Ash and Darkness (Translucent #3) (3 page)

My words tumbled out into the stillness.

I could hear my own voice, but nothing else.

Then, as I watched their conversation unfold in deathly silence, the colors began to blur together. The late-afternoon sun glared through the window, its rays washing out and bleaching everything in sight like an overexposed photo. A white fog coalesced out of thin air, reducing visibility to ten feet, then five feet, then inches.

Emory’s face sank into the haze.

Deaf and blind and unable to feel, I stumbled forward, groping blindly, and was only vaguely aware of passing through the walls and sprawling headfirst into the garden. I crawled on hands and knees, choking on fear.

“Help,” I cried. “Somebody help . . .”

I crouched over the soil, trying to see details,
anything
, but only vague, blurry shadows shifted in the fog.

“No, no . . .
please
,” I moaned as a suffocating terror took hold deep in my abdomen.

What was happening to me?

Erased . . . I was being erased.

If Major Connor ever did come by, I wasn’t aware of it at all.

The sun set around me, tinting the haze gold, then orange and red. Little by little, even those colors blanched to an indistinct gray. Everything was vanishing. Sobbing, I curled into a fetal position and pressed my jaw against the soil, clinging to the one thing I had left—the texture of sand and wood chips against my tear-soaked cheeks.

Then the ground dropped out from underneath me, and I fell, screaming, into oblivion.

My stomach rushed
up my throat, and my panic gave way to a startled gasp—
falling.

But I wasn’t falling. I was floating. Weightless. Going nowhere.

An ocean of blurry silver light engulfed me from all directions. Nothing in sight—no shadows, no lines, no figures—nothing but a cold, fluorescent luminosity that came from everywhere at once.

Still, the terrifying sense of hurtling downward sent tremor after tremor through my abdomen, threatening to pull my insides right out of me. Battling nausea, I swallowed them back down.

Just like that, the world had vanished. I was . . .
gone
. Truly gone.

The end.

I had come to the end.

A universe of white fog, zero gravity . . . endless silence, broken only by the throaty rasp of my lungs chocking down oxygen, my heart thumping in dizzy terror, my eyelashes beating furiously to resolve shapes in the mist.

The oblivion stretched to infinity.

No, this couldn’t be right. I still had a body, I felt a body.

I swung my arms to be sure. Though invisible from head to toe, I could still feel my shoulder blade pivoting in response, the joint popping and cracking near my ear. I made a fist and punched forward, sending a very real whiplash down my spine.

My limbs had weight, they could move. Which meant I still had a body . . . right?

Unless it was all an illusion.

My teeth began chattering again, the
clack-clack-clack
almost deafening in the silence. More proof that I was real. Instinctively, my palms went to rub my arms, but they passed right through me. Proof I wasn’t real.

Which one was it?

Still nothing but white. Nothing below me, nothing above me.

Think. I had to think.

Where was this?
What
was this?

Death. Not heaven or hell, somewhere in between. Purgatory. Somewhere people weren’t supposed to go. I’d slipped through the cracks into purgatory.

Or none of the above.

Dark matter had swallowed me, and now I was trapped inside its stomach, where I would hang in limbo for all eternity. A suffocating cold closed around me, racking me with shivers.

I was trapped inside dark matter.

But why was I still alive? Why could I still think and feel things and remember? I should be dead by now, aware of nothing. That would have been better. Not this.

I craned my neck to look behind me. The same faintly glowing mist reached in all directions. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, or touch or smell or taste . . . except the salty taste of my own mucous, coating the inside of my mouth.

So none of my five senses counted for anything. Basically, I was just a floating consciousness. But . . . but what was I supposed to do out here? How long would it be like this? An answer crept up on me.

Not . . . not
forever?

The thought sent a quiver through my heart.

“Nuh-uh, no way,” I spat, verging on panic. “I’m not staying here forever.” Growing desperate, I reached out as far as I could into the white space and sort of kicked off with my feet, seeing if I could touch anything out there. My fingers swept through air. Farther. I had to reach farther.

Maybe I could swim. A butterfly stroke or something.

I performed the motion awkwardly, stretching out and cupping my palms and pulling them down to my sides while I kicked with my legs.
Please, please, please let it not be forever.
As I lunged and thrashed, my body jerked forward and backward in space. Going nowhere.

The effort fatigued me after a few minutes, and I paused to catch my breath. A thin sheen of sweat evaporated off my skin. As I floated in space, panting heavily, the salty taste in my mouth intensified to a sting.

Absently I ran my tongue along my gummy teeth, my chapped lips, the dry roof of my mouth. I was thirsty.

I hadn’t drunk anything since last night, almost twenty hours ago. Or eaten. I hadn’t eaten breakfast. A good thing considering anything in my stomach would have forced its way up my esophagus by now.

Would I starve to death out here? Die of thirst?

At least that put an upper limit on how long I could suffer. Three agonizing days without water, bored out of my mind, and then I would dry out like a prune.

No, Leona
, said the voice in my head.
Your hunger will be everlasting.

An icy tingle rose up my spine as the words echoed into the silence, sounding closer than ever.

“What do you want?” My voice tumbled out into the emptiness. “What do you mean,
everlasting?
”

Lower jaw trembling, I waited for a reply.

Silence.

“What . . . what are you?” I said. “Are you real? Is this real?”

The voice in my brain stayed quiet.

I listened, trying to hear above my jackhammering pulse. I shut it out, projecting all my focus to
out there
, amplifying the stillness in my mind until it seemed to whoosh by me.

And then I did hear something.

Something
way
out there, so faint it could almost be my imagination. But it wasn’t.

I knew it wasn’t.

It was the sound of wind howling, whistling,
screaming
 . . . as if rushing by at enormous speed. The eerie sound raised goosebumps on my forearms.

But almost at the edge of awareness, a tiny niggling in my inner ear told me it wasn’t what was out there that was moving.

It was me.

I
was moving, along with all this white light.

And I was moving fast.

I was moving mind-bogglingly fast.

Chapter 3

“Five thousand three
hundred and twenty-one,” I croaked, my voice hoarse from counting. “Five thousand three hundred and twenty-two . . .”

Hours had passed. Nothing had changed. A world of pure white.

I was going crazy.

“Five thousand three hundred and twenty-three . . .”

My tongue darted across my lips, but rather than wet them, my sticky saliva only dried them out further. God I was thirsty.

“Five thousand three . . .” The words scratched at my throat and wheezed out in a painful, raspy cough. I continued counting in my head, sinking deeper into despair.

Five thousand three hundred and twenty-four . . .

I estimated I’d started counting thirty minutes in, although it was impossible to tell. It could have been five minutes. Or an hour. Who gave a crap? All I could ever do was float here like a dumb helium balloon. I was
sooooo
bored.

There were 3,600 seconds in an hour. I’d been counting slowly, taking two or three seconds to say each number, which meant I’d been here for something like four hours.

Four hours down.

Only forever to go.

So we were moving. The howling had kept up the whole time, rising and falling like a hurricane. I felt the movement deep in my inner ear, almost in my brain, like a tiny compass needle getting tugged this way and that. But somehow, I sensed we weren’t moving up or down, or left or right, but in a different direction altogether, a direction I couldn’t even point in.
Deeper
. We were moving deeper.

Five thousand three hundred and twenty-five . . .

For the past twenty minutes, an itch had been building on the tip of my nose. Now it was almost unbearable. I tried again to get it with the tip of my tongue, but it was out of reach. I’d heard some people could touch their noses with their tongues. Not me, apparently.

I scrunched up my nose, but that only made the itch flare up. My eyes began to water. Oh God. Maybe I could get my hair to do the job. I tilted my head back and snapped it forward, and my invisible hair sailed around and whipped me in the face . . . and lingered there, making my whole face itch.

I shook it off, wanting to scream. Fuming, I raised my hand to my face and made an aggressive motion of scratching, even though my fingers passed uselessly through my face. It wasn’t even vaguely cathartic.

Something blurry swooped in front of me.

After four hours of unbroken white, the motion startled me. I flinched back, pulse racing.
My hand?
Had I seen my hand? Shapes . . . I saw shapes! Lines and shadows. As I stared, wide-eyed, the ghostly contours of a room took shape around me, emerging out of the whiteness. Just like when I’d vanished, but in reverse.

It was my room.

My bed hung sideways in space next to me, still translucent, but becoming more solid each second as if coalescing out of smoke. A dark rectangle gaped below me—the door to the hallway.

The milky haze evaporated off the walls of my room, leaving spots of bright yellow, which expanded and fused together, crawling toward the floor. In the corner a lumpy pile of clothes formed out of the shadows.

A bristly rug materialized against my cheek. I began to feel gravity again, pressing me against it and pinning my arm underneath me. My hair collapsed across my cheek.

The last traces of fog cleared, leaving me lying on my side in my bedroom, brilliantly lit up in the pinks and golds of morning sunlight. I propped myself up on my elbow, and at once the blood drained from my head, leaving me dizzy. I waited for the spins to pass, then sat all the way up, blinding myself in a ray of sunshine. Instinctively, I raised my hand to shield my eyes.

The silhouette of my palm danced in front of the blaze.

My heart leapt. I dropped my hand and gaped at it—pink skin, palm lines dotted with lint, rosy color rushing to fill the white imprint of the carpet. The sight of my hand almost made me cry. It wasn’t just my hand. Sunlight gleamed off my wrist and forearm . . . which lengthened before my eyes, becoming visible.

It was peeling off on its own.

Dark matter was peeling off on its own.

My elbow took shape out of thin air, then the rest of my arm. From my shoulder it retreated down my torso, peeling off like cling wrap. At last my skin could breathe again.

The rest unstuck and fell away in a sheet.

I stood up and stepped clear of the invisible folds of dark matter, approaching the mirror slowly. A girl I hardly recognized came into view. Hardly breathing—in case I vanished again—I brushed my long, dark hair to the side, revealing the purple bruises lining my throat where Ashley had bitten me. Scabs and flaking blood covered the rest of my body. Injuries I hadn’t seen until now.

I looked into my eyes, and my heart fluttered nervously. I reached up and ran my finger along my cheek, my lips, my jaw—and only then remembered I hadn’t looked my reflection in the eye in four months. Not since Ashley. My gaze averted, but then flicked back, curious. I noticed my eyes were hazel, greener than I remembered. I looked away again, suddenly feeling shy in front of my own reflection.

I was back, and no longer invisible. That was the important thing. The dark matter had fallen off on its own.

I pulled on a pair of jean shorts and a tank top, and my gaze slid to my smartphone, resting on my backpack. I clicked the button to wake it, then held it down when nothing happened.

The screen stayed black. Out of batteries.

“Mom! Dad!” I called, pocketing the phone on my way into the hallway, “You guys home yet?”

I found their
room empty, their bed neatly made. “Mom, Dad, you guys here?” I shouted, going room to room. “Hellooooo . . . anyone home?”

No reply.

I veered toward the living room, expecting to find my dad watching football. But the living room was empty. Huh. I cut through the dining room toward the kitchen, trying to remember what day it was.

How long had I been gone?

Everything had gone white sometime Saturday evening, so I guessed it was now Sunday morning, around eight or nine based on the sunlight. Which meant I must have been gone for a lot longer than four hours—more like twelve or fifteen.

The thought made my skin crawl.
What had dark matter done to me while I was gone?
Ew
.

But that explained the empty house. My parents weren’t supposed to get back from Catalina Island until this afternoon—part of Megan’s plan to give us enough time to deal with Ashley.

A neatly pressed tablecloth draped the dining room table, and I rapped my knuckles along its length and skimmed my palm over the neat row of chairs before sauntering into the kitchen—

I froze.

Uh, wait a minute.

I backed up into the dining room.

Hadn’t I knocked over all the chairs in an attempt to stall Ashley? She’d even thrown one through the window. Now someone had tucked them all back in. And—my gaze slid to the window—someone had fixed the window.

Had Megan cleaned up after I left? Not likely. We had a maid that came once a month, she must have left literally just before I got back . . . er . . . woke up . . .
returned
. Whatever you called it.

But maids didn’t fix windows.

My gaze lingered on the series of intact panes.

Megan must have called my parents after I disappeared, and they’d come back early and fixed everything up. That was the only explanation.

Still, something didn’t sit right.

Okay, so my parents
were
home. Which meant they’d seen the mess before I had a chance to clean up or explain myself. Not good.

“Uh . . . Mom . . . Dad?” A guilty tone entered my voice as I peeked into the breakfast nook. Empty.

Where
were
they?

My tongue scraped across my dry lips. I could explain everything to them later. Water. I needed water. Yeah, a gallon of ice-cold water and a half dozen turkey sandwiches. My fingers cupped the biggest glass in the cupboard and I made a beeline for the kitchen faucet, already salivating at the prospect.

The tap stuck a little, and my fingers whitened on the stainless steel until it twisted open under my palm with a rusty screech. A gurgle rose up in the pipes. The faucet slurped and then sprayed a loud jet of water, startling me. Just air in the pipes.

Hissing in fits and starts, water sprayed into my cup and splashed my wrist. But it didn’t settle into a normal stream. The faucet continued to splatter and spit water. I pulled my cup out of the spray, only a quarter full, and cranked off the tap.

There was something wrong with the water.

I raised the glass to eye level. A yellowish bubbly foam gathered at the top, and the liquid had a faint brown tint. Could it be rust?

Unnerved, I tilted the glass to pour it out when something wriggling and white came into view at the bottom.

An insect larva.

I shrieked and jumped back. The glass shattered in the sink, splashing a foamy brown smear across the porcelain. The larva slipped down the drain, still wiggling madly.

Ew, ew, ew
—I backed against the opposite counter, hyperventilating. Something must have laid its eggs in the faucet.

Since when did that happen?

Screw that. Let my dad fix it. Shuddering, I went for the pantry and tugged a bottle loose from the 24-pack of Arrowhead, peeking warily back at the sink.

Something here didn’t feel right . . . I’d been on edge ever since I’d gotten back.

I tilted up the water bottle and chugged the whole thing. My lips puckered at the stale and plasticky taste, and the sudden influx of liquid made me woozy. Though wet, my throat still felt parched. I uncapped a second bottle and tilted it back, but this time the chemically taste almost made me gag.

I set it down, feeling the liquid slosh in my stomach, oddly unsatisfying. A layer of dust came off on my fingers, which I wiped on my shorts. Were the bottles just old?

My gaze slid to the refrigerator. Maybe some orange juice to get the taste out of my mouth—
later, Leona.

Right now I had to get in touch with Megan and tell her I was okay, then alert Major Connor to what had happened and dispose of all the dark matter I’d squirreled away over the last month and a half.

Dark matter had to be destroyed.

It was conscious—and malevolent. It had resurrected a dead girl’s body and turned her into a weapon against me, and for most of a day it had trapped me in an alternate plane of existence. Not only that but it was spreading, infecting people and animals, hopping from host to host and working them like puppets.

We needed the police. We needed NASA. We needed the Army, the Air Force, the Navy. We needed everybody.

Every last ounce of dark matter had to be destroyed or we would never be safe.

I could start with the stuff I’d just been wearing.

I spun on my heel and marched back to my bedroom where I had shed it like a snake skin. The water swilled around in my insides, each step triggering twinges of cold. Oooh . . . shouldn’t have drunk so much so fast.

From my bedroom doorway I assessed the dark matter situation. Like an idiot, I’d stripped out of it right in the middle of my bedroom, so I had no idea where it had fallen, what it was touching. It was
invisible.

Easy solution. Only my parents would hate me for it.

I hooked my finger under the edge of the big rug and heaved it over the tainted area, folding it over like a taco—and revealing the bare subfloor Major Connor had exposed when he’d ripped up the carpet weeks ago. Billowing up eddies of dust, I folded the rug several more times until I had it in an unwieldy armful with the dark matter trapped inside. I carried the bundle outside to the trash cans.

Done. I clapped the dust off my hands over the bin, sweating in the sun. Not a leaf stirred in the still, late-morning air. Another tremor of unease slid through me. Something off here . . .

Megan. Call Megan.

Wheezing a little, I headed back to my bedroom, my tongue running along my dry, rubbery gums. Sticky mucous coated the inside of my mouth. I swallowed, and it was like sandpaper scratching all the way down.

Still thirsty.

I eyed the half-empty Arrowhead bottle I’d left on the kitchen counter, but my stomach cramped at the sight, still uncomfortably full of liquid. That was a
no
.

With a struggle, I swallowed the chalky taste of dust and went back to search for my cell phone charger, growing more unnerved by the second.

The charger had fallen behind a pile of my clothes. Like the water bottle, the clothes left my fingers dusty after handling them.

I plugged the charger into my phone and waited for it to light up. It didn’t.

I jiggled the connector. Still nothing.

“C’monnn,” I muttered.

My gaze flicked to my bedside clock. The display reflected the glare from the window. I shifted my head to get a better view.

The display was blank.

I stood and flipped on the light. The ceiling bulb stayed dark.

Catching on, I moved from room to room, flipping switches and checking all the digital displays I could find—lights, television, Blu-ray player, thermostat, laptops.

Off. All off.

I finished my inspection in the kitchen.

Only then did I notice the eerie silence in the house. No humming refrigerator, no whirring fans, no clicking hard drives—none of the tiny electronic sounds that were normally so constant as background noise.

So the power was out.

So what? It didn’t mean anything.

Power went out all the time.

My stomach growled irritably, breaking the silence. Though full of water to the point of bursting, it felt like it was caving in on itself. A wave of dizziness passed over me. I needed solid food.

I grabbed a Luna bar from the pantry.

I had to talk to Megan. Now. Right now.

I grabbed my car keys and headed out to my car, wiping the dust off the Luna bar wrapper.

“Oh come on!
Are you
serious?
” I shouted, cranking the ignition in my Corolla. Nothing happened. The engine remained silent. I set the Luna bar aside, untouched.

I twisted the key again, and the pressure turned my thumb white on the plastic. The dashboard lights remained dark. The engine didn’t even
try
to turn over.

A dead battery?

I gave up and slapped the steering wheel, sending up two little puffs of dust.

And what was with all this freaking dust? I took my hands off the steering wheel and glared at the dark streaks across my palms. How the hell did dust get inside a sealed car?

I sat back and wiped the stuff on my shorts, feeling exhausted. The gallon of water I’d just drunk hadn’t done jack. If anything, my mouth felt
more
parched.

Did it have anything to do with the key fob remote being out of batteries? The doors hadn’t unlocked when I’d pushed the button, I’d noticed, and I’d had to open them manually.

But no, this wasn’t like my parents’ Prius. It was a physical key that turned the ignition, like opening a lock. It didn’t need batteries.

So the power was out, my cell phone was dead, and my car wouldn’t start. It had to be more than a coincidence. Something definitely weird was going on.