Everfound (Skinjacker 3)

But the kids didn’t move. “Out?” one of them said. “But the maniacs will get her if we take her out.”

“We’re going down with her!” said another, gently rubbing a hand across the glass of the casket. “Then when she wakes up, she’ll tell us what to do.”

Jix roared with such frustration he surprised himself by the force of it. It got their attention. “Do you think she’ll reward you for letting her sink? She’ll hate you! She’ll punish you! Better to be in the arms of the enemy than in the bowels of the earth! Now move!”

They didn’t need a second invitation. They grabbed Mary’s coffin, and, like pallbearers, moved her clumsily toward the door, which was quickly beginning to submerge.

Halfway out the door, the casket got stuck.

“Push!” said Jix, and, already up to his knees in the ground, he put all of his energy into pushing the coffin through, until finally it dislodged from the door and slid out into the night. Jix was right behind it, getting out at the last second.

Then, when he looked back, he saw there was still another boy in there. Jix locked eyes with him. The earth was up to his neck, and the doorway was now only a sliver above the ground. The boy was trapped. Still, Jix reached for him, and grabbed his hand, holding it tight, pulling—but someone wedged that deeply in the living world could not be pulled out, even by a strong Afterlight.

“Save her,” the boy said, before his head sunk under. Even after the boy was completely underground, Jix held on to his hand. It was pulling Jix down too—he was in up to his elbow . . . but then the sinking boy squeezed Jix’s hand to wish him a silent good-bye, and then let go. Jix pulled his hand out of the ground and when he looked up, the caboose was completely gone.

There were few things more humiliating to Milos than being pinned beneath a train car, and having no one—not even the ones he called his friends—willing to help him. He knew that they were out there; he had heard Jill call to him, as usual pointing out his shortcomings as a leader. Until this journey he had always considered himself quite a good leader. Why, then, was he such a failure here? He knew the answer. It was Mary. Even asleep, she was larger than life, dwarfing him, and as much as Milos loved her, he resented that he would never have the same commanding presence. Still he had to believe that there was something missing in her that only he could complete, and that together they would be greater than the sum of their parts. Now his greatest anguish was not knowing whether or not she had been saved from sinking.

He could see only the smallest glimpses of the battle, but he could hear everything. The shouts of the invaders were so confident, and the cries of Mary’s children were so desperate, he knew they were losing. Then, when he heard Jill shout out the “secret” combination to the caboose, he was glad she actually knew it. He had no idea who was going after Mary, or if they would be able to get her out, but at least now he had hope.

Finally one of the invading Afterlights came up to him. Milos spat his best ecto-loogy at him, not caring what the kid would do in retaliation. The one good thing about being pinned between the train and the tracks was that they couldn’t push him down into the living world while he was trapped there.

“Give me your coin or else!” said the kid.

“Idi k chertu!” Milos said. It gave Milos a little bit of satisfaction to be able to curse him out in a way he could not understand.

The kid kicked him in frustration. “How come you’re all so useless!?” he yelled. “How come none of you got no coins? We gotta feed him coins or he won’t tell us nothing—don’t you get it?”

Milos looked at the face-painted boy like he was the one talking a foreign language. “Feed who?” Milos asked, but the kid just ran off to take his frustration out on someone who could fight back.

The sounds of battle diminished. All the other train cars had sunk. Then, with a dread that crushed him almost as fully as the train, he began to realize that if Mary had been pulled from the caboose in time and they managed to keep her above the surface, when she awoke she would never forgive him for this.

Moose, Squirrel, and Jill had the best view of the battle. The roof of the mansion was a fortress for them; they could look down from their shingled battlements and see exactly how bad the situation was. There seemed to be only about a hundred attackers, but they were so aggressive, and so well-organized, that Mary’s kids didn’t stand a chance. Some were captured, some never got out of their trains before they sank. But most of them simply scattered, running from the disaster as fast as their legs could carry them.

The Neons tried to get up to the mansion roof, but the doors and windows were all locked—and although one resourceful Neon managed to climb up the drainpipe, Moose hurled him right off and into the living world, where he sank as if hurled into pudding. After that, no one dared to climb to the top of the mansion again.

They watched as the Neons lay all the sleeping Interlights on the tracks to count them.

“Milosh is down there shomewhere,” Moose told Jill. “I can’t shee him, but I heard him.”

Squirrel wrung his hands like an old woman. “What do we do? What do we do?”

“We save our own hides,” Jill said. “That’s what we do.”

Unfortunately, Jill had trouble taking her own advice.

Jix found that his own exotic look had given him an advantage. Instead of being corralled with the other prisoners, he was brought directly to the Neon’s leader. The kid was no older than fourteen, and beneath the streaks of war paint, he had bad skin with a whole host of whiteheads that yearned to pop, but never would. His greasy black hair looked like it had been cut by his mother, and his braces were caked with whatever he was eating when he died. Could be Oreos. All in all, he was definitely the kind of kid that got picked on while he was alive—but now, he got to be the bully.

Jix stood before him with beefy Neon guards holding him on either side, all of them shuffling their feet to keep from sinking into the living world.

“What are you?” Zit-kid asked.

“I am a son of the jaguar gods,” Jix announced, trying to be intimidating. “And you have angered them.”

Zit-kid was not concerned. He looked to the glass coffin that several of his Neon Nightmares now carried.

“Who’s the girl in the glass box?” he demanded.

Jix considered how he might respond, and one of the kids holding Jix smacked him. “Avalon asked you a question! Answer it!”