Jack and Ann followed railroad tracks under a tall overpass, keeping to the shadows. After squeezing through an opening in a tall chain-link fence, they made their way up the street. Yellow lights buzzed above them on tall poles every twenty feet. The old manufacturing buildings radiated new life as trendy offices, stores, and breweries. The pair strolled up the sidewalk, trying to look natural. Jack peered into the darkness of each alley as they passed, looking for threats.

Eventually, he motioned for Ann to stop. He leaned against the stone wall of a church with faded stained-glass windows and studied the street ahead of them. The old industrial buildings gave way to row houses of every color. Cars lined the street on both sides. The streetlights were farther apart, and large shadows loomed between houses. Ann put her back against the wall beside him.

“What are you doing?” Ann asked.

“Making sure there are no bad guys. That’s my car, in front of the tan house.”

“What about my car?” she asked.

“We’ll come back for it in the morning if it survives.”

Ann shot him a worried look. “Who were they?”

Jack shrugged. “Nostshen and Nostshu,” he said.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet. Let’s go,” he said.

They dashed down the street and up to his old black Mustang, parked between a red Volkswagen Beetle and a faded blue Ford Taurus. He glanced in the backseat before opening the driver’s door. A moment later, they were off with a rumble, twisting and turning through downtown streets before reaching the highway. It was time, Jack thought, to get far away from the city.

“We have to get out of town. They know where I live. Janile was at my apartment last night,” Jack said.

“Where do we go?” Ann asked, staring out at the passing lights.

“Let’s get out of town and stop at a diner or something,” Jack said.

“All right,” she said, sinking into the black leather seat.

After a long silence, Jack said, “I wrecked my motorcycle yesterday. I think I died.”

Ann studied him from the passenger seat without speaking.

“When I was unconscious I had a dream,” he continued, “or a vision.”

Jack stared straight ahead, and Ann turned her gaze to the night beyond her window. Finally, she said, “I’ve been having terrible dreams.” She closed her eyes, leaning her head against the cool glass. Engine noise and the sound of the highway settled into the space between them. Jack felt the adrenaline seeping out of him and his mind drifted. Lights from the suburban sprawl disappeared, replaced by darkness. He ignored the off-ramps until they finally came upon an isolated truck stop.

“This one has a diner,” he said, guiding them off the highway. They idled into the large parking lot, gliding to a stop under a massive illuminated sign. The yellow light from the parking lot reached into the darkness beyond just enough to show him the dirt of barren farm fields.

“This should be safe enough,” Jack said, opening his door.

They rushed across the parking lot. He imagined malicious eyes watching from dark fields but shook the thought away. Pushing open the glass doors they found a large gift shop to the right filled with shot glasses, Native American carvings, and small trinkets etched with the word Missouri and Kansas City. A young lady with bleached hair sat behind the counter with her eyes locked onto a smartphone screen.

Jack steered them into the dimly lit diner to the left. The smell of fried chicken and onions filled the air. Red booths lined the walls and an empty salad bar stretched down the middle of the room. Tall windows provided a view of the parking lot. Lamps with blue and yellow bulbs dangled over each table. Jack stepped up to the “Wait to be seated” sign. The sudden stillness of the room left him disoriented.

“Be right there, just grab a seat anywhere,” a woman called from somewhere in the kitchen. Two tired-looking, unshaven, truckers shared a table in the corner, and four teenagers sat at a table in the middle of the room, drinking coffee and staring at phones. Jack and Ann sat down in a booth next to the long row of windows.

“What was your dream?” Ann asked. “When you were unconscious.”

“It was a few days ago. But I don’t think it was a dream, not anymore,” he said, wondering if she knew what he did. When they connected in the library, did she see his split-second decision to end his life?

“What happened?” Ann asked.

“I was climbing a hill in a cemetery. There was a huge tree at the top. It wasn’t a normal tree, it’s a tree that keeps the world alive, or the people, or something. I think it bridges the worlds,” Jack said.

“What worlds?”

“Haven and Earth.”

Ann stared at him with bright green eyes and folded her hands under her chin. “I don’t think it was a dream either,” she said. “You were dead.”

Jack nodded and let out a sigh.

“But something happened, and you came back.”

“You saw. In the library, didn’t you?” he asked.

“I just saw you aim for the tree. It was horrible. Then other images of your life flashed by, moving backward until…something.”

“Until you saw other lives before this one,” he said.

She nodded, still staring at him.

“But, right after the crash was blackness. A hole, like you weren’t there for a moment,” she said.

“I guess I wasn’t,” Jack said. “I met Millae.”

“Where were you? What was it like?” Ann asked.

“I was in the In-Between and an Ancillary guided me up the hill to the tree. I think it is the In-between or a symbol for it, anyway. It’s the bridge between worlds.”

“What does that mean?”

“The In-between is where we go when we die. At least, where Nostshen go, I guess. I’m not sure about regular people.” I’m not human, he thought. He stared over Ann’s shoulder. I’m not human. Ann isn’t human. We aren’t —

“Go on,” Ann said.

“Right,” he focused on her green eyes. “An Ancillary is someone, or thing, that meets you in the In-between when you die. Millae said it is whatever you need it to be. Mine was an old man in a strange cemetery. He sent me to Millae. But when I got there, the cemetery disappeared. We were on the Isle of Song with Millae.”

“Isn’t that what Darean is looking for?”

“I don’t think I was actually there, I think it was a construct or something. A vision of it.”

“What did she say?”

“She told me to memorize all the details of the island.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. She wanted me to go back to my body. She said I needed to find you, and people were counting on me.”

“Find me? Why?”

“I assume it was you. She said we needed to bond and awaken. If we do, the Shen madness won’t drive me crazy. And now it won’t come for you either.” He never thought about the danger Ann was in from the Shen madness.

“That’s what Darean talked about.”

“Didn’t you see all this when we bonded?” he asked.

“I saw a lot of things.”

She shivered, and he wondered if she was remembering events she had seen in his life. His service. Maybe other lives. He thought of his past self at the WWI memorial, rotting away in a wheelchair. A small part of him felt relieved as Darean’s knife plunged into his neck. Had she seen that?

“I saw fragments of lives,” Ann said, “like sequences from a dream or scenes from a movie.”

The waitress stepped up to the table. She was a middle-aged woman with dirty blond hair and an annoyed look. She wore a dark blue dress, rumpled and faded.

“What can I get you?”

Jack ordered coffee and fried chicken. His stomach ached with hunger, and his hands were starting to shake.

“The same, please.”

“Sugar, cream?”

“No, thanks,” Jack said at the same time that Ann said, “Yes, please.”

The waitress rolled her eyes and walked back to the kitchen, returning with two cups of coffee, cream, and sugar.

“So?” Ann said, studying Jack over her coffee cup. Jack wanted to stammer and whither under her gaze. Instead, he took a sip of coffee and grabbed a drumstick from the plate as the waitress dropped it off. He explained his meeting with Millae and the Isle of Song and how she told him the demon’s voice would go away if he returned to his body and found her.

“What was the voice like?” she asked.

“Sometimes it’s like sitting here with you and fighting the urge to punch you for no reason. Sometimes it whispers about the people around me, how they need to be guided like animals. It was subtle most of the time, but when I was in combat or the interrogation room, it was forceful and hard to resist. Millae said it was Jode in my mind, a remnant or something. It started when I was young and grew stronger. I went to therapy for a while, after I got in the fight, but it didn’t help.”

“When you were sixteen,” Ann said.

“You saw,” he said, nodding.

“Only flashes of the fight and the aftermath.”

“That’s why I joined the military, so I could direct my rage at an enemy.”

“And your dad, you were close,” Ann said.

Jack nodded and looked down at the table. “We were. He took me to car shows. We ate too much ice cream and…” he took a deep breath. “But now, when I look back, I see his heart breaking a little at a time as the anger and rage slowly filled me. And then he died when I was overseas.”

“It’s okay, Jack,” Ann said. She reached across the table and touched his hand.

“After that, I almost killed a suspect in the interrogation room. I didn’t know it at the time, but I realize now that I saw what he did to those women in the village and the citizens. He raped, tortured, and murdered. His ideology gave him this blind righteousness, like armor against the suffering he caused.”

“It was armor against empathy and compassion,” she said.

“But Jode’s voice is gone now,” he said.

“And the ability is still there,” she said.

Jack nodded. “I feel your emotions in the back of my mind, and I feel the waitress and the truckers. But no voice.”

“Because we bonded,” she said.

“But I don’t think we awakened like Millae said we would. Maybe Darean was right, and that’s why we didn’t see things clearly,” Jack said. “She made it sound like we would understand everything once we awakened.”

“Do you think something went wrong?” she asked. “I recall strange things that aren’t familiar to me, but nothing I can hold on to.”

“When Darean was, well, when he was doing whatever he was doing to us, I saw a past life, I think. It was just after World War I. And before that, I may have dreamed of others. I’m always fighting wars.”

Ann pursed her lips and studied the waitress folding silverware at a distant table. Jack took a sip of coffee. He described his battle of wills with Janile at his apartment. How it felt like he was being sucked through the window during the struggle. And he told her about traveling into Ben’s past.

“I was dreaming when you came up to me in the library,” Ann said. “There was a creature, maybe it was Darean. He was dragging me to a dark place. Maybe hell. I could see the past and present stretch out in front of me and it was awful. But then, there you were.”

Jack nodded.

“And now you’re in my mind too. Not like an emotion, more like a jumble of thoughts or whispers. But when we were in the parking lot with Darean, your thoughts were clear. I knew exactly what you wanted me to do.”

“And now?” Jack asked.

“Whispers and gibberish,” she said, wrapping her hands around the warm cup.

The waitress lumbered by and filled their coffee cups.

“Do you think we’re cursed?” Ann asked.

“No, I don’t.” Jack thought about the whiskey-stained wheelchair of his past life. How he had been relieved when Darean sank the blade into his throat. “Probably not.”

“What about the woman who attacked Darean?” she asked.

“They seemed to know each other,” Jack said.

“Didn’t Darean say there were seven Shu gods who deliver order to humans?”

“And peace, but I don’t see a lot of either in the world,” Jack said. “And if there are seven Shu, how many cursed Shen are there?” he asked.

“We don’t know if we’re really cursed. But this means we’re not exactly human though,” she said, looking out the window into the darkness beyond the parking lot lights. “If my parents were here, they would lose their stuff right now. They still won’t acknowledge the Catholic church’s sex abuse scandals. Talking about gods and us, cursed to be reborn for burning the world, would send them into seizures,” Ann said.

“Do you think Millae and Jode created life on earth?” he asked.

“What, like Adam and Eve? And Millae is the naïve woman who ate the apple and cursed us all? I’m a little suspicious, Darean didn’t exactly act like an angel with all the mind control.”

“Are you saying women aren’t the root of all evil?” he asked. Ann glared at him and he smiled, feeling the knot of her anxiety loosen in his mind. “So, we avoid Darean and Janile and find the Isle of Song,” Jack said.

“We find a giant pillar of stone in the middle of the ocean? That sounds easy,” she said. “For now, why don’t we test your new talent?”

“What?”

“The waitress. Try to read her or whatever you’ve been doing. Like you did with your boss.”

Jack pursed his lips and scanned the diner until he saw the waitress. She was sitting at a booth, folding silverware again. He stared at her, but nothing happened.

“It’s not working, maybe I have to touch her, or be closer?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Why don’t you try?” Jack said.

“Me? I haven’t heard anyone’s thoughts clearly except yours,” she said.

“Try now, just focus on her,” Jack looked thoughtful for a moment. “Mine only seems to work when people are excited. My boss and Greg were both very upset.”

She narrowed her eyes and stared at the woman across the room.

“Anything?” Jack asked.

“Shh,” she said, without shifting her gaze from the woman.

Ann’s presence in his mind swelled. His hands shook on the table and the hairs stood up on the back of his neck.

“So tired. I can’t work another night shift, I wonder where Aaron is, he’s such a lonely boy.” The voice was tinny and muffled, but it was definitely the waitress. Jack closed his eyes, carried into Ann’s awareness of the woman, listening to her thoughts. Her husband left a few months ago, and her son spent too much time alone. A picture of a young blond boy floated across his mind. Sadness and worry. Helpless. Anger.

“Did you hear her?” Ann asked.

Jack opened his eyes to find Ann staring at him. His awareness snapped back into place. He blinked a few times before answering.

“We shared… something.” Jack couldn’t find words for the experience. His voice trembled. “Did you see the boy?” he asked.

Ann nodded with wide eyes.

“I think we both saw her somehow, through you,” he said.

Ann nodded again, clutching her cold coffee cup. “I could hear her thoughts and then you filled my mind, giving me the picture of her son and her sadness.”

Jack nodded and turned to the night outside, trying to shake the waitresses’ despair. Finally, Ann said, “I think we should get back on the road.”

“I don’t think we should go to either of our places.”

“I’ve got a nine o’clock history final tomorrow and then work.”

“How does that matter right now?”

“I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t,” she said. “But—”

“I know,” Jack said, feeling her anxiety swell again as she clung to a shred of normalcy. “This is a lot to take in but we’re in real danger, Ann.”

“You’re right, I won’t go to work tomorrow,” she said. “But we can stop by school in the morning and at least talk to the history professor. I’ve had him for other classes, he really knows his stuff. If these Nostshu and Nostshen have been around forever, maybe he’ll know something.”

“Or, maybe the guy will just think you’re psycho.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a guy thought that.”

“Ex-boyfriend?”

Ann glared at him.

“Just guessing.” Jack smiled, raising his hands in surrender. He lowered them to the table and took a deep breath, feeling the last of his energy seep out of him. “We’re going to make it.”

“Make it,” she said with a shiver. “You mean survive. Live. Not get kidnapped and murdered by Darean.”

Jack nodded and said, “Yes, make it.” It wouldn’t be his first time surrounded by enemies, behind enemy lines, except this time, he wouldn’t be pulled to safety and flown back to U.S. soil. This time, there was no safe place and no U.S. military to back him up.

“Even if the professor can’t point us in the right direction, maybe we can do some research at the library,” she said.

“It’s as good a plan as any,” he said. He was not looking forward to another library visit.