Shine, Page 2

  My phone. The red phone, our secret connection.

  Dylan kept talking as my hands dove into my bag.

  “ . . . my friend Rashid went to Disney World last week, and he sent me and Kyle and Jamal a brag-text when he was on the plane. Dickweed got to fly first class. Aura, are you there?”

  “Hang on!”

  Please, please, please, please, please. I yanked the zipper on the compartment that held my red phone. It stuck.

  Shrieking, I tore the fabric. The phone tumbled out onto the floor, screen side down.

  Dylan shouted from my other phone’s speaker. “What happened? You okay?”

  “Just wait!” I lunged to grab the red phone, jamming the emergency brake into my gut.

  I turned it over.

  NEW MESSAGE, it flashed.

  With a whimper of hope and fear, I jabbed the screen.

  MISSED PLANE THEYR TAKUNG M

  My hand covered my mouth. The message was marked 9:01 p.m. Megan had said that Flight 346 took off at eight thirty.

  Zachary wasn’t on the plane.

  “He’s alive,” I whispered to Dylan.

  His astonishment barely registered as I used my other trembling hand to return Zachary’s message:

  TKING U WHWRE? WHO?

  I punched send and waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  I waited, speechless, while Dylan told me which street he was on, described the cars he was passing, and yelled at the stupid driver who cut him off at the intersection. He kept talking, as if knowing I needed to hear a human voice.

  I was still waiting, staring at the blank screen, when a car pulled in beside me. My red phone was set on silent mode—no ring, no vibrations—so I had to watch for Zachary’s reply.

  It wasn’t coming.

  Dylan opened my car door. “If he’s alive—” he said into his own phone, then realized what he was doing and hung up. “If Zachary’s alive, he’ll call you.”

  “What if he’s hurt?”

  “Then he’ll call from the hospital, or his mom will.”

  His mom. “Zachary’s parents!” Did they get on the plane? Had he lost them? Wherever he was, he needed me.

  I rattled the red phone hard, as if I could shake Zachary’s location out of the speaker. “Where is he?! What did they do to him?”

  “Hey. Hey. Don’t break that.” Dylan crouched down and took my wrist in a soft grip. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  I lowered my chin, dribbling tears onto the blacktop between us. I wiped my eyes and noticed Dylan still hadn’t put on shoes. His middle toe peeked out of a hole in his white sock.

  Another car arrived, brakes squealing. I leaned on Dylan’s arm as he helped me up.

  Aunt Gina lurched out of the passenger side, her pale face pinched in sadness. She looked like she’d been crying on the ride over but had dried her eyes, thinking she had to be strong for me. Again.

  The full relief of Zachary’s escape hit me. I ran to her. “He’s alive!” My hug knocked her back against Megan’s car. “Zachary’s alive!”

  “What? Honey, how do you know?”

  “He sent me a text.” I shoved my red phone into her hands.

  “He’s alive?” Megan was scooting around the hood, her long auburn braid bouncing over her shoulder.

  “Yes!” I hurled myself into Megan’s arms.

  “Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod,” she chanted, rocking me back and forth. “Dylan, what are you doing here?”

  “Keeping me sane,” I told her. “It was his idea to check for a message from Zach.”

  “Are you sure Zachary sent this?” Gina’s voice held lawyerly suspicion.

  “No one else has this number. If he’d gone down in the plane, the phone would have gone with him.”

  “Unless someone stole it from him before he boarded,” Gina pointed out.

  I leaped to correct her, needing her to believe. “My number’s not on speed dial or in the contacts.”

  “Besides,” Dylan said, putting on his sneakers, “why would someone text you that Zachary wasn’t on the plane when he really was? Airlines know who’s on board and who isn’t.”

  My soaring mood plummeted at the thought of the people who had died. “What about Zachary’s mom and dad? You think they—”

  “No way.” Gina shook her head emphatically. “No parent would leave their kid behind in the terminal.”

  “Let me see that.” Megan snatched the phone from Gina. “Guys, it says, ‘They’re taking me.’ Not ‘They’re taking us.’ ”

  “Oh God.” Gina pressed her fingertips to her eyes. “So his parents weren’t with him when he sent that message.”

  My throat thickened with fear as I voiced the hardest questions of all. “Then who took Zachary? And where?”

  Chapter Three

  While Gina drove us home, zooming down the expressway, she told me who to dial from her contacts list. As a lawyer who specialized in wrongful death suits, she knew lots of people in law enforcement. Maybe one of them would know what had happened to Zachary and his parents.

  But the cell phone lines were jammed. Everyone in the area must have been calling friends and family to talk about the disaster.

  “Let’s go to the office,” Gina said. “I’ve got more numbers there, and maybe I’ll have better luck with a landline.”

  She clicked on the blinker, then waved at Megan in the rearview mirror so she knew to follow. Dylan’s parents had made him come home, once they realized he’d taken the car.

  The radio said that more than two hundred passengers had been in the crash, with no survivors found yet. One report claimed that planes had been grounded across the country in case Flight 346 was part of a coordinated terrorist attack. But another said the crash was due to a mechanical failure.

  We slowed at a stoplight. A group of girls my age were crowded around a café’s outdoor table, laughing and pointing at a magazine.

  Hadn’t they heard? Didn’t they care that the world had fallen down?

  My pulse accelerated as I listened to more contradictory news reports. In one hand I clutched the white rose I’d taken from Logan’s grave, and in the other, an iced-tea bottle cap Zachary had given me months ago. A spiral design adorned the cap’s underside. I’d found Zachary a matching one, which he’d carried with him as obsessively as I carried mine. The spiral reminded us of the walls of Newgrange, an ancient passage tomb, which we were convinced held the secret to our very natures.

  “I’ll call my friend in Immigration.” Gina was attempting a soothing tone. “Her home number is on my secretary’s Rolodex. Maybe she can find out what happened to the Moores.” She patted my shoulder. “We’ll get it all worked out, I promise.”

  I nodded, wishing I was driving so I could get us there faster.

  Dusk had turned to full dark, so ghosts were visible on the tree-lined sidewalk outside Gina’s Roland Park law office. None of these half-dozen violet-hued spirits could see one another. That’s why ghosts spend so much time haunting those who can see them—meaning, me and everyone younger.

  Post-Shifters, they call us. My birth marked the moment of the Shift, though few people knew I was the first. Born a minute before me—but halfway around the world to different parents—Zachary was the last of the pre-Shifters. This was also top secret.

  What no one but me and Zachary knew was why my birth caused the Shift and made ghosts visible to everyone born after—my own father was a ghost.

  I was struck with a new, horrible thought. “The people on the plane,” I said to Gina as we got out of the car. “They died suddenly, so a lot of them will be ghosts.”

  “Just what the world needs,” Gina sighed.

  Unlike most pre-Shifters, my aunt didn’t hate ghosts. She pitied them, thinking it pure torture to be stuck on earth in a desperate search for peace. Many did want to pass on, but others shared Logan’s most fervent wish:

  To live.

  Flaming wreckage, one of several pieces of what
was once Flight 346, floated in a Chesapeake Bay tributary. A sheen of jet fuel lay atop the river, so it looked like the water itself was on fire.

  Megan and I stared in horror at the wall-mounted television in the law office’s conference room. Gina was phoning her colleagues from her secretary’s desk outside the door.

  The shot switched to another burning airliner piece, engulfing the low, flat roof of a discount store in Dundalk.

  “I wonder if the people on the plane knew what was happening,” Megan said. “And did they all die when it blew up, or did some live long enough to feel themselves fall?”

  I closed my eyes and imagined it. The explosion, a sudden crack, the smell of burning metal and flesh. Then gravity having its way, the earth tugging its creatures into its hard embrace. People crying, screaming as they plummeted. Praying, as if that would break their fall.

  Would lovers hold hands and kiss, or would each person be trapped in their own grief and fear? What if a mother had more than two kids—whose hands would she grasp?

  Would Zachary’s last thought have been of me?

  My muscles went rigid, as though bracing for impact. “Zach should’ve been on that plane.” My words were strangled by a sob. “He should be dead.”

  “But he’s not.” Megan pulled me into a hug. “The universe would totally suck if it did that to you again.”

  If it killed another boyfriend of mine, she meant. I clutched her back and wept for Logan, too. My grief for him and my fear for Zachary formed a double-stranded rope of misery that would surely throttle me.

  My phone rang. Zero-one-one area code. United Kingdom.

  I almost fumbled the phone in my excitement. “Zachary?!”

  “Sorry, it’s Eowyn.”

  My heart plunged. For a second, I’d thought a UK area code meant that somehow he’d gotten a new phone. Not that I didn’t want to talk to Eowyn Harris, our friend and mentor.

  “Aura, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.” I grabbed a tissue from the nearly empty box in front of Megan. “Zachary’s plane went down, but he wasn’t on it.”

  “Oh, what a relief!” Her usually smooth voice turned ragged, making her sound much older than her thirty-four years. “What about his parents?”

  “No idea yet.” I shoved back my chair to stand, though my legs shook. “And we don’t know where Zachary is, just that someone took him somewhere.”

  “Let me know as soon as you find out.” Fear filled her words. I pictured her pacing, twisting her waist-length blond hair around her fingers.

  “What about you? Are you safe? Can you tell me where you are?”

  “Yes, I’m safe. And no, I can’t tell you.”

  Frustrated, I dragged the tissue over my cheeks. Professor Harris had fled to England to keep the DMP from seizing her Shift research. I assumed the agency’s British counterpart, MI-X, was protecting her. Zachary’s dad, Ian, had been MI-X’s liaison to the DMP before he got lung cancer. Part of his job was to keep those jerks away from me and Eowyn.

  Me, because I was the First, and Eowyn, because she’d been at Newgrange on the winter solstice nineteen years ago—the same morning as Ian and my mother were there. Eowyn saw the two of them light up from inside as they passed through the sunrise beam.

  “Zachary called me last Friday,” Eowyn continued breathlessly. “He said you two didn’t get to read all of your mother’s journal. I’m so thankful I made a copy.”

  “Me too.” Eowyn had left a trail of clues to locate my dead mother’s account of her Ireland trip. Desperate to know who my father was, I’d skipped to the end of the journal, skimming the middle. Then the DMP captured me and Zachary and tried to take us to a remote place in the Pennsylvania mountains called “3A.” We escaped, but the journal pages had been ruined as we crossed a river to cover our tracks.

  “I told Zachary I’d give him my copy of the journal when he arrived in the UK,” Eowyn said, “but who knows when that’ll be?”

  “Can you mail it to me, or scan and e-mail it?”

  “It could be intercepted. I don’t trust anyone but you two. I promised your mother that even I wouldn’t read it.” She spoke more slowly. “There’s only one thing I worry about more than that journal, and that’s you, Aura. Please be careful.”

  “I will,” I said, though it was the last thing I wanted to be. Zachary wouldn’t settle for “careful” if I were the one who’d disappeared.

  We hung up, and I turned back to the television.

  The news channel was interviewing a near-hysterical woman at the airport. The caption said her sister-in-law and niece had been on Flight 346.

  They switched to a picture of one of the plane crash victims, a fourteen-year-old girl with a mop of dark, wavy hair and a soccer ball under her arm. Again I was swept with relief for Zachary’s survival, then guilt for being happy while so many others were heartbroken.

  Gina stepped into the conference room. “Good news: Mr. and Mrs. Moore are alive.”

  “Yes!” I went to pump my fist, then saw that her hands were locked together, white-knuckle hard. “What’s wrong?”

  “Zachary and his parents have been detained.”

  I stared at her. Maybe that word didn’t mean what I thought it meant. “Detained? Why? By who?”

  “By the FBI. In case Flight 346 was bombed.”

  “That’s insane!” I stalked toward her, almost tripping over the leg of an office chair. “They’re not terrorists.”

  “The government doesn’t think the Moores actually put a bomb on the plane, if there was a bomb. Obviously their bags were removed after they failed to board.”

  “But why didn’t they board? Did Ian get sick?” Between his disease and the chemo treatments, the poor man rarely felt well.

  “No, it’s strange.” Gina scratched her head, mussing her short blond waves. “Zachary wasn’t at the gate on time.”

  “That’s not like him,” Megan said. “He’s crazy punctual.”

  “The authorities suspect he may have gotten information at the last minute. Maybe he was warned about a bombing.”

  “If he was warned, he would’ve reported it!” My tongue stuttered with rage and confusion. “There’s—there’s lots of reasons he could’ve been late.”

  “Maybe he had the wrong gate number,” Megan offered. “Or maybe he got distracted.”

  I pictured Zachary in the terminal, checking out the aircraft, discovering fascinating facts about—

  Oh no.

  Zachary had been distracted, all right. By a ghost. He’d been talking to Logan—maybe even fighting with Logan—instead of getting on the plane.

  Which meant . . .

  Logan had saved Zachary’s life.

  Chapter Four

  Like most of America—and probably the United Kingdom—Gina and I stayed up late, watching our living room television, craving more news about the crash. The government remained silent regarding the cause, leaving the media to speculate.

  One expert claimed that the explosion could’ve been due to a mechanical problem, maybe a spark in the fuel tank. Another expert argued that the pattern of debris was similar to past airliner bombings. The FBI’s tip line scrolled continuously at the bottom of the screen, promising a reward for information about the incident.

  Nestled in the crook of the couch’s arm, I held close the red camisole shirt I’d worn last night. I’d purposely left it out of the laundry because it still smelled faintly of Zachary.

  We switched to the local news, carrying live coverage of an impromptu candlelight vigil on Mount Vernon Place here in Baltimore.

  Many people at the vigil held the American stars and stripes and the UK’s Union Jack, I guess as a sign of solidarity.

  “Can we go to the vigil?” I asked Gina.

  “You should lie low tonight, in case the media gets wind of Zachary’s detainment and your connection to him. Besides, I’m hoping my contact in Immigration will call me back. It’s best if I’m somewhere private
when I talk to her.”

  Under my breath, I cursed my powerlessness. I needed to do something other than sit here wallowing in tragedy and imagining what my government would do to suspected foreign terrorists.

  I squeezed the balled-up shirt tighter to feel the spiral-adorned bottle cap tucked inside. It was a small, silly thing, but picturing the FBI confiscating Zachary’s bottle cap made my fists tighten and throb.

  “Aura.” Gina broke through my misery. “Before you meet with the DMP tomorrow, we need to discuss what happened at the concert Friday night.”

  I sighed, knowing I had to come clean. Over the weekend, reports had popped up online, on TV, and in the papers about Logan’s “miracle concert.” Videos showed him transforming from a ghost into a living person at the moment of the solstice, then singing his new anthem, “Shade,” and finally disappearing in a pyrotechnic burst simulating the glow of a ghost passing on.

  I sat up, muted the television, and told Aunt Gina the truth.

  First, at the moment of the spring equinox, I’d changed Logan from a bitter, dangerous shade to a benign ghost, something no one had ever done.

  Second, for seventeen minutes after the beginning of spring and summer, including at his concert, I’d turned Logan human again.

  Aunt Gina wasn’t normally a drinker, but she responded to my tale by pouring herself a huge glass of wine. She seemed too stunned to be mad.

  She took a long sip. “Well, I’m glad to finally know the whole story.”

  Or at least what she thought was the whole story.

  Gina examined the glass’s crimson depths. “Do you think this power has something to do with you being the first person born after the Shift?”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “But it probably has more to do with the connection between me and Logan.” If I steered her away from my uniqueness as the First, maybe she wouldn’t think to ask if Zachary had any corresponding “power” as the Last. Which he did, a secret I’d sworn to keep.

  “What should I tell the DMP tomorrow?” I asked her.

  “Tell them what you told me, and nothing more.” She tapped her pale pink nails against her lips, contemplating. “But let’s try to make them think that Logan is—was—the special one, not you. He’s gone now, so they won’t be able to use him to prove you wrong.” She went to take another sip. “He is gone now, right? He disappeared at the concert?”