Broken Souls (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 2) (28 page)

“I think she might have irradiated some of our pixels somehow,” Ping said.

“I hope this isn’t some form of radiation,” Diana said, holding up her own hand, wiggling her fingers. “It doesn’t feel like it, whatever radiation feels like.” She turned to Mara. “Are you feeling okay, sweetie? That is a mind-blowing ability you have there.”

“I’m sorry. Are you saying I did this?” Mara stared at her glowing palms.

“Sam prompted you to use your ability,” Ping said.

She turned on Sam. “You did what?”

“I was only trying to show you that you could do it. Don’t be mad,” he said.

“You did your mind thing on me, and now we all look like human glow sticks, and you don’t want me to be mad?”

“You wanted to help Buddy, and I wanted to help you,” he said and turned to his mother for support.

“Don’t yell at him. It looks like it’s fading,” Diana said.

“She’s right. Look, I believe it will be gone in a few minutes,” Ping added.

Mara turned back to her brother, ready to continue yelling, but his bug-eyed expression as he stared past her shoulder interrupted her thought.

“What are you looking at?” she asked, pivoting to look behind her back.

“It really worked. Look, you can really see him,”

A part of her thought he was joking until her eyes locked onto the transparent, shimmering green image of her friend Buddy. “On my—Bud? Can you hear me?” she asked, her voice cracking.

Buddy’s eyes widened with shock. “Mara, can you see me? Can you hear me?”

Mara quickly stood up. “Yes, Buddy. I can. Come here and let me look at you.”

He ran up to her, leaned in to hug her and stumbled through her body. He regained his footing, turned around to face her and broke out in tears. “Oh, Mara, I’m so scared! What is happening to me? I thought I died. It’s like I died, but there was no one to meet me, like they say in the Bible. I looked everywhere for Jesus and for my dad. I am so scared. Am I dead? How do I get to heaven? Mara, what is happening to me?”

“Calm down, Bud. We’re going to figure out what is going on, but we need you to calm down.”

“I am so happy that you can see me.” He smeared tears across his greenish glowing face with the back of his hand.

“It makes me happy too. Can you sit down?”

He nodded haltingly, walked over to the end of the couch and took a seat.

Sam leaned over to Ping and whispered, “How come he passes through Mara but not the couch?”

Ping shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because it’s inanimate? We’re sort of in new territory here. I don’t think the stereotypical rules and myths apply. I mean, he’s not really a ghost, he’s the disembodied consciousness of that sick young man upstairs.”

“Boy, I’m glad this worked,” Sam said.

“Why do you say that?” Ping asked.

“Did you see Mara’s face when she realized I prompted her? At least now she’s distracted.”

Diana raised a finger to her lips, then leaned over to Ping. “I’m unclear on what we’re going to do now that we can see him. Buddy’s so scared and confused, how is he going to help?”

“I’m not sure. We’ll have to talk to him and see what we can surmise from his experience. If nothing else, it gives us an opportunity to console him and that will put Mara in a better state of mind to help us figure out what to do next.”

“This is all so complicated and scary. It’s a lot for someone so young to have to deal with,” Diana said, looking across the room at her daughter.

“It is,” Ping said, nodding solemnly. “But she is up to it. I believe that.”

* * *

Mara knew from years of experience and growing up with Buddy that the best way to get him to calm down was to allow him to talk it through, even if it took half an hour of seemingly endless nonsensical stream-of-consciousness thoughts. He also did better one-on-one, so she had asked everyone else to go hang out in the kitchen. After nearly an hour, Buddy seemed to be slowing down a bit, leaving room for Mara to interject a few words of consolation here and there. Finally he took a breather and appeared calm enough to answer a few questions.

“Buddy, do you remember when this happened to you, when you found yourself floating outside of your body?” Mara asked.

“Night before last, Sunday night. I went to sleep early because I felt tired, and I never really ever woke up.” A look of excitement crossed his face as if something had occurred to him. “Maybe I’m still dreaming. It feels like a nightmare. I bet that’s what it is. But if it is, it’s been a really long one.”

Mara leaned forward, wanting to interrupt him before he got off on a tangent. “You said you were still dreaming. Do you remember having a dream Sunday night after you went to bed?”

“Yeah, it was really scary too.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“There was a man, a dark man with black, black eyes. He snuck up behind me, and wrapped his arms and legs around me, and squeezed me.” Buddy pantomimed pulling at a choke hold around his neck. “He made me not breathe, so I was coughing. And he squeezed my middle and held me down on the ground. It was like on WrestleMania when they put holds on each other.” Buddy’s hands fluttered, and his voice trembled. “Then I got woozy, like I was going to pass out, and the dark man picked me up and threw me into the black hole. I fell and fell, like we were on top of a skyscraper. I squeezed my eyes closed. Then I stopped falling, and I opened them, and I was on the floor beside my bed, but I was still in my bed, looking really, really sick.”

“Did you see any black smoke or mist when you woke up?”

“No. Just me in the bed.”

“And you stayed in your apartment until Sam and I showed up?”

“I was afraid to leave. I tried to talk to Hilde next door but she could not see me, and so I thought maybe I was dead.”

“That must have been horrible, being like that all alone.”

Buddy nodded. “I cried a lot, but I knew you would come. You always do.”

“I wish I had come sooner.” Mara looked down, feeling terrible about what he had been through.

“I saw you do magic,” Buddy said, smiling.

“What?” Mara’s heart skipped a beat.

“At my house, you made me disappear into the car. And again you did it here. I saw it.” He pointed up the stairs toward where his body lay. “And you made me green so people can see me again.” He held up his hand, wiggling his slightly fluorescent, transparent fingers. “Magic.”

“If we get through this, you need to keep that to yourself.”

“Am I gonna die?”

“Not if I can help it,” Mara said. She stood up, walked over to the couch where he sat and crouched down next to him. Without thinking about it, she reached up to touch his shoulder, to reassure him, but her fingers simply passed through him. “Hey, Bud. Would it be okay if you visit out here with my mom and brother? I have some stuff to talk over with Mr. Ping in the kitchen.”

“Sure. Your mom is cool. I’m not sure about your brother though.”

“Why’s that? What’s wrong with Sam?”

“Nothing. I don’t ever remember you having a brother, then one day you do. I must be really dumb not to remember that.”

“You’re not the dumb one, Bud. It’s something I forgot to explain to you.”

The copper teakettle on the stove’s back burner trembled and whistled, prompting Mara to get up from the table where she sat across from Ping. Two empty cups were before them with strings from their tea bags hanging over their rims. Flipping the knob on the stove to Off with a loud click, Mara lifted the kettle and poured the steaming water into the waiting cups. After replacing the kettle on the burner, she took her seat and slowly dunked her tea bag in the water.

“Did Buddy mention where he might have been exposed to the shedding?” Ping asked.

She lifted a shoulder. “He said something about going to the convenience store across the road earlier in the day. Why?”

“Buddy was home alone when you found him, right?” Mara nodded and Ping continued. “There must have been the passage of some length of time between when he was infected with this mist of Prado’s and the time in which he was disembodied. On the bank video, it looked fairly instantaneous. The mist entered the security guard’s body and shortly thereafter, we saw his apparition appear. That doesn’t appear to be the case with Buddy.”

“There was a video on television where it showed the mist, but it didn’t show an apparition. I assumed they had edited it out for some reason. Why? Is that important?”

“It might indicate a change in tactics, as if there’s a mind at work here. If everyone who was exposed fell down on the spot, eventually the opportunity to spread would be greatly reduced or even eliminated as the authorities identified cases and quarantined them.”

“That creepy voice did say he would soon be all of us, like it was a personal goal or something.” Mara shivered and sipped her tea. “Prado’s definitely doing this intentionally. It may not have started out that way, but he seems fully committed to continuing.”

“Yes, but the question is,
to what end
?”

“What do you mean?”

“What is he trying to accomplish? Is he clinging to life in the only way he knows how? Maybe this is a normal process where he comes from, a means of preserving a legacy or propagating the species, and it has gone horribly wrong in this realm. Who knows?”

“I don’t get the sense that he’s an innocent victim of circumstance. He’s knowingly hurting people with complete disregard.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Ping, that deep lispy voice coming out of Buddy’s mouth was clearly making a threat. Those were not the words of a benign lost soul. He is not going to stop until we do something.”

“So you want to do something.”

She pointed toward the front of the house. “I’m not going to sit here and watch Buddy rot to death upstairs while his spirit, or whatever it is, has a nervous breakdown in the living room. Yes, I want to do something.”

“What would you suggest?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can use my abilities to pull him out of Buddy.”

“Even if you could do that, what about the hundreds of other people he has infected? Saving Buddy won’t stop Prado from entering other people or even reinfecting Buddy later.”

“Maybe there is something the Proctors can do. That mist seemed to bounce right off of Denton, and Melanie’s body seemed to recoil from it at an elemental level. Maybe they can help.”

“They looked like they had had their fill of Prado when they were leaving. I’m not sure they would be willing to engage with him again on the off chance that they could accomplish something,” Ping said. “We need more information. We can’t confront Prado until we understand what is going on and what can be done about it.”

“Where can we find more information about a guy who has gone viral and is possessing a good chunk of metro Portland?”

“There’s only one place I can think of where that would even be a remote possibility,” Ping said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

“Where?”

“The realm where Prado came from.”

“Obviously, if we could go to his realm, we might be able to learn more about what he’s doing and how. But that’s impossible, so why bring it up?”

“Is it impossible?” He make a point of catching her eye.

“Well, yeah. We can’t go into another realm, right?”

“
We
can’t, but
you
can, using the Chronicle.”

“Are you nuts? Even if I knew how to use the Chronicle that way, I’m not crazy enough to try it. Isn’t that how all this got started? If Sam’s version of Mara hadn’t been monkeying around with the Chronicle, none of this would be happening now.”

“Can you suggest a better way to get information about Prado and his intentions?”

“There’s got to be an alternative to me getting sucked into the Chronicle.”

“This is the reason the Chronicles exists, to give the progenitor the means to cross realms. This is part of what you were meant to do, part of your metaphysical role in the creation of existence.”

“Sheesh, I hate when you say stuff like that. What teenager already has a defined metaphysical role in the creation of existence? Don’t I get a chance to figure out who and what I am without being obliged to consider the implications on the universe?”

“You said you wanted to help Buddy.”

“I do, but there has to be another way. I mean, going into another realm is completely insane.”

“More insane than a man, whose essence is spreading virally from person to person, ejecting their souls along the way?” Ping asked. “You can’t address a metaphysical catastrophe with what you consider
sane
. This goes back to you accepting who you are and what you can do. Using the Chronicle is part of that.”

“I don’t recall you ever saying I had to go to other realms before,” Mara said.

“It’s not my place to set expectations for you. What do you think you should do to help Buddy?”

Mara paused for a moment to consider the question. After a moment, her entire body sagged against the back of her chair. “Okay, hypothetically, if I were to do this—go to another realm—how do I know which one? When you open the Chronicle, there are millions of those nodes floating around in there. If Prado isn’t standing right there, the node representing his realm isn’t going to be obvious.”

Ping held up a finger and said, “Hold that thought.” He stood up and walked out of the kitchen. A moment later, he returned with Sam.

“How’s Buddy doing?” Mara asked.

“Mom’s playing an audiobook on her phone for him. It seems to make him happy. I think he was getting tired of our questions,” he said. “What’s up?”

Ping pointed to a chair for him to take. “We’ve got some questions about the Chronicle and how it works.”

“You can’t discuss this with Mom, at least not right now.”

“Okay, shoot,” he said.

“If Mara wanted to figure out which node in the Chronicle represents the one Prado came from, how would she go about doing it?” Ping asked.

“Prado would have to be there, so she could see which node is attracted to him,” Sam said.

“But he’s dead,” Mara said.

“Get some of that dust he turned into. I bet that would work,” Sam said.