CHAPTER THREE

*DAY 01*

"Emma!"

I came up out of sleep like I'd been yanked by the hair, already sitting, one hand flat against my chest. My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth. For a few seconds I forgot how breathing worked.

Pink curtains.

That was the first thing. Pink curtains, faded along the fold where the sun hit them every afternoon, with that one hem I'd never finished stitching because I'd gotten bored in the ninth grade.

Behind them, soft gray morning. Next to the bed, the wardrobe with the sticky left door. The little table under the window. My desk, still buried in old notebooks and a mug of pens I'd stolen from three different banks.

I knew this room. I hadn't slept in it for two years.

This isn't the apartment. My brain kept circling that like a dog that can't settle. No brown stains on the plaster. No boards nailed over the windows. No gouges in the door where something had spent a whole night trying to get through it. And no smell.

That was the part that got me. Nothing rotten, nothing sweet and metallic under the damp. Just laundry detergent and dust, and somewhere below me, faintly, frying onions.

I looked at my hands. Clean. Short nails, no dirt packed under them, none of the black crust I'd stopped noticing a year ago. I pressed my fingers to my shoulder where the claws had gone through, and there was only skin, warm and whole.

I fell out of bed. I mean that literally, my foot tangled in the blanket and I crossed the room half-stumbling, and caught myself on the mirror frame.

The girl in the glass was me. Just not the me I'd been getting used to. Her hair was long and fell past her shoulders, shiny, the kind of hair you only have when you've never had to wash it in a bucket.

Her skin looked rested. There wasn't a scar on her face. She even had a pimple coming in on her chin, and the sight of it made a noise come out of me that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

"No," I said. My voice sounded rusty. "That's not... no."

I touched my cheek and it felt alive and warm. Absolutely, ridiculously healthy.

Then I saw the calendar.

It hung on a nail beside the desk, one of those free ones from the dentist's office with a photo of a lighthouse. Someone had circled a date in red marker, and I'd forgotten I ever did that. I'd circled it because it was my cousin's wedding, a nothing date, a day I'd wanted to buy a dress for.

I counted forward with one finger. Then I counted again, in case I'd got it wrong.

Thirty days. That circle was thirty days away, and thirty days from now, the sky would start to bleed.

My knees went soft. I grabbed the corner of the desk and hung on until the room stopped tilting.

"It worked," I whispered. "It actually... it sent me back."

Everything came in at once, and it wasn't like remembering. It was more like being hit.

The red rain on the windshields. The first body in the road, and the way the man standing over it had looked up at us.

Bread so stale it cut my gums. The woman who'd traded her wedding ring for two bottles of water and never once complained.

Screaming in the stairwell. Daniel's hand letting go of mine, so gently. Lily's head on his shoulder as the elevator sank.

And then the claws before total darkness.

I clenched my nails so deep that they sank into my skin. A laugh came out of me, short and ugly.

"I'm back."

My eyes were burning and I dragged the heel of my hand across them, hard. No. Not that.

I'd done my crying already, on a cold landing in front of two people who'd watched me do it like it was television. I wasn't going to spend another drop on them.

Someone knocked and I went completely still.

"Emma? You up?"

I knew that voice the way you know your own handwriting. It was bright and a little bored and slightly nasal, the way it got when she'd just woken up.

The last time I'd heard it, it had told me I'd be doing everyone a favor by dying.

"I'm up," I said.

The door opened and Lily leaned in, hair in a messy knot, wearing the oversized T-shirt she used to sleep in.

She smiled at me. It was the smile she'd had since she was six, gap-toothed once, now just sweet. If you'd shown me that face a month ago I'd have trusted it with my life.

Actually, I had.

"Mom says come down," she said. "You slept forever. It's almost nine."

Mom.

The word landed somewhere under my ribs and sat there, heavy and warm and about to break. Mom was downstairs. Frying onions. For a second I couldn't even hold my face still, and I turned toward the wardrobe like I was looking for something to wear.

"What's with you?" Lily said. "You look weird."

"Bad night."

"Nightmare?" She wandered in and scooped up one of my pillows, hugging it against her stomach, her flat stomach, with nothing in it. I made myself look at her face instead.

"Yeah."

"What about?" she asked.

I thought about lying. It would've been easy. Instead I said, "I died."

She laughed. "Okay, that's not funny."

"I know it isn't." I replied.

"God, you're so dramatic." She lobbed the pillow back at the bed and missed. "Anyway, Mom wants us down for breakfast. Hurry up, or Dad will eat your pancakes."

Dad too. I shut my eyes for one second.

"Go ahead," I said. "I'll be right there."

She turned for the door, and for a moment she stopped in it, one hand on the frame, and looked back at me with that little crease between her brows.

The worried one. She'd always had a very convincing worried face.

"Emma. You're okay, right?"

I looked at the back of her neck. A part of me wanted to cross the room and take two fistfuls of that messy knot and ask her, why? What did I ever do? I carried you through the whole world.

I wanted it so badly my hands actually shook.

But she'd just stare at me, confused, because she hadn't done it yet.

Nobody had. The only person who remembered any of it was me, and that was a very lonely thing to be.

I don't know if the world was actually going to end, but if it did, then Lily was really going to betray me and leave me for dead.