Earthbound

ever again.

A sound pulls me out of my thoughts. I can hear Benson, but not see him. We’re pulled off on the side of the road somewhere I don’t recognize, and I finally find Benson behind a tree talking on his phone.

Arguing.

I step closer, trying to catch words, but he keeps cutting off, like someone’s talking over him.

“… not what we agreed to. But—” I watch his hand fist against his hip. “I understand,” he says a few seconds later, then hangs up without saying goodbye.

“Who was that?” My voice sounds creaky.

Benson whirls around with a gasp and sighs when he sees me. “Make some noise, will you?” he says with a half grin.

“Sorry.” It sounds lame, but what else is there to say? “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, roommate stuff,” he says, pointing at the phone.

I nod. I don’t know what he means and my brain is still too fuzzy to care.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

I laugh. “Like I’m never going to sleep tonight.”

Benson shrugs helplessly. “Sorry, I couldn’t bear to wake you up.” He pauses and then puts his fingers just under my chin. “I worry. You’re so tired.”

“Hey!” I counter. “Under-eye circles are the new black.” But my joke falls totally flat.

“I don’t mean physically.” He studies me for another long moment, like he wants to say something else, but I don’t drop my challenging gaze, and after a few seconds he lets his hand fall.

The look on his face is so strange—there are more emotions there than I can interpret, and I find myself wishing I’d brought my charcoals so I could capture him on paper—maybe figure him out that way. I lift my hand to his face and he leans into it, trapping it between his face and shoulder. I step forward for more, but he clears his throat and holds up his phone and I stop. “I found a small online report of what happened today,” he says.

“Oh yeah?” I say, instantly curious.

“It didn’t say much, just that an unmanned car was parked on a hill without the e-brake set.” He looks up from the screen on his phone and says, “They’re saying no one got hurt.”

“No one got hurt? But—” I close my mouth to cut the words off. “Are you sure?” I have to ask. I know what I saw. The images are branded into my brain.

“That’s what the report says. They commented that the office staff had just left for lunch, so the building was empty.”

“And there’s nothing about … about …”

“Nothing about Quinn,” Benson finishes for me.

I stand for a long time in the crisscrossed shadows of the trees. I have no idea what’s happening to my life. It feels like it’s slowly splintering. Not breaking apart yet, but full of spidery cracks barely clinging to each other.

Things were starting to get better.

And then this.

It’s like all the emotional healing I went through after the plane crash never happened.

“I saw him,” I say.

“I believe you.”

“Not Quinn—I mean obviously Quinn too, but—” I take a steadying breath as the shadow memory finally solidifies. “I saw the Sunglasses Guy. From Portsmouth. Just out of the corner of my eye a second after the accident, but I know it was him,” I say quickly before Benson can cut me off.

He doesn’t try. It’s like he already knew. But then, he was there. He probably saw the guy too and didn’t want me to know.

I look up at Benson, force myself to meet his eyes. “Is everyone in on it? You asked me yesterday how deep I thought this went and I didn’t know. Is this a cover-up, Benson?”

Benson is silent. He folds his arms across his chest, then changes his mind and shoves them into his pockets instead. Though my mind is screaming for him to just speak, I stand silently, watching him. There’s a possibility my eye is twitching.

“What if Quinn’s a ghost?” Benson says softly.

A bark of laughter bursts from me before I can stop it. “Seriously? No. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“There’s no such thing as people who can pull ChapStick and pencils and stress balls out of thin air either. Think about it, Tave, it would explain everything: the old-fashioned clothes, the thing with Rebecca Fielding, having that car run into him and no one notices.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” I repeat, but my voice is so quiet it’s almost a whisper. My mind is racing. I saw him die. But did I actually see the blood or was that my mind filling it in? I shake that thought away and try to analyze what I know. Quinn is always in old-fashioned clothes; he comes and goes so quickly it’s like he disappears; he never lets me get a word in edgewise—it’s almost like he can’t hear me. And that weird place he led me to last night, it seriously looked like no one had stepped into it for …

For …

Two hundred years. My mind forces me to complete the thought.

“He never touched me,” I say, looking at Benson with wide eyes.

Benson says nothing but he’s studying me with a grim expression that says he knows it makes sense.

“All those times—even when we talked—he never touched me.” My chin jerks up. “Am I a psychic now?”

“Like a medium? Maybe.”

“Benson, the fact is that I see things that other people don’t see. All the time. I can’t deny that anymore.”

Benson nods, but says nothing.

“Do you think this is because of my surgery?”

“Your brain surgery?”

“Yeah. When I was in the hospital, I found this wacko website that suggested that trauma to the brain could give you paranormal abilities. I thought it was stupid at the time, but now?” I spread my hands out helplessly.

Benson pushes his glasses higher on his nose. “It doesn’t sound very likely to me. But what do I know? Nothing, apparently.”

Something doesn’t fit. “Except …” I say, the idea gelling even as I speak. “It couldn’t have been totally triggered by my brain injury. Reese and Elizabeth got me on that plane. They were expecting something like this to happen. You can’t just predict that anyone who has brain trauma is suddenly going to turn into … I don’t know, an X-Man or something.”

“I wish I knew what they know,” Benson says with a sigh.

“Me too.” I sink down onto a moss-covered stump.

Two weeks ago I was a regular old sole-survivor-of-a-plane-wreck orphan being hidden from the media. Today? I don’t even know what I am.

“Elizabeth called me an Earthbound,” I say after a while. “What do you think that means?”

Benson stares at me blankly. “I don’t know,” he says.

“It all comes back to Quinn Avery,” I finally say. “The old one, I mean. Everything. I think …” I don’t even want to say it. “I think I need to go see that place he took me to again.”

“You said you’d never go back there …” Benson answers, a spark in his eye betraying his interest.

“I know, but I think maybe that’s what we’re going to have to do to figure all of this out.”

Benson nods thoughtfully. “If Quinn had any answers, it makes sense that that’s where they’d be.”

“I don’t want to go alone. Will you come?”

“Of course,” Benson says, and there’s a ripple of excitement in his voice.

The place scares the bejesus out of me, but I guess it’s kind of a grown-up field trip to him.

“Sun’s going to set in about an hour, but I can pick up a flashlight in Camden,” he says, then flushes. “I stopped in some town we passed through while you were sleeping and sold the gold coin. I hope you don’t mind;