SPECTER

I sneak through the hallway beyond the door. The leaks are worse out here, and there is no light except the blue that seeps past me from the room behind. I creep through trickles of water, groping for doorways, but feeling only the jagged edges of ruined machines.

Whenever I look back for reassurance, I expect to see the blue doorway as a tiny rectangle in the distance, but it's still close by. Thick darkness and slow caution have made a hundred steps seem like an ordeal.

Far away, there are voices, human voices, but they echo strangely on the metal walls, and I cannot find any turnings that might lead to them.

Then a tinny echo becomes audible, distorted by distance. "It seems that you're awake."

I grit my teeth in the dark, half-smile, half-grimace. If it were a human behind that sound, they would have talked to me through my implant, like they did before, not called to me with this faraway voice.

Specters, on the other hand, never use tech. The tinny quality of the ghost's voice is supposed to make me think it's someone talking through a speaker, a tech-using human.

Clever, for a ghost.

Based on the crackle of wrecked equipment beneath my feet, I'd guess that most of the humans have abandoned this area to the specter a long time ago. I'm alone in here, helpless without my diffuser. If ghosts had human-level intelligence, this one would realize that it doesn't need voice-tricks; it can just come kill me with a knife.

Ahead of me, a dim rectangle of red light has gradually been drawing nearer, and as I sneak toward it, remaining as silent as possible, I use my implant to signal the channel that I talked to before I went into cryo.

My stomach drops as I do so. Cyberattacks and barbiturates are tech, so it was a human being behind that. Most likely, a human sliced me open as well, because if it had been a ghost, it would have harvested my skin. Humans, even murderous government spooks, are a thousand times better than ghosts. At least if a human kills me, it will be for some rational purpose.

I send the message in text so as not to break the silence. Hello? Anyone receiving this?

But the channel is dead. There's not even the static laced with haunting voices like there was before.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I pad through the red rectangle and find myself in a diagonal room with three exits: one behind me, one in a far corner, and a third that spills a sharp-edged shape of startling blood-red light onto the floor. One corner of the light gleams on the edge of a surgery table, and as I pad closer, I see a dark shape lying open on the stainless steel.

A yasod sliced in two. A yasod with complex organs.

I close my eyes and shake my head, warning myself not to give in to hope. It's just a trick of the dark. There were no organs.

I look again. I step closer and put a hand on it, pressing the glistening tubules beneath my fingertips through a layer of soggy dust. They're real.

An involuntary hiss escapes between my teeth. My brain is bursting with happiness. I'm so excited I could scream, dance, laugh, sob, become vulnerable. I grip my face to control myself.

That's when I hear it, the softest imaginable scraping. Behind me.

I spin, ducking.

There’s nothing to see. Only the glare of the red emergency light. The doorway it spills through leads to a closet, and the closet is lined with jars, some of them broken and leaking formalin, human organs floating in the fluid. Had that been what I'd heard? A loose liver falling? A shifting sliver of broken glass?

I continue turning, scanning through the dark.

"Help!" a child's voice pleads.

I spin to look in the exact opposite direction. There is the flash of a scalpel thrusting toward my head, silent, quick.

I jerk aside and it slips through my ear. A shadowed arm curls around my face from behind, and there's a stabbing pain in the side of the neck. The arm flexes to drag the edge across my throat, but I spin with the cut, keeping the blade in the same spot in my flesh despite the violent movement of the arm.

I skid to a halt, alone.

No one is behind me.

There is only silence.

The scalpel slides out of my ear and falls, jingling against the floor.

To wield physical objects is tiring for a ghost. I'll have a few minutes to breathe, now, to try to escape. I check my implant for biometrics, and find a message.

So you're awake. We thought you must have been killed in there. We lost that area to the specter several days ago.

I ignore the message for the moment and focus instead on my arterial map. My left external jugular vein has been nicked, and the shoulder of my clothes is soaking with syrupy heat. The cold blade is still sticking out of my neck, where I can't see it.

I carefully grope until I find the handle. It's another scalpel. If I remove it, the bleeding will intensify; but if I don't, I'll have to stay perfectly still to keep the edge from traveling.

I grip the weapon, holding it steady as I wait for my blood to gum up a little more. It's depressing to feel my body losing heat, beginning to shiver worse, but wounds are nothing new. What makes this difficult to handle is being unarmed… lost…