Foreverland Is Dead

visible.
    “Where you taking us?” Cyn asks.
    “A mile due south.” Kat says. “We’re going to fall out of here, Cyn. I just need you to remember one thing.”
    Kat leans in, whispers in her ear.

    Pain radiates between her eyes. A face hovers over her. Short brown hair drapes like curtains, framing an angular face and green eyes.
    “Password?” Linda says.
    Cyn’s arms are pinned at her sides. Jackie stands at the IV, a syringe inserted in the tube, her thumb on the plunger.
    “Password?” she asks again. “What is it? You know it—tell me.”
    Cyn shakes her head. She hasn’t a clue what she’s talking about. There’s no password. She knows that, but maybe something has changed. She thinks, tries to remember where she was a second ago. She just woke up in the bed. But before that, she was…she was…
    “Last time,” Linda says. “Password?”
    She closes her eyes, holds her breath. There was a tree and a rock. The sun was rising when she grabbed onto it.
    When she fell.
    When Kat told her to say—
    “Sandy sent me.” She opens her eyes.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Cyn.”
    “Full name?”
    She hesitates. “Cynthia.”
    Linda nods at Jackie. She pulls the syringe out of the tube.
    Someone reaches over Cyn’s head, her finger and thumb on the wire stuck between her eyes. A needle slides out of her head, a cold sliver that’s been in far too long.
    A drop of clear liquid streams across her forehead. The pressure between her eyes eases. Linda embraces her tightly.
    “Welcome back, Cynthia.”
    And there’s applause.
    The bunkhouse is full of people. The youngest of them fall on her. Cyn is trapped by three girls and a grown woman.
    Home.

63

    The grass is knee-high. Wildflowers sway here and there, but few are left as the mornings have gotten colder. Mad, Kat, and Jen wander up the slope, Jen with a fistful of white flowers from the meadow.
    Jennifer . And Madeline and Kathryn.
    “Those are their names,” Linda reminded Cyn. The three-lettered versions are the names inside the dream.
    We’re not in the dream anymore.
    It’s been weeks since she woke up. Weeks since Kat and Mad were brave enough to come back for her and Jen. It took a lot of work, though. Linda and Thomas wouldn’t get duped again. There was a close watch on those needles. They weren’t planning on the girls going back inside. Cyn had done it, and look what happened to her.
    “She did it for us!” Kat had argued. “You ain’t stopping us.”
    No good, though. They were just kids—they didn’t know the risks. And Thomas and the important people did, and they weren’t going to take them.
    But then Kat and Mad got clever. They lied to Linda and Thomas, said that Patricia was about dead and that Cyn and Jen would be lost to the Nowhere forever. They had no idea the word “Nowhere” would sell it. Linda bought it, came to their rescue. She persuaded Thomas to let the girls go back inside the needle.
    “ We running out time,” Mr. Thomas,” Kat had added. “We’ll lose Cyn forever.”
    Besides, Cyn wasn’t getting out until someone escorted Mr. Williams back inside the dream. Otherwise, she had no body.
    Yeah, Cyn’s body.
    His body is dead.
    He exited the dream into the one body he knew would be vacant. Cyn was still in the dream when he made his escape, opened his eyes as a sixteen-year-old female, which beat the hell out of spending eternity in the Nowhere. He could figure out bras and tampons. No one would know the difference.
    But Thomas and the important people had done their research—they knew how things worked on the island. They knew there was a password. When an old man transferred into a young man’s body, they were asked for it in order to confirm the identity, to make sure the right person was in the body.
    Linda asked for a password the first time and Cyn didn’t know one. The girls were asked, too. They had no idea.
    But Mr. Williams had said, with a smile, “ Foreverland.”
    After that, he was easy pickings.
    They sent him back inside the dream to make room for Cyn to return. It was her body, after all.
    She shivers at the thought of that old bastard sliding into her body. It was a good thing she couldn’t remember him when Kat and Mad came back for her and Jen. She would’ve done something to him.
    Something very bad.
    Strangely, she feels sorry for him. A small part of her, deep inside, will miss him. She told Linda that. She decided it was time to start talking about things, to