were merged now, waiting for me to
complete the circuit.
“You’re lucky,” Joyce murmured as I stepped up on the
bridge and hesitated at the fence blocking the edge. It was so
foggy I’d have time to climb it before anyone spotted me and
butted in, but how to do so without breaking Joyce? “You’re still
young enough. Still pure.”
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Was I? Despite everything that’d happened, I still felt very
young and very alone, aching for the comfort of Dad’s loose arm
around my shoulder, missing sips of strawberry lemonade
Mom’d make in June.
Juan’d made my missing lesser for a while but then-
“What are you doing to me?” I asked as I began my ascent.
My head felt alternately fuzzy and sharp, my palms slicked with
sweat as that muffled voice in the back of my mind screamed
itself hoarse.
“Just clearing the way, dear,” the doll murmured and I knew
what it intended, clear as day. We were connected and I could
feel her preparing to hollow me out.
Problem is, I couldn’t quite make myself care.
It’s not like I hadn’t gone through it once before.
I swung a leg over the edge of the fence and the rain began.
It pattered around us, little drops at first, but soon pounding my
shoulders and head, soaking my socks. I reached the bottom of
the fence and looped my fingers into the chain link, relishing the
numbness.
If it were a little colder, just a little, it would ice the way it
had the night my parents died. The streets would grow slick.
People would die.
Joyce was crooning at me, singing a sweet siren song, but all
I could recall was the silence of my room the day of the funeral.
The dark. The quiet. The space that was all mine before I’d
moved in with Carlie in her cramped studio.
Carlie wouldn’t miss me. Carmen would.
As if I’d pulled her from thin air, suddenly there was a
screech of tires and Carmen was there, Wendy right behind her,
scrambling up the fence, and screaming—no, shrieking—my
name.
She shouldn’t be here, I thought. She shouldn’t have to see
this.
In the back of my brain Joyce was howling, cursing, and
Wendy was glowing, ribbons of the whitest, purest light pouring
out of her chest, yet Carmen didn’t seem to notice, and I couldn’t
really make myself care …
there was a pressure and a pinch and I was so, so cold …
and the two worlds bled together, grey over black, Light
sluicing over me, hotter than fire, burning, searing the cold
away …
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but the cold fought back and Joyce’s howl turned triumphant.
She sank into me and jostling at my soul, pushing it nearly out of
me, joining her spirit to mine for better control. I could feel the
pressure of her, the frozen chill of her dead and decaying mind
and I just … knew.
I could clearly see—no, recall, we were so close as to be one
person now—every awful thing Joyce was responsible for, every
casual cruelty in life and death, every terrible, nasty deed, every
child soul she’d devoured to stave off the inevitable fading away.
In a flash like lightning I understood about the limbo, the Never,
and Wendy, the Lightbringer, the terror of the dead, the reaper of
souls.
Carmen was stuck on the fence. A break in the chainlink had
snagged her hem. She was sobbing openly, her mascara black
rivulets snaking down her cheeks.
Wendy wasn’t crying. I think she knew that I knew about her
now. There was such a look of sadness to her, a well of grief that
stunned me with its depth.
I writhed; Joyce was in me like fishhooks dug deep.
But I was in her as well.
“Don’t,” I heard Wendy say into the storm, not a cry but a
whisper. She knew, or thought she did, what I had to do now, but
it was a futile request. I knew all about her and Wendy wasn’t a
fool; allowing a dead woman to ride around in my body would
damn so many more than just me.
I smiled. “I’m pure,” I said, and despite the storm I knew that
she had heard me. “I guess it’s my lucky day.”
Unwilling to waver any longer, I wrestled Joyce for control
of my limbs. It would be easy to give up, to let her use me,
squashed small in my own skin. Or I could go and take her with
me. Joyce had refused the Light when she died before, scared of
Hell or the nothing of the after, existing as a carrion feeder ever
since. So many would die if I let her go on. I wouldn’t make that
mistake.
I pushed off the bridge. Joyce shrieked. But it didn’t matter,
I was rising on the tide of Wendy’s grief and acceptance. I hit the
water. I didn’t struggle.
It filled me. And when the Light came … I smiled.
KD McEntire is the author of the Lightbringer YA urban fantasy
trilogy from PYR Books. She lives in Kansas where between
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raising her two young sons, she is working on another novel, and
can be found online at kdmcentire.com .
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253
A boy in a refugee camp fighting for water to keep his family
alive, encounters Jumpers David and Millie in this tale from
Steven Gould’s bestselling and brilliant Jumper series, the basis
for the movie starring Hayden Christensen.
S H A D E
( A J u m p e r S t o r y )
By Steven Gould
Xareed had been waiting for the water truck for two days, seated
in the dirt at the edge of the camp, his family’s plastic ten-liter
water-jug tied to his ankle.
He didn’t like being on the edge of the camp. Except for the
piece of cardboard he carried impaled on a stick there was no
shade. The poet Sayyid had said, “God’s Blessing are more
numerous than those growing trees,” and Xareed hoped so, for
there were no trees in the camp or outside. So the blessings had
better be more numerous, not less.
Being on the edge of the camp, especially on this side, was
also bad because rebels would occasionally fire into the tents
from the far side of the old lakebed, or set up mortars among the
folds and gullies in the bottom.
Bad enough, but when the government troops came in
response, the rebels would be long gone, and the troops would
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say they were hiding in the camp and there would be searches
and arrests and summary executions.
It was safer deep inside the camp where Xareed lived with
his mother and grandfather and sisters. Back when they’d come
here, after the rebels had killed his father and burned their farm,
there’d still been a little water in the lake and a lot of mud, so his
family actually had a house, just a one-room building, but made
of thick sun-dried bricks that kept the family cool in the heat and
which had, on more than one occasion, stopped stray bullets and
shrapnel that tore through the tents that most of the refugees lived
in.
It had been Xareed’s idea, one of the few things he’d gotten
from school that meant anything here. That, and enough English
to talk to the foreigners who helped at the camps.
But Xareed really missed the shade of trees. His last memory
of their farm, as they fled, was not the burning house and fields,
but the flames consuming the wide canopy of their umbrella
thorn acacia tree.
When the strangers showed up at the clinic tent, rumors and
questions flew up and down the water line.
“How did they get here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a truck on the far side of the camp?”
“Maybe they came on a water truck?”
This was nonsense since the entire camp knew within
minutes when the water truck had been sighted.
“Could it be a new supplies convoy?”
“Maybe a new drilling machine?”
The camp’s three wells, drilled two years before, had dried
up in the previous month. There was still some water in the
clinic’s tanks but it was being strictly rationed. One of the NGOs
had sent a new drilling rig but it had been confiscated by the
government and sent south.
Everyone was dry-mouthed and angry and all the young ones
kept saying “Waan domonahay” (I’m thirsty) over and over
again. Many had woken to find their water bottles stolen and
accusations had flown, followed by fists.
“Maybe there was a helicopter?”
Sometimes the IRC got copters in with medical supplies.
“I heard they walked.”
Xareed peered across the baked earth toward the nurse’s
station. The strangers were a white man and woman, wearing
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practical khakis and baseball caps. They didn’t look like they’d
walked. It was possible, but it was thirty dry kilometers to the
next village. These people looked fresh, almost moist, like the
reeds that grew by the stream in his old village.
“It’s like they sprouted from the ground.”
There was laughter at this, but only quiet laughter. Everyone
was too hot and thirsty to laugh loudly.
“Xareed,” one of his friends said, “you go ask.”
Xareed translated to English for anyone. “They could be
French or German or Norwegian. You go ask. Nurse will know.”
A boy further down the line saw the tanker truck first, by the
dust it threw up, while it was still kilometers away. It was coming
by the lake road, winding along the old shoreline. Some of the
newer refugees surged to their feet, but the old hands sat
stoically. Time enough to stand when you could hear the diesel
motor, hear the creaks of the springs as it bounced in and out of
the road’s potholes. Even then there would be some delay as they
put the dispenser hose on the tank and filled the clinic’s tanks
first.
Xareed shifted his cardboard parasol as the sun tracked
across the sky. It was one of the few things he owned and he had
to watch it carefully. As shade it was valuable enough but during
the cold nights any number of his campmates would steal it to
burn. Fuel was not quite as rare as water. You could get it by
walking far enough from the camp but the rebels or government
troops might find you and that never ended well.
The sound of grinding gears was plainly audible and he had
untied the string around his ankle and was thinking of standing
when the truck hit the mine.
He jumped to his feet, his mouth open in
dismay. The rebels
must’ve planted it in the last two days. This same truck had used
the same route the week before with no problem. The diesel was
burning and he was pretty sure he’d seen water spray from a tank
rupture before the swirling dust had engulfed the vehicle.
He was running, sprinting forward, almost without thought.
The water. Even ruptured, the tanker could take some time to
drain, if he could get to it in time—
It was at least six hundred meters to the truck and he slowed
almost immediately to a steady jog. While speed was of the
essence, it would do no good if he collapsed on the way to the
truck or was too weak to carry his filled water can back.
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Or if I step on a mine, he thought, and shifted his course off
the dirt road.
If he could just fill his can. His sisters complained all day
long about the thirst but his grandfather, who never complained,
was weak and feverish.
He glanced behind. He’d clearly had the element of surprise
but now a general rush was on, other boys and men and a few
girls, enough that dust was rising into the air from their passage.
Ignore them, he told himself.
A tall thin boy sprinted past Xareed, running for all he was
worth, a twenty-five liter can in each hand and two more slung
over one shoulder, banging against his back and chest.
For an instant Xareed was tempted to match his speed, to
sprint as he did, but he kept himself to the steady jog. His resolve
was tested as two more men dashed past. He was over halfway
now, but the truck still seemed small in the distance, shrouded in
dust and dark smoke, and the tall, skinny sprinter seemed almost
there, but that had to be an illusion.
He hoped it was an illusion.
It was. The tall sprinter collapsed a hundred meters short of
the truck and the other fast men were reduced to a staggering
walk. They were bent over, gasping for air as Xareed jogged past
them.
Xareed was also gasping for air by the time he reached the
truck. He circled wide around the front where the fuel tank,
behind and below the driver’s side, had been ruptured by the
mine and a puddle of diesel burned, flames licking up the driver’s
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