Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
—T. S. Eliot
"You are so late," Tucker hissed. He glared up at her, barely more than a silhouette on the dark, empty bridge. It was near the edge of town, just a few hundred yards from where the river spread out into a sprawling marsh that eventually seeped into the lake. Late-season fireflies winked out over the darkness. The river shushed beneath them, smelling of damp and algae and garbage.
Valerie dematerialized her jet sled and landed neatly on the ground in front of him.
He'd picked a good meeting place; the bridge was part of a a little-used road that meandered out through the suburbs and into the countryside. The closest block of buildings held nothing but warehouses and a few businesses, all dark at this time of night. The streetlights didn't make it to the bridge, leaving the two of them in a humid gloom.
"I'm sorry, alright?" Even with no one around, Valerie still felt the need to whisper. She kept her suit activated; it felt better to keep her face obscured. They were about to majorly break the law. Who knew where the government had surveillance? "My alarm didn't go off."
Actually it had, but she'd been too wiped out to hear it at first, tired from a long day of school with complementary ghost attacks between periods. She'd been dragged out of blissful sleep by a weird and distant brrrr—obviously not her phone, her fuzzy brain decided, since she didn't feel it vibrating—only to jump awake at the blare of — IT'S MORPHIN' TIME! Followed by a cacophony of tinny guitars that had her cursing and scrambling for her phone, suddenly wide awake.
Valerie didn't know how Tucker had forced it to play that dumb song when she'd left it on vibrate, but she'd given up on figuring out half the stuff he did. Technogeek apparently meant electronic miracle worker. "You have nerd tastes, by the way."
"Guilty as charged," he shot back, but his eyes were scanning the far end of the bridge. He took off his red beret, put it back on, then changed his mind and stuffed it in a pocket of his backpack. He'd worn dark grey cargo pants and a black shirt, a long way from his usual tacky getup. He was nervous too, she realized. "We should've left half an hour ago," he muttered, forcing the zipper closed over the hat.
Valerie felt her face grow hot, the suit buzzing in the back of her brain. "I said I was sorry."
Dad must have moved her phone. She had a vague impression of his familiar, broad-shouldered silhouette against the weak yellow light from the half-open door, a hand brushing over her hair. He used to do that a lot right after Mom had left. Come in after he thought she was asleep to sit with her and stroke her hair, as if to remind himself that she hadn't abandoned him, too. He'd started again after the whole Pariah Dark thing. The thought made her shrivel up inside.
She hated lying to her dad—had always hated it—but he sheltered her with such a rabid intensity that she had no other choice. These… people had held Danny like a specimen in a lab. The GIW had to go down. This was the right thing to do. Dad had given her that sense of justice in the first place. He'd understand why, but he'd still forbid her from going. Sorry Daddy, she thought. We'll just have to disagree on that one. Valerie cracked her knuckles; if justice involved the Red Hunter punching a few government agents in the face, all the better.
"Doesn't that fancy suit of yours have some kind of alarm clock feature?" Tucker grumbled, still tugging at the zipper. Valerie, startled out of her thoughts, looked down at him. The zipper slid shut, to a muttered "finally." He sounded more nervous than angry.
Suddenly Val wasn't either. "It's a battlesuit, not a smartphone," she said, but not as sharply as she'd planned. "Let's just get going."
"Fine." He produced a PDA out of his pocket and tapped a button. "Porting the coordinates to your suit now."
She started as a flicker of numbers, latitude and longitude, popped up on her visor screen. "How—did you just hack my suit?"
He smiled in the slice of blue light from his cell phone. Sharp with tension as it was, it looked more threatening than she would have imagined Tucker Foley could muster. "Your upgrade was compliments of Technus, right? I've hacked his systems so many times I could do it in my sleep."
Valerie scowled; she spent most of her time ignoring that little detail. Ghost-upgrade or not, it was her suit. "That's supposed to make me feel better?"
"Tell you what: Once this is all taken care of, I'll help you set up a personal firewall, so nobody will be able to access your tech."
Not even Vlad Masters? Valerie nodded slowly; she liked that idea. Her once-benefactor and his manipulative lies had been festering in the back of her mind. She owed him serious payback… but Dad worked at Axiom—a company that Mr. Masters owned. He'd designed her suit. Those were weak points. He didn't seem like the kind of guy to let go of an investment, even if the investment was an angry, contrary teenager. Masters-proofing her gear would be a start.
She sent a sidelong glance at Tucker. "That's assuming I trust you to mess around with my software." He'd said the suit was basically a part of her, and she was beginning to believe it.
"Hey, I'm trusting you to fly me around who-knows-how-high on that death machine of yours." He gestured vaguely at the night sky. "That's got to count for something. Besides," he smiled weakly. "We're about to be accomplices."
Accomplices. The word rang in her head, a term like the news announcer on TV would use to describe criminals. Participating in a crime. She'd bent the law plenty as a vigilante, but this was different. From the way Tucker hands were shaking as he slung on his backpack and fussed with the straps, he knew it, too.
"That's fair," Valerie said, feeling subdued. She activated her jet sled just above the sidewalk, feeling her boots click into place as the board materialized, and offered him a hand. "Ready?"
"Yeah." He climbed aboard, sneakers slipping a bit on the slick metal surface, then put his arms gingerly around her. Valerie rolled her eyes at the china doll treatment. Even knowing she kicked ghost butt on a daily basis couldn't shake Tucker's pretty-girl image of her. The suit's connection to the jet sled should keep them both stable, even at a good speed.
"Hold on tight," Valerie warned. The last thing she wanted to do was end up carrying Tucker Foley in her arms across three states. They rose smoothly into the air. The ground dropped away, replaced by a brisk breeze rising cool and swampy off the river.
Tucker gulped, gripping her waist tighter. "Yes ma'am."
The lights of Amity Park glittered below, mirroring the stars. It would be dark without moonlight, but the screen of Valerie's suit had a night vision feature. She could feel—or hear, in that weird, buzzy way the suit enhanced her senses—Tucker's heartbeat kick into high gear as he pressed into her back. A smirk played around her lips. She activated her helmet's navigation program and a translucent pink line marked her course across the night sky.
"I hope you're not afraid of heights. Or speed."
She gave him no time to answer as they shot out into the night, leaving Amity Park behind.
"Ecto-entity acquisition designated G - 0051," the cool, computerized voice announced. "Commencing retrieval."
Kerza folded his arms, leaned back in his chair, and watched as the cloud of green smoke condensed into a humanoid silhouette behind the containing force field. Greasy, dirty blonde locks straggling around a sour face the color of putty, pitted with acne scars. Scuffed leather jacket hung loose off its thin shoulders, dirty white t-shirt tucked into ratty black jeans.
The ghost glanced around, eyes widening as it took in the sterile white lab, the army of examination equipment, the force field, and finally Dr. Kerza. Scowling, it stalked toward Kerza—then drew up short as the force field crackled in warning. It jabbed a finger at the scientist. "You'd better let me out, old man!"
Kerza arched an eyebrow. "I see no incentive for such a course of action."
"I'll show you incentive—Shadow! Sha—" It looked down at its feet and started, staring at the blank riveted steel where only the faintest grey patch hinted at a shadow.
"If you're trying to summon that nasty extension of yourself that gave my colleagues so much trouble, it's a wasted effort," Dr. Kerza remarked. "Even if the force field's diffusion of light did not prevent it, our security measures prohibit such external manifestations." One advantage to this "top secret" facility and its insistence on isolation: The electromagnetic field, despite its annoying drawbacks from a scientific perspective, served its security purpose very well.
"You white-collar freaks," the ghost snarled, "never woulda caught me if that hunter girl hadn't wrecked my bike. What do you losers want with me?"
"Answer a few of my questions, to start with. As for the rest, well..." The ghost would be promptly dissected and studied post-interrogation, but that information would hardly put it in the mood for cooperation. "Let's see how well your answers serve my purpose."
"Hmph." The ghost crossed its arms.
Kerza picked up a pen and looked at his clipboard, leaning back in his chair. It was blank, waiting for notation, but it gave him a moment to collect his thoughts. Where to begin? How to frame the pressing questions that weighed on his mind in such a way that an ecto-entity of limited mental and social capacities could properly respond to them?
"I am seeking… information," Dr. Kerza began, setting aside the clipboard and steepling his fingers. "On a certain ghost you may know. Phantom."
"What, that loser?" The ghost scoffed. He picked at a scuff on his leather jacket. "What's to know? The kid cramps my style. He's a do-gooding twit who'll take a swing at you if you look at him sideways. I got nothin' to say about him."
Kerza frowned. "But you know of him, apparently. He's different from your average ecto-entity, correct? Unique. Special, somehow."
"Special? Get real." The ghost's dull green eyes glittered angrily. "Just because he's from your world, Phantom thinks he gets a say on who goes where. He thinks he can kick my butt back to the Ghost Zone whenever he wants."
Kerza glanced away to conceal his excitement. Now they were getting somewhere.
Phantom originated here, in the natural world? How? Ectoplasm did not naturally occur in this dimension, at least not in amounts significant enough to produce a stable, powerful ecto-entity such as Phantom. Then what? An unsanctioned experiment? He had heard—in Europe, in particularly bold scientific circles, of plans to begin programming ectoplasm with artificial personalities. Or perhaps… He glanced at the folder he'd left on the console, one thick with Phantom's oddly physiological traits. It seemed impossible, and yet… what else explained the evidence?
"Next time," the ghost growled. G-0015 slammed a fist into its palm and turned to pace. "Next time I see tights boy I'm gonna pound that logo right into the asphalt. He'll eat my treads! Shadow'll show him." Little wisps of black rose off its back and shoulders like smoke, only to dissipate into thin air. "He'll trash Phantom's luck so bad he'll break every mirror he looks into. Smash his pasty weak face—"
"Why is he associated with our dimension?" Kerza interrupted. "This is the human world."
The ghost turned and stared at him, then its pitted face split in a crooked grin. "You suits really know nothin', huh?"
"An oversight I'm attempting to rectify," Kerza said, tone acerbic. He stood up and stepped closer to the containment field. The field made a high, faint whine, its translucent blue surface flickering with the electrical current. "Do not deflect the question. Who or what is Phantom? How has it eluded us? Is it..." the scientist hesitated, reluctant to voice the idea that had been buzzing in his brain ever since that interview with Dr. Fenton. "Are there elements to the entity's physiological infrastructure—organic elements— that are native to this dimension?"
"I don't speak geek, freak," the ghost spat.
Kerza's eyes narrowed. "Phantom seems at times remarkably human. Incredibly… uniquely so."
"I told you." Darkness rippled around the ghost's form. "There's nothing incredible about that loser. Human, huh. You think that makes him special or something?"
Running a tongue over its yellowed teeth, the ghost blinked a few times. Its aura fizzled to a barely visible sheen. Heavy biker boots thumped onto the floor, and the eerie glow faded from its eyes. Dr. Kerza watched this subtle but distinct transformation with no little astonishment, though he schooled his features into calm observation. He took a step back, in case the field were somehow altering his vision. It was not. The ghost looked... human. Sickly, and ill-complexioned, but overall the effect was quite convincing.
The ghost grinned. "I look pretty real, right? Picked up a girl or two like this."
"Fascinating," Kerza muttered.
He moved aside the chair and strode back toward the control console, pressing a button. A metal cuff snaked out of the floor and clamped around the ghost's ankle. The ghost started and tried to yank itself free.
"What the—hey!"
Dr. Kerza ignored the entity's increasingly vulgar shouts as it was dragged down and fastened to the emerging lab table. He pulled on a pair of thick hazmat gloves and selected a scalpel from the excessive array on the nearest lab table. Agent L and his even more dubious forerunners believed in quantity over quality. He glanced at the ghost, which still struggled but was completely secure, then deactivated the containment field and stepped inside.
He frowned. The ghost's aura had flared again, dull green eyes glowing with rage, energy hissing against the ectoproof restraints. "Resume your human appearance," Kerza ordered.
"Like hell, old man," the ghost spat.
Kerza sighed and retrieved a remote control from his lab coat pocket. "Then I shall have to resort to more rigorous forms of persuasion." He stepped back and pushed a button. Thousands of volts ran through the cuffs, eliciting a scream from the ghost. Kerza let it run for a moment, watching coolly, then shut it off. G-0015 lay twitching in its restraints, gasping, steam rising from its body. Dull green eyes full of hate rolled in Kerza's direction.
Holding up the remote, he smiled. "If you please."
"We're here," Valerie announced. She glanced around at the dark, empty woods and frowned at the blinking coordinates.
"Finally," Tucker wheezed, shifting behind her. With the way he'd clung for dear life his arms were probably cramping by now.
She looked down at the overgrown gravel road that cut a weak grey ribbon through the thick forest. It was the only sign of civilization, and looked completely unused. "Wherever here is. Are you sure this is the right place?"
"Of course. Set us down. Somewhere in the woods if you can; I bet they have security cameras even here." Now her heart had begun a rapid tattoo, sending an excited red pulse through her suit. Finally. A chance to get back at the ones who'd taken Danny. Tucker might just want to trash their hard drives, but she'd take care of the hardware, too. Make sure they didn't have so much as a ghost shield left standing. She maneuvered them skillfully into the thick tree cover, found a rocky patch free of underbrush, and set them down, deactivating the jet sled.
Tucker staggered to the nearest tree and leaned against it, panting.
"Too much for you, Foley?" She couldn't help the grin on her face; she might have gone a little faster than was safe for a passenger, just to show off.
Tucker groaned. "Gimme a sec, my dinner might just speak for me."
Oh, please. "Pull it together. I don't want to get caught just because you have a weak stomach." Suddenly nervous, she glanced around, then deactivated her suit entirely. If there was any kind of electromagnetic field detector, she'd stand out like a beacon amid all this tech-free wilderness. Valerie had also worn black—faded sweatpants and a tank top. She'd tucked her dark curls into a messy bun at the nape of her neck.
A breeze shook the trees, tugging a curl loose and sending goosebumps up her bare arms. She felt incredibly exposed, standing out here without a scrap of armor. She shivered.
Tucker straightened, apparently over his nausea. He took a deep breath, let it out, then checked his PDA. "Bright side, we're back on schedule. Let's go." He hefted his backpack by the straps, resettling it on his back, and stepped into the underbrush, PDA in hand.
"You're welcome," Valerie said, and followed after him.
They stomped and battled their way through brambles and underbrush. It was a good thing they hadn't seen any sign of guards, because they were about as quiet as a stampeding gorilla. Valerie was relieved when the gravel road reappeared, outlined in moonlight and with weeds growing tall between the tracks. But instead of stepping out onto the road, Tucker made a sharp right turn and continued to battle the bushes parallel. Valerie bit back a protest and trudged after him. After what felt like an hour—but was probably more like ten minutes—Tucker motioned for her to come up beside him. Valerie, whose hair had just tangled into a particularly mean bramble, yanked it free.
Tucker pointed. A little track barely wide enough for an ATV to drive ran off the main road at an angle, leading to a clearing and a small building. "There it is."
Valerie squinted through the leaves; the secret facility was apparently a small, squat, whitewashed concrete building with a flat tin roof, barely six feet square. A single street light stood just a little bit away from it, flickering from the thick cloud of moths that crowded around the lone source of light in the wilderness. The grass surrounding the building was long and choppy, like it got mowed only once or twice a season, and unevenly at that. The only signs of there being anything more valuable than a working toilet inside were the grey steel door with the heavy padlock and the little black camera nestled under the eaves, red light blinking watchfully.
"That's the place they kept Danny?" Valerie said doubtfully. Maybe there was more to it underground.
"What?" Tucker, who'd begun to circle the clearing, still well inside the bushes, stopped and looked at her. "No, of course not. Did you think we'd go their actual secret facility? Are you crazy?"
"Of course not!" Valerie decided not to mention how much she'd been looking forward to personally turning their lab into rubble and slag. Maybe blacking a few GIW eyes too. "What is this place, then?"
"It's a maintenance point," Tucker said. "Remember how I said they have a closed computer system? The only places you can tap into it are at the facility itself, their high security cold data storage off in Maine somewhere, and these sheds, which are here in case the underground cable gets damaged."
They were whispering again, despite the deserted look of the place. "Isn't that kind of stupid of them?"
"The data's so encrypted it hardly matters. Unless you're me, that is." He jabbed a thumb a his backpack full of tech.
"Not much for bragging, are you?"
His face was barely a shadow in the dark, but she could practically hear his eyebrows wiggling. "Only when there's ladies worth impressing." Nerves seemed to bring out the dork in Tucker Foley.
"Let's just do this, alright?"
Tucker nodded. "Knock out that security camera first. But then we'll need to move fast—we'll have about twenty-five minutes before a security detail shows up."
"No pressure." She materialized an ectogun with a long, narrow barrel and balanced it on her shoulder, taking careful aim through the cross-hairs. Bright red energy flashed across the clearing and turned the camera into a sizzling wreck. "Your turn."
She touched the side of her visor and a timer popped up in the corner of her vision: 24:59 and counting. The hairs stood up on the back of her neck; someone, somewhere, knew they were here.
Tucker ran across the clearing. Valerie followed. He unslung his backpack and set it down in the dirt with a thud. Unzipping a side pocket, he tugged out a squat can of WD-40 and a long, jingling set of silver tools. Lockpicks. Tucker Foley had lockpicks?
Valerie raised her ectogun with mingled curiosity and exasperation. "Couldn't I just zap the lock?"
"If you want to risk frying what's inside and make this a wasted trip, be my guest."
Valerie watched, mildly impressed, as he set to work, coating the locks in oil and inserting the tools with practiced speed. "You break into creepy secret storage sheds often?"
He tucked away the can of oil and twisted the lockpicks, slowly and carefully. "Do you have any idea how many times I had to break in somewhere to help Danny take down a ghost?" He frowned in concentration, fiddling with the little silver tools. "Not all of us can walk through walls. Sam's usually the lockpick though, she… ha!"
The shank clicked open. He pocketed the tools and gave her a thumbs up, grinning.
"Very impressive," she said, and crossed her arms. Numbers flickered in her peripheral vision with dizzying speed. "Twenty minutes now."
"Okay, right. You first, full helmet on so they can't see your face. Zap anything that looks like a camera, but carefully. I need the electronics to stay functional."
Valerie conjured an ecto-laser about the size of her pinky. "I can do subtle."
—kin' bastard—" the ghost coughed out, but its aura quenched like a light. Up close, the illusion held. It even picked up human tics, breathing and blinking. There was a reddish tint to the corner of the ghost's eyes and the inside of its mouth that seemed to hint at blood running through its system instead of cold ectoplasm.
On the street or in a crowd, Kerza wouldn't have given the youth a second glance—sallow and unhealthy as it might look, it was far from dead. Here in the laboratory though, with all his attention focused, there was an unsettling wrongness that lay in minute details. The odd way shadows lay on its face, no doubt subtly influenced by its suppressed aura, the pupil that failed to constrict as it glanced up at the glaring examination light, then back at Kerza.
"Take a picture pops, it lasts longer."
"Fascinating," he said again, speaking to himself."Still. Appearance alone would not fool an astute scientist such as Dr. Fenton."
He took the scalpel and slashed the ghost's throat.
It… looked like an empty shed. Valerie glanced around, expecting to find a big bank of computers or something, but… nothing. Just plain cement floor and a few pipes and wires running up from the floor into a plain metal box on the wall.
"The computer system's hard lines run underground," Tucker said in answer to her unspoken question. The box was padlocked too; he set to work with his lockpicks. "They use it to sync the laboratory's data with their bank of remote backup servers." Tucker pried open the box, which opened with a clang, and studied the mass of technology inside. "Lucky for me."
Valerie peered over his shoulder and tried to puzzle out the dizzying array of buttons, wires and switches. Nothing was marked. "Lucky for you they have a backup?"
Tucker knelt and pulled several coiled-up cables out of his backpack. "Lucky that they're connected and synced in real time. That means there's a data stream going both ways." He set two laptops up on the floor and hit the boot button on each, then uncoiled the cables and plugged them into the box, at what looked like random ports to Valerie. "If I can hack it, which I can, I get to both. Then it's goodbye Phantom data." His hands flew across the keys, the blue-white light from the laptop reflecting on his face. He looked calm, focused, but there was sweat running down his forehead.
Valerie balanced on the balls of her feet, glancing anxiously at the door. No alarm had sounded, but that didn't mean they weren't coming. Sixteen minutes now. The seconds flew by on her visor. It occurred to her that this shed was freakishly clean for a little-used access point. No cobwebs or dust. Creepy. "What if somebody made a hard copy? Like a flash drive or something?"
"Nuh-uh, they don't let that kind of thing happen. Too easy for there to be a security breach, you know? Somebody could just stick that in their pocket and take it home. Upload it to the internet. Show the world. And then where would the GIW be?"
His fingers flew across the keys. She watched as a dizzying matrix of numbers and letters scrolled down the two screens, shifting and blinking as Tucker's fingers flew across the keys. "I'm in," he said.
Valerie crouched behind him. Twelve minutes. "Just like that?"
"Just like that?" he snorted, shaking his head. "I've been working on this for weeks. I had to create a fictional agent—complete with fake DNA profile and fake match—to even get started, and that still just puts me on the bottom rung. If I didn't have all that data from Mrs. F and your dad, it'd be hopeless."
Valerie felt a spike of anxiety. Twelve minutes. "They won't trace it back to Dad, will they? If he gets in trouble at work—"
"Don't worry, I only looked with your Dad's account. Zero suspicious activities. And I backdated the logins to look like they happened when he was helping them set things up." The two laptops beeped in unison. "There it goes," Tuck said, sitting back and blowing out a breath. "Nothing can stop it now."
"That's all?" Valerie watched as the white text on the screen shuddered. Suddenly there seemed to be a lot more zeroes than ones. The letters disappeared altogether.
"A hundred new algorithms, hours of research, dozens of borrowed servers, a month of intricate cracking, a virus written totally from scratch, and yeah, that's all." The two computer screens lit Tucker's face from beneath, highlighting the angry set of his chin, the whites of his eyes, his close-cropped hair. "It's not perfect. They probably have at least some hard copy. An unattached drive maybe. But this'll set them back. If that's all I can do, I'll take it."
His shoulders quivered, and she saw an echo of the helpless rage that had gripped her as she watched ghosts wreck her life. Valerie knew how that felt.
Except this wasn't a house that got wrecked. it was a person. Danny. For a split second she saw Phantom staggering off after she'd nailed him that one time, green ectoplasm seeping through the fingers clamped on his side. Felt again that gut satisfaction at destroying the one who'd devastated her. She felt very, very small.
"It's a virus. Polymorphic code, double encrypted." He grinned at her, and looked a little more like old Tucker, though the anger simmered underneath. "A little bit of home cooking I like to call Acid Zero."
He stood up and unplugged one of the laptops, coiling up the cord and tucking it into the backpack with the laptop. Then he sat and watched the wiggling numbers on the remaining screen along with along with Valerie.
"The metamorphic engine disguises it so any antiviral software doesn't catch on. Not until it's too late, anyway. Acid Zero eats right through code, like acid, right? There are certain inevitable patterns in any binary code, and it latches onto those patterns and bites them out, eating holes right through the code. It'll keep seeking out smaller and smaller patterns until the entire grid reverts to zero. Once it's finished, there's nothing left. No files, no software, zip. You can't restore something that's been totally wiped. And it's uncontainable."
Tucker watched as the laptop's screen glitched, then deteriorated into a pixelated mass of color, turning the entire screen blue.
"The GIW is on a closed circuit. No wires out means perfect containment. Acid Zero will burn through the system, and then destroy itself. It won't leave anything but wiped hard drives behind." The laptop went dark. He closed it, resting his hand on the machine.
Valerie's mind reeled with the information he'd just given here. "If that thing hit the internet…" What, exactly, had he planned to do if their servers had been connected to the internet?
"It'd be totally unstoppable and bring about the end of the world as we know it. Pretty scary, right?" He stood up and stretched, then gave her a casual grin."
A distant engine roaring made them both jump. Three minutes, read Valerie's visor. Tucker scrambled for his gear, yanking out the last cable and stuffing everything into his backpack.
"Okay, noted, you're a scary genius," Val hissed. "Let's get out of here before we end up calling our parents from a jail cell."
"Good plan." He followed her out, struggling into the straps of his backpack. She activated the jets sled and he jumped aboard, zooming up into the dark just as headlights bumped into sight around the bend in the old dirt road.
"You—science freak! You—" the ghost sputtered and snarled. Kerza watched the green fluid oozing out of the thing's slit throat and frowned. He'd definitely severed what would have been the vocal chords on a living specimen, but it had no effect whatsoever on the furious words bubbling out of the ghost's throat.
This was not what Dr. Fenton had discovered. It was a superficial appearance, a disguise; Phantom had a more articulate anatomy, one with a strange physical dependency unnatural for an ecto-entity. Something entirely different.
He turned his back on the ecto-entity, tossing the dirty scalpel onto a tray and scowling. Still. Experiments on his own blood combined with ectoplasm had proven unfruitful. It was impossible for human flesh and ectoplasmic matter to coexist—truly coexist, not possession or poisoning. It was a paradox. Paradoxes irked him.
A distant alarm shrilled. Kerza looked up just in time to see the lights go out, plunging the room in utter blackness. He froze, mentally placing himself—the lab supplies two steps ahead, his chair to the right and a dozen steps away. The ecto-entity directly behind him, on the table which… something clanked onto the floor, echoes rolling around the room. He spun around and saw the ghost, sitting up and pulling the dead cuffs off its wrists, dusted in the light of its own aura. It was the only thing visible in the utter, crushing blackness. Kerza backed away until his back hit the table, making the tools clink against each other.
The ecto-entity grinned. Its sickly green aura cast a shadow wide and dark behind it. Something huge and and scarlet-eyed grinned from over its shoulder, a grin with sharp, deadly teeth. "Bad luck, old man."
The shadows closed in.
Hands that Heal :: tbc...
A/N:
Dun dun DUN! You have no idea how much fun I had writing this chapter. Nothing like some action adventure and pseudoscience to spice things up!
Technically still the weekend, so this counts, right? I'll make this quick since we're about to head out for lunch. Oh, and PoT's anniversary is tomorrow! Happy birthday, Phantom of Truth! Look out for a new(ish) addition to Edge of a Knife.
Thank you so much, readers, for your awesome reviews! Thank you beta readers Cordria and MyAibou! Thank you Sarapsys for the computer programming advice (though I lost the notes I took so it's probably pretty ridiculously inaccurate anyway, sorry!). ETA and thank you SO much for Anneriawings who caught typos I SO wanted to come back and fix. :P
Quick update on my life: Still no apartment, but I have not one but three potential job offers, so that's good. Also parrots! There's a whole flock of them hanging outside our window and making a delightful racket. I'm both charmed and slightly aggravated.
Until next time!
- Hj