Jessica meandered through Cliff's Edge's twist of streets, sending up a spray of water where her tires left their tracks on the pavement, gleaming with liquid opalescence. The roads seemed to welcome her like a long-lost friend, though it was not a gesture of warmth or fondness, but rather a desperate appeal, as to a traveler who returns to her country to find it ravaged by invasion. From the vibes she was getting, Jessica wouldn't have been surprised if the cottage she had left what seemed like millennia ago actually had been invaded. Queasiness rose in the pit of her stomach -- she wondered if she'd be surprised at anything with the power to overcome logic and reason and summon her from Boston in the middle of the night and a hurricane. Thank God the hurricane was over; at least that was one less thing to have to deal with.

She pulled the car into the cottage's gravel driveway, parking it behind the family station wagon, in whose back window she noticed Melanie's brand-new surfboard.

She won't get to use it now, she caught herself thinking, then wondered, taken aback, at her own mental comment. The hurricane, of course. Even though it's over, the waves are probably still ten feet high, and I'll bet the beaches will stay closed for quite a while.

Jessica opened the car door, and planted her feet firmly on the gravel. Although her legs ached with the hours she'd just spent in the car, the rest of her ached to find out what was going on here. Slamming the door behind her, she strode briskly toward the front door, her walk becoming a jog as she neared the porch steps, then cleared them in a single bound. Fumbling the keys from her pocket, she threw open the door with a mix of anxiety and anticipation, excitement and fear, any caution that might have held her back melted away by the need to know. For, as scientific as her mind was, she could no longer doubt that there was something she needed to know; and as much as she wanted to believe that it was nothing more than a dream which had drawn her back here to Cliff's Edge, she no longer could. As long has she could remember, she had believed nothing, but now, for the first time, she needed something to believe. Only now it wasn't there.

"Mel!" she called. "Dad! Leigh Anne! I'm home."

Silence was the only response she received. It hung over the cottage like a shroud, stagnating the air and stealing the breath from her lungs. Her stomach and head did a gymnastic routine in tandem, spinning and tumbling in a discordant collaboration that seemed physically impossible.

"Melanie!" she called out again, louder. "Dad! Edward! " Her father had never minded that, but Leigh Anne had. Calling her father by his first name made Leigh Anne think she wasn't respecting him. This information came along with other irrational bits and pieces and flashes that had no bearing on anything. If one's mind could vomit, thought Jessica, this is what it would feel like.

She ventured into the silent house on legs that didn't want to carry her, but did anyway, as though they were controlled by machine, forced forward by some invisible but not intangible force. The floor squeaked as it gave under Jessica's feet, moving toward the kitchen now, into the doorway...

She froze.

She froze.

Her body would not respond. It was as though she'd lain eyes on the mythical Medusa, and her body was now a stone statue as her mind fought a losing battle against her eyes, which took in a scene no less paralyzing than the face of Medusa herself. Her family lay piled in a heap in a pool of blood. Leigh Anne was simply a mess, the only description Jessica's brain could give her without folding in upon itself. Blood flowed from the corner of her father's mouth, and he clasped a gun in one hand. Her sister, like the other two, was covered in blood -- but she was alive. Jessica knew it even before she saw the movement of her chest that signaled breathing, and with it, life. She sensed that life, a faint glow emanating from the darkness of the death that surrounded it, that pervaded and overtook the entire house. She sensed something left amidst nothingness.

But the rest...

As her psychic shields went up, Jessica's shock and horror slipped into a kind of apathetic efficiency. The rationalism that had always protected and defended her did their duty, her mind draining itself of emotion and focusing on what to do next. For starters, she had to do something about Melanie. She had no idea what was wrong with her -- most likely catatonia or something like that -- but she knew that the best thing to do would be to get her out of here. After that was taken care of, her best bet would be a hospital.

She crossed the room, still registering no emotion as she stepped through her family's blood, and lifted Melanie off the floor with hardly any effort, though she weighed more than a hundred pounds and Jessica was certainly no athlete. She gently hoisted her sister onto her shoulder, headed for the door, and opened it. Careful not to jar Melanie, she slammed it with a force that seemed to shake the whole house, as it shook her life to slam the door on not only her past, her family, but a part of herself.

Jessica got into her car, placing Melanie's still form on the passenger seat beside her. Starting the car, she backed down the driveway as fast as possible without being reckless and pulled away from the cottage like a bat out of hell, a phrase that took on more of a literal meaning than she would have liked. It was hell, all right, but she was leaving it. She and Melanie.

As they sped away, they left only silence in their wake.

"Don't worry, Mel," she said, the first time she'd spoken aloud since Boston. The sound of her own voice was a nice thing to hear, and somehow hearing herself say things made them more believable. "We'll start a new life, you and I. I'm old enough to take care of you. We can live with Kari in Boston. No parents, no rules, just three girls on our own. What do you say to that, Mel?" She smiled over at Melanie, whose lack of an answer mattered no more than an answer would have. Things would be fine, they always were.

She was unprepared for the deer. It dashed into the road without warning, camouflaged by the forestry that lined the road until it was in the middle of the street, Jessica's headlights spotlighting that panic-stricken paralyzed look that you hear about so many times, one that Jessica's memory recalled frozen on her own face just a short while ago. She jerked the wheel to the right, realizing too late to avoid the inevitable that her car was on a collision course for a tree.

In slow motion, her body whipped forward, her seatbelt stopping her forward motion by cutting painfully into her skin. Then she was thrown backward, her neck jerking violently back as her head smacked against the headrest. Her body repeated the motion several times, to a lesser degree each time, until she finally came to a limp halt. It seemed to reach her after the fact, the spine-chilling sound of shattering glass as Melanie's body was thrown through the windshield. And then she was overtaken by blackness, and all sensation was momentarily suspended.

She came to not more than a few seconds later, and her brain immediately threw itself into gear. She knew exactly where she was, what had happened. Quickly assessing herself for injury and finding none, she unbuckled her belt, the belt that had saved her life, and, after a few kicks of the uncooperative door, managed to extract herself from the crumpled wreck that was once her car. She immediately ran to Melanie's side as she lay broken, a shattered diamond in a bed of emerald grass, the fallen rain emitting a crystalline glow in the quiet radiance of the dawn's light. Dropping to her knees beside Melanie, Jessica had no time to respond to this twist of fate before another, greater shock hit her -- Melanie's eyes were opening.

The look in those green eyes was beyond what mere words can describe. Her gaze was distant, yet not hazy -- it shone with a clarity, an awareness that seemed to extend far beyond the consciousness of the ordinary person. And although the cliff upon whose edge Melanie stood was that of death, that awareness did not seem to be fearful. Rather, the edge seemed to be a horizon, a threshold onto something... greater than life.

"Jessica," she said, and her voice was one of pure ecstasy. In fact, for one moment, it seemed as though it were not Melanie, but the entire universe, speaking to Jessica. Then it was Melanie again.

"Jessica," she said. "I'm free." And her eyelids fluttered gently shut one last time, a smile touching her lips; her voice, her eyes, herself once again becoming something greater, something beyond anything she ever had been. She was no longer Melanie Cross, a teenage girl whose life had spiraled so out of control that she had actually killed to save herself. She was the dawn, spreading in golden waves its radiant beauty across the sky, breaking free of whatever night had held her captive. She was free.

Jessica turned her gaze upward to that sky. It seemed to lift her to her feet, beckoning to her, replacing that inner nothingness with warmth, with light. She began to walk toward it, toward her own horizon of new dreams, a new life, leaving Cliff's Edge behind her forever.