Everlost (Skinjacker 1)

Lief put his hands in his pockets and sullenly looked at the ground. “Good luck, then,” he said. “And watch out for the McGill.”

“We will.”

He stood there for a moment more, then said, “Thank you for giving me a name.

I’ll try to remember it.” Then he climbed away, disappearing high in his tree house again.

“South,” said Nick.

“Home,” said Allie, and they climbed out of the forest to face the treacherous unknowns of the living world.

Whether or not careless children actually sink down to the center of the Earth, no one can say for sure. Certainly many do disappear, but as it always seems to happen when no one else is looking, it confounds all attempts to discover where they actually go. The official term for sinking, coined by none other than Mary Hightower herself, is “Gravity Fatigue.”

In her groundbreaking book The Gravity of Gravity, Mary writes: “Do not believe rumors that children leave Everlost. We are here to stay. Those who can no longer be seen have simply fallen victim to Gravity Fatigue, and are either at, or on their way to the center of the Earth. I imagine the center of the Earth must be a crowded place by now, but perhaps it is the spirits of those of us residing there that keep the Earth alive and green.”

Chapter 5

Friends in High Places Mary Hightower was not born with that name. She could no longer remember what her true name was, although she was relatively certain her first name started with an M. She took the name Mary because it seemed a proper, motherly name.

True, she was only fifteen, but had she lived, she would most certainly have become a mother. And anyway, she was a mother to those who needed one—and there were many.

The name Hightower came because she was the very first who dared to ascend.

That singular bold act of climbing the stairs and staking a claim had earned her a level of respect from others she could not have imagined. They were in awe of her, and many other Everlost children followed her lead. Realizing her position was now high in more ways than one, she decided it was time to share what she knew about Everlost with all Afterlights. Although she had been writing for more than a hundred years, she had only shared it with the small group of younger children she had taken under her wing. But the moment she became Mary Hightower, all that changed. Now her writings were read by everyone—and what had once been a small group of children in her care had grown into hundreds. She had no doubt she would eventually be a mother to thousands.

e presence of monsters, Mary Hightower is curiously silent.

Chapter 4

A Coin on its Edge Night had fallen over the woods, and the three dead kids sat on the highest platform of the tree house bathed in an unnaturally bright moonlight that truly made them look like ghosts. It took a while for Nick and Allie to realize that the moon wasn’t out that night.

“Great,” said Nick, not thinking it was great at all. “Just what I always wanted—to be a glow-in-the-dark ghost.”

“Don’t call us ghosts,” Allie said.

Nick simply didn’t have the patience for Allies issues with word choice. “Face it, that’s what we are.”

“‘Ghost’ implies a whole lot of things that I am NOT. Do I look like Casper to you?”

“Fine,” said Nick. “We’re not ghosts, we’re Undefined Spectral Doohickies. USDs.

Are you happy now?”

“Well that’s just stupid.”

“We’re Afterlights,” said Lief. They both turned to him. “The others who pass through — that’s what they call us, on account of how we glow in the dark — in the daytime, too, if you look close enough.”

“Afterlights,” repeated Allie. “See, I told you we weren’t ghosts.”

Allie and Lief began to talk about monsters again, and, as far as Nick was concerned, this was a conversation he would just as well stay out of. Instead, Nick decided to hold his breath, to see if it were true that oxygen was no longer a requirement. Still, he listened.

“If nothing can hurt you here,” asked Allie, “why be afraid of the McGill?”

“The McGill knows how to hurt you in other ways. It knows how to make you suffer till the end of time, and it’ll do it too, if it gets the chance.” Lief’s eyes were wide, and he made sweeping gestures with his hands like he was telling a campfire story. “The McGill hates kids that get stuck here — hates the sounds we make. It’ll tear out your tongue if it hears you talk, and rip out your lungs if it hears you pretending to breathe. They say the McGill is the devil’s own pet hound that chewed through its leash, and escaped. It couldn’t make it all the way to the living world, but it made it to here. That’s why we have to stay in the forest. It doesn’t know about the forest. We’re safe here.”

Nick could tell that Allie wasn’t convinced. He wasn’t convinced himself, but in light of their current predicament, suddenly anything seemed possible.

“How do you know all this?” Allie asked.