White Space by Ilsa J. Bick

cemeteries.
    “You okay?” Tony tosses a look at the truck. “What?”
    “Nothing.” He doesn’t see the crows. No one normal ever does. Still, as she hurries inside the rest stop, she holds her breath. She doesn’t actually believe that old saw aboutbreathing in dead spirits, but there’s always a first time for everything and she has enough problems.
    Just as she’s about to turn into the ladies’ room, a hard-faced kid in baggy, olive-green fatigues cuts a sharp dogleg. “Hey,” she says, pulling up short. “Watch it.”
    “Say what?” He whirls, incredibly fast, his fists coming up. The kid’s pupils are huge, black holes rimmed with a sliver of sky blue. Then he spazzes, blinking away from whatever horror show he’s watching. “Oh. Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry. I thought you were—”
    “Hey, Bode!” Another kid, also in olive drab, stands at a table in the fast-food joint. Even at this distance, she spots the angry sore pitting the left corner of his mouth, and the kid’s so meth-head jittery he could scramble a couple eggs.
    “Hey, Chad,” Bode says. And then to Rima: “I got to go.” Before she can shrink back, he puts a hand on her arm. “You sure you’re okay?”
    His touch is volcanic, atomic, so hot she can feel the death cooking into her flesh. “Oh, yeah,” she says, faintly. “I’m good.”
    As soon as he lets her go, she bolts into the bathroom, making it to a stall just in time. Later, as the taste of vomit sours her mouth, she hangs over the bowl—lucky for her, no one died on that seat—and thinks about Bode. The guy’s touch was mercifully brief and fragmentary, but she’d seen enough. Ten to one, he’s that truck with the death-crows. The real question is who, exactly, is dead?
    Because when Bode touched her, he
changed
. Just for an instant, but enough so she saw Bode’s head—
5
    “OH, HECK,” SAID Tony.
    Rima blinked back to the here and now. “What?”
    “The truck’s gone,” Tony returned grimly.
    “Maybe there’s a turnoff.” Something sparkled then, and she squinted through the snow frothing the windshield. Way off to the right, there was a sharp glint—glass?—and something very black and formless floating over the snow. “Is that …?” She almost said
smoke
, but the word died halfway to her teeth.
    Not smoke.
    Crows.
    And, in a crush of splintered trees, an overturned van.

PART TWO
THE
VALLEY

LIZZIE
Whisper-Man Black
    ONLY MOM POPS out of the barn, and she is screaming: “Get in the car, get in the car, just get in the car!” Mom hauls Lizzie down the porch steps, practically throws Lizzie into the front seat. She thrusts the memory quilt into Lizzie’s lap: “Hang on to that; don’t let go, no matter what!” Mom’s hand shakes so bad the ignition key stutters against metal, and she’s sobbing: “Oh please, oh please, oh please, come on, come on, come on goddamnit, come on!” She lets out a little cry as the key socks into place and the engine roars.
    Then they are moving, moving, moving, going very fast, racing after their headlights, her mother hammering the accelerator. The force slams Lizzie back against the seat; her teeth come together
—ka-chunk
—and her tongue screams as the taste of dirty pennies floods her mouth. But Lizzie is too scared to cry; she is absolutely silent, quiet as a mouse, as the car fishtails, kicking up gravel rooster tails.
    We’re never coming back
. She clutches her memory quilt in both hands. The glass might be magic, and those stitches asstrong as her mother, but Lizzie’s life is unraveling.
I’ll never see my house again. I’ll never find Marmalade
.
    She cranes over her shoulder. Peering through the rear window is like seeing a movie through the wrong end of a telescope. She watches as their farmhouse, Wisconsin-sturdy and built to last until the end of time, recedes. To the left and across the drive, the big prairie barn hulks in the gloom, and that is when her sharp eyes pick out the