CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Working up the courage to question Sarah is harder than I thought. Every time I open my mouth with the intension of speaking, the silence surrounding us rushes in, hardening into a lump in my throat. It’s when we’re nearing the spot where we saw the dark figure waiting for us yesterday that the words finally come, flowing out as more of a distraction than a way to get answers.

“So what have you been doing since I last saw you?” I ask Sarah.

She frowns. “Well… I went to class and-“

“No, I meant what’s happened between when we separated as children and now.”

“Oh,” she says quietly, eyes on the ground. I can feel Caden behind us, listening in even though I wish he wasn’t. For some reason, this topic feels personal – like it’s something only Sarah and I should share. But I know that the more everyone knows, the better our chance of getting through this alive, and if an important piece of information lies in Sarah’s backstory, then Caden needs to hear it as well.

“I suppose I should have seen this coming,” she says, sighing. She closes her eyes and for a second, everything is still, as if the world itself is waiting for her words to be released into the air. She takes one last breath, opens her eyes and speaks, “My mother told me everything – about being swapped, about the abilities that she and countless others possess, and about the nameless group who watch our every move – when I was ten. She told me that when I was young, she met with a lady who knew of a way to dull the effects of being swapped so that I wouldn’t get heat attacks. Instead, my body constantly absorbs the heat needed to stop it from freezing over in tiny painless amounts. Of course, that doesn’t stop the temperature around me from dropping, it just slows down the process and makes it less noticeable. I have to move at least once every year, and my mum always moves us to a place that’s going into autumn so that people won’t find the drop in temperature unusual.”

I close my eyes, feeling, for the second time today, jealous. While every year I’ve had to push through countless heat attacks, she’s been living a semi-normal life. No one knew about her disease – hell, she wasn’t even diagnosed with a disease. She hasn’t had to put up with people calling her a freak or had to spend day after day attending a school that wants her gone. She hasn’t walked into a room and realised that everyone in it hates her or watched her parents grow distant. Her life has been easy and I’m jealous.

And with this jealousy comes something else: pain.

Every time she mentions her mum, all I can think about is how she’s actually talking about my mother – my real mother – and how I’ve missed out on a life with her. And the pain that accompanies this thought threatens to break free of the flimsy sheet I’ve stuffed on top of it. If given the chance, would my mother even want me after spending years and years with someone else as her daughter?

I want to collapse to the ground and cry until I’ve no more tears. But that would be selfish. I’m not the only one in an unbearable situation; as easy as Sarah’s life has been in the past, her future will be just as hard as mine, if not harder.

Because when we swap back, she’ll become Melissa – the girl whose disease is known worldwide. I’ve ruined her future for her and when – if – I swap with her, I’ll be condemning her to the fate I’ve thought would be mine for years.

I want to crawl in on myself until I wink out of existence. How many lives must I wreck before I finally set things straight? How can one person be responsible for so much pain?

I withdraw from my thoughts in time to hear Sarah continue, her voice soft. “When I was seven, my dad was…killed. My mum never told me the details, and after a while I learned not to ask.” She stops and looks at me. “I’m sorry, Melissa.”

She waits for a reaction, but the truth is, she’s probably not going to get one. I know I should feel something, but I don’t. Her words pass into me and bounce off the walls of my mind, sending out echoes that aren’t received. It’s as if I’ve been hollowed out, my emotions tugged from my body along with the rest of me.

I look away from her eyes, hoping she won’t see the writing scrawled across my features, announcing to the world that I can’t find it in me to care – that I’m dead inside.

Hesitantly, she continues. “Over a month ago, I moved here, knowing that you were living in this area. My mother had never urged me to swap back – she said when I wanted to, I could, but there was never any pressure. Of course, we both knew that I would have to eventually – and I knew that I was running out of time.” She turns her head to the side and her eyes lock onto mine for a split second. But in that second, I see the pain and the worry – the years and years of pent up fear. I’ve known for around a week that I will die if I don’t swap back. She’s known for over five years. And if she’s done any of the research I have, then she’d have known that you only get ten to fifteen years before your body gets too cold to continue functioning.

“That’s why I decided to start my search for you.” She pauses to take in a deep breath. “There’s a five year period of ‘not- knowing’ between your tenth year of being swapped and your fifteenth year. In this period of time, I knew that either one of us could drop dead at any moment, and when I turned thirteen, I started freaking out, realising our tenth year had already begun. It had snuck up on me and I was afraid. I would have gone looking for you straight away, but mum wanted me to get through at least my first two years of high school before I focused on finding you and discarded my studies. She wasn’t worried that either of us would die soon – apparently, she’d visited a clairvoyant who had said we’d both last past our fifteenth birthdays.”

I frown. “A clairvoyant?”

“Yeah, like, someone who can see the future.” She moves on. “Anyway, I’ve been attending a school in the next suburb over and I’ve spent a while looking for you. Believe it or not, they don’t advertise what school you go to on the internet.” She smiles. “But anyway, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay here long since our combined effects on the weather would cause it to get much colder, much quicker, so I’ve spent all my free time looking for you, visiting all the schools in this area. And then I found yours and saw you and so on. And yeah. That’s it, I guess.”

I don’t know what to say when she finishes speaking. Her words spin around inside my head and get tangled with my thoughts, making it impossible to come up with a sentence. All I can think about is the clairvoyant who said we’d both last past our fifteenth birthdays. But what about our sixteenth birthdays? Will we live past them?

Fear takes up residence within me. I’ll be sixteen in two months – but what if I don’t make it that long? What if tomorrow is the day I die?

Suddenly, the reality of my situation hits me and I cease walking, holding one hand to my stomach and placing another on a short brick wall to steady myself. I’ve known for a while now that any day could be the day my body freezes over, but now I know for certain that it will happen – and soon. If we don’t find out a way to swap back, I may very well have only two more months left to live.

“Melissa?” Sarah asks, coming to a halt alongside me.

“I’m fine,” I say, holding up a hand so that she doesn’t come any closer. “I just felt a little dizzy.”

Breathing deeply, I move away from the brick wall and stand up straight, facing my two friends. Caden is frowning and Sarah looks worried. Neither seem to believe my lie. “I’m fine, okay?”

Their expressions don’t change. I sigh. “Come on, let’s go.”

They don’t say anything, but they do follow me as I walk the last of the way to Rand’s place, feeling as though I’m playing a game with death, and it’s won.

-:-:-:-:-

There’s someone waiting for us when we reach Rand’s house – and it’s not Rand.

He leans against the front door, his dark grey coat hanging loosely on his thin frame. Even from this distance I can see the way he’s both solid and not, as if he’s hovering between life and death, between this world and the next. It’s not long before a wave of icy air washes over us, freezing me to my core, and a voice in my brain pleads with me to turn around and go back.

I look over my shoulder at Sarah. She meets my eyes, offering me a small smile and a nod. Grimly, I smile back and face the path ahead of me.

“Caden,” I whisper. “You ready for this?”

Somehow, without speaking, the three of us have come to an agreement: we’ll face the ghost and deal with the consequences. There’s no point in evading him and besides, it’d be good to have one less thing to worry about.

Beside me, Caden nods, looking slightly sick. He’s afraid, and with good reason. The only way for him to get out of this situation without dying is to kill the ghost, but how do you kill someone who’s already dead?

We stop out the front of the house, a short pathway and a small wooden gate being the only things between the ghost and us. I swallow.

Casually, the man steps away from the wall, descending the two small steps that lead off the front porch and, in three long strides, reaches the gate. He stops.

It’s about now that I’m wondering how ghosts actually kill people, seeing as they don’t technically exist in this world. I eye the surprisingly short man – who is still at least an inch taller than me – and wait for him to make a move.

A minute passes.

Then two.

Caden gets bored of waiting. “Well?” he asks.

The ghost rolls his eyes, and it’s such a normal response that I nearly miss what he does next. In a fraction of a second, his arms shoot forward as if about to push Caden, but instead an enormous unseen force, like a strong gust of wind, launches him into the air. He hits the concrete with a dull thud, and the force has him skidding across the asphalt until he finally comes to a stop in the centre of the road.

Beside me, Sarah is frozen, her eyes wide and unbelieving. And I expect my reaction to mirror hers, except, it doesn’t. In the seconds between Caden’s body hitting the road and when he finally stops skidding, something in me clicks, driving me to action. Summoning my own abilities, I strike back, using the air to toss the ghost backward like a rag doll. He smashes into the side of the house and drops to the ground, not moving.

I work hard to make sure the shock I’m feeling internally doesn’t register on the outside. And it’s not just shock at what happened – it’s surprise at how much my powers have improved.

“Holy shit,” Sarah breathes, looking at me in awe and slight fear. I pay her no mind, immediately dashing to Caden’s side.

“Oh my God,” I say under my breath as he sits up slowly. The back of his shirt has been ripped to shreds and bloods seeps through everywhere, all the individual cuts becoming a mass of shiny scarlet before my eyes. His arms are no different.

“Far out,” I say. “This is really bad.”

Surprisingly, he manages a response. “No shit.”

I got to touch him, but pull back, and my hands hang uselessly in front of me, hesitating while my brain thinks of what to do. I barely notice Sarah kneel down next to me.

“We need to get him inside,” she says and then looks at Caden. “This will probably hurt.”

He nods weakly.

She takes one of his hands and instructs me to do the same, and painfully slowly, we help Caden get his feet. At one point, I unthinkingly place a hand on his back to steady him and he flinches, his body going rigid. “Shit, sorry,” I say, removing my hand. I try not to think too much about the bright red substance now coating it.

But then I look down at his legs and all thoughts of my blood-covered hand fly out of my head. There’s a gash on his left calf, so deep I think it might have torn through muscle. A hand flies to my mouth to stop myself from throwing up, and I stare down at the road, wondering how it could have done so much damage. Aren’t roads meant to be smooth?

But that’s when I see the slight dent Caden’s body left in the asphalt and the hundreds of loosened rocks that were once a part of the road. He must have hid the ground with so much force that the ground itself was damaged. I’m surprised he’s still alive.

“Have you broken anything?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

His response just causes me to frown.

It’s at this point that the front door flies open, revealing Rand. His eyes grow wide and he hurries down the path towards us.

“What happened?” he asks when he’s close.

“The ghost attacked him,” I reply and let go of Caden’s hand, allowing Rand to take my spot by his side. With his help, we get Caden off the road fairly quickly and we walk through the gate, still wide open from when Rand dashed over to us. Something compels me to turn around and close it, and so I do, leaving blood on the handle.

I hurry down the path ahead of them, eyeing the spot where the ghost fell to the ground. He’s not there.

“He’s gone,” I announce to the three of them as they walk up the stairs.

“What?” Sarah asks. “But he wasn’t moving and I never saw him get up.”

“He’s a ghost,” Rand says. “They aren’t fully present in this world or the next, allowing them to jump between the two. He probably just left for the other world.”

“Do you think I hurt him?”

“What did you do?”

“Threw him at the house.”

For some reason, Rand smiles at my response. “Yeah, probably.”

“So they can feel pain?”

He nods as we pass through the front door. I close it behind us, locking it.

“Can they be killed?” Sarah asks.

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Let’s leave the questions for later, shall we?”

She nods.

We get Caden to the lounge room and help him to lie face down on the couch. His eyes are squeezed tightly shut and blood continues to flow out of his wounds.

“I’ll go get the first aid kit,” Rand says. “Can you two wet some cloths from the kitchen and clean up some of the blood?”

Sarah and I get up, rushing to the kitchen. I find the cloths under the sink and we run them under cold water before heading back to the lounge room.

“How are you doing?” I ask Caden, kneeling down beside the couch.

“Alright,” he says, clenching his teeth as Sarah starts dabbing the gashes on his legs. She cringes when she gets a look of his left calf and I try my best not to look at it also.

I rip the remains of his t-shirt, pushing it to the side so that the material isn’t touching his back. Grabbing one of the cloths, I start dabbing at the wounds. “Sorry if this hurts,” I say. Then I realise something: he needs a distraction.  “How long has this ghost been watching you again?”

“Over a month.” He winces.

“Do you know why?”

“No.”

“Do you think that nameless group could have sent him?”

“They probably did.”

Rand comes back into the room and opens up the kit, but the second he sees Caden’s leg, he hesitates. “That’s gonna need stitches,” he says.

“A lot of things are,” I say, looking at the wounds on his back now that I’ve cleared up some of the blood.

“No one here happens to have a secret healing ability, do they?”

Sarah shakes her head.

“I can heal myself,” I offer and out of the corner of my eye I see Caden roll his eyes.

Rand cracks a small grin but doesn’t say anything.

After a while of cleaning and bandaging Caden’s wounds, Sarah says, “So hospital then?”

Rand sighs. “We have no other options. Unless…”

I look at him. “Do you know someone with a healing ability?”

He nods. “But you’re not going to like who.”

Already, I know where this is headed. “Who?” I ask grimly.

“Patrick.”