Everwild

"Yeah," said Allie, "sleepwalking, yeah." She was always impressed by her mother's ability to be logical against all reason.

"Could you tell us where you live?" Allie's father asked.

She knew where Da

Her parents sighed in unison.

Allie looked at the stump of her father's arm. There were indentations in the skin that must have been from a prosthetic arm, but of course he hadn't had time to put it on before finding little Da

"How'd that happen?" Allie asked, realizing that a seven-year-old's lack of tact was an asset now.

Her father hesitated for a moment, then he said, "Car accident."

"Ouch."

"Yeah. Ouch."

Her father also had a scar on his forehead and cheek. So the accident had taken his right arm, and left him with scars. None of it was pleasant, but it could have been a whole lot worse. Then again, it was worse, because they had also lost a daughter.

Allie longed to tell them that they hadn't lost her at all-- that she was right here in front of them, but she couldn't find a way to do that as the cat woman, and she couldn't as Da

"Do you know your phone number, at least?" her mother asked. "We really should let someone know you're here-- your parents must be worried sick."

Allie didn't have much sympathy for parents who would eventually get their child back. She didn't know the number anyway, and that was fine. She was finally here with her own parents, and they were treating her with love and kindness. This was the closest thing she might ever have to true family time with them.

"I'm hungry," she said. "Can I have something to eat?"

Her parents glanced to each other, her mother threw her gaze to the phone, her father nodded and he left the room. It didn't take a genius to figure out that he was going to call the police from another room. Allie thought of throwing another hissy fit, but realized she couldn't stall the inevitable much longer. She would make the best of the time she had.

"Can I have Apple Jacks?" she asked. "Apple Jacks in strawberry milk?"

She could have sworn her mother turned a previously unknown shade of pale.

"Never mind," said Allie. "You probably don't have that."

"Actually," said her mother, "we do."

Her father rejoined them in the kitchen, giving a secret nod to his wife. He must have made the call. Allie figured they had about five minutes before the police arrived.

Allie savored every spoonful of her cereal while her parents sat with her at the kitchen table. She tried to trick herself into believing this was just a regular family breakfast.

"Sorry if they're a little stale," her mother said.

"No," said Allie, "they're fine."

"Our daughter liked Apple Jacks," her father said. "She liked them with strawberry milk, too."

"A lot of kids do," Allie told him--although she didn't know anyone else who ate them that way. She dipped the spoon into the pink milk and let the last applejack float in like a lone life preserver.

"More, please."

Her mother poured a second bowl. Allie pushed down the orange cereal circles with the back of her spoon, coating them with milk.

"I guess that was your daughter's room I was in, huh?"

Her mother nodded, but didn't meet her eyes.

"Something happened to her, didn't it?"

"Yes, Da

"You don't have to talk about it," Allie said, realizing this was going too far.

"No, that's okay--it was a long time ago," he said.

Not that long, Allie wanted to say, but instead she said, "I'll bet she loved you very much."

She should have left it there, but she could see a police cruiser pulling up to the curb outside, and then a second one. If she was going to do this, she had to do it now.

"Sometimes people go away," Allie told them. "They don't mean to, but they can't help it. It's nobody's fault. I'll bet if she could, she'd want to tell you that it's okay--that she's okay. I mean, people die, but that doesn't always mean they're gone."

Then her mother and father looked to each other, then back to Da

Allie gri

"No," her father said. "We mean that she's still alive."

Allie slowly lowered her spoon into the bowl, staring at them. "Excuse me?"

"She's just asleep, Da

CHAPTER 28 The Sleep of the Dead

Comatose.

Nonresponsive.

Persistent vegetative state.

All complicated words used by medical specialists to label a patient who remains unconscious. You would think that the labels mean something--that doctors know exactly what's going on in the brain of a comatose patient. But the truth is, nobody really knows anything. A coma can actually mean a whole range of things, but at its heart, all it really means is that someone simply won't wake up.

Allie Johnson had suffered internal injuries and severe head trauma in a head-on collision. She flew through the windshield, into another boy who was on his way through his own windshield. Nick was, of course, killed instantly, but Allie was quite a fighter. Her heart continued to beat. It was beating as they rushed her to an emergency room. It was beating as they hooked her to a dozen different life-support machines. It was beating as they worked on her on an operating table for five hours to repair her massive wounds, and it was still beating after all the operations were done. Thanks to medical science, and a body that simply would not give up, Allie did not die. Although her wounds were severe, her damaged body eventually healed, and her brain still showed a hint of basic brainwave pattern, proving that she was not entirely brain-dead. Brain-dead would have been easy. It would have given everyone a reason to just throw in the towel. But now Allie's parents were both blessed, and cursed, with the smallest fraction of hope.

"I won't try to sugarcoat this for you," the doctor had told her parents several weeks into Allie's coma. "She could wake up tomorrow, she could wake up next month, next year, or she might never wake up at all--and even if she does, there's a good chance she won't be the girl you remember. Her brain might be too damaged for higher cognitive functions--right now we just don't know." Then, in that compassionate yet heartless way that doctors have, he told Allie's distraught parents this: "For your sake, I hope she either wakes up the same girl you knew, or dies very quickly."

But neither of those two things happened. And now in a hospital somewhere, in a room somewhere, in a bed somewhere, Allie Johnson lies asleep unable to wake up ...

... because her soul is in Everlost. In her book, You Don't Know Jack, Allie the Outcast gives this as her final word on skinjacking:

"There is a truth about skinjacking that I can't tell you, because it's not my place. I don't have the right. It's the reason why we can skinjack, why we don't forget things, and why we're different from every other Afterlight in Everlost. It's a truth that all skinjackers must learn for themselves-- and if you are a skinjacker, then you will learn it, because the more you skinjack, the more you are driven toward it, like a salmon fighting a current to the head of a stream. I can only hope that once you do know the truth, you find the courage to face it."