“And after that?” The fox sipped from his cup. The brew was tepid but serviceable, sweeter than he’d have liked.

“We die, I suppose. And then we’ll see if there’s an adventure waiting on the other side.” Her smile was incandescent. “Would you like to come with me then? Should we survive dying, we could together find a new way to live. Something even more fun than being old.”

“Yes.” The fox said carefully, once he trusted himself to speak. “I’d like that.”

the ghost stories we tell around photon fires

Be careful with trusting navigation systems. Sometimes, they lie. They say there is a place where world ships go when they know the end is close. A prism of stars, ravenous, burning like abattoirs, striated by temporal anomalies and transcendentally sublime. If you go there, you’ll see leviathanic corpses suspended between asteroid belts, their bones polished to incandescence by solar winds and cosmic debris. But don’t get too close. Not every ship waits for its crew to evac first.

Still, if you make that mistake, all is not necessarily lost. If you’re quick enough and clever enough, if you can inject the right code, the right algorithms before the first revenants appear, chances are you’ll be fine. Ghosts, whether allegorical or discorporate victims of recursive timelines, only want space to sleep.

At least, that’s what they say.

“You don’t really believe there are ghosts, do you?” drawls Fatimah through a mouthful of cherry-cola gum. The tips of her black hair are knife-frayed, stained cinnamon and lime.

Allen bristles. “There’s no empirical evidence—”

“There’s no empirical evidence that the sun isn’t secretly rainbow-colored either,” Fatimah retorts as she decants from her perch, an elegant motion, a gymnast’s descent. She sweeps thick hair from a sharp-boned face, eyes liquid and bored. Against her brown skin, the vintage headphones, meticulously maintained, gleam like the ferryman’s wages. “But you don’t see anyone complaining about that.”

He scowls. Fatimah grins. Were it not for the way she makes his pulse jackhammer against the membrane of his throat, the way her voice makes reason the exception, he wouldn’t tolerate her. Allen’s sure of that. Stupid crush, he thinks, before Fatimah’s proximity devours all autonomy.

“You’re sweating.”

Stupid crush, he thinks again, a smile trembling on the cusp of being. “Yeah. Well. Might have something to do with the fact we’re in the incinerator room.”

Fatimah laughs and turns, the sway of her hips keeping time with the pounding of his heart, to strut up to the dormant trash compactor and pat it like a recalcitrant puppy. Allen tenses with the urge to follow, but he knows better to react before Fatimah commands, knows better than to volunteer a voice to the hungry silence.

“Since you believe in ghosts—”

“I never said—”