“Ama, are you going to get up?” my mother asked me, rousing me from a dreamless sleep. This was the first dreamless sleep I’d had in months, and it was unexpectedly refreshing not to see someone’s life for once, or their death.

Without meaning to, I thought back to Donovan, his death. I remembered the first time I’d dreamt about his death, which wasn’t too far off from how I had seen the dream the second time. There was still that fire that he was desperately trying to save his sister from. There was still that moment he was able to see the bed collapsing and save himself from it. There was still the moment he had found them in the bathroom, covered in wet towels, but Donovan had been able to save them and get them out. He had taken them both and helped them crawl their way to safety through the wreckage of the apartment, and just as they’d reached the door, a piece of the ceiling gave way and fell on his back, pinning him inside as he screamed at them to run.

“Yeah, I guess,” I sighed, throwing an arm over my eyes.

“Come on, baby. You gotta get up,” my mother said softly.

“And do what?” I murmured.

“I don’t know; why don’t you invite someone over?” she asked.

Taking a deep, open mouthed breath, I exhaled, “I guess I could do that.”

“Yeah, just go ahead and do that,” she said, shaking my hip gently. “Here, I have to go to work, have a good day.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I breathed, not moving.

I stayed in that spot for a few hours, not feeling any motivation to really do anything. I felt overcome and overwhelmed by this blankness I was so familiar with. I couldn’t really feel much, and I didn’t know what I was really thinking. My thoughts were fluid and transparent. They were there, but I didn’t know what they were, and I didn’t have it in me to try to figure them out. I was afraid, kind of. Afraid of looking too deep into the pool of my thoughts and seeing how deep and dark they were. I’d rather be numb and tired than grieving and drowning, but I still rather have none of that at all if I could. I didn’t really know how to get out of this place, and it seemed I was going to be stuck here for a while.

I sent Bond a text as a feeble attempt to save myself, but there wasn’t much success there. I was craving some sort of human interaction, and all I had were my thoughts and the ever constant reminder of the darkness that was never far behind them. He wasn’t able to spend time with me, but he did let me know about some of the homework I was missing, which somehow brought me down more. It was as if the knowledge of this reality beyond my walls was too much for me suddenly. I mentally recoiled further into my own dark cave.

There wasn’t much to be had or done here in my room except sleep, and at that moment, it seemed the most appealing thing to me. I had no particular motivation to do anything. TV had grown boring. I was banned from exercising. I wasn’t really hungry, or I was but I had no motivation to go downstairs and feed myself. There wasn’t much to be done when the motivation and drive to get it done were all gone. Maybe I could fall back asleep and try to restart my day. Maybe things would be better if I took a quick—or long—nap. And so I did. But things didn’t get better. My sleep was dreamless, and I somehow felt more alone than ever upon waking. My hunger by that time had grown too much to ignore, so I went downstairs to make myself something to eat. It was around three in the afternoon by then, and my back wasn’t much more than a dull ache. I figured I’d go and look at it since it’d been a few days since I’d last seen the hideous mark. Nochi was laying on the bathmat in the bathroom, so before I actually checked on myself, I let her outside in the backyard. I’m sure she needed to go out for a little while, and I still had no motivation to do anything, including taking a walk outside with a dog who liked me at a distance.

“Finally awake, huh?” Someone asked me, and I halfheartedly flinched and turned my gaze to the woman in the mirror. Willowy. Oval face. Blonde hair, ocean blue eyes.

“Are you ready to talk now?” she asked me, arms crossed and giving me a pointed expression.

Without really thinking, I shut off the light and put my forehead to the wall outside the bathroom, my mind slowly picking up pace. Madison Grier was in my dreams. She was only ever in my dreams. She had spoken to me. She and Donovan, I was absolutely certain. Maybe she was a hallucination. Maybe they both were. Hallucinations followed patterns, right?

“You’re not hallucinating, Ama,” she called from the darkness, and I flinched, turned my head to the bathroom.

Taking a deep breath, I thought about the last dream I’d had, of Donovan’s death. It made me question whether he was actually real or not, if she was actually real. People don’t just die either of those ways. At that moment, Madison sighed loudly form the bathroom, called out, “Your dog is rummaging through the trash in your dad’s study right now.”

Pressing my lips together, I tentatively peeled myself from the wall and jogged to the other side of the house. The door to his study was ajar, and Nochi was nosing her way through it. Her head snapped up when she heard me approach, and she darted out of the room.

Clenching my jaw, I stiffly cleaned up the mess and returned to the bathroom. I turned on the light and put both hands on the counter. Taking a deep breath, I asked slowly, “How, how do you know who I am?”

She was looking at me languidly, sitting on the edge of the tub and facing the mirror, looking directly at me. I glanced to where the tub actually was. There was no sign of her presence there, whatsoever, and looking closer into the mirror, I saw the curtains were undisturbed by her as well. She watched me quietly, nodding her head as if to affirm that she was actually intangible and not there. I looked back at her, waiting for her answer.

“That’s kind of hard to explain,” she finally responded.

“What do you mean?” I asked, “Hard how?”

She made a slight face, said, “Hard in the way that you won’t want to understand it.”

“What? What makes you think that?” I asked, bewildered.

“Because I know you, Ama. You don’t want to make sense of these things. You’re just like me,” she said easily, looking on towards me with a passive expression. I gave her incredulous look, but her expression remained the same. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, “I said what I said.”

She was wearing a white dress, close to the one I’d last seen her in in my last dream of her. Her hair was hanging down near her waist, and her ocean blue eyes were quiet. They seemed to be lacking in something, but they were old and wise. She’d seen many things, I could tell, even if I hadn’t seen them all in my dreams.

“We are not alike,” I scoffed disbelievingly. Rolling her eyes, she said, “It never hit you that some of the memories you had of my life were parallel to yours?” A bark of laughter clawed out of my mouth and I said, listing on each finger, “I have never been married, I haven’t graduated high school, I haven’t been killed.”

“You have a triangle on your face, a mark on your back, you watched me die, and bonus! You touched death,” she shot back, listing them off on her hand. I opened my mouth, but quickly closed it, glancing at myself in the mirror. The triangle had been steadily darkening, but I had in turn steadily been ignoring it, but she was right. It looked as if it were turning red, and while she was alive in my dreams—her memories—she had the same triangle on her face. One of the last memories I’d had before I’d dreamt of her death was witnessing an accident worse off than my own. I shuddered, thinking back to it.

Shaking my head and running my hands over my face, I moaned out, “This can’t really be happening. I have to be losing my mind or something.”

“No, Ama, you’re not. This is real, and I’m real. Kind of.”

“What do you mean, ‘kind of?’” I asked, suspiciously, looking at her.

“It’s a lot to explain,” she shrugged. She gestured to my back, said, “You were going to check that right?”

“Yeah,” I responded slowly.

“Check it,” she replied simply. I looked at her another moment, and gingerly turned around and lifted up my shirt. In the corner of my eye, I could see her moving a little closer to me in the mirror. The bruise was yellowing and greening at the edges, but there were still thick, angry blotches of near black and purple near the center of my back. In the middle of it all, the mark stood out clearly to me, looking like an angry burn, like the one I thought Donovan had suffered.

“You see that?” Madison asked, pointing to the mark on my back. I nodded, and she turned around. The white dress she wore was low cut in the back and easily revealed an identical mark on her back as well, but it looked as if it’d healed more, or not been as developed.

“We all have that mark.”

“We?”

“There’s a lot to explain.” Sighing, I pulled down my shirt and turned around to look at her.

“I guess I’m ready for whatever you have to tell me,” I murmured, feeling the tides of my mind rise as confusion mounted beside them.

“Good. I’m you,” she said casually, staring squarely at me.

“What?” I scowled. “What does that mean?”

“Right, this needs to be explained from scratch,” she said, leaning forward and looking up. “Well, I’m an incarnation of you, or rather you’re an incarnation of me.”

“An incarnation?” I asked skeptically. “How? That’s real?”

“Yeah, it’s real, and it’s complicated,” she said, looking on.

“How do I know this is real? How do I know this isn’t some weird hallucination or dream?”

“First, the medication you’re on wouldn’t make you hallucinate. Second, it’s because there are some things that we all have in common in every life, like–”

“Wait, there’s more than just you?” I interrupted.

She gave me an agitated look and said, “Come on, Ama. Don’t ask dumb questions. You know at least a little about how this works. You’ve already kind of met Donovan.”

“He’s an incarnation, too?”

She sighed with clear annoyance and said, “I knew you’d be in denial about this but I didn’t realize you just would not put two and two together.”

“Shut up,” I said defensively, and then I thought about my dreams, of all these lives I dreamt about and how I just didn’t want to make sense of them. “You’re telling me all those dreams I had were of past incarnations?”

“Yes, Ama. All those dreams you had, which were all realistic, mind you, were of the memories of the lives you and I have lived.”

“Can you read my thoughts or something?”

Leaning back, a look of approval on her face, she said, “Something like that. I get these impressions of how you feel, and then they start to form into actual thoughts and words. So I can kind of read your mind. That’s my gift.”

“What do you mean, your gift?” I asked curiously.

“We all have a gift, something that makes us different from normal people.”

“Right, because having incarnations is something normal people just have, huh.”

“Yes, Ama, everyone has incarnations. New souls are rare. Talking to your incarnations is something different,” she snapped. I held up my hands and said, “Well. Excuse me.”

“Anyway, we all have a gift. I got impressions of thoughts. Donovan’s gift was he could see immediate danger. Abby’s gift was that she could divine out the dead, Yaya’s gift was that she could heal,” she went on. Abigail Sutton and Yaya Howard were both people I’d dreamt of before as well, and neither of their lives ended well. No one’s life ended well, and I asked quietly, “If I was dreaming of your lives, did I also dream of your deaths?”

And Madison was quiet for a moment, looking off as her eyes grew hazy. She said after a few more moments, “Yes. You saw each of our deaths. You lived through them all, and I do want to say I’m proud of you for that. Each life is another death the next has to deal with, and I’m sure you’ve dealt with quite a few so far.”

“Wait,” I said abruptly, thinking about the last dream I’d had of Donovan. “I dreamt of Donovan’s death twice, but there were two different versions.”

Madison didn’t say anything for a moment. She looked off, contemplating, and then asked carefully, “How did Abby die, Ama?”

Wincing my eyes, I said, “She stumbled onto a train track.”

“How did I die?”

“Something killed you,” I grimaced, my torso growing tender at the memory of being impaled.

“You’re . . . very good at that. It’s concerning,” Madison said in a straightforward tone. Without waiting for a response, she explained, “We think it’s our human brains trying to make sense of the memories. Some memories that are too . . . severe. . . are sometimes, rewritten, I guess, to make them more palatable. Most of us haven’t been able to rewrite that many. After so many, our brains give up and allow us to see the whole thing. You have somehow managed to rewrite every single one.”

“What does that mean?” I asked warily.

She shrugged easily, flopped her arms down and said, “I don’t know. There’s nothing we can do about it now. Most of us haven’t made it this far.”

“What does that mean?” I asked quickly.

Madison was silent for a moment, and she stood to look at me fully, and said, “Things are about to get really complicated and really dangerous for you, Ama.”

A chill shot down my spine. The gravity in her tone was almost palpable.

“What?” I asked, rigidly, “How do you know?”

“Because this is the same point in life where it all starts to happen.”

“What starts to happen? What point in life?”

“We all start at different ages, but the situations stay the same. You get the mark. You see the last incarnation’s death. You get the other mark. You touched death,” she said in a serious and dark tone.

“How–”

“You don’t dream in the order of the incarnations’ lives, and you even miss a lot of them. You dream about the ones you’re closest, too. You and me and Donovan and Abby and all the others—we’ve got something in common, and since I’m the most recent incarnation, you and I are closest. You need to listen to me, though, and seriously think about it. Not everyone who is near you is your friend. Someone is going to betray you and try to kill you. You need to be very aware of the company you’re keeping, Ama.”

My heart dropped as I thought of the man from Donovan’s death, Eli, but I chose not to bring it up. Instead, I asked, “Who is it?”

“I don’t know, Ama.”

“Then how am I supposed to keep myself safe?” I all but yelled at her. “What am I even keeping myself safe from?”

“Ama, who are you talking to?” I heard my mother call from the front door, and Madison and I instantly quieted. She was home much earlier than expected, and Madison leaned in and said, “There is a lot that you need to know and not enough time to hear it all. Listen to your instincts. They’re more attuned to the Ways than others.”

My mother’s voice sounded then, coming from the front door, a question in her voice, “Ama?”

“Yeah, Mom, I’m in the bathroom!” I called back, looking to the doorway, but when I looked back to the mirror, she was gone.

“How are you feeling, baby?” she asked, poking her head into the bathroom.

“I’m alright. I’ve been napping on and off all day,” I murmured gently pushing past her.

“How’s your back doing?” she asked, turning me around and pulling up my shirt. I laughed to myself and said, “I can’t really feel it. The painkillers are working.”

“That’s good, baby. It’s looking better now,” she said, running her hands over the dark markings. “What’s this mark on your back?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said, feeling a spike of panic.

“It looks like a burn,” she murmured.

“I really couldn’t tell you,” I said, looking off, trying to think of an excuse I could say, but I gave up the endeavor shortly. Knowing my mother, it didn’t really matter where it came from. It just mattered that it wasn’t causing me pain.

“It doesn’t hurt, does it?” she asked, and I smiled to myself quietly.

“No, Mama, it doesn’t hurt.” Without warning, I turned around and gave her a tight hug. We were now the same height, and I was still adjusting to this. It was odd since for most of my life, she’d been taller, but now I was slowly growing taller than her, or rather she was growing shorter than me. This was evidence of our age, and though she hated to admit it, she knew I was getting taller than her and that she was slowly getting older. I remember she’d always say how she wished I could be young forever so that she could love me and take care of me forever.

“I love you, Mama, you know that, right?”

“Yes, I know, baby,” she said with a smile, returning the hug. I could rely on my mother to be there for me and to remind me that no matter what happened, she would always be there, loving me.

I squeezed her a little tighter, feeling unease seep into my being as I thought back to my conversation with Madison, hoping it wasn’t real and she wasn’t. There was still a chance she wasn’t, that everything was just an odd coincidence, but something told me it was all too real and that some very, very bad things would happen in the future. Madison had told me, after all, if not anything, to trust my instincts. Our instincts were never wrong.