Screams shot up all around. The spigot-people screamed. My patients screamed. Maybe I was screaming too. I couldn’t tell.

Powers went haywire.

Furniture leapt, knocking people to the ground. Sheets blasted off the beds, only to hover in the air or slap against the walls. Beds jostled and rutted; the metal frames heaved, shrieked and groaned. Lights flickered and tap danced.

Andalon looked around full of concern, and not just at me. She knelt beside me. “Mr. Genneth! Do something!”

Behind me, Bethany cackled wordlessly. Or was it weeping?

I… I…

Panicked music filled my head as a bed suddenly came flying at me. Flailing my arms, I spat the music out in sheer terror. Electric tingles crawled down my arm bones and leapt out of my fingertips. A split second later, an invisible force slammed into the bed, bending it in half, as if the bed had crashed into a column of reinforced concrete. The bed recoiled and bounced back and crashed, screeching its legs across the floor.

Werumed-san’s pancake head snapped all the way around. “WERUMED-SAN LIVES!” he shrieked. “LIVVVVVVES!”

The spinning head snapped still, its sewed-on eyes locking with mine. And then the mascot pounced. It leapt at me like a tiger.

A blue streak charged at it, leaping in between us.

I gasped.

“Kurt!?”

The hero tackled the manic mascot, knocking him to the ground for a second time. The felt scraped softly across the lacquered floor. Kurt rode Werumed-san all the way, coming to a gentle stop as the mascot’s head clonked against a wall—and this time, he didn’t move off or let go.

The spigot-people ran to the out-of-control transformees in groups of two and three. Some got knocked back, while others succeeded in pinning my patients to the ground. I darted out of the way, not wanting to get caught in the crossfire, but then a fiery pain split my head down the middle and forced me down onto my hands and knees, screaming in pain.

Something was horribly wrong.

Electricity buzzed in my ears. It throbbed like hammer blows on the inside of my skull. My eyes watered. Like a flame bursting to life, Frank’s specter appeared in the middle of the room. I raised my head to look. My skull might as well have weighed a thousand pounds.

Pixelated smoke spewed off the specter’s body in iridescent trails. It flexed its beastly arm’s polyhedral claws. Sparks rippled from its feet and hopped across the floor.

With a gulp, I pushed myself to my feet.

This is it.

It was hard to think with the intoxicating gas in the air, but I had no other choice.

I…

I needed to get it away from everyone else. Better the ghost kill me than anyone else.

“Mr. G-n—th! Ru—” Andalon’s words were crisscrossed in static and noise, as was her body.

She was a record, suddenly scratched.

Oh no…

Particles streamed from the specter as it crossed the room. They glistened like diamonds in my hazy vision.

The residual pain burning in my body kept me focused. With a groan, I pulled myself up with one of the upturned beds and pushed off the frame as I set off in a run, barging into one of the spigot-heads. The being yelped, and then yelped again as I elbowed my way through and ran into the vestibule and out into the hall. My loafers were dolphins, squeaking on the floor beneath me.

The air was cooler outside Room 268. The intoxicant wasn’t being pumped in. The second floor’s raspberry antiseptic scent tingled in my nose, jolting me awake. The haze receded from my vision.

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My head throbbed. I turned in the direction of the ache to see Frank’s specter lumber toward me like a dinosaur on the hunt. The throbs of pain were synchronized with its footsteps. I felt the power being pulled out of me like a rope as the specter’s arms phased through the vestibule’s doors and made them flutter.

Oh fudge…

I guess my time had finally come. Now it was my turn to be Brave.

Just like Cat.

My breaths were wild and wooly in my chest as I ran. My feet were stone and my legs were muddy glass, yet still, I ran—around a corner; down a hall.

Andalon had appeared of her own accord and disappeared just as suddenly.

Please be ready, I begged.

I needed to get far enough away that when Andalon did her thing, no one would get hurt from my hijacked psychokinesis.

The specter roared.

Oh God.

I pushed a passerby out of the way. Everything shook and burned. Lights flickered, the air rumbled.

I looked over my shoulder and thought I saw footprints indenting the floor.

I ran faster, yelping in terror. Soon, I reached a recessed area sporting tables, chairs, and vending machines—all of which were empty.

Here goes nothing…

I shouted in my mind: Andalon! Now! Let’s do this!

I looked left and right.

Andalon?

Oh God. Oh God.

“Where are you?!” I hissed, softly. My voice cracked.

I couldn’t see her anywhere.

Frank’s ghost barreled toward me. Its digitigrade feet kicked up sparks. Particles flared behind it like a burning software mane.

“Andalon?!”

But no, no response. Just white noise in my head. Static.

No signal.

A pit opened in my stomach. I was hungry again. And Andalon…

“Oh fudge…”

I didn’t ask for this, just as Cat didn’t ask to get cast adrift in the Worlds Beyond the Night. Cat I wanted things to go back to the way they’d been before, and so did I. But they couldn’t; not in Cat’s story, nor in mine.

The specter swung its arms through the chairs and a potted plastic orchid. Bolts of lightning struck my spine as my stolen powers knocked the furniture across the hall. I pushed off the wall and ran, panting like mad.

Where to go? Where to go?

Everything blurred as I ran. I was dead twice over. No heartbeat. No rush of blood. Even my shallow, heaving breaths felt like mere habit—a holdover from my old life.

I looked over my shoulder to the specter giving chase. It roared again. Its cry was the shriek of metal rasping against metal, and the grind of glass over stone.

I needed food, now!

Lightheadedness flooded into me. Everything ached. Everything raced.

I focused on visualizing the map of vending machines, and then yelped in hope and horror as a map popped into existence right in front of me. It was a mini-map, except this wasn’t a video game.

I couldn’t wish I were dead, because I already was.

I ran out into the Hall of Echoes. The chamber reverberated with the sounds from the throng down below. The Hall’s great doors opened and shut like heart valves, letting in the city’s evening cries: traffic, footsteps, sirens, and wails.

I dashed around the corner.

The Ice-Cream Sandwich Buddy!

I don’t think I’d ever been so happy to see a machine that would give a man ice-cream.

And it wasn’t empty. It wasn’t empty!

I slammed my hand on the scanner.

Hurry up!

The machine reacted.

Around the corner, the beast roared. The sound rumbled through the Hall of Echoes. I felt it in my bones.

I selected the first item. The ICSB’s brand jingle played as the machine began the dispensing process.

My back burned in pain, making my tail lash around my thigh. I fell to my knees.

Somewhere in the distance, stone crunched.

No matter our fervent wishes, we could not change the past. We had to come to terms with it, and with the paths we took.

I looked back.

The specter had leaped up onto the wall, where it was poised, mid-jump like a gargoyle. Its taloned toes and savage polygonal claws raked psychokinetic furrows as it slid down the wall, casting bits of polished stone onto the floor below.

“C’mon!” I thumped my fist on the machine. “C’mon!”

The beast leapt off the wall, sailing through the air.

Right at me.

Pixelated flames trailed in its wake.

An ice-cream sandwich plopped into the receptacle. I pulled it out and stuffed it down my throat, wrapper and all.

Let it be known that the dead can get brain freeze. It wasn’t fair, and, once this was all over, I was going to have a long talk with whomever was responsible for it. But, compared to the burn of my stolen powers or the certain death flying toward me, the cold, dull, familiar ache of brain-freeze spreading through my head was almost pleasant.

Nostalgic even.

Sickly sweetness blossomed in my throat as the plastic packaging dissolved. Caramel-fudge swirl ice cream sandwiched between two chocolate chip cookies filled my mouth and nose with its delicious taste and wondrous scent as the food melted into my chill-numbed gullet. Mass crawled into my flesh in rivulets as my transforming body assimilated the frozen treat and got for itself once last bit of fuel.

I screamed in my head.

ANDALON! FRANK! HELP! NOW!

Time began to slow.

Andalon materialized beside me, floating midair, and aglow with power. Her nightgown billowed in an unseen wind. Her eyes were sapphire twilight, coruscating and brilliant. Her hair was a bonfire, plasmic and blue. Light glowed in her veins.

We both raised our hands.

“Eat ice-cream, meanie!” Andalon yelled.

Light poured out of her mouth, like a door opening.

The specter’s fractured face stopped mere inches from mine. I stared into its many facets, watching scenes from a life cut short, and I didn’t care whether or not it was all in my head.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, as light blasted from Andalon’s hand and mine.

He’d deserved better.

The specter dissolved, disintegrating into black manga lines and digital snow which the light then washed away.

Then the specter and the light vanished, taking Andalon with them, leaving me on my knees on the gallery of the Hall of Echoes’ second floor, with a killer case of brain-freeze.

Ow.