She’s onto something. This world, the in-between, the Divide—it’s a world of transition. But who controls that, anyway? Who says what occurs between life and death, if not the mediums and the ghosts stuck inside of it?

“Why don’t we help each other?” I propose. “Nothing good will come from either one of us letting the dead world control us. Otherwise, I’ll be running away from my own powers forever and you’ll be stuck in this room. But if Sawyer’s still conquering the world, that means it’s possible you could too. You could get a message to your mom. Even in death you can still live, in your own way, and communicate with your family. We both could do more than we’re doing, but not from in here. Not trapped in a room controlled by his horror.”

River looks down at the backlit screen of her phone and frowns. “I know what you’re saying, and I get it. But it’s so loud out there. I’m afraid to leave this room and confront it.”

I know what it’s like to hear the world so loudly you’re afraid to leave your room. To have a memory weigh you down so much you can’t move or do anything at all.

Sssssssssssss. Mist swims around the bones of my wrist and seeps through my skin, like glowing plankton. And then it lifts out of my pores as a spiral, then a channel, extending toward River. It caresses her like puppet strings, lifting her arm.

“What is this?” She’s confused and intrigued. “An electro-magnetic Slinky?”

“Maybe dead world is pushing us to connect our energy.”

“Why?”

The mist claws up to our chests and sinks inside us, pulling us together and into each other until we vortex into one, clashing with a crack in the elbows, a tremor in the lungs. Thermal light sprays across my mind, with sounds—a lawn mower, a barking dog. Visuals—a middle-aged Black man cutting the grass in his lounge shorts, a pit bull running to greet me in a lawn.

Then I open my eyes to the room, which looks different now—more complete, with columns of windows that show the sky. A whiteboard materializes, floating against the dulled white of the classroom wall. And then the door—a wooden panel.

This is trippy, River thinks. As fuck.

We rip the door open and launch into a stumble down the endless hallway, where the floor falls off at the end. Our feet move, barely in sync. She says left when I say right, so it’s all my body can do to stumble.