Reality slams into me and sends me running.

My brain rushes into a shutter of snapshots, receiving the stimuli so quickly that I see the scene in split-second pictures.

Leo's curly head held upwards—

The black braids of Emily Collins as she—

—pink lips puckered at the Shade like he's giving it a stern talking to—

There is another of Paqad blood we could use.

—cradles her wrist to her chest where she fell from the monkey bars—

—Jase's endearingly perplexed frown as I abandon him in my dust.

Only then do I remember my ring and my duty, but I don't have time to spin my ring the two times clockwise (to fast forward time) and one time counter (to rewind it) needed to activate my Disillusion. My personal invisibility cloak. Too late now. I'm fully visible instead of the rippled-air camouflage illusion my suit and ring can transform me into as I leap cleanly over the turtle-shaped sandbox and barrel into my little brother.

All I can hope for is that Jase and any other humans in the vicinity have found another insane girl to stare at.

Doubtful.

Leo releases a squawk of protest when I crush him to the ground. He looks up at me with wide, aqua eyes that take up half his face, and I realize in this moment that I probably should have approached this situation differently.

"Annnndddd the mighty Leo the Lion gets captured by the victorious zoo keeper!"

I've amended the situation a few seconds too late. Still, I ruffle my brother's fluffy hair and give him a rough, animalistic growl, but my heart is racing, pumping, thumping. "I think that means I win. Again."

I don't look at the Drude Shade as I twist Leo against me and spin him away.

It isn't even dark. The sun still shines. This Shade should not be here.

Leo's tiny fists fight against the cage of my arms, and he's not laughing even though I'm indulging in his favorite game: Wild Zoo Escape. Perhaps he can read my lies better than others.

"Ouch, Guin, you're crushing me!" He pommels my forearms, his body coiled. "Can't you tell I'm busy?"

He tries wiggling like a lizard to slip underneath my hold, but the fear of my two worlds colliding has him in a near choke-hold. "How did you get here?" I try to keep my voice light, so light. My words could float away on the breeze. "Who brought you here?"

"How did you get here?" he counters in that seven-year-old lawyer voice of his.

"I can drive, Squirt."

"So can Daddy, Bumhead."

Bumhead because he's still innocent enough to consider butt to be an equivalent to a swear word. Serah Mallory can't know. She can't know. Can't. Know. I will not let the Seers use Leo like they used and discarded Jericho. And my dad is here? But of course he's here because what else could go wrong with this day? My lungs seize into a fist so tight that I swear I see black stars in a halo around Leo's hair.

"Let me go!" Leo demands with a stomp of his foot. "That monster hurt the girl, and she shared her shovel with me." And then his eyes widen into a Caribbean pool of such trust that it nearly tears me in two. "You can fix this, Guin."

That trusting expression reminds me of myself and the way I used to view my mother. I had always hoped to mentor Leo in the world of the Orbs Hall, used to dream about the day he would be old enough to understand, planned lessons and everything. But now, after everything that has happened, I won't have him be any part of this. He manages to slip away from me when my grip slackens but my reflexes are quick and I manage to grab him by his thin shoulders.

He glares at me, but I glare right back. "I can't stop what doesn't exist, Leo."

He purses his lips, as stubborn as I can be. "You've seen them!" he argues. "You scared them away from my bed when I was little!"

Part of me wants to laugh at him: little? He's barely been speaking in complete sentences for two years now because he had a speech impediment and couldn't fully express himself until he was nearly five years old! But the Settler part of myself bleaches, color leaching from my skin, and I realize that Leo has been seeing Shades far longer than I have ever realized.

My heart stops.

Leo looks up at me, hooking his fingers around my wrists attached to his shoulders. "Help her, Guinny."

I'm already shaking my head back and forth. I should help Emily, I could help her, but I can't. Not now. I sigh heavily, my breath whooshing across my brother's face. I glance around: Where's my dad? If I could pawn Leo off on him, then I could—

"Those monkey bars are tricky little beasts, am I right?" Jase asks Emily Collins, squatting down beside the young girl.

My breath catches in my throat. Where did he come from? Emily is still blubbering, but her brown eyes watch Jase a little shyly. She hiccups quietly before warbling through quivering lips, "You f-fell off t-them when you were m-my age?"

Jase catches my shocked stare and winks. "No—well, yes—but I also fell off of them just last week. I think the scrapes make me look tougher, don't you think?" he asks Emily, showing her the palms of his hands. She nods slowly, eyes wide in her face. "Just like you. Next time, you'll conquer them, no problem."

Leo stands on his tiptoes and whispers in my ear, "Who's that?"

I can only shake my head because looking at Jase as he offers Emily—my Emily—one of his hands to help her back to her feet leaves me oddly breathless. Leo's finally able to tear himself from my grasp and approaches Jase and Emily, palms held outwards as if to show he's unarmed.

"Can you walk home?" Leo asks Emily. He bumps shoulders with Jase's much broader one like my little brother is releasing him from duty.

A mad desire to giggle threatens to consume me, and I choke on any words I would have when Jase glances back at me, rising slowly to his feet.

"You know, when I called you out as Superwoman, I didn't actually expect you to dash off to battle a jungle gym," he teases.

"Well, I do aim to be unpredictable," I mutter.

Something chillingly cold sweeps by my ankle, and I try not to flinch towards the blade hidden in my suit as the Drude Shade slinks past me. At least it's a lower-level Shade, the mischievous sort who dabble in immaturity, like yanking a ten-year-old from playground climbing equipment to feed off the fear it would induce. Its goat-like hooves clop across the grass, its scaly body camouflaged into the greenery around it.

"Filthy heaven's scent," it hisses in a voice—if you could call it that—like a bag of gravel crunching together as it gets dumped onto a construction site. Shades spout out the same nonsense all the time: the reek of righteousness, hell's fury, the Void's happy-homey atmosphere. Deranged creatures. I try not to follow the Drude's movements, but the damned creature is testing my patience because it's inching its way back towards Emily and Leo, twig fingers tapping together in a menacingly minion-type way. I suck in a hot breath, sweat trickling down my bra, stuck in my suit.

"Burns. Always burning."

Jase doesn't notice the creature weaving between his legs like smoke. I clench my teeth tightly, fingers itching to unsheathe my blade and drive it through this thing's head for the first time in months. My fingers inch towards my ring to spin it, twist it, hide me, but Jase is watching me, and Leo is sending Emily Collins back off towards an open-air patio that belongs to a house not even fifty yards away—

"The key is near," the Drude scratches again. "The key to be found survives."

Every single one of my organs jump so hard that I'm nearly lifted off my feet. The key: what does a creature like a Drude know about it? It's hard to think when my heart is screaming so loudly.

"You know what they say about daydreamers?"

I startle at the sound of Jase's deep voice, my retorts on some inborn autopilot manual system I somehow possess. "No, but I'm sure you're about to enlighten me."

"Daydreamers daydream because they don't have much of a social life going on," he finishes.

My arms cross again, my hand closer to the blade sewn into my sleeve. "Who says that, exactly?"

Jase smirks, and he quirks an eyebrow. "Taylor Swift, I think. I saw the quote written in a girl's bathroom stall once. It's a memory that has always stuck with me, for obvious reasons, I'm sure."

I'm only half-listening because just as Jase was apparently somehow stuck in a women's toilet, I'm currently stuck between trailing the Drude Shade as it nips at Emily's heels, a rabid dog on the loose, and forcing Leo back home before he rushes off to be Emily's knight in shining make-believe armor again. And the key. The lost key. If I were a still an aspiring Settler, the choice would be easy, really.

Videns supra Affectum.

Seeing above Feeling.

Unfortunately, I've always been a rather selfish person. I brush past Jase without a response, something I'm sure he'll mourn over seeing as I didn't even inquire about his mysterious bathroom mishap. It most likely promises to be a riveting story.

"Leo, let's go."

Who else is looking for the key? Who else even knows about it?

"Where's Dad?"

Leo tears his eyes from Emily's retreating back; she's currently stumbling up the steps towards her screened door. "But I—"

"Where's Dad?" I repeat through clenched teeth.

"One of the swings was broken; he fixed it. But, Guin—"

Of course he did. My dad: the fixer. Hopefully, the swingset still stands upright. I tug on Leo's arm, but he resists, taking the time to wave a small hand in Jase's general direction. "Be careful!" he calls out to Jase.

Don't speak another word, Leo, be quiet. Be silent. Be NORMAL.

I don't dare look back at my faux cowboy who is once again being left in my destructive wake. Besides, I already know the expression that I would see if I did: bewilderment, confusion, crazy-person.

Leo trips in my haste. "Stop being weird, Guin," he demands, and his tone gets all snooty, or maybe he's about to cry even though he hardly even cried as a baby—"You used to be a good fixer," he accuses before stubbornly retreating into the silent treatment.

My denial lodges in my throat because I had been a great fixer. The most promising Settler of my age, as a matter of fact. I tug on Leo's hand just like I tug myself into this new life every day.

A sense of uneasiness rattles the knobs of my spines, knocking them loose, and I suddenly feel like screaming at my seven-year-old brother. You have no idea, Leo, none at all! No one knows anything, and I fear I'm going to lose my mind. I bite my tongue hard and channel the pent-up anguish into a promise: I will check in on Emily Collins as soon as Leo is tucked away; my ring will remind me anyways. My fool-proof mystical penpal.

Besides, I should wait for dark, anyways.

Shades could only be sent back to the Void when the moon was high.

Then again, a Drude should not have been visible in the sun.

And what about Jase? my mind hisses at me. What about him? I shoot back because I have a feeling Jase can handle himself.

O * O * O

I'm lying on my stomach, glaring at the silver manacle around my finger every two seconds even though I'm trying to focus on my journal. After locating my father, who had been tightening the bolt on the teeter-totter with the wrench he keeps in his back pocket at all times, I was forced to throw quite the teenage tantrum about needing to get home, and, no, I did not want to go out for sushi because I have summer reading to catch up on for Battlefield Prep and—

How could you have let Leo wander off alone in a park, Dad? There are creatures waiting to prey on him even out here in farmland U.S.A. I'm trying to keep us alive, Dad, and you're doing a pretty terrible job at helping me!

Of course, I didn't say that last part, but I've locked myself in my bedroom for the past two hours regardless, just in case my fear bleeds my secrets out of me. Because it's not my dad's fault. It's mine, and Serah Mallory's, Adelaide Paqad's.

Jericho Crosse's.

I swear at my ring and flick it sharply with my fingernail; perhaps it is malfunctioning like Ewan Maccabee first suggested all those days ago in that Conclave meeting. Or, the repressed optimism within me whispers, maybe Emily Collins is fine. Then there would be no need for her name to appear on my ring. Maybe her Orb settled itself, the Drude successfully frightened away from Leo's stern telling off.

Or maybe she's already in the Void.

"She's safe," I mutter to the pessimistic betrayal, but it's difficult to convince my eyes of that fact because they still watch my ring, waiting for signs of trouble.

Frustrated, I groan at myself, throwing my face into my arms to muffle the sound. I hate these two lives; it had been so much easier to accept them both when I had really only lived in one: my Settler life with Jericho had been mine. I thrived there, with him, in the Orbs Hall, when Serah Mallory had been the mother figure that I wanted.

But that life was wrenched from me six months ago, an abrupt tear in the page of the novel of my life, so where do I fit in now?

Nowhere.

"If you weren't here, you would be nowhere, and then you'd be in the Void."

Those familiar words seep out of my journal, staining across my heart, and then I'm on my feet. I'm moving, throwing my hair into a tight ponytail, pulling the sleeves of my black Catwoman suit down to my wrists. I should have reported to the Orbs Hall right after I failed to take care of that Drude Shade, but I'm no longer Serah Mallory's poster child. And thank goodness for that because it saves me a trip since I never returned my Settler suit to the Hall. It only takes me five seconds to lace up my shoes, zip up the suit's zipper to my throat, and then I'm sweating in the humidity as I sprint off through the trees that dot the roads of my neighborhood.

I'm not even sure where I'm going, but the rhythmic beat that the soles of my feet make on the pavement has always been therapeutic. The sound is a pattern, one that I know well, a staccato of drums that push every other thought from my mind. I won't think. I can't think. I will just do. The moisture in the air makes my lungs feel as if they're drowning, and I smile as I force my legs faster, lengthening my strides, pumping my arms.

Two miles later, I find myself at the back of Emily Collins' house. There's a faint scent of smoke on the wind from someone burning their compost, and it meddles with the air's heat in a confusing mix of seasons. I place my hands on my knees, breathing hard, as I observe the quiet home. Crickets chirp with a peace that I lack. Please. I pray I don't hear sounds of distress. Of mourning. A lamp flickers on in one of the second story bedrooms, an outline of young girl with spiraling braids backlit against the night as she closes her pale pink curtains.

See? She's fine.

The relief sends a shudder down my spine, and I plop down onto the grass, landing on an exposed tree root, when I hear it.

"Follow the scent."

A precise clench of my fingers and a flick of my wrist releases the glass blade from my suit. It shoots out like a javelin, but I grasp onto the iron handle before it runs from me. I'm pure reaction now, retreating into my instinctual zone, as I spin my ring twice and once, the Disillusionment rolling down my spine and out along my arms like someone doused me in a bucket of ice water.

"Scent to her."

I'm invisible to Peripheral eyes now. I jump to my feet, flipping the blade to my left hand, which has always been my stronger one because I had been forced to train with it for hours on end. The waning moon reflects enough light that it glints off my blade, and I can just make out the swirling, white mass within it that matches the mist of the orbs.

"She to key."

I spin towards the grating voice.

I find it. A dark spot. An absence of life. A void. I can hear it moving, slithering along the grass until it also finds me. Though the Disillusionment hides me from the Peripherals, there's no such luck from Shades. The black mass that can only be its head narrows in on me. It lifts on a sniff, a trained mutt on the hunt. We watch each other through the night, the blade in my hand warming familiarly, and then its head begins to morph.

My curse gets sucked down my throat when I inhale too sharply.

An Obake Shade. A shapeshifter.

The Void's tracker.

The grip I have on my blade tightens. I shove all the thoughts about who has commanded this Shade to enter the Peripherals in search of a portal key out of my mind. For now, at least. Because the Obake's body expands, muscles punching out from the Darkness, limbs beginning to take shape, and its head—it flickers between toned colors, a television that's had its satellite knocked out, until the Obake settles on a face to wear.

Everything within me freezes, my bones as brittle as ice and blood as thick as a twenty-foot snow bank. The Obake stills as well, its transformation complete, and raises its now very human head.

The boy's hair is blond, slicked back behind his ears, a navy suit covering his round shoulders, and I stumble over the name that falls from my lips.

"Jericho."

_ _ _

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