“So the question is,” said Nick, “where do we go to find out?”
“There’s only one place I want to go,” said Allie. “Home.”
Nick instinctively sensed that going home wouldn’t be a good idea-but just like Allie, he wanted to go home. He had to find out if his family had survived, or if they “got where they were going.” They were in Upstate New York, though; it was far from home.
“I’m from Baltimore,” Nick said. “How about you?”
“New Jersey,” Allie said. “The southern tip.”
“Okay. Then we head south from here, and keep an eye out for others who can help us. Someone has got to know how to get out of this place…one way, or another.”
Nick put his coin away, and they all began to talk about life, death, and a way out of this place in-between. None of them had noticed on which side the coin had landed.
Allie had always been a goal-oriented girl. It was both her strength and her weakness. She had a drive to completion that always got things done, but it also made her inflexible, and stubborn. Even though she adamantly denied being stubborn, she knew deep down it was true.
The coin-on-its-edge business might have been fine for Nick, but Allie was not at ease with all this metaphysical talk. Going home, however-that was a goal she could buy into. Whether she was dead or half-dead, whether she was spirit or wraith, didn’t matter. It was too unpleasant to think about. Better to put on the blinders, and keep her thoughts fully focused on the house where she had spent her life. She would go back there. And once she was there, all things would sort themselves out. She had to believe that, or she would lose her mind.
Lief had his own unique way of seeing things, too – and his vision began and ended with the forest. He wouldn’t be going with them, because for Lief, being alone in his safe haven was better than having company in the big bad world of the living.
As for the snowshoes, they were Nick’s idea, although Allie was the one who figured out how to make them, and Lief was the one with the practical know-how to actually do it with twigs and strips of bark. Allie thought they looked kind of goofy, but after all it wasn’t like they’d be posing for a fashion show any time soon.
“What’s the point,” Lief had said when Nick first mentioned the idea of snowshoes. “It’s not going to snow for months, and we move right through snow anyway.”
“They’re not for snow,” Nick had told him. “It’s so we can walk on living-world roads without sinking in. We’ll be able to move faster if we don’t have to pluck our feet out of the asphalt after every step.”
“So then they’re road-shoes, not snowshoes,” Lief said, then went about tying twigs together with strips of bark. When he had finished the shoes, he handed them to Nick and Allie. “Aren’t you afraid at all?” he asked. “Aren’t you afraid of what’s out there? All the things you couldn’t see when you were alive? Evil spirits? Monsters? I’ve been waiting forever for you to come. I prayed for you, did you know that? God hears our prayers here. Maybe even better than before, because we’re closer to him here.” Lief looked at them with big, mournful eyes.
“Please don’t go.”
It tugged at Allie’s heart, and brought a tear to her eyes, but she couldn’t let her emotions influence this decision. She had to remind herself that Lief wasn’t really a little kid. He was an Afterlight who was more than a hundred years old.
He had done fine in his forest alone, and there was no reason to think he wouldn’t be fine once they left.
“I’m sorry,” Allie told him. “But we can’t stay. Maybe once we learn more, we’ll come back for you.”
Lief put his hands in his pockets and sullenly looked at the ground. “Good luck, then,” he said. “And watch out for the McGill.”
“We will.”
He stood there for a moment more, then said, “Thank you for giving me a name.
I’ll try to remember it.” Then he climbed away, disappearing high in his tree house again.
“South,” said Nick.
“Home,” said Allie, and they climbed out of the forest to face the treacherous unknowns of the living world.
Whether or not careless children actually sink down to the center of the Earth, no one can say for sure. Certainly many do disappear, but as it always seems to happen when no one else is looking, it confounds all attempts to discover where they actually go. The official term for sinking, coined by none other than Mary Hightower herself, is “Gravity Fatigue.”
In her groundbreaking book The Gravity of Gravity, Mary writes: “Do not believe rumors that children leave Everlost. We are here to stay. Those who can no longer be seen have simply fallen victim to Gravity Fatigue, and are either at, or on their way to the center of the Earth. I imagine the center of the Earth must be a crowded place by now, but perhaps it is the spirits of those of us residing there that keep the Earth alive and green.”
CHAPTER 5
Friends in High Places Mary Hightower was not born with that name. She could no longer remember what her true name was, although she was relatively certain her first name started with an M. She took the name Mary because it seemed a proper, motherly name.
True, she was only fifteen, but had she lived, she would most certainly have become a mother. And anyway, she was a mother to those who needed one-and there were many.
The name Hightower came because she was the very first who dared to ascend.
That singular bold act of climbing the stairs and staking a claim had earned her a level of respect from others she could not have imagined. They were in awe of her, and many other Everlost children followed her lead. Realizing her position was now high in more ways than one, she decided it was time to share what she knew about Everlost with all Afterlights. Although she had been writing for more than a hundred years, she had only shared it with the small group of younger children she had taken under her wing. But the moment she became Mary Hightower, all that changed. Now her writings were read by everyone-and what had once been a small group of children in her care had grown into hundreds. She had no doubt she would eventually be a mother to thousands.
Some people thought of her as a god. She had no desire to be a god, but she did like the respect and honor with which she was now treated. Of course, she did have her enemies, and they called her less flattering things, but always from a safe distance.
Today her view from the top floor was magnificent, and sometimes she swore she could see the whole world from here. Yet she knew it was a world that had gone on without her. Far below the traffic of the living world passed, dots of buses and taxis in constant congestion. Let them go about their business, she thought.
It means nothing to me. My concern is this world, not theirs.
A knock at the door drew her attention away from the view. In a moment Stradivarius stepped in, a mousy boy with tufts of tightly curled blond hair.
“What is it, Vari?”
“A Finder’s here to see you, Miss Mary. He says he’s got something really good.”
Mary sighed. Everyone called themselves “Finders” these days. Usually they had never actually found anything of importance. A scrap of paper, a piece of driftwood, maybe. The true Finders had far better goods. They were masters at what they did, and knew all the circumstances that could cause an object to cross over into Everlost. The true Finders were few.
“Is this someone we’ve seen before?”
“I think so,” said Stradivarius. “And I think he’s got real food!”
This news caught Mary’s attention, although she tried not to show Vari how much.
She was good at keeping her emotions to herself, but if the Finder truly had food that had crossed over from the living world, it would be hard to contain herself.
“Show him in.”
Vari slipped out, and returned with a young man, about thirteen years old, wearing nothing but a bathing suit, its waistband hidden by a pasty root-beer belly. Well, thought Mary, we can’t choose the moment and manner of our crowding. Just as this boy was condemned to travel eternity in a wet bathing suit, she was consigned to the
