Oblivion

Someone shouted at her as her feet found the sidewalk, but she didn’t stop, not until she arrived at the side entrance to the park—the same she’d taken that night after meeting with Varen at Nobit’s Nook.

Until this moment, her plan had been to use the shortcut to get to her house. Now, though, even with the midafternoon sun blazing and the sight of people strolling within, bundled in their coats and scarves and still unaware of the chaos that had rocked the world mere blocks away, something held her at bay. An inkling that warned her against entering.

Isobel told herself she didn’t have time to deliberate—or to take the long way around. She didn’t have time for inklings, warranted or not.

She needed to get home, to check on her parents and Danny, to warn them about what was coming. And to tell them she was sorry.

Pounding pavement, her feet carried her up the snaking road, past thickets of trees that flanked the narrow lane. As she rounded one bend after another, winding farther into the park, flashes from her previous nighttime run along this same stretch began to flip through her head.

Murky figures skirting through the brush. Whispers in the woods.

Something hissing her name.

Isobel shoved the memories aside. Keeping her pace up and her head down, she focused on the pavement, on putting as much of it behind her as quickly as possible.

Veined with the shadows cast by branches overhead, the road skimmed by beneath her. Her own shadow rotated this way and that, orbiting underfoot while she followed each curve.

When the lane straightened, however, her shadow, which had situated itself in front of her, grew suddenly longer with each stride.

Isobel slowed, watching her silhouette stretch then fade into a sudden darkness that, like a consuming presence, seeped in from every corner.

The nagging sensation she’d tried to brush off at the entrance returned, too intense now to dismiss. This time the foreboding brought company—that old feeling of being watched, a ghost in and of itself.

Isobel drew to a stop and tilted her head back. Gone was the white-gold sun. In its place, ragged patches of clouds blotted brightening stars from view. The darkness thickened. Night was falling—in the middle of the day.

Glancing one way and then the other, she no longer saw the pedestrians, snug in their winter wear. She didn’t hear talking or footsteps or the whirring tick of coasting bikes.

Aside from the forestlike patches of trees, though, there wasn’t anywhere any of them could have gone.

Straining her ears, she tried to detect the sound of voices, the chattering of birds. Anything at all.

She was rewarded only with the hush of the wind and the rustle of dry foliage as it scampered across her path.

Scowling at the collage of papery hand-shaped leaves, she wondered how, in the dead of winter, they had managed to retain their vibrant autumnal colors.

Whirling, she found the answer waiting at her back.

Fall trees, their boughs garbed in ember orange and flame yellow, now bordered the narrow lane. Their fiery colors drained away fast, though, siphoned off by the deepening dusk that should not have arrived for several more hours.

Isobel turned again, looking ahead.

Darkness waited on the stretch of road before her, where the canopy of limbs and leaves became an all-too-familiar tunnel.

Slap slap slap slap.

The sound of someone running up behind her, panting hard, had Isobel pivoting yet again.

A girl barreled up the road toward her, and Isobel knew her instantly—as well as she recognized the scene unfolding before her.

Fear, primal and gut-wrenching, owned the girl’s expression. Clutching tight to the straps of her backpack, she kept glancing behind her, blond hair whipping this way and that as she tried to see what was chasing her through the line of trees.

Isobel had no time to dart aside before the past version of herself rushed into her—through her.

The world flickered black, and Isobel swung in the direction of her running self, aware that somehow she’d become caught in another memory. Like when Pinfeathers had shown her what had happened to Poe. But how?

Squinting through the gloom, she no longer saw her past self on the path. That specter had vanished.

In its place stood another on the road.

Even with his lean figure enswathed by shadow, she could still make out the insignia of the upside-down bird on the white patch of cloth pinned to the back of his jacket.

Turning his head, he glanced at her from over one shoulder, revealing the open pit in his porcelain cheek.

“Some say memories are merely another form of dreaming,” the Noc said. “We, of course, would argue that they are, rather, another form of torture. Wouldn’t you agree?”