Across Carina (31 page)

I closed my eyes. I was on a white sand beach.
My
beach. The sun was drenching my skin while Sal fed me raspberries. They were bursting between my teeth, trickling juice across my lips. In the water, a tiger shark was performing tricks just for us.

“Hellooo?”

I opened my eyes, and Sal was snapping his fingers in my face.

“Okay,” he said, “you’re going to sleep this off. That’s how I came to my senses. I’m not about to drag you from floor to floor. We will go willingly, together.”

I smiled, patting him on the shoulder.

“That was a beautiful speech, Sal, but I’m not tired.”

“You’re
going
to sleep,” he said.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

He fell to his knees.

“Jade, I’m begging you.”

I giggled. “Are you proposing? I’m not sure that my parents will approve. We’re still pretty young. But I could talk to them. I’ll do it.”

He sighed, taking my hands into his.

“I know this isn’t you,” he said. “Please sleep with me.”

I laughed. “You are so inappropriate, Mr. Yurek.”

Sal did not laugh, but his expression had softened. He began to reminisce about our meeting at the pond on Getheos. I closed my eyes, remembering, and I fell into him.

He wrapped his arms around me, and we leaned against the wall beside the elevator. I listened as he described the meadow where we’d danced and kissed in the rain. Soon I felt calm, even sleepy, and I let Sal lull me into the land of dreams.

After a three-hour nap, I awoke feeling much clearer. Sal and I were still curled up beside the elevator, and the sound of hip hop was filtering through the steel doors.

Almost immediately, I remembered my conversation with Fleuric, and I relayed it to Sal.

“He’s right that you shouldn’t feel guilty,” Sal said, “but he offered you a poor solution.”

“He said to enjoy people. How is that a poor solution?” I asked.

“Let’s try the elevator again.”

“And if we have to stop on every floor?”

We disentangled ourselves and stood. I tried to smooth down my tank top and pants, but they were wrinkled beyond repair. My jacket was missing, and my hair smelled sour. I hadn’t bathed in days. Neither had Sal, I noted when I caught a whiff of him.

“I wish there were stairs,” he was saying, “or some other way to evade the power of the house.”

I had my hands in my pockets, and suddenly I remembered the stone.

“Fleuric gave this to me,” I said, showing the stone to Sal. “He said if I rub it three times, it’ll make me invisible.”

“Invisible?”

Sal took the stone and held it beneath the light.

I shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”

“Is it?” Sal asked. “What are the implications? Can we trust this guy? I’d like to know how he got his powers.”

“Maybe he has a connection to El,” I said.

Sal gasped.

“El! We’re in his channel now. We should be able to communicate with him.”

“You’re right,” I murmured, feeling a sense of déjà vu. “But how are we going to reach him from in here?”

We stared at the ceiling. It was as bleak and beige as the walls around us. Even with the club booming in the next room, the lobby had an emptiness to it that could not be filled.

“El, can you hear me?” Sal asked.

Our only reply was from the flickering lights overhead, one of which was on its way out.

I felt awkward standing there waiting for the ceiling to speak. We had no clue what we were doing. But Sal had tried, and so would I.

“El, we’d like to go home,” I said, my lips wrapping slowly around the last word.

Home had become an alien concept. I couldn’t remember what my family looked like or how our house was laid out. My only memories were of Carina, as if I’d always lived there. Returning to Earth would mean returning to a life that I could no longer comprehend. Even basic math had become jumbled in my head.

“What’s nine times four?” I whispered.

Sal wasn’t paying attention.

“I don’t think we can reach El from inside the house, he said. “I guess we’ll have to use your stone after all. I’m out of ideas, and I’m afraid that if we try to go one floor at a time, we’ll get distracted for months or even years.”

I nodded.

Together we rubbed the stone three times, and then I returned it to my pocket.

“I can still see you,” I told Sal.

He shrugged. “Maybe if we’re both invisible, we can still see each other. That would make sense . . . sort of. Maybe not. I don’t know.”

The steel doors opened, and three boys stumbled out of the club, all holding purple drinks. Hip hop exploded into the lobby and then faded, like a passing siren. The boys staggered toward the elevator—toward me.

Sal tried to move me out of their way, but he missed me and somehow ended up on my other side. The boys walked right through me.

“What in the world?” I asked.

“Shh,” Sal said.

But the boys hadn’t heard us. And they definitely hadn’t seen us. They entered the elevator without as much as a glance in our direction.

“We’re not invisible,” Sal realized. “We’ve lost our bodies.”

I smiled. “Then we should in no way be detected by the house. Let’s go.”

We let the boys ride first. When the elevator resurfaced, we stepped inside and gawked at our reflections. We were stained purple from head to toe. Even our faces were covered in bruise-like marks.

I rubbed my cheek and flinched. They
were
bruises.

“Was my tank top always black?” I asked Sal, turning sideways.

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “I remember.”

As I looked to the panel on the wall, I noticed that most of the buttons were black, too. There were no longer numbers showing for any of the floors except the first six.

Sal was ecstatic. He punched the button for the first floor and waited eagerly for the doors to close.

But the doors didn’t close. In fact, Sal tried the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors all without success.

It wasn’t until he tried the sixth floor that suddenly the panel lit up and we started to move.

Sal laughed. “We just bypassed over half the house! This is awesome!”

“I know,” I said, “but don’t you wonder why the buttons for the other floors are blacked out?”

“Oh, I do,” he said. “I just don’t think we’re going to make much sense of . . . of . . .”

He trailed off.

I looked up, and Sal was staring in the mirror. As I followed his gaze, I saw that there had come an end to our reflections. We were no longer infinite. We were mirrored six times and then swallowed in darkness.

“Jade?”

“Yes?”

“If we don’t have our bodies, then how did we push the buttons?”

“I don’t know. . . . Maybe we only thought we pushed them.” My mind was clouding again.

“Or maybe someone pushed them for us.”

Ding!

The elevator had reached its stop. I looked at Sal right as the doors were opening.

“Let’s be quick,” he said.

I nodded, and we stepped onto the sixth floor.

We found ourselves standing at the forefront of a crypt. There were skeletons all around. They were sitting in circles and lining the walls and pitted against each other on the massive chessboard that was in front of us.

Behind the board, there was a round table covered in scarlet cloth. Candlelight was flickering on the cloth from a large, black chandelier that was hanging overhead.

“Think we’ve seen enough?” Sal asked.

“Yep,” I said.

Our plan had been reasonable enough—to physically step onto the sixth floor and then try getting back into the elevator. But as we turned to leave, the elevator was gone.

“I guess there’s more to see,” Sal said.

Reluctantly, we started for the table. I was growing uneasy.

“I think you were right about the stone,” I said.

“Then let’s deactivate it,” Sal said.

He held out his hand, and I placed the stone in it. Together, we rubbed it three times.

I wished that that could have been enough, but I felt like there was no way to be sure that we had our bodies back. Ever since we had rubbed the stone the first time, our abilities had been inconsistent. In the lobby, the boys had walked through me, but in the elevator I had touched my face. I was still struggling to make sense of it all.

When we arrived at the table, I pulled back the scarlet cloth. It had been concealing a hole that was wide enough for someone to fit through. I peered into the hole, but I couldn’t see anything.

“It must be pretty deep,” I said.

Sal bent down to look for himself. As he did, the stone, which he had been sliding between his fingers, fell into the hole.

Five seconds passed without a sound.

“It’s still falling,” he whispered.

The chandelier rattled, casting shadows on every wall. I shuddered at the thought of them coming to life. Even the chandelier was growing teeth between its crystals, and I had to look away.

Five more seconds passed before the stone finally landed.

Clink.

“What do you think is down there?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Sal said.

I looked into the hole again, this time pushing my head through. I felt a rush of cold air . . . and then suddenly I was sucked in!

Sal grabbed my leg and fell behind me. We screamed, and our echoes screamed back. The hole was loud and dark, and all of my blood pooled in my head as Sal’s grip on me tightened. We fell for ten seconds in cool paralysis.

Just before we hit the bottom, we were brought to a halt and left dangling. I covered my head and waited for a hard drop, but we were lowered gently onto the floor. It seemed the house didn’t want us dead just yet.

At the bottom, there was a marquee hanging from the ceiling. On it the word
BASEMENT
was flickering in neon letters. There was nothing else to be seen.

I struggled to my feet, noticing my legs as my pants rode up. Even they were covered in bruises. Sal’s face was swollen and so purple that it lit up the floor around us.

And there lay Fleuric’s stone.

Fuming, I snatched it and threw it under the marquee. Its path was illuminated as overhead lights flipped on in sequence, and I could see that there was something in the basement after all. It was just ahead—a metallic maze with two entrances.

I watched the stone fly in the entrance on the left, and then it disappeared. I had the feeling that we were supposed to follow it.

I turned to Sal.

“What if we can’t find our way out?” I asked.

“We will,” he said. “We’re smarter than the house. I think we’ve proven that much.”

“Then why are we still trapped?”

“Just because we’re smarter than the house doesn’t mean that the house isn’t smart at all. It’s putting up a good fight, and we still have to win.”

Sal and I wandered the maze, cold and hungry. All we’d had for days were those purple drinks. Without them we felt the withdrawal in our aches and stains. We were bleeding out in purple.

We took a left, another left, and then a right. Every turn felt random. There seemed no end to our possible combination of paths.

Walled in by black metal that distorted us, it didn’t take long for my claustrophobia to kick in. I slid to the floor and hugged my knees, trying to steady my breathing. It was ragged and hoarse, and I was only managing to inhale.

I felt Sal’s hand on my shoulder. But even still I cried. I began to sputter through tears.

“Why did we try taking shortcuts? Why did we even come in? We’re too young for this. I miss homework. I miss my family.”

“I wish mine were alive,” Sal remarked.

I looked at him. “Maybe they are.”

“Not my parents,” he said. “My sister, maybe.”

“I hardly remember my family,” I said. “But I miss them. I thought leaving them and everything else would make things simpler, but it did the opposite. And Perunda is the worst of all. Why would El make this place and these people?”

I rubbed my nose, my fingers now slick, and turned away from Sal.

He pulled me into him. “Everyone is capable of being dark—people here and people on Earth. But you’re right. Earth is better than these bizarre worlds of Carina. I only got comfortable on Getheos because I didn’t think that I could leave. You proved me wrong.”

“But I forgot along the way.”

“So we traded places for a minute. What are friends for? You walk in my shoes, I walk in yours.”

His eyes began to water, so I only nodded; and we curled up on the floor in disarray.

“Let’s try El again,” I said.

“You know he can’t hear us,” Sal said. “We have to escape the house first.”

His tone was soft, but unyielding. I started to protest, but I only managed three words. Something suddenly took hold of me—swathed me in paralysis. It was invisible and strong, like death.

It began to drag me away across the cold stone floor. Sal tried to reach for me, but he was blocked by the unseen force. He pounded on the air, and as I was pulled, I watched him shrink into nothing.

Exhausted, I lost my will to fight, and I closed my eyes.

When I came to, my legs were hanging off a three-legged stool. I looked up and found Fleuric in front of me, his bloody red lips in a smile.

We were in a hallway of doors. There was one door opposite me and two along each wall. I couldn’t see anything else or remember how I had gotten there.

“You did this,” I said.

Fleuric sneered. “No. I presented an opportunity, which you took. You make poor decisions, Jade. Or good decisions, depending on your perspective.”

“What do you want from me, Fleuric?” I asked.

I was in no frame of mind for guessing games. I could hardly keep my head up, and my body felt heavy, like I had been beaten.

“Oh dear,” he said. “You didn’t actually think my name was Fleuric, did you?”

I stared at him. His name had seemed strange, but it was the name that he had given me. Of course I had believed him.

Fleuric laughed. “Think about it. Think about those letters.”