Page 101 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Once the bomb was armed, Annie went to recover the last few artifacts, while I followed Sarah and talked her through arming the other two bombs. And still no one came from above. If not for Sarah monitoring the hall, I would have been afraid it had been abandoned at some point, leaving us to demolish a haunted house and accomplish nothing but making the Covenant even angrier with us.

Sarah and I returned to the center of the basement after arming the third bomb, standing next to the cat carrier, which was now filled to bursting with enthusiastically chattering Aeslin mice. After a lifetime spent in silence, they were finally free to make themselves heard, and they were taking that opportunity seriously. Sarah stood between me and them, and we waited, her wrapping her arms around her middle like she was trying to stop herself from shaking apart, me wishing I had a mirror so I could check to see if my eyes were recovering at all. Abruptly, Sarah jerked like she’d been stuck with a pin.

“Annie,” she said.

“I think she’s in the next room,” I said. “Want me to go get her?”

“I don’t want you to goanywhere,” she snapped, grabbing for my hand and flinching when her fingers passed through me. “Annie!”

“What?” Annie called back, sounding frustrated. “I’m almost finished.”

“Youarefinished, because we have to gonow,” yelled Sarah. “Someone’s coming!”

Annie came running into the room, mice clinging to her hair to keep themselves from being thrown off, and raced to join us. “I have to put this pack on,” she said. “Please make way.” Then she shrugged the backpack over her shoulders as the mice scurried clear of the straps, hurrying to avoid being squished.

“Sarah?” she asked.

“I have them,” said Sarah, picking up the cat carrier. It must have contained hundreds of mice, all of them crammed in on top of one another until there wasn’t any space left. The ones on the bottom must have been on the verge of being crushed. But none of them complained. They were doing this to please their gods, and because they wanted to survive. If not all of them did, they would still have better odds than the ones who’d chosen to remain.

“All right,” said Annie. She raised her hands to roughly shoulder height and began opening and closing them, like a cat making biscuits on a blanket. The air in front of her started to shimmer with a heat haze. “When I let go, grab me and jump,” she said.

Sarah nodded. This part of the plan hinged on her being faster than the fire.

Somewhere high above us and in the next room over, a door closed. It was an ordinary sound, rendered loud only by how much we didn’t want to hear it right now. Footsteps followed, an unlucky Covenant researcher descending toward us.

Annie kept kneading the air, the heat haze growing thicker and thicker. “Now,” she snapped, and made a hard shoving motion, which turned into a wall of rolling flame that crackled menacingly as it advanced toward the bomb. People like to talk about fire like it’s a living thing; well, this fire was definitely alive, in its terrible, magical way. Alive, andhungry.

Sarah grabbed Annie’s arm, and they were gone, both of them stepping into a fold in the fabric of space, tesseracting away without another word said.

The fire would hit the first bomb in under a second, and from there, the blaze and blasts would handle setting off the other two. I didn’t want to be here for that. Ghosts are notoriously hard to destroy, but “hard” is not “impossible,” and standing at ground zero of a massive explosion felt like a bad idea all the way around. I blinked out.

Except that I didn’t. I tensed in that way that had nothing to do with tension and everything to do with no longer being somewhere I didn’t want to be, and nothing happened. The fire was still rushing forward—time had done me the immense favor of slowing down just enough to let me enjoy my failure—and so I did the next best thing, and dropped into the twilight.

Only I didn’t do that, either. I remained stubbornly rooted to the spot, not quite material and not quite insubstantial, unable to change states or levels of reality. And then the flames hit the plastic explosives, and everything was fire and massive, concussive booms, and once again, the rest was silence.

Exit Mary, stage right.

Twenty-one

“This isn’t the end of the road. This is just the start of a new adventure. So come on, and let me show you how far this highway goes.”

—Rose Marshall

Who the hell knows anymore? Position: uncertain, time: unknown

THERE WAS NOTHING.

It wasn’t dark; darkness would have been something. It wasn’t light, either. Sarah described finding herself in a big white room when she was locked inside her own mind by a hostile cuckoo, and again, that’ssomething. There was just...nothing. I gradually became aware of myself as a sequence of thoughts and memories, a whisp of information that believed it was an individual, but that awareness didn’t come with anything else, not even the sensation of having a physical form. That wasn’t as frightening as it would have been once upon a time; I’d been dead for decades, and ghosts are only questionably physical. Even down in the starlight, my body was more my idea of what I was supposed to be than anything real.

Which meant my body couldn’t be hurt, right? Standing at ground zero of a massive explosion wouldn’t be enough to do anything permanent to me—maybe enough to knock me out for a while, discorporate me and leave me drifting in an intangible void, but nothing more than that.

I was starting to get upset. I forced myself to slow down, reflecting grimly on the fact that in the absence of the physical indicators of upset—the racing heart, elevated blood pressure, clammy palms—it was hard tostopbeing upset. Those responses give a person something to focus on, something to calm. All I had were my thoughts, and the nothing.

Until, gradually, there was something: a breeze, blowing from the east. It was soft and warm and playful, in the way of little spring breezes, and I had no skin, but I could feel it all the same. I focused on the breeze, letting it remind me of the outlines of my body, like a bat using echolocation to find its way home. The breeze kept blowing, and bit by bit, my awareness of what my physical form was supposed to be came back. I still couldn’t move what I felt, couldn’t reach up to touch my face or make sure I had all the pieces of myself, but Ihada self again, and it was impossible not to see that as an improvement.

After the breeze came a slowly building golden light, replacing the void with itself a degree at a time. I didn’t know if I evenhadeyes at the moment, but if I did, the light came on gradually enough that they didn’t need to adjust. I looked into it, and it shone around and through me, warmer than the wind but just as soothing.

Then, something new: a hand, touching my cheek, and with that touch, I had a cheek, unquestionably, and that meant the rest of me existed as well. It was like someone had touched the surface of my psyche and, through the ripples cast by that moment, called everything I was back into being.

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