No judge in the world would send a bulldozer to the bad man’s property based on my “evidence.” No wonder Yama had simply turned away from the sight of the little girls. We were psychopomps, not the ghost police.
But I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I wanted justice to be done, somehow. I wanted the world to make sense again, and I had to start by telling Yama what I’d learned.
* * *
It was our longest journey on the Vaitarna so far, the strangest and most varied. The river was angry at first, with touches of stray memories like a thousand cold fingertips brushing against us in the dark. But finally it settled, and for a long time we drifted on a current as slow and still as a flat sea.
Yama and I arrived on a crescent beach of white sand and small pebbles. The shoreline stretched away in both directions, curving in on itself in the distance to form a large circular lagoon. The roar of heavy surf was somewhere close, but the water before us lapped placidly at the sand. A warm wind played with my hair and rippled the silk of his shirt.
“Where are we?”
“On an island.”
I looked at him. “Can you be more specific?”
“An atoll, specifically.” He smiled at me, as if pleased about being his usual uninformative self.
I looked up into the night sky. There was no sign of dawn, so we couldn’t be too far from California time. But the stars looked wrong. “The Pacific Ocean, right?”
Yama nodded. “About as far away from everything as it’s possible to get.”
“It’s . . . nice,” I said, though the atoll wasn’t exactly a tropical paradise. There were no palm trees, no grass or flowers up from the beach, just stunted trees in rocky soil, their broad leaves shivering in the wind.
“It takes getting used to,” Yama said, leading me away from the water and onto stony ground. There were seabirds huddled everywhere, and lizards as long as fingers skittered beneath our feet. The land climbed for a few minutes’ walk, but as we crested a small ridge it fell away again before us, back down toward the sea. The whole island was like a squashed doughnut, with the still lagoon in its center and the wild ocean on the outside.
Huge waves tumbled out there, lumbering and dark. They looked big enough to roll across us and sweep the atoll away. It was a very lonely place indeed.
“Do you hear it?” Yama asked.
I listened. Even in the muffled air of the flipside, the roar of surf was loud enough to sink into my bones. Only a few sharp seabirds’ cries slipped through its thunder.
“What am I listening for?”
“The silence. No voices at all.”
I looked at Yama. His eyes were closed, and all the worry had lifted from his face. I reached out and traced the line of his eyebrow with my fingertip, and he smiled and took my hand.
“All I hear are waves and birds,” I said.
“Exactly.” He opened his eyes, as happy as I’d ever seen him. “No one has ever died on this island.”
“Oh.” I looked around at the rocky ground, the empty horizon. “But that’s just because nobody’s ever lived here either, right?”
“I would think not. But the result is the same—silence.”
“Wait. You mean, you can hear the dead?”
“Always. Everywhere but here.”
I remembered my vision on the playground. The history of the place flashing past in an instant, all its traumas and joys and aches. Was that what the world was like for Yama all the time? My own powers were growing every day, and he had been a psychopomp for thousands of years.
I could feel the ocean’s roar with every part of my body. What would life be like with the voices of the dead as constant in my ears?
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said.
I stood closer and linked our arms, needing his warmth. The wind was stronger up here on the ridge. It sifted the sand around our feet.
Standing there, I could see the island’s desolate beauty. For me it wasn’t about the silence of the dead, but about being here with him. It was like we’d been given our very own planet—a little bleak, but ours alone.
And there was something wonderful about the air, something I couldn’t quite pin down.
I cupped my palm around the back of Yama’s head and drew him closer for a kiss. It left me breathless, and the gray sky pulsed with color. For a moment this was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.
Before we pulled apart, he kissed me once on my tear-shaped scar. A crackle of electricity stayed there, an itch for more.
“How did you find this place?” I asked, a little breathless.
“By searching for a thousand years.”
“It took that long, just to find somewhere quiet?”
“I didn’t know what I was looking for at first. But I wanted to explore the world, so I learned to travel on the river in body, not just spirit.” His voice softened. “Everywhere I went, there were stories buried in the earth, voices in the stones.”
My hand sought his again, and squeezed. “I’ll hear them too, won’t I?”
“I hope that’s a long time from now.” He spread his hands. “But when you need to get away, this island is yours, too, Lizzie.”
I stared out at the gray and tumbling ocean, not sure what to say. I didn’t want this splendid isolation yet, unless it was with Yama. The thought that this desolation could one day be beautiful for itself scared me a little.
How long did I have? I thought of the dead girls on the bad man’s lawn, and wondered if I was more connected to them now, more joined to death itself. I needed to tell Yama that I’d been back there, and what I suspected about where the girls were buried.
But not yet. He looked too happy.
“Thanks for bringing me here. This is your favorite place, isn’t it?”
“In a way,” he said. “My city in the underworld is more beautiful. But this island is the only place I’m really alone.”
“But now I’m here, so that’s ruined.”
Yama turned to me, his smile almost shy. “I can be alone with you.”
“I guess that’s a good thing?”
“More than I can say.” He drew me closer, and the sky rippled with color again, my breath catching and shuddering in my lungs.
By the time our lips parted, I wanted to know every detail of this place. “How did you get here the first time? On a ship?”
“In the pages of a book.” He pulled us back into motion, leading me along the windy ridge. “A Portuguese ship discovered it four centuries ago. It was forgotten, then found again, until naturalists came here and painted what they saw.”
“So we can connect to places through books?” I asked, amazed. Of course, I’d traveled to my mother’s old house using a photo. Suddenly being a psychopomp didn’t seem so bad, if I could read my way around the world.
“Partly,” Yama said. “But I also got to know a naturalist who’d come here. He said that only two kinds of plants grow on this island. Can you imagine?”
My eyes swept the bleak expanse. All the trees looked the same. “It’s not that hard to believe. But you made friends with a liver—I mean, a living person? That means you left the afterworld.”
“This was worth it.” He closed his eyes again, breathing in the salt spray. “For the air alone.”
That was when I realized what had been bugging me. “It doesn’t smell rusty here. That metal scent the flipside usually has, it’s gone.”
He opened his eyes. “That’s the smell of death. Of blood.”
“Oh.” A shiver went through me, and I drew us to a stop and pressed my face against his chest. Yama was always so warm, like something was on fire inside him, but still the shudders took a moment to subside. “It kind of sucks to be a . . .”
I still hated the word “psychopomp,” but I didn’t have a better one yet.
“Not always.” He put his arms around me.
I held Yama tighter, needing the solidity of his muscles, the current of his skin. The sand beneath my feet felt slippery, the atoll so fragile in that endless gray ocean.
My geology teacher in tenth grade had always said that there were no islands, only mountaintops that brushed the ocean’s surface. It made me dizzy for a moment, thinking of the coral reef beneath us, and beneath that a mountain reaching all the way to the lightless floor of the Pacific.
All those millions of tons of rock and coral, just to hold this lonely sliver of land a few yards above the water. I wondered how many times the sea had washed over it, erasing everything.
“How did you keep from going crazy, hearing voices all the time? I mean, before you found this place. It took so long.”
His voice went softer, as if he were telling me a secret. “Looking for a thousand years is worth it, if in the end you find what you need.”
I swallowed, taking a moment to answer. The words were clumsy in my mouth, like typing with hammers. “I’m glad you did.”
His arms tightened around me, and for a moment the roar of the surf went silent in my ears. Or maybe it was inside my body now, all of me vibrating with that same huge sound.
We kissed there, the bell of the ocean ringing in my lips, until I needed to hear his voice again.
I pulled away and said, “You never finished your story about crossing over. You told me about where you and Yami grew up. You said she died young, because she was betrayed by a donkey. Seriously?”
“That’s how it seemed at the time.” He turned, leading me along the rocky spine of the island, the ocean on one side, the lagoon on the other. “My father’s brother had a farm, a couple of hours’ walk away from our village. When Yami and I went there to play with our cousins, we brought along an old donkey. My sister could ride him when she was tired, and he knew his way home in the dark.”
“The donkey knew the way home. Of course.” I’d almost forgotten about the bronze knives in Yama’s childhood, and now there was donkey GPS. The distant past sounded like a very strange place.
“One afternoon we stayed too late. There was a storm on the horizon, and my uncle said we should spend the night, but Yami refused. She said his house smelled of boiled onions.”
“She hasn’t changed much, has she?”
“Not really,” Yama said with a sigh. “She wouldn’t listen. We set off before dusk, but when the rain started it went as dark as night. There was lightning all around us.”
I looked out across the sea, trying to imagine what a thunderstorm would look like from this empty, windswept island. “Sounds scary.”
“It was, but the donkey led us through the darkness. He didn’t complain.”
“So how did it betray you?”
“We thought he was taking a different way home, along the sea instead of across the hills, to avoid the lightning. He was an old and sensible beast, and we’d always trusted him. But then he stopped in a place we didn’t recognize. We could hear waves crashing, and the ground was sharp and crumbling underfoot. Something brittle was cutting my feet through the straps of my sandals. I knelt to see what it was.”
He paused, and a shiver went through me.
“The ground was covered with bones.”
I stared at him. “Holy crap. What the hell lived there?”
“Nothing at all.” As we walked, Yama stared down at the rocks and shells beneath our feet. “It was the skeletons of dead animals. When the lightning flashed, we saw piles of bones broken and scattered all around us.”
I shook my head, not understanding. Some little piece of my airport panic was returning, its cold tendrils creeping through my body. I pulled Yama closer.
“But then I remembered something,” he said. “A few years before, when our donkey’s mate had grown too old and sickly to work, my father led her to the top of a tall cliff near the sea. He brought me along to help.”