Chapter Text
The first thing Taissa notices in the wake of the crash is the high-pitched wail inside her ears.
She’s on her side. On her side, panting, feeling cross-eyed with dizziness. Pine needles prick her skin. Pine needles.
Where is the plane?
She presses herself gingerly up, just a little at a time. Up off the ground. Up to a sitting position. Up, until she can stand, until she can test her strength on legs that wobble, but thankfully do not collapse.
Where is the plane? Here—and also there. In pieces. It’s in fucking pieces because it fell out of the fucking sky.
“Oh,” she hears herself say as if through a tin can. “We crashed.”
No shit, something replies—the sound of her own moody irritation. No shit, because of course they did. Because they shouldn’t have gone this way. The flight path to Seattle was meant to take another turn or seven to avoid this very goddamn thing.
Everyone knows not to fly over this mountainous stretch. Everyone knows there’s something wrong with the soil or the trees—something that pulls planes horribly off course, kills engines, shatters navigation.
It’s the fucking Bermuda Triangle, Nat said once, when they heard of yet another crash, yet another handful of lives tragically lost. Except in the sky or whatever.
And the fucking pilots chose this anyway. To shave off an hour, or conserve fuel, or maybe just to prove they could. To prove they were adept enough at their craft to fight off whatever magnetic force drags planes down over this exact spot.
Was it worth it? Taissa’s dizzy gaze roams the area, taking in bleeding girls and huge pieces of shrapnel embedded in the earth. Was it fucking worth it?
The cockpit is a riot of gore. Those men, long gone. A few others, too—the flight attendant, and Rachel. Nobody has seen Coach Martinez. Surprisingly, just about everyone else is present and accounted for. Shaky, injured, terrified—but alive.
“God is good,” Laura Lee says. “He saved us.”
“If He really wanted to save us,” Lottie mutters, “maybe He shouldn’t have knocked us out of the fucking sky.”
A wild laugh threatens to skid out of Taissa’s mouth. She clamps it down. She can’t imagine a less funny situation. They’re supposed to be off to win Nationals. They’re off to prove themselves the greatest soccer team in the country. And now they’re here. In a random stretch of endless forest, battered and bleeding and lost.
“You want the good news?” says Nat miserably. Her eyes are fixed on Travis Martinez, the coach’s son. His back is to the rest of them, his shoulders bowed inward.
“What good news?” Mari asks, disbelieving. “How high are you?”
“We aren’t dead,” says Misty.
“That’s true!” Jackie says, too brightly. Then, with a little less verve: “Allie, sweetheart, please.”
Ah, thinks Taissa. That’s what that noise is. The high-pitched wail she’d assumed was the ringing of her own concussion is, in fact, coming from outside of her skull. Outside, and several feet to the right, where the freshman is hunkered in a shrieking ball.
“Allie,” Jackie tries again, “I really don’t think that’s helping—”
Allie ignores her, wedged inside the cycle of her own terror. Jackie exchanges a look with Shauna, whose eyes are huge and oddly groggy.
“She’ll…snap out of it eventually.”
Taissa’s tempted to stride up to Allie and slap her sidelong. That would get the job done—and temper some of the darker feelings she’s been nursing about their unreliable weakest link.
Jesus, the fact they’ve ever gotten this far with Allie in goal is a minor miracle. Much less that they’ve—most of them—just survived a fucking plane crash.
This is not how Taissa saw her senior year ending.
“The good news,” Natalie says, raising her voice to be heard over Allie’s increasing hysteria, “is they’ll find us.”
“Yeah?” Mari’s voice trembles. “How you know that?”
Natalie raises a hand, pointing. “Because this is where the last one went down, too.”
Taissa follows her solemn gaze. She’s right. There, not so far away, an arrangement of metal shards are stuck into the ground. Too neat, too orderly, to be the product of the crash. Too neat, too orderly, to be anything but intentional.
Graves, she realizes with cold certainty. Empty now, dug up by a rescue team with no one left to rescue, the bones returned home. Even so. These were graves, dug and marked with reverent care.
“Someone survived last time?” she asks. “I thought…”
No, that isn’t right. She knows. She knows no one made it out of the ’94 crash—because that plane had been big fucking news. It had been just like theirs: a team headed on the exact same path. A team from the next town over, headed toward the exact same end.
She knows no one survived, because that team had been made up of champions, and their loss had been monumental. Girls just like these ones, with their whole futures ahead of them. Girls just like them, girls the Yellowjackets had played against.
Had lost to.
Taissa remembers regrettably little of them now. She’d been a sophomore, playing varsity with an intensity none of the older girls could match, and she’d been so fixated on her own footwork, her own eagerness to win, that the other team had barely registered. They were just bodies. Just obstacles to work around, puzzles to crack as the minutes ticked down.
She remembers that final play. How it had come down her and the opposing goalie. How she’d been so sure, so confident, looking at this kid. Sunburnt cheeks and big blue eyes, a jersey just a little too big for her. The goalie had seemed so small.
Taissa had looked at her and known, in her bones, this girl was like her. Fearless. Ready. Used to being underestimated, used to twisting expectation against her enemies like a battering ram.
Taissa had looked at her, this girl with freckled knees and oversized gloves, and—
“Tai?”
Shauna, her hand firm around Taissa’s elbow. She still doesn’t look entirely present, entirely tethered to her own body, but she’s looking into Taissa’s face like Tai is the one worth worrying over. Instinctively, Taissa reaches up, squeezes her shoulder.
“I’m fine. We should…get some water into everyone, take stock of what’s still salvageable.”
Because this is what matters. That team—the ’94 champs-to-be who wrote this exact story two years before the Yellowjackets could follow in their footsteps—is gone. Dead, and buried, and tragic.
They’re gone. The Yellowjackets aren’t. Taissa needs to keep her attention where it counts, needs to keep her eyes on the goal.
“I’m going to take a look around,” she announces. “Everybody just sit tight.”
Jackie straightens. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Taissa drags her gaze slowly from the makeshift graveyard—to the still-wailing goalie—to her teammates, sodden with their own blood, streaked with ash. She raises her eyebrows.
“You’d rather we all just sit and scream like Allie?”
Jackie’s got a lot to say most days. Not now. Not like this. She lowers her head and sighs.
“Just. Be careful.”
“I already fell out of the fucking sky, Jackie.” Tai almost smiles. “How much worse could it get?”
***
They’ve landed in the middle of nowhere. That much was obvious from the jump—but, the longer Taissa walks, the more horrifying their situation becomes. Nowhere back in Jersey means an empty stretch of beach, a back road with no street lights, a field above which you can see only a smattering of stars. Nowhere back in Jersey still smells of exhaust, of fast food, of home.
Not here. Here, it’s trees as far as the eye can see, as far as the mind can comprehend. Here, it’s trees, and trees, and—eventually—a lake. Beyond which she can see—yup, yeah, there they are—more fucking trees.
God, that’s going to get old quick.
She stumps through the foliage, short-sleeved Yellowjackets t-shirt and half-shredded blue jeans. The lake, at least, is beautiful. Glimmering blue, a cool breeze teasing gentle waves. Part of her wants to strip and dive in, scrub the blood from her skin and the terror from her body.
She should go back. She should go find the others, tell them what she’s discovered. Maybe they can come this way, clean up, rest on the shoreline. Maybe they can even fashion poles, do a little pathetic fishing.
The idea of the rescue team rolling up on a half-assed sushi bar is almost enough to make her smile. Because they will come, won’t they? Sure, they didn’t find the ’94 crash until it was too late—but that was two whole years ago, and no one will ever forget the fallout. No one will ever forget those girls, who should be the same age as Taissa—maybe a little older, some of them, already off to college.
Girls who were, instead, awaiting salvation in shallow graves dug by…whom? One of their own, probably. Someone who didn’t die quick, who stayed out here on her own for…
Taissa shivers. “Knock it off,” she tells herself, relieved by the weight of her own voice in the open air. “That shit is not your business.”
Cold as ice, that thought. Her teammates would call her a bitch, if they could hear, but she doesn’t mean it that way. Doesn’t mean it cruelly at all. It’s just—she hadn’t even known those girls, and stacking the pressure of their tragedy on top of her own buzzing anxiety isn’t going to bring them back. All it’s going to do is drive her off the deep end, and Christ knows none of them can afford another shrieking mess right now.
Still. It’s hard, alone out here, not to imagine what it would have been like. A girl just like her: a jock, a champion, the best of the best. A girl just like her: shivering, terrified, hoping against hope for rescue.
A girl just like her, and where is she now?
“Stop,” she tells herself again, more firmly. The wind picks up, dragging her curls across her face. She shoves them impatiently aside, tosses her head, tries to claw her way back to the person she’d been only hours ago. Self-assured, and strong, and ready to take on the world.
A little more difficult than it’s ever been, admittedly, but she can do it. The others need someone to keep their shit together. Jackie’s barely managing it, Laura Lee’s about ready to break out the prayer services, Allie’s…Allie, and—
Her thoughts stall out, her eyes catching on something odd. Among all the trees and lake, there’s something…man-made.
A shelter?
A shelter.
She moves carefully, one foot in front of the other, gaze sweeping the shore for prints. For any sign at all. Could someone really have survived out here, missed by the far-too-late salvage team? Could someone still be here, two years later?
“Hello?” Her voice is edged with tension, too loud. What is she expecting? A girl? A beast?
Whatever she’s anticipating, it doesn’t show. She has reached the doorway of the lean-to, met by not so much as a breath. She inhales, readying herself—and steps inside.
Someone had been living here, it’s clear, but whoever it was is long gone. The little space is trashed, carpeted with leaves and animal droppings. Articles of clothing are spread across the ground, rumpled, shot through with holes the likes of which only stem from rending teeth. Something has nested here. Something has destroyed all sense of human habitation.
All that’s left is a backpack, tucked against the trunk of a tree. The fabric is sun-bleached, stained dark brown in places, as if its owner kept it close against an injury. Taissa brushes her fingers against the zipper, hesitating.
No one’s coming back for it, she thinks. No one’s coming back for any of this.
It hurts her heart. This battered JanSport belonged to someone just like her. Just like any of those girls waiting for her back in the wreckage. It carried math textbooks, pencils, notes from friends. It carried someone’s life.
And now it’s sitting here against a tree inscribed with some bizarre scratches, never to be touched again. Forgotten, like its owner.
Her head swims. She remembers, again, that game. The look on the goalie’s face. How bright, how focused, how happy she’d been when Taissa wound up, punted, and—
She sways in place, swinging out a hand on reflex to catch herself. Her palm presses against the trunk, that weird circle-triangle-line-hook cool under her skin. Did the girl who built this shelter and left this backpack make this rune, too? Was it a final art project, a last-ditch message before she disappeared? And where did she go?
Doesn’t matter, the pragmatic part of Taissa insists. Her chest tightens. It does matter. It does, because there was a person here, and now that person is gone. Erased.
It does matter, because it could have been Tai. Her team. Her friends. How many lives has this strange Bermuda Triangle claimed?
Without really understanding why she’s doing it, Taissa gathers the backpack into her arms and sits down. She settles her back against the trunk, fingers trailing over the stitching, the pockets, the zip.
Again, that overwhelming sense of precipice strikes her chest. As if, by opening this bag, she’ll come face to face with incontrovertible proof of a girl’s death. As if she’ll snarl open the zipper to find a skull waiting inside.
She opens it anyway.
There are no textbooks inside, no homework. It’s packed, instead, with clothing—carefully rolled t-shirts and underwear—and pads and medication. With travel-sized toothpaste and twigs, with bones Taissa can’t begin to translate back to life. A pen-knife, a flashlight with long-dead batteries.
There’s one pocket-sized notebook, a pen clipped to its cover; when Tai flips it open, she finds lists. Columns labeled safe and sick, scribblings of leaves and mushrooms. Tally marks. Names.
The names, she realizes—remembering the news stories, the obituaries—of the dead.
She flips through, suddenly desperate for more. For something genuine, something of the girl who kept this log. A mindless doodle. An if found, return to.
Nothing. This girl was here, and she fought to stay, and now—now she’s gone. What got her, in the end? An animal? A cold snap? Simple starvation, illness, the exhaustion that pins a person to the floor when despair grows too thick to see past?
Taissa slams the cover shut, stuffs the notebook back into the bag. Her skin is crawling. Her eyes are blurry. She is suddenly irrationally angry on behalf of this girl. Irrationally furious that she could have been out here for weeks and weeks, and the rescue team never—never—
Her hand closes around one more item, a scrap of metal at the bottom of the bag. She hauls it up, hissing in surprise when an edge slices into her palm.
A small, misshapen piece of steel. Coin-sized, utterly innocuous, threaded onto a loop of leather. That symbol—the same one from the tree—has been scratched faintly into one side.
A drop of Taissa’s blood mars the rune now, arterial violence against matte gray. She stares at it, imagines a girl sitting in this shelter, dragging the tip of a pocket knife against the flat metal. Imagines a girl going slowly wild, wearing this necklace against her heart.
She shivers. Instinct tells her to throw the pendant as far as she can, to bury it deep. Her fingers tighten around its awkward shape. She raises it to her eye, gazing at the etching.
Slowly, without entirely understanding herself, she drapes the cord around her neck. There’s almost no weight at all to the token, laying flat against her t-shirt. She exhales.
Nothing happens.
“Well, fucking of course,” she mutters. Again: what had she expected? It’s a fucking necklace. A token of tragedy, like everything in this abandoned shelter. Nothing more.
She needs to get out of here. Go back to the others, to the site. The rescue team will arrive soon, surely. Someone might have already noticed they haven’t arrived.
And if they don’t come? If you’re just doomed to follow the same path as this girl?
Taissa shakes her head. She’s exhausted, hungry, maybe even concussed. Nothing of use can come out of this combination. Time to go.
She crawls out of the shelter, dragging the backpack with her. It seems foolish to leave it behind, this carefully-assembled survival kit. Moreover, it seems…wrong. Wrong, like finding the remains of a dead girl and moving on without sparing that lost life a second thought.
She straightens up, her fist closing around the token. Her body feels strange. Heavy. Fatigue finally setting in, she supposes, now that the adrenaline from the crash, the hike, the discoveries she made has drained away. Of course she’s tired. Of course her very bones feel too heavy to carry.
Heavy, and…kind of fizzy.
Her bones feel almost drunk.
“Jesus,” she mutters, shading her eyes with one trembling hand. Little though she likes to admit it, Jackie might have been right. This might have been a less-than-brilliant idea.
She takes a step.
And passes out.
***
It’s a strange thing, waking up. Strange, in that it’s something you do every day—a minimum of once a day—and never think about it until the day you just…don’t. The day it stops. They day you stop, and the universe just goes merrily spinning on without you.
How long has it been spinning without her?
She doesn’t blink, exactly. Her arms, her legs, her head—all so fucking heavy. She doesn’t blink, exactly, but she’s breathing. She’s breathing.
She’s breathing?
“Woah,” she mutters. Breathing, again: one of those things you just do. You don’t waste the energy mulling it over, deciding, Oh, should I? Oh, go on, then, have a little sip of air.
But she hasn’t drawn breath in…in…
Doesn’t bear thinking about. Thinking about it sets off an ache behind her teeth, radiating down her jaw. Thinking about it makes her feel all fluttery with panic, and that shit helps no one. Shut off the panic. Focus on the tangible, on the fixable. Take stock.
Her backpack.
Her backpack is here, thank god. Her backpack, here on the shoreline of her lake. Means her shelter isn’t far off, nestled just against the Tree, the Tree with the Symbol. Means she’s close to home.
No. Not home. Home is—home is—
“What the fuck,” she says aloud, “is this?”
***
There’s a voice in her head.
There’s a fucking voice inside her head.
Taissa jolts upright, gasping. For the second time in one day, her head is ringing, her body stretched out on unfamiliar ground. For the second time in one day, she is rattled beyond measure.
“Better question, maybe,” says the voice. “Who the fuck are you?”
Better? It’s a deranged question. It almost doesn’t merit answering at all, because—obviously—it can’t be real. It’s a product of Taissa’s head trauma. It’s a product of Taissa’s dehydration.
It just sounds nothing like her, is the thing. Sounds like no one she’s ever heard before. She’s read that theory about dreams, that a human mind can’t invent a face from scratch—that every person you see in your subconscious is someone you’ve come across before. Can the same be said for voices?
“Look,” says the voice, “I’ve been alone a minute, haven’t flexed this muscle in a while. Probably came out kinda rude.”
Taissa scrubs at her ear with the heel of one hand. “This isn’t happening,” she mutters. “I am not hallucinating voices on top of a goddamned plane crash.”
“No,” the voice says amiably, “you’re not. Totally real voice here. Totally real person. Hey, did you say plane crash?”
Taissa ignores this. She staggers to her feet, looking dazedly around. Is it smart to just go around drinking lake water? Definitely not. Even so, she moves toward the gently-rippling waves as if in a dream.
Right on cue, the voice says, “Listen, I don’t want to go telling you what to do, but you’re not planning on drinking that straight, right? I did that once. Take it from a place of experience, you do not want that kind of evening.”
“Not real,” Taissa mutters. “Not real, not real, not real.”
“Rude.” The voice sounds amused. Sounds oddly relaxed, for a hallucination. Taissa has always assumed a mental breakdown would be shot through with feverish mania, with shrieks and cackles and misery—but the voice in her head just sounds like a regular person.
A regular person not unfamiliar with sass, as it goes on: “Maybe you’re not real. You ever think of that? Why does the burden of unreality get slapped on me, huh?”
Taissa collapses at the edge of the lake, scooping handfuls of sun-warmed water into her own face. She counts her breaths, trying to ease the ramshackle gallop of her heartbeats, trying to remind herself of what matters most. She’s alive. Her friends are alive. Rescue is coming.
Her eyes flicker open, droplets trickling down her cheeks, off the end of her nose. She stares into the gleaming surface, watching her reflection gently sway back at her.
Her reflection.
What the hell is going on with her reflection?
It’s there, sure—just as it was this morning. Smooth brown skin, furrowed brow, curls all havoc-tossed, wary dark eyes. It’s there, the same bone structure and big earrings, just a few scratches and soot-marks more than she’d seen in her bathroom mirror.
But there’s something else, too. A second face—sunburnt, a smattering of freckles. A second face, with blue eyes and a firm jaw, a tangle of copper hair hanging loose.
Taissa reaches up, unsteady. In the water, her fingers—long, slender, familiar—brush against her curls. In the water, someone else’s fingers—pale, calloused, strange—rake through a curtain of red.
“Ah,” says the voice—and, this time, Taissa could swear she sees the words form, the mouth of the strange girl in the water moving while her own hangs open in shock. “Mm, right, okay. Awkward. This is not how I left things.”
Taissa slams her eyes shut. Not happening. This isn’t happening. When she opens her eyes, when she looks again, the redhead in the water will be gone. She’ll have one reflection, and no lilt of amusement echoing between her ears, and—
“Hello,” the girl in the water says, raising a hand in greeting. Raising Tai’s hand in greeting. It jerks into the air of its own accord, fingers spread in an unfamiliar arc. She’s never put thought into exactly how she holds her hand before, how the knobs of her knuckles look, the instinctive spaces between her fingers—and now she’s looking at it, this part of her body, like it belongs to a stranger.
It's being used by a stranger.
“Stop that!” Her right hand swings up, catching her left in a bruising grip. She drags it down like she’s swatting a bird out of the air. The second face in the water scrunches up in apology.
“Yeah, that wasn’t on purpose.”
“I don’t care if it was on purpose!” Taissa hisses. “That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?” the girl asks, sounding genuinely curious. Tai grits her teeth.
“This. Isn’t. Happening.”
“Kinda seems like it is.”
“It’s. Not.”
“Do you feel punctuating your every word is helping your case?” She sounds amused. This voice, this girl, this person inside her fucking head has the audacity to sound deeply entertained by the whole situation.
The situation which isn’t a situation, because that would make it real. Which it isn’t. Because Taissa has been in a fucking plane crash, and that would jar anyone’s brain cells out of alignment. It sure as shit shook Allie loose. Hell, if she shuts her eyes and really concentrates, she can still hear the goalie shrieking from back at—
“Goalie,” she says under her breath, an unpleasant certainty dawning.
“Most people just call me Van.”
And, though she doesn’t want to, though every instinct screams for her to back away from the water, Taissa looks closer. Really looks at the face layered with lenticular grace over her own. At the crooked smile. At the shape of that face which, while thinner and infinitely more tired, is not so alien after all.
It's the goalie. The goalie from the lost team, a girl who never came back. A girl whose body was never found, who was listed missing, not deceased.
Van.
***
“Goalie,” the girl says, like she’s understanding something Van doesn’t. It’s not a lot better than repeating this isn’t real, but Van supposes she’s in no position to be choosey.
“Most people just call me Van,” she says, because it’s only polite to introduce yourself to the person whose body you woke up sharing.
Not that that isn’t fucked up, but—her life’s been pretty fucked up for a while now. Survival means rolling with the punches. All of the punches.
Even this one.
“You look familiar,” she tells the girl whose pretty face is creased with concentration. “Didn’t I absolutely demolish your penalty kick once?”
That face—incredibly pretty, if she’s being honest, but maybe that’s just because she hasn’t seen another human being in a fucking eternity—bunches up. Van grins. Can’t remember the last time her face bowed like this, can’t remember what used to come so easily—but it feels almost good now.
“Ooh,” she adds. “Struck a nerve.”
“You didn’t demolish anything,” Pretty Face says. “It was a lucky save.”
“Mm, don’t think so. I don’t make lucky saves.”
“You don’t do anything,” the girl seethes. “Because you’re not here.”
“Beg to differ,” says Van, and even though it’s kind of petty, she adds, “If I weren’t here, could I do this?”
She kicks up one leg, bopping in a small circle. When she lands, she splays out her hands, jazz-style, and laughs.
The girl’s body performs the exact same motions, step for step. In the surface of the lake, she watches the layered actions, the bizarre intricacy of two frames lashed together by invisible cords.
“Can you not?” the girl cries. Her arms wrap around her middle, her body tensing as if to ward off attack. Van feels a stab of guilt.
“That was too far, yeah. I’m sorry.”
The girl says nothing for a long moment. At last, she says in a low voice, “You’re really…a person. Inside my head.”
“Head? I think I’m inside of you,” Van says without thinking. She grimaces, feeling heat crawl up her neck. “That. Didn’t come out right.”
“How did you expect it to come out?” asks the girl, her mouth unexpectedly quirking at the corners. God, if Van had thought she was pretty freaking out…
“What I mean,” she says hurriedly, “is there’s a huge difference between talking inside your noggin and, well. That whole thing.”
The girl tenses. “You’re not going to do it again, are you?”
“No,” Van assures her, though a not-insignificant part of her adds, Not on purpose. Truth be told, she has no idea how she’s been able to puppet this poor girl from the inside. Has no idea how she’s come to breathe and think and be inside of her at all.
She’s still her, isn’t she? Still Van Palmer, the champion goalie of ’94. Still Van Palmer, who would have killed to get out of her mother’s house alive, who was banking on a scholarship to NYU to go be someone. She’s still Van; her reflection is right there, close enough to touch. Her reflection is right there, and when she ran her fingers through her hair, it felt like her own. Her hands, her shoulders, her heartbeat feels like her own.
But it isn’t.
It all belongs to this girl.
“This,” she says, “is fucked up, huh?”
“That’s your takeaway? Fucked up?” The girl massages her forehead. “I’m going insane. I am talking to a—”
“New friend?” asks Van brightly. The girl’s eyes narrow.
“You were on the plane. The last one.”
It isn’t a question. Normally, it would be just the kind of statement Van revels in deflecting—but what’s she going to do? Run away?
She does not get the sense this girl is going let her get away with that, particularly when she adds, “You were. The ’94 crash. We saw the site, we saw the…graves. That was your shelter.”
“It was,” Van admits, choosing to—pardon the pun, Jesus—ghost over eighty-percent of those words. “And, look, I don’t wanna make a big deal out of this—I’m not mad. I just…can’t help but notice you’ve bogarted my backpack. You make a habit of sniping people’s shit while they’re out of town?”
“You’re not out of town,” the girl says dryly. Then, as if it pains her to put it so plainly: “I think you’re dead.”
“You think?” Van makes a show of looking herself over. “I look pretty good for going all Casper.”
This is not, strictly speaking, true—not compared to the person she’d been back in Jersey. A shoddy home life, it had been, but she’d been decently-fed, muscles well-defined, a dedicated athlete to the last.
And then she’d found herself immersed in a very specific kind of private Hell, scrambling to make use of berries, mushrooms, whatever critters she’d been able to trap. It hadn’t been easy. It hadn’t been good. It took her longer than she’ll ever admit to learn how to start a fire, and it turns out fishing is pretty fucking difficult without a tackle box. She’d grown thin fast. Grown weak. Grown tired.
But she’d lived. For a long time, she clung to that. Clung to the notes in her little book, to the memories of those girls who hadn’t. Her friends. Her friends, whose bodies she’d had to drag, whose graves she’d dug with seat-shrapnel, whose belongings she pillaged because she was here, and they weren’t—
“Are you okay?” the girl asks guardedly. Van drags a hand across her eyes. She’s relieved to find the girl whose body she’s treating as a Hilton doesn’t do the same.
“Dude, I’m dead, and still kicking. I think that’s as good as it gets.”
Those words come back around to wallop her in the sternum. Two tiny words, more consequential than anything else she’s ever said. I’m dead. A wave of dizziness rolls over her, fuzzing the edges of her vision. She claws for the next breath.
At the same time, the girl makes a soft noise and shrinks down into a crouch.
“Was that you? That feeling?”
“Dunno,” Van lies. “I’ve never done this before.”
They stare together into the lake, caught in their mingled reflection. Finally, the girl heaves a sigh, pressing herself upright.
“Van, right? I’m Taissa.”
“Taissa,” Van repeats. “Nice to meet you. Sorry it’s under, uh. Supernatural circumstances.”
Taissa makes a sound she doesn’t entirely understand, snagged somewhere between laughter and pain. “Well, Van. I gotta get back to my team before it gets dark. I guess you’re…coming with?”
Van steals one final look at the water, at the breeze-whipped vision of her own face layered over Taissa’s. She forces levity into her voice. Forces herself not to think about her little shelter, her meager belongings. Her body.
“You know, my dance card was pretty full up tonight,” she says. “But I think I can squeeze in a hike.”
***
It’s not that this isn’t crazy; it certainly is. It’s not even that Taissa believes it completely. It’s just that there are some things in this world which, when thrown at you all at once, get a little too heavy to be denied.
Plane crash? Check.
Surviving said plane crash with mere scratches? Check.
Finding the remnants of a dead girl’s camp? Check.
Hearing that same dead girl laugh inside your head, feeling her spin your body like a top?
Jesus. Yeah, okay.
It’s crazy. It’s head trauma of the highest order. But it feels real, and Tai figures she has enough problems right now. Bouncing this hallucination out of her skull doesn’t rank nearly as high as it would back in Jersey.
Besides: Van’s actually pretty helpful.
“Yeah, you don’t want to go that way,” she says, right on cue. “Unless you’re a huge fan of snakes.”
“Sorry—snakes?” Taissa repeats, shuddering. “Poisonous ones?”
“Fun fact: when it’s a snake, they’re generally venomous.”
“Okay,” Tai says irritably. “Are they venomous snakes?”
“God, no idea. Never got that close. Best rule of thumb with bitey things: stay out of biting range.”
Okay, maybe she’s not entirely helpful. Still, it’s nice not feeling quite so alone. There’s a relaxed energy to Van—or the delusion she’s opting to call Van, for argument’s sake—Taissa actually likes. She does talk a lot, but it never quite feels like she’s just doing it to hear her own voice. She’s talking to Taissa like she’s been waiting for someone to hear her for months.
The idea makes her stomach hurt. How long was Van out here? How long did she survive on her own, the goalie pushing ahead while the rest of her team slumbered beneath the earth? How long before she stopped talking out loud, stopped burning energy she couldn’t afford to waste?
How long was she lonely, before the wilderness finally won?
“Van?”
“Uh huh?”
“You were out here a long time, weren’t you?”
Silence for a moment. Then, her voice so light, she must be forcing it: “I guess. Got hard to keep track.”
“You went down in May,” Taissa prompts. Late May, just like her team. It plucks at her, the similarities: the girls, the neighboring towns, the flight path. Except most of them lived, and most of Van’s team didn’t. Except Taissa lived, and Van didn’t.
“May, yeah,” Van says. “Sounds right.”
All of the excitement has leaked out of her voice. Taissa half-wishes they were still by the lake, that she could look over and see Van’s expression.
“And you were out there for…? The whole summer? Longer?”
“Mmhmm.” It’s like she’s not even listening. Which shouldn’t be annoying, but Taissa is kind of having one hell of a day, and if this really is a ghost sharing her fucking body, the least Van can do is pay attention.
“Van. Focus up.”
“Focus up,” Van mimics, deepening her voice until it sounds nothing like Taissa’s. “You wear the captain band on your team?”
Taissa kicks aside a branch. “No. I just don’t like being ignored.”
“Not ignoring anybody. Just making sure you don’t—hole!”
Tai darts aside at the last moment, narrowly avoiding what Van has charitably called a hole. To her eyes, it’s more of a fucking pit. She’s lucky she missed it on her way up, or she’d be sprawled at the bottom with a shattered tibia.
“Fuck,” she pants. “Did you dig that?”
“No.” Van sounds uneasy. “There’s a lot of shit like that out here. Leftovers from other crashes, or lost hikers, or whatever. This place…pulls people in.”
You can’t live on your own in the woods for months without going a little loopy, Taissa reasons. Can’t live out here, knowing what it’s like to barely scrape to the next day, without getting flimsy upstairs. She considers saying so, telling Van she’s just being paranoid—that there’s a scientific explanation for everything that’s happened here—
Someone is shouting. Her name, she realizes. She’s been gone too long.
“Do me a favor,” she says quickly. “Don’t do the puppet thing in front of any of them.”
“I said I was sorry.” Van sounds lightly offended. “Don’t exactly know where all the controls are in this hot new convertible.”
“Did you just call me a fucking car?”
Taissa imagines she can feel Van opening her mouth to reply, but before she can get another word out, Shauna is crashing through the brush.
“Thank god! We were starting to think you fell off a cliff or something!”
“Who’s this?” Van asks cheerfully. At the same moment, Shauna’s brow creases, her hand stretching toward the token resting against Taissa’s clavicle.
“What’s this? Where’d you find that backpack? Where did you go, Tai?”
Taissa hurriedly tucks the pendant under her shirt, uncertain why she’s doing it even as her hand moves. It isn’t Van’s will, but it doesn’t feel entirely her own, either. A deep-buried instinct screams that this is important, this is vital, this is for no one’s eyes but her own.
“There’s a lake,” she says. “A mile or two that way.”
“More than that,” scoffs Van. “You’ve got no sense of distance, anyone ever tell you that?”
Taissa ignores her. “I found this there,” she goes on, gesturing to the pack slung over her shoulder. “And a shelter. One of the girls from…before, I think.”
“Did you find…?” Shauna trails off, grimacing. She can’t even say it. Can’t even put it into words, after all the horrors of the day. Taissa doesn’t blame her.
“No. No, I didn’t.”
The girl inside her head gives a soft laugh. Taissa utters a silent apology, wondering if Van can hear it—wondering, with a sudden chill, if Van can hear everything inside her skull. If she can, she doesn’t let on.
The others are still more or less where she’d left them. Mari is leaning against Lottie’s shoulder, dozing. Jackie has an arm around Allie, who has finally stopped shrieking. Far from the rest of the team, Travis sits with his back to a tree, his eyes fixed sightlessly on the branches high above.
Shauna leans close, her lips brushing Taissa’s ear.
“We found Coach,” she whispers. “Up there. Travis tried to climb to him.”
Tai looks sharply around, seeking the familiar broad shoulders, the solemn expression, the face of an adult. “Is he—”
Shauna shakes her head. Van utters a low whistle.
“Gnarly.”
“Coach Scott, though,” Shauna says. “He’s mostly okay. Misty, um. Misty…”
“Hacked off his fuckin’ leg,” Natalie supplies. She has a cigarette hanging from her lips, unlit. She doesn’t seem to realize.
“I had to,” Misty insists. Tiny beads of blood are sprinkled across the lenses of her glasses. Her eyes glitter. “If we left him like that, he was going to die.”
Taissa doesn’t want to hear any of this. Her body is worn out, the stress of crash and hike and delusions masquerading as possession finally setting in. She sinks to the ground, arms around her knees.
“It’ll be okay,” Jackie assures her. “I’m sure they’ll find us soon. Do you want some corn nuts?”
“Ooh,” Van says. “You guys crashed with amenities. Lucky.”
Despite her exhaustion, Taissa laughs. The others exchange glances, plainly worried she’s cracked.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe she has. Even so, she drinks her allotted water, and eats her allotted corn nuts, and then she’s up again. She’s showing them how to build a fire—Van walking her through the steps with exaggerated patience—and which nearby berry bushes are safe to pick from.
Lottie cocks her head. “How do you know that?”
Tai rummages in the backpack, holds up the little notebook. She’s relieved to have something tangible, neatly clarifying her actions. It’s so much easier to point to the sketches Van’s made, to the safe vs. sick columns in her loopy chickenscratch, and never have to explain she can hear the girl inside her head saying, “Yeah, those ones kept me alive for days before I figured out how to catch a stupid rabbit.”
“You think she’s still out there?” Natalie asks that evening, all of them tucked close around the crackling campfire. No one needs to ask who she means.
Taissa shrugs. “I hope so,” she says softly. Her chest is tight, her lungs constricted.
In her head, Van makes a delighted sound. “Aw, that’s sweet. I’ve grown on you already.”
“Although,” Tai can’t resist adding, “I get the feeling she’s probably a real pain in the ass.”
The others raise their eyebrows, perplexed.
Van cackles hard enough to send warmth rushing through Taissa’s weary body.