In all the other disasters, his acts were just a small part of a larger whole . . . but this time, it was all him. He would be releasing the load of deadly beams. Not Squirrel, not Milos—him.

And so he stared at the button.

The girders were still dangling from the end of the cable when Allie body-surfed her way out of the nearby office building, and down the street toward the playground once more, but since her eyes were on the load of girders, she wasn’t watching the fleshies she surfed. She miscalculated, overshot the fleshie she was aiming for, and stumbled to the ground.

She was back in Everlost again, still down the street from the school. But something had changed. To Allie’s surprise, there were Afterlights running all around her—Milos’s Afterlights—and they were running away from the playground. Allie saw Lacey and caught her. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“It’s horrible!” Lacey said. “You have to run before it eats you!” And she raced off with the others.

Then Allie saw it. It was perhaps the most horrific thing she had ever seen: a puke-green creature covered with scales as sharp as razors. Its head was a giant bloodshot eyeball sprouting tentacles instead of eyelashes, and at the end of each tentacle was a hungry tooth-filled mouth.

. . . And at the sight of the horrible beast, Allie’s afterglow flushed purple with a deep and powerful love.

* * *

The journey of Mikey and Clarence to San Antonio was not an easy one. Suffice it to say that it involved many unorthodox methods of travel in two different worlds.

It was Nick’s sweet aroma that had led Mikey and Clarence to the playground. Without it, they would have wandered the streets of San Antonio as Allie had, no closer to solving the mystery of the psycho-jackers than she had been all these weeks. But once Nick came out into the open, without even knowing it he became a beacon for anyone trying to find him.

They found Nick right about the time Allie and Milos battled on the thirtieth floor. When they saw Nick, and the many Afterlights waiting in the playground, Clarence was hesitant. He had never seen so many “ghosties,” in one place. Mikey, however, went straight to Nick, who looked at him, bewildered.

“Mikey?” The change in Nick’s face was almost immediate. The unnatural roundness of his head took on a more defined shape.

“Have you found Allie?” Mikey asked, never realizing that her spirit had just shot past them, and into the office building a block away.

“Allie!” Nick said with intense joy. “That’s her name.” Now eyebrows formed, and lids that blinked over brown eyes.

“Of course that’s her name. Have you seen her?”