Chapter 4: Half a Ghost for a Whole Pass

Milo counted the others before he looked at the building, because the others were the part that could be turned into something.

Five on the tile with him. The big one — Brett, six foot something, arm already around a short-haired girl and no plan to take it off. Owen, two rows over in fourth period, who had never raised his hand in four months and hadn’t raised it now. A small sharp-faced boy with his chin up, working at it. The girl in the white dress, hair in two braids, a cardigan over it, dressed like the field trip was going to be photographed.

Five. Six with him.

One adult, then. Milo ran it the way he ran everything, and it came back ugly: six kids, one proctor, an A-class building, and a district that had decided one grown-up was enough to look after the lot of them. Which meant the looking-after was going to happen from somewhere high up and far away, by somebody who had already decided how the day was going to go.

That’s not a field trip. That’s a standardized test with a body count.

He put it away. He was good at putting things away.

The hospital took up the end of the courtyard: six stories of brick, one wing paler than the rest, most of the windows dark, a few of them doing something that wasn’t quite flickering. Around the property, a wall. Fifteen feet of cinder block with an iron gate in it, and the gate had been chained a dozen times over, and every link of those chains had sealwork cut into it, thin and tight and still wet-looking.

Past the gate: fog, and blood, and a sound like a wet towel going through a machine.

Then the paper came down.

It came fast and stopped a foot off the ground, as if it had found a shelf. Man-shaped, folded, layered, the seams showing — a ridge down each arm, a crooked line up the middle of the chest where somebody had joined the two halves badly. Straw out of the cuffs. A face painted on: two dots, a curve, and a chip out of one end of the curve so that one side of the smile rode higher than the other, and in the crack between them something dark that had dried there.

“Morning,” it said. Brisk. Cheerful. A voice with no business coming out of paper.

Nobody said anything. Somebody behind Milo took a step back without seeming to know they had.

Milo filed it under the only name that fit. The straw man.

“Background first, then the fun part.” The painted head turned a few degrees. “You’re in Halcyon. Which is a thing people used to say. Two years ago the north end didn’t hold — the surge came through around three in the morning, and by the next afternoon there was nobody left in this city who was still alive in it. Two full crews came in after that. Neither one came out. The Bureau lost good people here, and that’s not a reason for you to be scared, it’s a reason for you to be careful, and there’s a difference. Write it down or remember it, whichever’s cheaper.”

Nobody wrote anything down.

“This is Halcyon General,” the straw man said, and lifted one paper hand without turning its head, so the whole folded body rocked a degree. “The Bureau’s registry has it as Mercy General now, on account of a committee, and I’m told there was a reason. Doesn’t matter. What matters is the seal. Bureau ran a perimeter through the walls and out past the fence. Nothing in here gets out. Nothing out there gets in, and that includes on exam day. You’re not going to be surprised by something off the street. You’re going to be surprised by something off the fifth floor, which is why we’re going to go over this once and then stop talking.”

The paper hand came down.

“Count in the building is under twenty, per the survey. The survey’s two years old, so treat it like a rumor with a number on it.”

“Your exam. One: survive the day. Twenty-four hours, bell to bell, and we come and get you. Two: bind one ghost before the bell. Bind one and you pass. That’s the whole thing.” It paused. “Counted by number, not by grade. A remnant counts as one, same as a full one, same as a thing with six arms. I say that every year, and every year somebody comes out of a haunt with half a ghost and wants to argue about it.”

“What if your bond cap is point five,” Milo said.

He had moved up a step while the straw man was talking, and he let that be true.

The two painted dots came around.

“Now that’s a good question, and the good part is the answer doesn’t cost me anything. If your cap is half, then one is what you’re holding, and a remnant is exactly your size. Going bigger makes you a fool. Going home empty makes you a fool. Half a ghost for a whole pass is a bargain or it isn’t, depending who you ask.” The painted smile didn’t move. “Which kind are you?”

“Haven’t decided,” Milo said.

“Ha.” It said it without the mouth doing anything. “Anything else, before I hand these out.”

“Say we’re in there and it’s going badly,” Brett said. His hand hadn’t moved off the girl’s shoulder since they landed. “What do we — there’s got to be a—“

“Right. These.” The straw man pinched its own chest and tore six pieces off itself, one after another, and fanned them like cards. Each was the size of a business card and had the same fine lines cut into it as the chains. “Transit slips. One each. You tear it and you’re in the gym before your hand comes down. Not a penalty. Not a fail. It’s your one thing, so don’t give it to a friend and don’t put it in a pocket with a hole in it.”

It handed them out and read names off the corner of each one as it went. “Sunderland, L. Nash, T. Grant, M.”

“When?” Owen said.

“When you’re about to die. Not when you’re scared, not when you’re tired, not when the day’s gone sideways on you. When you’re about to die.” The painted head ticked. “And because this is where I stop being nice: plenty of people leave it too late, or get greedy, or think they can get one more thing out of a room before they go. We find those ones. Usually not in one piece, and always with the slip still in their hand. If you die in there, you die for a high school credit, and I’ve watched it happen.”

The straw wrists came back down.

“One more, then I’ll get out of your way. The Bureau likes this exam and the Bureau has money. Bind or kill a malevolent-grade and you get the ribbon for the year, plus a Green-Corpse core out of the requisition pool. Auction price on one of those runs a hundred thousand dollars, give or take, and ‘give or take’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence.” The head ticked. “That’s a down payment on a house. It’s also how people end up dead in a stairwell. Those are the only two places that ribbon comes from.”

Nobody asked anything else.

“Then good luck to you all,” the straw man said. “And remember — I’ll be right up there.”

It went up. Straight up, no fuss, and stopped at the height of the fourth floor and hung there, turning a few degrees in the wind. From below, it looked like a scarecrow somebody had tied to the roof. From the way the light came off the chains, it looked like a camera.

Six kids looked at each other and did not move.

“Point five,” Toby Nash said.

He said it loud, and he said it out into the courtyard so it would carry, and then he said the rest of it at the girl in the white dress, who was close enough to hear it and close enough to have to do something about it.

“Worst talent in the whole school, and he picks an A.” Toby’s chin was up and his hands were loose. “Point five. He can’t hold one whole ghost. He’d have to find one in pieces.”

“Sorry,” Milo said. “Didn’t see you down there.”

Brett made a noise through his nose and turned it into a cough. The short-haired girl put her face into his shoulder, which was worse than laughing.

Toby’s neck went red from the collar up, and that was the clearest part of him from here.

BREAK +10

Ten. One sentence, no effort at all, off a kid who was going to be standing in the same building for the next twenty-four hours. There were five of them out here and a whole day on the clock and the straw man hadn’t said a word about a limit.

Lila hadn’t laughed. She hadn’t stepped away from Toby either, and she was looking at Milo now with her chin a little to one side, the way you look at a stain that has turned out to have an opinion.

“Right,” Milo said. “I’m going to go see if the nurses are cute.”

He went in first, and the others came in behind him, because they’d all had the same thought at the same time: if the guy with half a ghost for a cap got first pick of the building, the easy ones were going to be gone.

The lobby was one long echo with a desk at the end of it.

Paper everywhere — lab slips, mostly, the pink carbon still stuck to them, a thousand of them come out of somewhere and settled. Under the paper the floor was tacky in patches and dry in others. A wheelchair on its side by the elevator, and the elevator had no door. A smear on the ceiling that took a second to notice and longer to stop noticing.

The smell wasn’t spoiled. It was fresh, and it was doing something Milo didn’t have a word for, and he decided not to go looking for the word.

They spread out along the lobby, walking like people on a dock, testing every plank.

Milo went left. There was a corridor, and the corridor had a corner, and he went around it and stopped.

He stopped hard enough that his heels squeaked. His face went tight and gray, his jaw came open, and his hand came up and hung there.

That one was cheap, and he was good at it.

“What,” somebody said behind him, and every voice in the lobby dropped to the floor. “What — what is—“

“Ghosts,” Milo said. “Fifty. Fifty-something. Fifty-something ghosts, run.”

He ran. He was not quiet about it. He came around the corner at a dead sprint, caught his own foot on the tile, went down on one knee, got a hand on the wall and pushed off it and kept going, and it looked — he would think about it later, and be satisfied — extremely real.

“Shit,” Brett said.

“Oh my God, oh my God—“

“Mom—“ from Owen, who heard himself and shut it off like a switch.

The lobby emptied in about four seconds. The doors banged. Somebody went over the fallen wheelchair and crawled the last of it.

Outside, six people stood in the gray and breathed.

Milo had come out sideways and put his back against the wall beside the doors, and nobody had looked at him yet, because everybody was busy being alive.

“Where’s Grant?” Lila said.

Nobody answered. She looked at the doors, and her face had gone the color of the sky. “He was in front. He was right there.”

“Then he’s in pieces,” Toby said. His hands were on his knees and it didn’t stop him smiling. “He wanted to go first so bad. Well. He went first.”

“Hold on,” Owen said.

“He’s dead, Owen—“

“Hold on.” Owen straightened up with one hand out, palm up, like a man checking the wind. “The survey said under twenty. Under twenty, in the building. Where’d fifty come from?”

“Who counted?”

“He counted. In three seconds. While he was running.”

“Nineteen is one number,” Brett said. He wasn’t laughing. “Fifty is another number. Which is it?” He turned to the girl under his arm. “He was lying. Tell me he was lying.”

They looked at the doors, and the doors didn’t have an answer in them.

Milo pushed off the wall and went back through them while they were still arguing, and found the stairwell where the elevator wasn’t, and went up.

The second-floor window stuck and then came up all at once, and he put his head and one shoulder out and looked down at the five of them and grinned like a kid with a new bike.

He got all of it. Five faces going through it in order: the confusion, then the understanding, then the disgust. Brett’s shoulders coming down. Lila pressing her fingers against her mouth. Toby getting there last and getting there hardest.

“You ass—”

Milo pulled his head back in.

BREAK +100

Five of them, twenty apiece. He’d have done it for five and called it a good day.

He didn’t stay at the window. That was the part people got wrong: you take the win and you move.

The lights were doing their flicker. Between flickers he got the hallway in still frames: doors on both sides, some flat on the floor, some a hand’s width back. A line of smoke damage ran the length of the ceiling, like something had been carried down the corridor while it burned.

The fog sat about knee-high and didn’t move right. He could see maybe ten feet.

Then a stripe of light from a door on the right, and a face on the door in chipped paint — a closed eye, a hand under it, and a word he read upside down.

OPHTHALMOLOGY

PARTIAL — MID-GRADE VENGEFUL
BOND COST: 0.5

Half a ghost.

He stood in the corridor and looked at the door and did not touch the handle.

The door was open a hand’s width. Not all the way. Not shut. There was a brass plate at chest height and blood on the plate, and the blood had gone dark a long time ago. There was a dent low on the door, knee height, old, the kind something makes when it’s been shoved at the door from the inside.

He got down on one knee in the fog and put his eye to the gap.

He saw a slice of the room. A counter. An instrument table. A cabinet with brown bottles behind glass. The floor was worse than the lobby floor; there were fluids on it that had separated. And in the slice of ceiling he could see, the white blades of a fan going slowly around. Not on. Turning the way a fan turns after you switch it off.

There was something on the fan.

That was the whole of it. A shape, hanging between three blades, with weight to it, the blades dipping a little each time it came around. The fog and the angle and the flicker were all against him. He could not make it out.

He stayed down and counted what he could see of the room, and he did not go in.

“Of course,” Toby’s voice said behind him. “Of course he found one.”

Milo got up slowly, the way a man gets up when he’s been caught doing something he isn’t ashamed of.

Three of them. Toby with his jaw set. Owen behind him, one hand holding his glasses on, looking at the door. And Lila.

She was the cleanest thing in the building, and it was the first unfair thing about her: a white dress and a cardigan that had never been anywhere, hair braided that morning and still holding, and all of it still like that, in here. She was tall and she stood straight and she didn’t stand close to Toby.

Her eyes went to the brass plate, to the blood on it, and then to Milo.

“That’s mine,” Toby said.

“Which part?”

“The room. We’re taking it. Priority.”

“Priority,” Milo said. “That’s on the slip?”

“Don’t be stupid. Do you know who she is?” Toby’s thumb went sideways. “Lila Sunderland. Three years running, first in the school. Three years. Her cap’s a three.” He said the number like it was funny. “Yours is point five. You couldn’t hold what’s in there with both hands.”

“That’s not how cap works,” Owen said.

“Whose side—”

“I’m saying it’s not — you don’t —“ Owen gave up. “It’s not a bucket.”

“You’ve been kneeling at that door a while,” Lila said.

She said it to Milo, not to Toby, and she said it without heat.

“Long enough for me to walk up on you. You didn’t open it. You didn’t leave.” She looked at the painted eye on the door. “I know what that is. Partial, mid-grade. A senior crew clears a room like that in ten minutes. I can hold one. And I’m not going to stand in a hallway while you work out whether it’s safe to go first.”

“You’d be first anyway,” Milo said.

“I know.”

Milo looked at her for a second.

Then he smiled, stepped back off the door, and swept his hand at it — such a polite little gesture that for half a second Toby’s face relaxed, thinking he’d won something.

“Then please. After you.”

“Wait,” Owen said.

“Shut up, Owen.”

“I’m seriously—“

“Shut up, Owen.” Toby stepped in front of the door. “This is what she’s for.”

He did not appear to hear himself.

Lila pulled the cardigan straight and put her hand flat on the door, and Milo watched her shoulders.

She was scared. The hand that wasn’t on the door had a thumb working at the seam of her dress, and her back was very straight, which is a thing people do instead of breathing.

She could turn around. He’d left her the room and the door and all of it.

She pushed the door. It swung in further than it should have.

“Fan’s still moving,” Milo said.

She went in. Toby went in after her, close, saying something to her back that Milo couldn’t hear. Then Owen — Owen, who had counted the ghosts out loud in the courtyard and knew exactly how much the survey didn’t add up — put his hand on the doorframe and stopped, and looked back, and Milo looked back at him, and neither of them said anything, and then Owen went in.

The fan ticked around.

The blades went around, one, two, and on the third the shape between them came out of the shadow and into the door light, and Milo saw all three of them see it.

He did not see it. He was outside the door with his eye on the gap, and what he saw was three faces at once.

Lila’s mouth came open. Her eyes didn’t widen so much as empty, the pupil going out until the iris was a rim. Toby’s hands came up two inches and stopped, not held — nobody was holding him, he just didn’t put them anywhere else — and he made a small sound in his throat that wasn’t a word. Owen got there half a second later, and his arms went rigid at his sides.

Then they stopped moving. Not the way a person stops. The way a car stops.

And the color went out of the three of them — worse than pale, the gray a thing goes when the blood has decided to be somewhere else.

The fan went around.

“Yep,” Milo said.

He did not go in. He got down again, one knee in the cold fog, and put his eye back to the gap, and what he could see was the same slice of the room as before. The cabinet with the bottles. The floor. Three people standing in the middle of it like coat racks.

The door hadn’t closed. It had swung in and stayed in, and the gap was a hand wide, and nothing had come out of it.

Milo’s hand went into his pocket and found the slip and didn’t pull it out. He kept his fingers on it, dry and warm, and stayed down in the cold with his eye on the door and did the arithmetic.

One partial. Half a ghost. Cap of two and a half, which meant half of one fit inside him with room left over, and the room left over was the interesting part.

“A remnant counts as one,” the straw man had said, in front of six people, the way you say a thing you’ve said a hundred times.