My heart is beating. That means Luka’s wrong. I’m alive.
“You’re not making sense,” I whisper. “You died last year, but you’re still going to school? Still on the track team? Still going to classes?” My voice rises with each word until I’m practically screaming. “What, you’re a zombie? One of the living dead?”
I take a step forward. He takes a step back.
“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m not saying this right.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” I’m shaking with fear and anger. “This isn’t funny, Luka.”
“No, I know. Listen, I understand how you feel. I remember waking up right where you did. I remember what I thought. That I was dead. That I was in a coma. That I was dreaming the whole thing.” He touches my shoulder, and then jerks his hand away, his fist clenching as he drops it to his side. “Those same thoughts went through your head, right?”
They had. Every single one of them.
I slap my palm against his chest, over his heart. I feel the steady drum of his heartbeat. “You’re lying. You’re alive. I can feel it. Dead. People. Don’t. Have. Heartbeats.” I punctuate each word with a tap against his chest, and then let my hand fall to my side.
He shakes his head. “I am. You are. Alive, I mean.” He lifts his hand like he’s going to touch my shoulder again, but he only holds it there for a second, then drops it. “We’re mostly alive. Most of the time. But for the mission, we’re not. Not really. We’re here, and we get to go back when we’re done.”
“Start making sense, Luka, because so far, everything you’ve said just sounds crazy.” I feel sick, woozy, adrenaline slamming my pulse into overdrive and making me want to run, scream, hit something. “Just tell me what’s going on.” I enunciate each word, slow and careful. “In plain, simple terms. Just tell me what the hell is going on.”
Luka glances around like he’s looking for an escape route. I follow his gaze. We’re in a clearing surrounded by trees. There’s nothing familiar. No street. No crosswalk. No schools. No landmarks I recognize. And for the first time, I notice that there are more than three of us here.
About ten feet away are two large boulders. A boy is sitting on one, a girl on the other. I don’t recognize either one of them. The boy’s a little older, maybe twenty or so. His blue eyes are a stunning contrast to his dark skin and black lashes. His curly hair is trimmed close to his skull. He looks like a model in a J.Crew ad, and he’s watching me with an expression that I can only read as sympathetic. The girl’s red haired and pale, blue eyed, too—what’s with that?—very pretty, with a figure that’s all curves. She’s wearing a cheer uniform. The only things missing are the pom-poms. They’re both wearing the wristbands.
After a minute, the girl pushes off the boulder and walks over. She approaches me warily, like I’m some wild animal that’s going to pounce on her and tear her throat out.
“Listen . . . um . . .” Her brows shoot up and she looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to tell her my name.
“Miki Jones.”
“Richelle Kirkman.” She gestures back toward the boy on the boulder. “That’s Tyrone Walker.” I recognize her voice. She’s the girl who was speaking when I first woke up, and I’m guessing Tyrone is the guy she was talking to. “You already had the pleasure”—she rolls her eyes—“of meeting Jackson.” At the mention of his name, I glance over to where he’s standing on the far side of the boulders. “And from the looks of things, you already know Luka,” Richelle continues, then frowns. “Which is odd because we’ve never had anyone go through who knew each other from . . . before. You go to the same school or something?”
“Yeah. Glenbrook, in Rochester,” Luka says.
“Minnesota? Michigan?”
“What are you, a geography teacher?”
“It’s a hobby,” Richelle says.
Luka purses his lips and nods. “Rochester, New York. But I was living in Seattle when I was pulled. My dad was only transferred back to Rochester a couple of weeks ago. Right before school started. So we weren’t actually pulled from the same geographic area. But I wouldn’t say it’s never happened.”
Richelle nods like that means something to her. She and Luka seem to know each other, so I wonder why she doesn’t know where he goes to school or that he used to live in Seattle. But I have more important questions to ask.
“Pulled?” I glance at Luka.
“Pulled from real life,” he says.
His answer makes me shiver. I wrap my arms around my waist, holding myself together.
Richelle shoots a hard look his way and jumps in with, “Don’t listen to him. We still have real lives. They just get temporarily interrupted every now and then.”
CHAPTER THREE