18
“I’ve ruled out simultaneous psychotic break, because the odds of that seem so low as to be incalculable,” Nysus is saying when I walk onto the bridge. “But the fact is we now have record of three people seeing the impossible. Captain Gerard, Lourdes, and Kane.”
“Four,” I say reluctantly.
Heads whip around to face me. Kane gives me a brief nod, as if he expected nothing less of me. Voller groans. Someone, probably Kane, dragged him from his rest to join us. Lourdes, wrapped in a blanket and seated at the comm station, eyes me warily.
“I saw… one of the passengers,” I say.
“One of thedeadpassengers?” Nysus asks.
“Uh, yeah.” I shift my weight uneasily. “She was under the bed, grabbed my ankle. But then she vanished.”
“Oh my God,” Lourdes whispers, her hand pressed to her mouth.
“It wasn’t real, obviously,” I add. “Though it felt real at the time.”
“Did she look dead?” Nysus asks.
“Come on,” Voller moans at the same time, where he’s sitting with his head in his hands in the command chair. He looks pale and sweaty, with that undertone of green still holding steady in his skin. “You pulled me off rest for this bullshit?” He looks over at Kane. “You gotta give me something more for this headache, chief. I’m dying.”
Kane ignores him. “Productive conversation at this point would be most useful, Ny.”
“I’m trying to gather data,” Nysus says, before looking to me for the answer.
“Yes,” I say. “She did.” Her skin was that horrible shade of gray that just doesn’t exist on living humans.
I shudder.
“Interesting.” Nysus taps his fingers against his lips as he paces the front of the bridge. “That’s definitely what one would traditionally call a ghost. Someone who is confirmed as deceased.”
“You’re not fucking suggesting that the ship is haunted, are you?” Voller demands, his voice muffled by his head resting in his hands.
“It’s a theory,” Nysus argues, sounding a little frayed at the edges. He squeezes his eyes shut, as if in an attempt to resurrect the privacy he so valued back on LINA. “Humans have documented supernatural experiences in locations that have seen violent death for centuries. Battlefields are particularly—”
“Except not everyone is seeing dead passengers,” I say. “Just me.” For now. Forever.
“True, and that’s our problem,” Nysus says, opening his hands in a wide gesture. “We don’t have enough data. Every theory is equally valid right now.”
“Not ghosts,” Voller mutters. “Ghosts don’t exist.”
“No?” Nysus asks. “I’m assuming that none of you are seeing my father pacing in that corner over there.” He points a trembling finger to the far side of the room, and all of us look.
The space is empty.
An icy chill runs down my back, like an unfamiliar fingertip brushing the length of my spine.
“How do you explain that?” Nysus asks Voller. “I can see him and you can’t.”
“But what I saw was real,” Lourdes says immediately. “I was there. I sawher.” She can’t look at me as she’s saying it.
“Here’s what we know. TL, you’re the aberration here. You’re the only one so far seeing the confirmed dead,” Nysus says.
I clear my throat. “And that’s happened before. To me, I mean.”
Lourdes and Voller both turn to stare. My face flushes.
Nysus’s eyebrows shoot up. “I definitely want to hear more about that. But for now we have to discard you from the data set. One of these things is not like the others. It could be something in your brain chemistry, a preexisting condition. But we just don’t know.”He pauses, rubbing at his ears with a pained expression. “They keep ringing,” he mutters.
