“Sixteen,” he answered.
“Hmm. You asked me if I was afraid of the future. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“Such a . . . human question.”
The fingers of one hand massaging him while the fingers of the other slowly unbuttoned her shirt.
“Not as much as the other one I asked.”
She tilted her head inquisitively. Her hair fell over her shoulder. Her face lost in shadow and her shirt falling open like a curtain drawn back.
“What was that?” she whispered.
“If you’d not been, for a very long time, inexpressibly lonely.”
The coolness of her fingers. The heat of his seared flesh.
“Your heart is beating very fast,” she breathed.
She stood up. He closed his eyes. For the promise. Just outside the circle of light, Grace stepped out of the pants that pooled around her ankles. He did not watch.
“Not so lonely,” Grace said, her breath caressing his ear. “Being locked in these bodies does have its compensations.”
For the promise. And Cassie the island he swam toward, rising from a blood-filled sea.
“Not so lonely, Evan,” Grace said. She touched his lips with her fingers, his neck with her lips.
He had no choice. His promise afforded none. Grace would never let him go; she would not hesitate to kill him if he tried. There could be no outrunning her or hiding from her. No choice.
He opened his eyes, reached up with his right hand and ran his fingers through her hair. His left hand slid beneath the pillow. Above them, he could see the lonely sun stripped of its offspring, shining in the lamplight. He thought Grace might notice the planets were missing. He expected her to ask why he needed to remove them, though it wasn’t the planets he needed.
It was the wire.
But Grace hadn’t noticed. Her mind had been on other things. “Touch me, Evan,” she whispered.
He rolled hard to his right and smashed his left forearm into her jaw. She stumbled backward as he came off the bed, driving his shoulder into her midsection. She sank her nails deep into the burns on his back and ripped. The room went black for a moment, but he didn’t need to see—he just needed to be close.
She may have seen the makeshift garrote of broken wood and mobile wire in his hand, or she might have been just lucky, but her fist closed around the wire and pushed as he drew it tight. He swept her leg with the outside of his good ankle and took her to the floor, following her body down, crushing his knee into her lower back on impact.
No choice.
He summoned every ounce of augmented strength that remained into tightening the wire, until it sliced through her palm and hit bone.
She bucked against his weight. He swung his right knee around and ground it into her head. Tighter. Tighter. He smelled blood. His. Hers.
The room spun around.
Sinking deep into blood, his, hers, Evan Walker held still.
WHEN IT WAS DONE, he crawled to the bed and pulled out the broken slat. A little long for a crutch—he had to hold the board at a difficult angle—but it would have to do. He hobbled to the other bedroom, where he found men’s clothing: a pair of jeans, a plaid shirt, a hand-knit sweater, and a leather jacket with the name of the owner’s bowling team, The Urbana Pinheads, emblazoned on the back. The fabric scraped and rubbed against his raw skin, making every movement a study in pain. Then he shuffled into the living room, where he found Grace’s rucksack and rifle. He threw both over his shoulder.
Hours later, resting in the nestlike mangle of metal in the middle of an eight-car pileup on Highway 68, he opened the sack to take inventory and found dozens of plastic baggies labeled with black marker, each bag containing clippings of human hair. At first he was puzzled. Whose hair was this and why was it in baggies, each neatly marked with dates? Then he understood: Grace was taking trophies from her kills.
Where the body went, the mind followed.
He fashioned a splint for his ankle from two pieces of broken metal and the rest of the bandage roll. He drank a few sips of water. His body ached for sleep, but he would not sleep again until he kept his promise. He lifted his face to the pinpricks of pure light fixed above him in the limitless dark. Don’t I always find you?
The headlamp of the car beside him exploded in a shower of pulverized glass and plastic. He dove beneath the nearest vehicle, dragging the rifle behind him.
Grace. It had to be. Grace was alive.
He left too quickly. He assumed too much, hoped too much. And now he was trapped, pinned down with no way out, and Evan realized in that moment how promises can be kept in the most unexpected of ways: He’d found Cassie by becoming her.
Wounded, trapped beneath a car, unable to run, unable to rise, at the mercy of a faceless, merciless hunter, a Silencer engineered to snuff out the human noise.
HE MET—found would be more accurate—Grace the summer they both turned sixteen, at the Hamilton County Fair. Evan was standing outside the exotic petting zoo tent with his little sister, Val, who had been demanding to see the white tiger since they arrived early that morning. It was August. The line was long. Val was tired and grouchy and sticky with sweat. He’d put her off. He didn’t like to see animals in captivity. When he looked into their eyes, something in their eyes looked back at him.
He found Grace first, standing beside the funnel cake trailer, a dripping wedge of watermelon in her hand. Blond hair that fell to the middle of her back, cool, nearly arctic features, especially the ice-blue eyes, and the cynical turn of her mouth, glistening with juice. She turned toward him and he quickly looked away, to the face of his baby sister, who would be dead in less than two years. A fact he carried within him, locked away in a different kind of hidden room. Sometimes it was hard to shake—the knowledge that every face he saw was the face of a corpse-to-be. His world was peopled with living ghosts.
“What?” Val asked.
He shook his head. Nothing. He took a deep breath and glanced toward the trailer again. The tall blond girl was gone.
Inside the tent, behind a steel mesh fence, the white tiger panted in the heat. Small children crowded in front. Behind them, cameras and smartphones clicked. The tiger remained regally indifferent to the attention.
“Beautiful,” a husky voice murmured in Evan’s ear. He did not turn. He knew, without looking, it was the girl with the long blond hair and lips that glistened with watermelon juice. The exhibit was packed; her bare arm brushed against his.
“And sad,” Evan said.
“No,” Grace said. “He could tear through that fence in two seconds. Rip off a kid’s face in three. He’s choosing to be there. That’s the beautiful thing.”
He looked at her. Her eyes were even more startling up close. They bored into his, and in a knee-weakening instant, he knew the entity hiding inside Grace’s body.
“We should talk,” Grace whispered.