Which was how I saw a figure flitting away on the opposite side of the cell, toward a long line of them, stretching toward the horizon.
I ran after her.
This place had weird static in the air that burst on my vision here and there, like tiny, too-close fireworks. It kept making me jerk my head back, and should have made her hard to see. But people were clearer than the walls, more solid—like Rosier, when I glanced over my shoulder, huddled near my collapsed form. His features were blurry at this distance, but his body was a solid chunk of off-white.
Like the figure who had just darted behind another cell.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Please! I need to talk to you!”
Only to find her gone when I rounded the corner.
Because she was hiding on the other side of the cell.
“I can see you!” I pointed out, and heard what sounded suspiciously like a giggle. “I can hear you, too!”
A hand came up to cover her mouth. And then she was off again, flitting across the barren landscape like a tissue blown on the breeze, and faster than me because she was used to this. I was only a temporary ghost, while she’d been at it for years.
I knew that because I knew her.
I put on a burst of speed, following her zigzag course between several more cells. And then abruptly reversed it, going around the other way on the next one, watching her parallel me on the opposite side. And keep checking behind her, but never once glancing across at me.
Until she ran straight into me.
&nb
sp; Her head was still turned around, looking behind her, when we collided. And I got blown backward for my trouble, ten or twelve feet, because ghosts don’t take sudden scares any better than humans. “Aughhhh!” she screamed, staring at me as I lay there, looking up at her in confusion. “Aughhhh!”
And then she turned and fled.
Straight into a cell up ahead.
I scrambled to my feet and followed.
“Would you relax?” a man’s voice said as I stepped through the wall. “I told you they can’t follow us in— Shit!” That last was in response to his turning and seeing me. For a moment, we just stared at each other.
Well, I stared. He glared. It didn’t do his slightly horsey features any favors. And the rest of him wasn’t much more impressive, being tall and lanky, with a too-prominent Adam’s apple and a mane of blond hair that was getting dangerously close to a mullet.
But I stared anyway. Even though I’d half expected it, considering that I’d recognized the ghost. But it was still a surprise.
My father turned up in the weirdest of places.
And he never seemed happy to see me in any of them. “You!” he snarled.
“Me,” I agreed. “Look—”
“Save it!” It was venomous. “I’ve nothing to say to you people!”
“I—there’s no ‘you people.’ There’s just me—”
“Your bitch friend take the day off?”
“What?” I said, confused. And not just because I was talking to my long-dead father while one of his pet ghosts made little hissing noises at me from near the ceiling. But because he looked like he had no idea who I was.
And then I noticed his clothes: singed-knee pants, dirty white hose, a puffy shirt, and a pair of neatly buckled shoes—Pilgrim-style. He looked like he’d just stepped out of the sixteen hundreds. And then I saw the hat sticking out of his pack, a wide, floppy-brimmed number with a distinct bullet hole in it, one Agnes had given him at our first meeting.
And by the look of things, that had been pretty damn recent.
Well, recent from his perspective.