The town centre was busier than usual, after-work drinkers getting caught up with those on a full-blown night out. Walking through them all felt different now. Kat could have reached out and become any one of them, shrugged their lives around her shoulders to try them on for size. She should be looking for one that fit, one she could soon call home. Despite her determination to redeem herself, it was still so tempting to experience it one last time, while she still had the power.
Safa stumbled on her heels for the tenth time since leaving the house. ‘That’s it,’ she said, scooping them off and throwing them across the square.
‘You’ll get tetanus,’ said Kat.
‘By this time tomorrow there’ll be nothing left to get tetanus.’
They had emptied Safa’s wardrobe onto the bed to choose their outfits. While Safa chose a long, flowery dress she claimed to have never worn, Kat had quickly realised everything on offer was too short for her. They had raided her mum’s wardrobe instead, and Kat wondered how long it would take for the strappy top and neatly ironed jeans to be missed.
A line of people shivered away from the door of a club on the far corner of the square. Automatically, Kat went to join the queue, before Safa sashayed past like a celebrity.
‘We’re under age,’ she announced to the bouncers that flanked the door, before looking at Kat over her shoulder. ‘The security here is a joke.’
Past the cloakroom, where the noise of the club was muffled, before they pushed through a set of double doors. Kat had never been to a club before. The music landed like a physical blow. It thumped in her chest, tickling her throat and making her want to cough. The air was hot, wet against her skin, like the rainforest inside the boy from the march. Flashing lights made her head spin.
She followed Safa to an open space against a wall overlooking a dance floor. It was probably still early for a club, but there were plenty of people dancing, more leaning against the walls or lounging at tables.
‘What do we do now?’ Kat shouted over the din.
Inside, Safa’s confidence seemed to have dimmed. Whenever the lights swept through her she all but disappeared, making it seem as if she flashed in and out of existence. She looked around – the dance floor, growing busier by the second, the crowds at the bar, the queue for the toilet – and appeared lost.
‘Are you going to do it again?’ Kat shouted, gesturing to the people around them. They all tugged at her, inviting her inside. She remembered how good it had felt. The relief of escape.
Safa leaned close to her ear. ‘I think I could without it tipping me over the edge. I can hold on. Until tomorrow.’
Tomorrow.
At least they had tonight. Kat could give her that.
‘We’re standing against a wall,’ she said, as the music shifted to something faster, sending people running to the dance floor.
‘So?’
‘I bet this is exactly what we would do in a nightclub.’
A smile unfurled across Safa’s lips, and she set off towards the dance floor, Kat following close behind. It was packed now, and they found a space for themselves near the middle.
‘They say you should dance like nobody’s watching,’ said Safa. ‘We’ll never have a better chance.’
And she threw up her arms in time with the music, grinning wildly as her hair flew. Kat laughed and did the same, swinging her head and her hips, smiling so widely it hurt. The music was relentless, and the crowd jostled around them, pumping their fists in the air. The flashing lights seemed to obliterate Safa and remake her in jittery patterns.
The beat shifted, and the crowd began to jump, bouncing to the rhythm. The two of them moved as one, falling into time, bodies swaying closer. The last of Kat’s self-consciousness withdrew. She jumped as high as she could, sweat already flying from her skin.
‘Hey,’ shouted Safa.
‘Hey,’ Kat replied, quiet enough that she may not have spoken at all.
‘One last time.’
Safa spun away into a tight space between a group of girls dancing behind them. Without hesitation she slipped into the nearest body, sugar dissolving in water.
The newfound host kept dancing as if nothing had happened, smiling across at her friends. Kat eyed a young guy beside her dancing only with shuffling feet and arrhythmic nods of the head. The yearning was too strong. Tomorrow she would save herself. So why shouldn’t she enjoy tonight? When Kat reached for him the barrier broke with ease. One last time. She took a breath as if going underwater.
Vertigo. The melee of the club muted.
There were two of her again. A proxy still in the club, another standing on a white sand beach with clear water lapping between her toes. Every grain of sand was warm, a memory, a feeling, on a beach that seemed to stretch for ever. She wanted to lie back and bury herself in the sand, armour herself with its possibility. Who might be watching him? Where might this night lead? This could be Kat’s life, second-hand, if she chose it.
Except there was something else on the beach. A black shape of flotsam buried on the tideline. She waded towards it, feeling the energy emanating from it and the sand’s determination to swallow it down. It was a box, just like she had seen in the rainforest, sealed tight but always threatening to leak.
In the club, the song changed again. A tempo shift sent ripples through the crowd. The guy – she, Kat – turned just enough to see Safa’s host, and for a fleeting moment their eyes met. Kat watched as Safa stepped out of the girl’s skin and burrowed deeper into the mass of bodies, slipping into another skin as the dancing intensified.
There was still a force inside her host trying to push her out, but she could hold on for longer if she wanted. Instead she let it evict her, emerging again on the dance floor, thrumming with energy. She gave chase to Safa, leaping into another body. It was so easy now, the resistance weakening with every transition.
A mountaintop, snow falling gently across a sweep of valley. Every flake was made of belonging, confidence, lightness, release. She caught them on her tongue, ignoring the looming black shape caught in a snowdrift.
When Safa switched again, she followed, bounding from body to body across the dance floor. A jungle, a yacht deck, a picnic blanket spread out in a park with gleaming skyscrapers on all sides. She couldn’t get enough. It could all be hers, without the weight of Kat Waldgrave being attached to drag it all down.
And always the box, pushed out of sight, whatever lay inside a doomsday device ready to destroy it all.
Kat wanted to catch Safa out this time, switch first, get ahead of her in the chase. Close by were a boy and a girl dancing out of time to the music, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, foreheads pressed together. Kat stepped out onto the dance floor and reached for the boy, just as Safa appeared and slipped into the girl. At the same moment the couple brought their lips together.
It wasn’t her kiss, but oh god it was so close, and she sank into it as deeply as she could. Every inch of her body tingled, every nerve ending set ablaze, as surrogate lips nipped and opened, stubble scratched against skin. It said everything Kat had been unable to put into words, made her blind to whatever landscape was inside the boy. Pleasure sang through her. The pleasure of being noticed, of being seen by the only person who mattered. It was everything.
Except . . .
It wasn’t her skin. They weren’t her lips.
It lasted only seconds before it overwhelmed and bucked her out of his body, all thundering heart and sweaty skin. Safa appeared at the same moment, wide-eyed and breathing hard. Kat gasped at the sight of her.
‘Look at you,’ she said.
Safa glowed opaque, as if every star in the universe was lighting her up. The fade was gone.
Hardly daring to breathe, Kat lifted a hand and found it was solid, complete.
‘Holy shit.’
The couple they had inhabited broke their kiss, and stared at them reproachfully. Others around them were looking too, looking right at them, sensing that something was wrong.
‘They see us,’ said Kat, hardly remembering they could probably hear her, too.
Safa’s eyes gleamed with panic, and she tried to hide her face with her hands, before turning to push away through the crowd.
‘Wait!’
As they ran for the exit, the colour drained from Safa’s skin as the fade reclaimed its territory. A sensation of lightness, her body becoming untethered from the world just like that first day, let Kat know the same was happening to her.
By the time they burst out into the night, she was more faded than ever before.