Yet for any of this to work, for it to make any sense, the ghost had to think back to a simpler time, to travel into the past, through parts of Borne’s journal, and in that past Borne had just been out for longer than was safe. Borne was a lost child who needed looking after. So I searched that nocturnal night—Nocturnalia, as he’d called it—treading wraithlike and anonymous down the ruined streets of our fucked-up city.
This ghost conducted a subtle search, making use of veteran survival skills. No ghost would wander half crazed, shouting out Borne’s name. No ghost would walk up to a Mord proxy and ask if it had seen Borne, because, deep down, the ghost didn’t really want to die—just maybe come right up to the edge, so that the entire spectrum of colors would click back into place behind her eyes.
Evidence of prudence: Once, at the heart of what had been the city’s commercial district, the ghost peeked around a corner and saw two Mord proxies in the middle distance. They were tearing at a human corpse. The ghost turned back and detoured several blocks, then course-corrected again when encountering a handful of skeletal people at a street corner drinking homemade alcohol out of old bottles. Their eyes were looking out somewhere else and nothing about them even mimicked the idea of “kind” or “reasonable.” The ghost believed the people would be ghosts soon enough, and she could talk to them then.
No, the ghost channeled anger and grief in another way: through controlled, bloodless, clinical searching. First, the ghost searched the perimeter of the Balcony Cliffs, and then, starting to the south, clearing those areas where he might have been most likely to go. While inside the ghost’s heart raged, but what could a ghost’s heart rage about? That the ghost hadn’t been able to protect Borne from the world or the world from Borne, or frustration with herself at the impulse to still seek him out?
As the ghost immersed herself in the night, became steeped in it and more comfortable, the ghost’s search became more and more meaningless. The ghost’s purpose changed and the ghost became a chronicler in her head of a damaged city, a city that could not go on like this forever, torn between foes and monsters, before it, too, became a ghost. The body still gasped and drew breath and reanimated itself—contained the capacity to be rejuvenated, even now. But not forever. Eventually the collective memory would fail, and travelers, if travelers ever came again, would find a stretch of desert that had once been a vast ocean and hardly a sign that a city had ever been here.
Yet, despite this, people still cared. As the ghost wandered, she could see that people still cared, and there was a kind of dangerous ecstasy in that—a kind of displaced passion and recklessness from seeing the way people could still care about something dying, dead.
*
I might have snuck out until someone did kill me, if the ghost hadn’t eventually found what she was looking for. Even a ghost could sicken of combing through a place populated by the fearful and dangerous, even if this particular ghost often snuck around with a confidant’s stride, had become an actor steadied by sadness and self-loathing, making others leery of asking questions.
A man I could not see, a stranger recessed into an alcove, the ground in front seeded with broken glass and worse, gave the ghost the tip.
“Something strange? Something strange? Past the burning bear. Past the playground. Foraging. You’ll find something strange all right. Then, maybe, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
Was the something strange enough? The ghost would have to discover that for herself.
“What about something familiar?” the voice said, cackling, proud of his joke, as the ghost drifted away. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer something familiar?”
The burnt bear lay beneath the faded pink archway for an arcade long destroyed, paint peeling like a disease of the skin to reveal cracked stone and a latticework of exposed steel bars beneath. It was a landmark the ghost had used before, about half a mile from the neighborhood formerly graced by dead astronauts. Something had gone wrong with the proxy’s breathing of fire and the flames had washed back over it, so swift that in death the bear remained on its haunches, blackened and hairless, looking like a huge half-demonic bat or rat. The skull was black and glistening and narrow without the fur, the torso all fused bones and withered meat and ash. The claws on the broad feet were an astonishing, threatening white, and no one would touch the corpse, fearing a trap. Every time I saw it, the corpse looked more like a statue: a memorial sent back in time from a future where Mord ruled the city unopposed and all worshipped him. We would go from the Age of the Company to the Age of the Bears, unless the Magician had her way.
I used the bear corpse to orient myself, venturing ever farther out on sweeps to check first for the Magician’s patrols. It was safer on this side, in territory held by either the Magician or no one, as Mord pressed his advantage to the west and the Magician changed tactics.
Down through a darkened courtyard strode the ghost that night, past a handful of muttering specters, headed for an abandoned, long-looted department store, so old no one could read the sign. I climbed a ladder up the building’s side. The ladder was new and shiny, which made the ghost smirk. Such an obvious trap must be a kind of joke left behind by whoever had killed or captured the trap-setters. As expected, nothing waited for me on the roof but safe passage and a slight breeze. The moon had gone to sleep or died and I couldn’t look at the stars without thinking of Borne.
On the other side I found the fossilized remains of a public park centered around a rotting fountain. Despite evidence of attempts to resurrect that space, the swing set had become deformed and crumpled into the earth, and there was a faint smell of carrion and sour marrow. I would not set foot there, experienced ghost that I was, and I sidled along the edge, careful and slow, as if the playground dirt might be toxic or was actually a vast and horrific swimming pool that went deep and was full of monsters.
Beyond the park, I came across the exposed ground level of a skating rink or storage hangar and watched from the threshold as five scavengers sorted through a rich mélange of probably worthless debris. They had a glowworm trapped in an hourglass to see by, and when the sand ran out I assumed they’d move on. Their quarry included filthy plastic bags filled with nothing, old barrels, boxes sagging from water damage and mold, and a few piles of upended garbage that had been there long enough to have already been gone through and to have stopped stinking. But each generation lowered its expectations.