And he was the last one present who’d been orphaned by the Blight. Everyone else from that poisoned generation had grown up and moved on to something else by now—everyone but Rector, who had done his noble best to refuse adulthood or die before meeting it, whichever was easier.

He whispered to the ceiling, “One more thing I failed at for sure.” Because, goddammit, he was still alive.

In the back of his mind, a shadow shook. It wavered across his vision, a flash of darkness shaped like someone familiar, someone gone. He blinked to banish it, but failed at that, too.

It hovered at the far edge of what he could see, as opposed to what he couldn’t.

He breathed, “No,” knowing that the word had no power. He added, “I know you’re not really here.” But that was a lie, and it was meaningless. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. Even with his eyes smashed shut like they were welded that way, he could see the figure outlined against the inside of his lids. It was skinny like him, and a little younger. Not much, but enough to make a difference in size. It moved with the furtive unhappiness of something that has often been mocked or kicked.

It shifted on featherlight feet between the boys’ beds, like a feral cat ready to dodge a hurled shoe.

Rector huddled beneath his insufficient blankets and drew his feet against himself, knees up, panting under the covers and smelling his own stale breath. “Go away,” he commanded aloud. “I don’t know why you keep coming here.”

Because you’re here.

“I didn’t hurt you.”

You sent me someplace where you knew I’d get hurt.

“No, I only told you how to get there. Everything else was you. It was all your own doing. You’re just looking for someone to blame. You’re just mad about being dead.”

You murdered me. The least you could do is bury me.

The ghost of Ezekiel Wilkes quivered. It came forward, mothlike, to the candle of Rector’s guilt.

You left me there.

“And I told you, I’ll come find you. I’ll come fix it, if I can.”

He waited until his heart had calmed, and he heard only the farts, sniffles, and sighs that made up the nighttime music of the orphans’ home. He moved his legs slowly beneath the blanket until his feet dangled off the edge of the flat straw mattress.