Banshee’s eyes met mine.
She saw me.
They say that dogs — some dogs — can see things in the unseen world. Junie tells me that kind of thing all the time. Dogs can see spirits. And ghosts.
Banshee could see me.
Me.
I screamed.
And a voice said, “Hit him again.”
“Charging… charging… clear!”
I blinked and it was bright daylight.
Mr. Church stood in the shadows thrown by a huge old oak tree. Autumn leaves blew gently across the tops of the autumn grass and between the rows of headstones. In the trees, birds sang songs of leaving and of farewell; the songs they sing before they all fly away because winter is coming.
The cemetery was quiet and still green. Church wore a topcoat and he had one gloved hand in his pocket. The other held the hand of a tall, stern-faced woman who wore a ruby red cloth coat and a broad-brimmed gray hat.
Lilith. She looked older than I remembered. Not much, just a little. Not Church, though. He never seems to change. His face was hard, though, without trace of humor or hope.
They stood looking down at a gravestone. I didn’t need to read the name on it to know what I was seeing. They did not speak for a long time and I thought they wouldn’t. Then Church broke the silence.
“I did not see this coming,” he said. “I should have. This is my fault.”
“How many times will you be betrayed before you realize that you should never trust anyone? You believe in people, St. Germaine. That will always get you hurt. It always has.”
“This war is to protect people.”
“We’ll never agree on that,” she said.
Church looked at her. “What can we agree on?”
“The war is the war,” she said softly. “No matter how many of our family we have to bury, we still have to fight.”
Church drew in a breath, sighed, nodded.
Then he stiffened and turned, his eyes searching the graveyard as if he’d heard something.
“What is it?” asked Lilith, releasing his hand and reaching under her coat, half-drawing a concealed pistol.
Church said nothing. His roving eyes stopped and fixed on one point.
He looked directly at me.
Like Banshee, I think he could see me.
But how? What did that mean? What does something like that mean about a person? How could any ordinary person see me?
I was dead, after all. I was dead and time had passed. The grass on my grave looked old.
White-hot light blasted me out of that moment.
I saw Bug in his office. The threadbare goatee he’d been trying to grow these last few months was now a full beard. Scraggly and unkempt. Like the rest of him. Bug was a small guy, thin and nerdy, but that had changed. Now he was a skeleton, a stick figure. Gaunt, with hollow cheeks and dark smudges under his eyes. His hair was badly brushed and his nails were bitten down to raw flesh.
He was at his console in the MindReader clean room. Except it wasn’t clean. His desk was a mess, littered with pizza boxes and plastic plates on which half-eaten food was going bad. Cans of Red Bull and empty coffee cups were everywhere. Amid the detritus was a framed picture of his mother, murdered by the Seven Kings. There was a picture tacked to a wall-mounted corkboard. Grace Courtland, my former lover and a victim of the Jakobys. That corkboard was crammed with photos, many of them overlapping like a pile of dead leaves. I saw my old teammates John Smith and Khalid Shaheed. I saw Colonel Samson Riggs and Sergeant Gus Dietrich. I saw so many of the people I’d known and fought alongside. The people I helped bury.
And there, in one corner, was my own face.
And Top Sims and Bunny.
Lydia Ruiz was there, too. And Sam Imura.
All of us.
All of the dead.
I wanted to yell at Bug, to tell him that Lydia and Sam and a lot of the others weren’t dead, that he was wrong.
But he wasn’t wrong. This was Bug but this wasn’t now. This was what the world was going to do. To us and to Bug. There was none of the innocence left in his face. All of the joy of life had been bled out of his eyes and all that remained was fear and hate.
So much fear. So much hate.
If the world could destroy someone like Bug, if the things that bad people do could erase the powerful innocence of a person like him, then what hope was there for anyone else?
I wanted to say something to him, to warn him to step back from the abyss, to find an anchor for his hope. To continue being alive while he was alive. But I wasn’t Jacob Marley and this wasn’t a Christmas story with a happy ending.
Blast. The bright heat.
Again.
I saw something else, something that shifted my brain into another gear without bothering to use the clutch.
It was me.
In bed. Hooked up to fifty kinds of weird machines that beeped and pinged and insisted that I was still alive. Some kind of alive. Not the good kind. I looked thinner, wasted, smaller, deader.
But not dead.
I was in an oxygen tent and there was a man with me. He wore a hazmat suit, but I could see his face. I knew him.
Dr. William Hu.
He sat in a chair beside my bed, bent forward as he read through a thick stack of medical test reports. His face was drawn but his eyes were intense. The floor around him was littered with papers.
“No,” he said, and flung a file folder away. He read through the next one, growled the same thing. “No.”
It went soaring across the room.
“No.
“No.
“Goddamn it, fucking no.”
He was alone and I was sleeping. Or in a coma. But somehow I knew he was talking to both of us. He flung down another report.
“Don’t you goddamn die on me, Ledger. Don’t you do it. I won’t let you die, you son of a bitch.”
I watched him search for answers. I watched Dr. Hu fight for me. As if my life actually mattered to him. Maybe it did. I can’t stand the guy. Never could. He hates me, too. So not once have I ever wondered how deep that animosity ran.
Perspective is every bit as sharp a knife as assumptions are dull.
“Shit,” he snarled. “No, no, no.”
Blast.
I was elsewhere.
And somewhere else again. And somewhere else after that.
Was this the same thing that happened back under the ice when I was in the bedroom of the cottage shared by Bunny and Lydia? Was I walking through someone else’s life again? Is that what the dead do? Is a haunting some kind of perverse peeping Tom show that never ends?
I saw the man with the blurry face several more times. Nearby. At a distance.
And I realized that I’d seen him once before. When I was awake. When I was alive.
Down in the ice. Down in the frozen cavern of Gateway. He’d been there, ducking out of sight right as everything started going to hell.
Who was he?
What was he?
Blast.
Elsewhere.
This time I didn’t know where I was.
For a moment I thought I was back inside the cave down in the Antarctic. It was a cave and it was huge, but…
It was hot. Geothermal heat. I could see steam rise from vents off to my right. Huge columns rose twisting toward a ceiling that was so vast it was lost in shadows. Every once in a while static lightning flashed within that smoke, and in the strobe bursts of light I saw things.
There was a machine. The same one we saw in the ancient city. A massive ring of steel and copper and glittering jewels.