Three Ghosts and a Debt

Chapter 6: Loyalty Below Zero

The heat came first. Then the sound: a wet little sound, a seam giving way in something that had never had a seam.

Milo got one hand on the counter. His other hand was already at his face, because his face was where the problem was, and he hadn't decided to raise it. It had just gotten there.

Behind his right eye, something settled. Not a flinch. A settling. A stone dropping into mud, and the mud closing back over it.

"Okay," he said. "Okay."

Out in the corridor the fog rolled over itself. In the eye clinic behind him the fan was still spinning, unbalanced now, whining against its housing.

The correct next move was to check the room. Door, corners, floor, then the panel — what this had cost him, in the only currency that mattered. He'd been running that particular account for eighteen years without a maintenance plan and had intended to keep running it.

He went across the hall to the restroom instead.

The door was stiff and didn't latch. The light came on with a tick: one long tube over the sink, half of it dead, so the mirror was lit down one side and dark down the other. Beside it, a hand dryer had a strip of masking tape across the vent. Somebody had written OUT in marker, and then, underneath, in smaller letters, OF ORDER.

Milo leaned on the sink and looked at himself.

Left eye: brown, ordinary, the one he'd been issued. Right eye: red.

Not bloodshot. Bloodshot was veins, and veins were a thing you could explain to a nurse. This was flat and even, the whole white gone the color of a taillight, and the pupil wasn't a dot anymore. It was a thin black ring.

He leaned in until his own face showed in the middle of it, small and warped and lit from one side.

He turned his head. The ring stayed a ring.

There was something wet at the corner of it. He wiped it with the side of his thumb, and it came away thin and pink, and he wiped that on his jeans and didn't look at it again.

"...Okay," he said, again.

There'd been a cartoon he watched once, late, on somebody else's couch. One of the guys in it had an eye like this and no manners, and had been a serious problem for everybody on the show. Milo tilted his chin down and looked at the mirror from under his eyebrows.

Yeah. That was not bad.

"I want it back," said a voice inside his head.

Milo didn't jump. Or he'd jumped before the voice finished, and by the time it finished he was standing still with his hands in his pockets.

"Congratulations," the voice said. It sat behind his right ear and also everywhere. "You look like a crime scene."

Blood-Eye. Up on the fan it had been a red globe the size of a grapefruit with its lids glued shut and a mouth that wouldn't quit. Now it was a voice in Milo's skull, and the voice was a lot calmer than it had any right to be.

"Eye," Milo said. "You're gonna be fine."

"My name is—"

"Blood-Eye. I know." Milo turned off the tap he hadn't turned on. "I'm not saying all of that every time."

"You're shortening my name."

"Yeah."

"People don't shorten my name."

"Sure they do," Milo said. "Behind your back."

Blood-Eye said nothing for a second, and the nothing had weight to it, like somebody deciding not to put their hand through a wall.

"Get it out," it said. "Get it off your head, put it back on the fan, walk away, and I'll let you keep the eye."

"Can't."

"You can. You're a kid with a—"

"It's fused." Milo pushed off the sink. "Partials fuse. That's not me guessing. That's the screen."

The voice went quiet.

"Yeah," Blood-Eye said at last. "That's what happened."

Milo brought the panel up with a thought — a thing he was going to have to get used to — and it opened in the corner of his right eye, where the fog wasn't.

BLOOD-EYE — PARTIAL. MID-GRADE.

RESERVE 100/200

LOYALTY 3%

SKILL: LOCKED

Under that, smaller:

PARTIAL GHOSTS DO NOT DEPLOY. THEY FUSE AND THEY STAY FUSED.

LOYALTY AT 0% OR BELOW: BINDING RELEASED. BACKLASH BORNE BY HOST.

He read it twice. The second time he read it slower, because the first time his eyes had slid over the number and quit.

Three percent.

"How," he said.

"How what."

"Three. How am I at three. I just met you."

"You put glue in my eyes," Blood-Eye said, "and made me say yes."

"I didn't make you—"

"The system made me say yes," Blood-Eye said. "The system isn't a person. I'm not over it. That's three."

Milo opened his mouth to say something reasonable, and the panel moved.

LOYALTY −2%

CURRENT: 1%

The restroom got hot around the edges. One long pressure built up behind his right eye, hard enough that he put both palms flat on the sink.

"It says backlash," Blood-Eye said. "It doesn't say what's left of you after."

"Hey," Milo said. "Hey. Stop."

"I'm not doing it." Blood-Eye's voice had no heat in it at all, which was worse. "That's what you're not getting. I'm trying to leave. The number comes with me. Your screen is keeping score on a hostage."

"What happens at zero?"

"Nothing good for you, and nothing good for me. It's not a good night for either of us."

Milo breathed in through his nose. Counted three. Let it out.

"Okay," he said. "So let's not do that."

"Give me one reason."

"You can't deploy." Milo straightened up. "Partials don't deploy. So if you get loose, what are you? You're an eye with an opinion. You can't get off this floor, you can't get out of this building, and the thing that glued you to a ceiling fan is still out there somewhere being twice your size."

Blood-Eye said nothing.

"That's my reason," Milo said. "You want a better one, help me not hit zero."

"You're not afraid of me."

"I'm extremely afraid of you," Milo said. "I'm also broke."

There was a slip in his inside pocket. He could feel the fold of it through the jacket. One pull on the tear line and the exam was over, and he was on his way back to Halcyon with a score and no ghost and a story about how he'd almost done it.

He thought about it for a full second.

"No," he said, to the slip, or to himself — he wasn't sure which.

Then he opened the exchange menu.

SKILL EXCHANGE

200 BREAK POINTS — ONE SKILL, ANY BOUND GHOST.

BREAK POINTS: 218

Two hundred and eighteen. Everything he'd stolen, sweated for, and talked his way into since the doors of Mercy General shut behind him, and the menu wanted a round two hundred of it, in one go, with no refunds listed anywhere on the screen.

"What are you doing," Blood-Eye said.

"Investing."

"Don't—"

Milo bought it.

SKILL ACQUIRED

BLOOD PIT — LV 1

ON EYE CONTACT: TARGET HELD. TARGET BLEEDS FOR THE DURATION.

COST: 50 RESERVE. COOLDOWN: 60 SECONDS.

HOLD: 30 SECONDS AT YOUR GRADE OR BELOW. 10 SECONDS ABOVE.

BREAK POINTS: 18

The thing in his eye went still.

"You bought it," Blood-Eye said.

"Yep."

"With your points."

"Yep."

"That's my skill." A pause. "You spent my strength. Don't call it a purchase."

"I call it a paycheck," Milo said. "You work here now."

LOYALTY +9%

CURRENT: 10%

Some of the pressure went out of his skull. Not all of it. The thing behind his eye had shifted its weight onto its other foot, and that was all, and Milo could feel the difference in how his own head sat on his neck.

He straightened off the sink and checked his face in the mirror. Was his mouth going one way and the rest of him the other? It wasn't. It was a kid in a dirty jacket with one red eye and half a lightbulb.

Then he wiped his palm down the seam of his jeans, once, and put his hands back in his pockets.

"Ten percent," he said, out loud, to hear how it sounded.

Blood-Eye didn't answer that.

He pushed the restroom door open and stepped out into the corridor, and stopped.

The fog.

He'd gotten used to it sitting on him. Two meters out, both eyes, since the front door. That was how this floor worked. That was why people walked with one hand on the wall. That was why Lila Sunderland and her two idiots had walked into a room with a bloody eyeball on the ceiling and stood there waiting to be told what to do.

Two meters. That had been the whole world since the front door.

Now it started at ten.

He could see the elevator bay — the brass plate, the dead floor indicator, the soda can somebody had left on top of the fire extinguisher cabinet. He could see the corner where the corridor turned, which he had never once seen, and the sign over the next set of doors, and read it. PATHOLOGY, this way, with an arrow.

He put a hand up and covered his left eye, and everything got further away, sharper, and redder, all at once.

"Oh," Milo said.

The whole day had been like looking through a glass of milk. He hadn't even known. He'd figured that was the fog — that everybody got the milk, that when people said two meters they meant two meters for the strong kids too.

"My eyes were good," Blood-Eye said. "Before."

"You have no eyes," Milo said. "You have glue."

Eighteen break points left, and a skill he couldn't use until something looked him in his new eye.

He got to the middle of the corridor, and heard it.

Dragging. Something heavy and soft dragging over linoleum — the way a bag drags, the way a leg drags. And under it, laughter.

Then more laughter. Not one throat. Throats, thin and delighted, coming up the corridor out of the dark end where the fog no longer reached.

"Not one," Blood-Eye said.

Milo counted the echoes.

"One."

The dragging stopped, started, stopped.

"Two. Three."

Two of the laughs were almost on top of each other, one high and one not, the way kids laugh when they're doing something they've been told not to do.

"Four. Five."

Then the dragging stopped for good, and the laughter didn't.

"Five," Milo said.

Ten meters out, at the end of the hall, the fog turned over.