Page 27 of All Her Ghosts

Why is my mother tracking ghosts on a professional level—amore thanprofessional level—when she supposedly works for a fundraising nonprofit? What is going on? What is she hiding from me?

I can’t choke down anger without a throat to swallow it. My ghostshape swells, my head brushing the ceiling. The pinwheels flutter, spinning faster and faster, swinging around on their dangling wires. I surge forward. Slamming against the desk, I break like a wave, foamy and indistinct. I can’t move much without my body, but I can shove the mouse. The small computer screen flicks awake: a blinking cursor and the stark white prompt,PASSWORD.

I can’t answer it. Even if I knew my mother well enough to know what she’d use as a password—and clearly, I don’t know the woman at all—the solid metal keyboard thwarts me, mocking me with its typewriter keys.

Furious, fraying, bits of me flaking away at every moment, I don’t even bother to try. I round on the room, looking for something else, anything I can pry apart for some kind of answer.

Key-coded locks—there’s something I can break. Wheeling, I punch my hands through every button pad I can find, flooding the electronics until my head hurts all the way back in my bedroom—until mynothinghurts, the mist of me searing with cold agony—but even unlocked, even throwing my body against the filing cabinet doors, I can’t rattle them open. I sink my fingers into the gaps, prying, but my ghost shape spits and fizzles, scattering away. I’m not strong enough.

Swearing, I spin away. My attention lands on the bizarre machine half assembled on a metal table. Is this what she’s doing down here? Building some new science project? A Frankenstein ghost scare? I lurch forward, claws outstretched—and immediately regret it.

Something about this skinned exoskeleton feels wrong. Mom left it sprawled half built on the table, six shiny chitinous hexagons flayed open around a bulging core. Whatever it is, it clearly isn’t functional, but an inverted resonance seeps from it just the same, frigid as an in-drawnbreath. Its mirrors and LED rune-lattices glitter in the light of the screens behind me, wires writhing from crystal panels chased in silver and steel, layered over more mirrors and labyrinthine filigree.

I can’t look away. Even dead and broken, it warps the eye. It tugs at me, hateful and perverse. I know if I touch it, something awful will happen. There’s a kind of—I don’t know,tension, in the way the six outer hexagons sit slightly flexed, a drooling Venus flytrap jaw shivering, poised to slam closed at any second. Deep down in my faraway meat, I know in a way I can’t explain that if this thing swallows me, I’ll be trapped forever, perpetually digested in a cube of mirrors. My mind screams at me to run, leave, thrash myself away and awake but I—

Can’t.

Seized by a strange riptide, I struggle to peel myself out but can’t break away. I can’t fight against its pull, ensnared and drawing inexorably closer. I can only throw up my not-arms, trying helplessly to protect my head.

A bear-trap vortex snaps around my hand, my arm, choking me down in fraying increments, slurping my spaghettified mind into an endless void. Agony flays every nerve in my ghost shape and body. I stagger, thrashing backward, but it only clamps down harder. My shape warps, spiraling, draining away. My mind slips. I can’t think, can’t scream, can’t close my eyes and snap back into my body. I lose my left arm, half my rib cage, my right hip—it’ll drain me until there’s nothing left. I have to do something, have tothink—

My eyes seize on the screens. Ghosts eat electricity. This room might be wall-to-wall mirrors and iron, but those screens are vulnerable, the outlet behind them a free buffet with my name on it. I don’t know if I’ma ghost—don’t know what the hell I am or what’s happening to me—but if I can suck power from a high school emergency exit, I can stick my tongue into a secret bunker’s electrical socket. I can slurp the power out of my house like boba tea and maybe live long enough to demand a goddamned answer.

Grappling forward, leaving my entire left leg behind, I drive my right hand through the map of the country and scrabble toward the wall. Power lines thrum just beyond my reach, bright streaks of glaring, man-made energy running behind the bricks and into the ground, streaking through the street outside. It jars against my outstretched fingers, discordant, not quite right.

Driven by pain and instinct, I grope past it. Reaching through miles of dirt, hunting mole-blind in the dark, my grasping fingers brush another source of power—a groundwater creek, cool and bright and welcoming.

Not electricity, but something close. Something old and vital, arteries of the earth.

I’ve been on every pseudo-magic website. Every Wiccan Tumblr and pagan Instagram. I’ve fallen down the dark web. I’ve read every conspiracy theory, scoured the internet for anything extra-earthly, anything to explain my party trick—

I know what this is.

Officially, it doesn’t exist. The government claims that despite what ancient cultures believed, there are no magical currents running beneath the earth. They say that ghosts don’t migrate and that if they do, it has nothing to do with an invisible compass leading them along these underground rivers.

But then, they also say they didn’t break the world. And I trust the collective obsession of the internet a lot more than I trust them.

This is aley line. And it’s calling me.

I grapple for it, dragging myself forward, both legs unspooled behind me, trapped in the machine. Gritting teeth through the screaming cold wall, I shove myself through the iron-studded cement bricks—are thoserailroad spikes, Mom, what thefuck?—stretching as far as I can go, misty through the dirt.

And the power, the—themagicwakes. The ley line stirs at my outstretched fingers, eddying closer. Ancient, old as the dirt, it lifts its mossy head and turns, seeking me out, splitting from the main body and curling toward me. But it’s still yards away, moving too slowly to save me, andI can’t reach. Every second, the machine wrenches me back piece by piece. I claw against it, stealing inches. My body frays, spinning down to rags with every inch I gain, but I keep dragging forward. The only thing that matters is the pinprick of light outside my reach. A color I can’t describe, a burning need. I slam my hand out, clawing, grasping—

My palm strikes the buried power line instead. The heavy, artificial current floods me, blazing through my un-bones, burning down my spine. My arm returns, my ribs, my legs. An alarm blares from somewhere in the basement, then chokes quiet the moment a loud snap ricochets through the crackling silence like a huge mousetrap firing, and I’m blown straight out of the wall.

Something crackles in the rafters. I wheel around barely in time to catch sight of it—a little spark of light rocketing along a fuse. A firecracker explodes, then another, faster and faster, dominoes cracking down. The room fills with a stinking, acrid smoke. But with everycrack-crack-crack, some kind of… of packet launches off the cellar beams, flash paper burning in a blink. In the light of small explosions, the air fills with a dense and glittering dust.

Iron filings.

I can’t breathe.

Gasping, clawing at the throat I didn’t bring, I squeeze my eyes shut. I break off the spectral projector and shoot back into my body on the floor beneath my bed, battering my head on the beams, belly-down and coughing, retching, struggling to breathe. Panicking, I army crawl out of the darkness and flop onto my back on the bare floor of my empty room, heaving for air. Every nerve in my body blares a warning, screams a howling alarm—

No, that’s my actual alarm. Bleary-eyed and wiping tears, I grope under the bed for my phone and slap the screen with numb fingers until the noise stops. It glowers back at me in accusation, flashingalarm snoozedand the time,6:05 a.m.

I stare at it in dumb horror. I was down there for that long? How did I lose that much time? And what in the unholy hell is my mom building?

Stabbing in my passcode, I open my messages and find one waiting text from Bas, sent an hour after mine: