Page 8 of Installment Immortality

Verity hadn’t been my primary charge for very long. As the family babysitter, all the kids are my responsibility, but the majority of my focus is always on the youngest. It’s not fair, since it reduces all children to ages rather than individuals, but the younger a child is, the more likely they are to need constant supervision, and the little compass in my head that tells me where my family is had always seized on that need as a form of guide. Verity had been born only a little while before her cousin Arthur, and so I’d been pulled away from taking constant care of her before we’d been able to make much of an impression on each other.

To me, she’d always been one more child in a swarm of children I knew better, and to her, I’d always been something she’d been denied by the order of her birth. It wasn’t fair, but it was the way it was. I still cared about her desperately, and I always would.

Sarah sighed. “She’s still in New York,” she said. “After we… after…”

“It’s all right,” I said gently. “I know what happened.” Verity’shusband, Dominic, had been one of the casualties of the early days of our war against the Covenant. They’d set an ambush, and Dom and Verity ran right into it. His death was quick and traumatic, and his ghost hadn’t lingered, or if it had, it hadn’t manifested yet by the time I got discorporated.

Sarah nodded. “She said it was better if Livvy stayed here with us until she felt a little bit more like herself, and nothing in her thoughts sounded like following Dominic into the afterlife, so we let her go. She calls every night so she can tell Liv a bedtime story, and Uncle Mike is there with her.”

“All right. As long as she’s not alone.” If she didn’t want to be here with her family, New York was a good place for Verity. She had friends there, good ones, the kind who would make sure she ate and showered and didn’t jump off too many buildings. It would still have been better for her to be in Portland with her daughter, but I could understand why she wouldn’t want to be. If I knew Verity at all, she was going to be struggling with her own culpability in this entire situation. She’d been the one to set the Covenant off this time, and she was the reason Dominic had been anywhere near the battlefield.

That didn’t make this herfault.If there was any fault to be handed out, it belonged to the people who’d decided they had the holy right to assault us because we weren’t all perfectly, impeccably human. But we’d all played our part in things getting as bad as they had, and Verity had always been remarkably good at dodging the consequences of her own actions. She wasn’t used to things having permanent costs.

Sarah nodded again.

“Do you ever go there to see her?”

“Sometimes,” she said, and looked away.

Sarah could move through space as easily as the dead did, bending the innate math of distance to wind up wherever she felt she needed to be. It had been a relatively new skill of hers the last timeI’d seen her, but she’d been getting steadily better. She referred to it as spatial tunneling, and while it had its limitations, some of the things she’d said made me suspect that those limits weren’t going to exist forever.

Her steadily increasing power was honestly a little frightening, even to me—and I was already dead. I didn’t have anything left to lose, not in the traditional manner. She was the most sophisticated example of her species we’d ever found ourselves dealing with, and no one knew what she was going to be capable of in the end.

Whatever it was, she’d still be our Sarah, and our ally. That was enough to keep me from getting too worked up about it.

We walked through the empty living room to the hallway beyond, from which various parts of the house could be accessed—most importantly the kitchen and the main living room. People could usually be found in one of those places, if not both of them. My family liked their coffee and their cushions when they weren’t traveling, and those things could be found in the living room/kitchen area with reasonable reliability.

As we got closer, I heard voices, and Sarah’s hand closed around my wrist like a vise, stopping me before I could go any farther. I tried to go insubstantial and pull through her fingers, but nothing happened. I blinked down at my arm, staring at the place where she held me. Nothing changed.

I was as solid as a living girl, and as trapped.

Sarah’s eyes flashed white, and her voice filled my head.

You weren’t here. We buried Jane and Dominic, and you weren’t here. If you’re planning to just run off on us again, you’d better think twice, because I don’t think Uncle Kevin will be okay if you do that.

I blinked at her, and thought back, as clearly as I could,I’m not planning to go anywhere unless someone needs me. Livvy is still technically the youngest.

The anima mundi had said that I’d still be able to be there formy family. But she could be expecting me to be there on a bus. We’d find out when someone younger than Livvy came along.

Sarah glanced guiltily away. I blinked.

“What don’t I know?” I asked, aloud.

Sarah didn’t look back.

“What don’t I know?” I repeated, slightly louder. If she wanted to keep me quiet, this wasn’t the way to go about it. “I’m warning you, Sarah, Iwillstart yelling if you don’t—”

“Verity was pregnant when Dominic died,” she blurted. I stared in shock as she turned back to me, her pale cheeks wan in the interior light. Cuckoos aren’t mammals, and they don’t have hemoglobin the way humans do. Their blood is clear and viscous, like mucus. No matter how distressed Sarah was, she would never redden or blush. “She’s about eight months along now. Evie’s been trying to convince her to come home for the birth, but she says she wants to stay in New York, that she feels closer to Dominic there, even though he was buried here. I’ve been attending all her prenatal visits and holding her hands. It’s a boy.”

Now that I knew what I was listening for, I could hear a faint hum in the distance, like a note from a tuning fork. It would get stronger once the baby was born, and start becoming unique to him almost immediately, distinguishing itself from the rest of the family.

Hearing it was a relief. It meant my connections were still open, even if my intangibility was on the fritz. Honestly, being unable to pass through Sarah’s grip reminded me of my first days among the dead, back when I’d been reasonably recently deceased and still trying to figure out how to control my various ghostly abilities. Being solid had been hard back then. Being intangible had been even harder. It was like having to focus on every aspect of my existence.

The thought was followed by another: maybe Iwasrecently deceased, in a way. The blast in the basement of Penton Hall hadblown me apart, scattered me across the starlight like a phantasmal glitter bomb. The anima mundi had gathered all my parts back together and sort of glued them together to give me the time to heal.

And something about that process had shaken the cemetery sky straight out of my eyes. I was a different kind of ghost now, no longer a hybrid of crossroads and babysitter, but a caretaker from one end to the other. So maybe I needed to behave like someone who had only just died, who was still figuring things out. Maybe I needed to relax.

As if on cue, my wrist passed through Sarah’s fingers, and I was free. I raised it to my chest, rubbing it with the opposite hand, and was pleased to find that both halves of me seemed to be equally solid. The last thing I needed was to be halfway walking through things and halfway not, like some sort of conscious transitory state.

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