Are all the drawers full? Am I really in a room with thirty serial killers?
Nico flips switches on the control panel, bringing up various displays on monitors mounted on black arms that extend from behind it. He’s dressed for the cold, too, and has a brown leather jacket layered over a hoodie, with the hood up. When he exhales, his breath comes out in a visible cloud that he seems to watch with annoyance. He shifts his weight from foot to foot like he’s already trying to keep his blood moving.
I lean against the wall right next to the stairs. “So. Do you come down here often?”
My voice echoes, bouncing off the metal walls.
His jaw tightens. I wonder if he really is counting in his head before trusting himself to speak. I begin counting in my own head, and I get to ten before he finally says: “As much as is required.”
I glance around at the closed drawers. “Is Billy in one of those drawers?”
Nico gives a curt nod. “We don’t keep entities in the main chamber unless we’re studying them.”
“Do you use the questionnaires to study them?” I ask.
“I sure don’t do it for fun,” he snaps, then sighs, and rubs his temples like he’s rubbing out a headache. “Donny’s researching how death changes behavior. I collect data for him.” Nico presses a button, and a soft hum fills the room. “I interview each entity using questionnaires Donny developed, and I transcribe the sessions so Donny can compare each entity’s post-death psychology to their living psychology.”
“And then you use the information to build profiles,” I say. “So you can find Possessors before the police do.”
“Yes.” He side-eyes me. “Sometimes that means talking to them when they’re most active, no matter the hour.”
I do believe he was interviewing Billy last night. It’s the most logical reason for him to be down here, and who am I to judge what a normal time for talking to a ghost is? But he is acting weird about why the door was open.
I push all thoughts of the door from my mind. I have bigger problems right now. Hearing ghosts makes me even more of a liability than before. What if he’s right? What if I can’t learn this fast enough, and Nico has to watch another team member lose their mind?
I’m going to learn this fast enough. Ihaveto.
Nico moves to the center of the room, gesturing for me to join him. When I don’t comply, he sighs. “This will go faster if you cooperate.”
“Can we do this farther away from all the scary drawers?”
“You have nothing to worry about. This facility is secure.”
“That’s what they said about Jurassic Park, but the velociraptors still figured out how to open doors.”
“These aren’t dinosaurs.”
“No, just the disembodied souls of murderers. So much better.”
He raises his eyes to the ceiling like this is the most tedious conversation in the world, then tilts his chin toward a thermostat that reads thirty-six degrees. “This is an old root cellar. Each containment unit is individually sealed. Cold weakens ghosts. Doesn’t stop them completely, but makes them easier to manage. We keep it as cold as we can without risking frozen pipes or equipment failure.”
“They really can’t break out?”
“No, Eden,” Nico says, sounding so annoyed you’d think I was a kid asking him, ‘But why?’ nonstop. “They really can’t break out.”
I stare at the drawers, my skin crawling at the thought of all those twisted minds just stuffed in there. “Do you hear them talking to you through the floors every night?”
“They can’t talk unless they’re let out of their containment unit.”
“But Billy?—”
“Billy was in the main chamber when you heard him,” Nico says, and there’s an unsteadiness in his voice that makes me look at him more carefully. “Trust me. I wouldn’t get much sleep around here if all our long-term residents could call up to me whenever they wanted to. Now that I know you can hear them, you’ll need to be present for every conversation I have.We can’t risk another entity trying what Billy did when you’re unprepared.”
“So yesterday won’t be our last late-night hangout sesh,” I say, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“Unfortunately for both of us, no.”
I feel as comforted as I can be for someone who’s been violated by four ghosts in six days. As long as Billy could only talk to me because he was already out of his containment unit, I’m not in danger of him getting into my head again.
