Pushing her way through the bedroom door, Rima ran over to shake Kasper awake. He was sprawled over a rotten bare mattress in his boxer shorts.
He rubbed sleep out of his eyes. “Rima? What’s…?”
“The police have come for Harriet’s body! Get up, get up, get up!”
“Where is she?” His voice was thick.
“I found her upstairs. She’s gone down to the foyer already. Her hair is white now, did you know? FELIX! GET UP!”
Felix was curled up on the floor in Rima’s bedroom, his head resting on a pile of Chinese takeaway menus. Without opening his eyes, he groaned mulishly and pressed his face into the concrete.
“The police are here! Can’t you hear the sirens?”
Felix stretched, limbs splayed out like a starfish, and let out a lengthy, extravagant yawn. “I thought it was your terrible singing.”
“We need to go,” Kasper said, pulling on his shirt. “Harriet needs me.”
Felix’s expression dropped into pure despair. “Right. Harriet.”
Rima looped her arm through Felix’s, as they followed Kasper downstairs. They left Leah asleep on the fire escape. This was nothing she hadn’t seen dozens of times before.
“We have to talk later about Kasper,” she whispered in his ear.
“Do we?” Felix replied, sounding like he wanted to stab something.
Rima squeezed his arm. Unfortunately, they probably did. Before this love triangle business got even messier.
Harriet’s hair went white for the same reason she’s starting to lose control. Her body can’t handle so much energy. It’s sending her nerves into overdrive. Every molecule of her body is vibrating at a frequency that’s much too high, trying to keep all that energy under control. The lightning-bright flow sent her hair white with the shock of the electric force.
Even worse, it’s affecting her brain too. All those subconscious thoughts that we work so hard to keep hidden? Harriet won’t have the capacity to control them any more. They’re roaming free. Her darkest desires – the ones she’s ashamed even cross her mind – are coming to the forefront now. The energy is eating up her fear and guilt and empathy and spitting out anger and reckless determination in their place. She’s come a long way since her death.
Rufus and Vini were quick enough to tell Harriet to steal powers, but they’d never do it themselves. They know that they’d go mad if they did. Instead, they stick with just the one power, and let their subordinates take the risks of gathering more.
I think it’s time to look back at the moment Harriet died, now that the snippets of the future I’ve seen over the centuries have begun to reveal themselves. I can start planning and testing theories for how we’ll get from Point A to Point B.
When I first saw her in the future, I tried to find the moment of her death. But it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Dipping in at random periods is no way to find answers. I usually saw snapshots of Kasper snoring in his bedroom, or Rima stroking Cody’s fur, or Felix wiping his glasses. Quiet, peaceful moments. No big conversations that revealed exactly the information I needed to know. No dramatic showdowns.
But now I know when and where Harriet’s death happened, I can find it again. I can go back to the past and see those important seconds before Harriet cracked her skull open on the steel beam.
Let’s replay it. Harriet is walking up the stairs to the top floor of Mulcture Hall. She’s taking photographs and listening to pop music. She’s getting a call from her grandmother.
It’s about to happen. You’ve seen it before, so you know the score. This time, shall we look at it from another side? You might see something different.
Harriet walks towards the edge of the stairwell. She doesn’t notice the barriers, pushed up against the walls – or the dust-free places where the bright yellow warning signs used to stand. But we do, don’t we?
Someone moved them. Those barriers were there to stop people from going too close to the broken edge of the floor, where it had collapsed. Now they’re stacked up against a wall, out of sight.
There’s something else I didn’t see before. Right at the edge, before floor becomes air becomes a deadly fall, there’s a wire. Strung at ankle height, in the perfect place to make someone trip over the edge.
There she goes now, past the barriers and warning signs, talking to her gran about Autumnwatch. And her shoe catches, as we knew it would, on the hair-thin tripwire.
And then she’s nothing but blood and shards of bone and a very angry, very confused ghost.
Someone made this happen. Harriet Stoker’s death wasn’t an accident.
It was murder.
Chapter 11
HARRIET
Harriet crashed into the foyer, taking the stairs three at a time, just as the police officers in bulletproof vests piled out of their cars. She stood by her corpse, waiting with clenched fists. Her hands were slipping in and out of visibility, but she couldn’t focus enough to control it.
She pressed a hand to her forehead. Her temples burned. Her brain was melting. Everything ached. Had she made a mistake, going back up to the Shells?
After Kasper had fallen asleep the night before, she’d slipped away to the fifth floor to claim the powers of another Shell. The excess energy made her ignore everything except getting another fix.
She felt guilty, but her hunger outweighed everything else. It no longer mattered if the Shell disintegrated. That concern felt blurry and far away. She couldn’t even remember why she’d been so worried about it. Getting powers was more important.
When she reached the top floor, the Shells had all skittered in a panic. She had chased them from room to room, finally pinning them in the corner of the building, up against an outer wall where they couldn’t escape.
Choosing a boy at random, she had tugged him forwards, ignoring the petrified
