by E. E. Holmes
“Is that all?” he asked when I was done.
“I… yes, sir. I think that’s everything.”
“Let me ask you a question, Carey. Do you think you are personally aware of every gathering, meeting, schedule change and event that occurs within the walls of this fortress.”
“I… no, sir. I don’t presume to possess that kind of knowledge.”
“That’s right. You’re at the bottom of the heap here, Carey. This place is full of activity, most of which does not concern you in the slightest.”
I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Did this mean he knew about the gathering I had witnessed? Was I relaying information he already had?
“I understand that, sir. I was just concerned that the information on the log didn’t match up with—”
“Was that log signed?” Eamon asked, cutting me off.
“Yes, sir.”
“By a Commander?”
“Yes, sir. Commander Booker.”
“I see. So, have you come down here to call Commander Booker’s integrity into question?”
“No, sir. I simply wanted to…”
“Let me explain something to you, Carey,” Eamon said, and his tone sharpened considerably. “Your Council clan status seems to have given you the false impression that anyone in this fortress gives a good goddamn about your opinions. We don’t. I don’t care one whit about your bloodline, your pedigree, or how many goddamn laws your mummy has passed. Here, you’re only as good as your word and your work ethic. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Whatever you’ve cooked up in your mind, whatever conspiracy theory you’ve convinced yourself of that puts you on some kind of moral high ground over your peers, you can forget about it. You’ve been assigned here to keep your head down and do as you’re blood well ordered, do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now get out of my office and don’t presume to waste my time again, unless you’d like to find yourself on another double tonight.”
“Understood, sir,” I replied, nodding my head and backing out of the office, closing the door behind me.
Out in the hallway, my heart and mind were racing. Eamon’s words, far from convincing me to forget about what I’d seen, had only convinced me more thoroughly that something was wrong. More alarming still, the leadership was in on it, and that meant that there was no one left to tell, no one to whom to report.
I was so distracted that I turned the corner and nearly walked right into Booker, who was on his way back into the offices. His face, when he saw me, turned instantly to stony disapproval.
“Carey,” he said with a curt nod. He was carrying the clipboard with the shift log on it. He did not miss my eyes flicking involuntarily to it and then away again.
“Good morning, sir,” I replied, returning the nod and then walking on. I could feel his eyes on my retreating back all the way down the corridor until I turned the corner.
It was as though the walls of the príosún were closing in around me. I couldn’t be sure who I could trust, or what I could tell them. Even West, whom I considered something akin to a friend, wouldn’t be safe to confide in anymore. He was too easy-going, too trusting of everyone. There wasn’t a thing he couldn’t find a way to shrug off, and while this was sometimes admirable, now it felt downright dangerous. I had never felt so isolated in all my time at Skye.
Even as I felt that isolation begin to close in around me, a ray of hope burst through my chest, and I clung to it like a drowning man to a life preserver. In a few short weeks, fate willing, I would see Jess. Even if only for a few minutes, we would be able to speak to each other. There was no one in the world I trusted like I trusted her. If I could relay this information to her, make her understand the significance of what I had witnessed amongst the ranks of the Caomhnóir here, I knew she would find a way to raise the alarm. It was not the way I had envisioned spending our few stolen moments together, but now it was clear that she was my only chance.
My immediate panic seemed to calm itself. There was a path forward. Get to Jess. Tell her everything. Trust that she would pass the information along to the right person. If I could just keep my head down that long, avoid any more suspicion, and keep my eyes peeled, I might just be okay.
More than ever before, I found myself counting the seconds until we would see each other again. Only now, it was more than just my heart that depended upon our reunion: it might just be the safety of the entire Northern Clans.
Hannah's Story
“HANNAH, TALK TO ME.”
“No.”
“Please, sweetness.”
“NO!”
I was pressing my pillow over my head with every ounce of strength I had, but it still wasn’t enough to keep Milo’s voice out.
“Come on. I can’t keep apologizing indefinitely. At some point, you’re going to have to forgive me.”
“No, I don’t. I can do this forever. I’ll walk around with this pillow on my head for the rest of my life. I’ll start a new fashion trend,” I sniffed.
“Hmmm… edgy, but I’m not sure it would catch on,” he replied in a mock-thoughtful voice that made me want to throttle him.
“Very funny. Now go away.”
He didn’t answer, but I knew he was still there. I could feel him, his energy pushing and prodding against the pillowcase, willing it aside. I waited, holding my breath. Finally, I heard him sigh dejectedly, and the sound was like a punch in the gut. “Fine. Take a little time. I’ll come and check on you in a bit.”
Don’t, I thought to myself. Please don’t.
It had been one week. One week since he’d… made his decision. I still couldn’t bear to think about it, even though I knew that my best friend was right there in the room with me—that he wasn’t really gone for me the way that he was gone for other people. This knowledge didn’t soften the blow at all—if anything, it made me feel worse. I remained, despite his best efforts, utterly inconsolable.
Of course, I hadn’t known he was still earthbound at first, because he’d had no idea what the hell he was doing. It took him a full two days to realize where he was, and another two days to figure out how to manifest himself, how to move around, and how to focus his energy in such a way that he could reach out to me. Meanwhile, I’d spent four days crying constantly, refusing to eat, and reaching out into the mental space around me, tugging on energies and bright spots, searching for any sign of him, hoping I would find him but also hating myself for hoping it. And when I finally found him, and he finally grasped enough about his state to show himself, I wanted nothing more than to never have found him at all.
I know. That sounds really messed up. But hear me out before you write me off as the worst best friend in the history of ever.
The guilt had always been the worst part of what I could do. Unless you’ve experienced it, you just can’t imagine it. Most people would assume that being scared frequently is the worst part, but they’d be wrong. It’s unpleasant, of course, being confronted with ghosts just popping up out of nowhere—like living in a low-budget horror movie that relies on cheap jump scares to keep you on the edge of your seat. And there is an element of that—of living life permanently on the edge of your seat. But the truth is that human beings can get used to almost anything. We’re surprisingly adaptable like that. And so, by the time Milo… left… and then came back, I was quite accustomed to living life on the edge of my seat. I made the edge as comfortable as I could and settled in for the long haul, because if one thing was clear, it was that the spirits, however they had found me, were not going away.
No, the worst part was not the sudden entrances or the sometimes gruesome appearances. It has always been the guilt, pure and simple. I understood guilt at an age when most children have scarcely understood that other people possess feelings at once as strong and tender as their own, and it all stemmed from the fact that spirits didn’t simply appear to me: they needed me for reasons none of them could pro
perly explain.
Imagine being four years old and having grown adults appearing to you in the night like monsters from under your bed, begging for your help. Imagine sitting in school trying to take a third-grade spelling test with a ghost standing behind you, demanding you look them in the eye when they’re talking to you, you insolent brat. Imagine trying to navigate the horror of a seventh-grade girls’ locker room, dying of shame as a ghost follows you into the shower in its quest for your undivided attention. And through it all, what I felt more than anything was guilt—guilt because they all seemed to think that I alone could help them… and I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. I’d lived with the guilt of that—of my inability to give them what they needed—since I could remember.
But this guilt I felt now, about Milo, was an entirely new animal—a beast I didn’t know how to wrestle with. Because never before had someone I’d known chosen to become a ghost because of what I could do. Just thinking the thought made my skin crawl and my stomach heave and my head want to explode. It was unbearable.
“But I knew there was a chance I could still be here for you!” he had told me when he appeared for the first time, his voice tinged with an incomprehensible note of pride.
For me. For me. He wanted to leave everything except me. And so, he did.
I rolled to my side and vomited right over the end of my bed and then spent the next hour scrubbing the carpet with violently shaking hands until my fingertips were red and raw.
The next day I dragged myself to group, not because I wanted to be there, but because dragging myself was preferable to someone else dragging me, which is what would have happened if I hadn’t showed up. Dr. Mulligan had already hinted at a meeting with my team to “reassess my services,” which was group-home-speak for “you’d better get your shit together and show us you’re coping or we’re going to medicate/transfer you.” I’d had this threat made to me so many times over the years in so many different settings that I could see it coming just by the way someone cleared their throat or looked over the top of their glasses at me. I had also become very adept at convincing people I was coping—at least, until the next public spirit encounter that I was unable to convincingly ignore.
As usual, everyone at group treated me like I had a particularly virulent strain of leprosy. In fact, it seemed to be worse today. They weren’t even bothering to keep their whispers to a level I could reasonably pretend to ignore.
“Jesus, she looks like hell…”
“Surprised she hasn’t offed herself…”
“Should she even be here…”
Dr. Mulligan shot them all reproving looks before turning and smiling at me, patting the chair beside her, inviting me silently to sit down while also singling me out as someone she might need to “handle” during our session. I dropped resignedly into the chair, folding my legs up onto the seat and resting my chin on my knees, hoping that a closed-off physicality might send the signal for people to just leave me alone. The chair next to me on the other side remained empty as the rest of the kids settled into their seats, and Dr. Mulligan, looking over at it in vague confusion, gave a quiet gasp. I knew right away what had happened.
She had miscounted. That was supposed to be Milo’s seat, but Milo was no longer there to sit in it.
She stood up, face flushed pink, and reached out to pull the chair out of the circle, but I placed a hand on it.
“No,” I said quietly.
“What’s that, Hannah?” Dr. Mulligan asked, attempting to keep her smile pasted on her face, but failing.
I looked up at her and felt a possessive kind of anger blaze up behind my eyes. “Leave it,” I said.
She looked as though she wanted to argue with me, as though this might be some sort of learning moment for the group that she could seize on. I could almost hear the line of inquiry forming in her head.“Let’s all talk about Hannah’s feelings. Why don’t you want me to take the chair, Hannah? Talk to me about the empty chair, Hannah. What does it represent to you?” But just as she opened her mouth to say it, she looked into my eyes and her face went quite pale.
“No,” I whispered again. Inside my head, I was screaming at her. “If you take his chair… if you dare take his chair and erase him like that, I swear to God, woman…”
Dr. Mulligan withdrew her hand and swallowed hard before sitting back down. “Well, shall we get started, everyone?” she asked, a little too loudly.
I kept my hand on the chair, just in case.
Meghan started, as I knew she would, because Meghan wasn’t happy unless group turned into a breathless, captive audience bent on analyzing her every private thought. Milo couldn’t stand her. He called her a “Look-At-Me,” one of his made-up categories for the kids who populated places like New Beginnings. The description had never been more apt than it was that day, as Meghan, who had barely had a passing acquaintance with Milo, launched into a ten-minute monologue detailing her devastation over his death. By the time she was finished, punctuated by lots of nodding and sympathetic noises from Dr. Mulligan and a few of the other kids, I wanted to leap across the circle like some kind of jungle cat and slap the phony tears right off her cheeks.
“Hey, thanks for saving my seat,” came Milo’s voice. I managed not to look, but rather felt him settle into the chair beside me, and I quickly pulled my hand away. I wanted to shout for him to leave, that he was only making this worse, but of course, I couldn’t do that in a room full of people. Instead, I pressed my lips together and pulled my hood up over my head in a gesture I hoped he would interpret as, “Leave me the hell alone.” If he noticed, he ignored it.
From the corner of my eye, I could see him shaking his head at Meghan. “Someone slap this girl. Can you believe her? ‘A hole in her life’ without me? Oh, please. Histrionic personality disorder, table for one.”
I covered an involuntary snigger with a cough, then cursed myself. It would only encourage him if he thought I was listening. Thankfully, no one else in the circle seemed to have noticed my slip-up. Meghan was still rambling on, twisting a strand of over-processed blonde hair around one of her fingers and sniffling theatrically into a wad of tissue.
“Remember when she started flirting with me over the summer, to make Jacob jealous?” Milo went on snorting with quiet laughter. “And when I told her I wasn’t into girls, she insisted that gay boys were just boys who hadn’t met the right girl yet, and that she could convince me if I’d just go back to her room and make out with her? And then when I refused, she wrote ‘Faggots will burn in hell’ on the door of my room in permanent marker? Ah, good times, good times.”
I maintained a straight face this time, but it was a close call. I’d just managed to completely compose myself when Milo let out a sound like an angry cat.
“Did she… did she write my name on her hand in Sharpie?” His voice rose to an absolute shriek of incredulity. I looked over and, sure enough, amongst her usual array of self-inflicted skin graffiti, Meghan had scribbled Milo’s name onto the back of her hand, enclosed in a heart.
It happened in the blink of an eye. Once second, Milo was sitting beside me, fuming, and the next second, he was across the circle in front of Meghan. I could feel his energy building like the pressure in the atmosphere, making my ears pop.
“Milo, don’t!” I blurted out.
Suddenly, the soda can in Meghan’s hand exploded. Lemon-lime soda sprayed into the air like a geyser, soaking her face and splattering everyone around her. Colleen squealed and fell sideways out of her seat. Jacob swore and jumped up, throwing his arms over his head. Milo, however, shot back into his seat, a terrified look on his face.
“Holy shit, did… did I do that?” he whispered.
Everyone else, however, was now looking at me.
“What… how did you… what the fuck, freak?” Meghan shouted, pointing at me.
Dr. Mulligan held up a hand. “Meghan, that’s enough, that language is completely—”
But Meghan was hysterical.
“Didn’t you hear her?” she shrieked, pushing dripping wet hair out of her eyes and pointing dramatically at me. “She… she said something about Milo and then my soda exploded!”
“Your soda exploded because of carbonation, Meghan,” Jacob snorted. “Jesus Christ, get a grip.”
“But didn’t you hear her?!”
“What, so people can’t talk now?”
“I’m telling you, she did it! She doesn’t belong in here with normal people! Why isn’t she locked up?” Meghan shrieked.
Jacob laughed. “Are you actually calling yourself normal now?”
“Shut the FUCK up, Jake!” Meghan shouted, rounding on him now.
“You probably shook the can before you opened it,” Jacob said.
“It was already open when I sat down!” Meghan shouted back.
“That’s enough, both of you!” Dr. Mulligan was also shouting now. Meghan jumped out of her seat and strode over to Jacob, tossing the can to the floor and spilling the rest of the contents on Colleen’s purse, causing her to start swearing and shouting, too.
Under cover of the chaos, I slipped out of my chair and fled the room, closing my door behind me. The door, of course, was no deterrent for Milo.
“Look, Hannah, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“You can’t do stuff like that, Milo!” I hissed at him. “You’re going to get me in trouble!”
“I don’t even know what I did!” Milo cried. “Or how the hell I did it! What happened in there?”
“Just because you don’t have a body anymore doesn’t mean you can’t touch things!” I snapped, still fighting to keep my voice low, desperate not to draw any more attention to myself. “Ghosts have a lot of power. It’s your… your energy. You can concentrate it, you can focus it on things and manipulate them.”
“I can?” Milo asked, a smile dawning on his face.
“Yes. Especially when you’re experiencing really strong emotions. But you’ll be tired and drained after you do it.”
Milo’s smile slipped just a little. “Yeah. Yeah, now that you mention it, I do feel a little… hey, what should I try next?” He floated over to my desk and bent low over a pencil, trying to move it across the surface.
