Sleep No More

TWENTY-ONE

“You’re sure?” Smith asks when I call him from my bedroom with my music on to cover up the sound of my frantic whispers. “How can it be tonight? He just killed yesterday!”

“I don’t know, okay?” I hiss. “But it’s going to happen tonight and we have to do something.”

“What do you suggest? I have a feeling your mom isn’t going to suddenly let you out.”

“I don’t know,” I say, almost too loud. “I was kinda hoping you had a plan. It was your idea.”

There’s a long pause and I can hear him muttering under his breath, but I can’t make out the words. “Listen,” Smith says—audible finally. “You have the stone. Do you think you can get into the vision on your own?”

“You said it was going to be really hard.”

“It will. Are you going to let that scare you off?”

“No,” I protest, feeling weirdly guilty that he would even ask. “I just want this to work.”

“Then focus. Harder than you’ve ever focused in a vision before.”

“I can do that,” I say shakily.

“When you get in there, take her back as far as you can and try to figure out why the hell she’s walking alone by a train tunnel, okay?”

“Got it.”

“And you didn’t see any signs of a weapon around her?”

“Clara,” I emphasize, needing to give her a name—to keep all of this real and personal—“had no knife marks or gunshot wounds. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he won’t have something. Maybe, like, a baseball bat? You know, something that damages but doesn’t cut.”

“Okay. I guess you’re going to have to make her fight him off, or run. Get her to take her phone out right before he comes. Maybe she can get a call off to the cops. Or someone else and have them hear her get attacked so they can call the cops.”

I breathe a small sigh. “That’s a great idea. And the cops will be out in force after this morning anyway, I’m sure.”

“Pray hard that they are,” Smith says. “Call me if you need anything else, okay? Do you want me to go to the tunnel in real life? Just to watch over her? Clara,” he adds.

“Maybe, but . . . won’t that change things?”

“It might. What if I got there early?”

“I don’t know, Smith. I don’t want to screw this up.”

“All right. I’ll stay home. Text me when it’s done.”

I’ve got three hours before it actually happens. We got lucky with the location. The train station has clocks posted all over the place along with routes and updates and such—that’s how I knew it would be tonight.

I think Smith’s got a good idea about the phone thing. But if the killer hears her talking on the phone, will he still attack? I feel like everything’s balanced on a knife’s edge. One imperfect move and it’ll all go wrong; she’ll die, or we’ll miss the opportunity entirely. I’m not sure which would be worse. Who knows how many more people will die if I don’t do this?

When I come out of my bedroom, Mom’s banging pans around the kitchen in her classic tell that she’s angry. Hopefully not at me.

“You okay, Mom?” I ask from the doorway of the kitchen. I draw in a quick breath as I see her standing; standing on her own two feet and bending over to pick up a canister she would have had to reach up for in her wheelchair. My mouth is dry and I can hardly believe my eyes.

I blink.

And she’s back in her chair. Too fast to have moved there. What just happened?

Mom looks over at me and then sets down the frying pan she was banging around. “I guess.” She gestures vaguely down the hall. “Sierra went out.”

“Tonight?” I ask.

“What is she thinking?” my mom mutters, and I’m dismayed to see angry tears running down her cheeks. I want to tell her that no one’s after Sierra—that it’s going to be another teenager—but I can’t.

“It’ll be okay, Mom,” I instantly assure her, though there’s no way for me to tell her why. “She’s smart,” I add, like that means anything. “And . . . the wrong age,” I tack on.

“So far,” my mom mutters. “But who knows what this psycho will do next?”

I step tentatively to where she’s gathering ingredients for something I don’t yet recognize; she’s an angry cooker. “Can I help with anything?” I offer, my mind screaming at her to say no.

She pauses midreach and really looks at me for the first time since I walked in. For a moment, I’m afraid she’s going to say yes—that this is about to turn into a mother-daughter night. And that Clara’s going to die because of it.

But she turns away and grabs the canister she was reaching for. The same one she was bending down to get a few minutes ago. No, no that can’t be right. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been.

“I’m okay,” Mom says. “I just need to beat some dough for a while. If it’s still fit to eat when I’m done, we’ll have pizza tonight.”

“Sounds great,” I say, then I back out of the room and try not to make a sound as I head down the hall.

To Sierra’s door.

I look both ways before holding my breath and turning the knob.

Locked.

Frustrated tears work their way to the surface and I have to take a few deep breaths before I manage to stop them. This is the first time I’ve seen her leave the house since I got the pictures of Repairing the Fractured Future. I wonder briefly if I could get a screwdriver and take the whole knob off. If Sierra took the time to tell Mom she was leaving, it’s probably more than a coffee run. Surely she’ll be gone for at least an hour.

Clara or the book? I slowly withdraw my hand.

I believe in omens; it goes hand in hand with being an Oracle. Sierra being out of the house is the perfect scenario to either break into her office or change the vision. But I have to choose.

What is the universe trying to tell me? Do I need that book? If I let Clara die tonight but I get the resources I need to save the next person, is that worth it?

But what if there isn’t anything useful in the rest of the text? What if I’m wrong? Then an innocent girl is dead and I’m back at square one.

I walk back to my bedroom. Tonight I go with the sure path.

After giving the hallway a quick listen, I sprawl down on my stomach and grab the pendant from its hiding place inside the box spring of my bed. Then I sit cross-legged on the floor and brace myself with pillows. I hold the necklace in my hands and fix my eyes on it. It sparkles with glints of red, blue, and purple and, as I continue to stare, yellow and orange make appearances too.

Then I’m in the tunnel. So easily it’s almost jolting. I’m convinced that somehow, we Oracles are supposed to do this kind of thing. It’s too easy for it not to be our natural path. It’s like a part of me awakened the first time Smith showed me how to enter my visions, and now I’m ready to fulfill its potential.

But Clara first.

I walk forward and it’s like climbing uphill, but not nearly as difficult as it was before. As I approach the murder site, I begin reversing the scene in my head. The first thing I have to do is find out what the hell Clara Daniels is doing out alone, at night, the very same day a murder was discovered.

I watch as emotionlessly as I can while the brutal murder plays out in reverse. I was right about the weapon; the masked killer wields what looks like a short bat with sickening efficiency and soon we reach the point where they’re both alive.

I’m both relieved and surprised when Clara walks backward through the night by herself a few seconds later. He really did just see her and swoop in. Or he will in a few hours. But what could possibly make her walk away on her own? In the dark. With a murderer on the loose.

I trail her, growing more and more puzzled as she walks in reverse through the train station, right down the middle of the seediest neighborhood in Coldwater, and then up around some designer condo development. From there, we continue on to a nice middle-class neighborhood. I don’t know much about Clara outside of school but after the vision, I figured she lived near the train yard and maybe her parents didn’t have a car. Because then it would make sense for her to be walking there.

But as I follow she walks up the steps of a nice two-story home a good half mile from the murder site, and when I slip through the door behind her, she sheds her coat and walks backward to settle herself on a couch.

Now I’ll see something, I tell myself. A fight with her parents, a weird text or phone call.

But I see nothing.

She just reads. Panicked about time—who knows how long it’ll be before my mom calls me for dinner—I go ahead and let the scene play forward. But watching it in real time doesn’t give me any more answers than fast in reverse. If anything, it gives me more questions. She’s reading a book—a novel, not even schoolwork or anything—and then, very abruptly, she looks up, tilts her head to one side, and rises from the couch.

It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. She says nothing. Just slips into her coat and goes out the front door. Again, we walk side by side, as though we’re friends on a stroll, all the way back down toward the tunnel. Twice Clara stops and looks back the way we came, but each time she turns forward, and starts walking again.

We’re nearly to the train yard when I realize I’ve been watching her so carefully that I’ve almost missed my cue. I don’t know who her friends are, so as I walk alongside her I say, “Call your mom. Right now. Get your phone out and call your mom.”

Her steps slow and she looks confused, but she doesn’t reach for her phone.

“Call your dad then,” I shout. “Call someone, right now!”

She pauses this time, and I nearly die of relief when she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone.

And then just looks at it.

Why is this so hard? I can walk, I could probably push her over if I really tried, but she’s not following my commands. I shout step-by-step instructions at her—willing her with every fiber of my being to follow them—until finally she hits SEND and raises the phone to her ear. As soon as she does, she continues walking, as though pulled by an invisible string. She says nothing and I measure the remaining steps with my eyes hoping someone will answer before it’s too late.

Her head clicks up in an unnatural motion and she says, “Hi, Dad, I . . . I’m . . .” She pauses and her whole face crumples in confusion. “I don’t know what I—”

And then he’s there. I manage to shove Clara very slightly out of the way so the first blow that was supposed to be straight to the head wings her shoulder instead. She lets out a piercing scream of agony, and guilt shatters me from the inside out. It would have been so easy to divert her. To save her.

But I can’t think about that now. I’ve got to keep her alive until the cops come. That scream was so loud surely her dad is calling 911 right now. I shove her around as fast as I can, though even colossal effort on my part leads only to tiny changes in Clara’s movements. Her screams continue as she gets hit over and over—her arms, her legs—but I’m managing to protect her head.

Until the killer gets smart and takes out both legs with one low swoop I can’t block.

He stands over her and while I can’t see his face, I know from the sick, low chuckle that emanates from his throat that he must be grinning.

No! I agonize as I watch him raise his bat to deliver what will surely be the deadly blow. I can’t have done all of this for nothing.

But I can’t do anything. I can’t affect the world physically—Smith said so.

Even so, as the bat comes down, I throw myself over Clara’s crumpled, sobbing body, and raise my hand to block the blow.

It slams into my arm with a force that jars my shoulder and radiates all the way to my spine, the pain exploding within me.

He was wrong, I realize in wonder as the killer pauses to look down at his bat in confusion. Smith was wrong! I can save her! I cover Clara’s body and absorb the next hard blow as well, a scream tearing itself from my throat as pain like nothing I’ve ever felt before spreads across my back from the savage strike.

Two more blows across my back, and then the scene is wavering. It’s too much. I’m losing the mental strength to stay in it. Once more the bat strikes me, at the back of the head this time, and in the last moments before I lose consciousness I look up and see a dark figure in a familiar peacoat running toward me.

Smith, I realize. He’s coming to save me. No, to save her.

And as the vision fades, I hear the most beautiful sound in the entire world.

Sirens.