Sarah didn’t seem entirely convinced. But I’d swayed her enough to give it a try.
“Remember,” I told Jacob, “no veil.”
“No veil,” he echoed, and we positioned ourselves in a triangle with Sarah at the center and the spot I’d seen her repeater right behind her. I pulled down white light until I buzzed, careful not to touch anyone or anything, especially Jacob. To an outsider, it must’ve looked like a lot of nothing. A couple of black-suited guys staring at a vaguely apprehensive lank-haired woman in a dowdy sweatsuit.
White light, white light, white light.
Nothing.
I told myself I could do this. I’d just exorcised a raging cyclist from a moving vehicle. I could give a repeater a little nudge and let ghost-gravity do the rest.
“Maybe you should do some kind of countdown,” Boswell suggested from the doorway.
“I told you to stay out of this,” I said through gritted teeth.
“You told me to stay in the hall. Which is exactly where I am.”
“Don’t waste your energy on him,” Jacob said. “Focus on Sarah.”
He was right. “Let’s try that box-breathing from yoga,” I told Jacob, thinking that maybe the rhythm of it would activate whatever vibrations were normally enhanced by the binaural beats. “In two-three-four. Hold-two-three-four. Out two-three-four. Empty two-three-four.” Instead of continuing the count, I tapped my foot in time since I couldn’t really talk with no air in my lungs. And pretty soon we were all breathing to the same beat.
Maybe together, we activated something on one of the other subtle planes. Or maybe it was just good for me to worry about something as immediate as breathing so my fear of failure could take a back seat. Either way, as I leaned solidly into the rhythm, eventually, I glimpsed a faint flicker behind Sarah.
The emotional fragment.
“Push,” I whispered to Jacob.
He huffed out a gasp of effort.
And nothing happened.
“She should be behind the ghost,” Boswell piped in, “not in front of it.”
I wanted to tell Jacob to go shove him out the jimmied window. But what I said was, “He’s right. Sarah, could you back up a few paces?”
Sarah did so until she was leaning against the closet door that replaced the one Sledge had broken with her face…though she didn’t seem unduly disturbed by it. Now was not the time to wonder if I was doing the right thing. Besides, I told myself, it wasn’t as if she was serene without her fear. Just flat. “Breathe two-three-four…” I guided Jacob through a few more boxes of breathing, and when I felt as full of white light as I could hope to get, I said, “Okay, now.” I pushed.
And nothing happened.
“Again,” Jacob said.
“It’s no good,” I told him.
“Again,” he insisted.
There was no reason to keep going if it obviously wasn’t working, although we wouldn’t get another chance. “Okay, one more try. Ready…set….”
On the “go” mark, something jostled me and a weird sensation whooshed through my center of balance. A brief second of disorientation—a lot like the loopiness I’d experienced from the SPECs, but without the burnt molar taste. It was like stepping off the bottom stair and finding the floor was just an inch farther away than you expected. Nothing to send you sprawling, just a little stagger.
But that stagger caused a ripple, and the ripple punched Sarah as hard as Sledge ever had. Her physical body didn’t register the hit—but her etheric body tumbled out. And when it did, her fragment flared bright, and merged with her etheric.
“This is just stupid,” her body said.
I turned around and found Boswell there, becauseof coursehe didn’t stay in the hall. “What did you do?” I snapped.
“I was helping!” Oh, I’d “help” him, all right…. “Did it work?”
Meanwhile, Sarah’s etheric form—and the emotional fragment she’d tried to leave behind—were so tangible to my inner eye that she was practically as solid as her body.
