Instinctively, I pull my hand away as if the surface is hot.
Let me out! Let me out! I won’t hurt them again, I promise…A man’s voice, but it holds such shrill notes of hysteria and unhinged laughter that it sounds barely human.
“Do you hear that?” I ask on instinct, even though I know better.
“I don’t hear anything,” Reed says. “I can’t fucking see anything either.” He sounds more annoyed than scared now, but his tone shifts, then, growing bitter. Mean. “Which is exactly the way you want it. So you can be in charge.”
“Shut up, Reed.” I don’t have time for this.
I tighten my grip on Kane’s hand and start forward again.
The voice, along with the banging, stops as soon as we move on.
But this time, dread curdles in my stomach. If the pattern holds, that only means that something else is coming.
An instant later, cool breath moves against my cheek, as if someone is standing right next to me, about to whisper in my ear.
I nearly turn, expecting to see the frightful but familiar vision of my mother, but a deeper instinct in me speaks up.NO.
The fear—of what I’m not seeing, what I might see—nearly stalls me out, and sweat breaks out across my forehead.
How long is this hallway? Shouldn’t we be close to the end by now?
Or can I even trust my perceptions?
I grit my teeth and keep lifting my feet, one in front of the other.
The first chilly tap on my shoulder is rapidly followed by a second and a third. Like a single fingertip pressing against my skin lightly.
It’s only when I feel the sensation roll down my back that I recognize it as water droplets.
The drops come faster and faster, that cool breath against my skin, as if someone soaking wet is leaning close.
He held me down. Put my face under the water. I don’t know why.She sounds distraught, confused.
The female passenger frozen in the tub, the princess. I remember her. Her vulnerable form curled up in a protective, fetal posture in the tub beneath the ice.
I should have killed him first.
Those words come with a sharp tug at my cheek, followed by the sting of broken skin.
I gasp involuntarily, my hand releasing Kane’s and flying to my face. Was that… did shebiteme?
My fingers come away from my face damp and warm. Possibly blood. Maybe sweat. I can’t tell. If the ghosts can hurt us…
We will never survive this.
I fumble for Kane’s hand and start us moving again. “Faster,” I tell Reed over my shoulder.
“You know they’ll never believe you,” Reed says. “Verux and my father. They know what people like you are all about. Greedy. Selfish. Always after whatever you can take that you don’t deserve.”
Anger flickers to life in me, hot and sharp.
“And you… you just want to makemelook bad,” he continues, his voice pitching lower suddenly, from indignation to fury.
A memory of my first sight of the atrium flashes in my head: all those people gliding endlessly overhead. The Dunleavy sister with the purple hair in the bathrobe with a knife strapped to her wrist. The man with the belt around his neck, the end of it still wrapped in another passenger’s hands.
In the cabins, Anthony Lightfoot and Jasen Wyman, the two men who’d beaten each other to death with camera equipment.
