A Perfect Machine(40)

“That’s great, Milo,” Henry said, “but where are we supposed to go? And how do we get anywhere without being noticed? Adelina said we’re being watched by Palermo’s men, right? And even if we weren’t, I’m kind of gaining on eight feet tall and made nearly entirely of metal. Bit of a point of interest there, you know?”

“Let’s just get a couple of hours sleep, then decide, OK?” Faye said. “I’m running on empty, and we should be thinking as clearly as possible when we decide our next step.”

Milo and Henry exchanged glances. Until Faye said it, neither of them had really thought about how tired they were. Henry was physically beat, and Milo was emotionally tired, since physical concerns were no longer at the top of his list – though maybe they would start to be again, since he was feeling somewhat fleshy now.

Faye took Henry’s silence as agreement. “Alright, so corporeal people get the bedroom; incorporeal people have to sort themselves out. The living room is fine, if such things matter to ghosts.”

“I’m not a–”

“I know, Milo,” Henry said. “We just don’t know what else to call you, OK?”

Milo frowned. “Maybe one day I’ll be a real boy.”

Henry laughed.

“No way I’m fitting on a bed anymore, even if you’d allow me in,” Henry said, “so I’m good on the bedroom floor… Actually, I don’t even need to take up your space, if you’re not comfortable with it, Faye. I’m fine to go out on the living room floor.”

“No,” she said, quicker on the heels of his words than she wanted. “No, I mean – I want you to stay in here. With me. OK?”

Henry nodded. “We’ll set the alarm for three hours from now.”

“And I’ll call in sick to the hospital when we’re up again.”

“See you guys in a few hours, then,” Milo said, and hovered out the door.

When he got out to the living room, Adelina was gone.

“Really? Again?” he said to the empty room.





T H I R T E E N





All around Adelina, energy swirled. She was aware of no sensation other than a strange kind of sight, but even that gave her no clue as to her whereabouts.

Although she had no way of knowing it, in those instances when she disappeared from the world she knew, Adelina reappeared here, in this near-colorless space. She floated here, in this place where time did not seem to exist. Occasionally, she would see what looked like a flash of lightning, but not much else. It seemed to her that her surroundings were constantly in flux. And though she did not feel it as a sensation, per se, she felt somewhere deep inside that she was more alone than she could ever have thought possible. Wherever she was, she was the only person who had ever been there, the only person that would ever be there. Her loneliness carved a channel through her psyche that got deeper every time she returned.

Warring with these emotions, however, was the supreme sense of calm she sometimes felt. When she’d first come here, immediately following her ascension, she’d felt this same overwhelming calm. She did not know how long she floated here back then, but when she returned to her world it was with a purpose. She had appeared to Milo, tried to impart to him information received in this strange place. Information she had no recollection of receiving in any traditional way her mind could interpret, but there nonetheless.

And what she knew was incredibly important.

What she knew would change everything.

While she hovered in this strange place now, her mind turned again to Milo, who was apparently Henry’s ghost familiar. Adelina had had a ghost familiar, too, right after she died, but she couldn’t remember who it was. Was it one of her close friends, like Milo was to Henry, or was it someone she didn’t know? She felt like she’d learned very important things from her familiar, but most – if not all – of it seemed drained from her mind.

She felt like her name started with an M. Marney? Mabel? Marissa? Maureen? Maura? … Then it popped into her head: Marla. That was it. A little girl.

Adelina had no idea where she’d come from, but as soon as she’d died, this little girl, this comfortable companion was very near her. But she had eventually left her side. Gone somewhere else.

In this formless place, which she had come to call simply the Otherland, memories slipped through her fingers like tiny fish in a stream, but one conversation burbled briefly to the surface now, and she grasped at it, held on tightly, tried to remember…

When Adelina had first arrived here, her brain couldn’t conceive of the near-nothingness in which it’d found itself, so it created a fictional construct from a memory of her childhood. Her mind plugged in walls with movie star posters on them, a carpeted floor on which she sat crosslegged, leafing through a celebrity gossip magazine. This was her teenage room, at home with her parents. She’d barely had any lead in her body at this point, had only just started participating in the Runs recently – fourteen being the age everyone had to start. It was quickly discovered that if you didn’t start on the night of your fourteenth birthday, your friends and family began to disappear. The learning curve was incredibly fast for this, so not as many people vanished in the early days of the Inferne Cutis – about a hundred and fifty years ago – as one might imagine, and not a lot had disappeared since. (There had been one or two people who tried purposely missing Runs so they could get rid of family members they loathed, but whatever external force oversaw the vanishings saw through this tactic, so no one would disappear in those cases.)