Torment - Lauren Kate [82]
The sky was filling with Announcers, like a flock of enormous black crows, a cloud so thick they blocked the sun. The long-ago Luce in the water noticed nothing, saw nothing. But watching all those Announcers flit and gather in the humid air of that rain forest, in an image made by an Announcer, had the Luce in the forest feeling suddenly dizzy.
“You make me wait forever,” long-ago Luce called up to Daniel. “Pretty soon I’m going to freeze.”
Daniel tore his eyes away from the sky, looking down at her with a broken expression. His lip was trembling and his face was ghostly white. “You won’t freeze,” he told her. Were those tears Daniel was wiping away? He closed his eyes and shivered. Then, arcing his hands over his head, he pushed off the rock and dove.
Daniel surfaced a moment later, and long-ago Luce swam toward him. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her face bright and happy. Luce watched it all play out with a mixture of sickness and satisfaction. She wanted her former self to have as much of Daniel as she could get, to feel that innocent, ecstatic closeness of being with the person she loved.
But she knew, just as Daniel knew, as the swarm of Announcers knew, exactly what was going to happen as soon as this Luce pressed her lips to his. Daniel was right: She wasn’t going to freeze. She was going to combust in a horrifying burst of flames.
And Daniel would be left to mourn her.
But he wasn’t the only one. This girl had had a life, friends, and a family who loved her, who would be devastated when they lost her.
Suddenly, Luce was enraged. Furious with the curse that had been hanging over her and Daniel. She had been innocent, powerless; she didn’t understand a thing about what was going to happen. She still didn’t understand why it happened, why she always had to die so quickly after finding Daniel.
Why it hadn’t happened to her yet in this life.
The Luce in the water was still alive. Luce wouldn’t—couldn’t let her die.
She grabbed at the Announcer, curling its edges in her fists. It twisted and bent, contorting the swimmers’ images like a fun-house mirror might. Inside its screen, the other shadows were descending. The swimmers were running out of time.
In frustration, Luce screamed and swung her fists at the Announcer—first one, then the other, raining blows upon the scene before her. She struck out at it again and again, heaving and crying as she tried her best to stop what was going to transpire.
Then it happened: Her right fist broke through and her arm sank in up to her elbow. Instantly, she felt the shock of a temperature change. The heat of a summer sunset spreading across her palm. Gravity shifted. Luce couldn’t tell which way was up or down. She felt her stomach recoiling and feared she was going to throw up.
She could go through. She could save her old self. Tentatively, she stretched her left arm forward. It, too, disappeared into the Announcer, like passing through a bright, clammy sheet of Jell-O that rippled and widened as if it could just let her through.
“It wants me to,” she said aloud. “I can do this. I can save her. I can save my life.” She leaned back slightly and then thrust her body into the Announcer.
There was sunlight, so bright she had to close her eyes, and a warmth so tropical a sheen of sweat immediately broke out on her skin. And a nauseating scene of gravity tilting and upending, like at the height of a dive. In a moment she’d be falling—
Except something had hold of her left ankle. And her right. That something was pulling Luce very forcefully backward.
“No!” Luce cried out, because she could see now, could see, far below, a burst of yellow in the water. Too bright to be the halter top of her bathing suit. Was long-ago Luce already burning up?
Then it all vanished.
Luce was yanked roughly back into the cool, dim patch of redwood trees behind the Shoreline dorm. Her skin felt cold and clammy and her balance was all screwed up and she fell flat on her face in the dirt and redwood needles on the forest floor. She rolled over and saw