For Life, Alex translated in her head. The Latin had been inscribed on her great uncle’s tombstone. He died during World War II, and she had often passed his tombstone when she visited her mother’s grave. Alex had thought during those visits how ironic it was to carve those two words on a stone that marks the existence of death.
As they stepped through the archway, Alex noticed that they were venturing through a series of walls, each one tilting at a different angle. She shuffled through one disorienting arc after another, feeling like the rotating hand of a clock.
Darkness shrouded the sky when they finally reached a courtyard framed by two black L-shaped buildings. They towered in size, and thus Alex realized the purpose of the mammoth trees. Crossbreeds between skyscrapers and medieval churches, the epic structures stood blatantly out of place in the middle of the forest. Crookedly placed gothic stones comprised the misshapen framework, each block cracked into a unique form. It was imperfection at its best.
“This is it?” Alex whispered.
Ellington’s shoulders relaxed. “It’s a small part of Eidolon, but it’s a good place to start.”
A rippling of fog lapped at her ankles like an airborne stream. Outlining the rickety, stone pathways through the courtyard, hazy streetlights stood at attention allowing ivy to coil around their bases. This is exactly what she’d expected a ghost town to look like. The scene was daunting and exquisite in a fabulously eerie kind of way.
One was thing missing. “Where are all the people?”
“I’m not sure of the time,” Ellington said. “But I assume the sessions are still in progress.”
“Sessions?”
“Like workshops. There’s so much you don’t know about this afterworld.”
“You make it sound like school,” she said with a grimace.
“The actual city is farther that way.” Ellington pointed through a gap between the two buildings. “But where we stand now is Eidolon’s Brigitta Square, a campus where the newly buried must stay.”
“How long?”
“A few years.”
“And I have to take sessions here? Or workshops, whatever they’re called.”
“I think you’ll appreciate all there is to learn.”
“Learn about what?”
“Being a spirit.”
Alex looked down at herself. “But I already am a spirit.”
“Were you not a person when you were born? And yet you still had a lot to learn, right?”
Alex had no counterargument, so she merely crossed her arms.
Ellington smirked. “Remember when you asked how I was able to cross the river so gracefully? It wasn’t because I’ve crossed it so many times before, although I’m sure that helps. It’s because I was able to calculate how quickly I needed to walk based on the speed of the moving water.”
She recalled that he hadn’t even hesitated at the riverbank. “How did you do that?”
“My mind. You can do it too. You just don’t know how yet.”
“I hate math.”
“You won’t hate it when you realize how good you are at it. You need to learn to use the new capacity of your intellect. Why do you think a learning center was built inside the city? And besides, you can’t just be thrown into a world without knowing the rules.”
Spirits had rules?
“People have difficulty dealing with the concept of death. The learning, the people, the campus—they help the newly dead to cope.”
“And I would live here?”
He stretched his hand towards a door that stood poised in its elegance with Brigitta carved above the frame. “Right there, but we’re waiting on someone.”
Alex felt a pounding in her chest. Her mind hadn’t forgotten what anticipation felt like.
“I have no idea what’s keeping her. She’s usually very punctual.”
Alex’s heart sank. Her. Not Chase.
Ellington stood tapping his foot, checking the sky, and fidgeting with a button on the cuff of his shirt.
“What’s the matter?”
“I wish I knew what time it was.”
She reached out for his wrist. “Why don’t you just use that watch?”
His mouth popped open in surprise. “I hadn’t even realized I had one.” He rubbed his head. “It still gets me sometimes.”
“What does?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. And, oh, it’s later than I thought. It’s going to be very crowded here soon.” He lifted a hand and began to nibble on his nails. “Stay here. I’m going to see if I can find her.”
“Can’t I go with you?”
“You won’t be able to get in.”
Alex inspected the door for a lock but realized it didn’t even have a knob. “But you can?”
“I used to live here. A long time ago.” Ellington approached the monstrosity of a door, and it swung open with a groan of welcome. “I’ll be right back. It will only take me a minute.” The door slammed immediately behind him, reinforcing the idea that Alex was uninvited.
Before a minute passed, Alex heard the creaking of another door, and a boy emerged from the fog. He darted through the archway connecting the two buildings and disappeared without noticing her. The way her anxiety began to rise, Alex could have been standing in a room at the bottom of the ocean and hearing the first drip of water seeping through the cracks.
The door opened again. Drip. And again. Drip, drip. It leaked out spirit after spirit. They were very diversely dressed, to say the least. Their attire ranged from sundresses to prom dresses, rainy day sweats to runway chic. No one else seemed to think this was strange. Despite their differences, they swam together, immersed in the same air of excitement, like it was the last day before a holiday.
Some of them noticed Alex and began giggling or elbowing one another. How ironic, Alex thought, that a girl in a bathrobe was eying her like she was the oddball. And then came the flood.
The doors of the building burst open, releasing dozens of spirits who spilled out into the square. Alex had to move with the tide to avoid being trampled. As she treaded among the crowd, she couldn’t be sure if they were staring because of her frail appearance—her size had always generated attention—or because in a small setting like this one, a new face stood out.
The attention only increased when Alex broke away from the current to stand alone in the corner of the square. The whispers and the pointing didn’t bother her, but the paranoia did. Kids stood on tiptoe, scanning the perimeter, and some covered their heads with their books. Alex tried to ignore them and keep her focus, searching for Chase. Hoping.
She probably wouldn’t have seen it coming if not for the eruption of screams. A dark shadow inched across the crowd. Above it, a stone boulder of a bench arched to the peak of its height and surrendered to gravity.
Ellington had not been lying about the new extent of her mind. Now that she thought about it, she could see the trajectory of the object, as though someone had used a marker to trace it in the air. The bench was set to land on the crown of her head. In that split second, she could even visualize exactly where the pieces would land once the bench was demolished.
Instinctively she thought to run, a logical reaction, but before she could move, an unexplainable energy tugged at her brain. She cried out as her head filled with pressure like a screeching teapot. She feared her skull might burst, and prayed for the pain to release her. It aptly obeyed, shooting from her, detonating like a bomb, forcing her to her knees. The granite bench halted above her, colliding with an invisible barrier. It fell to the ground and landed with five simultaneous claps of thunder.