“I don’t really miss most of them, not in a constant way.” The admission actually felt more painful than the memory. “The only home I ever had was gone, but it never really felt like home. I should feel sad, or mourn them, or pray to the gods to care for them in the afterlife, or seek out a shaman and try to speak to them. But I don’t. I miss my family, sometimes, but the rest…”
She looked up at the silvery home of the gods stretched across the sky, then back down at Hail, who was looking at her with a blank expression, waiting, expectant.
“Hail, am I a bad person?”
Hail looked confused. “Of course not. You’re… you’re Saint Isavel.”
Isavel offered a faint smile. She hoped Hail was right. “I don’t have a duty towards the dead. My duty is towards the living, and towards the gods. Hail, I can’t tell you what you did was fine, or that you shouldn’t feel bad about it. But I can tell you that you have no duty to carry the souls of the dead after they’re gone. You have a duty to help those you still can, and follow whatever plans the gods have for you, but your only duty to the dead is… lay them to rest.”
Hail’s eyes softened a bit as she looked around. “That’s all the gods want from me? Leave them alone?”
Isavel bit her lip. From what little she had seen, she was willing to believe that Hail truly was trying to be different. She leaned forward and reached up with both arms, embracing the woman in a hug. “I can’t speak with the voice of the gods. All I can say is this - you’ve carried the dead far enough. You’ve come a long way, in life and in the world. I don’t imagine you’d be doing any of this if you weren’t trying to become more than you were, and that’s what the gods want from us all. But for what little it’s worth, I do forgive you.”
Hail hugged her back, feebly, and from the corner of her eye Isavel thought she was smiling a bit. Were those words enough? Isavel knew they weren’t enough. How could they be? She had no idea what she was saying. She had no connection to the gods, no idea what they could want from a repentant bandit and killer. She was saying whatever came to mind - but that seemed enough for Hail.
“Thank you, Saint Herald. I’ll… I’ll do that. Lay them to rest, become more than I was. I’ll do it for the gods.”
Isavel tried not to let her own uncertainty show on her face as she smiled back. Hail’s face looked relaxed, her icy blue eyes glancing away from Isavel’s face, and she thought she saw some moisture welling there. Why? What had Isavel said right?
Hail’s eyes flicked to the ground, then back up again.
“I want to join you.”
Isavel blinked. “You want to join the army?”
“Yes. I’ve been sitting here, in this city; carrying the dead, like you said. And I like to think I’ve been helping people, but the number of times I’ve actually done anything more than just keep an eye out for danger…”
She looked at her hands, calling up the hexagonal shards of light that marked a hunter’s deadliest powers.
“The gods gave me this gift, and they gave me the chance to meet you, too. Maybe… Maybe I should make sure I actually use the gift they gave me. For a good cause. What do you think? Does that make sense with the gods’ plan?”
Isavel pursed her lips. “I have no idea what the gods have planned for anyone but me.” If only she knew even that much. “But I’d be happy to have you with us, Hail.”
Hail smiled, and this seemed like as good a time as any to finish the conversation. Isavel stood up, and reaching out a hand, she pulled Hail to her feet as well. They looked out of the city, towards an army that was settling in for a night’s rest. They would leave in the morning, and hopefully the end of the war wouldn’t be far behind.
“Feel free to say your goodbyes overnight. We’ll leave in the morning, and hopefully we’ll find and break the ghost shrine not long after that.”
Hail nodded. “I’ll pack what I have, but I don’t really have any goodbyes to say.”
Isavle glanced at Hail, reading the flat resignation on her face. This was apparently not the first time that statement would have applied. “I’ll see you in the camp tomorrow then, either way.”
Hail nodded, and bowed at the shoulder, blushing a little. “Thank you again, Saint Isavel. For listening to me.”
Isavel smiled back. “I just do what I can, Hail.”
She made her way back to the camp, alone, and found her way into Sorn’s tent. A good night’s rest came not long after. Whatever would happen as they marched north-east, towards the shrine, was for another day to decide.
Chapter 8
When Ada hauled Sam out of the cockpit and shoved him onto the ground in front of Tanos and Zhilik, Tanos’ first reaction was to ignore Sam completely. Instead, he gaped wide-eyed at Cherry. “Holy shit. I mean, I saw your ship from far away, but… wow.”
Ada rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, it’s a spaceship. We need to talk about something more important - this guy.”
Sam glanced at her as though the term hurt him. “Wow, I’m honoured. Can you at least undo my hands?”
Ada turned to her ship. “Cherry, shoot him if he attacks us?”
“Yes, Ada.”
Ada smiled and knelt down, untying the ghost’s hands and hauling him to his feet. “Now then - Zhilik, Tanos, I’d like you to meet Sam.”
Zhilik looked at the man curiously, ears twitching, but it was Tanos who spoke first. “So what? New boyfriend?”
“No, you idiot. He’s a ghost.”
Anger split across Tanos’ face all at once, and he pulled a long gun up from his side, aiming it straight at Sam’s face. Fuck. She kicked Sam out of the way just as Tanos pulled the trigger, a long slice of white light cracking through the empty space where Sam’s head had been just a moment before.
In the confusion, even as Tanos started squawking something, Ada stepped forward and wrenched his gun up, pointing it in the air and glaring him in the eyes. “Calm the fuck down!”
“A ghost! A fucking ghost! Ada, what the hell are you doing with a ghost here? Are we going to interrogate him, figure out how to kill the rest of them?”
She turned to Sam, who was starting to stand again, and pointed at him. “You - don’t move. Tanos - no, I’m not going to torture him, that’s pointless. You think he’s afraid of death? He’s already died once before. That’s the point, Tanos.”
“What point? He’s an evil spirit, he’s just going to stab -”
“No, he’s not an evil spirit.”
Tanos cocked an eyebrow. “Are you hearing yourself? Have you gone completely crazy? You told me the stories -”
Crazy. What was it the people at the Institute had called her, when she practiced her heresy? Ah, yes. She stepped forward and punched Tanos in the jaw. He reeled, staggering back and tripping over a rock.
“Ow! What the fuck was that for?”
“ Don’t call me crazy.” She glared at Tanos. Zhilik had taken a step back from the two humans. “I know better than anyone what’s going on here.”
“So fucking enlighten me.”
“What are ghosts?” She looked at her two companions. “Zhilik? Tanos?”
Zhilik seemed to know, but he was clearly not interested in trying to cut the tension here, and his body language was closed. Tanos kept his mouth shut. Ada huffed.
“They’re what happens to everybody, after death. All of us, Tanos - your dead parents, your dead neighbours, and you yourself when you die. We all go to the afterlife, and that’s all there is in the afterlife - dead souls. No spirits. And the ghosts are the dead, returned from the afterlife in stolen bodies. They were alive, once, just like you and me - and we’ll be dead like them one day.”
Tanos looked to Zhilik, and the outer nodded, ears swivelling around. “It seems true, from what little we know.”
Tanos didn’t seem to like that explanation. “No way. The dead wouldn’t come back and steal living bodies. They live in the afterlife, peacefully.”
“Peace?” Sam scowled and spat. “O
f the worst fucking kind. There’s nothing there except silence, darkness, and fragments of broken light. Your bodies isn’t even whole, and it’s constantly being torn at. You meet other people - suddenly, because you can’t see them - and they’re all just screaming, or dead inside. It hurts, and it lasts centuries - forever, if you don’t escape.”
Ada remembered the bubble around the walker she had seen east of Glass Peaks, almost a moon ago. Black void, jagged white fragments, and ghosts coming out of it. “From what I’ve seen, and from what the gods told me on the ring, he’s telling the truth. I want to fix that, because if I don’t I’ll end up there someday too.”
Tanos looked between her and Sam. “So, what, you’re going to team up with the ghosts?”
“Yes. If they want to.”
Tanos blinked. “That was a joke. You’re serious?”
“Completely. Sam says I might be able to convince them to help me.”
“Help you do what?”
“Whatever is necessary. I don’t even know yet! All I know is I have to get to that damned control centre and fix it. The ghosts can help me keep away the humans - they’re trying to find it too it, and I don’t trust them with -”
“They’re literally trying to destroy it.” Sam’s voice was flat.
Ada looked over to Zhilik, and his eyes spoke of shared pain of some kind. He must know what she knew - to destroy the simulation control centre was not just to disconnect the ghosts from the real world, but also to destroy the afterlife itself. Blocked from entering from the thousand worlds, and with no Elysium to go to after death, every human mind would simply vanish into nothing.
Nothing at all.
Worse than darkness, worse than the broken afterlife.
She rounded on Sam. “Are you fucking serious? Why?”
“To stop us ghosts forever.”
Tanos nodded. “I like that idea. Ada, let’s do that instead.”
She rounded on Tanos. “You're an idiot! If they destroy that thing they’re not locking the ghosts away - they’re destroying the afterlife! ”
Tanos looked at her, glancing up at the ring and back down. “That’s impossible. The gods wouldn’t let that happen.”
“The gods can’t do anything about the afterlife. Tanos, listen to me! We need to fix the afterlife, and stop that army. If we do, the ghosts stop their war and live in peace, and we all have somewhere to go when we die! Why are you being so fucking difficult?”
He threw up his arms. “I don’t know, because ghosts possessed or killed almost everyone I ever knew, after which you abandoned me?”
Sam spat back at him. “If you’d died and spent centuries in that fucking hell, you wouldn’t think it was so simple. We’re trying to escape the mess you living people put us in! And once we’re able to walk freely in this world, we’ll try to fix it. It’s a necessary sacrifice! I remember the time before the Ghost War, and things were better! We were… getting used to it. I was almost happy, damn it! It was your fucking coders and outers who came along and messed it up.”
Zhilik flatted his ears, but Ada also saw the academic curiosity sparked by the words. “What do you remember of the Ghost War?”
Sam shrugged his shoulders, shaking his head with the look of someone who didn’t want to talk about it. “It was the Starshadow and that fucking cult that started the Ghost War. Hell, most of the dead and a lot of the spirits fought back! We tried to stop them from the inside. The living didn’t fucking care, though, eh? You split the dead from the thousand worlds and ruined the afterlife in the process..”
Ada frowned. “Wait, what’s the Starshadow? What cult?”
“Some twisted spirit convinced a few religious freaks they needed to reclaim real bodies and live in the real world, because the afterlife was an illusion. It broke some kind of barrier, made the first ghosts. Most people thought it was crazy. Why would we want to leave? Sure, it wasn’t strictly real stuff you were touching, but the thousand worlds had real people, real feelings, real lives. There was never a reason to steal bodies! We never asked for this, but then everything got taken away. What choice do we have now?”
Ada saw rage and pain carved into Sam’s face, and it wasn’t hard to imagine why. One day, much as she might not like to think about it, she would die - and if the afterlife she arrived into was a mad world devoid of reason or comfort, she would be really fucking angry. Angry enough to destroy human lives? Probably. She had killed for less, and it didn’t keep her up at night. Would knowing their minds vanished entirely change things?
“What happened to the Starshadow?”
Sam flapped his hand. “One of us hunted and killed it, not long before the living split the afterlife from the thousand worlds. Stalked it and learned all about it, for months, to get close enough and smart enough to finish it off. A lot of us fought alongside him. We thought he was a hero, thought he’d ended the war. Turns out that didn’t matter out here. Fucked us over anyway.”
Ada looked at her own hands, real skin and bone and blood. An afterlife where, after death, she could continue to feel exactly the same way, without further death or aging. That notion stood in sharp contrast to the black and white hell she had seen around the ghosts in the firelit village east of Glass Peaks. “Coders and outers destroyed the afterlife.”
Zhilik flatted his ears again, protesting. “We did our best with the knowledge we had.”
“It’s not your fault, but when your ancestors’ best destroys worlds and you still hold their power and knowledge, I’d say the responsibility falls to you. And me - same damned story. Sam, you’re not even the same damned ghosts as last time, right? You don’t want bodies -”
“Of course we want bodies.” Sam pointed behind himself. “Anything is better than being stuck in there. I don’t want to go back.”
“But possessing bodies isn’t your core goal. You just don’t want to suffer, and you’re willing to possess to avoid it.”
Sam threw up his hands. “If you’re feeling generous, sure. That’s why I joined. That’s why everyone I know joined. We want to live again, the way the afterlife was meant to be - and the truth is, unless someone fixes it, we’re going to have to keep taking new bodies as these ones age and die. The Master has been talking about farms. If we just let ourselves die again… We can’t. It’s indescribable.”
Ada blinked in horror. “Farms? As in, human farms? ”
“Yes. So that we never need to go back into the afterlife until it’s restored - if that ever happens.”
Ada clenched her fists at the thought of it. It made a horrible, disgusting kind of sense. Sam was already beaten, bloodied, bruised - but he stood there, an emissary for the monstrous rage of his people. A monstrous rage she knew she might be all too happy to feel herself, if she were denied an afterlife.
She lashed out, struck him across the face and sending him down to the ground.
Tanos spat. “And you want to work with these things? They’re insane!”
Ada breathed heavily, heart pounding. She had to work with them. She had to. She had no choice. Sam wasn’t even looking back at her. He was staring into nothingness, head lying on the ground, drooling out blood. “Yes.”
Tanos blinked. “What?”
“Yes, I want to work with them.”
“Are you serious?”
She turned on Tanos.
“If I don’t work with them, I’ll either fade into nothing after death, or I’ll become them . And I don’t want to do that. You don’t want to do that, either of you.”
Tanos gritted his teeth, but Zhilik piped up a correction. “My people do not partake in your afterlife. It was only built for you. We await only darkness after death.”
That revelation hit Ada like a rock, and she sputtered. “Well, that’s just... completely fucking horrifying, Zhilik. I don’t even… Look, I don’t even know how we could possibly get you into the afterlife after you die. I wish I could, but right now, this is the problem I can fix, at least for some of us.”
“If you want to become a ghost like the rest of them when you die someday, you can fuck right off. Is that what you want? To become a body-thieving soul-killer?”
Tanos pursed his lips. “Of course not.”
“To be fair, Ada, you’ve murdered your fair share.” Sam raised an eyebrow. “You blew away the Mayor of Hive pretty damn casually.”
Zhilik and Tanos both looked at her blankly. Gods, this was getting far too difficult. Zhilik flatted his ears again, looking nervous. “Killing the Mayor may destabilize the city, leading more of the inhabitants to fight the ghosts.”
“He was in my way, and he was an asshole.” She could see Zhilik curl his nose, though, and knew he thought this was a strategic mistake. Maybe he was right.
Sam grimaced but said nothing, instead scratching furiously at his beard. Gods, why did he keep doing that? She grunted.
“All right - Zhilik, Tanos, I don’t want you two getting closer to the ghosts than necessary. I’ve got Cherry and the gods watching my back, but you two don’t.”
Sam coughed. “We can’t actually steal an outer’s body. It doesn’t work like that. Only human-like brains are vulnerable. Hell, I don’t even think outers actually appear in the walk, though don’t ask me where they go.”
“Fine, but Tanos is still vulnerable. Damn it, Tanos, you’re not even supposed to be here!”
He looked furious. “Ada, you can’t just keep dumping me in the middle of the woods! I want to help. Hell, I did help! I helped get you into that tower in Hive! You can’t just keep telling me to go away!”
Ada felt a pang of guilt for that. It was true, he was not entirely useless - but making her worry would more than outbalance all the other things he might be able to do. She wanted to have to worry about as few people as humanly possible. “I don’t want you getting killed!”
“What do you even care? I’m disposable to you anyway, might as well drag me along into the wolves’ den.”
“That’s not true!”
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