You quickly scanned the room again and were struck by its nagging familiarity. You should have known it. You did know it. “This is Canaan House,” you said.

“Moment of death,” he agreed. “I said the rules were limited. I can hang on to my sense of self in here, but not my necromancy. I can’t do anything. All I have is a single still image of the room, and for some reason a single romance novel, which I have read upward of fifty times. Thank God I had a pencil in my pocket; I’m in the process of crafting the sequel on a section of wallpaper.”

“How much were you able to retain?”

“Look out in the hallway,” he suggested.

Cautiously, you stepped out of the doorway. What you had taken for an exit consisted of no more than the view from the door, with some leeway for peripheral vision. It extended maybe a foot in either direction, and then gave way to an enormous white blank: when you walked toward it and pushed (“Steady,” Palamedes warned), the white was solid, though with a vague sticky jellified quality to it. It was an abyssal whiteness. It was an absence, resolved into touch.

When you stepped back into the room and knelt on the bed to peer out the window, it was the same. The vision was all the same dead terrace, and a sliver of ocean, and stone: craning to look either way revealed that great and terrible whiteness. The window was solid and did not open.

You said, “The barrier begins where your line of sight ended. It’s derived from everything you saw.”

He said, “And it doesn’t change … the sea is still. It looks like it’s moving, but it’s not—it’s like one of those holographic pictures where turning it up and down lets you see another part of the image. There is nothing here, and that nothing never changes.”

You sat down on that overcushioned bed, and you looked up at his long, grave face; you tried to remember if you had ever seen it, before it was summarily blown off by gunshot. You really did try. When you closed your eyes, there was nothing cauterized upon your eyelids—except a little redness. You said, “A human mind cannot live this way, Sextus. Being stuck in place is any revenant’s undoing, unless it has a very specific anchor. Eventually it will lose purchase—it will let go—it will return to the River. I cannot imagine the type of mind that would hold on to that edge, and keep holding.”

“I can, and it scares me,” he said heavily. “Look. How long have I been dead, Nonagesimus?”

“Eight months,” you said, “give or take.”