An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

  “I’ve told you many times that we’re to wear our masks always,” said Theo. He had, but she made no move to put it back on.

  The tick of the radiolabe persisted in the background, and made it difficult to focus on the body gray and decaying before her. Not that she wanted the noise of it to stop. She never wanted it to stop. She’d take to sleeping next to Nicolaeus’s corpse if it meant hearing those sensors indefinitely.

  “I might have an idea,” said Theo, hand on his cocked-out hip. It wasn’t a gesture he’d perform in public, and it was good to see him behave so unconsciously, letting his body move in the ways that came naturally to him. “Before, I assumed a botanical poison because—”

  “Because you thought that I killed him.”

  Theo nodded. “Right. And my autopsy earlier confirmed my findings. That’s why I contacted you. I think I was onto something, just a little bit off. Have a look at him, and tell me what you think.”

  Aster began with the external examination, checking the tips of his fingers and toes for needle marks, paying special attention to the undersides of things. Knowing Theo would’ve already run tests for the most common narcotics, Aster only did this as an extra precaution.

  When she went to examine the lids of his eyes for swelling and popped vessels, she smelled an odd but familiar scent near his lips, like lavender but more bitter, with a streak of something quite musky. She could see why Theo would’ve suspected poison. Distinctive smells often suggested as much.

  “The toxicity screen didn’t reveal any of the typical culprits. Another reason I suspected your hand,” said Theo.

  “The irises really are quite remarkable.” Aster had never seen such a thing in her life. “They look like broken gears. Believe me, if I could make a poison that did this, you better believe I’d give it to every upperdecker on this ship. Excluding you, of course. You were right to suspect me.”

  Aster continued her examination, noting the general wear of tissues. The same smell she’d noticed on his lips was in his gut as well. The lining of his mouth and throat were inflamed. His kidneys showed early signs of necrosis. His stomach was discolored and swollen. Aster wasn’t a toxicologist, and she tended to work with bodies when they were alive, but she knew what the effects of long-term exposure to toxins looked like.

  “Heavy metal poisoning,” she said.

  Theo smiled so wide it verged on laughter. “Exactly,” he said. Aster smiled too.

  Heavy metal poisoning explained why Lune’s radiolabe might’ve gone off for Nicolaeus and only Nicolaeus. She could’ve calibrated the device to respond to a specific form of radioactive metal.

  “May we use the centrifuge?” Aster asked, clapping her hands together and interlacing her fingers. She often begged to use it but there was rarely justification. She’d built one herself from repurposed materials for use in her botanarium, but it was hand-cranked and didn’t have the panache of the one in the morgue.

  “We may,” said Theo, walking over to the counter to set it up. He poured Nicolaeus’s blood into two test tubes and mucus from his stomach into another and told Aster to have at it. She clicked it on and watched it whir, the materials dehomogenizing beneath a shield of metal cartridges. Soon, the parts of the mixture would be separated into layers by type, the heaviest of them at the bottom, the less dense ones near the top.

  After three minutes, the machine stopped.

  “That was quick,” said Theo.

  Aster smacked the centrifuge with her hand. “It’s broken. It still had several minutes left.” She pressed the start button again, but nothing, and she checked to see that it was still plugged into the electrical outlet.

  “See if it’s done,” Theo told her.

  Aster removed the test tubes by hand, ignoring the tongs he would’ve likely used.

  “Lord above,” said Theo, voice soft and reverent.

  The materials had separated, but not as expected. Floating at the top of each of the five test tubes was a silvery, viscous layer, lighter than any of the other substances. Aster didn’t know what metal in existence behaved that way. Lighter than water. Liquid at room temperature. She’d have expected it to gather as sediment at the bottom of the tube.

  There it was, the poison that killed Nicolaeus. Maybe Lune too.

  “Careful,” said Theo.

  Aster pulled her face mask back on as she extracted the substance from the tube and placed it onto a slide to view beneath the microscope. Her breath caught.

  “What is it?” asked Theo.

  Aster could see nothing of the substance’s structure. It appeared the same through the microscope lens as it did to the naked eye. Whatever this stuff was, it was made up of something too small for the microscope to capture and magnify. “Look,” she said, and Theo looked.

  “Come.” He slipped off his lab coat and face mask, grabbed the slide, and walked briskly toward the door, brown eyes alert. Aster followed him, having no idea what else to do. It was hard to turn away from his religious fervor, his dynamism.

  The crowd parted for Theo as he whipped through the corridor, and Aster stayed close on his trail lest she be subsumed by the mass of zealous reporters. She lost track of where they were going except for a vague directional sense that they were traveling down. Soon they were in the lowdecks, but not the portion of the ship allotted to residences. They were in one of the industrial wings. “Why?” asked Aster, but as soon as she asked it she knew what Theo had in mind. The laboratory in the chemical-manufacturing plant housed Matilda’s only electron microscope. It surely would discern what the optical microscope missed and reveal some aspects of the silver substance’s structure.

  “Sergeant Hamilton,” said Theo. Hamilton was hunched over a desk, scribbling figures onto a pad. Workers in the laboratory glanced up from their tasks.

  “Surgeon, sir,” Hamilton said, standing and giving a salute. He was a small, wrinkled man with graying hair. “I must’ve forgotten we had an appointment.”

  “You’ve forgotten nothing. My colleague and I require immediate use of your electron microscope.”

  Hamilton nodded and snapped his fingers. “Indrit, Jai, you’ll have to finish what you’re doing right now.” The chemist in Aster wondered just what that was. Perhaps they were measuring the bond lengths of nanoengineered oranium or observing the form of hypercharged synthetic proteins—things Aster had only ever heard of by way of eavesdropping.

  The microscope was taller than her, and she had to get on a step stool to reach the eyepiece. She inhaled, closed one eye, and looked.

  “Holy, holy, holy,” she whispered under her breath. She couldn’t stop. “Holy, holy, holy, holy.” She felt her body rock. Had it not been for Theo’s hand at the base of her back, she’d have toppled off the step stool. The electron microscope was just as ineffective as rendering an image of the silver substance’s macrostructure as the optical microscope.

  It wasn’t a logical thought, but she thought it anyway: This is the stuff ghosts is made of. She heard it in her head in Aint Melusine’s voice. Aster thought to call it eidolon, after the wraiths of the ancient world.

  It was no wonder why such a substance, whatever it was, interested a particle physicist like Lune. Wherever her studies of the electricity spikes had taken her—that was where the eidolon was. She’d found out one of Matilda’s secrets, and if anyone was Matilda’s secret-keeper, was it not the Sovereign himself? Aster needed to go where her mother had gone. There, she would find out the extent of their connection.

  “Giselle,” she said.

  “What?” asked the Surgeon.

  Aster shook her head and waved him off. She knew where Giselle was hiding.

  xi

  Aster ran to her botanarium straight after shift, barreling down and down and farther down. Running had become her favorite mode of transport. She lived for that brief snap of true flight, both feet in the air at once. Jumping down a half-flight of stairs then catapulting down another. Aerial Aster. Sky Master Aster! Barely A
voiding Disaster Aster! There was less time lost in transport when she ran as fast as she could, no care for her own safety.

  She didn’t know how long she had before her mother’s trail disappeared. The blackouts wouldn’t last forever, and after sham deliberations, the Sovereignty’s Council would appoint Lieutenant Matilda’s new head. A calamity, to be sure.

  Aster prayed in her lazy way, neither believing nor disbelieving, that the Council would give themselves fully to the show of it all. Righteous hemming and hawing over potential candidates. A vetting process. Debates about who was most worthy. It could take up to a month for them to decide that as sibling to a previous sovereign and as uncle to Heavens’ Hands Made Flesh, Lieutenant belonged on the throne.

  Aster tore off some bread from the stale wheat loaf in her cupboard, slicing off the moldy areas and adding generous portions of butter and purple honey. It wasn’t much, but once—if—she located Giselle, she’d have time for a proper meal.

  She rifled through Lune’s notes and folders until she found the page labeled, Fish Dissection. She studied the circulatory system as she had before, paying special attention to those areas not shown on the electrical grid map in the Nexus. Aster could see a number of capillaries and routes that went to the fish’s brain, what she’d been thinking of as the Eidolon Hub since this morning’s discoveries, but she couldn’t figure out how to get there herself. Shame, because that was where Giselle was hiding. Where Lune herself had gone in her investigations of the blackouts. The source of the power sink, of the eidolon.

  Frustrated, Aster threw her radiolabe down on the countertop before picking it back up and clutching it to her chest. She wished to scan it over Lune’s notes. She wished it would tick over the solutions. She wished and she wished, and though what she wished for didn’t come, the act of holding the radiolabe reminded her of something. Ghost-hunting through Matilda’s corridors in X deck but also Y, where Lune had lived.

  The end of the hidden Y deck shaft, of course. She had discovered it when taking language lessons with Ms. Bleeker, experimenting with her radiolabe. Aster had never been to its other side: a tunnel to the top of Matilda.

  There was an old dumbwaiter line that went from Y up to Heavens knew where, no stops, out of service behind a wall no one questioned. To get there, you had to make your way down to Yak Wing, pry open the elevator doors, then climb the ladder in the shaft. Aster had discovered it when she was nine, after having language lessons in Yellow Warbler Wing. She’d wandered into Yak and found the strange metal hatch labeled, SERVICE LIFT. At the time, the letters had been unfamiliar, and Aster had to later ask the Surgeon what they meant. Eventually, she’d figured it out, used a crowbar with Giselle’s help to pry it ajar.

  They used to talk about making it to the very top one day and hiding out there. They imagined a hidden deck only they’d know about. Grander than the upperdecks. Full of swimming pools and gardens and spice cakes. Home of the angels transporting Matilda.

  One night they tried it, loaded up backpacks and climbed. They made it a few hundred feet before having a sit on a wide service ledge. Stayed there until morning. The next day they climbed fifty more feet, sitting again at the next ledge, their little legs so tired and requiring a full day of rest. They did this for three days, surviving on canned peaches, having no way to cook the dried beans, rice, and oats they’d brought with them.

  When they’d returned downward to gather more foodstuffs, they’d been caught, and punished appropriately, which, in the eyes of the guard who’d found them out past curfew in Yipping Wolf Wing, was a public whipping. For missing headcount three days in a row, they’d been locked in the brigbox without food or any human contact for a period of eight days. They’d abandoned plans of running away and dreams about the hidden deck.

  That was over fifteen years ago. Surely she could climb it in one go now.

  * * *

  What she found was grander than the Field Decks even, a glass dome hundreds of meters high. Aster’s neck strained as she peered up. It truly appeared to be a passageway to the Heavens. Maybe her childhood self had it right all along. Stars, them was stars she was seeing. Shining silver specks burning holes in the sky. Light-years and light-years of them. Too many to count.

  She’d seen pictures before, mostly in Night Empress comics, but she’d always assumed the artist had taken some liberties. Surely, megaspheres of fusing hydrogen shined a bit brighter than what she saw in those drawings. Shouldn’t it look like bombs going off in the sky everywhere above her?

  She knew it was their distance that made them seem small. How far away they must be to be reduced to dots. How astonishing to learn how colossal the Heavens were. Aster finally understood Theo’s devotion. The spectacle before her deserved all of her praises.

  Small shuttles were lined up in neat rows, some worn, some pristine and untouched. Giselle sat among a slew of papers in an area that Aster guessed was a runway or repair area, open and spacious.

  “Quite the climb, yeah?” said Giselle.

  “Yes.” Aster felt blisters splitting the skin over her heels, arches, and left instep. She couldn’t feel her legs at the moment, but she suspected when she did, they would hurt more than they ever had before, excepting instances of corporal punishment.

  “Took you long enough,” Giselle said, her tone equal parts playful and accusatory.

  “I can’t run away at a whim to chase after you.”

  “You could if you had your priorities straight. After all this time, how can you still be so caught up in their rules?”

  But it wasn’t the rules of the Sovereignty that hindered Aster. Her own rules did. Responsibility to Theo and Aint Melusine and her bunkmates. Most of all, it was her need to solve this mystery on her own terms in her own time.

  Lune was her mother. Aster had lived inside of her. She wanted the same things Giselle wanted, but it was personal. It was her very own history come to life, breathing hot dragon breath all around her, begging her down its scorched throat.

  A scientist, Aster had learned something Giselle had not: decoding the past was like decoding the physical world. The best that could be hoped for was a working model. A reasonable approximation. That was to say, no matter what Aster learned of Lune, there was no piecing together the full mystery of her life. There was no hearing her laugh or feeling her embrace. A ghost is not a person.

  Giselle gestured for Aster to come closer. Nicolaeus’s rifle was slung over her back, blood marred her clothes, and she looked beautifully demonic. “Check this out,” said Giselle, holding up a sheet of paper. She must have taken some of Lune’s notebooks and folders from the botanarium and brought them here.

  “Giselle—”

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t get smudges on them or bend them or whatever you’re afraid of. I was careful. Now look. I noticed something.”

  Aster sighed and took a seat next to her, stacking the scattered pages back in order.

  “All right, now first you got to look up.” Giselle pointed to the domed glass ceiling, then stood and ran to a light switch, flipping it so the room was dark. With the lights off, Aster could see the stars outside so clearly. She estimated thousands in her visual range. “Does anything stand out?” Giselle asked.

  Aster searched the Heavens, trying to identify a pattern, a bright spot. “I see stars.”

  Giselle ran back from the light switch to join her, this time holding a little lantern in the dark over the page she held. “Now look at this.”

  “Molecule models,” Aster said, brow scrunched, though she knew it was another of her mother’s tricks. The drawings of cellulose polymer, sucrose, cysteine amino acid could’ve been a biscuit recipe for all Lune’s obfuscating.

  “That’s what I thought at first too. Or at least something to do with alchematics. But they’re constellations, Aster. Look again, up at the sky, then at the page.”

  Aster set her gaze to the stars, searching for the same dots and lines in her mother’s drawings, but saw nothing.


  “Look, Aster.”

  “I am looking.”

  There was such a mass of them, bright and white, that she couldn’t sort them, or tell one from another, and they blurred together into a great heavenly array of sparks—until she saw it. The propane molecule. Three stars in a wide, obtuse triangle. Three carbons. Three stars.

  “You see it, don’t you? Don’t you?”

  “I see it,” said Aster, feeling herself smile, though she didn’t know what any of it meant.

  “Your meema drew a star map.”

  Aster took the paper from Giselle’s hand, traced her finger over the molecules disguising aphorisms, and kissed each atom, each star. She imagined the movement of her mother’s hand as she drew the figures, fingers clasped around a pen. Were her fingers thin, delicate? Or stubby and meaty like Aster’s?

  “The only thing I can’t figure out is this, here in the middle,” said Giselle, pointing to a molecule of H2O, drawn larger than everything else, the atom of oxygen directly in the center. Aster compared the star map to the night sky, and saw only a smattering of small stars in the place that the H2O indicated there was something more significant.

  “I am curious how my mother would have gotten up here. Certainly not through the dumbwaiter shaft,” said Aster.

  “Here.” Giselle hopped up, flipped the lights back on, and led Aster up to another room. It looked to be a control center, sharing much in common with the Nexus. Consoles, switchboards, transmitters, receivers, stations with dials and buttons. There were papers strewn everywhere—all over the floor, taped to the walls, to the glass separating the room from the shuttle area. All of it, Lune’s handwriting.

  “You’ll be pleased to know none of it’s in code,” said Giselle, “which is probably why I don’t understand none of it.” Lune wouldn’t have had to disguise the notes she kept up here. The journals she kept in code were in case a guard confiscated them. Aster scanned the various papers. Ninety percent of it was mathematics so far beyond her that her eyes strained to make basic sense of it. Diagrams. Models.