During the fifteen years following her daughter’s ascension into the simulated world of the dead, Zula spent much time wondering about what, if anything, she was doing there. But as time went on she grew accustomed to the mystery. Her mind filed it away and only hauled it out to contemplate it on rare occasions. She spent some time thinking about it, for example, while lying in a street gutter one October morning with wrecked knees.

While stepping off a curb during her walk to work, she’d felt a sharp pain in her leg and heard a pop. As that leg had collapsed, she had tried to break her fall by planting the other leg, which had produced another pop, another lance of pain, and a full-body collapse into the gutter. It had rained the night before, the first really serious rain of the fall, and so she found herself sharing the gutter with a curiously Seattle medley of damp leaves, discarded coffee cups, and one used hypodermic syringe. A raven flew down out of a fir to see if she was edible yet. The only explanation she could think of was that some asshole had shot her a couple of times and then run away. But there were no holes, no bleeding.

Nothing happened for an amazingly long time. It was a mixed neighborhood of high-density housing and commercial buildings on the slope that joined the base of Capitol Hill to the shores of Lake Union. It ought to have been bustling. In a sense it was; cars whooshed by every few seconds, swinging wide to avoid the vaguely human-shaped blob that their infrared cameras had noticed in the gutter. In no time all of the cars had let each other know about said blob and rerouted traffic to mitigate the risk. The humans inside of them were, of course, otherwise occupied and so never looked up. The people in the apartment buildings, offices, and cafés were likewise paying no notice to goings-on in the gutter. Zula was left alone to ponder existential topics.