Ghost Town

“You don’t have to ask permission,” Shane said then. “You can just go. The machine’s dead. Just go.” His voice sounded flat, and wrong.

They all looked at one another, the rest of them. “There’ll be roadblocks,” Michael finally said. “It’s not that easy.”

“Yeah, it never is, is it?” Shane threw down his fork, pushed back from the table, and took his stuff into the kitchen. Claire went after him, but as soon as she came in the door, he dumped his food in the trash and his plate in the sink and turned to go.

“Shane—”

He held up both hands, pushing her off without touching her. “Give me some room, okay? I need room.” He left. She stood there, looking at his plate sitting in the sink, and felt her heart breaking again. Why wouldn’t he talk to her? What had she done? It hurt; it really did. She felt like . . . like she was losing him again.

She was tired of losing him.

Claire walked back out to the table. Shane had already disappeared upstairs, and his door shut with a slam. Michael and Eve were looking down at their plates.

“Awkward,” Eve finally said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

Michael shook his head. “He lost his dad. It hurts.”

“I know,” Eve said sharply. “Remember? Not like I don’t have the T-shirt for that one.”

“Sorry. I just meant—”

“I know.” Eve sighed, and took his hand. “I know. Sorry. I’m just a little . . . weird. I guess we all are.”

“The truth is, he lost his dad a long time ago. Maybe when his sister died. Maybe when Frank . . . uh . . .” Claire didn’t quite know how to say it.

Michael did. “Got turned.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think he ever really faced it, though. Now it’s right in his face. He can’t really avoid it anymore. His dad’s just . . . gone.”

“That’s not it,” Shane said from the stairs. They all jumped, even Michael, whom Claire guessed hadn’t heard him coming, either. Shane could be quiet when he wanted to. “It isn’t that he’s gone. My problem is that I knew my dad. I was afraid of him, and then I wanted to please him, and then I hated him because I thought he was just a hundred percent evil, especially after he turned vamp. But he wasn’t. I was wrong about him. He came to help. And when he had to, he died so we could make it through this.”

They all looked at him silently. Shane sat down on the steps.

“The point is,” he said, “it’s too late for me to really love him now. That’s what hurts.”

Claire got up, holding her plate, but Eve took it away from her. “Go,” she said. “I’ve got this. But you owe me laundry duty.”

Claire nodded and went up the steps. Shane raised his head, and their eyes met. She held out her hand.

After a long moment, he took it and stood up. “You know, even when I didn’t know you, I wanted to know you,” he said. “So I guess you’re stuck with me. Sorry.”

“I’m not,” Claire said, and led him upstairs.

Her cell phone rang at about four in the morning, vibrating around on the nightstand and sending her fumbling for it in a bleary haze. Claire pulled herself carefully out from under Shane’s heavy arm and slipped out of bed, grabbed a robe, and walked out into the hall to answer the call.

The screen said Myrnin. Claire closed her eyes tightly for a moment, then flipped the phone open and said, “It’s four in the morning. And it wasn’t exactly an easy day.”

Myrnin said, “I can put up the boundaries.”

The way he said it gave her pause, because it wasn’t manic; it wasn’t crazy; it was just . . . a simple statement of fact. “You can? How? The whole thing was . . . destroyed.”

“Yes,” he said. “It was. But as I once told you, the machine was a support system. An amplifier. The important part of creating the boundaries and the memory control isn’t the machine; it’s the mind.”

“Myrnin—” Claire wanted to scream, throw the phone, do something crazy. But she didn’t. She swallowed all that and forced herself to say, very carefully, “Myrnin, I am not putting my brain into a jar to get you out of the doghouse with Amelie. That’s never, ever going to happen.”

“I know that,” Myrnin said. “You don’t need to.”

Claire drew in a deep, calming breath. “I don’t.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Come to the lab,” he said. “Come now.”

He hung up. Claire stared at the phone through narrowed, bleary eyes, then turned around and went back into her room.

Getting dressed in silence, in the dark, was a little challenging, but she managed, and sneaked carefully down the hallway, down the stairs, and hopped on one foot as she put her shoes on in the living room. She turned on a light and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked . . . well, pretty much like she’d been rousted out of bed without enough sleep. Bedhead. Creased skin. Wrinkled clothes.

“I’ll kill him if this is for nothing,” she told her reflection, and grabbed her backpack, which was sitting in the corner. She threw it over her shoulder and walked over to the section of blank wall where the portal would appear. A few moments of concentration, and the black doorway appeared, stabilized, and she walked through, into Myrnin’s lab.

It was still a whole lot worse for wear. Broken glass glittered on the floor. Tables were overturned. There was still a faint haze of dust in the air.

Then it occurred to her tired, lagging brain, with a real shock, that she shouldn’t have been able to do that. Not coming through the portal. The machine had controlled the portal . . . and the machine was a crushed metal mess in the basement.

Why had it worked?

Myrnin was in the back of the lab, standing in front of . . . something she couldn’t see too clearly. He didn’t turn around. “Claire,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

“Yeah. Does Amelie know you’re doing this?”

“She instructed me to rest,” he said. “So no, in fact she doesn’t. But ultimately, I don’t think she’ll be angry.”

“You don’t think so? Are you crazy?”

He didn’t answer that directly. “I’ve been working all night,” he said. “Some of the parts were still usable, but I was only able to cobble together the very basic elements.”

“Elements of what?”

Myrnin finally moved, and Claire walked a few more steps toward him before stopping cold, her breath locked in her throat, her heart lurching, then hammering very, very fast.

Because that was a brain. In a jar. A jar of faintly green liquid that bubbled. There were tubes, copper tubes, circulating liquid, and there were wires, and there were clockworks ticking along, but there was a brain.

In a jar.

“What did you do?” Claire’s voice didn’t sound at all like her own. She didn’t even realize that she’d said it out loud, until Myrnin looked directly at her.

“What I had to do,” he said. “It won’t work any other way. It’s too dangerous. I can’t risk anything like that happening again, and neither should you, Claire. Next time, we may not be so fortunate.”

“You killed somebody,” she said. Her throat was so tight that she thought she might choke on the words. “Oh, my God, you killed somebody and . . . put their brain . . . in—”

“The point is that the barriers are up,” Myrnin said. “And we are safe. I did what I knew had to be done. But you mustn’t tell him.”

“Tell who?” Claire couldn’t decide whether she was furious or terrified. Probably both.

Myrnin didn’t answer.

The voice came out of her cell phone speaker, slightly muffled by her pocket—an eerie, disembodied voice that nevertheless was familiar.

The last thing she’d heard it say was Good-bye.

“He means Shane,” said Frank Collins. The brain in the jar. “Don’t tell Shane, Claire. This is going to have to be our secret.”

TRACK LIST

GHOST TOWN had a more eclectic mix of music than ever. I hope you enjoy the song suggestions, and remember: feed the artists. Buy the music!