The last thing I remember was her smile.

  The sight of her standing there, like an angel unexpected, robbed me of any worries my first day of classes had inspired. Her unconscious poise, so at odds with her unsure expression. Her eyes, wide and curious and concerned, turning towards me.

  Then that bashful, shy shadow of a smile as she looked at me, as if the sight of me had given her a tiny bit of the same joy she had inspired in my heart.

  I was lost in that smile. I couldn't look away from it.

  I never even saw the bus coming.

  #

  What happens after you die?

  It’s a question humankind has spent its entire history trying to answer. It has stoked the imaginations of a million million philosophers, artists, poets, writers, scientists, grifters, and lunatics. It’s the basis of nearly every religion worth the name. Do we ascend to paradise, or are we punished for our past sins? Are we reincarnated, or do we simply cease to be?

  I had no idea. At nineteen, I was cursed to be ever-so-slightly more self-aware than most of the people around me, a trait that had not only managed to propel me all the way to the local community college, with no friends worth the name and no family I wanted to acknowledge, but had also kept me from ever taking a decisive stance on the afterlife. I certainly didn’t have enough faith to believe in paradise or pandemonium, but the alternatives seemed so nihilistic that they didn’t feel worth accepting.

  Instead, I had mentally lumped death together with destiny, the future, love, and quantum physics to make a distasteful pile in the back of my head that I had happily thrown a mental curtain over and labelled “Things Not Worth Thinking About.”

  Of course, just like everyone else who has ever dodged the question, death inevitably came for me as suddenly and unexpectedly as a runaway bus crash.

  Well.

  Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite that literal for most people, but here we are.

  Still, even if I had no idea what death would be like, I certainly didn’t expect to wake up afterwards–and nothing I had ever heard or read described the afterlife as a small, rough, dim, dank, little cave.

  #

  I blinked blearily as I sat up, trying desperately to pull my whirling brain together. I felt… weird. Like I had stayed up for three days straight on only energy drinks and microwave pasta cups, then ran a marathon, then had my entire body blended up and poured into a vaguely Dani-shaped mold.

  I stretched from side to side, and appended one more unlikely experience to the end of the list–it was like I had done all of that, then took a particularly euphoric drug.

  I felt good. Weird, but good.

  I sprang to my feet with far too much ease, and looked around.

  I was, indeed, for some reason, in a cave. It was roughly circular in shape, with a domed ceiling and a flat floor of loose dirt and gravel. Once, years before, I had gone on a mine tour with my family (because that was what every twelve year old wanted to do on a summer vacation, thanks mom). I still remembered that looming feeling, that knowledge that above my head was a thousand thousand tons of dirt and rock and probably a subway or something, all held in place and kept from crushing me by friction and inertia, and which could give away at any moment.

  This cave reminded me of that experience. Without quite knowing why, my instincts left me confident that I wasn’t just underground–I was deep underground. Still, I was able to see my surroundings just fine, thanks to the dim, diffuse light that filled the cave, shining from a dozen some-odd clusters of crystals. These weren’t the sort of pretty crystals you see in overpriced jewelry shops or simplistic video game sprites, either. They were rough, lumpy, and uneven, bursting from the wall and ceiling, ranging in size from only a little larger than my fist, all the way up to one that was bigger than my entire body and provided the lion’s share of light in the little cavern.

  The light they gave off wasn’t all that bright, but it was the clean, sharp light that reminded me of those LED headlights that people loved to blind others with on the highway–if you had slapped like a dozen extra levels of refracting plastic casing over them. It was more than enough to let me make out the details of the cave–or more specifically, the complete lack thereof. The cave was, aside from myself and the crystals, completely devoid of any interesting features. It took me a few minutes of pacing before I even picked out the only exit, an uneven hole mostly hidden amidst the off-kilter shadows of the cave.

  I approached the craggy entrance, and found that I could make out the barest suggestion of a tunnel, leaving this room and continuing sharply downwards.

  “Nope,” I decided aloud, “I’m allll set on that.”

  I returned to the middle of the cave, where I had woken up, and sat down, trying to remember what I could of the events that brought me here.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  It had been the first day of classes at Coastside Community College, the crappy hole-in-the-wall local college that had been all I had been able to get into, thanks to the complete lack of financial support, or even cosigning, from my wonderful parents.

  Of course, the fact that I had skipped the majority of my classes throughout junior and senior year probably hadn’t helped, but I still argued that was dumb. I had aced all of my finals! Just because I hadn’t needed to actually go to any of the useless classes didn’t mean I cheated!

  Okay, sorry, I’m getting off topic. So it was my first day at Coastside. I had, ironically, enrolled into their education program, one of the few degrees they offered that was worth more than the paper the diploma was printed on. I took the bus to campus with my backpack of way-too-expensive books already starting to give me irreversible back damage…

  And then I saw her. The girl in white. The sight of her had struck me senseless, and then she had turned towards me, and then she smiled, and then…

  And then I was hit by the same bus I had just gotten off of.

  I blinked once. I looked down at myself.

  I was still there. Still a girl, still a few inches under six feet, still a shade of light tan that made my ethnicity as much a mystery to me as everyone else.

  I blinked again. I pinched myself. It still hurt.

  “So… Am I dead?”

  The cave didn’t respond. Neither did the crystals.

  I sniffed at the air cautiously. “No smoke, no fire, no brimstone.” Not that I knew what brimstone smelled like. Sulfur, right? Rotten eggs? There certainly wasn’t any of that.

  “So this probably isn’t the real bad place.” Or at least not any of the ones I knew about. A mysterious cave trapping me deep underground certainly had the feel of someone’s idea of the place you went to be punished. But if that was the case, the crystals seemed a bit out of place. Suffocating darkness, deep underground, rough terrain, no way out? That seemed like a properly torturous afterlife. One I certainly hadn’t earned, but hey, who said the world was fair?

  The crystals lit the place up, though. They made it… well, not comfortable, but only mildly unsettling, rather than completely terrifying. If I hadn’t woken up here after being hit by a bus, with no idea of how I got here, I might even think that the place was pretty.

  “So… where am I then?”

  I didn’t expect a response, of course, but the sound of my own voice seemed to dispel a little bit of my lurking discomfort of being trapped underground, lost and alone, after having apparently died. I remember learning about the effect somewhere online. Whistling past the graveyard, it was called.

  “Okay, new questions then,” I told myself. “Let’s start with what am I wearing?”

  I wasn’t naked, which seemed like something I should be happy about, all things considered. But I also definitely wasn’t wearing my comfortable, second-hand black jeans, or my ripped-up band tee. Instead, from the waist down, I was wearing a pair of loose fitting black pants made of some sort of fabric I had never encountered before. It was soft and smooth to the touch, like a synthetic blend, but when I poked at it, it proved tougher than it looked. From the waist up, I was wearing a sleeveless shirt of the same material, fit a little more snuggly.

  In fact… I had to stand up to confirm, but the entire style of the outfit was odd, far cry from my second-hand clothes, which had been exactly as stylish as they were when they had still been first-hand, twenty-plus years ago. The pants were tight around my waist and ended at ankle cuffs, but otherwise hung loosely. Similarly, the shirt was tight around my stomach, but loose fitting at the chest, complete with a broad collar that hung off my shoulders, showing more than a bit of my neck and collarbone, but only the very top of my chest. Even my shoes were made of strips of similar material, overlapping in a design that reminded me of sandals, but with thick enough layers that my feet were completely covered.

  I frowned, but as I moved around a little more, I paid attention to how the clothes moved with my body. While I wasn’t used to exactly how they hung, I couldn’t help but notice that they were loose in all the right places, not tugging or limiting my movements at all, while still offering support where I needed it. And as I tried some increasingly unorthodox stretches, I started to notice something about the body those clothes were covering. It was… different.

  I hadn’t exactly been in terrible shape, but I was self-aware enough to know that my lifestyle choices, which involved a lot of sugar, chemicals, fried foods, and sitting on my ass, had slowly been overcoming any advantages my genes had granted me. I was only nineteen, but on my darker days, I knew that, one day, my metabolism wouldn’t be able to compensate for my choices any more. I periodically attempted to be healthier and more fit, but it was hard.

  Now, my body felt like I had gotten really into those karate classes I had signed up for in junior high. My arms, legs, shoulders, and abs were all strong and flexible, with the sort of lean muscles I had envied in the runners and swimmers I mocked in high school. A few cup checks even confirmed that I seemed to be a bit improved in a couple areas that were less useful, but still very much appreciated.

  “Okay, well, I’m not gonna argue with this part,” I decided to myself.

  Idly, I lifted a hand to slide it over my face, trying to feel if it was any different, but that was a waste of time. Grumbling, I approached one of the smoother crystals, but the light that seemed to come from inside of it was too bright for it to be reflective. At the very least, I was able to confirm that my shaggy hair was still dyed the same, pitch black tipped with acid green.

  “Okay, I’m getting increasingly sure this isn’t Hell,” I told the cave at large. “But it doesn’t seem particularly heavenly, either. So… where am I?”

  I expected the cave to stay quiet again–but this time, I was surprised, as a voice echoed through it, as if in response.

  “Hello?”

  I flinched a little, nerves and anxiety building in my chest. I called back, “Hello?”

  “Is someone there?”

  I blinked–and I looked to the tunnel entrance I had turned away from earlier, sure that was where the voice was coming from.