I shook my head. Cole grunted and turned his head as if looking for an answer. The man behind him—Ashe—paced back and forth. Cole met my gaze.
“Nik. Remember your first projection here? There were all those pictures of Jack, all those memories. Remember the pictures of the burned marshmallow? There were like fifty of them.”
Burned marshmallow. Burned marshmallow. I grasped on to the picture. Mentally set it next to the picture of Jack in my head. Burned marshmallow. What was significant about it?
I couldn’t think of anything except for how much I hated burned marshmallows.
I hated them.
Raising my head, I felt the light of hope show in my face.
“I remember.”
SOPHOMORE YEAR
The Surface. Millcreek Canyon.
It was Jack’s idea to drive his father’s old 1979 Scout up the canyon to roast s’mores. The last day of September felt more like a summer heat wave than a fall chill, and Jack was convinced it was our last chance to have a cookout.
Jack and Will sat in the front; Jules and I sat in the backseat, waving our arms in the air and screaming loudly like you do when your truck doesn’t have a roof.
It was good to be with Jack now that we had buffers in Jules and Will. Things had been strangely tense between us ever since I went to the party with Andrew. More than anything, I wanted our friendship to return to normal.
We pulled into the Church Fork campfire site and had our pick of fire pits. Jack parked the Scout in front of one of the highest places, and then we started up the trail to Grandeur Peak, a spectacular hike that would reward us with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the valley.
“Race to the top,” Jack said.
Jules put her hand on her hip. “It’s an hour-long hike. And you’re in football shape.”
“Excuses,” Jack said.
Jules looked as if she was about to argue, and then she took off running. “C’mon, Becks!”
I sprinted after her, laughing.
Jack and Will must have given us a head start, because it took them three whole minutes to catch up.
Jack went in front of me and turned around, jogging backward.
“Show-off,” I said, panting.
He grinned. “The view’s much better this way.”
My cheeks got hot, and not just because of the exercise. But Jack was always saying things like that. He said the same things to Jules too.
I’m not special. I had to remind myself of this over and over, especially lately, because my hopeless crush—the one my mom told me I would grow out of, the one that haunted my dreams—wasn’t going away. It felt as if I were running toward a cliff and I could see the edge; but I couldn’t stop running, even though I knew that if I jumped off, it would end badly.
“If you’re not going to try,” I said, and made a push to pass him. The sudden competition sparked him into action, and he turned around and did his turbo thing.
When he was out of sight, I eased up. “Go ahead, Jules,” I said. She was a long-distance track runner, so I knew she was just going slow for my benefit. She also couldn’t pass up a good race.
“You sure you’re okay?” she said.
“Yeah. I’ll have more fun if I don’t think I’m holding anyone back.”
“Okay. I’ll see you up there.”
“Please beat at least one of the boys,” I said.
She waved over her shoulder and took off.
Around the next bend, a small stream intersected the trail. I didn’t want to get my feet wet when there was still so much of the hike left, so I leaped to one of the stones in the middle. Only it was covered in moss, and my foot slipped.
I heard a pop as my ankle turned, and I fell into the stream, butt first. Tears sprang to my eyes. I reached down to my ankle. It felt as if someone had just shoved a billiard ball inside of it. I didn’t care about the couple of inches of water I was sitting in. I was too focused on the pain.
“Crap,” I said through clenched teeth. I scooted crab-leg style, holding my bad ankle up in the air until I was out of the stream and sitting on a log. The ankle started to swell.
I looked ahead up the trail. “Jules!” I called.
There was no answer.
“Jules!” I screamed louder.
Nothing.
I waited for a few minutes, then stood and tried to put weight on the bad ankle. Pain shot through my leg all the way up to my knee.
Okay, so I obviously wasn’t going to get down on my own. I pulled out my phone. No signal.
I did some mental calculations. Maybe forty-five minutes for the three of them to reach the top and then a half hour for them to get back down. But they’d wait for me for a while before they gave up and figured out something was wrong.
It’ll be okay, I thought, even though I knew my ankle would be twice as swollen by the time they reached me. But there was nothing I could do.…
At that moment Jack rounded the corner, almost at a flat-out sprint, interrupting my internal dialogue.
“Becks! Are you okay?”
It took me a second to get over my surprise. “I’m fine. I just twisted my stupid, stupid ankle.”
“Well, don’t blame the ankle.” He crouched in front of me and examined it, pushing up the leg of my jeans to get a closer look. It gave me chills, and I tried to pull it down a bit.
“How did you know to turn back?” I said.
With his head still down, he said, “I waited for you.”
“But it’s a race. Why did you wait for me?”
He lifted his head so that his eyes met mine. “I always wait for you.” He took a deep breath, my ankle still in his hands. “I’m always waiting for you.”
In an embarrassingly breathless voice that didn’t sound like my own, I said, “Because I’m so slow?”
He smiled. “Yes. But not in the way that you think.”
My heartbeat started racing. It ran right out of my chest and up into the sky, where it exploded in fireworks. At least that’s how it felt.
He was waiting for me. Right now. Waiting for me to say something. Wasn’t he?
Maybe he was messing with me. And if he was serious, would I be dumped in two weeks? Suddenly that cliff was closer than it had ever been. He’d left the decision open. I could jump off if I wanted to. Or we could pretend the cliff wasn’t even there. I could choose to believe that Jack was talking about how I was slow at running.
I turned my face away, trying to hide all the emotions Jack always brought out.
He lowered his head and pulled my hem back down around my ankle. “I think you’ll survive.”
My heart was beating so fast that I thought my survival was not necessarily a foregone conclusion. Or maybe he was talking about my ankle.
The silence at that point felt heavy. He sat back on his heels and watched me. He was waiting for me again.
“Um.” My voice sounded weird. “So how are we going to get down?”
He gave me a wry smile and helped me up. “You’re going to walk.”
It took us forty-five minutes to cover a distance that had taken me fifteen minutes to climb. But we made it.
He got my leg elevated on the cooler and put a bag of ice on it. Then he built a fire with the practiced hands of a Boy Scout, and we roasted marshmallows while we waited for Will and Jules to finish.
The sun started to set, earlier than we had anticipated. But it was fall. At one point I caught Jack staring at me, the shadows from the flames dancing across his face.
I put a hand to my hair. “Do I look that bad?”
He smiled. “You never care much about your appearance—”
“Hey!” I said, mock offended.
“That’s not what I mean.” He seemed flustered. Very un-Jack-like. “I just mean … What do I mean?”
“Are you asking me?”
He nodded, now completely at a loss.
I tilted my head, thrilled to see that even Jack could get flustered. “Maybe you mean, ‘Hey Becks, you have such natural beauty, even without effort you shine like the stars.’”
He stared at me and nodded slowly. Which was not the reaction I’d been expecting. For the first time since I’d known Jack, he looked … vulnerable. And I was the person who could hurt him. What was going on?
He looked at me with an intense expression, as if each word out of his mouth was paid for with a hundred push-ups. And finally he was too tired to go on. “You’re my best friend.”
“That was your point? Well, Jack,” I said, leaning toward him. “You sure took the long way to get there.”
“Am I your best friend?”
“Of course,” I said without hesitation.
“Good,” he said. His face finally relaxed a little.
“But you know what?” I said, leaning toward him.
His face tightened up. “What?”
“Your marshmallow is on fire.”
He looked down at the end of his wire hanger to where his marshmallow had become a flaming ball of black goo. With a smile, he brought it close to his lips and blew it out.
Just like that, his characteristic smirk was back. “Perfect. Exactly how I like them.” He gingerly pulled the charred remains off the end of the stick.
“That looks disgusting,” I said.
His smile became deranged, and he brought the black ashes to his mouth and took a giant bite. Flakes of marshmallow ash dusted his mouth and cheeks.
He closed his eyes. “Mmmmmm.”
I snorted.
The fire had died down, the sun had long ago set, and Jack and I were in a little circle of light. I wanted everything inside that circle to be the only things that existed. Just for a little while.
I hope you’re still waiting for me, Jack.
NOW
The Everneath. The Ring of Wind.
I looked down at my feet. My tether was back. It was strong and tangible.
“It worked!” I said to Cole. But he didn’t answer. I looked back to where he should’ve been, but he wasn’t there. He was gone.
Frantic, I turned in circles, searching for any sign of him. “Cole!” I shouted his name over and over, but all I could hear was the wind.
We’d been together the whole time, hadn’t we? Was he playing some sort of sick joke?
“Cole, this isn’t funny,” I said, my voice shaking. “Please. Don’t do this to me.”
There was no reply. If anything, the wind got louder.
What if he was in trouble? I tried to replay the last few minutes in my head, but the memory was shaky. Flashes of images passed through my mind. We were walking together; I was telling my story. Had I lost my balance? Did I fall into the wall again? The moment I asked myself those questions, I was flooded with images of me falling into the wall and being taken up by the wind and blown into the sky.
But were they real? Or were they created by my mind?
I had to get moving. Sitting here, trying to sort out what had happened, would make me crazy.
Retracing my steps might’ve helped, but by this point I was so turned around that I couldn’t remember which way I’d come from. My tether was pointing straight ahead, so I decided to go the exact opposite way. Maybe that would take me back.
I ran. If something had purposely separated us, it couldn’t be good. Using my tether as a guide, but in the opposite direction, I sprinted around corners, through hidden archways in the maze that took me from one corridor to the next, frantic.
What if I couldn’t find him? What if I was trapped here forever in one of those endless loops Cole had told me about?
I leaped through one more archway and froze. There was somebody there, standing with his back to me. It wasn’t one of us, and he looked as if he had too much meat on his bones to be a Wanderer. He had shaggy brown hair. And broad shoulders.
He turned around, and his big brown eyes went wide. “Becks?”
TWENTY-FOUR
NOW
The Everneath. The Ring of Wind.
Tears sprang up in my eyes, and I tried to catch my breath. “Jack?”
The edges of my vision started to blur. The blood drained from my face, and my head filled with air. Jack raced toward me and caught me just as I started to pass out.
“Stay with me, Becks.”
I fought to keep my eyes open. “You said those exact words. When you left me.”
“I know,” he said. His strong arms were around me, keeping me upright, and he brushed the hair from my eyes. “I remember everything. Like it was yesterday.”
I brought a hand up to his face and ran it over his cheeks, his forehead, his neck. He was so real. His face was rounder than I’d last seen it in my dreams.
I ran my fingers down his arms, tracing the ropey muscles there. He was beautiful. “Jack.” His name coming off of my lips was the sound of a wish fulfilled, a longing satisfied. “How are you here? Did you escape?”
He smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you. For so long.”
He dropped his head and kissed me, and I felt that kiss everywhere. My knees went weak. In fact, my entire body went weak, and a strange darkness began to creep in behind my eyes. His lips were hard against mine. They allowed for no space, and too soon my lungs were screaming for air.