Touch

Copyright © 2014 by Michelle Sagara.

All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by Cliff Nielsen.

DAW Book Collectors No. 1620.

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

Book designed by Elizabeth Glover

All characters in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62584-2

This is for the teachers:

Carol Morgan

Manjit Virk

Lisa Adams

Carolyn Watt

Sara Cheng

Eric Chellew

Ashley Marshall

Ed Hitchcock

Because you chose to see all difficulties as challenges, and you worked to meet—and
even exceed—them. Teaching is a vocation; it is an incredible gift, and it’s given
day-in and day-out.

T
his was possibly the hardest book of my career to write. I thought, going in, it would
be the easiest. This is the occupational hazard of the writer’s life. Usually, though,
my hazards don’t cause quite as many problems for my publisher. DAW has been, as always,
fabulous. I’m sure there was hair-pulling and teeth-grinding in New York—but it stayed
in New York.

So: Sheila Gilbert & Joshua Starr,
thank you, thank you, thank you
. You let me take the time to start this book
four times
from the beginning, to figure out where and why it didn’t work, and to ultimately
make it work, even though it messed up the schedule terribly.

Inasmuch as this book is any good, it’s due in large part to that understanding and
that space.

Also: my family put up with an increasingly stressed and depressed writer for way
too many months—which is generally what happens when I keep dashing my head against
the wall of writer competence. So they deserve your sympathy.

W
HEN YOU SLIDE INTO THE CAR, it’s empty. Stuffy. You roll down the windows, sit for
a minute in the garage. It’s quiet, in the car. It’s like a bubble world. You’re in
it; it’s your space. It’s your space until you park, turn off the engine, and get
out.

Sitting in the garage won’t get you anywhere you want to be, and you want to be somewhere,
but you’re not in a hurry, not yet. You start the car, back out of the garage, think
about where you’re going.

Radio says there’s an accident on Eglinton you want to avoid. You’re not the only
one to take that advice; traffic is slow.

Here’s a thing about cars. In the summer, when the humidity is 98%, you might as well
be in an oven if your dad’s air-conditioning is dead. Intersections are not your friend.
Windows are. Still air becomes breeze, and breeze becomes wind—but only when the wheels
rotate.

Here’s another thing about cars. They have history.

Some of the history is in rust and nicks and dents and the taillight that’s sketchy.
Some of it’s in stains on the vinyl; some of it’s wedged between the seat back and
the bench. Some of it, though, is memory. Where you went. More important, with who.
You can think about the empty passenger seat on the hot, humid drive, and you can
imagine that Emma is sitting beside you, hair trailing back in the cross-breeze, elbow
on the doorframe.

You can remember the first time you kissed her, when she got out of the passenger
side and walked around to where you sat, behind the wheel, looking for words. Words
have never come easily to you, but Emma gets that. She doesn’t make you say anything
you’re not ready to say.

It was dark, but her eyes looked so bright. You didn’t even get out of the car; you
looked up to tell her you’d see her tomorrow, and her face was inches from yours;
she was leaning into the open window, into where you were. And then you didn’t want
to start the car at all.

And maybe you didn’t.

When you’re on the inside of a car in motion, you’re not really thinking about physics.
When you’re behind the wheel, you pay attention to red lights, green lights, stop
signs, walk signals. If you don’t, you’ve got no business being behind that wheel.
But there’s room for Emma in that, and you think about her when you’re waiting for
lights to change. You want to see her. You’re going to see her.

But here’s the big thing about cars: They’re a couple of tons of metal and extraneous
bits. Add wheels, and you get momentum. It’s pure physics. You get momentum even if
your car isn’t moving, because the car that
is
moving doesn’t stop until half your car is crushed between its SUV hood and the wall
of a building.

The front half.

* * *

You see the SUV.

You see the SUV a dozen times.

You see it a hundred times. You’re trapped in a loop where time slows down or speeds
up randomly. You can see the license plate. You can see the driver. You can see his
passengers, and you can count them. He’s not much older than you are. They’re not
much older than he is.

You can see the front grille getting closer and closer. You know the license plate
number by heart; it’s burned into your memory. You can feel the car crumple around
you, can see the windshield crack and shatter. You don’t feel pain. It happens too
fast for pain.

And you don’t feel heat. It’s summer, the sun made the car seats too hot to touch.
Now it’s cold in the middle of July. Cold, dry, endless July. It’s still a bubble
world, and you know you’re trapped here until you can open the door—but you can’t.
There’s not enough of a door left. Not enough of you.

* * *

You are dead.

You come to realize you are dead. It only happened once, the dying; this stupid looped
repeat has nothing to do with life. Nothing to do with you, except you’re
in it
. You don’t know where you are. You know that people talk about heaven—or hell—and
this is hellish, except you feel no pain. Only confusion and anger and cold. You don’t
know how many times their car has hit your car. You can’t begin to count.

But until you realized what it
meant
, you had to live it over and over again.

Now you know.

Now you can leave the car. You don’t even try to open the door. You just slide to
the left of the steering wheel, and you pass through the car door. You’re out.

Your car still gets crushed against the wall, but this time, you’re not in it.

Your ears are ringing. You can see the street. You can see pedestrians, freezing,
turning; you can hear the sound of a woman screaming. That grabs you, makes your blood
freeze, but you don’t recognize the voice, and you can move again.

The thing is, you can’t see very well. You know people are here, but they’re blurs.
You shout. They can’t hear you. You stand in front of them. You jump up and down like
a four year old, but nothing changes. They’re still blurry. Some of them move. But
they move past you, around you, as if you’re not there. As if they’re not here.

There’s no sun here. No heat.

You spend an hour screaming. You can scream forever. No one hears you. You jump up
and down, you try to throw things. You go nuts. You haven’t gone nuts like this since
you were five. There’s no reaction. No one sees you. You can barely see them, they’re
so fuzzy. It’s like you died and you suddenly need glasses. Or worse.

You need to get out of here. You need to leave.

You can go home. That’s what you should have done. You should have gone home. You
didn’t even think of home. Why?

Thinking of home. Mom. Dad. Gotrek the hamster. You’ll go home.

* * *

You don’t recognize the street you’re on. You don’t recognize the intersection. You
know
how to get home. You know this part of the city. But . . . you don’t. The streets
are too long. The buildings are the wrong shape, the wrong size. You can see them
more clearly than the blurred smudges that are people—but they make no sense.

You’ve had this nightmare before. You leave school, exit by the front doors, and stare
out at a totally unfamiliar neighborhood. It’s as if the entire building had been
teleported to some other borough while you were in history or math. In those nightmares,
you end up wandering the streets, lost, until you wake up.

But you can’t wake up here. You’ve never been lost like this.

When it gets to be too much, you sit down. Just sit, in the middle of the road, staring
at nothing, wondering where the hell the sun is. Wondering why there’s no blood on
your clothing, no dirt on your hands. Wondering why you’re even here at all. This
isn’t how death is supposed to work.

* * *

You have no sense of time, because time makes no difference. You have no idea how
long you’ve been sitting on your butt in the middle of this street. You are cold,
you are silent. You don’t scream anymore. You don’t move. The world moves around you,
leaving you behind. You miss Emma. You miss Emma, but you’re terrified because you
don’t remember what she
looked like
. You don’t remember sunlight.

So when sunlight comes, it’s almost too much. You curl in on yourself, because it’s
too much. But it gets stronger and brighter. It’s not going away. You stand, you turn,
you face it; it is so bright and so warm and so close you can almost touch it. And
you can
hear
it. If you can reach it, you know you will never be cold again.

You won’t be lost, either. Maybe this is why you couldn’t find home when you tried:
you can’t live there anymore. You can walk toward the sun. You don’t need the road.
You can run, and you do.

Scattered throughout your childhood are memories:
Cover your eyes. Don’t stare at the sun. Do you want to go blind?
Different voices, different ages, same advice.

So you know this isn’t the sun because there’s no pain. Your eyes don’t water. Your
vision doesn’t blur. The light doesn’t become a spread of painful brilliance; it takes
shape and form. And you have no words for the form. It’s not round; it’s not square;
it’s not flat. It’s not person-shaped, but . . . it’s alive. You are certain it’s
alive. It’s alive the way home is alive: it promises warmth. It promises what you
need—what you’ve always needed: quiet space, and company in which you can be entirely
yourself.

No defenses. No shields. No prescriptive behavior. No need to define yourself by other
people’s desires, by other people’s approval or disapproval. No need to talk if you’ve
got nothing to say, no need to shut up if you’ve got too much. People are waiting
there, on the other side: people who see you and know you and accept everything about
you until your fear of the things they can’t accept becomes meaningless.

You can’t see that—how could you? You’re not even certain what it would look like,
if you were still alive. You’ve seen glimpses of it in Emma. In your parents. In moments
of time. You can’t put a shape to it. But it’s solid, and you understand that you
only have to reach it, touch it, and you will be fully, finally, home.

But as you approach, you hear wailing. It is the most distinct sound you’ve heard
since your car collapsed around you.

You can hear it as if it’s your voice; it’s inside you, inside your mouth and your
ears. Your hands freeze with the strength of it because it is loss. It is loss; it
is death.

You thought you were dead. No, you
knew
you were dead. But until this moment, you didn’t understand what that meant.

The light is where you belong. It’s where you want to be—it’s the only thing you want.
But you can’t reach it. No one—you understand this as the screams take shape and form—can.

You can see shadows moving in the light. You know what they’re doing: They’re trying
to touch it. They’re trying to reach it. You want to do the same. You don’t. You don’t
because you know you’ll be up there screaming with the rest of them if you try and
you fail.

* * *

And it’s true. You would be. You’d scream for years, and you’d feel every passing
second as if it were a century. It’s what the dead do. This is their birth, their
rebirth; this is when they come, at last, to accept their eternity. Like any birth,
it’s painful and of interest only to parents—but, of course, yours aren’t here.

If they knew what awaited the dead, would they have children at all? It’s a question
that no one has asked. The living who can speak to the dead don’t care, after all.
The dead are dead, and they serve at the whim of their Queen, when they are at last
presented to her.

Rare indeed is the dead boy who does not need to journey to the city to greet her.
How many times do you think she has left her palace within that city and walked the
paths the living walk to find the newborn dead?

Ah, but you
are
newborn. You don’t know. You have no idea of the honor done you.

You know only that there is a light that reaches for you, a light you can touch. In
form and shape it is familiar: human, only slightly taller than yourself. But it casts
no shadow, and it offers warmth—the only warmth you’ve found in the land of the dead.

Is she beautiful? To you, yes; you are dead. You see what lies beneath the surface
of life, and you see it purely. No age, no experience, no prior vision blurs your
sight. You would kneel, if kneeling made sense; you are immobile, instead, staring;
you are afraid to blink, because in blinking, you might lose sight of her. Thus do
all of the dead who understand their state stand before her: transfixed. Helpless.

Here. Take the Queen’s hand, and she will lead you to the only real home you will
have for the rest of eternity.

Some people cry in public. They’re champion criers. They cry when they see a familiar
name in a phone book, or when they’re signing yearbooks, or when they’re talking about
anything more emotional than grocery shopping. It’s as though all of life is a big
box of tissues.

Nathan’s mother has never been one of them. Nathan’s never
seen
her cry. Maybe her mother did, when she was a kid; if she did, she never shared.
Nathan learned about crying from his mother, but it took him longer.

Maybe that’s why he fell for Emma. Emma was a total failure as a crier. She wasn’t
like his mother in any other way, except gender. Which is also why he liked her.

But she and his mother had this in common. It wasn’t that they didn’t
want
to cry; it was that they chose not to and made it stick. No tears in public. Nathan
never understood why.

“If it’s the way you feel, why hold back?”

“If I feel like punching Nick in the face,” Emma replied, “I don’t see you encouraging
me.”

“Your fists, his face. Not practical. Get a tire iron.” He shrugged. “It wouldn’t
bother me if you cry.”

“It would bother
me
.”

“Why?”

She kissed him instead of answering, which was a cheat. But it was a
good
cheat.