Everfound (Skinjacker 3)

“Why?” asked Jix. Jill had no answer for him. “I’ll tell you why. Because you never saw me as a threat. And yet I was. I knew you all so well—and had earned the respect of so many of Mary’s children, I could have easily taken over the train if I wanted to.”

Jill looked a little shaken. “Was that your plan? To take over?”

“No,” he told her, then leaned in closer. “But it is now.”

* * *

The following day, one of the lookouts—a skinny kid they called Domino—came down from up above, announcing that he had been seen by a group of refugees from the train crash. Avalon was not pleased. “I should push you down myself!” Avalon yelled at him. Then he ordered the Neons to prepare for battle. “We beat them once,” he said, “and we’ll do it again. And this time, we’ll send every last one of them downtown!”

“But they’ve got a monster now,” said Domino.

“What do you mean, monster?”

“I don’t know what else to call it. I’ve never seen anything that strong. And here’s the weird part,” he said, looking around, almost afraid to say it, as if they wouldn’t believe him, “It’s made . . . of chocolate.”

Jill gasped, then pretended she hadn’t.

“It’s true!” said the lookout, and showed them the brown stains on his clothes where it had grabbed him.

“And you led it right here, didn’t you?” said Avalon in disgust.

The lookout began to stammer. “I . . . I . . . I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Imbecile!”

Up above them, in the Alamo complex, a woman screamed and an alarm began to blare. Even though living-world business meant nothing to them, today it added to the tension. The Neons were all looking to Avalon for direction, so he pulled out the one remaining coin from his pocket. “We’ll ask Wurlitzer what to do.” Everyone agreed. He strode toward the machine, tugged off the blanket, and all the Neons fell to their knees. Even Jix did, for fear of angering it, whatever it was. Jill had to be forced to her knees.

Wurlitzer’s light cast a multicolored glow around the common room, caught and refracted by the many bits of glass that made up Mary’s coffin, which sat just a few yards in front of the jukebox. It almost seemed as if her coffin was a part of Wurlitzer now: an altar before the figure of a god. Jix couldn’t help but wonder if Wurlitzer wanted it this way—that even the attention given to Mary somehow reflected back on the mystical machine.

Avalon dropped the coin in and waited for it to clink its way down to the coin box and then he asked his question. “Mighty Wurlitzer, what do we do about this chocolate monster?” He pressed a random button on the machine’s console, and Wurlitzer came to life. It pulled a record from its apparently infinite spinning rack, dropped it on the turntable, and with clicks and pops the song began to play.

“Oh, don’t it hurt, deeeeep inside . . .” sang a man in falsetto.

“I don’t know this one,” said Avalon.

“What does it mean?” someone asked.

“Shh! Let me listen.” Avalon put his ear to the glass as if that might help his hearing, then he squinted through the next few lines as if squinting might make him smarter. “This is a difficult one.”

But then Jill said, “Wait for the chorus. . . .” because she did know this song. In fact, it had been one of her grandfather’s favorites.

The music built to the chorus, and Frankie Valli sang, “Silence is golden . . .” and there was a collective gasp from the room.

“Wurlitzer has spoken,” Jill muttered, clearly a little freaked by it.

“Quiet!” yelled Avalon, then realized his error, and whispered, “Quiet . . .” Avalon went to the back of the machine and turned the volume down as low as it would go. In a couple of minutes, the song ended and when it was done, silence fell and it remained. No one spoke, no one moved. From the Alamo gift shop above them, they heard a voice.

“I know you are here somewhere!” someone yelled. Someone with a Russian accent. “And I won’t rest until I find you!”

Jill stood up.

“No!” whispered Jix.

“I’m done with this place,” said Jill. “I want out. Even Milos and his morons are better than this.” The others threw angry gazes at her, and Dionne brandished her knife—but silence was not golden for Jill—not when her fate was being decided by a glorified music box.

Jix grabbed her, getting face to face. Then looking into her eyes, he said, “It’s time for you to choose, then. Choose that life . . . or choose me.”

Jill looked at him with bitter fury.