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All of those good grades, charmed teachers. The cut that had disappeared from my hand. Even the burns from the curling iron were healing quickly—though the healing seemed to start and stop at random intervals.
“It would be selfish to keep such blessings to one small group of people. So when the time comes, one of your friends—or it could even be you—will volunteer, make a gift of her own life force so Aralt can keep going, keep helping others. It replenishes his strength.”
I closed my eyes. “That’s so wrong.”
“Why?” she asked. “If Suzette was happy to do it, why should we not accept her painless, happy death as the generous and precious gift it was?”
“That’s horrible,” I said. “It’s not worth a life.”
“Easy for you to say,” she said, rearing her head back. “You’re a confident, talented, healthy young woman. But what about the others?”
Healthy—that made me think of Adrie
“All I’m saying,” Farrin said quietly, “is that maybe it doesn’t seem like a very significant thing to you. But there are others for whom it is quite a big deal.”
Would Adrie
“Dr. Jeanette Garzon discovered a treatment for a genetic disorder that has saved the lives of thousands of children,” Farrin said. “Jeanette was a freshman at Weatherly when Suzi, Barbara, and I were juniors. She was dirt-poor and in danger of losing her scholarship.”
I stared at the floor.
“Ask the parents of the children Jeanette has saved,” Farrin said. “Ask the children themselves. If it’s worth the death of one willing person so that they all might be alive today.”
“But maybe if she hadn’t gotten into medical school, someone else would have, and maybe they would have discovered the cure to a totally different disease.”
Farrin lifted her chin. “You can’t live according to theoretical models, Alexis. You can only make the most of the opportunities you’ve been given.”
I sat back and sighed. “But if Tashi’s really—gone, then who’s going to manage the energy?”
Farrin turned away. “That does complicate things. But we have no reason to believe that we can’t keep the book in a safe place and continue to benefit from Aralt’s generosity.”
“Not send it to a new group of girls?” I asked. “Then…no one else would die.”
“I suppose not,” Farrin said. “We couldn’t risk sending the book out without Tashiana. Does that make it easier for you?”
“No,” I said, trying to sound more sure than I was.
“Anyway, the simple fact is, you have no options other than Tuga
“If I weren’t one of Aralt’s girls,” I said, “would I still have won the contest?”
She didn’t look up from her work. “But you are one of Aralt’s girls.”
“But if I weren’t.”
She finished clipping the print over the air vent and turned to me. “Alexis, with your camera, you can change the world. You can affect the way people think. You can fight wars and end them. You can make heroes and destroy them. You can shine a light on injustice. It’s not just doctors who make a difference.”
I thought about that—finding something I cared about and bringing out passion in other people. For a treacherous moment, I was filled with a lustrous feeling of power.
“But I don’t—I mean, I do want to achieve things. But not because of some magical ring. Not because someone died for it.”
“Aralt isn’t a genie in a bottle. I’ve worked hard, very hard, to get where I am. And you will have to work hard too. But when you do the work, you will see the results. That’s all.”
I was starting to get a headache.
She came toward me and grabbed my hands. “This is your destiny, Alexis. Embrace it.”
“No.” I backed away. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry is not an option.” Her fingers were still wrapped around my own. “You don’t have a choice.”
“I do,” I said. “We could just not do anything. Or we could get rid of the book.”
In the dark, with the red light behind her, her eye sockets were shadows. Her hair was a mass of blackness outlined by a red halo. “Now don’t go doing anything foolish.”
I swallowed hard, fighting the urge to back away. “No, I mean, give it back to you.”
She relaxed. “You’re so smart,” she said, twisting the word derisively. “Why don’t you go home and research the South McBride River incident?”
She followed me out through the workroom, though in a way it felt like I was being chased out. As she held the door open, she looked down her nose at me.
“You have a responsibility, Alexis. Remember that.”
I ran out to the parking lot, huffing and puffing painfully by the time I got to Mom’s car.
Stuck beneath the windshield wiper, flapping in the wind, was a parking ticket.
I drove straight to the library.
In the summer of 1987, a group of sixteen high school girls in the town of South McBride River, Virginia, were all struck with a debilitating mental illness. The most accepted theory was that the girls had somehow stirred up some toxic sludge from the bottom of a local lake, exposing them to a previously unknown bacterium. The infection shut down their brain functions and left them all comatose. One by one, they died.
There were entire websites devoted to it, most of them set up by conspiracy theorists, who pi
So the door to Aralt, once opened, must be closed again or you’ll be driven insane, and then your brain will turn to useless mush.
I sat back against the hard wood of the library chair, feeling this new information like a twenty-pound weight on my chest.
We had to read that spell. One of us had to die…or we’d all die anyway.
I WENT STRAIGHT HOME, got in bed, and stared at the ceiling. I didn’t answer my phone. I lied to my parents about feeling sick, and I ignored Kasey when she tried to talk to me. Finally, teary-eyed with hurt, she got the idea and left me alone.
Tashi was dead.
We were all bound to an incredibly selfish and angry spirit.
And the only way to fix it was for someone else to die.
I kept feeling this weird urge to just act normal, to pull the covers up to my chin and try to get some sleep. Wake up and have everything be fine. Just an ordinary day.
That is never going to happen, I told myself. You are never going to have another normal day. Unless you find some way to stop this, you will never be normal again.
* * *
The orange glow of the sodium halide streetlights mixed with the shadows of tree branches on my wall.
I ran through everything I could remember about the book, about Aralt, about Tashi. Especially Tashi. That night I’d been there, she’d been afraid. Why? Had it been Lydia at the door? Why had she pushed me into the garage?
I need to show you, she’d said.
Show me that Aralt was evil?
Because she’d known someone was going to die? But women had been dying for more than a century for Aralt. There had to be a hundred and fifty signatures on those pages. What was different now? What had changed?
And I kept repeating her last words to me: Try again.