“If you see him again, will you give him a message for me?” Liesl asked Po.
“The chances I will see him again are next to nothing,” Po said. The ghost did not want the girl to get her hopes up. It might not even recognize Liesl’s father if it saw him again; by then, Liesl’s father might not recognize himself. He might have begun to blur, letting the infinity tug on him gently from all sides, like sand being pulled by an eternal tide. He might have already begun the process of becoming part of the Everything. He would begin to feel the electricity from distant stars pulsing through him like a heartbeat. He would feel the weight of old planets on his shoulders, and he would feel the winds of distant corners of the universe blowing through him.
“Next to nothing,” Liesl retorted, “but not nothing.”
Liesl was quite right about this. Nothing in the world is ever really nothing, and everything is possible in some way, and Po knew it. The ghost made a full turn in the air, which Liesl (correctly) assumed meant that the ghost had taken her point.
“Tell him,” Liesl said, and found that she was choking up and couldn’t speak. There was so much she wanted to say and so much she wanted to ask, but she refused to cry in front of anyone, especially a ghostly someone, and so she just said, “Tell him I miss him.” Then she turned her face into the sleeve of her nightshirt.
“All right,” Po said. “If you’ll make another drawing for me.”
Liesl nodded.
“Good-bye,” Po said. Bundle vanished from her lap. The darkness there suddenly became empty.
“Wait!” Liesl called the ghosts back. She was desperate not to be alone again. “Did my father say anything else? Anything at all?”
Her face was turned up toward Po, and all that hope was clearly there, shining, as bright as the sun that had shone long ago.
“He said that he missed you,” Po said. “He said good-bye.”
Liesl made a little cry: a sound that was both happy and sad, Po thought, although it couldn’t be sure.
It did not stay to find out. Po had already been too long on the Living Side for one night, and the ghost let itself sink back into the softness and the deepness of the Other Side with something like relief.
Two visits to the Living Side, and the ghost had already become a little more human.
Po had remembered how to lie.
Chapter Five
THAT VERY SAME NIGHT, THE ALCHEMIST’S apprentice was once again weaving his way through the dark and silent city streets, this time struggling to keep up with his master. He pulled his oversized coat closer and ducked his head against the wind, which was fierce and deathly cold. Winter had arrived, there was no doubt about it. The air was full of a wet, sleeting rain, and it stung Will’s cheeks like shards of cut glass.
The alchemist whipped around and urged him on. “Faster,” he barked. There was a bit of moisture hanging from the tip of his nose, and it trembled a bit before receding into his left nostril. “The Lady Premiere won’t like to be kept waiting.”
Will tried to urge his feet to move faster, but they seemed to be encased in solid blocks of ice. It was not just the cold, either. His whole body felt heavy, from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. Even his hair felt weightier than usual.
The problem was simple: He was exhausted. By the time he had returned from making his delivery to the Lady Premiere the night before, it was close to four o’clock in the morning. The alchemist had awakened him at six thirty with a swift kick to the ribs. Will had accidentally overslept his alarm; he was supposed to be out at six to feed the enormous, slimy, bleary-eyed catfish that lived in the foul-smelling pool of water behind the alchemist’s living quarters. Then he had spent the whole day grinding up cow eyes, and measuring the blood of lizards into different-sized vials, and mixing and labeling, while the alchemist watched and criticized. Nothing Will ever did seemed to be correct: The word useless had been thrown around a record sixty-seven times just between the hours of four and six p.m.
And then, just as Will was sinking into his small cot at eleven thirty p.m.—for once, with no deliveries and no pickups to make—a messenger had rapped sharply at the door. The alchemist was requested at the house of the Lady Premiere, on a matter of some urgency.
“This is it,” the alchemist had said, his voice trembling with emotion, after the messenger had departed. “This is the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life. She is going to make me Official. You just wait and see. It is because of the magic I made for her.” Then he glanced sharply in Will’s direction. “And you will see. You must come with me, and take notes. That way, when I’m Official, and my talent is recognized far and wide, there will be a record of the moment of my ascension.”
And so here Will was, trekking through the dark and ice-covered streets at midnight, returning to the Lady Premiere’s estate for the second time in twenty-four hours.