For now I’m at peace, and I’d like to hold on to this moment. I close my eyes and take in the sounds of the animated show. The zips and zoinks and boings!

It was the closest I’d come to violence before stabbing someone and then shooting someone else and setting his body on fire. I could have saved his life had I fought back sooner. Could have accessed the power I knew was inside me, but I decided it wasn’t worth it.

One day, I hope, I’ll be able to live with that. One day I’ll forget that I was able to kill a man.

Jake

When I was asleep, I had an experience.

There was total darkness, and then ecto-mist was expanding beneath me like a field of electric dandelion petals. A sky broke out above in shades of vibrant purple and pink, and then I found River, now a constellated figure, approaching me from across the ecto-field.

“Funny seeing you here,” she said.

Then we were standing right across from each other. I looked at my arms and found them outlined in the astral glow. “Does this mean we’ll only get to see each other when I have a near-death experience?”

She pondered it for a moment. “I think that’s how the full-body thing works. But you can hear me at all times.”

“In the mist.”

“In the mist. I visited my mom. Could swear she heard me while she was doing dishes. She put her head toward the curtains like they were whispering to her, and she said my name.”

“I’m glad you got in touch. And thank you. I don’t think I could’ve stopped him without . . .” I gestured at the ecto-mist floating around us like sedated smoke fairies. “All this. Thank you.”

“Thank you. This place does feel better than where I was before. Stuck in that room, I felt like that was it. Death was this horrible loop I’d have to live in, and peace after it didn’t exist. But here, all I feel is peace. Here, I hear the voices of everyone I care about at exactly the moment they think of me. I hear them instead of him.” River looked at their hands and cheesed at the crystals and diamonds shining in them. “It’s really cool, honestly.”

It got me thinking about the dead world as a haven of possibilities rather than a hopeless nightmare. “Now that we’ve joined bodies and made that connection, do you think we’ll have a telepathic connection forever?”

“Would be cool,” she said. “Inter-realm friendship. But I hope it’s not because we joined bodies, but because we just remember each other. Because if it’s the body joining that secures the telepathy, then that means you-know-who will be in your head forever too.”