Sublime

COLIN AND JAY ARE NEAR the back of the library, jumping from rails to stairs, when Lucy returns. Colin approaches her slowly, as if she might roar, first inspecting her eyes and then reaching for her hand. “Are you mad?”

“I wasn’t mad.” She pulls his fingers up to kiss them.

“You totally were,” Jay says, coming to a skidding stop next to them. “You just have to trust that we are completely legit. We are adventure experts.”

“Legit?” She shakes her head at him, fighting a smile. “Don’t do that, Jay. You can’t pull off nineties gangster.”

“Ignore him,” Colin says, pressing a hand to Jay’s chest and pushing him away. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I needed to think. I went to talk to Henry.”

“You told him about the lake?”

“No, no,” she assures him quickly. “I wanted to know why I feel different lately. But it doesn’t happen to him. He says he’s always the same.”

Colin’s face falls, but he tries to hide his disappointment. “We’ll figure it out.” He kisses her cheek before turning to watch Jay grind down the stairs again.

In turn, Lucy watches Colin, thinking of what Henry said in the auditorium. She puts her hand on her opposite forearm, feeling the swirling energy beneath. “How do you feel today?”

He glances at her and then back to Jay. “I’m good. I swear. No tingling in my fingers anymore.” He wiggles them playfully in demonstration, but Lucy only feels the tightness in her chest intensify. She’s missing something. She’s missing something and she can’t disappear again.

“And you really do want to go back to the lake?”

He turns to her fully now, eyes bright. “Yeah, I do.”

Lucy squeezes her arm. Nothing. Colin looks hopeful, bordering on giddy, but she basically feels the same: somewhere in between a solid and a gas. In that strange no man’s land on the verge of the sublime. “And it works for you, going into the water alone? Having Jay pull you out?”

“Absolutely.” Colin is practically vibrating with joy now, but Lucy doesn’t register any change in herself. It can’t be tied only to his happiness. There’s something she isn’t getting right.

“Is there a better way to do it?”

“Other than packing my bed with ice and curling up with me?” he says, laughing. “No. This works.”

With him.

The idea sparks a realization so fierce it takes her a moment to see beyond it and into the present, where Colin has looked away again. She came back from the lake to be with him but has been sending him into the water alone. Every time he goes in, she’s stronger. . . . She’s grown stronger so she can help him.

“Do you want me to go into the water with you?”

Her fingers sense the shock of energy surging into place beneath her skin, and she pulls her hand back as if she’s plugged her own fingers into a generator.

Colin reaches for her shoulders, steadying. She remembers the first day, in the dining hall, when she saw him and felt starved for details about his face up close, his voice, the feel of his skin on hers. She’s been staring at his face at a distance for years. The face that is here, right in front of her, bending close and kissing her as if she’s made from blown glass.

“Yeah,” he says. “You would do that?”

“Of course I would.”

“I’d follow you anywhere, Lucy. You just point the way.”

“Then, let’s swim.” She’s convinced she’s smiling with her whole body.

“When? When can we go?”

She pulls away and looks behind Colin to where Jay is very much not looking at what they’re doing. “Jay, you free tomorrow?”

Jay whoops and walks to Colin, bumping fists with him. “I’m in.”

• • •

It’s early, barely dawn. The sky clings weakly to darkness until clouds take their place and begin to drop fluffy snow. Colin and Jay shove peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into their mouths as they do a final check of the supplies.

“Still ready?” Colin asks her, heaving a large duffel over his shoulder.

Lucy nods, unable to open her mouth for fear she’ll admit that she’s never felt this strong or this sure of anything.

By the time they’ve arrived and hiked to the shore, the surface is blinding in the early-morning sunlight, brilliant white broken up by tiny speckles of fallen brown leaves. Colin’s original site of entry, the jagged and thin section of ice in the middle of the lake, shines a brilliant blue, thinner than the ice around it. Now when she sees the sharp edges pointing like arrows to the center, Lucy’s memory of Colin falling in is rewritten as something calm and idyllic. Like a reel of images, she sees him going under, his face relieved instead of terrified. She remembers hearing him call her name on the trail, of the first sensation of solid skin to skin, of the way his eyes begged her to not ruin it by pointing out that something was very wrong.

Their shoes crunch along the surface, and she hears Colin slip on the ice, and both guys laugh behind her. She doesn’t even turn around because she wants in. It’s different now that they’ve decided to go in together. Something heavy pulls inside her chest, a sudden tether to some unseen anchor underwater.

She turns and looks at him here and wonders if it’s true that she lived in the lake for so long. Did she see him? Is that the hunger that takes over every thought? Beneath the blue ice there’s something deeper, a space carved for them. It’s all she can do to not pull him down to the opening with her. Her hands are magnets and his skin is iron and their place together is just below the surface.

While Jay unrolls the foil blanket and unpacks his kit of supplies, Lucy strips down to her underwear, unwilling to waste a single second. Boots, pants, sweater, shirt form a rumpled pile at her feet. Her skin is startlingly white in the sun, iridescent and more opaque than she’s ever seen it.

She looks up at a surprised Colin, his eyes taking in every inch. He stutters a few sounds before fumbling with his own buttons to catch up.

“I’ve never seen you . . . like this,” he says, eyes bright, cheeks flushed.

Lucy glances at the opening to the water and then back at him. “On the count of three?”

• • •

They dive in, arms stretching out into the clear blue water. It presses against every inch of her, cold and silvery. When they dip under a fallen tree, a fluff of moss waves in their wake, releasing a million tiny bubbles to travel the surface. Lucy doesn’t know exactly where she’s going, but she’s pulled toward the deep end of the lake, under the shadows where the ice is thick and dark.

She feels Colin’s fingers brush the skin of her ankle, his hair on her thigh as he pushes to catch up and swim beside her. As she turns her head, she sees him trying to hold his breath. Behind them, his unconscious body floats to the surface.

“Let go,” she says as clearly as if they were on dry land. She takes his hand and pulls him closer. It’s warm in hers, solid and familiar. At the surface, Jay pulls Colin’s body out of the lake. “Jay’s got you out.”

He struggles for a moment, a look of fear passing through his wide eyes as he works to let go of the instinct to breathe. Tugging his arm, she leads him forward, where the deep blue slowly morphs darker and darker, turning into a tunnel of soft black.

“Luce,” Colin whispers from beside her. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know exactly,” she says. And she doesn’t. Even though being back in the lake feels familiar, she realizes she’s never known what this world is. It’s not heaven or hell. It’s not a different universe.

Light shines above, and they both look to the whiteness over them and push up through the crystal-blue water until they break the surface on this strange, other side. It’s unlike anything Lucy has ever seen since her return, but the space is so familiar and tugs at something in the back of her mind, some instinct that she’s finding the world she retreats to when she vanishes.

There’s a brief flash of disappointment: Everything is the same—trees and boulders and the trail—but then Lucy realizes that it’s not at all like the shore they just left.

Instead, it’s a mirror image, a replica of the icy earth aboveground, but it’s so much more. More color, more light, more reflections on every surface. Entering this world feels like stepping into the center of a diamond.

Lucy and Colin climb out of the water onto a shore of sand so crystalline, it glimmers in the indirect sun filtered through the trees. Branches of amber, leaves of a silver green so bright Lucy has to blink away, let her eyes adjust.

Beside her, Colin is silent, and when she looks to him, she registers that he’s watching her reaction, waiting. “There was something different about that world, something perfect,” he’d said. He’s seen this every other time he’s been here, and it’s she who’s forgotten what it’s like, because, until now, she didn’t go under with him.

“You can see this?” she asks, looking up at a sky so blue it almost needs another name. It’s the lake reflected, an entire galaxy, a massive ocean in a single glimpse of sky.

He nods, taking her hand and pulling her toward the trail. But when she expects him to pull her in the direction of the shed, he surprises her, walking the other way, away from the field and the school buildings and deeper into the woods instead.

Beneath their feet, amber leaves crunch like splinters of precious stone. The snow is mesmerizing, winking back a hundred shades of blue reflected from the lake and sky. It’s like she can see every frozen, glittering crystal that blankets the ground and trees and hills beyond.

Lucy’s memories come back slowly, giving her mind time to adjust the same way her eyes adjusted to the light: first recover. And then see: see the world that must have been her home for the past ten years.

“It’s like a reflection,” she tells Colin, following his lead at a fork in the trail. “Everything up there is down here. Buildings and trees. Even the lake. Like Wonderland.” She points back at the water behind them, looking like a sapphire planted in a bed of quartz.

He must hear the awe in her voice because he stops, turning to face her.

She shifts where she stands. “Except people. I mean, I think I’ve been alone, watching.”

His dark brows pull together, and he whispers, “I hate that.”

Not wanting to worry him, she adds, “I don’t think time passed the same way. I mean, I remember being here, but I don’t feel like I was sitting around, bored out of my mind for the past ten years.” His face relaxes, and she says, “I remember looking up, as if I could see everything through a glass. I think I was waiting. And I remember watching you.”

“Really?”

Nodding, Lucy takes his hand and leads him down the trail this time, feeling a pull to go forward, to keep moving. “I remember watching you on the hill during a winter social. You and Jay swung from a tree branch and jumped down onto the lake.”

Colin laughs, shaking his head. “I’d forgotten about that. We were twelve. I broke my ankle.” There’s a hint of pride in this admission that makes her smile.

“I saw you ride out here the first time,” she says, the images unrolling in her head like a reel of film. “You were a little scared but a lot more excited.” She grins as she remembers his pink cheeks and smiling face, the way he kept glancing back over his shoulder as if he expected to be caught any minute. “You two were the only ones who came out here at first, but you didn’t seem to be looking for me.”

“I remember that! Jay dared me to walk out on the ice when we were seven. The joke ended up being on him because he cut himself on the dock and needed a tetanus shot. Man, we got in trouble for that.”

Their joined hands swing between them as they continue to walk along the trail. Every few minutes Colin lifts the back of hers to his mouth, kissing it. His lips are warm.

“And obviously it didn’t stop you.”

He grins. “No way. We’ve grown up hearing stories about this place. About Walkers and disappearances, of people claiming to see a girl slip along the shore or hearing voices.” He bends to pick up a leaf, spinning it in front of him. “I mean, it was creepy, yeah. But not everyone bought into it. Just adults discouraging crazy kids from drinking and fornicating at the lake. Made it sound cooler, really.”

Lucy snorts and shakes her head. “Of course the prospect of danger would make it more appealing to you. And even before I died, I don’t think we were supposed to come out here. Too far from the main buildings, too many ways to get in trouble.”

They stop walking, and he bends to her, whispering, his smiling kiss covering her lips, “I can think of lots of ways to get in trouble out here.”

“How long have we been gone?” she asks, tilting her head back as Colin kisses a path from her chin to her neck. He mumbles something unintelligible, and she means to ask him what he said, but a bird cuts through the air over his shoulder. A raven. It’s beautiful, with wings like shards of ebony. It flies overhead, calling out into the silence before circling back and landing somewhere in front of them.

Lucy turns to find it, to point out the hauntingly beautiful bird to Colin, but she freezes, the words lost in a gasp when she realizes how far they’ve walked.

She can see the hulking shape of Ethan Hall behind them in the distance, and ahead of her is the raven, its talons wrapped around the highest arch of the imposing metal gate that surrounds Saint Osanna’s.

But something is different. Instead of feeling an invisible bubble pushing against her chest and sending her back to the trail, she feels like a fish caught on the end of a hook. Pulled. Slowly reeled in.

She takes a step forward.

“Luce?” Colin asks. “You okay?”

“I don’t know,” she says, continuing on, her steps quicker now. Purposeful. As she nears the iron fence, she looks up and meets the raven’s watchful stare, can see her own reflection in the luminous black of the bird’s eyes. “Something . . . something’s different.”

She hears the crunch of snow as Colin jogs to catch up, feels the beat of a pulse in her hollow veins. When Colin stops at her side, the pull gets stronger. “Do you feel that?”

“Feel what? Lucy, what’s going on?”

“Like suction? Like I’m metal and there’s this giant magnet on the other side? You don’t feel that?”

Colin shakes his head, eyes wide as he blinks from Lucy to the gate and back again. “Do you think you can get through?”

“I don’t know.” Her mouth is suddenly so dry, drier than she can ever remember. For the first time since waking, she wants something to drink, can almost imagine the feel of cold water as she swallows.

“Touch it,” she hears Colin whisper. “Lucy, touch it.”

She licks her lips, shaking as she lifts her arm, fingers trembling as they find the icy metal. There’s no resistance. She holds her breath, watching as her hand passes between two of the ornate balusters and to the other side.

“Oh my God,” she gasps. “Oh my God!” There’s the faintest hint of a tan; blue veins form a map across her palm and up her wrist. There’s a scar. Freckles. Imperfections. She forms a fist, feeling the warmth of her own skin. “Colin!”

But he doesn’t answer. Colin is gone.