“Please, Leah? We can’t do anything unless we know what Harriet is planning to do.” Felix and Kasper were quiet, leaving this to Rima.
Leah ran her finger down the side of Claudia’s cheek as she thought about using her power. The baby watched her, blinking leisurely. She opened her lips and made a small, soft burble.
Finally, when Rima was about to take back the request out of sheer awkwardness, Leah nodded. “OK. I’ll look for you, Rima. But you should know that I’m very low on energy. And Claudia may – overreact.”
Rima swallowed. Leah looked … scared. It was a new expression on her face.
Rima suddenly regretted asking at all. “What does that mean?”
“The last time I used my power, I didn’t wake up immediately afterwards. My energy was too low. Claudia thought I was going to disintegrate, and she panicked.” Leah looked up at the ceiling. “She took energy from someone nearby and pushed it all into me.”
“What?” Kasper looked horrified.
Rima looked aghast at Claudia. Could a baby do something like that? Surely Leah was mistaken. It wasn’t possible. She was only a few months old.
Leah explained, “When I woke up, the person had disintegrated. It was … unfortunate. I’ve explained to Claudia many times that she shouldn’t do that again. When it’s my time to disintegrate, she can’t stop it. She seems to have accepted that now, but you should keep your distance. Just in case.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” Rima said, trying to keep her horror off her face. Leah made it sound like Claudia was … developed. Perceptive. Communicative. That couldn’t possibly be right.
“I have to try,” Leah said. “If Harriet is putting the whole building in danger … I can’t let her hurt any of you.”
Rima looked between her and Claudia, still unsure. Finally, she turned to Felix. “What do you think?”
He was staring at Claudia, too, and doing a much worse job of hiding his horror than Rima had.
“Felix?”
He jerked his gaze away from the baby, turning to her. “Sorry?” he asked hoarsely.
“Do you really, genuinely think that Harriet is a murderer? Do you believe that enough to put Leah and Claudia at risk?”
Felix swallowed. He wrapped his arms around his chest, pressing his chin into the crook of his elbow. “I – I don’t—” A pained look crossed his face. “Yes. I’m sorry, Leah, I’m really sorry, but – yes. I really do think that she’s dangerous. And I think we’re going to need all the information we can get.”
Kasper nodded his head, too, slowly at first, then more quickly. “She’s going after the weakest people here. We can’t allow that, not while we’ve got the strength to stop her.”
A feeling of pure terror washed over Rima. How could things have escalated this quickly?
“OK.” Leah carefully laid Claudia down in her lap and adjusted the material around her face. She leant down to press a kiss to her forehead, and whispered, “Please be good. You know it’s time.”
The baby wriggled in her blanket, letting out a feeble cry.
Rima looked away, uncomfortable.
Leah said, “It will only take a second. Please don’t touch us. At any point.”
“Good luck.” Rima slid back on the floor until she found Felix, blindly squeezing his hand.
Leah took a deep breath and tipped her head forwards. She was completely still at first. Then her fingertips started trembling. The shudders spread up her limbs and across her body. In her lap, Claudia started wailing, an endless, terrible noise that pierced Rima’s eardrums.
Kasper wrapped his arm around Rima’s shoulder. She was crying, and pressed her cheek into his bicep, unable to watch but unable to look away.
Leah’s light was dimming. She hadn’t been very bright before, but now her colour began fading rapidly. After only a few minutes she was so dull that she was almost black and white. She was staring at something inside her mind, something the others couldn’t see.
Leah swung her head back around, eyes wide. Looking right at Felix, she said, petrified, “We have to stop her!”
Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she tipped over to one side, unconscious.
Claudia let out an agonized screech, legs kicking in her unresponsive mother’s lap. None of them touched her.
Leah had become a Shell.
You know, ghosts have myths. They’re passed down from generation to generation – ancient, millennia-old ghosts passing on stories they heard when they were newly dead, from other ancient ghosts on the brink of disintegration.
The stories stretch back all the way to Neolithic times, before stories were told in words. Back then, language was crude and essential, nothing more than a way to help humans work together to hunt and eat and sleep.
Those stories don’t make much sense now. They don’t follow the forms of tales we know. They are short and to the point: the man saw a deer on the eastern slopes and cornered the deer in a small cluster of trees. It tasted good. The hide was strong.
Those early humans weren’t interested in entertainment. It hadn’t been invented yet. There were no happy endings or romances, or heroes. The stories nearly always ended in death. A hunt, a defeat, a victory, a bad case of food poisoning.
But those stories – if you can call them stories – all have one thing in common, as far as I can see. They might not have plot, or characters, or beautiful writing. But there is always one thing: a lesson. A moral. A new piece of information, worthy of remembering and passing on.
I haven’t decided what the moral of my story is yet. The lesson that needs sharing. What here is worth remembering a millennium from now, if we survive that long? Worth passing on to the generations
