Wyatt’s nails dig into my skin. “I love you, Olive. Always have. Always will.”
I wantalwaysto be more than the next three minutes.
Brace,the flight attendants yell.Brace!
The plane plunges vertically. Bags fly out of the overhead compartments and the oxygen masks drop on their strings like macabre marionettes. Someone screams, and my head whips around. “Look at me,” Wyatt commands, his words lost in the roar of the plane breaking apart. My world narrows down to those fierce blue eyes, which have criticized me, challenged me, surprised me, seduced me, loved me.
As we fall out of the sky, I wonder who will remember me.
—
IHAVE SUNKinto the lake of fire, between the two routes of the Book of Two Ways. It roars around me, smoke billowing, coating the inside of my mouth and underneath my eyelids, making tears burn down my face. Flames grab at my clothes, my shoulders, my hair. I am shouting but no one can hear me.
Knowledge. I need knowledge. That’s what will get me through the gates, past the demons. They are everywhere—a monster with half its body torn off. A mangled seat with a man strapped to it, shrieking as the fire consumes his fastened seatbelt. A girl with flame where her braids used to be. Their eyes are as wild as mine, and I try to get past, as I scream for Wyatt.
There are two ways out—land and water. I know this viscerally, as if it’s been stamped into my heart. But I am not going without him.
Wyatt,I yell.
The smoke becomes a beast, clouds rolling into the blackened form of a person, coming for me. I stagger backward.Wyatt! Wyatt!
A flight attendant steps out of the smoke like she’s shedding a second skin. She grabs my arm.You need to come with me.I can read her lips, but there’s no sound.
I don’t need to come anywhere. I wrench away from her and dodge through a hoop of fire and fuselage. As I am running I trip and fall flat onto the soft mattress of a man wearing a white shirt; a man, facedown, with yellow hair.Wyatt.
It takes all my strength to turn him over and I am coughing and my lungs are ribbons and his eyes, his sightless eyes, are staring up at the black sky.
But this man is wearing glasses, and has a mustache. This man is not Wyatt.
I start crying so hard that I can’t get to my feet. A fine mist covers my face and my hair. The water route. I turn toward it and mark the distant glint of fire hoses, magical hydras fighting the breath of dragons.
But it also makes the smoke thicker and viscous until I am breathing soup, and I can’t find my way through. The land route is nothing but an inferno. I’m trapped.
The smoke parts like wood split by an ax and another monster stalks toward me. This one has blood covering its face.
This one is shouting my name.
I get to my feet and he pulls me against him, holds the back of my head with his hands, kisses me like he could gift me the oxygen from his own lungs.
That’s when I can see it: a way out. A next life.
WHENIOPENmy eyes, everything is white, so white and bright that I wince. There are objects, unmoving, unfocused, surrounded by halos.
The first thing I notice is the pain.
My head is too heavy to move and it has its own pulse. My throat is a ribbon of desert. It takes a Herculean effort to open my eyes.
I can’t be dead if there’s pain, can I? But none of us knows what the afterlife holds. Maybe it’s nothingbutpain.
Immediately, as if a blanket has muffled all that light, it isn’t quite so blinding. I let my vision adjust, realizing that a curtain has been yanked across a window. The objects become a chair, a sink, the foot of a hospital bed. Then I hear Brian’s voice. “Better?” he asks.
His hand, warm, enfolds mine. His face rises in my field of vision like a blood moon, familiar, but unexpected.
He smiles down at me, and there are tears in his eyes, and I realize he is having the same trouble finding language that I am.
“You were hurt,” he says finally. “You had to have surgery to relieve the pressure on your brain.”
Gingerly I raise my free hand, feeling the edges of a bandage wrapped around my entire head. I try to stay calm, but inside, I am terrified. My brother has told me about some of the neurosurgery cases he’s seen: Workmen who fall off ladders and never wake up. Award-winning professors who have seizures and cannot remember how to dress themselves. The brain, Kieran says, is a fascinating and frivolous organ. You never know what it’s going to do.
