If there was one thing that Allie had, it was insight into the soul, having seen through the eyes of so many people—and every time they showed Seth Fellon on the news, there was something about him—something about the whole situation—that didn’t sit right with her. She couldn’t say why.

“They ought to give him the death penalty,” Miranda’s father said while watching the news one night. “Lower the age for capital punishment, and be done with him.”

It was Miranda herself who gave Allie a crucial bit of insight. Allie was there in the room, observing but not skinjacking at that particular moment, so the thought was Miranda’s all on her own.

“I think he’s innocent,” Miranda said.

“That’s only because you think he’s cute,” her brother teased.

Miranda smacked him, then she said, “His tattoos have skulls and roses but no fire. If he’s a pyro, his body art would have fire in it, don’t you think?”

Allie couldn’t help but be a little bit proud of Miranda; she was absolutely right!

In her book Caution: This Means You!, Mary Hightower says this about the hazards of entering living-world buildings.

“Don’t. Plain and simple. Don’t enter a living-world building unless you have no other choice. Living-world floors are deceptively thin. Stand on a wood floor, and you may just find yourself sinking through to the basement too quickly to escape the relentless pull of gravity. Step into a living-world elevator, and you may just find it rising to higher floors, leaving you behind to plunge down the shaft.

Do not be tempted by curiosity, and do not accept a dare. Limit yourself to buildings that have crossed into Everlost. They are the only buildings worthy of our attention anyway.

CHAPTER 21
The Benson Burner

It was a simple matter for Allie to get into a high security detention center, walking right through every security door as an Afterlight. Unlike most Afterlights, she didn’t have to worry about sinking through living-world floors, because she simply jumped inside of living hosts, piggybacking rides inside of them, hiding behind their consciousnesses, rather than taking them over completely. Such “half-jacking” made it easy for her to get around without being noticed. First she half-jacked a correctional officer on his way to the main cell block, hanging on to the edge of his thoughts as he went about his business. Then she jumped to another, and another and another, until she had a good sense of the detention center’s layout, and had gotten some inside info about the Benson Burner, who was the subject of quite a few conversations.

Apparently the public defender’s office had assigned Seth Fellon a lawyer who came to see him daily, because his family had disowned him.