What if alive and dead weren’t the simple choices everyone acted so sure about? The Grays were really thinking about it now, their eyes slick with possibilities. They all knew people who were technically alive but weren’t bothering to live. They knew people who were dead on paper but whose memory lingered like sharp perfume after someone leaves a room.

Imogen closed her eyes. “If I turn into a ghost, I’m going to haunt you all so much.”

“Fuck that!” Lelia shouted.

June laughed, hiding from the swear behind crosshatched fingers.

“Really?” Imogen’s eyes snapped open, and the rest of the Grays focused on her pupils, slivered thin against the sun. “I thought it was a compliment. We’re friends now. I would never give you up just because I was dead.”

She smiled, and the line of her lips was a thread, binding them.

The Grays: Now

Danny slips out of her shoes and stands in her bare feet, adding her likeness to the other four. They gather in a circle around the pile, but not in the usual way. Now the Grays spin outward, their backs to the center, arm pressed to arm, protecting everything inside that circle.

Rush sings a song that is made of thorns. Of Don’t come closer.

Hawthorn weaves words through the notes, stitching together a warning as she sprinkles water from the Pacific vial on top of the shoes and the rosin, the flowers and the wax and the hair. Her fingers shake, but her voice is steady. “You will not touch what is not yours.” She passes the vial, and they all dip their fingers in the water and sprinkle it, repeating the words. “You will not touch what is not yours. You will not touch what is not yours.”

Even though sunset is hours away, darkness drops. The Grays have time to share one panicked look before the water they’re dribbling catches fire, and the fire eats everything it falls on. The Grays are pitched out of the circle, away from one another. Danny cries out, her fingers singed. Hawthorn catches herself on her palm, bloody where it hits a rock. June falls, her leg twisted beneath her. She gasps, but the wrench is too sudden to feel how bad it is at first.

And then, it’s a thousand hornets stinging. It’s having your leg fall asleep hard and wake up harder, the pins and needles staying hours or days past the time when they should have faded.

This hurt is going to stay with her.

The unnatural darkness lets up, leaving the Grays in the standard blue of late afternoon. When the Grays put themselves back together, they turn to find that, where the likenesses were a minute ago, there are only five marks of scorched earth, like dark sunbursts.

“Did it work?” Danny asks.