Under Zenith Read online

  I guess it was a stupid question.

  “How many people have you guided?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

  “Just one other girl,” he said, his eyes trained on the ceiling very pointedly as he lay on his back.

  “Were you this mean to her?”

  “The job does bring out some of my less desirable traits I guess,” he began, making the biggest understatement ever spoken. “But she was my niece so I was definitely nicer to her.”

  “Niece?” I asked, my interest suddenly piqued. “So you did have a life before this.”

  “It’s not important,” he said, sounding like we were treading on dangerous ground.

  “Did she make it to her Destination?”

  Hayden was quiet for a long time. I couldn’t tell if he was hesitant to answer me or if he was just completely ignoring me like he usually did.

  “No,” he finally said after a long silence. “She didn’t.”

  I mulled this over for a moment.

  It was possible to fail this series of tests, which made them infinitely scarier. But the scariest thing was not knowing what that actually meant.

  “What happens if we don’t make it to our Destination?”

  “I don’t remember,” Hayden said, sounding genuine.

  “How can you not remember something like that?” I asked incredulously.

  I realized I should have been a little nicer to him since he was opening up about his niece and he hadn’t made a snarky comment in the last few minutes, but it just didn’t make sense to me that he could forget such a monumental detail.

  “Things get a bit cloudy when I get here at the beginning of a cycle,” he said gruffly, indicating to me that our time of ‘open discussion’ was quickly coming to a close.

  “Does that mean you can’t remember what you did before this? You must remember something if you can recall your niece,” I pointed out gently, trying to sound as unobtrusive as possible.

  “We’re done talking about this,” he said with a note of finality.

  Honestly, I was surprised I’d gotten that much out of him. He didn’t really seem like the type to share his feelings with the class.

  Still, he wasn’t all snark and threats and that gave me a small glimmer of hope that he wasn’t completely soulless.

  We sat in silence for a while, me trying not to think about my family or my stolen life, Hayden brooding and giving me the silent treatment. It was a good forty minutes or so when the snow finally started to fall. Only it wasn’t just falling outside. Delicate white flakes made their way through nonexistent cracks in the ceiling, landing on my bare shoulders and making me shiver.

  “It’s cold,” I commented, quite obviously.

  “It’s snow,” Hayden pointed out in exasperation.

  “So does this mean you’re leaving?” I asked, yawning loudly and finding that I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to kick him off of the dusty bed and take it for myself.

  “Sadly, our riveting conversation will be over in about thirty seconds when you fall asleep.”

  “Sorry,” I said, more out of habit than anything else. “I’m not sure why I’m so tired all of a sudden.”

  “It’s the snow,” Hayden said, making absolutely no sense at all.

  Maybe it was my exhaustion setting in and he had actually said something that was completely logical. My tired mind had just botched it all up.

  Wordlessly, he stood from the bed and ushered me over to it, almost seeming kind. Almost.

  “I guess I’ll deal with you tomorrow. Try not to make a mess of things too much while I’m gone,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to throw some witty insult back at him, but found that my entire body felt as if it were shutting down involuntarily. It was the same sensation I got when a doctor put me under and I tried as hard as I could to stay awake. It was a losing battle to say the least.

  My eyes became fuzzy and my lids heavy as I tried to ask Hayden one last question that never came out. I had to know if I’d be safe in the cabin after he left. Instead, I gave in to the overwhelming urge to let sleep take me as I watched my Guide disappear through the front door, leaving it unlocked behind him.

  Chapter 7

  I woke the next morning feeling sore, achy, and warm. The ‘sore and achy’ I’d expected. I wasn’t out of shape because of Monica’s mandatory-apartment-weekly-yoga she’d instated, but I didn’t work out every day, so running for my life from a zombie hadn’t really been something I’d trained for.

  I could feel the sun beating down on my closed lids, which surprised me to no end, since the last time I’d been awake it was foggy and snowy. Apparently weather was very unpredictable in purgatory. I’d have to make a note of that somewhere in my ‘What I Did on my Purgatory Vacation’ essay I presented to the class. This nonexistent essay would probably consist of three things: unpredictable weather, stupid challenges that seemed completely irrelevant, and rude, but highly attractive British men.

  Really, if Hayden wasn’t so completely unpleasant, my stay in purgatory wouldn’t be all that bad. But no. Mr. ‘Bad Boy’ had to have an attitude.

  Opening my eyes wearily, I glanced around the room, surprised that I’d been so anxious to hop into the completely disgusting bed I was currently lying on. The sheets were dusty, the mattress reeked of mold, and the entire bed frame was covered in spider webs. The only explanation I could come up with for my desire to sleep somewhere so horrible, was the fact that the snow made me sleep…somehow…because that made all the sense in the world.

  Logic told me that I probably needed to eat something for breakfast, but as I stood and walked around the dusty cabin room, I didn’t feel hungry at all. It was probably just as well since it didn’t look like the room contained any food that hadn’t expired over 100 years ago anyway.

  I heaved a heavy sigh, very pointedly ignoring the homesick feeling that was beginning to spread at the thought of my family and what they might be doing today.

  Would they be picking out a coffin? Or was it too soon for that? How long did people generally wait until they buried someone anyway?

  I shivered at the thought that my body might be lying in a morgue somewhere surrounded by other dead bodies. Everything sterile, cold, and metal. Absolutely no warmth or life. And to top it all off I absolutely hated the smell of formaldehyde, which would undoubtedly be a permanent fixture in the morgue.

  Those were the thoughts I needed to keep at bay. Maybe when all of these tasks were done, I’d let myself think about my family, or all of the things I wanted to do before I’d died. But for now, I was going to focus on the task at hand and just try to survive through the cycles and Hayden’s attitude. Though I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  “I hope Monica remembered to feed Ron Swanson,” I thought aloud, my nonexistent hunger reminding me that Monica might forget her responsibilities in light of her roommate/best friend dying.

  Our Scottish Fold looked grumpy enough when he had enough to eat. I couldn’t imagine what his smushed up little face would look like if he wasn’t being fed.

  Killing time until my unwilling Guide showed up, I examined the cabin more closely, feeling like it looked more like a haunted house than anything. I wasn’t too keen to get outside just in case that zombie from yesterday decided to stick around. Of course I could always look out the windows, but the shutters seemed to be stuck, only letting in the tiny beam of light I had woken to that snuck between the wooden planks.

  Sitting down on the moldy bed again, I felt myself shiver involuntarily as I replayed the traumatic scene from yesterday. The cabin was quiet; the sound muffled by the layers of dust that coated every surface. But somewhere, I could vaguely hear what sounded like crying.

  Not just crying, but a woman crying.

  “Mama?” I whispered to the empty room, wondering if my mind was playing tricks on me.

  “My little girl,” she whispered back, her voice broken and difficult to hear.

  Was I actually
hearing my mother? Was my spirit somehow still linked to my body?

  “Mama?” I said again, this time a bit louder, hoping that by some miracle she could hear me.

  I looked around the room, desperate to find some indication that she could hear what I was saying.

  Though the sound was still muffled, I could have sworn my brother’s voice came next, saying, “I can’t believe this happened.”

  “Tuck!” I shouted, overjoyed to hear his voice, but instantly saddened by the reminder that I could no longer see him.

  Forgetting about my fears, I opened the door to the cabin and ran out into the thick fog. Apparently the beautiful sunny day had disappeared the second I stepped outside. I could barely see my hand in front of my face, but I could tell right away that the ground felt different than it had the day before.

  Where dirt and plants had padded the ground before, there was now thick, lush grass. It was almost as if the cabin wasn’t in the same place as it was yesterday. Of course that didn’t make any sense. But none of my experience in this place had made sense so far.

  “Tuck?” I called again, now running blindly through the fog that had so quickly replaced the sunlight, not concerned with the cabin that I could no longer see. “I can hear you, Tuck.”

  “Are you completely insane? Get back here!” Hayden yelled, pulling me back forcefully by the arm so that I spun around and hit his chest painfully.

  “That hurt,” I shouted at him, mostly angry that he had scared me so badly and less concerned with the iron tight grip he had on my upper arm at the moment.

  “Not as much as falling off the island, genius,” he retorted coolly, nodding over my shoulder into the fog. “I don’t need you failing the second task before it even starts.”

  I looked behind me, trying to understand what he was talking about. I still wasn’t sure when the sun had disappeared and left me with the impenetrable curtain of fog, but it made it very difficult to make out my surroundings.

  “Let me help you,” he said.

  Hayden pulled on my arm, yanking me down to the ground with him so that we were on our hands and knees, side by side. He looked over at me with an annoyed raise of his eyebrow, his face only inches from mine and our shoulders touching.

  I hated myself for noticing how blue his eyes were at this proximity.

  “Look down there,” he said, nodding to the grass in front of us and finally releasing my arm, leaving a bright red mark where his hand had been only moments before.

  Something told me he wasn’t too concerned with hurting me since I plagued his existence with pleasant conversation.

  Trying to ignore the fact that Hayden had so unexpectedly doomed my day with his angst, I crawled forward a bit, letting my hands feel the ground in front of me to avoid whatever hazard he was trying to show me. It only took a few seconds to see why he had been so forceful with me (besides the obvious reason that it gave him a good excuse to manhandle me and inflict at least a little pain). The grass ended suddenly and dropped off into nothingness.

  I would have called it a cliff, if I could see the bottom of the drop off, or even if I could see the earth below the grass. But from what I could observe, the grassy hill I was perched on didn’t drop off into a cliff. It simply ended. As if the entire hill were floating in midair.

  “This hill--”

  “Island,” Hayden corrected.

  “Island,” I said, trying the word on for size, but not quite liking the description for our current environment. “It’s…what? Floating?”

  “Like I said Casper, I don’t make up the rules. This place is all you.”

  “But when would I ever imagine up a floating island? It doesn’t make any sense,” I asked, standing with him and backing away from the edge carefully.

  “Your cousin Reagan was playing a video game when you went to visit her in Oregon a few years back and you saw it there,” Hayden told me, reporting back details of my life in such a matter-of-fact way that I almost believed it wasn’t weird.

  “How did you--”

  “I already told you. I’m your Guide. I know things.”

  “Except what you did before you got here,” I said.

  I knew it was a low blow, but I was so sick of his smug grin that I had to do something to put him in his place.

  “We’re going to be late for your second task,” he answered simply.

  It was obvious that he liked me even less than I liked him and simply wanted to get the tasks over with as soon as possible so that he could get rid of me.

  Of course I didn’t understand why he didn’t just let me fall off the edge of the island. That would have saved him a lot of trouble in the long run. Then again, if his job was to get me to my Destination, I guess he had to follow those rules no matter how little he cared for me. He had to do his job the best he could.

  “Shouldn’t we be walking a little slower so we don’t fall off this island and die?” I asked Hayden in a sing song voice.

  The fog was so thick that I knew by the time we saw a drop off it would be too late. We would have just walked casually to our deaths…our second deaths I guess.

  “If you hadn’t taken a little detour this morning, we wouldn’t have to walk so fast now,” he answered.

  “I thought I heard something.”

  “Great, now you’ve gone nuts. Normally we wait until the last task for that bit to kick in, but it’s good that you’re getting an early start on it,” he said dryly.

  The dewy grass squeaked under our feet and I suddenly wished I could take off my cowboy boots and just enjoy the less than sunny day, rather than following a grumpy British guy to a task that would probably force me to do all sorts of unpleasant things.

  “Who did you hear?” he asked after a few minutes of us walking in silence.

  To say that I was surprised to hear Hayden ask me a personal question was the understatement of the century. I wasn’t sure what his angle was, but I knew he couldn’t just be asking to be nice. It wasn’t like him.

  “I thought I heard my mom,” I told him timidly. I didn’t want to sound too crazy. “And then my brother.”

  Hayden didn’t say anything to my remarks; he simply kept up his impossible pace that required me to do an awkward half jog by his side.

  “Well?” I said in annoyance.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, what does that mean?”

  “That you’re crazy? I don’t know,” he said, sounding much more like his old self again.

  “Ugh. What is that, your new catch phrase?” I asked. “’I don’t know.’ ‘I don’t know’,” I said in the best imitation of his voice that I could muster.

  It was a pretty awful imitation. My British accent wasn’t exactly up to scratch.

  He didn’t respond (surprise, surprise), but instead kept walking in silence.

  The fog was slowly lessening and I could just make out the hazy surroundings that were veiled in mystery only moments before. From what I could tell (and I couldn’t tell much), it looked like we were surrounded by a number of floating islands just like the one we were currently standing on.

  Each one kind of resembled an ice cream cone of earth with a grassy hill on top; a few trees and small rivers dotting the surface. Thick tree roots stuck out of the ground all around the sides of the earth, and each island spun in slow, lazy rotations.

  “Please don’t tell me I’m going to be chased again today,” I said, whining a bit, but not really caring at the moment.

  It wasn’t like I could make Hayden think less of me at that point. It was a mathematical impossibility.

  “Second task: Motor Skills,” he answered, just as vague as ever.

  I gave him a skeptical look, knowing that the task was sure to be overkill just to test out such a simple ability. “Can’t I just complete the sobriety test or something?” I asked.

  “Familiar with that test, are we?” he asked back, shutting me up.

  We walked in silence. Again. As usual. Until we came
to the opposite end of the island where Hayden abruptly stopped and looked over at me expectantly.

  “What?”

  “Get on with the test,” he responded, sounding like I definitely shouldn’t have to ask him what he was talking about.

  “What do you want me to do? Touch my finger to my nose or something?”

  “No, I want you to jump.”

  Chapter 8

  “I’m sorry, what?” I asked Hayden, sure that I had misheard what he’d said.

  “I want you to jump,” he repeated in the calmest voice I’d ever heard.

  “Weren’t you the person who just called me all sorts of horrible things for almost walking off the edge of the island?” I asked. I needed to clarify that he was, in fact, just as crazy as he was coming off at the moment.

  “That was on that side of the island,” he said with a smirk. “Now that we’re on this side, I want you to jump.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I asked sarcastically. “And why, exactly, am I doing this?”

  “Motor skills,” he said, like I was an idiot.

  “What does jumping off of a cliff have to do with motor skills?”

  “See that island in the distance?” he asked me, pointing straight ahead at a large, rotating island a good fifteen or twenty feet away.

  “I definitely can’t jump to that,” I informed him.

  Though really, that shouldn’t be the type of thing you need to point out to someone. I’d hope that information was pretty obvious.

  “No, not that one,” he said in annoyance. “The one beyond that.”

  I squinted my eyes in the fog, trying to see what he was talking about, but failing miserably. I could see a faint purple light in the distance, somewhere even higher up than the island we were standing on at the moment.

  “The light?” I asked finally.

  “That light is actually a stone set in a tree trunk on another island,” he said.

  It almost sounded as if he had given this information hundreds of times and was now reciting it because he had to. Of course I knew that wasn’t the case because A) he’d only ever guided one other person and B) he’d said that I invented this entire place so he couldn’t have seen it before.