CHAPTER ONE

 THE WEIGHT YOU DON’T PUT DOWN

I don’t talk about my brother much.

Not because I don’t want to. Because if I start, he doesn’t shut up.

He’s been dead six years. Here’s how that went.

Room 317 was never quiet. The monitor chirping along with Billy’s heart. The fluorescent tube over his bed buzzing like it was trying to give me cancer on purpose. A vending machine down the hall that dropped a can every forty minutes whether anybody paid or not. Three days in that chair and I’d stopped hearing all of it.

Then, around three in the morning, the world went quiet first.

Not hospital quiet. The other kind. The quiet between the lightning and the thunder, when you’re a kid at the window counting Mississippis to find out how close it is.

Every hair on my arms stood up. My fillings hummed. The air tasted like I’d licked a battery.

Then the pulse hit.

It didn’t sound like thunder. It sounded like the sky tearing down the middle. The window went white, and every light in the room died at once, like somebody leaned over the bed and blew out the candles.

The monitor stopped mid-chirp.

Three days I hadn’t heard it. Now it was gone, and it was the only thing I could hear.

Then the screaming started down the hall. A nurse. A patient. Somebody hooked to a machine that had just quit on them. Then a floor below, then another, until the whole hospital remembered at once that it was full of people, and every one of them was scared.

“Code black! All floors!”

I didn’t move.

Billy’s hand was in mine. I could feel every bone in it. Knuckles like marbles in a sock. The same hand that taught me to throw a ball, change a tire, and lie to our mother about where we’d been on a Friday night.

“Sean.” Thin. Billy never sounded weak, but he sounded thin, like the word had a long way to travel.

“I’m here.”

“You should go.”

“No.”

“Sean.”

“No.”

His fingers tightened once. “You’re doing the thing with your jaw.”

“My jaw doesn’t do a thing.”

“Your jaw absolutely does a thing.”

I laughed, and it came out half a sob. The room smelled like melted plastic and hot dust, every machine in the building dying at the same time.

The backup power never came on.

But one little amber light was still glowing on the floor beside his bed. My extraction kit.

I pulled it into my lap. The cradle. Two cold contacts for the base of the skull, a lead for the port behind the ear, and a sealed battery the dealer swore would survive the end of the world. He also swore a tiger gave him the scar on his neck, so.

The battery was still warm.

Everybody in Anchor City gets a port before they get a name. Shots, records, firmware, a little door behind your ear for whatever parts you’ll need replaced later. Nobody mentions in the brochure that it’s also a door for people like me.

I seated the lead behind his ear. His port took it without a fight.

“Sean.” His voice changed. I’d heard that voice maybe three times in my life. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“You always say that right before you do something stupid.”

“And I always mean it.”

I reached.

Not for a memory. I’d been lifting memories out of strangers for nine years, and this wasn’t that. This was what you do when somebody’s falling and you already know you can’t catch them.

You reach anyway.

I felt all of him at once. The fear. The love he hid inside bad jokes and broken things he could fix. Everything that made him exactly Billy, inside a body closing up like a shop at the end of the night.

And under all of it, the thing he never once said out loud:

I don’t want to go.

His pulse stopped under my thumb. Not a stop, exactly. A beat that never showed up, and my thumb still waiting for it, like a foot reaching in the dark for a stair that isn’t there.

Over the door, the wall clock had died with everything else.

3:47.

I didn’t let go.

Something opened in me. Not the way it opens for work, everything neat and labeled. It opened like a floor giving way, and it took me with it.

White light.

Black water, flat as a mirror, going out farther than water should.

A door, standing half open with no walls to hold it up.

Somewhere past the door a kid was crying. And close by, a woman was talking, calm, like a nurse reading off a chart. I leaned in to hear her, and something thin slid out from behind my eyes, like a thread pulled from a sweater.

The words went with it.

I wouldn’t know they were gone for six years.

Then nothing.

I was back in the chair. The machines were dark. Billy’s hand was in mine, and it was just a hand.

Ten seconds.

I said his name.

Twenty.

I said it again, quieter, the way you say a name in a house where somebody’s sleeping.

Thirty.

I’d sat with the dying for a living. I knew what came next. You stay with the body. You say the thing. You pack up the kit and go home and find out who you are without them.

I put my fingers on the lead.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, Billy. You can go. I’ve got Mom. I’ve got your jacket. I’m going to tell your parrot joke wrong at every wedding for the rest of my life and you can’t stop me. You can—”

Sean?

Thirty-seven seconds, the cradle said later. Billy still argues it was longer.

It came from inside my own head. Where my thoughts live. It wasn’t my thought.

I didn’t answer. I knew what an echo was. I’d pulled a thousand of them out of a thousand heads. The last thing a person was doing, playing over and over like a song stuck on a scratch. Billy’s last word had been my name.

An echo would say my name.

Sean? Why can’t I feel my hands?

An echo doesn’t ask questions.

“Billy.” It came out of me like something breaking. “Billy, is that you?”

Who else would it be? Why is it so dark? Why is your jaw doing the thing?

I laughed and sobbed at the same time and made a sound I’ve never made since.

“You don’t have hands anymore.”

A long pause. Even in there.

Okay, he said. Okay. That tracks.

Somebody was shaking me. A nurse, face pale in the emergency lamps, saying words I couldn’t hear. A doctor shoved in beside her and pressed two fingers to Billy’s throat, hunting for a pulse that wasn’t there anymore.

What did you do?

“I don’t know.”

What do we do now?

“We figure it out.”

Together?

“Together.”

Sean.

“What?”

Don’t disappear with me.

“I’m right here.”

I know, he said. That’s what scares me.

The doctor looked at the clock and said the time out loud, for the paperwork.

Well, Billy said. This is going to be interesting.

“Shut up.”

You shut up.

I walked out of that hospital wearing his jacket.

He’s been talking ever since.

*   *   *

Gravity finally runs out of patience with Kora.

She drops from the pole. Halfway down, her chrome hand snaps shut around the steel.

SCREEECH.

Every glass in Gary’s jumps. Some guy in the next booth spills beer down his shirt and doesn’t even look away.

Kora hangs there, grinning, then opens her mechanical fingers one at a time.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Pink neon catches the chrome. Polished knuckles, precision joints, servos that probably cost more than everything I own. In this flood-soaked corner of Anchor City, people would trade a kidney, a lung, and one disappointing relative for an arm like that.

I lean back in my booth.

“I bet she could pulp an apple one-handed,” I tell Billy. “One squeeze. Instant applesauce. Pulp all over the walls like a goddamn crime scene. Fuck, that would be sexy.”

“Jesus Christ, Sean.”

My older brother is in the mirror behind Gary’s liquor bottles. Same battered leather jacket. Same frayed left cuff. Same stupid grin. Nobody else in Gary’s can hear him. Most of them can’t see him either. Most.

Six years dead, and the asshole still won’t leave me alone.

“That’s what you’re thinking about?” he says. “There’s a naked woman onstage, and you’re thinking about apples?”

“I’m appreciating the engineering.”

“You’re a weird chick.”

“And you’re a prick. We’ve established this.”

“I’m serious. You need to get laid.”

“Billy, you got dumped by a woman who worked at a funeral home. Even she didn’t want to spend that much time with a dead guy.”

He stares at me. “That’s fucked up.”

“Little bit.”

“At least she called me back. What happened to Forrest?”

“Oh, here we go.”

“That guy dressed way too nice to be dating you. He ironed his underwear. He had more hair products than you had groceries.”

“At least he had hair.”

Billy looks genuinely wounded. “You’re going after my hair now? I’m dead.”

“Doesn’t make you immune.”

He laughs. I take a drink of coffee. It’s terrible. Gary’s been serving the same burnt sludge since before the second flood. I think he adds water every morning and hopes nobody notices.

Billy waits until I’ve swallowed. “You know, I think you turned a couple of your boyfriends gay.”

I nearly spit coffee across the table. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I’m just saying. There’s a pattern.”

“There’s a pattern of you being an asshole.”

“Runs in the family.”

He used to pull this shit when we were kids. Five years older and convinced it gave him a license to run my life. He once broke up with a boyfriend for me by telling the poor guy I’d left the country. Dale. Dale called my mother every Sunday for a month to ask when I was coming home. Billy laughed so hard he had to sit down.

Gary looks over from behind the bar. He’s been polishing the same glass for twenty minutes. It could signal ships. He catches me staring at Kora and raises an eyebrow.

“See something you like, Sinclair?”

I lift my coffee. “Professional research.”

Kora catches the exchange. Then she catches me looking at her arm.

She smiles.

Oh, boy. I’ve seen that smile before.

She lets go of the pole, drops to her hands and knees, and starts crawling toward my booth. The entire bar notices.

“Girl-on-girl action tonight!”

“Get her, Kora!”

Kora stops about three feet away. Topless, sweat running down her stomach, the expensive arm resting against her hip. She cups one breast with her real hand. The chrome fingers slide down her side, tapping against her hip.

“You really like these, baby? Or are you more of an ass girl?”

“Oh, fuck yeah. I’ve been watching those fingers all night.”

“I noticed.”

“What kind of grip strength does that thing have?”

Her smile slips. “My what?”

“Your hand. Look at it. I bet you could crush an apple without even trying.”

Kora stares at me. “You’ve been staring at my hand?”

“Well, yeah. Look at that thing!”

She looks down at her chest. Then back at me.

“Honey, I’ve been shaking my tits at you for ten minutes.”

“I’ve got tits too. They’re just migrating south these days.”

For a second she’s speechless. Then Kora bursts out laughing.

Some guy behind her says, “What the fuck did she just say?”

“She’s a weird little bitch,” Kora tells him, still laughing.

“I’ve heard worse.”

“I like it.” She winks, crawls back to the pole, and keeps throwing looks my way for the rest of her set.

Billy’s practically falling out of the mirror. “You’re the only woman I know who could get a private dance and ask for the fucking owner’s manual.”

“That’s high-end engineering.”

“You’ve got no game.”

“I wasn’t making a move.”

“Yeah, I think we all figured that out.”

“Fuck you.”

“Love you too, sis.”

Gary’s sits in the Shallows, three blocks from the old seawall and one decent storm away from becoming a rumor. The floorboards warp every spring. The lower bricks sweat salt. The back room smells like mold, old beer, and wiring that somehow survived two floods.

Outside, rain blows sideways through the neon. A kid kicks a broken surveillance drone down the gutter like a soccer ball. Two doors down, a noodle vendor argues with a delivery algorithm about parking rights. The machine keeps repeating the ordinance. The vendor keeps telling it to go fuck itself.

A security camera blinks red over the intersection, and for half a second the rain under it runs backward. Water lifts off the pavement, hangs there, then falls again.

Nobody else notices.

Behind the bar, Gary feeds his mechanical fish. The thing hasn’t worked in eight years. The motor died, the fins seized, and one eye fell out. Gary still feeds it every Tuesday.

I asked him why once. He said the fish doesn’t know it’s broken.

I turn back toward Kora.

Then I smell cigarette smoke.

Not the cheap synthetic crap they sell in the Shallows. Real tobacco, hand-rolled. Nobody near me is smoking. A second later I taste saltwater, and my front teeth start to ache.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Billy looks at me from the mirror. “What?”

“Rosa.”

“Again?”

I’m a memory extractor. People pay me to take things out of their heads. Bad days. Dead spouses. Accidents. The memories don’t disappear when I take them. They come into me, into a place in my head I call the Vault, and they stay there. Thousands of them. Most of them stay quiet.

Rosa doesn’t do quiet.

I carry the last few minutes of her life. A drainage tunnel. Black water. Men shouting behind her. Two broken front teeth and both middle fingers up at the bastards trying to drag her out. She’s been dead four years, and when something gets her going, she leaks. Her smoke in my nose. Her salt in my mouth. Her teeth hurting in my face.

And her voice, right behind my eyes, rough as a gravel road.

Hot one.

I follow the ache. It’s pointed straight at the stage.

“Rosa thinks Kora’s hot,” I tell Billy.

He laughs. “She’s got taste.”

“She’s got no business watching a strip show through my eyes.”

I got eyes. I’m using ’em, honey.

“You’re the one staring,” Billy says.

“I’m appreciating the engineering.”

“Yeah, we’ve covered that.”

I take another drink of coffee. The salt fades. The teeth stop. That’s usually how it works.

People think a memory is just something you remember. A picture, maybe. A sound. Try carrying somebody else’s broken teeth around for an afternoon and see how you like it.

“You made the Vault face,” Billy says.

“I don’t have a Vault face.”

“Like somebody asked you to do math at a funeral.”

“That’s just my face.”

The neon above the bar flickers. A man under the liquor mirror glances up, and his eyes move across the bottles, and stop right where Billy is standing.

Billy looks back at him. “Can I help you?”

The man can’t hear him. At least I don’t think he can. He puts some credits beside his unfinished drink and walks out.

Smart man.

“Think he saw me?” Billy says.

“Pretty sure.”

“Was it the jacket?”

“Definitely the jacket.”

“Vintage.”

“Dead guy chic.”

“Bitch.”

Above Gary’s shoulder, the clock reads 3:47. Same as yesterday. Same as every day for six years. It stopped the night Billy died. Gary tried to fix it once and got the hands moving for about nine seconds before they spun backward so hard the glass cracked. He took the batteries out. Didn’t help.

Three forty-seven. Always.

I look away before Billy catches me staring.

A stool scrapes near the door, and Gary stops polishing his glass. That gets my attention.

A man in a dark raincoat steps inside, hood up, water dripping on the floor. Nobody keeps a hood up in Gary’s. Gary says he likes knowing who’s planning to rob him. Three conversations stop. A dockworker at the counter suddenly finds his beer fascinating.

The man stands there a few seconds. Then he lifts one hand, long fingers, pale skin, and points straight at my booth.

Then he leaves.

Gary doesn’t move for two full seconds, which scares me more than the hood did.

“Gary?”

“Yeah.”

“You expecting somebody?”

“Nope.” He walks to the far end of the bar, where nobody’s been sitting, and comes back holding an envelope. Thick, cream-colored paper. No name. No return address. “This was on the end of the bar. I never saw him go near it.”

“Didn’t catch his face?”

“No.”

“You okay?”

“No.”

“Good answer.”

Three triangles are pressed into the front, one inside another.

I know that mark. Six months ago somebody offered me a job on a dead woman they’d pulled out of the flood channels near South Lock. She had the same mark on her wrist. I turned it down. Two days later her body disappeared from the morgue. No transfer records. No authorization. I called to ask about it, and I was told to mind my own fucking business.

Billy leans closer to the mirror. “Don’t love that face.”

“I have lots of faces.”

“That’s your this-is-going-to-become-a-problem face.”

“Maybe it’s my free-money face.”

“It is absolutely not.”

I run my finger under the flap. One card. No signature. Three words in black ink.

You found Lighthouse.

I turn it over. Nothing on the back.

“Billy. You ever hear me say that word?”

“What word?”

I hold the card up to the mirror. “Lighthouse.”

He leans in. “No. Why?”

I close my eyes and try to find it. A building. A client. A street. Anything.

Nothing.

I try again, and for a fraction of a second I see a white door. Black water. A little kid crying somewhere I can’t reach.

Then it’s gone.

When I open my eyes, Billy isn’t smiling anymore.

I’ve spent years taking memories out of other people’s heads. Somebody apparently knows about one I can’t find in my own.

Every light in Gary’s dims. A groan goes up from the customers.

“Gary!”

“I’m working on it!”

“You say that every time!”

“It’s worked eventually every time!”

Billy looks at the ceiling, then back at me. “Oh. That’s bad.”

“Helpful.”

I fold the note. “Cocksucker,” I mutter.

“Sorry?”

“Sock tucker. Sewing thing.”

He stares at me. I let him.

Gary comes over, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He looks at my face. Then the note. Then the clock.

“You got that look.”

“Apparently everybody’s an expert on my face tonight.”

“Seen it twice before. Both times people ended up in the water.”

“Third time’s the charm.”

He doesn’t laugh. Neither does Billy.

Thom shows up five minutes later. Of course he does.

People move out of his way as he crosses the room. Nobody asks them to. They just shift their stools, tuck in their elbows, and find something else to look at. Perfect suit. Perfect shoes. Hair that probably has its own insurance policy.

He sits across from me without asking. “Sean.”

“Thomas.”

“It’s Thom.”

“I know.”

“Then why do you keep saying Thomas?”

“Because it annoys you.”

He considers that. “Fair.”

“Hands on the table.”

“I haven’t moved them.”

“Yet.”

He puts both hands where I can see them. Billy folds his arms in the mirror.

“Lord Touchy arrives.”

“Stop calling him that,” I say, mostly into my cup.

“He touches everything.”

“He touched Gary’s fish once.”

“Twice.”

Thom looks at me. “What?”

“Nothing.”

He straightens his cuff. Fourth time since he walked in.

Billy leans toward me. “Twenty credits says you don’t call him a cocksucker to his face before he leaves.”

“You don’t have credits.”

“Moral victory, then.”

“And if I do?”

Billy grins. “Then I do the sheet thing to Gary.”

“The sheet thing?”

“Full apparition. White sheet. Eyeholes. Floating across the bar.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Gary’s going to have a heart attack.”

“He will not. Gary’s heart is load-bearing. Strongest thing in this building.”

“You remember the haunted houses?”

His grin gets bigger. “Oh, hell yeah.”

“We got thrown out of two.”

“We got caught at two. Big difference.”

“You put a fucking rat on my shoulder.”

“You wanted to look like staff.”

“Until you scared that woman.”

“She threw popcorn at me.”

“YOU HAD A RAT ON YOUR SHOULDER!”

Billy loses it. I have to bite my lip.

Thom looks up from his cuff. “Is something funny?”

“Nope.”

“Remember the cops?” Billy says.

“Different story, asshole.”

“Oh, right. Golf course.”

Thom looks between me and the mirror. “Are you finished?”

“Are you?”

He sighs and takes a job card from inside his jacket. He sets it on the table and squares it to the edge with two fingers, like it’s a place setting.

“Gary says somebody left you mail,” he says.

“Somebody did.”

“Not me, if that’s your next question.”

It was. I don’t mention Lighthouse. Not yet.

“Client’s name is Chad Fitzgerald.”

“Should I know him?”

“No.”

“Good start.”

“Wedding extraction. Full sensory archive. Ceremony. Reception. Emotional imprinting. Architectural memory.”

I snort. “Architectural memory?”

“Some people remember vows.”

“Some people remember chandeliers.”

“That sounds exhausting,” Billy says.

“It sounds wealthy,” I say.

“Forty thousand on completion,” Thom says.

Forty thousand. For a wedding.

Billy whistles. “Well, that’s not ominous.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch.”

Too fast. His left eye twitches.

“There’s always a catch, Thomas.”

“Thom.” He taps one finger against the card. “There is one detail. If the word Lighthouse appears anywhere in the extraction…”

My hand stops. Billy goes quiet.

“…it gets removed. Any memory connected to it. Any emotional association. Anything. Client specifically requested total removal.”

The note is in my pocket. You found Lighthouse.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

He doesn’t even blink. I’ve pulled enough memories out of liars to know one when he’s sitting across from me.

“Does Chad know about Lighthouse?”

“It’s his request.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Neither of us says anything for a few seconds.

“And if I find it?”

“You erase it.”

“Just like that.”

“That’s the job.” He stands and straightens his cuffs. “Think about it.”

“I was planning to.”

“Try not to think too hard.”

“That’s usually when people start dying.”

He smiles, and for once I think he means it. “That’s why I enjoy working with you, Sean.”

“That makes one of us.”

His eye twitches. Tiny victory.

On his way to the door he passes a table where a woman sits with her daughter. Little girl, maybe six, dark curls sticking out of an oversized raincoat, boots too big for her feet, swinging her legs because they don’t reach the floor.

Thom stops. Crouches beside her. Says something low, and she laughs. He takes an old coin out of his pocket, puts it in her palm, and closes her fingers around it.

Then he walks out into the rain.

Gary comes over to collect my cup. “What’d he give her?”

“Some old coin,” I say. “I heard him. Told her it was the kind of money nobody could buy anything with, so nobody could ever take it from her.”

Gary looks at the door. “Complicated man.”

“Yeah.”

Thom would sell your grandmother for spare parts if the price was right. I watch the little girl turn the coin over in her fingers.

Billy waits until Gary’s gone. “You need a catchphrase.”

“What?”

“A catchphrase. Something iconic. I’ll be back. You can’t handle the truth. Multipass.”

“That’s from The Fifth Element.”

“Multipass transcends its origin. What do you have?”

I think about it. “Cocksucker?”

“That’s not a catchphrase. That’s a medical diagnosis.”

“Entropy always wins. That’s why I don’t fold laundry.”

“That’s not a philosophy. That’s a pile of shirts.”

“Fuck you.”

“See? That’s closer.” Then his grin gets bigger. “Oh, wait. He’s leaving, and you didn’t say it.”

“I was being professional.”

“That’s adorable. Your jaw did the thing. You thought it. You never said it.”

“He told me to erase a word out of a man’s head without telling me what it means.”

“Yep.”

“And he acted like it was standard procedure.”

Billy waits. “How bad do you want it?”

I look at the door. “Oh, pretty fucking bad.”

I get up.

“Hey, Thom!”

He’s almost to his car. He turns halfway around. “What?”

“YOU’RE A REAL COCKSUCKER!”

His driver stops walking. Two pedestrians remember important appointments elsewhere.

Thom stares at me. “What did you just call me?”

“I said have a great night!”

“That’s not what you said.”

“Jesus, Thom. Get your hearing checked.”

His left eye twitches so hard I could probably translate it from Morse code. Behind me, through the window, Billy is losing his shit in the mirror.

“You’re unbelievable, Sean.”

“Clock’s still broke, by the way. Drive safe!”

He shakes his head, gets into the sedan, and the car pulls away through the water running along the curb.

I head back inside. “Happy?” Billy says.

“Immensely. You owe Gary a ghost.”

Then his light goes out. All at once.

“Billy?”

No answer.

Behind Gary, the corner gets darker. Then something white appears. Long. Flowing. Two black holes where the eyes should be. One battered leather cuff hangs out the bottom of the sheet.

Oh, you beautiful asshole.

Gary looks up from his glass. The glass slips out of his hand and shatters. I’ve known Gary since I was seven. He has never dropped a glass.

“Holy shit. Is that a…” A man near the counter points.

“Fucking ghost!” his date finishes for him.

Gary backs away. The thing floats closer. He reaches under the counter and comes up with a broom, and I have to put my hand over my mouth.

“Gary?” I call.

“WHAT?”

“Don’t make it angry!”

He swings. The broom passes straight through Billy with a little static hiss. The sheet turns toward it. Even without a face, I can tell Billy’s offended.

“I TOLD YOU THIS PLACE WAS HAUNTED!” I shout. “Years, Gary. I have been saying it for YEARS!”

“SEAN!”

“Get behind me!”

I charge at Billy with both arms out. He floats away. Wrong direction.

“Over here! Gary, help me corner it!”

Gary tries to retreat behind the bar. Billy cuts him off. I come around the other side, and for one glorious second Gary has nowhere to go.

He makes a noise I have never heard a grown man make.

Then he runs straight through Billy and hits the back-room door hard enough to shake the bottles. The scream that follows isn’t anything I can put into words. The door slams. The lock clicks.

Billy hangs there, sheet floating, cuff sticking out.

I am going to piss myself.

“Gary!” I shout. “You were supposed to help me corner it! You ran the other way!”

Nothing.

I go back to my booth. “I did my part,” I tell the mirror. “Wrap it up.”

Billy disappears. The sheet goes with him. The corner looks perfectly ordinary.

A minute later the back-room door opens about an inch. One of Gary’s eyes appears. “Is it gone.”

He doesn’t even make it a question.

“It’s gone. No thanks to you.”

He comes out carrying the broom. Looks at the corner. Looks at the broken glass. Starts sweeping.

“Fish processing plant,” I tell him.

He stops. “What?”

“Before this was a bar. Whole crew died in a cold storage accident. Never got paid. Still pissed about it.”

He stares at me. I take a sip of coffee. Gary goes back into the office and closes the door.

The couple who saw the ghost put their money on the counter and leave. I wait until they’re outside.

Billy comes back into the mirror, dimmer now. That little performance cost him.

I look at him. He looks at me.

And I lose it.

“His face,” I manage.

“His face,” Billy says. “And then the broom.”

“He was going to sweep you!”

“Oh God.”

I press both hands over my mouth. Doesn’t help. “I peed a little.”

“You did not.”

“I did. A little.”

Billy’s light flashes gold. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve done in six years.”

“And the part where you ran from me…”

“I wasn’t running.”

“You were floating away.”

“I forgot I was a ghost for a second.”

That does it. I’m laughing so hard my stomach hurts, and I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.

“You know,” I tell him, “you’re a real prick.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a dick.”

“Gary almost shit himself.”

“So did you.”

“I peed. There’s a difference.”

He laughs. I look at him in the mirror.

“Remember when we used to do stupid shit like that all the time?”

“We literally just scared the piss out of a bartender.”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

He looks down at his jacket. “Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

For a few seconds neither of us talks.

“Had to give you something good to remember,” he says.

I look down at my coffee. There’s a chip in the rim of the mug. Same mug Gary’s been giving me for years. I’ve asked him to throw it out twice. He says it still holds coffee.

I turn the mug so the chip faces away from me.

“I’m pretending I didn’t hear that part,” I tell him.

“I know.”

He leaves it alone. Annoying bastard. Good brother.

Outside, a faded turquoise Corvair floats past on the mag-loop, an inch above the guide rail. Nobody’s driving. Probably quit three exits back, and the track keeps hauling it along anyway. Twenty seconds later a light-rail car rounds the corner, slows, and gives the Corvair a shove with the steel push bar welded to its nose. The empty car slides onto a siding. The train carries on. Nobody inside even looks up.

I take out the envelope and put Thom’s job card beside it. Forty thousand credits. Chad Fitzgerald. A wedding somebody wants erased. Three triangles. Lighthouse.

“You sure you never heard of it?” I ask.

“Pretty sure I’d remember.”

“You remember everything.”

“Not everything.”

I look at him. He looks back.

“Billy.”

“What?”

“You know what I mean.”

He doesn’t answer.

I touch the note.

Behind the bar, the clock ticks.

Just once. A small, dry click.

3:47. The hands haven’t moved.

Gary’s in the back room. Kora’s back onstage. The bass is still thumping through the floor. That clock hasn’t made a sound in six years.

“Tell me you heard that,” I say.

“Yeah.”

I wait for a joke. Nothing.

“Sean?” he says, still looking at the clock. “Don’t take that job.”

“I haven’t said I’m taking it.”

“You’ve got that look. The one right before I have to talk you out of something stupid.”

“You’ve never talked me out of anything.”

“Yeah. That’s been a problem.”

“Somebody knows something about me,” I say.

Billy looks at the clock again. “Yeah. And I think they know something about me, too.”

That’s when the Vault moves.

Not Rosa this time. All of them. Four thousand people I carry, sitting up at once inside my head, like a house full of sleepers who all heard the same noise downstairs. The smoke, the salt, the teeth, a hundred kitchens and hospital rooms and car crashes, every one of them turned the same way.

Not toward the note.

Toward me.

Then something answers from farther out than the Vault goes. Somewhere I’ve never been able to reach. Patient, like it’s been asking for a very long time and only just found somebody close enough to hear.

Why?

In the mirror, Billy is still watching the clock like nothing else happened.

The clock holds at 3:47.