Page 26 of All Her Ghosts

He texts back, almost immediately:Like what?

Like my missing heartbeat.

A pause stretches out between us. I have just enough time to miss my headphones, the red cord binding us together, the sour blue-raspberry memory of his mouth.

My phone pings.

Where would she hide it if she took it?

I blink in the haunting dark, caught sideways. It’s such a bizarre Bas answer, but something about it catches at me. I turn it over in my head, considering it. Outside my room, my mother crosses the hallway again. She pads down the stairs, her footsteps pausing on the landing. I can feel her eyes burning on my door. Watching me, listening, making super sure I don’t leave.

Where would she hide it if she took it?

Where she hides everything. The one locked room in every house we move into, every new address christened with a trip to the home improvement store before we even unpack the van, a key-coded entry lock her perpetual first priority.

I text him:BRB.

CHAPTER 8

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“The Lonely” by Christina Perri

I clamber out from under the bed wearing only my party trick, leaving my body behind in the monster’s den. I’m already dreading the number of closed doors between me and my destination—and the pain that comes with crossing them—but I firm up my resolve. Striding forward, I throw myself through the bedroom door before I have a chance to psych myself out, hissing through my ghostly teeth at the sensation of icy needles blazing through every cell of my un-body.

Out in the hallway, I pause, listening for Mom. She must be taking a break from her prison rounds because inside, a pen xylophones against the metal rings of a notebook—her thinking sound. Making lists of all the ways to punish me, probably. Or doing longhand calculus to distract her from wanting to kill me. Either way, I pad past and down the stairs on silent, see-through feet. I cross the living room and kitchen, pausing at the basement door.

God, I hate this. My body still stings from the last door, but I know from experience if I hesitate—if I doubt myself for even a second—I’ll get stuck halfway through the door and the whole time it’ll feel likesticking my bones in a blender until I snap back into my flesh. I don’t really breathe in my party trick, but I suck in the memory of air anyway, shake out my arms, bounce on my toes. I can do this. I don’t have a body right now; I can do whatever I want. Bas’s grin springs into my mind, his fingers tangled in mine—us dead kids gotta stick together—and a spindly white flower of determination blooms open in my chest.

Nobody can stop me. Not my mother and not her stupid key-coded door. I plunge through.

Winter gnashes my not-body raw. An icy hail assaults me from all sides. This door is thicker than my bedroom’s, takes an eternity to force myself through. Gritting something like teeth, I jab a hand through the electronic lock. Its components sizzle and complain, electricity flooding straight into my brain. The batteries beep a dying complaint. With a sullenthunk, the dead bolt retracts, the indicator light blinks out, and I tumble through to the other side.

Immediately, the air in the basement feels wrong. Gelatinous and acrid, it clings to me. I stumble down the first step, trying to suck in an unsteady breath that I don’t really need, my footing unfamiliar. How messed up is it that I’ve never been in my own basement—

Holy shit, I can see why Mom hid this.

Reflective ghost scares hang from the rafters above the stairs, pinwheel spirals drifting in the thin breeze stirred by my movement. Mirrors of every type and size line the walls, cheap plastic drugstore compacts and antique thrift store finds alike jammed anywhere they’ll fit. Lurching forward, I stumble down the stairs. I don’t need to touch the ground, can’t really fall, but something about this place makes me forget. The mirrors wrench at me, scatter me somehow, fragmenting myattention in a thousand glittering directions. I throw a hand out against the wall to steady myself but reel back swearing, freezing, fighting for every step forward. The ghost scares seem to laugh, reflecting nothing but my hazy failure, a hundred different perspectives, each stealing a misty piece of me.

What the hell is Mom doing down here? Why does she need a safe room from ghosts?

Finally, gasping, I reach the bottom of the stairs and tumble into the basement’s single, large room. The mirror onslaught stops but the strangeness doesn’t. Everything reeks of essential oils. Not a couple spilled drops from DIY ghost spray, either. This is a whole perfume department full of aggressive salespeople.

More pinwheels hang from the rafters. Stick-on mirrors dot the walls and ceiling but at least there’s enough room between reflections to—well, notbreatheexactly, but re-coalesce. I gather myself together, taking a slow pan around my mom’s crazy supervillain lair and the three massive screens glowing on the back wall, a single smaller computer screen beneath them on an industrial-looking metal desk.

What the heck kind of gamer setup is this? Carefully dodging the rainbows refracting from the spinning pinwheels, I float over. It’s not even a desk, really, but a hard slab of metal propped up on four double-drawer filing cabinets, its polished surface reflecting the flickering light of the screens. All three of them show some kind of… weather map?

I squint, leaning in. One shows a map of the whole country. The other two show top-down views of surrounding states—one for Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio; another for West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky. Hundreds of tiny circles flare across all three, a rainbow of colors and sizes. Someflicker on and off, flashing numbers between one and five. Others grow silently larger, displaying tallies in the hundreds. Some in the thousands. As I drift closer, I catch today’s date in the bottom left-hand corner of every screen, the graphics refreshing in thirty-second intervals.

Blame it on the hateful mirrors or phasing through multiple doors, but it takes me a minute to work out what I’m looking at.

It’s a ghost map.

It’s aliveghost map, charted in real time. But that shouldn’t be possible. The amount of real-time info you’d need to collate, never mind how you’d even get that data in the first place. The best the local news stations can manage is a graph of averages over the last week, a day or two if it’s a ghost storm—and even then, only when the attacks get bad enough and frequent enough to send people to the hospital—but here, my mom’s got a real-time counter running in the basement, updating with fresh numbers twice every minute? Like it’s no big deal, casually running software so technical and expensive only the government could possibly…

Slowly, I stare around the room. Everything is iron down here, isn’t it? Iron shelves with metal equipment I don’t recognize. Iron standing cabinets with heavy iron doors. An iron table with some kind of project sprawled in a state of disarray. All with a peeling label:property of macdougall memorial. All of it looking like military surplus, like some kind of doomsday prepper’s bunker.

Like government.