“The worlds overlap,” My Nana said to me when I was a child, “Just a little. Just enough to collect the new ones.”

She was like me, she could see them peeking around the corners, checking up on their loved ones from time to time. They wouldn’t stay long, couldn’t stay long. The other spirits called to them and they answered, leaving this world for the next.

It was something I never learned to keep to myself. I would see someone in such pain and agony, yelling at the sky to bring their mother back. Their father, sister, brother back. I would take their hand and tell them that they were watching from the corner, tell them to take solace in the fact that they were not truly gone.

It got out in college when I made the mistake of comforting a cadaver. The other kids laughed at me, even my best friend gave me an odd look. I didn’t see him much after that. He didn’t want to be branded as a friend of that weird kid. I couldn’t find a lab partner and ended up doing the work on my own.

At least I started to learn the human body. I searched long and hard for where the spirit could be kept, hoping that my eyes, the eyes that could see spirits, would also see where they used to hide. Nothing.

Frustrated, I switched my degree to engineering.

It was an accident when I pulled the first one. I was working on a device to see them, so that someone in this faithless world would finally believe me. I never meant to pull one in. It shot into my shoddily constructed meter and shattered it, sending shards of plastic into my hands. The spirit looked a little dazed, but stumbled off to the next world unharmed.

I went to the nurse with a story about a bad prototype, finally learning to lie. I was labelled as the bombmaker for my trouble. Better than the Shaman.

The next device was much better, it had an area to actually store the spirit, a small symbol in the corner attracting and binding it. I threw in a large hamster wheel to keep it occupied while I ran some tests to try and bring it into the visible spectrum. No dice though. The wheel creaked and spun, faster and faster until it tore itself off its axle. I let the spirit out a little sheepishly, weathering the glare with an apologetic look.

“What the fuck was that?”

My roommate Katie stood in the doorway, staring at the broken wheel. I had lied to her when she asked me if the rumors that I claimed to see ghosts were true. I winced, expecting a lecture.

“That wheel turned by itself,” She snapped her fingers at me, “By ghosts. You can see them. They are real.”

“Spirits,” I corrected with a sigh.

“So you could put a motor on it and get free energy, right?”

I froze, the conversation going in a direction that I hadn’t prepared for. “You believe me”

Katie laughed, “I have to now. And plus,” She winked, “we’re going to be rich.”

I wasn’t sure about it, but I also didn’t want to disappoint the only person that believed in me. The spirits weren’t really harmed, just inconvenienced a little.

Two years and a lot of confusing meetings later, we had a working system in every major city. The terms were catch and release. A chute would pull the spirit from the dying person and power a spinning wheel until a week of energy was stored. Fortunately, the higher the population in an area using the energy, the more people died there as well.

I had talked to a few after the process and they were just annoyed more than anything, but as the process became public, they began to accept their place and the fact that what they were doing was for a good cause. To protect the future generations from pollution. To make a utopia.

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Society was transformed. It was amazing how much more people cared about the energy they used when they knew that it was made by the dead. If there was one thing that was sacred in the world, it was death.

I was sitting in my penthouse apartment, admiring the skyline when I first saw the cracks. It looked like someone had taken a hammer to the sky, green spiderweb fractures radiating in all directions.

“There are cracks in the sky,” I said without preamble.

I heard her yawn, “good morning to you too”

“Katie I’m serious, look at the sky”

“I’m looking, sweetheart. It's wide and blue from here. No need to panic”

I felt like I had taken a portal back in time, feeling the frustration that came with no one seeing what I could see. I had been working on a way to visualize it for years and had come up empty.

“We have to do something”

“Do what?”

“Shut it down”

She laughed. She actually laughed.

“This is the third time you’ve told me that. It’s just your conscience playing tricks on you. They are fine with it, remember?”

“I’m coming over”

She sighed, but agreed to get dressed and actually answer the door when I came.

I called my driver and was headed downtown in a matter of minutes, glancing at the sky repeatedly. The cracks were growing slowly, pale green light shining through with increased brightness.

“Everything alright sir?” My driver, Paul asked hesitantly. Paul never had the strongest spirit, he regularly let people in front of him and yielded even when it was a bad idea. I kept him around because he was too precious to ever let go.

“Everything is fine,” I said through partially gritted teeth.

Suddenly Paul swerved into oncoming traffic then righted the car like nothing happened. I looked at the rearview mirror questioningly. His head moved jerkily, like a broken automaton. Then he met my eyes with his.

They were completely green.

The same green that the spirits were. The same green that was in the sky. 

“Should have kept your troops on the front lines,” it spoke in a voice like Paul’s but with a note out of place. It smiled a smile more animal than human then it spun the wheel right.

We slammed into a parked car shattering the windows and throwing me into the headrest in front of me. Glass showered my side. Paul, or Paul’s body, peeled its face off the wheel, head hanging sideways from a clearly broken neck. His fingers moved to his waist and he unbuckled the belt holding him into the car. The belt holding him away from me.

I threw open the door and sprinted down the street. Paul’s body stumbling after me.

As I ran, I saw several accidents and a few people standing too still on the sidewalks, turning their heads and green eyes only as I ran by them. I sprinted faster and faster.

I made it to Katie’s house three seconds before my heart burst and rang the doorbell thirty times. She answered in a pink bathrobe, the annoyed look on her face melting away when she saw mine.

I threw myself through the door before she could invite me in, falling on my hands and knees in her hallway.

“Oh my god are you ok?”

“Lock. The. Door.” I said between breaths. But it was too late.

I heard a crash behind me and rolled forward, away from the door. Paul was standing in the doorway, neck at the same odd angle, door in pieces in the front yard. He lunged at Katie.

Katie pulled mace from a fuzzy pocket, spraying it all over Paul. She didn’t hesitate even though she knew those kind wrinkles and that fatherly face.

The spirit inside Paul giggled “Not as fragile as a human.” It slapped Katie to the floor with a closed fist.

I let out a cry and tackled it, determined to save Katie if nothing else. I didn’t have a lot of friends and I wasn’t losing the one that believed in me.

It went down easily, having broken both its ankles pushing Paul’s body to the limit to catch up with me. I ripped the chauffeur pin from its lapel and started carving a symbol into its forehead. It slapped at my hands with broken wrists as I completed the last line. Then it was Paul again.

Even with most of the bones broken in his body, I could still tell it was him by how he laid there. Tears filled my eyes.

The bloody symbol on its head was the opposite of the binding one I usually used. Fear and adrenaline dredging it from my memory where Nana had shown me how to help a spirit on its way.

I heard Katie shift behind me and let my shoulders slump in relief. She was ok.

Then I heard her voice, a single note ringing out of place. I turned my head to meet the green eyes there.

“The worlds overlap, but almost completely now,” It grinned, “Good luck”