Everfound (Skinjacker 3)

Allie looked up to where the spine and horizontal boom of the crane met. That’s where the control cab was, still far above her. There was no way to leap that far. She would have to climb the ladder in the body of the welder—but just then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

It was Milos. He was in a lean and sinewy worker. He looked like a man whose body knew how to fight. “I’m sorry, Allie, but I can’t let you ruin this. . . .” And he elbowed Allie in the jaw. She felt excruciating pain as the welder’s jaw shattered, and she fell to the naked beam, which was barely a foot wide. She tried to scramble away, but the pain from the broken jaw made her weak and unable to focus. Fortunately they were both tethered to a safety cable . . . but unfortunately Milos unhooked their safety wires.

“More interesting this way, yes?”

As he moved in for the fight, Allie thrust her legs out, kicking Milos, and knocking his feet out from under him. He landed on top of her, pinning her to the beam. His face was just inches away from hers. She could smell the remains of a rancid cigar on his fleshie’s breath.

“If you were in a different body,” Milos said, “I might kiss you again. But then, no. Mary is a much better kisser.”

And then Milos did the unthinkable.

Holding on to Allie, he rolled off the girder, taking Allie with him, and they began a thirty-story plunge.

“No!” Allie felt that horrible falling sensation, a roller coaster without a track. The whole world spun around them. In just a few seconds, their fleshies would be dead and their own spirits would be injected deep into the earth by their momentum. But when Allie met eyes with Milos as they fell, all she saw were the eyes of a horrified construction worker. Milos was gone . . . and right beside them a construction elevator carried Milos, in a freshly-skinjacked worker to the top floor.

Now in the last few moments of the plunge, Allie did the only thing she could do. “I’m sorry,” she said to the two doomed men. “I hope you get where you’re going.” Then, just before impact, Allie peeled out and leaped up and away like a pole-vaulter, putting all the force of her will behind the leap. She shot through the Everlost void searching for flesh, anyone’s flesh, to give her safe harbor, and—

—don’t sweat don’t sweat / and stick to more buzzwords

upward trend / target demographics

and if you get lost point to the graph—

Allie forced full control over whoever’s body she was in, and found herself staring at a dozen dark-suited people in a conference room, pointing to a graph. It was such a total disconnect from the moment before, she thought she must have actually died, or at the very least lost her mind. It took her a moment to realize that she had leaped so powerfully, she had landed a block away, in an entirely different office building.

“Go on,” said the man at the far end of the table, obviously the boss. “What was that about our target demographics?”

Then, one of the executives at the table stood and looked out of the window. “Hey, did you see that? I think two people just fell from the Last National Life building!”

Everyone got up to look, but only Allie noticed the load of girders still hanging thirty stories above the playground. She was relieved the load hadn’t been released yet, but had to wonder why.

At that same moment, Moose sat in the control cab of the sky crane in full control of his fleshie, staring at the release button. He had been staring at it for at least a minute now. The load of girders was positioned exactly where it was supposed to be, but he couldn’t hit the button. He thought back to the part he played in the concert disaster. It had been hard to make himself set off the sprinklers at the Rhoda Dakota concert.

“She is for you,” Milos had told him. “When she wakes up, she will be yours.”

Although Moose was thrilled at the idea of just meeting Rhoda Dakota, much less a date-after-death with her, knowing he was responsible for ending her life made it all seem a little bit dishonest, didn’t it?

And now this.

In all the other disasters, his acts were just a small part of a larger whole . . . but this time, it was all him. He would be releasing the load of deadly beams. Not Squirrel, not Milos—him.

And so he stared at the button.

The girders were still dangling from the end of the cable when Allie body-surfed her way out of the nearby office building, and down the street toward the playground once more, but since her eyes were on the load of girders, she wasn’t watching the fleshies she surfed. She miscalculated, overshot the fleshie she was aiming for, and stumbled to the ground.

She was back in Everlost again, still down the street from the school. But something had changed. To Allie’s surprise, there were Afterlights running all around her—Milos’s Afterlights—and they were running away from the playground. Allie saw Lacey and caught her. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“It’s horrible!” Lacey said. “You have to run before it eats you!” And she raced off with the others.

Then Allie saw it. It was perhaps the most horrific thing she had ever seen: a puke-green creature covered with scales as sharp as razors. Its head was a giant bloodshot eyeball sprouting tentacles instead of eyelashes, and at the end of each tentacle was a hungry tooth-filled mouth.

. . . And at the sight of the horrible beast, Allie’s afterglow flushed purple with a deep and powerful love.

* * *

The journey of Mikey and Clarence to San Antonio was not an easy one. Suffice it to say that it involved many unorthodox methods of travel in two different worlds.

It was Nick’s sweet aroma that had led Mikey and Clarence to the playground. Without it, they would have wandered the streets of San Antonio as Allie had, no closer to solving the mystery of the psycho-jackers than she had been all these weeks. But once Nick came out into the open, without even knowing it he became a beacon for anyone trying to find him.