Afterworlds Read Online Free Page B

me.
    My hand clasped his.
    “Do you remember what happened?” he asked softly. “How you crossed over?”
    “We tried to run away.” My voice faltered, and it took a few slow breaths to continue. “But the gate was locked, and one of those men was coming toward us, shooting everyone. I called 911, and the woman on the phone said I should play dead.”
    “Ah. You played too well.”
    I closed my eyes and opened them again—same airport, same plastic chairs and blank televisions. But everything looked wrong, like when a hotel elevator opens on a new floor, and the carpet and furniture and potted plants are the same, but different.
    “This isn’t really the airport, is it?”
    “Not quite. This is where the dead walk—beneath the surface of things. You thought your way here.”
    I remembered lying there playing dead, that feeling of falling through the floor. “A man walked through me and your sister. Because we’re . . . ghosts.”
    “Yami is. She died a long time ago.” Yamaraj lowered the cloth and peered at my forehead. “But you and I are something else.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “We’re . . .” He stared at me a moment, an expression of longing on his face, and I was transfixed again at how beautiful he was. But then he shook his head. “You should forget this ever happened.”
    I didn’t answer, looking down at my hands, at the familiar whorls on my palms and fingertips. My skin had the same shine as Yamaraj’s, but it was still me. I felt the way my tongue slid along my teeth, and swallowed the taste of my own mouth. Everything was perfect in detail, even the way my feet felt in my sneakers.
    I looked up into his brown eyes. “But this is real.”
    “Some part of you knows that, for now. But once you’re safe in your own home, you can put it out of your mind, like a dream.” He said it softly, with a kind of knowing sadness, but to me it sounded like a challenge.
    “Are you saying I’ll be too afraid to believe this happened?”
    Yamaraj shook his head. “It’s not about courage, Lizzie. It’s about the world making sense. You may not even remember the attack, much less me and Yami.”
    “You think I’ll forget this ?”
    “I hope so.”
    Part of me wanted to agree with this beautiful boy, to let everything I’d seen fall into some dark hole of memory. But for a moment my mind went back to when my father left home. My mother lied to me for the first few months, saying he was just working in New York, that he was coming back soon. And when she finally told me the truth, I was angrier at myself than at my parents, because I should have figured it out on my own.
    Hiding from the truth was worse than being lied to.
    “I’m not very good at fooling myself,” I said.
    “Believing won’t be easy either.”
    Something like a laugh pushed its way out of me. “You think things are going to be easy? After this ?”
    The look of longing crossed his face again, but then he shook his head. “I hope you’re wrong, Lizzie. Believing isn’t just hard, it’s dangerous. Doing what you’ve done, crossing over, can change you in ways you don’t want.”
    “What does that even—” I began, but Yamaraj was staring past me, beyond the metal gate. I turned, and saw something that made the inky cold rise up in me again.
    Walking through the mist were dozens of people—eighty-seven, as the news kept repeating later—their faces gray, their clothing torn by bullets. They shuffled together in a mass, crowding around Yami, as if they all wanted to be close to her. They didn’t touch one another, except for one little girl holding both her parents’ hands. She was staring at me, her expression clearly wondering, Why does that girl get to stay?
    Yami knelt and touched the tile floor, and a darkness began to spread out from her, as if some slow black liquid were bubbling out of her hand. The dead people looked down at their feet. And then they began to sink. . . .
    A bitter taste rose in