Zin thought back to her earliest days in Everlost. Ripping wasn’t easy when she first began. The world held on to stuff like a kid holds on to toys. “No,” Zin had to admit. “It was hard at first.”

“But the world got used to it, right?”

“I guess …”

“It got used to ripping, so it’ll get used to … cramming … as well.” They both looked at the half-eaten sucker on the living world counter until the candy store cashier noticed it and eyed it with disgust. He then picked it up, and dropped it into the trash.

“I want you to practice this,” the Ogre told Zin. “Practice cramming every chance you get, until you can do it as quickly and as smoothly as ripping.”

Then Zin asked the million dollar question. “Why?”

“Does there have to be a ‘why’?” asked the Ogre. “Isn’t knowing the full extent of your powers reason enough?”

But if there was one thing Zin had come to learn and respect about the Ogre, it was his strategy as a general … and the fact that everything he did was always a single move in a much larger campaign.

CHAPTER 23
Severance and Blithe

Doris Meltzer had led a long and productive life. At the age of eighty-three, she knew she didn’t have much time left, but she was satisfied with the life she had lived.

For her entire adult life, she wore her wristwatch on her left wrist, but would always glance at her right. She would gently rub it, and convinced herself it was just a nervous habit. The truth of it lay below the threshold of her understanding. At times she touched upon the true meaning of it—at the moment of waking, or the instant before sleep set in—the two places where one’s spirit comes closest to Everlost. Never close enough to actually see it, but close enough to sense its existence.

It all began the night of her high school prom. It was a momentous occasion, but not in the way anyone had expected. Her date was a boy named Billy, and she’d had a crush on him since grade school. She had dreams they might be married—and in those days marrying your high school sweetheart was more the norm than the exception.

Billy had just learned to drive and was proud to be doing it, taking her to the prom under the capable control of his own hands and feet, even if he was driving his father’s clunky old DeSoto.

He gave her a wrist corsage of yellow roses.

It was a beautiful thing that matched her lemon chiffon dress. She wore it on her right wrist, and lifted it to her face, inhaling its rich aroma all night long. Even then she knew that, for the rest of her life, when she smelled roses, she would think of this night. She would think of Billy.