It had been a pretty bad football accident that landed Mitchell “Moose” Moessner’s body comatose in a Pittsburgh convalescent hospital, paralyzed from the neck down. Wilted flowers attested to the fact that he was visited regularly, but no one was visiting him at the moment that Allie “the Outcast” Johnson put his physical self to rest. Unlike Milos, he had not suffered brain damage. In fact, Moose’s brain should have been functioning normally, and yet he had never come out of his coma. It made perfect sense to Allie; consciousness could not exist here while his consciousness was elsewhere.

Moose could have skinjacked his own body if he had chosen to . . . if he had, he would have woken as a quadriplegic with no hope of motion below the neck, and no hope of even breathing for himself. Still, he could have done it, reclaiming some version of his old life. Now, however, that was out of the question.

There were many things that Moose feared: hell, the scar wraith, but God help anyone who witnessed the fury of Mary Hightower. As far as Moose was concerned, her anger was the most frightening thing in the universe—and for the first time ever, he was glad he was wearing a helmet, because he truly believed her rage could make his head explode.

“How could I have been so stupid?” Mary seethed. “How could I have been so blind to not know the truth from the moment Milos lost his ability?”

“Maybe itch a coincidench?” Moose’s eyes were full of tears, but fortunately his face mask hid them, and Mary was not looking too closely.

“If you think that, then you’re a more of a fool than I thought you were.”

He had lost his ability to skinjack only minutes after crashing the tanker truck into the electrical station. And since then he had been hiding, afraid to come back.

Mary paced back and forth in the gazebo. “This is Allie’s doing—I’m sure of it—and it’s all Milos’s fault! He should have sent her down the moment she was captured instead of making her the blasted figurehead of the train. He brought this on all of us!”

“Not really,” said Moose, trying to defend him, because Milos was beyond any ability to defend himself. All of his attention was now on a deck of cards he had taken from one of the other kids. Milos spent all of his time shuffling it, and looking for one-eyed jacks.

“What I want to know is how she found your bodies,” Mary said. “She must have known your true names!”

“Not neshisharily . . . ,” said Moose.