11 – i – Anna

“I’m going out, Mother,” Anna called out as she laced up her boots. “I should be back before dinner, but just in case I’m not, there is a salad in the fridge, all ready to eat.”

The scrape-clack, tap-tap, scrape-clack, tap-tap of Mirabelle’s walker grew louder as she approached, until finally, the hunched woman stopped in the doorway. “I thought you had the day off,” she said, her voice trailing off. “Did the lab call you in again?”

Anna patiently smiled as she pulled out a leather jacket, then went for the heavier coat. “I haven’t worked at the lab in five years, Mother.”

A brief haze of confusion crossed Mirabelle’s sunken eyes, making Anna hesitate, but the moment passed without incident. “Oh, that’s right. You mentioned that.”

“Several times.”

“No need to be snippy with me,” Mirabelle quipped in an attempt at a tone of voice that she couldn’t quite manage anymore. “Then are you going out with that young man? Harrison was his name?”

“Harrison and I broke up about eight years ago,” Anna said, trying not to be too terse.

“Oh, that’s a shame to hear. He was such a nice boy, and quick with the flattery—he always complimented my looks.”

“You and every other woman,” Anna muttered to herself as she checked herself over. Wallet, check. Keys, check. Leatherman, check. Balisong, check. Phone…

Anna patted her coat pockets, jean pockets, then grabbed her discarded jacket and started searching its pockets. She had her Taoist talismans, prayer beads, a thin corked vial of holy water, a small silver cross, and her packet of white sage and matches. Thus far, none of it had proved effective against ghosts, but she had such a small sample size that she felt compelled to test everything at every available opportunity. Latin chants worked, so why not blessed water?

Her phone wasn’t that much help warding off ghosts… though, now that she thought about it, what was the difference between a paper talisman and an image of the talisman’s designs on a screen? Surely it was the pattern and not the paper that held the effect. That line of thinking gave Anna an idea.

Turning around, Anna swept her gaze over her room. It was a sparse living environment, made up of a bed shoved in one corner with a pile of blankets thrown on top, her desk and laptop with a dining chair for a seat, and her wardrobe filled mostly with biker leathers. Instead of finding her phone, she spotted the corner of her notebook peeking out from one of the half-closed desk drawers. She pulled it out and started making notes.

Latin chanting did work, at least in about twenty percent of the ghosts Rick and Leslie had encountered. Anna had only seen it for herself twice, which was more than some other methods that they claimed had higher exorcism chances. What exact aspect of the chanting worked? The vibrations in the air? The words themselves?

Had anyone tried recorded voices? Ghosts often grew violent during the final stages of an exorcism. They had ways of containing such violence, such as salt circles, but those had about as high a success rate as anything else they had tried. Being out of the room, letting a tape recorder do the work, seemed much safer.

And if recorded voices worked—or, even if they didn’t—what about generated voices? Was the human component necessary? If not, generated voices would be optimal. Different exorcisms required different words, and sometimes, some of those words had to be made up on the spot; thus, the ability to change dialog with ghosts on the fly could be important. They could test a whole range of voices, from archaic Doctor Sbaitso to modern language model generations.

Alternatively, they could simply try throwing a phone on speaker mode, or a walkie-talkie, into a haunted room while remaining out in the van. That would probably be simpler, if less fun.

“Devon?”

Anna jolted slightly, looking up from her notebook to find her mother over in the corner, trying to make the bed. “What?”

“Devon? From school? Are you going out with him?”

Vaguely, a half-repressed, half-forgotten face faded into Anna’s memory. “From high school?”

With a disapproving tut, Mirabelle turned away from the bed to frown at Anna. “High schoolers are a bit young for you, aren’t they?”

“I was in high school when…” Anna paused, shaking her head. There was no point in getting upset over some crush she had back in ninth grade. She doubted either of them would remember this conversation by the time she got back. “No Devon, no Harrison, no Mark, no Luther, no Peter. No other names you dig out of that Swiss-cheese mind of yours. I’m not going on a date.”

“You better not be going on a date, young lady.” Mirabelle huffed, hands on her hips. “Carmack would be heartbroken to hear you talk about all these other men.”

That one made Anna flinch. Involuntarily, her thumb rubbed against the vacancy on her ring finger. “Carmack’s gone, Mother,” she said, voice soft.

“Gone? When is he…” She trailed off, a haze of confusion passing over her eyes before a moment of clarity hit. “I’m so sorry. I just… I forgot.”

Anna’s hand lingered at her side, thumb still tracing the space where her wedding band had once rested. The phantom weight of the ring felt heavier than usual. She could almost feel the warm, reassuring presence of Carmack’s hand closing over hers.

The memory struck unbidden, sharp as broken glass: The two of them, moving around their new apartment after four years of hopping from one bad rental to the next, unpacking and arguing over where a picture frame should go or what side of the room should have the bed. She had been in the kitchen, fussing over a pot of tea while they took a short break, when Carmack had called out to her—steady, joking, and unafraid, “Anna, come look at this!”

She had found him standing in front of the bathroom mirror, frowning at the way his breath fogged the glass. The temperature had been freezing, despite having had the heater on all evening.

She remembered the sudden, suffocating sense of wrongness. She remembered the way Carmack’s reflection had lingered a moment too long after he turned away.

She remembered the shouting.

She remembered the blood.

Carefully, taking a long moment to gather herself back into the present, Anna closed her notebook and slid it back into her desk. “I know.” Her throat felt tight, but she forced in a breath, then let it out in one long, slow exhalation.

She knew, now, what had happened. She had allies now, people who worked with her to stop things like that from happening to other unsuspecting couples. It didn’t remove the pain, but it helped in its own way.

It gave her something to focus on, if nothing else.

Anna stood and put an arm around her mother’s shoulders, leading her back to her walker at the room’s doorway. “Come on, Mother, let’s get you back to your chair.”

“I’m really—”

“I know,” Anna cut her off as they moved down the hallway. “Now, I left that salad in the fridge,” she said, more to change the subject than anything else. Once Mirabelle got onto a new topic, she would forget the previous one. “There are notes reminding you on the fridge, by the phone, on the counter, on the door, and just about everywhere else. If you need help, who do you call?”

“Piper King,” Mirabelle said without hesitation.

“Very good.” Anna turned on the television in her mother’s room—a much tidier room than Anna’s—and set the local server to auto-play the 60’s TV shows playlist. As Bewitched popped on, she made sure that her mother was comfortable in her rocker chair, and that she had her blanket, water, and bowl of pretzels all within reach.

For a long moment, Anna simply watched her mother wiggle back and forth until she was happy, but her mind lingered on the past. Not just the night Carmack died, but the gaping wound his absence had left behind. For four short years, she had thought they had everything.

Anna spotted her phone next to one of the notes about calling Piper, quickly flipped through a few missed messages, and then headed out.

One more exorcism to handle. One less potential trap for someone to stumble into.

---

For one blissful moment, Anna thought she saw him, a dark silhouette haloed with a blinding white light.

But the light was too harsh, too clinical, and the silhouette dissolved as her senses struggled to catch up. She felt as if she were surfacing from the bottom of a deep, glacial lake. Her thoughts felt slow, muffled, and heavy. Every sound was distant, as if she had pillows pressed to her ears.

A buzzing hummed in the back of her mind.

She tried to remember where she was, why she was here, but her memories spun in circles, snagging on fragments—the screech of tires, the crunch of metal, the world spinning around her…

Then nothing.

“Welcome back.”

Anna’s hazy vision resolved into a heavyset man with wispy white hair, small glasses pinched to his nose, and a white surgical mask. He stood over her, staring from behind those mirrored lenses. Anna tried to shove him away, but found she could barely lift her leaden arm off whatever bed she was lying in. Her entire body felt exhausted, as if she had just finished running two back-to-back marathons.

“That would be the sedatives wearing off. You should be able to move normally shortly. Until then, try to avoid too much panic. Your heart… Well, we’ll discuss that momentarily. Orderly.”

The man stepped back, making Anna flinch from the light hanging overhead. She felt a pain as her eyes constricted too much. A new figure moved forward to block part of it: a young woman with blonde hair and odd, distinctive eyes. The new woman also hid her face behind a surgical mask. “Please, follow the motion,” she said, holding up a small and thankfully dim flashlight, which she started moving back and forth, up and down.

Anna tried to talk, but she just couldn’t speak. The words wouldn’t form in the back of her throat, dying out as strange mumbles instead. The buzzing in her ears spiked, growing louder.

“Please, follow the motion,” the nurse said once again, waving her light around. Her voice helped settle the buzz, overpowering it. This time, Anna followed along the faint trail it left in the air until the nurse seemed satisfied.

“Everything is operating normally on my end,” a chipper, if muffled voice called out from beyond where Anna could see. “Going to disconnect the diagnostic cable—”

Anna sucked in a sharp breath as something pinched the back of her neck. A spasm struck her arms, sending them twitching and flopping until a hard yank, as if someone ripped half her hair off, finally let her sit still.

“That’s probably normal, probably. Or maybe it was just a little short circuit of the connectors.”

“Gadget,” the nurse said, her tone carrying deep disapproval.

“It isn’t my fault humans are so gooey. Look, she can move properly now.”

The unseen speaker was right. Anna’s earlier exhaustion faded rapidly, letting her push herself up to a sitting position. “What…” Words came easier now, though still not as easily as Anna was used to. “What happened?”

“Your body suffered heavy damage following a deliberately engineered vehicular crash,” the nurse said, then held her arms out at chest level, palms up. “Press down on my hands, please.”

“A car crash…” That sounded familiar. Although her mind was still somewhat hazy, she could at least put together a cause and effect: car crash, thus hospital.

It didn’t look like any hospital that Anna was familiar with. All around her, the equipment looked out of date, to put it generously. Rather than typical scrubs, the nurse wore a uniform straight out of an old World War movie, and the doctor simply threw a heavy-duty apron over the top of a button-up shirt. The air did not carry that sterilized scent, though perhaps her own sweat-musk was overpowering it.

“Press down on my hands, please,” the nurse repeated.

Recognizing the request as a neurological test, Anna reached out with both hands, one over each of the nurse’s, and started pressing down. She halted when she realized that something was off. It wasn’t pain…

There was a phrase about easily recognizing the back of the hand, but Anna didn’t. Her left hand was fine, with her jagged circuit tattoo all down her arm. The black paint on her nails was flaking and scuffed, but if she had been in an accident, that wasn’t surprising. It was her right arm that had her staring. A thin seam spiraled around from her elbow halfway to her wrist, with the skin color not quite matching on either side. Her palm was slightly too big and her fingers were slightly too short, and while her tattoo—the alchemical symbols of the base metals, quicksilver, salt, and the cardinal elements—was intact, she could tell that it wasn’t exactly the same. The portion that crossed the seam was cleaner, newer, and her fingernails weren’t painted.

This right arm was not her arm.

A shorter figure popped up from under the medical bed, their face entirely concealed by an old-fashioned gas mask. Anna yelped in surprise, her arm momentarily forgotten, but the new person didn’t seem to care. “That’s my work. I hope you like it,” they said, voice chipper behind that mask. “About half of the original was unreadable, but it was pretty easy to infer that you had the common alchemical primes and their transmutations all arrayed out artsy-like. You’re missing vitae and mors though. I wanted to add them, but The Orderly said not to do anything that wasn’t already there without asking first, so I gotta ask: do you want me to finish the prime compass? Vitae and mors are pretty important to alchemy, so them being gone—”

The nurse thumped the masked… child? over their head, bopping them hard enough to knock them back under the bed. They did not get back up.

“Later,” she hissed before returning her attention to Anna. “Squeeze my forearms, please, as hard as you can manage.”

Anna did not obey, shirking back. “What is going on? What are—”

“You were in a vehicular accident and—”

“You died,” the enormous form of the doctor moved to the foot of the bed, staying a nonthreatening distance away.

“I… what?”

“Lucky for you, I do not believe in death. At least, not so long as the brain is mostly intact. Even if it wasn’t, there are options, though The Director disapproves of such methods.”

Anna slumped back, feeling faint and dizzy. That buzzing in her ears was back in full force, grinding away at something inside her head. She felt something press tightly against her chest, on the inside of her ribs. Whatever that something was, it vibrated—the source of the buzzing.

“Through a combination of cloned tissue and biomechanical augments—”

“That was me,” the gas mask-wearing child said, popping up once again.

“—you live once again, and will probably enjoy a quality of life on par with what you had before, if not better.” The doctor let out a deep, hearty chuckle. “The Director suggested I rehouse your consciousness in a photosynthesizing mass of flesh while we built a fully artificial lifeform, but I believed enough original material remained to be worth the effort of reconstruction—”

“Anna!”

Anna turned, latching onto the familiar voice as if it were a floating log in the middle of a torrential sea. Rick rushed into the room, leaving a massive, suited woman at the doorway. He pushed right past the assembled medical crew to Anna’s side and immediately wrapped her in a tight embrace. Anna returned it, grasping hold of him while avoiding the sword strapped to his back.

“You’re alright,” he said. “You’re going to be alright.”

She wasn’t sure if he was informing her, reassuring her, or reassuring himself. Frankly, she didn’t care at the moment.

Rick was here. Thus, everything was going to be alright.