Three Ghosts and a Debt

Chapter 2: Four Wrong Answers

"Burning ghost," Mr. Hollis said. "Somebody who isn't Grant."

Chairs creaked. Everyone found a reason to look at their own desk. Then Priya's hand went up halfway, came down, and went up again.

"You leave by the door you came in by," she said. "And you shut it behind you."

"Why."

"Because it wants you close. It doesn't chase. It waits for you to come to it."

Hollis nodded once. "That's the shape of the answer. Every one of them is that same question in a different coat. What does it want, and what does that let you do." He tapped the marker twice against the tray, click, click, and turned around. "Grant."

"Still here."

"Stand up."

Milo stood up.

"Grave ghost."

"Strip it."

Hollis's marker stopped against the tray. "That's your answer. Say it again."

"Strip it."

"Go on."

"Everything it's wearing, everything in the box with it." The room had gone quiet in the way that meant people were listening, and he could feel it, and he kept going. "Grave ghosts are old. Three hundred years in the ground means three hundred years of stuff. Rings. Cufflinks. A watch that stopped in some year nobody's heard of. Gold doesn't rust." He turned his hand over, weighing it. "You take it somewhere that doesn't ask, and you open a pawn shop with what you get. Or skip the pawn shop. I'm just saying that's a business you could build."

Somebody behind him said, "Oh my God."

"You're describing a felony," Hollis said.

"I'm describing a business."

The kid by the window — the one who'd coughed himself inside out over the furnace answer — went off again, and this time it turned into real coughing, his face going red, his sleeve jammed against his mouth while the guy next to him hit him on the back twice, helpfully, and made it worse.

Two rows over, a boy laughed, and then stopped laughing. Just stopped, mid-sound. He turned his head toward the door and left it there.

The girl with the two pins in her hair wasn't laughing. She hadn't laughed at the furnace either. Her hands were flat on the desk and she was looking at the door, and she'd been looking at it since before any of this started.

At the desk beside Milo's, Dumpster was already talking. "I've been saying this since the first week of school," he said, and his voice came out bigger than the room needed, the way a scout talks when he's decided he's found something. "First week. I said, that is not a dumb kid, that is a kid with a gift, and the gift is that he genuinely does not care. Ceiling unmeasured. Instincts feral. I'd draft him."

He was grinning. His hand was wrapped around the edge of the desk, knuckles pale, and it stayed there after he stopped talking.

Hollis let it die out. Then: "Electrocuted ghost."

"Charge it," Milo said.

"Charge it."

"Grab it, walk it into a wall socket. Free power for the whole building." He shrugged. "Whole neighborhood. You could rent it out."

"You'd rent it out," Hollis said.

"Look, you keep asking me what to do with them. Nobody's asking what they're for."

That got a laugh, and then a bigger one, and someone said something Milo didn't catch that made the back three rows lose it entirely. The fluorescent in the corner had been flickering since September, and it picked that moment to stutter — off, on, off — and the laugh came out of the room in pieces.

"Red dress," Hollis said.

The laughing stopped being one thing and became a lot of small separate things, all at once, and then it stopped.

"The red dress ghost," Hollis said again, evenly. "Grant. Answer the question."

Milo put his hands in his pockets.

"Is she single?"

The room didn't laugh. It made a sound like thirty people inhaling.

"What," he said. "Red dress. That's not a work outfit. Nobody gets buried in a work outfit. That's somebody who got dressed up for something." He was enjoying himself now, and he knew it, and he kept going anyway. "Which means she might be reasonable. So you don't go in swinging. You ask her. If she's fine with it, you bind her right there and you skip the fight. That's a win. That's the cheapest win on the board."

"She was somebody," said the girl with the pins.

She hadn't turned around. Her hands were still flat on the desk.

"She's dead," Milo said.

She didn't answer him. She didn't need to. She turned her head, and she looked at him, and it was the first time all period, and then she looked back at the door.

Two rows back, a girl laughed into her sleeve and then made a noise like she was trying to take the laugh back out of the air.

Mr. Hollis reached over and hit the switch bank by the board, and the first three rows of lights went out.

The room shut up.

He didn't shout. He stood in the half-dark with one hand still on the switch and waited until even the coughing had stopped, and when he spoke he spoke quietly, the way people speak when they've decided to spend very little.

"Grant. Back of the room."

Milo picked up his notebook.

"Not the notebook. Walk."

He walked.

The back wall of Room 214 was cinderblock painted the color of oatmeal, and there was a radiator that clanked in cold weather and a map of the state that had gone yellow at the top edge. He put his shoulders against the wall and looked at the blackboard from a distance.

GRANT, M. DETENTION. *report to me before the exam.*

"Rest of you," Hollis said. "The next person who laughs at one of those takes the exam in the parking lot. I'll bring the paperwork out to you myself."

Nobody laughed at anything.

Milo's phone was in his pocket. He didn't take it out. He was doing something better than that.

BREAK DETECTED: M. HOLLIS.

The words sat in the air in front of the blackboard where the map wasn't, gray, thin, patient, visible to exactly one person in the room.

+40 POINTS.

STARTER PACKAGE UNLOCKED.

SKILL ACQUIRED — BREAK CONTRACT.

A ghost at 99% break or higher may be bound without its consent.

BOND CAP +2.

He read the last line three times.

Something in his chest went and stayed where it went: a stretch, like a room he'd been told had one closet and turned out to have three.

Cap was not stock. Cap was how much of it you could hold, and he had been holding a half his whole life with nothing to put in it.

Two and a half. Five times what he'd had at breakfast. Five times his mother's.

At the kitchen table, with the drawer that didn't shut, she had said it once, flat, the way you read a label off a can. Half a ghost was not a real number. Half a ghost was the world's way of telling you what you were.

He could walk through that gym door with two whole ghosts and a half besides, and there was not one line on his paperwork that said so.

*Without its consent.*

He turned it over. It didn't get better. It sat there, honest, and he found he didn't mind it as much as maybe he should have.

The other part took longer. Ninety-nine percent. He had pulled forty points off a man who only had to stop talking and set a marker down. Ninety-nine percent was not that. Ninety-nine percent was a thing brought to the edge of something he had no name for, and he was supposed to know when it got there, in the dark, with the thing in front of him.

He could not tell anyone. That was the part that came last. He couldn't say where the extra cap had come from, and he couldn't show what he could do, because what he could do needed a ghost at ninety-nine and there was no way to explain, in a classroom, to a man with a marker, how he would know that number or how he'd know when he got there. Any answer he gave would be worse than no answer.

Down the rows, Dumpster had turned around in his chair as far as his body allowed, which was not very, and he was looking at Milo with his eyebrows up and his mouth doing something between *you good* and *what did you just do?*

"You good?" he whispered.

"Yeah," Milo said.

It was a lie, and it went down easy, and he did not take it back.

"Grant."

Hollis was at the front with his arms folded, and the three rows of dead lights made him look like he was standing in a doorway.

"Sit down."

Milo pushed off the wall.

Ten steps, maybe eleven. He counted ghosts instead of steps. Two and a half. Two whole ones and a half besides.

Somebody's pen had rolled under his shoe. He stepped over it without breaking stride, and he was still counting when he put his hand on the back of his chair.