Page 99 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Alex lowered his phone, looking at me with naked concern. “Mary, we don’t know all the rules of your new kind of ghost yet.”

“I know.”

“We still need you.Istill need you. You were the first woman I ever loved. You were my best friend and the only person who ever really understood me when I was a kid, and I don’t want to lose you over this.”

“I know.” Alex’s crush on me had never been as well concealed as he’d thought it was. There had been times when the crossroads implied, slyly, that if I were willing to exploit it, I might be able to strike the kind of deal that let me return to the lands of the living and enjoy the rest of the mortal life I’d been denied. Joke was on them, though. My loyalty to the family was and had always been such that I would rather haunt them forever than live a few short years at their expense. What’s more, the thought of seeing one of my kids in that manner was revolting. I’d changed his diapers. I didn’t need to share his adulthood.

Alex watched me for a few long seconds, then sighed and turned his face away. “But you’re still going to do this.”

“Unless you’ve figured out teleportation in the last few hours, I’m the only one who can. Now help me.”

I sank to the floor, no longer trusting myself to do this standing up, and Alex half-rolled, half-dragged the bomb over to me, allowing me to hoist it up into my lap. I wrapped both arms and legs around it, clinging like a koala, and flashed him a watery, no doubt unnerving smile. “Love you, kiddo,” I said.

“I love you too, Mary,” he replied, and I was gone, and I don’t know what he said or did after that.

Back into the anima mundi’s void I went, motionless and moving very slowly at the same time, a falling star for the living spirit of our world to weep over. I could feel her watching me go, and I wanted to call out for her, to ask her for help, but I knew in some fundamental way that her help would take the form of plucking me from my passage and pulling me down into the grain, where she could keep me safely grounded. What I was doing didn’t break the rules, but it bent them, twisted them so hard that itfeltlike they were being broken, even if I was still technically in the right. The universe doesn’t like a rules lawyer.

It would be so easy, I knew, to drop out of the space that my mind insisted on interpreting as a sky, to let it go and descend into the grain where the anima mundi would be happy to take care of me, to leave my task unfinished. They had two bombs and however much plastic explosive Antimony had managed to scrounge. They’d be fine. They’d finish what they started and be home in plenty of time for dinner.

Unless they weren’t. Unless they waited for me to come back until they couldn’t wait any longer, and got caught by the Covenant; unless the charges they had weren’t enough to knock the building down, and they wound up with a half-destroyed Penton Hall filled with even-angrier Covenant agents, who would now be on guard against similar guerilla tactics. This was our only shot. This was what we had to do. I couldn’t leave them hanging now.

The air pushed against me like it was trying to blow me back to Ohio, and the bomb was so heavy I could barely hold it up, but I kept going, and then Penton Hall shimmered into view around me, dragged back into visibility aching inch by aching inch. I dropped this bomb, too, and it hit the floor more loudly than I would have thought possible.

I didn’t really notice, since I hit the floor half a second later, my entire body throbbing like a bruise, stars bursting behind my eyelids, and the dark reached up and dragged me down, and everything was silence, and everything was still.

Twenty

“People like me, who gain something by losing everything, we’re the exception, not the rule, and we make things harder for everyone, because people look at us and think the universe is kind. The universe isn’t kind. The universe is a hungry animal, and some of us don’t taste good enough to eat. That’s all.”

—Apple Tanaka

In the basement of Penton Hall, Covenant stronghold and extremely historic building that probably shouldn’t be blown up, but what can you do?

EVERYTHING WAS PEACEFUL ANDnothing hurt, mostly because nothing existed; I knew, on some level, that if I went back to where anything existed, then the states would reverse. Nothing would be peaceful, and everything would hurt. I didn’t like that idea. Pain was never something I enjoyed when I was alive, and then I died, and pain became something that happened to other people, somethingIdidn’t have to worry about. Now it was waiting for me on the other side of waking up, and fucked if I was going to hurry toward it. The bomb was in place. My work here was done. I could stay in the comforting absence for a little longer.

Then there was something that was neither peace nor pain: a voice, echoing through the abyss.Mary? Mary, can you hear me?

Sarah sounded frightened, like she didn’t understand what was going on and didn’t know how she was supposed to deal with it. But she was definitely herself, and not some sort of weird hallucination; I hadn’t been unconscious or dreaming in a very long time, and yet I knew there was no way I could have mimicked her so convincingly, even inside my own mind.

Mary, you’re scaring us.

She sounded like she was getting closer, which was impossible, since she was definitely inside my head, and thus right on top of me. But maybe there’s distance in dreams, somehow, miles measured in minds, and she was approaching through a mechanic I didn’t appreciate or understand. Maybe I should answer her.

Mary!

Maybe I wanted to answer her. But maybe I didn’t know how.

She made a small sound, like she was trying not to cry.The children went outside, and the mice came, Mary. While you were gone, the mice came out of the walls, and now they’re here, and they’re helping Annie find the things she needs to take. They’ve read the files—we won’t lose the information, just the artifacts, and Annie’s picking through those as fast as she can. Please, can you wake up?

So I hadn’t vanished when I passed out? That was good to know. My kind of ghost normally needs at least a little effort to remain in the daylight; I would have expected to drop to the twilight at the absolute minimum, and possibly all the way down into the starlight. Better to stay here than to be knocked cold in either of those places, which have their own predators. The twilight under Penton Hall wasn’t likely to be the sort of place I’d enjoy visiting.

Mary, I’m scared. I need you. Please can you wake up now? Please? Come back to us. Come to me, Mary, please.

Sarah’s position in the family has always been difficult to articulate. It’s not that she’s adopted—we have plenty of adoptees, and they’re all family, just as much as the ones who were born into the whole mess. It’s that she’s technically Evelyn’s sister, making her Kevin’s sister-in-law, and that’s normally a distant-enough relationship to release me from my duties as babysitter. But because she was brought into the family so young and bonded so tightly with her cousins—who are really her nieces and nephews—she’s still my responsibility, and the universe takes that as seriously as I do.

She called me, and when one of my children calls me, I come. The nothing dropped away, replaced by something, and the something was an amount of pain that I imagined I would have felt if the accident that killed me had left me to die slowly, instead of snapping my neck on impact with the ground. Every muscle I had ached, including some that couldn’t possibly have been involved in lifting the bomb. My arms and back and abdomen, sure, but my ears? My tongue? This was a full-body agony that I wanted nothing to do with.

I opened my eyes anyway. Sarah needed me to open my eyes.

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