Everfound

“I know you are here somewhere!” someone yelled. Someone with a Russian accent. “And I won’t rest until I find you!”

Jill stood up.

“No!” whispered Jix.

“I’m done with this place,” said Jill. “I want out. Even Milos and his morons are better than this.” The others threw angry gazes at her, and Dio

Jix grabbed her, getting face to face. Then looking into her eyes, he said, “It’s time for you to choose, then. Choose that life . . . or choose me.”

Jill looked at him with bitter fury.

“You must make your decision now,” he demanded.

She glared at him a moment more, then she pulled him close, kissed him hard, then slapped him even harder.

“I really, really don’t like you,” she said.

“Will you be quiet!” snapped Avalon. Jill sat back down in silence, not sure whether this was victory or defeat . . . while up above, things began to break.

CHAPTER 18

You Put Your Whole Self In . . .

Milos’s team of refugees had been scouring San Antonio for days, but it was a big city. There was no telling where the Neons were holing up. Wherever they had gone, they were well-concealed.

“Maybe they’re not here,” Moose suggested. “Maybe they went shumwhere elsh.” But Milos was not ready to give up. There were still too many places to look.

Shortly before Wurlitzer played its song about silence, Milos and his crew finally caught sight of a single Neon watching them, trying to appear like a Christmas elf in a department store’s holiday display. The kid ran when he was spotted, but Moose caught him and brought him to Milos.

“I will make a deal with you,” Milos told him. “Tell us where you are hiding and return Mary to us, and we won’t send you to the center of the earth.”

The kid laughed in his face. “I won’t tell you a thing.” Clearly, he meant it. He would rather sink than give away the location of the Neons.

“Very well,” said Milos and he called for the Chocolate Ogre, who came lumbering forward. “Say hello to my little fiend,” said Milos.

“I think you mean ‘friend,’” Squirrel corrected.

As soon as the Neon saw the Ogre, his face filled with terror. “What is that thing?”

Milos ignored the question. “Now I’m giving you one last chance. Tell us where you are holding Mary.”

“And Jill!” added the Ogre.

The kid still shook his head, but all the while stared at the Ogre. He seemed almost ready to break. Milos turned toward the Ogre. “Show this miserable Afterlight what we do to those who don’t cooperate with us.”

“Okay!” Then the Ogre thought for a moment. “What do we do?”

Milos sighed. “We show our strength in a way that they will never forget.”

“That makes sense,” said the Ogre cheerfully. Then he grabbed the Neon, lifted him off the ground, and threw him all the way over the building in front of them.

Milos stood there, stu

“Because I didn’t think he’d ever forget it,” said the Ogre.

The whole mob of Afterlights ran to find him, but he wasn’t on the next street, or the next, or the next. Milos had begun to think that maybe he had landed hard enough to sink—but then they finally saw him in the distance, turning a corner. Once they reached the corner he was long gone—but then one of the other Afterlights noticed something. “Hey, what’s that?”

They went down a narrow alley that opened up to a street with stone-paved sidewalks and crowds of living people. On one side of the street were older, living-world buildings, but their facades were insulted by garish, blinking signs advertising everything from a wax museum to a mirror maze, and across a large plaza was an old stone mission.

“I think itsh the Alamo,” said Moose. “But I thought it would be bigger.”

“Look at it, look at it!” said Squirrel, pointing at the familiar face of the structure.

The entire building, and the stone walls that surrounded the complex almost seemed to be squirming; randomly shifting in and out of focus. The stone itself appeared to swirl in and out of phase, as if it couldn’t decide whether it was in Everlost or in the living world.

“It’s a vortex,” Milos said. Milos didn’t even try to hide his disgust.

“You don’t think they’re in there, do you?” asked Moose.

“You can’t make me go into a vortex!” said the complaining Afterlight—the one who always doubted Milos. “You never know what a vortex will do to you!”

“If you don’t go, what I do to you will be much worse,” said Milos. No one else gave him an argument.

They crossed the plaza, then stepped into the main building, a stone church full of arches and iron chandeliers called “the Shrine.” The ground felt strange beneath their feet; one moment soft, the next moment solid.

“We shouldn’t be here. . . . ,” complained the complainer.

It was midday, and there were way too many tourists for Milos’s taste. He had been denying himself his skinjacking pleasures, putting the search for Mary ahead of his own desires, but having so many living, breathing bodies around him was insanely tempting. “We need to clear this place out,” Milos told Moose. “Go skinjack someone and pull a fire alarm.”

Then a living woman, blueberry-plump in a cranberry pants suit, looked at Milos. Not through him as if he wasn’t there, but at him—and she screamed. The vortex had made at least a part of his face visible for an instant. It was a complication he did not need.

The alarm began to blare before she stopped screaming, and guards ushered the living out. Milos was startled by the woman, but he could not be deterred from his mission. Vortex or not, he was finding the Neons.

After the living left, it was easier for Milos to move through the Alamo grounds and look for signs of Afterlight activity. Unfortunately, the alarm masked any sounds that hiding Afterlights might have made. He sent teams into every building, and through each courtyard and garden of the compound—and while voices in the Long Barracks were promising, they turned out to be the trapped words of soldiers, spoken more than a hundred and fifty years ago. A vortex could be a

When the fire threat was determined to be false, the alarm was reset, and the living were allowed back into the building—including the cranberry woman who was as loud as she was large, and demanded that security be on the lookout for ghosts. She insisted that a ghost had probably pulled the alarm. Security, however, had already nabbed her nephew as a suspect, an obnoxious boy with a history of lies and mischief. The woman insisted that Ralphy had been possessed.

Milos could not stand listening to her endless nattering. “Will you go skinjack her,” Milos told Moose, “and make her shut up?”

“Do I have to? She’s really not my type.”

“Just do it!”

Reluctantly, Moose jumped into the woman, and she immediately stopped talking. Then, commandeering her body, Moose took her out into the middle of the courtyard and started her doing the Hokey Pokey. By the time she was putting her left arm in, other tourists had begun to join in the spontaneous fun, until about a dozen Alamo visitors were doing the Hokey Pokey in the courtyard. Not to be outdone, Squirrel skinjacked an elderly gentleman in the Arbor Garden, and started doing the Chicken Dance, but nobody joined him.

Milos went back into the Shrine, and saw the Chocolate Ogre standing beneath a stone arch, looking at a series of historic Texas flags. He seemed thoughtful—which worried Milos. He did not want the Ogre thinking too much.

“People died here,” the Ogre said. “A hundred and fifty of ’em.” And he pointed to a full-fledged deadspot in a small grotto that didn’t shift in and out of phase like the rest of the building. “Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett, William Travis . . . I did a report on the Alamo once. . . .” And as he remembered, his shapeless face started to change. “I wonder if I could find the spot where Bowie died. . . .” The memory was strong enough to bring form back to his face. Cheekbones and a jawline.