Hereafter (Shadowlands) (15 page)

Outside, Joaquin flung Tristan’s arm off his and stormed to the edge of the bluff. In the distance, storm clouds gathered, lightning flashing deep within the dark gray cover. I took in a deep breath and tried to relax, but the mayor’s last words to me still rang in my ears. In two short days, I’d gone from being a “distinct pleasure” to being someone who needed an appointment. Someone who got the door slammed in her face. Was it just because I was siding with Joaquin, or was it something more?

“What is the matter with you?” Tristan demanded, charging after Joaquin. A gust of wind blasted his hair back from his face as they neared the drop-off. “You know she hates it when we just barge in.”

“Do you really think I give a shit?” Joaquin asked, whirling to face Tristan. “Something’s going on around here, Tristan. Something bigger than the random shriveled magnolia or the centipede you found at the gazebo. Don’t you feel it? Because I do. I can feel it in every inch of my body.”

Tristan scoffed. “You’re so melodramatic.”

Krista and I hovered a safe distance away as the boys faced off. I could feel the mayor watching us through her office windows, but I refused to turn. Krista, however, kept glancing furtively back at the house. Along the front of the porch, the garden that had once been bursting with daisies was now a square of dry brown thatch.

“What if she never lets us back in?” she whispered, biting her bottom lip.

“I’m sure she will. It’s your home,” I replied.

“Yeah, but not really,” Krista said. “It’s not like she’s really my mother. And I’ve never seen her that angry before.”

Krista toyed with her bracelet, looking at the ground.

“We can’t keep letting this happen!” Joaquin shouted, the veins in his neck bulging. “You know the weather vane has been pointing south a lot more often than usual. If people are being sent to the wrong place, then what’s the point of all this? What’s the point of our existence?”

Another cold wind whooshed in off the ocean, leaving me momentarily breathless. The clouds were moving in at a fast clip; they were an ominous shade of steel gray. Krista took a few steps back toward the porch and away from the drop-off.

“People aren’t getting sent to the wrong place,” Tristan replied stubbornly. “The system works, Joaquin. It’s
always
worked.”

“Always?” Joaquin asked, raising his eyebrows.

Something passed between them. Some unspoken communication. Tristan stood, stock-still and silent, as if weighing his response. I smoothed my braid. Was Joaquin talking about Jessica, or was there something else going on?

“You’ve been here longer than anyone, Tristan,” Joaquin said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “You know that things aren’t always what they seem. That the system can be circumvented.”

“No,” Tristan said firmly. “Not like this. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It can’t happen, J. It’s just…it’s not possible.”

They stared each other down, the wind blowing the sleeves of their shirts tight against their arms, until Joaquin finally chuckled and backed off.

“Screw this; I’m outta here,” he said, storming past me.

Krista looked away as he went by.

“So you’re really not gonna help us?” I asked Tristan, my voice nearly drowned out by the swirling of the wind.

He turned his palms out, his eyes determined but still full of sorrow. “There’s nothing to help with. This place isn’t broken, Rory. It
can’t
be broken.”

I pressed my lips together, hesitating. “But…Jessica broke it, didn’t she?”

An angry shadow crossed his face. “That was different,” he said fiercely. “She willingly ignored a rule, but once she did that, the mechanics worked as they were supposed to. The people who had been compromised went to the Shadowlands, as they were supposed to. You’re trying to say that the coins can be altered, that the final decision can be wrong. That can’t be.”

“But I know Aaron didn’t belong in the Shadowlands. I know it.” I looked down at my sneakers, gripping my fingertips until they hurt. It was nothing compared with the pain inside my chest. “What if we could bring them back?”

“We can’t,” Tristan said, pushing his sleeves down.

“But what if we could? What if there was a way to—”

“It wouldn’t matter anyway,” Krista interrupted. “If Tristan’s so sure they are where they’re supposed to be, then we
shouldn’t
bring them back.”

“Exactly,” Tristan said, his face like stone.

“But they’re not where they’re supposed to be!” I wailed.

“We can’t keep having the same conversation, Rory,” Tristan said firmly. “Trust me. Nothing’s broken, and no one is coming back.”

Suddenly, my whole body felt hollow. There would be no getting through to him, no making him understand how awful, how wrong, how desperate I felt. Something or someone had sent Aaron to the Shadowlands when he belonged in the Light. And nothing Tristan said was going to change my mind about that. He was right about only one thing: we couldn’t keep having this conversation.

“Rory,” Tristan said, taking an imploring step forward.

I instinctively backed away. “I have to go,” I said, my heart breaking along with my voice.

“But you don’t understand—”

“I have to go.”

I turned and jogged after Joaquin, the wind making me tear up. As I came around the corner of the house, my foot caught on a rock and I stumbled. From the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of dark eyes staring at me through the office window, and the second I did, the blinds snapped shut.

I shoved myself up to my feet and ran. “Joaquin!” I shouted.

He was crossing the patio out back, headed for the woods on the southwest corner of the island.

“Joaquin, stop!” I shouted again as the clouds moved in to block out the sun.

Joaquin finally paused near the tree line, but he didn’t turn around. A rumble of thunder sounded nearby as I jogged to catch up with him, shoving my knotted hair away from my face. One huge drop of rain plopped onto my cheek.

I blew out a breath, choked with anger, confusion, and despair. “What are we going to do?” I asked, my hands on my hips.

“I don’t know,” he replied simply.

“Why won’t he listen to us?” I asked.

Joaquin sighed. “You’ve gotta understand.… If Tristan admits that something is wrong, if he even starts to think about it, then he’ll have to question everything. It’s like we’re asking him to give up on his whole belief system. Without this place…without the whole ‘balance of good and evil’ thing, he has nothing.”

He’d have me
, I thought as the rain started to come harder.

“Well, why didn’t he tell me that?”

Joaquin looked me in the eye. “Maybe you should ask him.”

I pushed my hair away from my face. It didn’t escape me that even though Joaquin was pissed off, he was managing to see Tristan’s side of things. “You guys are really good friends, huh?”

Joaquin smirked. “When we’re not fighting, yeah. Tristan’s like a brother.”

Just like Darcy and me. The two of us could fight like crazy people, but in the end we’d always be there for each other. And I suddenly understood why Krista had been so eager to be my friend since I’d arrived in town. As the newest girls here, we had a lot in common. She was probably dying for a best friend, a sister figure. But I already had a sister. A sister I intended to keep with me forever, if I could only figure out how.

“We have to do something,” I said. “With or without Tristan. We have to—”

“Look, you should get inside,” Joaquin said, glancing toward town. “I have someplace I have to be right now. We’ll figure this out in the morning.”

As he started to move away from me, the sky opened up, rain flattening the grass all around us and soaking my clothes right through. The leaves on the trees turned upside down, and some of the smaller ones bowed toward the ground. I started to shiver.

“We can’t wait until the morning,” I protested, hugging myself against the sudden chill. “What if someone else gets taken tonight? What if they get sent to the wrong place?”

“That’s not going to happen,” Joaquin replied, shaking his head. Water dripped from his eyelashes and chin. “No one ever gets taken in a storm.”

I laughed sarcastically. “Oh, and there’s no chance
that
rule is going to be broken?”

Joaquin gave me a hard look. “I’m sorry, Rory, but there’s something I have to take care of. You’re just gonna have to trust me. I’ll be at your place first thing in the morning.”

Then he turned and slipped into the woods, disappearing between two huge trees. I just stood there, soaked and baffled, my teeth chattering, waiting for the punch line. He had something to take care of in the middle of the woods, right now, when two seconds ago he’d been about ready to throw down with Tristan?

Shaking from head to toe, I turned to look back at the mayor’s house. I’d never seen it from this angle before, and for the first time, I noticed the large garage facing the driveway. The door was open, and sitting inside, safe from the rain and wind, was a sleek silver convertible. The very same car I’d seen idling near the cliff the other night.

The mayor had met with Dorn. Dorn, who was watching me just like Nadia was. A chill went down my spine, and as I turned to go, I saw Tristan standing on the porch under the cover of its wide roof, staring out at me.

You’ve been here longer than anyone
, Joaquin had said. And Tristan hadn’t argued. Was that really true? How long was “longer than anyone”? And was it even possible that one person had been sent to Juniper Landing alone, with no one there to guide him?

Slowly, I headed back toward town. Joaquin didn’t want to deal with this tonight? Fine. As of that moment, I had my own mission to carry out.

Navigating the descent to the cove that night in the pouring rain and pitch dark was terrifying. The wind was so fierce it drove the rain sideways, each droplet a sharp dart against my skin. Halfway down the rocky decline, my foot slipped on the rocks, and as my arms flung out to grasp at the nothingness, I was sure I was about to fall to my death. Then my back hit a jagged point and I remembered: I couldn’t die. But I could feel excruciating pain.

I scrambled to my knees and checked the pocket of my rain jacket to make sure my flashlight hadn’t tumbled out. Shakily, I pushed myself to my feet and took baby steps all the way to the bottom of the hill. When I could finally see the sand, I unclenched my jaw and jumped the last few feet. The ground squished beneath the soles of my sneakers, bubbling up around the rubber treads with the consistency of oatmeal.

I could just make out the shadowy humps of the tents in the distance. Not surprisingly, they were dark and still. I flicked on my flashlight and ran it along the rock wall to my left, inching forward until I finally found the opening of the cave. It looked smaller somehow, as I stood there in front of it alone. Threatening. For one brief moment I thought I saw something flicker deep inside, and I almost turned around and ran.

No one’s here
,
I told myself, listening to the rain as it thwapped against the vinyl cover of my hood.
They’d have to
be crazy to come out in this.

Of course, I was crazy just for being here. And after seeing the Lifers storm-surfing last week and the cliff-diving the other night, I already knew that some of the others weren’t exactly on the right side of sane. But this place was mine now, as much as it was theirs. If someone was inside, they were just going to have to deal.

I took a deep breath and slipped into the cave. The narrow opening was clogged with smoke, the heady, ashy kind that billows up after dousing a fire. As I came around the corner, I covered my mouth with my sleeve and ran the flashlight’s beam along the floor. Sure enough, the fire pit was smoldering. A few small embers still glowed bright orange in the darkness, and thick gray smoke snaked up from the center of the charred logs, disappearing near the high ceiling of the cave.

“Anyone here?” I called.

No response. Somewhere in the deepest depths of the cavern, water dripped at a steady rhythm.

This made no sense. If someone had been in here just before me, I would have bumped into them coming out, either on the beach or on the rocks. Unless there was a back entrance to the cave, or some other way out to the cove that they hadn’t shown me.

Forget it
,
I told myself.
You came here for a reason.

I tried to ignore my trembling hands as I aimed the flashlight beam at the wall to my right. I found Krista’s name again, the bubbly flowery lettering proclaiming her arrival. A few feet away, Nadia had written her name in slanted, sophisticated script:
NADIA LINKOVA (NASH) 1982
. Right under hers, Cori had added her name:
CORI HERTZ (MORRISON) 1982
. No wonder they were so close. They’d shown up here around the same time. Another reason why Krista probably expected the two of us to become BFFs. I moved on, illuminating unfamiliar names like Corina Briggance (Horrance) from 1993 and Wallace Brooks (Garretson) from 1979. I paused when I found Kevin’s name, huge and jagged, near the top of the wall, an intricate fire-breathing dragon painted above it, the tail curling around his year, which was 1965. Kevin had come here the year my father was born.

Slowly, I made my way along the wall, reading name after name after name. Toward the back of the cave the years got older and older. 1921, 1915, 1906, 1899. Some looked hastily painted, in thick white paint. Others seemed to be written in chalk, probably the only instrument they could find in those days. I couldn’t imagine that some of the people I’d seen on the street had been here for almost two hundred years. How was that even possible? How was that survivable?

I squinted in the darkness, trying to make out the words that had faded with time, holding my breath as I waited for my light to find the name I was looking for. When it finally did, I was at the innermost point of the cave. And there, etched into the stone at eye-level, was Tristan’s name.

TRISTAN SEVARDES (PARRISH) 1766.

I inhaled sharply. He’d been alive before the U.S. was even a country. Had, in fact, died before the Revolutionary War. He was over two hundred years old.

There was a noise, like a scraping, near the mouth of the cave, and I dropped my flashlight. When I grabbed for it, it slipped through my fingers and hit my toe. Cursing under my breath, I picked it up again and shone the light near the opening. The fire still smoldered.

“Hello?” I said, my voice sounding weak and scared. My toe throbbed angrily. I cleared my throat, tried to sound more authoritative. “Who’s there?”

No reply. I took two tentative steps forward.

“Come on, you guys. This isn’t funny,” I said.

I listened hard for the sound to come again, but it didn’t. All I could hear was the deafening rasp of my own breathing, and the faint echo of the surf crashing outside.

I looked at Tristan’s name again. 1766.

Suddenly, my whole body started to shake. The manic scribble on the walls closed in. I tried to take a breath, but my throat squeezed shut. I had to get out. I had to breathe. I pressed one hand against the cold wall and lurched for the exit. That was when a crackling sound stopped me cold.

“Hello?” I called again.

I took a tentative step forward. Another crackle. Something in the corner of my vision flashed. There was a piece of white paper stuck to the bottom of my sneaker.

Nice.
Way to be paranoid, Rory.
I reached down and plucked the page from my sole, then kept moving.

Outside, the rain had reduced to a light drizzle. I took a deep breath of the cool night air and tipped my face toward the sky, letting the rain soothe my face. After a while, the rhythm of my breath returned to normal. I leaned back against the rock wall and trained my light on the paper. It was a small, rectangular sheet torn from a standard notepad, the kind reporters scrawled on in old movies. Someone had drawn a line down the center and made hash marks on either side, each set of four slashed through with a long mark—the old method of counting by fives. In one column there were thirteen slashes. In the other, only nine.

Someone was keeping score, but of what?

“What’ve you got there?”

I was so startled by the voice, I staggered backward and tripped, slamming my head into the sharp rock wall. Suddenly three flashlights flicked on, and Nadia, Pete, and Cori appeared as if from nowhere, dark hoods pulled over their hair. Before I had time to move, Pete stepped forward and snatched the page from my fingers.

“Wait!” I yelled.

Nadia shone her light on the paper. Her black eyes widened. “Holy crap. Is that what I think it is?” She turned the light on my face, effectively blinding me. I threw up my arms and squinted, but all I could see were a dozen purple dots and three looming shadows. “Are you actually keeping a log of all the people you damn to hell?”

“What? No! I just found that in the cave!” I protested. “It got stuck to my sneaker. Look, you can see the tread marks.”

I lunged forward to grab it back, but Pete pulled it up and out of my reach.

“Nice try,” he said with a sneer. “You think I’m gonna let you destroy the evidence?”

The three of them stared me down. Even Cori’s normally friendly face had gone taut and tense. I glanced back at the solid wall behind me. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to run.

“We know it’s you,” Nadia sneered. “It all started when you got here.”

“It’s the only explanation,” Cori said coldly, crossing her arms over her chest as Pete stared down his nose at me.

“It’s not,” I told them, trying to keep my voice from quavering. The skies opened up again, heavy raindrops pelting me. “I swear to you. It’s not me.”

“Yeah? Well, we’ll see what the mayor has to say about that,” Nadia spat, grasping my wrist, pinching the skin between her thumb and fingers.

Suddenly someone jumped down from the slope and squatted right next to me. I dropped my flashlight. Cori screamed, but Nadia’s grip only tightened.

“Get off her,” Joaquin growled, pushing his black hood off his face. Nadia instantly dropped my hand and backed up three feet, stepping right into the beam of my fallen flashlight. I stopped breathing.

Black Converse. Nadia had been in the mayor’s office this afternoon. My worst fear was confirmed; the girl who thought I was responsible for everything wrong on the island officially had the mayor’s ear. Maybe that was why the mayor’s attitude toward me had shifted so abruptly.

I was screwed. I was so very, very screwed.

“She’s guilty, Joaquin,” Pete said, shoving the tally into his pocket. “You and Tristan have to stop protecting her.”

“Dude, she just got here,” Joaquin pointed out. “Do you really think she could be responsible for everything that’s been going on?”

“It’s
because
she just got here that we know she’s responsible,” Nadia shot back, shooting me a slit-eyed look. “It can’t be one of us.”

“I say we take this to the mayor right now,” Pete said, advancing on me.

Joaquin moved sideways to stand squarely between us. “Back off her, Pete. I’m not kidding.”

Nadia laughed, shaking her head at the ground. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “You’re so predictable, J. Do we really have to remind you what happened the last time you and Tristan got into a pissing match over a girl?” Her gaze flicked to me. “Anyone tell
her
about it yet?”

My heart squeezed. Lightning flashed, and I caught a glimpse of Joaquin’s profile. His jaw was working hard, and his hands clenched at his sides.

“This is nothing like that,” Joaquin said through his teeth. “And you weren’t even here yet,
Nadia
.” He spat her name like a curse word. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

“Well, I do understand one thing,” Nadia said, stepping forward and tipping her head back to square off with Joaquin. “You might not want to get too close with her. You never know where you might end up.”

Lightning flashed again, a deafening thunderclap hot on its heels. I was so startled I reached for Joaquin’s hand. He froze. Nadia’s eyes darted to our fingers, and for a split second I was sure he’d pull away. But instead, he lifted his chin and curled his fingers through mine. His skin was warm and rough.

“I’m not worried,” Joaquin said clearly.

“Yeah, well. You should be,” Pete said, lifting his chin. “Come on. We’ve got something to show the mayor.”

The three of them turned and strode away. I sucked in a few broken breaths, the rain battering my face, trying to ignore the searing sting of tears behind my eyes. Joaquin just stood there, half a foot in front of me, still holding my hand. When he finally turned, he stared down at our clasped fingers before looking up at me. His dark eyes penetrated my fear.

“What did he mean, they’ve got something to show the mayor?” he asked.

“I found something,” I said. “In the cave. Some kind of tally. I have no idea what it even is, but they think it’s mine and they think it means something.” My stomach clenched. If the mayor suspected me, I was as good as dead.

Joaquin stared at the ground, fixated on the few mushy, wet inches of sand between the toes of our shoes. I started to shiver, and the longer he was silent, the more violent the shaking became. Did he think I was guilty, too? He was the only person who believed in me, who wanted to help save Aaron. I couldn’t handle this, any of this, if Joaquin wasn’t on my side.

“Here.” He released my hand and unzipped his heavy jacket, flinging it over my shoulders in one, smooth motion. The inside had been warmed by his body, and its comforting, musky-tart scent enveloped me. My shivering instantly stopped.

“Come on,” he said as I pushed my arms into the sleeves. “We should get you home.”

“But what about—?”

“Don’t worry,” Joaquin told me, looking darkly in the direction the others had gone. “I’ll take care of them.”