Page 52 of Installment Immortality

“Oh, no,” I said, and I meant it. “I’m so sorry.”

We knew when we set off the bombs that people were going to be hurt. We’d been hoping for it, even—what was the point of an attack that didn’t hurt anybody? We wanted the Covenant to go away and leave us alone, and that meant making a point they couldn’t ignore. But there was an abstract “people might get hurt,” and then there was someone right in front of me with hollow, grief-struck eyes, telling me that I had helped to kill her mother.

I spent decades working for the crossroads. I killed a lot of people’s mothers, either because they came to us with a petition and the price destroyed them, or because they’d been collateral damage to someone else’s bargain. I killed a lot of people, period. And none of that made it any easier to face this girl who looked a few years younger than Antimony and know, completely, that I had put her mother in the ground.

“So we’re going to hunt down every ghost in the world andmake sure they can’t hurt anyone else,” she continued, as if that were a perfectly reasonable, proportionate response. My brief spark of sympathy flared and died.

“Ah,” I said.

“My mother is alive and well,” said the darker-skinned man, accent South American and sweet. “She’s back home in Brazil, waiting for me to return and tell her that my sister’s soul is finally at rest.”

“Your sister?” I asked, dreadfully afraid I already knew the answer he was going to give me.

“She was a foolish girl. She ran afoul of a silbón in the club where she spent her nights, and she danced with him until dawn. She returned the next night to do it again, and again the night after that, and every night until he had drained the life from her body and she collapsed in the street, old beyond her years, with a heart as worn and tattered as tissue paper. We buried her in holy ground and thought to grieve her in peace, only for people to see her at the club the night after her funeral. She had risen as a midnight beauty, compelled to return from beyond the grave by her cruel lover. I will find her, and I will bring her home to our family, where she can rest at last.”

That explained Benedita’s reaction when Aoi had put on the man’s face. He was her brother. All these people had been victimized by the dead, one way or another, and all of them were good arguments for why the twilight and the daylight needed to stay separate.

And I couldn’t feel too bad for them, because their response to that victimization was to turn around and hurt people who didn’t have anything to do with their fight. It didn’t matter that the people they were hurting were already dead: we were still here, we had feelings and dreams and reasons to keep existing, and as far as I could tell, Agnes and Martha had never hurt anyone. These people were lashing out in all the wrong directions.

I unfolded my arms. “Gosh, those are some sad stories,” I said. “Guess I could understand why you wouldn’t want to go on television and tell the whole world how the ghosts hurt you.”

“Thank you,” said the first man. “Now if you could just—”

“But I didn’t hear anything about you being allowed in the building after we locked up for the night, and I really need this job. So if you want to wait here for a minute, I’ll go back to the lobby and call the mayor’s nighttime office. They can tell me if he gave you a pass to come in while we’re closed.”

His face fell, then slammed shut, all geniality gone in an instant and replaced by a hard, cold shell of businesslike efficiency. “I don’t think you want to do that,” he said. His free hand dipped into the pocket of his jacket, and produced a Taser.

I blinked at him, trying to maintain the aura of guileless, somewhat bumbling security guard that I’d been projecting thus far. “Gosh, mister,” I said, aware even as I spoke that I was on the cusp of laying it on too thickly. But then, none of these folks were from around here. Maybe they’d assume all American teenagers talked like me. Sorry, American teens. “I didn’t know you could hurt ghosts with a Taser.”

“You can’t.”

“So why are you carrying one?” I let my eyes go wide and round. “Unless you’re going to hurt something that’s not a ghost.”

“I don’t want to,” he said, and he sounded almost sincere; I could almost believe him. “If you just turn around and walk away, and promise not to call anyone about us being here, I won’t have to.”

“If you really believe that, then you’re as tactically inexperienced as you look, and you have no business being in the field,” I said.

“What?” he asked, looking genuinely startled. So did his sister. Benedita’s brother was a bit older, or just a little more jaded, because he looked less surprised than he did resigned, moving closer to his companions with a small frown on his face.

“You can’t let me walk away,” I said, shiningmyflashlight fullinhisface for a change. “Even if I promise not to call anyone, I’ll have seen your faces. I’ll be able to identify you on the street. And I know you’re creeping around government buildings at night with a Taser in your hand, which isn’t the sort of thing a security guard is supposed to just let go. It would be worth my job.”

“Is your job worth letting yourself be shocked into unconsciousness?” asked the girl, sounding genuinely concerned.

“In this economy it might be, if this were my job,” I said.

“What do you mean?” asked the man, warily.

I measured the distance between me and the girl with her so-threatening jar. Sure, it was open, and sure, it was technically magic, but it wasn’t a vacuum cleaner. She’d need to be much closer to threaten me properly.

I grinned, a little manically. “Dead people don’t normally have jobs,” I said.

To my surprise, the man with the Taser laughed, lowering it. “Is that so?” he asked. “Anything else you want to tell us about how ghosts work?”

I blinked. “Not really,” I said. “There’s being a good neighbor, and then there’s giving information to the enemy, and I prefer to stay on the side of the equation where I don’t wind up in a jar.”

The woman was the first to get my meaning. Her eyes widened incrementally, and she began trying to ease her way forward, past the man with the Taser. He didn’t move out of her way. He was too busy staring at me like I had suddenly become a puzzle very much in need of solving. I raised my free hand—the one that wasn’t holding the flashlight—and wiggled my fingers in a mocking wave. If I timed this right, it would be the wave that he remembered, the feeling of dismissal that it carried. It would haunt him when he tried to sleep.

“Boo,” I said, and vanished.

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