"What did you say?"
"I think you heard the question just fine," Regine says, looking at him firmly, as if setting him a
challenge. A test he has to pass.
"How did I die?" Seth repeats, looking back and forth between her and Tomasz. "So you're saying
. . . You're saying this place really is –"
"I'm not saying anything," Regine says. "I'm just asking how you died. And your reaction tells me
you know exactly what I mean."
"I got struck by lightning!" Tomasz volunteers.
Regine makes a loud scoffing sound. "You did not."
"You do not know," Tomasz says. "You were not there."
"Nobody actually gets struck by lightning. Not even in Poland."
Tomasz's eyes widen in indignation. "I was not in Poland! How many times I have to say? Mother
came over for better working and –"
"I drowned," Seth says, so quietly he thinks they may not have heard him.
But they stop bickering immediately.
"Drowned?" Regine says. "Where?"
Seth furrows his brow. "Halfmarket. It's a little town on the coast of –"
"No, I mean, where? The bathtub? A swimming pool –?"
"The ocean."
She nods, as if this makes sense. "Did you hit your head?"
"Did I hit my –?" Seth says, and then stops. He touches the back of his skull where it smashed into
the rocks. "What does that have to do with anything?"
"I . . ." Regine starts, then looks down at the freshly swept floor Seth left behind this morning. "I
fell down a flight of stairs. Cracked my head on a step on the way down."
"And you woke up here?"
She nods.
"It was the lightning for me!" Tomasz says happily. "It is like getting punched on your entire body
all at one time!"
"You did not get struck by lightning," Regine says.
"Then you did not fall down stairs!" Tomasz says, upset bending his voice, a tone Seth recognizes
from a hundred and one fights with Owen.
"So you both . . . ?" Seth doesn't finish the sentence.
"Died," Regine says. "In a way that caused a specific injury."
Seth feels the back of his head again, where he hit it on the rocks. He remembers the horrible
finality of that collision, could swear he still feels the bones breaking, in a way from which there was
no return.
Until he woke up here.
There are no broken bones now, of course, that was another place, another him, and all he can feel
is the still-brutal shortness of his hair, something that Regine and Tomasz have clearly been here long
enough to outgrow. There's nothing else unusual, just the inward curve of his neck leading up to the
outward curve of his skull.
Regine looks at Tomasz. "Show him," she says.
Tomasz leaps up from the settee. "Lean down, please," he says. Seth stoops to one knee and allows
Tomasz to take his hand. He splays Seth's fingers so the first two are a particular distance apart.
Tomasz sticks out a little nubbin of tongue as he concentrates, and once more, he reminds Seth so
much of Owen, Seth feels his chest contract.
"Here," Tomasz says, placing Seth's fingers on a particular stretch of bone just behind his left ear.
"Can you feel that?"
"Feel what?" Seth says. It's exactly where his head struck the rock, but there's nothing unusual
there, nothing but a stretch of –
There's something. A rise in the bone so slight as to almost not be present, so slight he didn't feel it
seconds ago when pressing in exactly the same place.
A rise in the bone.
Leading to a narrow notch in that same bone.
"What?" Seth whispers. "How . . . ?"
He swears it wasn't there before. But there it is now, subtle but clear, the rise and the notch almost
like a completely natural extension of his skull.
Almost.
"That's where you hit your head?" Regine asks.
"Yes," Seth answers. "You?"
Regine nods.
"And that is where the lightning punched me!" Tomasz says.
"Or whatever happened," Regine mumbles.
"What is it?" Seth asks, feeling around on the same spot on his right side to see if there's another
one. There isn't.
"We think it is a kind of connection," Tomasz says.
"Connection to what?"
Neither of them answers.
"Connection to what?" Seth says again.
"What have your dreams been like?" Regine says.
Seth frowns at her. Then he has to look away, feeling the vividness of his dreams in a way that
causes his skin to flush.
"The dreamings," Tomasz says, patting Seth's back sympathetically. "They are not easy."
"Like you're not just seeing it all again," Regine says. "Like you're actually there, back in time
somehow, reliving it."
Seth is surprised to find his eyes filling, his throat choking. "What is it? Why does it happen?"
She glances at Tomasz, then back at Seth. "We're not sure," she says carefully.
"But you have an idea."
She nods. "The things you dream. They're important?"
"Yes," Seth says. "More than I want them to be."
"Some of it is good," Tomasz says. "But good in painful way."
Seth nods.
"But that, all that –" Regine makes a gesture in the air, capturing in a single twist of her fingers all
the dreams he's had –"all that is not your whole life."
"What?"
"There's more. There's much, much more." She gets a grim set to her mouth. "And you've forgotten
it."
For some reason Seth can't quite put a finger on, this makes him angry. "Don't tell me I've forgotten,"
he says, fierce enough to surprise everyone, even himself. "I remember too much, is the problem. If I
could forget some of these things, then . . ."
"Then what?" Regine says. "You wouldn't have drowned?" She says the word with a sarcastic
snap, challenging him with her eyes.
"Did you fall down those stairs," he hears himself saying. "Or were you pushed?"
"Whoa," Tomasz says, taking a step back. "Something has happened. I have missed it. Why are we
fighting?"
"We're not fighting," Regine says. "We're getting to know each other."
"People who are getting to know each other share information," Seth says. "All you're giving me
are riddles and hints about how much more you know than I do." He stands, his voice rising with him.
"Why do I have a brand-new notch in my head?"
Tomasz starts to answer, "It is not brand –" but Seth keeps going.
"Why did I crawl out of a coffin in the house where I grew up?"
Regine looks surprised. "You grew up here? In this house?"
But Seth is barely listening. "And where is everyone else? Who are you, anyway? How do I know
you're not working with that thing in the van?"
This causes a lot more outrage than he was expecting.
"We are NOT!" Tomasz shouts.
"You don't know anything!" Regine says.
"Then tell me!"
"Fine!" she says. "Tomasz isn't the first person I saw here. He was the second."
Seth feels strangely victorious. "So there are others?"
"Only the one, before I found Tomasz."
"And thank the Holy Mother she did," Tomasz says, nodding vigorously. "Was in very bad way."
"But before then," Regine says, "there was another. A woman. I knew her one day. One day. And
then I watched her die. She pushed me to safety and let the Driver catch her so it wouldn't catch me. I
watched it kill her. That baton has some kind of charge in it. It kills you. And then the Driver takes
your body away."
Tomasz frowns at Seth. "She does not like to talk about it."
"So, screw you," Regine continues. "How do we know you're not –"
She stops.
Because they've noticed the sound.
A distant purring, a sound of the wind that isn't the wind.
The sound of an engine.
Growing louder as it approaches.