Everwild

Her mother nodded, but didn't meet her eyes.

'Something happened to her, didn't it?'

'Yes, Danny, something did,' her father answered.

'You don't have to talk about it,' Allie said, realizing this was going too far.

'No, that's okay-it was a long time ago,' he said.

Not that long, Allie wanted to say, but instead she said, 'I'll bet she loved you very much.'

She should have left it there, but she could see a police cruiser pulling up to the curb outside, and then a second one. If she was going to do this, she had to do it now.

'Sometimes people go away,' Allie told them. 'They don't mean to, but they can't help it. It's nobody's fault. I'll bet if she could, she'd want to tell you that it's okay-that she's okay. I mean, people die, but that doesn't always mean they're gone.'

Then her mother and father looked to each other, then back to Danny Rozelli with moist eyes, and her mother said, 'Allie's not dead.'

Allie grinned. It was so like her parents to see things that way. 'Of course she's not. As long as you remember her, I guess she'll never really be dead.'

'No,' her father said. 'We mean that she's still alive.'

Allie slowly lowered her spoon into the bowl, staring at them. 'Excuse me?'

'She's just asleep, Danny,' her father said. 'She's been asleep for a long, long time.'

CHAPTER 28 The Sleep of the Dead

Comatose.

Nonresponsive.

Persistent vegetative state.

All complicated words used by medical specialists to label a patient who remains unconscious. You would think that the labels mean something-that doctors know exactly what's going on in the brain of a comatose patient. But the truth is, nobody really knows anything. A coma can actually mean a whole range of things, but at its heart, all it really means is that someone simply won't wake up.

Allie Johnson had suffered internal injuries and severe head trauma in a head-on collision. She flew through the windshield, into another boy who was on his way through his own windshield. Nick was, of course, killed instantly, but Allie was quite a fighter. Her heart continued to beat. It was beating as they rushed her to an emergency room. It was beating as they hooked her to a dozen different life-support machines. It was beating as they worked on her on an operating table for five hours to repair her massive wounds, and it was still beating after all the operations were done. Thanks to medical science, and a body that simply would not give up, Allie did not die. Although her wounds were severe, her damaged body eventually healed, and her brain still showed a hint of basic brainwave pattern, proving that she was not entirely brain-dead. Brain-dead would have been easy. It would have given everyone a reason to just throw in the towel. But now Allie's parents were both blessed, and cursed, with the smallest fraction of hope.

'I won't try to sugarcoat this for you,' the doctor had told her parents several weeks into Allie's coma. 'She could wake up tomorrow, she could wake up next month, next year, or she might never wake up at all-and even if she does, there's a good chance she won't be the girl you remember. Her brain might be too damaged for higher cognitive functions-right now we just don't know.' Then, in that compassionate yet heartless way that doctors have, he told Allie's distraught parents this: 'For your sake, I hope she either wakes up the same girl you knew, or dies very quickly.'

But neither of those two things happened. And now in a hospital somewhere, in a room somewhere, in a bed somewhere, Allie Johnson lies asleep unable to wake up…

… because her soul is in Everlost. In her book, You Don't Know Jack, Allie the Outcast gives this as her final word on skinjacking:

'There is a truth about skinjacking that I can't tell you, because it's not my place. I don't have the right. It's the reason why we can skinjack, why we don't forget things, and why we're different from every other Afterlight in Everlost. It's a truth that all skinjackers must learn for themselves- and if you are a skinjacker, then you will learn it, because the more you skinjack, the more you are driven toward it, like a salmon fighting a current to the head of a stream. I can only hope that once you do know the truth, you find the courage to face it.'

CHAPTER 29 Teed for Two

Little Danny Rozelli was having a bad day. It began with waking up in a strange house, and now many hours later, things weren't getting any better. He was talking to himself, twisting and turning in bed-everything short of spinning his head around and vomiting pea soup. In the olden days, people would have said the boy was possessed, but modern science knew better. Danny was just sick. Very, very sick.

'Get out of me!'

– -I can't!- 'Get out of me!'

– -Just calm down!- 'Mom! Make her get out of me!'

– -Will you stop saying things like that out loud! They already think you've gone crazy!- Danny Rozelli was a willful little kid, who was still too teed off to be reasonable. He had already discovered the trick of thinking out loud. It gave him more power over his own body-it helped him to stay in control. Unfortunately, when you think out loud, people can hear you.

'Danny, honey, it's all right-everything's going to be all right.' But clearly Danny's mother didn't believe this, because she turned to her husband and cried, 'What do we do? What do we do?'

Allie fought against the boy, and regained control of his body long enough to say, 'Nothing's wrong with me. Everything's fine,' but Danny fought back, his body went into convulsions, and he wailed, 'Make her LEAVE!'

It was all Allie's fault. If she hadn't fallen asleep in his body, and skinjacked him for seven whole hours, none of this would have happened.

She should have tried to peel out of him the second she woke up that morning in her parents' house, but no, instead she asked her parents to feed her, and over a bowl of Apple Jacks they told her that she was still alive.

Alive!

The news was such a sudden shock that it not only echoed in her own mind, it also woke Danny up, and he began fighting his way to the surface. She tried to run, but when she opened the front door, she ran right into the policeman standing there. In a second even more police cruisers were showing up-one of them bearing a distraught couple, who had woken up two blocks away to find their son missing. When Allie's father had called 911, the police had apparently put two and two together, and raced Danny's parents over for a family reunion.

At the time, Allie was still reeling from her own revelation. She was alive. Did that mean she could live again? Could she-dare she even think it-could she skinjack herself? Oblivious to what was going on, Danny's parents had smothered him with kisses, and the police had questioned Allie's parents as to how on earth the boy had turned up there. Allie didn't want to fight Danny, and once they were in the police cruiser, driving away, she tried over and over again to peel herself out of the boy. His body stiffened, his back arched, his eyes bulged, but Allie could not get out of his body, and his parents became more and more concerned with their son's strange behavior. As the police car pulled into the Rozelli's driveway, Allie finally realized the true cost of skinjacking someone for too long. She was now a permanent resident in Danny Rozelli's body.

But the worst was yet to come.

It was the element of surprise that gave a skinjacker the advantage. A person didn't know how to defend themselves against a skinjacking, or how to fight to retain control of his or her own body-especially against a seasoned skinjacker like Allie. But fleshies learn quickly. Each time Danny's spirit surfaced, he was stronger, more able to fight Allie from the inside out, and now, half a day later, the two of them were still battling at sunset, with