“I’m Selma Tse and this is my brother, Sebastian,” the girl said in a reedy voice. “There’s no Internet, and we can’t get cell service, even though our phones were protected inside our bags.”
“We just walked through town, and the place is pretty much deserted,” Sebastian added. They turned their heads in opposite directions, sliding their suspicious eyes around the room.
“It seems as if everyone is…here,” Selma said. “Together. The entire town.”
“What’s the deal with this place?” Sebastian added. “It’s not normal.”
Thunder rumbled outside. The pendant lights overhead flickered and half the room gasped. I instinctively grabbed Joaquin’s arm. Silence.
“I’m sorry, was there a question in there somewhere?” the mayor asked impatiently.
“Yes,” Sebastian began, taking a step forward. “Who are you people? How did we get here when neither one of us remembers even deciding to leave home? And what the hell is Juniper Landing?”
My fingers dug deeper into Joaquin’s arm. Normally the visitors here were programmed to think they were on vacation. They were sort of lulled into a sense of happy complacency. But not these two.
“I knew it,” I whispered. “I knew something was off about them.”
“Is someone going to answer us?” Selma asked, her voice ringing to the ceiling.
And from the looks in their freaky light eyes, they weren’t about to take no for an answer.
I speed-walked across town that night on my way to Joaquin’s for Darcy and Liam’s initiation, my head bent toward the ground, trying to stay as dry as possible. The sidewalks were crisscrossed with hairline cracks and deep fractures, a spiderweb of hazards in the darkness. Near the corner in front of the general store, one of the gutters was so packed with leaves the water burbled and rose around it, and I saw a dead mouse bobbing up and down on the swell, its eyes blank.
I shuddered and hurried on, wishing Darcy were with me. She’d been assigned to a late shift at the nursery and was meeting me at Joaquin’s. It was close to midnight, and the town that was quiet in midday was now graveyard silent, aside from the rain and wind. I saw a stray light illuminated in one of the upper windows of the library. As I was about to dip downhill toward the docks, something in the library window shifted. I paused, heart in my throat, clutching my hood together under my chin. A shadow passed through the light—a person, though it was impossible to tell whether it was male or female.
Maybe I was imagining things. Maybe it was a trick of light. But still, I stood there, alone and shivering, squinting across the rain-flattened grasses of the park. I was just about to call myself crazy and give up, when the figure appeared again. This time, instead of moving on, it squared itself in the window and stood there, staring out. Staring out at me.
Then out of nowhere, a flash of lightning blinded me, and a simultaneous burst of thunder vibrated inside my bones. When I looked up at the window again, the shadow was gone.
I turned around and ran.
Hurdling over fallen branches down the hill, I could feel someone—something—behind me, gaining on me, tearing with an otherworldly quickness through the night. Wind-tossed leaves swirled up in front of me, and my foot caught on a raised bit of sidewalk, but I righted myself and kept running. Suddenly I heard a sound cut through the rain. The distant music of the Thirsty Swan, the only business in town still booming. If I could just get there. If I could just find someone, anyone real, maybe I would be okay.
I skidded onto the boardwalk at the bottom of the hill and turned. There was nothing there. Someone grabbed me by the arm.
“Rory?”
I screamed at the top of my lungs, but it was just Liam. He was with a tanned girl with wide dark eyes and long black hair tucked under a poncho hood. The boy walking out the door of the Thirsty Swan and over to join them had to be her brother. He was shorter and tanner, but had the same beautiful eyes.
“Are you okay?” the girl asked me, her face lined with real concern.
I could only imagine how I seemed to her, my breath staggered, my eyes shot through with fear. I must have looked psychotic, haunted.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Sorry. It probably wasn’t the best idea to walk through the park by myself this late.” I extended a shaking, cold, wet hand. “I’m Rory.”
“Lalani,” she said with a smile, grasping my hand. “This is my brother, Nicholas.”
“S’up,” the kid behind her said with a nod and a smirk.
“Lalani and Nick were on the ferry, but they swam to shore on their own,” Liam said, looking at Lalani with a proud expression.
“You guys weren’t hurt?” I asked.
Nicholas shook his head. “We’re from Hawaii, originally. We know how to deal with rough water.”
“Hawaii,” Liam said giddily. “Isn’t that so cool?”
“Awesome,” I said, realizing suddenly what was going on here. Liam had a crush. A big one. On a visitor. “You’re still going to Joaquin’s, right?”