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Professor Green immortal? He only appeared to be about twenty, but how long had he been that way? I knew he was a sentinel because the book had described the cold, ice-blue eyes with a star of pure jade green, which they all had. The brighter the color, the more powerful the sentinel and the higher his rank. The soldiers didn’t have any jade star, only a faded shade of ice blue.
    Alternate realities? Multiple universes potentially containing other Earths? People tracking and destroying alien-ghost-thingies that could somehow make holes between our worlds to climb through? What would be next? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but my curiosity overrode my fear as questions piled up.
    What did the wraiths want with our world if they had one of their own? It wasn’t like ours was perfect and pristine or anything with all of the fighting and pollution going on. And how did the sentinels send a wraith back to wherever they came from? Could a rift be opened on our side that led to their world, too? So far, the book hadn’t said anything about that. For now, I needed to know more about what the wraiths could do to people.
    And to me, as it seemed they liked me for some reason. Finger passing over the text, I continued on.
    The wraiths, we believe, are the dead from a parallel reality, their souls trapped in a void between our worlds. They have found a way to live again through human beings, using them as doorways.
    It seems they gain easier access to persons with severe mental illnesses, where they hide within the darkest corners of the mind. Once a melding takes place, the human soul is pushed aside, giving the wraith complete control over every aspect of movement and speech.
    A fully melded wraith then only needs to wait the necessary time for the human soul to weaken enough to near death, which is different for every caste. When the human soul is weak enough, the wraith can then pass the rest of the way through the body, stealing the energy left over in the person to take corporeal form on our plane. If this ever happens, they cannot be sent back through the veil.
    The state of their reality, how they’ve come to be here, and what they plan to do once they take over our world, remains unknown.
    Fear, icy and persistent, crawled into my mind. All I could see was the redheaded whatshername in Green’s class and Mr. Bugman touching her hair. Would it have crawled in through her nape and driven her around until her soul died?
    “Oh, God.” The sentinels of the Mortal Machine were all that stood between human beings and their creepy demises. A dead alien had touched me and maybe had been chasing me around for years. I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again.
    How did a sentinel send them back to the dark side of the wall? And more importantly, how did they get a wraith out of a person once it had disappeared inside?
    I turned the page.
    If a sentinel is unable to extract the wraith from its host due to insufficient power or reluctance by the creature to leave the body, the host must be cleansed. The wraith cannot survive the death of its host.
    My breath came too fast, too shallow. “Cleanse? As in kill? They really kill people.”
    My thoughts turned to Dad all alone at the cabin in Bracebridge. I’d seen the walls there melt a thousand times, but they’d always gone back to normal when I left. What if something had come through while I wasn’t looking? Would I know if Dad had a wraith inside him? And if he did, would the Mortal Machine send Green to murder him? My heart turned into a ticking time bomb. I had to get to Dad.
    The blanket disappeared from over my head. I screamed, one short rip of sound that tore open the silence. Still holding the flashlight on the book, I stared up into Ava’s face. Her mouth gaped open. The guy beside her, a muscle-bound jock with a shaved head, laughed.
    Remembering what Green had said, I scrambled to cover the pages with the blanket. Wouldn’t do to get my roommate killed over a bunch of