Chapter 8
763 Words
8
“Miss Markham?” I could hear a voice calling to me. Female, with an accent. Not British, but something else. “My name is Dr. Rios. Can you hear me?”
“Mmm,” was the best I could do. My mouth was dirt dry, my throat raspy and sore. My eyes felt crusted over. I tried to pry them open.
The doctor lifted one of my eyelids and shined a light into my pupil. Pain rocketed through my head. I jerked away.
“What does that mean?” I heard Jake ask. “Is she all right?”
“It could be a reflex,” Dr. Rios said. “She’s still heavily drugged. We’re continuing to scan the brain to search for any damage.”
That didn’t sound good. I tried to open my eyes again.
“Halli?” Jake said. “Can you hear us? Halli, say something, please.”
Too much trouble. He had no idea how much effort it took.
And I didn’t feel all that motivated to do him any favors, considering it was his fault I was even lying there in the first place.
I couldn’t remember everything, but I could remember enough:
Daniel and me together in a dark, quiet room at his parents’ production studio. Me trying to contact Halli for the second time that day.
The first time hadn’t ended well. A woman named Olga and her daughter Christine showed me how to calm my mind, how to let it drift while I felt for the energy of Halli out there in the vast ocean of time and space. And then, once I found her, how to dive down and rejoin my own body back in my own world.
But all it took was Halli’s exuberant greeting to pull me out of the moment. I lost control. I don’t know if it was because I came out of it too abruptly, or if something else went wrong, but for whatever reason it was like someone ripping my skin off and turning me inside out. Like spikes driven into my head. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life.
Until it happened the second time.
Everything had being going well: I’d been able to talk to not only Halli, but also Professor Whitfield. We were getting somewhere. He had a theory about how it was I ended up in Halli’s body, and she ended up in mine. Neither one of us understood how I’d jumped ahead three days in the process, but we probably could have figured that out if we had time.
And then I heard my mother coming in the front door of our house. I hadn’t seen her since the whole thing happened, and I was desperate to look at her face again, to give her a hug, even just to hear her voice. She called out that she had soup for me. I started to run to her.
But then it all blew apart.
The door to Daniel’s and my private sanctuary burst open, and in rushed Jake, Daniel’s sister Sarah, and the reporter who’d been following us around. And then it was utter chaos: shouting, fighting, screaming. The screams were mine. I’d been ripped out of my real body once more, and this time the crash of pain felt like an explosion inside Halli’s head. My screaming only made it worse, made Halli’s brain feel like it was splitting down the center, but I couldn’t stop myself. The sound just kept coming.
Daniel tried to protect me. I could hear him yelling at the three of them to get out, to leave us alone, but then Jake started pushing back, and finally punched Daniel in the face.
I couldn’t worry about that—I just wanted the pain in Halli’s head to stop. But the next thing I knew, there was more shouting, a bigger crowd, and I was being wheeled along on a gurney and then loaded into an ambulance. I remember poor Red, Halli’s big yellow Labrador, trying to jump up in there with me, and being kicked away by the medic. And I remember looking over and seeing Daniel’s bleeding face. I remember flashes of it all, each one more horrible than the next.
And now waking up in the hospital, in this prison of a drugged mind. I was going to have to convince somebody to stop feeding that into my veins. My only salvation would come from having a clear head again so I could travel back to my own universe. I needed a mind free to figure out the physics, and this gooey mind wasn’t capable of it.
“Halli, open your eyes,” Jake tried again. “Please. Come back to me. I love you.”
I mumbled something. Couldn’t get the words out. Couldn’t tell him what I really wanted.
Which was for him to go find Daniel for me, and then get out of my life forever.
- Writer
