The logical next question, more remote because the answer was usually the same: Where is Charlie X now? Nowhere. Nowhere. Dead. Forgotten. Rags buried in sand, buried in the past. Just the duck left behind.

But that was not the case in this City.

Charlie X, a ghost given flesh, rising up impossible to meet them across the years. Yet they could not meet him. Must not risk that in his disturbed mind might still exist a memory of Chen, of Moss and the wall of globes inside the Company. And, so, seeing Charlie X from afar as they had headed for the Balcony Cliffs, by the polluted river … the three let him pass unhindered. Did not call out. Did not admit to the past. Hardly discussed it after.

They’d never turned him to their cause, either too broken or not broken enough. But here, and most places now, he had already long past been abandoned or been kicked out by the Company. Unable to use the micro-tears created by the portals that allowed Moss a way to come through. Burdened by the bat-like hardening of features that the Company had imposed on him. That never truly fit. That proclaimed mask or helmet or cage. And how he breathed uneven through it, rasping, and how the mice living in his throat bulged there, clung to soft tissue with their sanitized toes. How long it had taken Charlie X not to claw at his throat, for all that lived inside it? Knew, somewhere deep inside, that he always went mad, went bad, could not be trusted, lived in a place where the landscape had been stripped bare.

Yet still, sometimes, in some scenarios, Chen would pause in the shadow of some version of a ruined building as some version of Charlie X stumbled by. As some version of Charlie X cowered in an empty cistern. Or lay quiet under a trapdoor to catch his prey. Or sat in the dust and wept in a self-pity that Moss found intolerable.

“Should we end him?”

A pause.

“No.” This from Grayson. Always.

It would be for themselves, not for him. He could do no harm now that he had not already achieved. In the grand scheme, to the three he had truly become a ghost. What could they say but words over his grave as he walked away from them, mumbling to himself.

Besides, Grayson argued, there was the risk: They did not know what Charlie X’s death might mean to the duck.

Dark bird. Dark secret. They knew not what it hid, what was artifice and what was content. Peel away that layer, find a deeper monster still.