Page 28 of All Her Ghosts

lol u fell asleep.

I text him back:

Need to talk.

I found something.

CHAPTER 9

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“Flying & Flocking” by Zöe Keating

I dress in a haze, shoving my way into a band T-shirt for a concert I never got to see, a black dress gone almost gray, whatever socks I can find. They don’t match but I don’t care. I barely see them, stomping into the secondhand combat boots I bought at a military surplus store two houses ago mostly because they irritated Mom—hilarious, since apparently the government had an entire war camp in our basement the whole goddamned time. Aching, I ease down the stairs one at a time.

The dim orange glow of the TV illuminates the living room, casting shadows on my mother’s grimace. Orange means Channel 8 news; they’re the only ones who decorate their set by the season. I’ve spent enough time hoping for snow days and ghost days to know each channel’s glow by heart, but I can’t remember Mom ever emerging from the basement long enough to watch.

“—remnant activity increasing across western Pennsylvania and into Ohio. Uniontown, you’re sitting at a three on the Faraday scale. Washington, hovering around a steady 4. McKees Rocks—”

The voice cuts off. My mom sets the remote down gently, but shestands up with a face like a battering ram, gripping her coffee mug with white knuckles. She stares at me, everything rigid from the line of her mouth to the set of her shoulders. I stare back, jaw tight and muscles sore.

I want to scream. I want to pick up the fight from the night before. I want to tell her she almost killed me. Demand answers, tell her I know she’s been lying to me, that she’sgovernment—she must be, right? Isn’t it the only explanation for what she has down there? For whatI am? I want to grab her, every straining seam in my body screaming at me to force the truth out of her—to make her admit I’m the failed science experiment I always suspected I was.

But I can’t bring myself to move, to fire that opening salvo to a battle I know I’ll lose. Because Idon’tknow. I don’t understandanything.

Why does she have a government-level program for tracking ghosts using equipment a civilian, even an ex-government civilian, almost certainly isn’t allowed to have? Why did she fill the basement with mirrors and pinwheels and iron filings? Build traps like something out ofHome Alone—deliberately mechanical so a ghost couldn’t fry them?

My chest burns, ribs aching with every breath. My mouth still tastes like metal. I swallow the bitterness down with my unanswered questions.

“Is school closed?” I ask instead.

Mom thrives on patterns and routines. Always the same minimalist five-minute makeup routine. The same chignon twist pinning up her blonde hair. The same pressed white blouse and charcoal slacks. The same patent-leather kitten heels, repaired or replaced the day after they scuff. From all outward appearances, she looks exactly the same as she does every other day: cold and glossy as a photograph on some scientific award wall and just as unapproachable.

But today she seems older. Worn. The sunrise sneaks through the living room blinds, shadowing the crow’s-feet around her eyes, the tight pursed clasp of her mouth. She chews the inside of her cheek, watching me, questions piling up behind her teeth about the broken locks, the fired traps, the damage something did down there—the damageIcouldn’t possibly have done, safe in my bed all night. But she swallows them, same as I do.

“You’re going to school.”

“They said it was a three, though. Out of five, that’s pretty high.”

“Can you just—” She cuts herself off, sucking in a breath. Starts again. “Can you just, please, for once, not fight me on every little thing?”

For someone who doesn’t want to fight, those are primo fighting words after the night I had. A booby-trapped basement and a machine designed to kill ghosts—or to kill whatever the hell I am—but she doesn’t want to fight? What the hell else have we ever done but fight? What has she been doing all this time in the basement if not preparing for war?

God, I just want to shake her until the truth leaks out.

But I’ve fought and lost this battle a hundred times. An unsteady bubble of calm closes over my head. I breathe into it, steadying myself, picking my battles, pretending I don’t care. I force a smile.

“Sure, Mom. I’llhappilygo to school during a level three. But I want black sunflowers at my funeral, okay?”

Things don’t improve from there. Mom eyes me popping ibuprofen like a prison warden, informs me she’s driving me to school because, felon that I am, I can’t be trusted not to slip out the back of the bus. But while she hasdemandedthe pleasure of my company, she refuses to look at me the entire drive. Fine, whatever. What else is new?

I stare out the window at the storm front from last night that never quite left, the sun barely rolled out of bed. Gray clouds grumble overhead, not raining but heavy somehow. Loud. My ears feel woolen, sound gone tinny and distant, but no matter how I work my jaw, I can’t fight the pressure off.

The birds feel it too. They fly in huge, looping eddies like a morbid van Gogh, and the heart-shaped silence in my chest aches to see it. Trapped in electromagnetic currents distorted by the energy cast off by the remnants swarming below, they fly lost, compasses spinning, unable to find their way or land.

More glowing, indistinct shapes wander the road today than usual, a roadkill buffet woken from its gutter nap. Usually, Mom has the decency to steer around them or at leastwincewhen she drives through one. Today, she white-knuckles it, staring dead-eyed at the road as little ghost wisps sizzle on the iron car grill and fragment into the breeze.

After an unspeaking eternity, we finally make it to the school but have to stop, the gate closed, its electricity cut via an emergency box, the standard preventive safety measure for all Remnant Alerts above Level 2. A grim-faced guard emerges from his booth in a shark-bite suit—a precaution so rarely used I’ve never evenseenone before. Grimacing, he clanks his way through entire puddles of mousy ghost lights, his suit’s tiny chain-mail links clinking on the gate’s iron bars as he cranks it open by hand.