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Meanwhile the adults in the playground were beginning to realize that the sky crane across the street was being very careless with its load. “If it doesn’t change its trajectory,” said the principal, “that load of girders will be right above us. What is the crane operator thinking?”
Allie knew there was no time to lose. She leaped out of the fifth-grade girl and began the most important relay race of her life. She hurled herself to another child, then to a pedestrian on the other side of the fence. She body-surfed her way from fleshie to fleshie, until she was in the construction site, then she paused just long enough to get her bearings. She was a construction worker, and the workers around her were already looking up, wondering why the I-beam load had swung so wide.
Allie turned to leap again, determined to make it up into the crane rising above the tower’s highest floors, but she came face-to-face with Milos in the body of one of the other workers.
“Don’t forget I am better at this than you,” he said, and he grabbed her. “I taught you everything you know!”
Instantly Allie leaped into the worker behind Milos, then to his right, then to his left and back again, creating a pattern of four—moving faster and faster until she was skinjacking all four men. Then she swung at him: identical punches from four different directions, powerful enough to bring Milos to his knees.
“Not everything!” she said in four voices. Then she pulled herself together, and leaped away, leaving Milos reeling from the blows.
Allie launched into a construction worker on the second floor, then to one on the fourth, the seventh, the tenth, up and up, relaying it in leaps and bounds as if the building was a skinjacker jungle gym. It was just as she had done at the Grand Ol’ Opry so many months ago when Milos taught her to body-surf this way, swinging from fleshie to fleshie as quick as lightning. They had tied that first race, but this time Allie had to win.
Twentieth floor, twenty-third, twenty-sixth. It was hard finding construction workers now to leap to and the most she could leap through was three floors at a time in the living world. Finally she found herself in the body of a welder on the top floor. Up here, the building was nothing more than a steel frame. It was windy and treacherous . . . and hanging in space before her, almost parallel with her line of vision, was the load of girders nearly in position above the playground. Far below, kids were desperately trying to climb the playground fence to escape. Had it been a chain-link fence, they might have done it, but it was wrought iron—vertical bars with spiked tips—and the kids couldn’t get a foothold. No one was getting out.
Allie looked up to where the spine and horizontal boom of the crane met. That’s where the control cab was, still far above her. There was no way to leap that far. She would have to climb the ladder in the body of the welder—but just then she felt a hand on her shoulder.
It was Milos. He was in a lean and sinewy worker. He looked like a man whose body knew how to fight. “I’m sorry, Allie, but I can’t let you ruin this. . . .” And he elbowed Allie in the jaw. She felt excruciating pain as the welder’s jaw shattered, and she fell to the naked beam, which was barely a foot wide. She tried to scramble away, but the pain from the broken jaw made her weak and unable to focus. Fortunately they were both tethered to a safety cable . . . but unfortunately Milos unhooked their safety wires.
“More interesting this way, yes?”
As he moved in for the fight, Allie thrust her legs out, kicking Milos, and knocking his feet out from under him. He landed on top of her, pinning her to the beam. His face was just inches away from hers. She could smell the remains of a rancid cigar on his fleshie’s breath.
“If you were in a different body,” Milos said, “I might kiss you again. But then, no. Mary is a much better kisser.”
And then Milos did the unthinkable.
Holding on to Allie, he rolled off the girder, taking Allie with him, and they began a thirty-story plunge.
“No!” Allie felt that horrible falling sensation, a roller coaster without a track. The whole world spun around them. In just a few seconds, their fleshies would be dead and their own spirits would be injected deep into the earth by their momentum. But when Allie met eyes with Milos as they fell, all she saw were the eyes of a horrified construction worker. Milos was gone . . . and right beside them a construction elevator carried Milos, in a freshly-skinjacked worker to the top floor.
Now in the last few moments of the plunge, Allie did the only thing she could do. “I’m sorry,” she said to the two doomed men. “I hope you get where you’re going.” Then, just before impact, Allie peeled out and leaped up and away like a pole-vaulter, putting all the force of her will behind the leap. She shot through the Everlost void searching for flesh, anyone’s flesh, to give her safe harbor, and—
—don’t sweat don’t sweat / and stick to more buzzwords
upward trend / target demographics
and if you get lost point to the graph—
Allie forced full control over whoever’s body she was in, and found herself staring at a dozen dark-suited people in a conference room, pointing to a graph. It was such a total disconnect from the moment before, she thought she must have actually died, or at the very least lost her mind. It took her a moment to realize that she had leaped so powerfully, she had landed a block away, in an entirely different office building.
“Go on,” said the man at the far end of the table, obviously the boss. “What was that about our target demographics?”
Then, one of the executives at the table stood and looked out of the window. “Hey, did you see that? I think two people just fell from the Last National Life building!”
Everyone got up to look, but only Allie noticed the load of girders still hanging thirty stories above the playground. She was relieved the load hadn’t been released yet, but had to wonder why.
At that same moment, Moose sat in the control cab of the sky crane in full control of his fleshie, staring at the release button. He had been staring at it for at least a minute now. The load of girders was positioned exactly where it was supposed to be, but he couldn’t hit the button. He thought back to the part he played in the concert disaster. It had been hard to make himself set off the sprinklers at the Rhoda Dakota concert.
“She is for you,” Milos had told him. “When she wakes up, she will be yours.”
Although Moose was thrilled at the idea of just meeting Rhoda Dakota, much less a date-after-death with her, knowing he was responsible for ending her life made it all seem a little bit dishonest, didn’t it?
And now this.
In all the other disasters, his acts were just a small part of a larger whole . . . but this time, it was all him. He would be releasing the load of deadly beams. Not Squirrel, not Milos—him.
And so he stared at the button.
