White Space

Can’t afford to blink away again, not while I’m driving. Although she’d clearly been away already, hadn’t she? But why now? Come on. Emma put a finger to her forehead, right above her nose, pressing the hard circle of a lacy titanium skull plate beneath muscle and skin. Think. When had she taken her last dose? This morning? Last night? Two days before? She couldn’t remember. The docs were always on her about that, too: Emma, you need to be more compliant. Easy for them to say. It wasn’t like she was trying to be a pain in the ass, but let them choke back pills for a week or two, see how much they liked it. The anti-spaz meds completely messed with her mind. The headaches might evaporate, but reality also misted to a blur until she felt as flat and lifeless as fading words on a tattered page. She didn’t know what was worse: no headaches, seizures, and blinks, or wandering around all hollow and zombied-out, like an extra from The Walking Dead.

Well, just muscle through it. Gripping the wheel harder, she squinted through tears. The world beyond the windshield was shimmery and nearly colorless, that relentless curtain of snow going to gray, about to fade to black as the day died. But what she saw around the edges of that purple maw was wrong: craggy mountains on the right, the drop-off of a valley on the left.

What? Her eyebrows pulled into a frown. That wasn’t right. Sure, Wisconsin has plenty of valleys, but the mountains were pimples. They were zits. Nice zits but still zits.

God, where are we? Her eyes slid to her driver’s side window, frosted with a rime of thin ice. And right then she had the strangest, weirdest impulse: to press her hand to the glass, feel the burn as the ice bled. One push, where the barrier’s thinnest. That’s all it would take. Push hard enough and the glass would open to swallow her up and then she would fall …

Another crash of lightning broke the spell, made her heart flop in her chest. Beside her, Lily let out a yelp and clutched the dash. “How can it do that in snow? Come on, Emma, you’re the science brain. Is it supposed to do that?”

“Sure, if cold air passes over warm water,” she said, relieved her voice didn’t shake. Temples throbbing, she forced her eyes forward again. The metal plate above her nose seemed to be burning its way through the bony vault of her skull. What had that been about? Bleeding ice? Pushing through melting glass, a thinning barrier, to some other world? You nut, who do you think you are—Neo? Stop this. Come on, get a grip. “It just means we’ve got to be close to Lake Superior. That’s why the thunder’s so loud. If we were further away …” She bit off the rest. Lily probably didn’t need a lecture on acoustic suppression and the reflective properties of ice crystals—and she did know Lily, right? Sure, they were both juniors at Holten Prep; Lily was in her … her … What class was it? English? History? Basket-weaving for the mentally deranged?

What’s wrong with me? Her tongue skimmed her lips, tasting fear and salt. Coming back from the blink this time was much worse than ever before, her mind pulling itself together like molten chewing gum pried from the underside of an old shoe. But why? Usually, it was blink-blink and, whoa, when had she decided to take up skydiving? All right, the fugues—pockets of time for which she had no memory—weren’t quite as bad as that, but if she ever needed a go- to for why eighteen pairs of shoes suddenly appeared in her closet, she was set.

Don’t freak. That just makes everything worse. Come on, you know who you are. You’re Emma Lindsay and she’s Lily … Lily … She swallowed around a sudden knot of panic. Lily who?

“Maybe we should turn back,” Lily said.

No, I don’t think we can. I don’t think the storm will let us. But those were crazy thoughts. A storm couldn’t think. Ice didn’t bleed. You couldn’t tumble through glass to fall into forever and all times like some kind of crazy Alice. Of course, a purple mouth shouldn’t make Swiss cheese of the world, but that didn’t stop her addled brain from conjuring one out of thin air. Understanding why didn’t make what she saw any less scary.

Then a real memory—what a weird way to think about it—floated from the fog of her thoughts. “If we go back, won’t your parents make you do that dogsled thing for wannabe warrior-women?” Emma asked.

“Yeah, but compared to this?” Lily grunted. “Dog shit looks pretty good.”

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