“What, that I loved your sister? Of course you didn’t, just like you had no idea Rebecca fancied you. You never had to go searching like the rest of us. She was haunting you a long time before she died, and if you’d been the one to go, you’d be haunting her the same way.” Mahir stood as the water turned off. “We’re all hauntings waiting to happen, Shaun. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll get past wondering when our normal lives will be starting up again.”

He didn’t look back as he walked out of the motel room, letting the door swing gently shut behind him. I stayed where I was, listening to the silence inside my head and the soft sounds of Kelly drying herself off behind the bathroom door. We were all hauntings waiting to happen? Really?

“I guess I can live with that,” I said, to the silence.

“Live with what?”

I turned to see Kelly standing in the bathroom door, wearing an outfit I hadn’t seen before. She must have bought it on one of her innumerable shopping trips with Maggie. Tan slacks, a white button-down blouse, and a pair of low, black heels. A starched white lab coat completed the illusion that she’d left the CDC only yesterday, not months before. I blinked and said the first thing that popped into my head: “What the hell happened to your hair?”

Kelly reached up to self-consciously touch her long blond ponytail. It was the hairstyle she’d been wearing when she first arrived in Oakland, if maybe a shade or two lighter. “Maggie found it for me at a beauty supply shop. Don’t you like it?”

“Shit, Doc, anyone who sees you is going to think they’re seeing a ghost.”

Very funny, said George.

“That’s the idea,” said Kelly, and smiled. There was a bitterness in that expression I don’t think she would have been capable of before she came to us. Even if she survived, the things she knew now had broken her, maybe forever. “Wiping my biometric information from the scanners would be expensive and time-consuming, and these people are arrogant bastards—I know, because I’m one of them. My profile will still be there. We won’t have any issues with the automatic doors. The night guards don’t really know any of the junior staff by name—we’re just faces to them, and with all the traveling we do, it’s not unusual for us to disappear for weeks at a time. As long as we don’t wander into a spot check, we’ll be fine.”

“What about the part where we’ve been hiding you all the way across the country, on account of that whole ‘faking your own death’ thing? This seems risky as hell.”