The flash of the muzzle blinded her.
Funny, the thing that crossed her mind then. She didn’t think of her brother, or of Kyla’s boyfriend Lance saying,I work for the cartel. You’re safe.She didn’t think of Kyla.
She thought of herself. Fernanda saw herself as a girl, sitting on her grandmother’s lap, asking, “Where did you learn all these stories?”
“El otro mundo.”The other world.“It’s like our world, but better.”
The afterlife, hell, the depths of space? Fernanda’s young mind boggled. “Then how did you hear them?”
“I got them from my little sister. She and her friend went to hike a mountain and never came back. A tall, tall mountain with a city inside it.”
Fernanda thought this was just another story. Maybe part of it was. Maybe none of it.
“My sister still sends me postcards with all the stories she hears over there,” her grandmother said. “Postales del otro mundo.”
Here, on the porch of the Brake Inn Motel, Fernanda didn’t hear the gunshot. She heard a wet spatter that she realized was the back of her head bursting across the wall.
Then nothing.
ETHAN
Minutes before the gunshot, Ethan and Kyla were still seated at the bar, trying to devise a plan. “You said that Sarah Powers spent time today at the old house out back, right?” he said.
Tabitha nodded. “It’s where she was when you first arrived.”
Ethan said to Kyla, “If we want to figure out what happened to Sarah, that seems like the best place to start.”
Outside, the lamps sputtered. A wave ofSHRIEKSfrom the dark. Those things out there refused to be forgotten.
Kyla leaned to look out the window, peering in the direction of the old house. Following her gaze, Ethan saw a familiar sight: the upstairs window was glowing with a silver light.
Kyla said, “There’s a lot of dark between here and there. I don’t think we’d make it five steps. I want to see what’s on that film Ryan stole from Sarah’s room. Maybe if we’re lucky, the woman took pictures of whatever she found in that house, and we won’t even have to go there.”
Ethan hesitated, massaging the pain in his head. With every minute that passed the pain grew worse, worse: but not absolute. Here and there, fragments—images, sounds, words—had begun to shoot through his mind, fast as stars, and while they traveled, the headache seemed to leave him.
It happened again now. He felt a moment of pure adrenaline, saw himself running
running through the dark, running for the house, running through the night.
He sees himself heave open the house’s door.
He turns, expecting to see Hunter right behind him and seeing only
Ethan blinked. The memory left, the pain flooded back in, but he knew what he’d seen. He wasn’t stupid. He was seeing a fragment from yesterday.
“Last night, I think we made it to the house,” he said. “At least… I made it. Thereisa way to do it.”
“And that is?”
“I—” Ethan pressed his fingers to his temples, willing his mind to go back. He felt like this was vital, desperately important.
But it wouldn’t come.
Kyla turned her attention back to Tabitha. “How do you and Thomas remember this every day? Why don’tyoulose your memories like we did?”
“I suspect it has something to do with the strange metal our father gave us in 1955. But I don’t know why you’ve regained yours.”
Ethan saw something else:
