Then Clarence left with the invisible chocolate boy before the bartender could call the media.
Nick met Mikey and Allie back at the playground. Clarence kept his distance, hiding his face because reporters still swarmed the accident scene in search of the mysterious scarred hero. Nick then led them halfway across town to the crossed bank, only to find it deserted. The vault was empty and not a single Afterlight was in sight.
“Milos could have left the city by now,” Mikey said, furious at himself for not going after him right away. “He could be anywhere!”
“I don’t understand,” said Nick, peering into the empty vault. “It was full of sleeping spirits. The ‘Angels of Life’ couldn’t have carried them away—there were too many.”
Then they heard a small voice somewhere behind them. “That’s because they all woke up.”
Allie recognized the voice right away. “Lacey?” Allie searched the bank, and found her hiding under the teller counter. She sat knees-to-chest, looking numb. Looking lost. Allie told the others to stay back. The last thing that Lacey needed was an audience. Then Allie knelt down to her and gently asked, “What happened, Lacey?”
“All the kids we reaped woke up. Mary woke up too, and she came to take them away.”
“Mary’s awake?” It was too much for Allie to process. How on earth could Mary be awake? It hadn’t been nine months. Allie had never heard of an Interlight waking up prematurely.
“I was glad Mary woke up at first, because I thought for sure the bad stuff would stop,” Lacey said. Then her voice got soft as if she was afraid Mary might hear. “But then I heard them all talking. Mary likes what Milos did. How could she like it? How could she?” Lacey looked up to Allie, her eyes pleading for an answer.
“I don’t know” was all Allie could say. Then she looked up to see Mikey and Nick peering over the counter. They had both heard. She couldn’t imagine the mixed feelings they must have had—Nick so in love with Mary for so long, in spite of all the awful things she’d done; Mikey struggling to reconcile the memory of his sister with the self-righteous power-hungry spirit she had become. And they didn’t even know the worst of it. Only Allie did, for only she had seen into Mary’s mind.
Allie returned her attention to Lacey. “Do you know where they were going?”
Lacey shrugged. “Kind of. But it didn’t make sense. I heard them talking about chickens. ‘It’s a chicken,’ they said. ‘We’re going somewhere far away, and it’s a chicken.’”
Allie went off with Nick and Mikey to puzzle all this out. Clarence stayed to entertain Lacey, who, amazingly, was not frightened by his creepy appearance. She had dozens of questions about both sides of his face—like whether or not he needed glasses, and how do you find glasses that have half-crossed?
Allie took Nick and Mikey into the vault, and they sat there, a summit meeting of three questionable superpowers: a skinjacker, an ex-ogre, and a part-time monster.
“This is going to be hard to hear,” Allie told them, “but you need to hear it. And then we have to decide what to do.”
Mikey took her hand and smiled at her, but Nick just looked down sullenly. “I’m remembering more and more about Mary,” he said. “I kind of wish I didn’t.”
Allie wasn’t sure how much Nick remembered, and how much Mikey even knew about that fateful day the bridge blew up, so she told them how she helped drag Mary, hair-first, out of Everlost, and into the living world. “When Mary was crammed back into the living world, she had a body. She was flesh and bone . . . at least she was before Milos re-killed her. And while she was alive . . . I skinjacked her. I saw Mary’s deepest thoughts. Everything she hoped for, everything she believed, everything she planned to do.” Allie hesitated, not wanting to say it, but knowing she had to. “Mary believes she was put on earth to bring an end to the living world.”
Both Nick and Mikey just stared at her.
“What do you mean . . . end?” asked Mikey.
“End means end. Complete and total destruction. She wants to kill everyone and everything. She wants to bring down every building, burn every forest, empty every ocean of life. She wants to turn the earth into a dead planet. . . .”
Nick looked to her with eyes almost as pleading as Lacey’s. “But . . . why would she want to do that?”
“Because to her, Everlost is the only world that matters.”
Mikey nodded, finally understanding his sister’s twisted logic. “And once the living world is gone . . . anything worth keeping will cross. . . .”
“Exactly,” said Allie. “Imagine a world that’s nothing but the memories of a dead one. That’s the future Mary wants. She wants no future at all.”
No one said anything for a while. Allie silently fantasized that they could close themselves in that vault, and just make the rest of the world go away. But that would be no better than what Mary wanted, would it? So this was their great reunion. Things were much different now than the last time the three of them were together. Allie had thought she was dead, Mikey had been a full-time monster determined to be king of the world, and Nick was just an Afterlight boy with a small smudge of chocolate on his face. For a place that was supposed to stay the same forever, quite a lot had changed for them in Everlost.
Mikey was the first to speak. “She can’t do anything without skinjackers.”
“No,” said Allie, “she can’t.” As a skinjacker, Allie knew that more than anyone. She knew how easy it was to change things in the living world by skinjacking just the right people at just the right time—and there were many ways to end the world if you could slip into anyone anywhere and take them over. But without skinjackers, Mary was completely powerless over the living.
“So it’s not her we have to stop, then,” said Mikey. “We have to end her skinjackers before they end the world. We have to extinguish all of them.”
“No!” The three of them turned to see Clarence standing on the vault threshold. “No! I won’t do it! You can’t make me do that!”
Mikey stood up. “What if it’s the only way to save the world?”