Page 50 of Installment Immortality

The room fell silent, the sort of deep, palpable silence that’s only really possible when there’s no one living around. In a room full of live people, there will be breath, and shuffling, and even the distant, dampened sound of heartbeats keeping things from going too quiet. But we were all dead. We had no sounds to offer to the void.

Then Jonah shouted, “We have to go get them! We have tosavethem! It was bad enough when they were just taking them like, like souvenirs, but if they’retorturingthem—”

“No,” said Benedita, harshly. “We don’t have any proof this crossroads bitch is telling us the truth about what they’re doing. Maybe they just want to collect ghosts and save them for later. Maybe they think they’re laying us to rest. It doesn’t matter. We’re not running off and putting ourselves in harm’s way on her say-so.”

“I think she’s right about the rest of us getting stronger,” said Aoi hesitantly. “I can’t normally cycle through this many faces, this quickly, but right now, it feels like I could be a one-ghost improv troupe.”

Jonah glared at Benedita. She glared back.

“You found us this place, and we’re grateful,” she said. “You made sure we had a safe hole to cluster up in, and we appreciate you. But you’re still achild.You don’t get to tell us to risk ourselves.”

I blinked, slowly. Jonah was a caddis fly who’d never quitefinished forming, and his childhood home had been torn down, probably because it was considered a plague pit, then used to build new structures, like the city hall. I took another look around at the brick walls of the basement where we were hiding.

“Jonah, is part of your house here?” I asked.

He nodded, still glaring at Benedita. “They used my bricks all over the city when they pulled my house down,” he said.

“Howmuchof the city would you say has pieces of your house worked into its walls?”

“I don’t know. Everything they were building that year. The city hall, and the courtyard outside the fountain, and some old stores, like this one—it used to be a general store, and now it’s part of a strip mall. A bunch of houses. The library.”

“And you can go to any of those places?”

He nodded.

“Can you tell what’s happening inside the places you’re connected to?”

I had never heard of anything like this, a caddis being broken up and patchworked across a city, but if I could exist, so could Jonah. He frowned, face screwing up in concentration for several seconds before his eyes went wide and bright with sudden revelation. “Oh!” he said. “Oh, I canhearthem.”

“Hear who?” asked Benedita.

“All the people who live in buildings my house is a part of. There are so many. They’re having dinner, and putting kids to bed, and watching television programs, and I could join any one of them if I wanted to—”

“Focus, Jonah,” I said. “What about City Hall? What’s going on there?”

He frowned again, this time in irritation rather than confusion. “There’s a broken window, cold air over glass, and there are people who aren’t supposed to be there inside.”

“Where?”

“Basement.”

“Great. Can you take me to the lobby?”

Jonah looked surprised. “Why would you want to go—”

“I don’t know your city hall well enough to aim for somewhere specific without help, and I want to talk to these people before they realize I’m dead,” I said. I flickered, replacing my clothes with a generic security uniform, buttoned white blouse and tan slacks and a heavy black belt around my waist. My name tag said I was Eloise and that I worked for the city. Mom wouldn’t mind me borrowing her name for something this important. My hair was shoved up under a police cap that felt like a good affectation for the role.

White hair would have been a major tip-off twenty years ago, or even ten, but now, with fashionable hair colors on the rise and dye available in every corner store, it would just make me look too young for the job I was pretending to have, naïve and easy to manipulate. That was all part of the plan.

I offered Jonah one hand, pulling the flashlight from my belt with the other. “Come on, kiddo,” I said. “You can get me there.”

He took my hand, glancing anxiously at Benedita. She turned her face resentfully away, refusing to acknowledge us, and then she couldn’t acknowledge us, because we were gone.

Twelve

“Sometimes thinking about your life gives me a headache so big I think it’s going to split my skull in two.”

—Juniper Campbell

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