Julia

  I become aware of the sounds of a crackling fire and ratchet my eyes open a degree. Immediately, I raise a hand to shield myself from the glare of the sunlit snow blazing in from outside. Still in the boathouse, then. By the look of things, the sun has been up for hours.

  Unwelcome visions of the previous night flood into my memory, and I feel a sudden, panicked need to make sure that I have the right number of arms and legs and am made of the right type of matter. My efforts evidently amuse Géraldine, who laughs warmly. “Wakey, wakey.”

  I crane my neck back and find her sitting cross-legged next to a bonfire, cooking something up in my cast-iron skillet.

  “I caught us some breakfast,” she says. “Doré jaune. From the river.”

  By the look of things, doré jaune is some type of fish. “The river’s frozen,” I reply, climbing with some difficulty out of my sleeping bag.

  Géraldine thumps a huge, corkscrew-like metal staff lying next to her on the dock with her hand. “Old ice auger. Hand operated. Can you believe these people just left it behind? Heh. Dumbasses.”

  “Well, I’m glad one of us is competent,” I say. I find my glasses in their case and sit down opposite her. There’s a pang of hunger as the scent of the sizzling fish meat fills my nostrils, but I make a show of forbearance. “Really, Géraldine, you don’t have to keep sharing food with me. I’ve got plenty—”

  She scoffs. “This ain’t charity, this is us keeping each other alive, yeah? Now here.” She skewers a filet on the point of a hunting knife and hands it to me. “Eat up.”

  I find I can’t argue with that. I eat the fish without another word.

  “So, how’re you feeling today?” she asks.

  I pause for a long moment, searching my heart for an answer. “Sore,” I settle on. “Disaffected. Discombobulated. Dissociated, maybe. Which is good, I suppose, because it means I can’t reflect on just how far, far in over my head I am.”

  Géraldine chuckles and tucks into her own piece of fish.

  “Also, I think Mr. Elsevier’s some kind of fucking sadist.”

  “Fucker really did a number on you, eh?”

  “You didn’t see it—one wonders.”

  Géraldine shakes her head. “You grabbed his hand, did a funny sort of dance, and fell on the ground, far as I could see.”

  “He got in my head,” I realize. “Literally.”

  “Did he answer your question at least?” she asks after a moment.

  “Yes,” I sigh. “It turns out I’m in it even deeper than I thought.” I lower my voice and look around the boathouse, as if discussing him will cause Elsevier to appear. “He says that ore-spinners are some kind of a…persecuted minority. Apparently mainstream Fairy society is afraid of their power.”

  She chuckles. “Really laying it on thick, hein?”

  “…Admittedly, it does make it even more mystifying that he would offer me an apprenticeship,” I concede.

  “Or why you’d take it,” quips Géraldine.

  “Hm. Yes, that’s one of the reasons I think he might just be telling the truth about it.” I sigh. “Honestly, I didn’t know what to make of it. They’re persecuted but they’re superpowered; he wants me to ask him questions, but he punishes me for doing so…and that’s without even getting into the mystic garbage—”

  “Mystic garbage?” Géraldine interrupts.

  “Everything has a soul,” I quote, skewering another piece of fish on the point of the knife. “Whatever that means.”

  This seems to give Géraldine pause. “Sounds like something nookomis used to say.”

  “‘Nookomis’?”

  “My gramma, sorry. When I was a little girl, she told me all the Creator’s gifts had a spirit, not just humans or animals. She wasn’t talking about magic though; it’s an old Indian belief. Religion, I guess.”

  “She might have been right,” I muse. “I don’t suppose your grandmother happened to mention anything about Fairies?”

  “No, my people don’t have ’em,” Géraldine replies. “Well…memegwesi are kind of like them, I suppose. Nookomis told me about them; they’re supposed to live in rivers and make mischief with canoes. But they’re not like these guys.” Her voice trails off. “You know, that’s actually been kind of bugging me, now I think about it.”

  I look askance at her.

  “Well, everybody’s going on about how ‘the old ways have returned’ and all that other bullshit and well…”

  “They’re not your old ways.”

  “Yeah! I mean, you’ve got your Fairies and your dragons and whatever else, but where are the memegwesi or the misikinebik or…any of the other things my gramma used to tell me about?”

  “Actually, come to think of it, those dragons are decidedly Eurocentric too!” I say. “I mean, China had dragons! Where is loong, one wonders!” I mentally add another question to my already far-too-long list. “Maybe they come from somewhere else.”

  “Maybe,” Géraldine replies distantly. “Just as well; nookomis wouldn’t like people calling them fairy tales, anyway.”

  “Hm.”

  For a long moment, we just sit there, listening to the crackling of the fire.

  “Can I ask you something?” asks Géraldine suddenly.

  I look up at her.

  “Are you actually going on this quest of yours? Like, you figure you’d actually head off to Faerie, with Elsevier?”

  “I mean…it’s kind of an academic question at this point,” I reply. “The portal is shut, remember.”

  “Supposing that there was another portal,” she prompts. “Or like a backdoor way in. Would you still go?”

  “One wonders why you’re asking.”

  “I just need to know. Would you?”

  I take a bite of my fish and chew it thoughtfully. Would I still do it? Knowing that he’s a criminal? Well, so am I, at this point: accessory to murder. Knowing that I’m probably being conned? Well, I already knew that. And what’s the alternative?

  I swallow my fish. “Yes. I would.”

  She nods solemnly. “Then I guess…I can say ‘yes’.”

  I furrow my brow in confusion.

  “As I very much hoped you would,” chimes in Elsevier. I bolt upright as I become aware of his presence, not a metre from where I’m sitting.

  I fight for words “W-what—what, one wonders, what’s going on.”

  “Welcome to the team, Géraldine,” Elsevier says, extending a hand to her. She looks almost as surprised by his appearance as I do, but shakes it nonetheless.

  “Sorry,” she says, looking at me. “He, uh. He spoke to me this morning. While you were sleeping.”

  “We need a back door into Faerie,” says Elsevier, with a shrug. “Her grandson, by all appearances, fell into one. She’s going to lead us to it.”

  “And then we get Paul back,” says Géraldine. “That’s the deal. But I wasn’t gonna agree to it until I knew you were good to keep going.”

  “Y-you could have just told me what was going on,” I stammer.

  “She didn’t want you to take on risk on her account,” says Elsevier. “And I didn’t want you to back out on hers. Now then, with that out of the way, we have a long day’s travel ahead of us, so you’d best gather your things together.” He claps his hands. “Pitter patter, as I believe you people say!”

  I pay a weary glance to Géraldine. Pitter patter my ass.

  *

  We spend the better part of the morning bypassing a hydroelectric dam that lies round a bend a few kilometres down the river. After that, our second day’s journey becomes marginally easier than the first; indeed, there are times when it almost becomes enjoyable. These times are, admittedly, mostly during the regular breaks that Géraldine has mandated as our guide, though they are neither as frequent nor as long as I would prefer. I can’t bring myself to ask for more, however, as I get the impression that they only exist at all for my benefit. The prospect of reuniting with her grandson seems to have lit a fire inside Géraldine, and she now spends our periods of rest looking antsy, eager to get underway. I can only hope that she doesn’t resent me for slowing her down.

  Mr. Elsevier, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to need rest at all. I see little of the ore-spinner during the day, although I’m aware that, in his case, absence of evidence is very much not evidence of absence. Supposedly, he’s gone on ahead to scout for dangers, and I hope that it’s true—it would be very nice to get a little advanced warning the next time that we run into a party of Fairy knights or a zombie or whatever other horrors the post-Shift world has in store. Even so, I remain guarded in my use of language, in case he’s lurking invisibly behind my shoulder, waiting to answer an errant question.

  As the day wears on, the houses along the riverbank grow gradually fewer and farther apart, suburbs giving way to countryside. By the late afternoon, it seems well and truly like we’re in the middle of nowhere—a sensation that is only punctuated by the faint but unmistakable sound of wolves howling in the far distance. Hopefully still afraid of humans. Hopefully.

  Finally, as evening starts to settle in, Géraldine resolves that we should stop for the day. For want of any pre-existing structures in our immediate vicinity, she and I pile up some snow for a quinzhee and then cook a broth with the bones and head of the fish we had for breakfast, making some polite conversation before she turns in for the night. For my part, I stay up for a while, writing something of Elsevier’s response to the previous night’s question in my journal. In all of the business of staying alive, I have been sorely neglecting my documentation.

  *

  I hold my pencil in my bare, cold-numbed fingers, thinking back on my last psychedelic session with Mr. Elsevier. “Everything has a soul,” I mutter as I jot it down. I sigh in disgust and tap the page; it may be true, but it still sounds like mystical rubbish.

  “Tell me about it,” comes a familiar voice from within my now-opened backpack.

  The ghost takes me so much by surprise that I have to stifle a yelp. “Sorry, Lester,” I say. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “Yeah, well,” he replies. “Turns out that being all alone with your thoughts in a darkened room for days on end when you’re dead, depressed, and disembodied kind of sucks. Especially when some other part of you is off far away, being violently jerked around.”

  “I’ve not been—oh, you mean physically,” I reply. “Well, at least we know that—” I’m about to say something along the lines of “your sense of motion still works”, but then it occurs to me that Lester probably doesn’t want to hear me musing about his current status. Finally, all that I can think to say is: “I’ll put you back, if you want.”

  “Not yet,” answers the chalk after a pause. “How’s everything going with you?”

  The question is so glib—so normal—that I start giggling in spite of myself. To my surprise, Lester joins in—or at least the chalk starts making a semi-periodic high-pitched trilling noise, which I take to be laughter.

  Finally, I get a hold of myself. “Oh, you know how it is,” I reply. “Epic quest, becoming an accessory to double murder, feeling the business end of a Midas touch. Pretty much exactly what I figured my life would be like when I entered academia.”

  “…Midas touch?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  There’s a lull in our conversation, and then Lester speaks up again: “Can I ask an enormous favour?”

  “Anything.”

  “Could you—could you ask your Rumpelstiltskin friend what I am?” Lester’s “voice” sounds almost furtive as he speaks. “You know, how I came to be…bound to this room. Whether there’s any way that I can move on, one way or another.”

  I look down at the chalk sympathetically. In all honesty, the idea of asking Mr. Elsevier anything to do with death seems like it would give him too wide of an opening to torment me. And yet—surely, I must owe Lester that much out of basic human decency. “I’ll think about it,” I say finally.

  “That’s not an answer,” Lester replies. “Look, I know this isn’t life or death—” He pauses, recognising his own, presumably accidental, groan-worthy pun. “But imagine not knowing what you are, or how you came to be, or even what’s going to happen to you.”

  “I only have eight questions,” I equivocate, realising even as it’s leaving my mouth how absolutely feeble it sounds.

  “You’re my only point of contact here, damn it!” Lester exclaims, cutting me off. “I wouldn’t ask you if I had any other choice!” His tone softens somewhat. “Don’t I deserve to know?”

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  I take off my glasses and squeeze my eyes in resignation. “Yes,” I admit. “You do. Sorry. It’s just that his last answer was…pretty unpleasant—”

  “You don’t have to explain,” Lester replies. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. If—”

  “I’ll do it,” I say. “I was being selfish. I’ll ask Mr. Elsevier at the next opportunity.”

  “Thank you.”

  *

  Early the next morning, I find Mr. Elsevier in the shadows farther off into the woods. I am surprised to see that he is hopping on one foot and balancing a plucked goose carcass on his head.

  “Mr. Elsevier,” I say with a perfunctory nod.

  “That is not my name,” Mr. Elsevier replies, bobbing his head up and down to make the dead goose wiggle provocatively.

  “Too bad; it’s what I’m calling you.”

  Mr. Elsevier kicks out his suspended leg, uses the momentum to bring himself into a midair flip, catches the goose on the sole of his other foot, and neatly deposits it back onto his head, landing in a one-legged stance. It is a legitimately impressive display of acrobatics, but I’m not fooled.

  “Don’t you want to know what I’m doing?” he demands after a pause.

  “Obviously you’re trying to get me to ask you that.”

  “Actually no,” he says, planting his other leg firmly upon the ground and letting the goose drop into his hands where it vaporizes in a flash. I expect him to elaborate, but of course, he does not. In spite of my frustration, I let the obvious question go unasked.

  “I have another question,” I announce after a tense moment.

  “Back for more, eh? Well, I shall endeavour to make the answer at least as memorable as the last. Shoot.”

  I take a deep breath, trying to steel myself against the inevitable ordeal.

  “Go ahead,” Mr. Elsevier says seductively. “I won’t bite; well…not unless the circumstances warrant it. Or I’m really, really hungry.”

  “Mr. Elsevier,” I blurt, and begin reciting the question that I have written in my journal. “Whereas haunting, as a phenomenon, has been observed to follow upon the deaths of certain human individuals, and you have asserted that everything, even inanimate objects, has its own soul, I ask that you explain to me, without inflicting any unnecessary physical or psychological torment, the physical and/or magical mechanisms through which ghosts arise.”

  Mr. Elsevier rolls his eyes. “That’s not a question.”

  “Yes, it is!” I insist.

  “No, it’s a statement; and as I have thus far tactfully refrained from interpreting your various inane statements as questions, I think that you can at least be expected to use the appropriate interrogative syntax, don’t you?”

  I sigh in exasperation, trying to think up an appropriate wording as I go. “Mr. Elsevier, given—given that hauntings have been seen to exist, could you—could you please…” My voice trails off as it occurs to me that I don’t want to ask him a yes-or-no question.

  He taps his foot impatiently on the snow. “Today would be nice.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake,” I explode. “Mr. Elsevier: what do you know about ghosts?”

  The Fairy smiles. “There! Was that so hard?”

  With that, he grabs me suddenly by the head and snaps my neck like a twig.

  *

  There was a short, sharp pain and a sickening crack, but it was over before I knew what was happening. Now I’m not sure whether I feel or see anything. But I must, surely? There’s shape, colour—

  “You’re dead, Julia,” announces a voice. After a second, I identify it as Mr. Elsevier’s. After another, it occurs to me I can hear.

  Julia.

  That’s me, isn’t it?

  No, that’s Julia. That shape with the trunk and the four limbs and the head that’s too loose lying on the forest floor, which I can see from so many, many angles. That’s me—oh.

  And that’s Elsevier kicking it in the ribs.

  I feel I rising tide of—what? Emotions of some kind. Disgust. Anger. Betrayal.

  “You murdered me!”

  The sound that I make is more like the rustling of tree branches than any sort of voice. And I can feel the tree branches, the winter air, the weight of the snow, the creakiness of the wood, the heartbeats of the animals forced into a sudden and unprepared hibernation. It’s internal to me, just like the beating of my heart—up until a few seconds ago.

  “Is that you, Julia?” calls Mr. Elsevier. “Surely not! You’ve gone where the stormy winds won’t blow! You have gone to—well—nowhere, as it turns out. You have just gone.”

  Mr. Elsevier kicks the corpse—me—again. “You! Are! Dead!”

  I watch my body decay. The skin shrinks, the flesh rots, the bones tumble from the leathery sack that had once held them and turn to dust. I feel sick to my—I just feel sick. Sick and empty and profoundly sad. My faint sobs are carried off by the wind.

  “This is the outcome of all mortal tales,” announces Mr. Elsevier. “Your lives are short, generally rather dull, and then they end—leaving nothing behind.” He looks theatrically confused for a moment. “But who am I talking to? Who, pray tell, watches me from out the forest?”

  He smiles and caresses the bark of an elm with his finger. His touch is a spot of warmth against the frigid weather. “Someone hears me? Who are you? Speak!”

  With sudden certainty, it dawns on me that this must be a trick. It has to be! Just like before, when I—when I—there had been a question involved, hadn’t there? I feel certain there was—

  He breaks a chunk of bark off with his hand and I feel it like a sting. I cry out with a gust of wind.

  “Ah, there you are. So, you are here after all. Except not really, I’m afraid, because—well—look at you! You’re not Julia Chen. She’s gone.”

  “But I remember—”

  “You are the spirit of the forest,” he asserts. “In a different time and place, humans might call someone like you a genius loci. You are a soul, but, if left to your own devices, old and slow and primitive. But when Julia was here—mind pressing against yours—she left an impression upon you; shaped you in her image.”

  “Because I—she—died,” I say, not quite able to believe that I’m entertaining this.

  “Yes. Death helps but is not always necessary; any intense experience can leave its mark. Even the quotidian blandness of routine can wear into a genius loci—like feet treading on a carpet. And you can remember the impressions it made, thinking they’re your memories. But they’re not.”

  “No, but—”

  “Tell me, ‘Julia’; what’s your mother’s name?”

  “I—” I search my memory. “I don’t remember.”

  “Of course, you don’t,” replies the Fairy. “Because Julia wasn’t thinking about her mother when I killed her. You see? You’re—”

  “Grace!” I suddenly shout. “Her name was Grace!”

  The memory comes rushing back as if a dam in my mind just exploded. It’s accompanied by a flood of others—including any number of things that I’d certainly not been thinking of when I’d…

  Died?

  I suddenly find myself looking at Mr. Elsevier from a single perspective—one not two feet in front of his face.

  He scowls. “Ah,” he says. “That glamour really should have lasted longer. You know, at this point, I should probably make a slight confession—”

  “I’m not dead.” I state blankly. “And I really am Julia Chen.”

  “Well, the thing about that is—”

  I realize that I am back in my body, which is fully intact, arms and legs and fingers and toes each in perfect working order. Without so much as a thought, I curl five of my perfectly functional fingers into a fist and clock Mr. Elsevier right in his eyeball.

  He gapes at me. “You…how did you—”

  “No more tricks,” I interrupt. “From now on, I will ask my questions, and you will answer them honestly. No more lying!”

  “I was answering honestly,” Elsevier protests. “The lies were in service of illustrating—”

  “The lies were in the service of gaslighting me,” I correct. “To make the questions so excruciating that I will stop asking them. But that ends right now. Do you—” I was about to ask “do you understand?” but I stop myself in the nick of time. “It ends.”

  Mr. Elsevier chuckles, but I recognize false bravado. “And pray tell, dear woman, why do you suppose that I will abide by those terms?”

  “Because they’re your terms!” I erupt. “You were the one who floated this apprenticeship! You dealt yourself every possible advantage, you told me to ask you ten questions, and now you are going out of your way to make actually hearing their answers as painful and unpleasant as possible. What—one wonders—the fuck!”

  My final outburst is apparently loud enough to echo through the forest for couple of seconds. I feel some slight embarrassment mingle in with my outrage.

  Elsevier crosses his arms. “You know I can’t tell you the criteria under which you are being judged. That was what we agreed.”

  “And I’m not asking you about those criteria,” I retort. “I’m asking about the format of your answers!”

  He looks at me intently. “Then ask.”

  “Alright.” I turn away from him and draw in a deep breath. “Mr. Elsevier. In the specific context of answering my questions”—I pause, a thousand sophisticated diplomatic wordings arranging themselves on my tongue before I finally just utter—“Why are you such a dick?”

  *

  I brace myself for yet another gruelling experience, but it doesn’t come. Instead, Elsevier’s body loosens and limbers up, the tension it holds suddenly dissipating into nothing. When he speaks, it is smooth and matter-of-fact, without any theatrical affectation. There are no illusions, no magic. Not even very much in the way of haughtiness. This is what he says:

  “I am ‘a dick’, as you so indelicately put it, dear Julia, because I very much hope for you to succeed in becoming my apprentice. And because I fear it as well.”

  “Huh?” I blurt. Then I hasten to add: “That’s not a question, I’m just requesting elaboration.”

  “Let me rephrase,” says Elsevier, straightening out his lapels. “I hope that you are the one we are looking for. I can say little as to why, as the terms of our agreement preclude me from specifying the criteria under which you are being judged—suffice it to say that a new ore-spinner is urgently required, and that I would not have extended the possibility of apprenticeship if I didn’t think that you had at least some remote possibility of distinguishing yourself in the manner that we need—though I shall leave it to you to figure out whether you have yet done so. As for the fear, well…” A small, odd sort of smile appears on his lips as he turns to look at me. “I fear you, Julia Chen.”

  For a moment, I can only stare at him, flabbergasted. “I’m…not out to hurt anyone,” I manage to say.

  He looks at me skeptically with the eye that I’d just punched.

  “Necessarily,” I append.

  “You know, I think that I might trust you more if you were,” he declares, turning away from me. “One knows where one stands with someone who’s out to hurt people. Or who wants to get rich. But someone who’d burn time itself just to have the satisfaction of knowing what colour the flames were—that’s someone who’s deeply dangerous.”

  I cross my arms over my chest. “I don’t recognize myself in that caricature.”

  Elsevier shrugs. “That hardly matters; I recognize you in it. I mean—Spirits of Heaven and Earth, woman, your entire world just ended! Everything you thought you knew about reality curled up and died before your very eyes, and your first thought is how embarrassed you are to know nothing!”

  I scowl uncomfortably; now I recognize myself.

  “Knowledge demands respect,” he intones. “But you treat it frivolously. Take that last question of yours: I offer tutelage in fundamental magic—magic, as I have shown you, capable of laying waste to entire nations—and you come to me with some trifling question about common ghosts! It’s all the same to you. Why, we were not even a day into our little quest before you picked up a vagrant and insisted that she come with us!”

  “You were going to murder her!” I retort. “And now, she’s our guide!”

  “Ah,” he says with a wag of his finger, “but you didn’t know that she’d be useful when you put your foot down to save her. You are pursuing dangerous secrets, and you treat it with all of the seriousness of a picnic in the countryside; the more the merrier!”

  “Well pardon me for exhibiting basic humanity!”

  “Yes!” Elsevier snaps. “Exactly the problem! Humanity! Billions of ignorant children blundering blindly around every dark corner, playing with primordial forces just to see what will happen, and never leaving well enough alone. And you—the human-est of all, high priestess dilletante of a bygone world!”

  “Dilletante?” I echo. “I’ve dedicated my life to science—”

  “A paltry few years of a human existence.”

  “And yet,” I reiterate, “it was you who made the offer to me. Knowing full well what I am.”

  “I did,” he replies simply.

  For a moment, we just stand there, facing each other. At last, I draw in a deep breath and turn away from him. “And you won’t tell me why, of course.”

  “I can’t. By the terms of—”

  “—Of our contract. Yes, I remember.” I press my lips into a line and look over at him. “So. Let me get this straight. You’re tormenting me—because I’m human.”

  “Not at all,” says Elsevier. “I am, shall we say, ‘answering your questions in a visceral fashion’—because if you cannot respect my knowledge, you should at least fear accessing it.”

  “If you think I’ve paid you insufficient respect—”

  “Oh, do pay attention, Julia! I said that knowledge demands respect. It is…fickle.”

  “‘Fickle’,” I repeat.

  “It does not dance only for you. Wealth you can hold in your hand and it will remain there ’til you let it go; power one has and others do not. But knowledge—knowledge makes itself available to anyone, for any purpose. And those who seek knowledge for its own sake never seem to envision the uses others might have for it—nor how dangerous it can be!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Mr. Elsevier throws back his head and laughs. “Of course you don’t, Julia! And that is exactly the problem. But let’s hash it out, shall we?”

  He leaps onto a stump and gestures expansively at the surroundings. “Take this country of yours, for example; I’ve been here before, you know. Well…it wasn’t really this country, per se. This landmass. This chunk of geography. Only a few millennia ago. Blink of an eye, really. I think I might have met an ancestor or two of Géraldine’s. Anyway, it was a paradise! Vast swathes of forest, and on the plains, herds of bison stampeding in their millions, far as the eye could see. There was this pigeon that darkened the skies with its numbers. But even that was nothing to what my father told me; there had been mammoths when he’d visited! Can you even imagine such a thing? Mammoths and enormous sloths, and huge beavers, and those—those cats with the oversized fangs, look like swords.” He mimes them with his fingers.

  “If there’s a point, please come to it.”

  “And no humans. Not a one. But, of course, some wandered here between my father’s visit and my own, so all of those things vanished. And now, on my second visit, it seems some more humans have shown up, and now there aren’t even any bison. I’m gone for a few millennia, and your civilization, such as it is, has already metastasized to the point where you’ve not just wiped them out, but despoiled your planet, and you find yourself careening toward your own doom, and why? Knowledge. You figure out how to kill a mammoth, and soon there are no mammoths. You figure out how to power a machine by burning coal, and soon you poison your sky. And if you figure out how to split the atom…why, you use it to raze your own cities!

  “And now,” he concludes. “You want to learn the secrets of fundamental magic. Magic that works with things that your language can’t even describe, let alone name. Magic that we Ore-Spinners jealously guard even from our own people, and Fairies actually keep their promises. So, you can perhaps understand why the idea of sharing it with your flighty, irrational self, whatever my hopes, might make me a bit…trepidatious.”

  “But I’m not trying to—”

  Mr. Elsevier looks askance and immediately I feel embarrassed. The words I was about to say were: “I’m not trying to use it.” Unfortunately, that’s not how science or technology work.

  “I wouldn’t share it if I thought it was dangerous,” I say instead.

  “No? Just all the knowledge leading up to it? Or were you planning on sitting on everything you learn?”

  “I…” The truth is that sharing my findings with others genuinely didn’t cross my mind. It’s not as if I can send my results to a journal or even stick them up on the Internet. “I don’t know,” I say finally.

  “How very reassuring!” he exclaims. “Depends how you’re feeling, does it? Maybe there will be a million stupid humans monkeying about with the very fabric of reality; but on the other hand, maybe there won’t. I can see that the future of this world is in good hands!”

  “Oh, and are you any better!?” I explode.

  And then—too late—slap a hand over my mouth, recognizing my error.

  I expect him to smile, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just looks at me long and hard, his expression a cypher.

  “No,” he says finally. “I’m not.”

  He looks away from me. “Anyway; I hope that you found these answers satisfactory. Do stop by if you have any more questions.”

  *

  I ruminate upon his words as I make my way back to camp. One very nice thing about being a theorist is that you so rarely have to care about ethics. You generally never have to deal with living research subjects and, at least for the last half-century or so, everything you can theorize about is so far out there that you’d be lucky to test your theories at all within your lifetime, let alone incorporate them into technology. And yet…

  It had only been one generation between Einstein’s mass–energy equivalence and the atomic bomb. Lise Meitner’s discovery of atomic fission had contributed even more directly. Oppenheimer, Feynman, Fermi, Bohr, and however many others had personally worked on the Manhattan Project; Heisenberg had done the same (though less successfully, thank God) on the Nazi side. It all seems so innocent when it’s just equations on a page, but nothing exists in a vacuum—

  Ugh. I need to talk to another physicist.

  Oh God, Lester! I suddenly remember the promise I made to him—and the answer I’d found to his question. How do you tell a man—after everything he’s been through—that he’s not even real?

  I can’t make him wait, I decide. It would be even crueller to make him wait.

  I reach into my backpack and, reluctantly, withdraw the chalk.

  “Hey, Lester?”

  “Yeah?” comes the disembodied voice.

  “I’ve spoken to Mr. Elsevier on your behalf,” I say neutrally.

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like to hear what he said?”

  It’s a cringe-inducingly stupid question, but I still hope that he’ll change his mind.

  “Yes, please.”

  I take a deep breath. “He said that ghosts are just memories. That—that human consciousnesses can leave imprints in the inanimate objects surrounding them.”

  There’s a pause. “I see.”

  “Lester,” I say. “That means you’re not who you think you are. You—you’re the spirit of the room. Thinking it’s a man.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But”—the ghost protests—“but I remember…”

  “Lester,” I say, sharply recalling the horror he must now be feeling. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But…do you remember your mother’s name?”

  For a moment, there is silence; then, from somewhere deep inside the chalk, I hear a keening wail, picking up in volume and intensity.

  “Lester,” I say, as soothingly as I can manage. “Believe me, I understand how hard this is, but just because you’re not who you thought you were—”

  The wail reaches a deafening crescendo, sounding nothing like what a human voice could produce. It’s all that I can do not to cover my ears.

  “It doesn’t mean you’re not a person!” I shout.

  The chalk snaps in half in my hand. And then, all is as silent as the grave.