“Something wrong?”

Allie was startled by the voice behind her. She turned to see the other ward nurse standing in the doorway. Short cropped hair and a tired smile. “I saw that you weren’t at your station,” the other nurse said. “Is there a problem with this patient, Daisy? Do you need some help?”

“No, no,” said Allie, and she knelt down. “I was just picking up some of the cards that had fallen. It’s a shame—she’s so young.”

The other nurse sighed. “There’s no rhyme or reason to these things. All we can do is make her comfortable.”

“Right. And who knows, maybe she’ll wake up someday.”

The other nurse gave her that tired smile again. “Stranger things have happened.” Then, seeing the tears in Allie’s eyes, she said, “Go back to your station, Daisy. I’ll pick up the rest of those cards.”

Allie left, but she didn’t go back to the nurse’s station. She walked straight to the elevator, and took it down to the lobby. She would be happy to be out of this place, and in a different body—one that didn’t remind her of hospitals. She looked down at her nurse’s uniform, where the name “Daisy” was brightly embroidered on her breast pocket, and she resolved to skinjack the first nonmedical person she saw once she stepped out of that elevator . . . but the only person there when the elevator door opened was another nurse getting in. That’s when Allie noticed something. . . .

The name “Daisy” was on the other nurse’s uniform too.

As the elevator closed behind her, Allie realized that Daisy wasn’t her name at all; it was the name of the company that manufactured the uniforms. Any other nurse would have known that.

Unless that nurse was being skinjacked.

Rotsie didn’t like being in a woman’s body, but it was the only one available, and a good soldier uses every resource at his disposal. He had never met Allie the Outcast, but his image of her had been larger than life. Yet here, lying on the bed before him was an ordinary girl. She was not larger than life at all. She was fragile, and easily put out of her misery.

It had all been easy enough until now. He had learned of her location by simple trial and error. He located the original accident report, and by skinjacking various people in various accounting offices, he followed the paper trail from an emergency room, to a hospital in New Jersey, to this hospital in Memphis.

At first he thought he might use a weapon—something suitable for an execution—but, although he would never admit it, he wasn’t too keen on the sight of blood. In the end he decided a simple suffocation would do the trick. No mess, no noise. He leaned over Allie’s body, took a pillow from behind her head, fluffed it a bit, then pressed it down over her face, already imagining how he’d announce to Mary that his mission had been accomplished.

The elevators were too slow, so Allie raced up five flights of stairs. The nurse she was skinjacking was not in the best of shape, and she was out of breath and dizzy by the time she reached the fifth floor. Allie could feel something happening to her, and she couldn’t tell whether it was the nurse’s body reacting to Allie’s own panic or the feeling of her real body dying.

She burst out of the stairwell and raced down the hallway to room 509. In the room, the nurse who had sent her out was suffocating Allie with a pillow. The body in the bed was bucking and quivering, but at least that meant she was still alive!

Allie didn’t waste a moment. She let loose an angry wail and hurled herself at the nurse, knocking her over and taking her down to the ground. The pillow went flying. They struggled on the ground, but Allie had an advantage, having caught her by surprise. She hit the woman over and over until the murderous nurse’s eyes went from steely anger to confusion and panic. Allie instantly knew the skinjacker had left her.

Then, before Allie could reassess, she was lifted off the ground by a very big, very bald male orderly who had the same look of determination the nurse had a moment ago.

“Mary wants you dead,” the skinjacked orderly said, and pushed her up against the wall. “And I always complete my mission.”

Allie didn’t answer him. Instead she leaned forward and bit his nose so hard that he screamed. The pain was enough to knock him out of the orderly. Allie peeled out as well, to get a good look at the true face of Mary’s assassin.

He was a tall kid in some sort of military uniform. Right now he was ankle-deep in the thin floor, trying to keep from sinking through. They made eye contact, but only for a moment.

Then they both heard the footsteps of hospital staff running toward the room, drawn by the commotion. In the room around them, the two nurses and the orderly still wailed and whimpered in their own personal shock and awe.

The assassin skinjacker staggered, slogging through the ground, struggling to keep from sinking, and reached toward an approaching guard, hoping to skinjack his way back into the living world.

Well, if this tool of Mary’s thought he could out-skinjack Allie, he had something else coming! Allie focused on the fleshie he was reaching for and leaped, zooming right past him, and skinjacked the fleshie before he could. She felt him try to get in, but couldn’t because Allie was already there. He just bounced off like a pinball. Now Allie leaped to the next closest fleshie, and again she got there before the murderous skinjacker. And then she did it again, out-racing, out-jacking, outsmarting him every single time.

Finally, as she neared the elevator, she peeled back into Everlost to see where he was. Each one of Allie’s preemptive skinjackings had left the assassin mired deeper in the floor. Now he was in the green linoleum tiles to his knees, and was near panic as he tried to keep himself from falling right through.

Just then, an elevator door opened before them—and there was a single fleshie inside. Allie hesitated, pretending she didn’t see the man in the elevator, and the assassin threw himself forward toward the unsuspecting man. This was exactly what Allie was hoping the assassin would do! The moment he crossed the elevator threshold, Allie launched over him and skinjacked the man in the elevator first!

Now, ensconced in flesh, and seeing only the living world, Allie couldn’t see the assassin skinjacker anymore—but she could feel him trying to get inside, desperately fighting to grab hold, but he couldn’t get in. Allie had him exactly where she wanted him.

“Mission accomplished,” she said. Then she hit the button for the top floor and the elevator began to rise.

Rotsie was furious. This girl had played him for a fool and now he knew he was in serious trouble. The fleshie in the elevator had already been skinjacked and the moment the elevator began to move, Rotsie realized the extent of his folly . . .

. . . because when the elevator went up, he didn’t.

With nothing to grab on to, the living world elevator rose away from him, and he found himself plunging down a dark elevator shaft. He hit bottom, but didn’t stop, because the living world could not provide enough resistance to catch his plummeting spirit. He found himself falling through the bottom of the elevator shaft, then through the basement, then through the first parking level, then the second.

Finally the thick cement floor of the second parking level caught him, but he was embedded all the way to his neck. He could feel the concrete of the building’s foundation in his chest—not painful, but thick and oppressive, like heavy congestion. He could feel poles of iron rebar passing through his gut like skewers, and he could already feel his feet in the densely packed earth beneath the foundation. As much as he tried to pull himself out, each movement just pulled him farther down until his chin was in the concrete as well, then his mouth, then his nose, then his eyes, then his scalp, until the surface world was history and everything around him was darkness and he knew the only place he was going from now until the end of time, was down.

Allie, rather than feeling traumatized by her run-in with Mary’s assassin, was filled with even more determination to stop her. She skinjacked a girl waiting at a bus stop, and met up with Clarence in a coffee shop. He was scouring newspapers, getting every last detail of Mary’s latest disaster.

Clarence was beside himself when he heard what happened at the hospital. “I knew I shoulda come with you,” he said. “I’ll stay here in Memphis and protect your body, ’cause if I don’t . . .”

“No,” said Allie. “Mary doesn’t know her assassin failed, so she won’t send out another one for a while. That buys us some time.”

“But when she does . . .”

“Then I’ll deal with it,” Allie told him. “If it happens, it happens—but while I can skinjack, I need to stand against Mary any way I can.”

“In that case, have a look at this.” Then Clarence showed her the latest headlines.

Allie thought it would be more on the toxic gas cloud, and fire in the town of Eunice—clearly Mary’s hand at work—but instead it was something new. The town of Artesia, New Mexico, about seventy miles west of Eunice, had suffered a deadly tainting of the water supply. Being that Artesia was so close to Roswell, nut jobs were already coming out of the woodwork, insisting that it was aliens.

“It’s ghosts, not aliens,” Allie said. “People need to get their conspiracy theories straight.”

“Read the next part,” Clarence said, pointing to the bottom of the page.

Allie read on. Apparently the death count was relatively low . . . which, if this was Mary’s doing, didn’t make much sense . . . until Allie saw how many people had been hospitalized . . . and were still in comas. . . .

Allie dropped the newspaper on the table as if it were also tainted.

“My God! She’s making more skinjackers!”

Clarence took back the newspaper with his good hand and pondered the article, but it was clear he was pondering something else entirely. “I said I would never want to extinguish another soul,” he said, “but if there’s one spirit I’d be willing to wipe out of existence . . .”

He didn’t need to finish his thought for Allie to know who he meant. “Whatever the consequences?” asked Allie.

Clarence nodded. “Whatever the consequences.”

Allie took a deep breath. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

An hour later they were on a flight headed toward New Mexico and Mary Hightower.

PART SIX

Ruin Nation

Historical Interlude with Angry Gods and Insufficient Sunscreen

The living see only ruins. They see crumbling temples and a stepped pyramid rising out of a dense forest that, year by year, struggles to consume it. To the living, the place is ancient history, full of colorful custom, furious gods, and countless vendors selling trinkets—all very interesting, but irrelevant to a modern world. Still, the many touristts who come to the great Mayan city of Chichén Itzá can’t help but feel a sense of mystical presence within the ruins that transcends time and space. No one who has ever visited Chichén Itzá will ever forget they’ve been there, and those who wander the ball court, and the great field that surrounds the pyramid, aside from getting a nasty sunburn, can’t help but sense a spiritual connection to something unseen. They leave knowing they’ve had some inexplicable experience, never realizing that they have just crossed through a crowded, bustling city of seventeen thousand invisible souls.