Logan flipped Zach over the City Council table like he was dominating a big-balled rottweiler. Zach’s nasty flag went with him: Give Ghosts A Chance: Vote Yes on 2!

The crash echoed off the twenty-foot ceilings of City Hall’s Main Room, protestors scattering while the Council tried to shield themselves. Folding chairs and water bottles went everywhere. It was so crowded that someone must’ve knocked into the room’s controls, because the meeting notes winked out, gone whether you had Expanse Implants or just Expanse Glasses like me.

The sinful title went too:

November 6th, 2042 – Public Discussion – Reconsidering Referendum 2: Do the good people of Lakeside Hill believe the dead shall have the right to vote?

I’d gone to homecoming with Zach once. As he crawled under the table, searching for a front tooth on dirty tiles, I remembered the minty taste of his lips. His Expanse Glasses must have broken in the fall because his flag had dematerialized along with the ridiculous Uncle Sam virtual suit he’d equipped for the night. Virtual clothes gone, blood ran down his graying beard and onto his old Ohio State sweater. We locked eyes. His quivered, but then he disappeared behind panicked feet.

“Get him out of here!” Franklin shouted, finally finding his deep Chairman’s voice.

Two cops hauled away Logan, stunning their way through the crowd, all of us choking the room like gut-to-gut hogs. We fogged up the windows and smelled too, the way only hot, angry people can stink when boxed in as fall gets colder and wetter off the lakeshore.

The only ones who didn’t stink were the dead. But the ghosts among us, in their fuzzy voices, shouted just as brutally. Spit foamed on their semi-clear lips.

Logan threw me a wild look. I pumped my bible at him, and he grinned as they shoved him out.

“Sit down!” Franklin shouted, seeming ready to split his banker’s suit. “For God’s sake, sit down!”

Someone hissed blasphemy, but Franklin ignored it, laying his Implant-tinted eyes on the speaker’s stand and me. “Hannah,” he said, “go on if you’re going to.”

Ghosts and people noisily found their seats. I opened my bible and clicked my EGs to Main Participant. “Only God—”

“For fuck’s sake, Hannah!” someone yelled.

“Don’t you dare!” I shouted and clenched the book’s leather. “Only God has dominion over the living and the dead. Psalm 103: The Lord has established His throne in heaven, and His kingdom rules over all. It’s right there, Franklin. We’ll all be judged. Stop this!”

This time, a whole mess of Libs, college students, and their ghost allies tried to shout me down. Franklin’s eyebrows arched furiously as Mary Nelson, a regular at our church, bolted from her Council chair like she was ready to pull a Logan on the first Lib she could grab. I slapped closed my bible, ready to join her—but someone else clicked to Main Participant, a halo seeming to highlight them.

“Please!” a woman yelled, and the room quieted. “We’re debating if we should add more voices to who picks our future,” she continued. “Shouldn’t we listen to the ones we already have?”

I searched the Council table and found Beth Mulray. I really didn’t know her. She’d moved to town to teach high school history and all I remembered was Kiara coming home and saying, Mom, the kids sit still for Mrs. Mulray. She was pretty: not intimidating-like, but the kind you want to like you. Some people had said the same about me.

She was also the fifth and final vote on the Council. It was her, Franklin, Mary, Professor Reddy, and Alice Kuma. Our all-powerful City Council. The ones our pre-Civil War charter said had to decide any vote that came back deadlocked—like Referendum 2 had, a week ago.

It’d tied.

I’d never imagined that we had so many faithless in our town. Never.

And just yesterday Mulray had told the Lakeside Tribune and all the other press, hundreds that had descended like rats, what she was thinking about Referendum 2. The news sites all wanted the big story coming out of Lakeside Hill—the first town in the whole fifty-four states to put the full rights of the dead to a vote.

And, sin on sin, Mulray had told them she was leaning yes.

“Hannah … Rainworth, right?” Mulray said to me. “Do you have more?”

I like to sound educated, because I am. But I can get passionate.

“This is … important, that’s what I want to say. Like cancer and a heart attack and a stroke all rolled into one. That’s what we’re all saying.” I swung my bible at our crosses and American flags and sparkling paintings of Heaven, many of them virtual. “We’ve got no right. This is God’s role, don’t you see?”

Mulray started to respond, but the Main Participant halo jumped to Professor Reddy, who sat next to the artist, Kuma.

“We,” Reddy said, “recognize many Gods and beliefs. We’re also, Mrs. Rainworth, humans who must write our own laws. No God can do that.” He paused. “Not even yours.”

I get passionate and I can mess up.

I know that.

“Then you can be damn sure,” I said, “that when you try to take that vote I’ll be here with my gun. We’ll—”

In my EQs’ display, a notice said that any more threats would dispatch the cops. I went quiet, but not because of the machine. Our side roared, sending the Council flinching.

Mulray stayed quiet.

The meeting went back to speechifying, and that didn’t even end when we all spilled out into the rainy November night.

Later, at home, the house felt empty, Kiara off in school and Tyler now dead a year. And when he finally floated in from talking with his buddies, living and dead, I made Tyler pray with me like I had ever since we were married. I made him try to join hands even if we couldn’t. He didn’t want to, growling like a busted old radio that he knew what we needed to do and that I did too. I screamed that we needed to pray, that I couldn’t think without His word. Never could. And, so, we prayed. And I could think.

My mind and soul hurt. I swear it felt like they already burned. But while there was the usual anger, there was also some doubt now.

Shouldn’t we listen to the ones we already have?

But the Council’s vote was only three days away.

And Mulray, sin on sin, kept leaning yes.

*     *     *
“They always take it too fucking far,” Tyler said later that night, hunched towards our living room feed. John Kennedy led a rally of the Dead Votes Party. Marilyn Monroe waved. They were married now. “Don’t they get it?” Tyler hissed. “Don’t they get this is how things break? Stretch, sure. Shit, bend. But they always take it too far.”

“Look at me.”

Tyler’s eyes had always seemed sleepy, or a little high. ‘Course in life he’d been as born-again Christian as me, hadn’t even done drugs until he’d hurt his shoulder, unable to sleep, even sitting up. Then the meat plant’s insurance had cut him off and we’d had to make deals with whoever could get him painkillers, using the measly cash we got from running Dad’s farm. After Tyler died, the hospital had told me that the dose that had killed him could have killed a whale. But I still loved his eyes, even if they were now semi-clear.

Kennedy gave way to Marilyn, she going on about all the things they’d learned since they’d died, and all that they could teach us. No one could want better for you than your dearly departed, she said. She always been smarter than they’d let her seem. Still, it made me think about 2037 and those Stanford professors making their announcement.

Ghosts—except they hadn’t said ghosts; they’d said Conscious Remnant Matter—had always been with us, we just hadn’t been able to see them. The professors had flicked on their new cameras—quantum mechanics stuff, they’d said—and we’d all seen the shadow bodies moving around behind them.

Two years after that, me and Tyler and half the church had watched the feed from the Supreme Court when that old woman had thundered down the Court’s marble stairs, screaming:

They did it, God save us, they really did it!

The lawyers of Conscious Remnant Matter Individual 1 v. The United States had come out next. They’d proved, they’d said, that their client met the “minimum standard of personhood.” One of them, the dead one who’d once led the ACLU, then said, smugly:

Citizenship is next!

We’d protested in Columbus. Argued online. EGs on, I’d prayed virtually with forty million others in Church-World.

Then came Referendum 2. Even though most of us were still farm and factory folk—You want meat sometimes, Lib? Then someone’s got to make your meat—we also had Orion College in Lakeside. So proud of their teachers and kids from all over the world they were, many feeding the space research center down the shore. Prouder than of us, certainly.

The college folk, the Libs, they really liked Referendum 2.

And I guess I didn’t blame them, the regular folks like us who had to go work there, more robots in the fields and the plant every day now. It must’ve gotten in your head, eventually.

But the vote had come back tied.

And then it’d gone to Council.

Watching us, the whole country had gone mad.

“Five of them,” Tyler said, reaching for my nightly tequila, though he then seemed to remember he couldn’t drink it. “For a town of eight thousand.”

“At least four thousand aren’t God’s people,” I said. “We know that now.”

“I know. But if Mulray votes yes, it’s like … what do they say? A domino. Us first, then a big city, then a state. Dominoes. God’ll close off Heaven if we let that happen.”

“Tell me, Ty. What’s it like to talk to Him?”

“I can’t explain. Me and Nick and Robbie … He don’t have to talk. You just know what He wants. The vote’s got to be stopped. And it’s got to be clear what’ll happen if someone tries it again.”

The carpet was frayed and I played in it with my toes.

“Gorgeous.” Tyler hugged me—I could feel fuzziness, if that was it. “He’ll close Heaven. I want to go. I deserve that, right? Don’t we?”

“I know,” I said, trying to lean into him. “But let me talk to her. Mulray. Just once.”

Tyler’s eyes opened wider.

He nodded. But he also lifted a finger.

Just one.

*     *     *
I went to see Beth Mulray in the morning. She lived by the woods, like us, but her cute backyard sloped right up to a hill of rain-heavy pines, the trees so thick someone could stand there all night and Mulray would never see them. Two ghosts lingered in her driveway, one with a sign: CRM & STILL HUMAN: VOTE YES!

Mulray opened the door wearing the athleisure we’d all worn in our twenties. She went up on her tiptoes to look over my shoulder.

“Too early and too nasty for more protestors?” she said. “Come in. It’s warmer.”

Her den, full of cozy, older furniture, had a great view of the woods. Serene-like. But her own feed made me pause. Donald Trump shouted at a Respect the Dead rally, then chatted up Rush Limbaugh, a cigar rigged so he could pretend to smoke.

Rush, do they really want someone like me voting again?

His smile looked fake, but a lot of what Rush said made sense.

Death certificates, Mr. President. For ID? Do you know how easy it is to fake a death—

The feed went dark.

Mulray took off her EGs, tapping them. “Some people say it’s these that did it.”

“What?”

“The years of using them, along with all the time in virtual reality. It sped up our evolution. Did you know scientists have seen new brain activity when a spirit is around? It’s why we can see them a little without the glasses, they think. And why our kids can see them even better.”

“Spirits?”

“Yeah?”

“I like that better than ghosts.”

“Beautiful, isn’t?”

“Yeah,” I said, quieter. “Like spiritual. Sweet like a song.’”

I thought that might do it, that Mulray might turn disgusted, the Jesus-freak having done exactly what she’d expected. But she just handed me a frame showing her, a handsome bearded man, and two such girly-girls that their bows looked like body parts. All four stood by a Catholic altar.

“Communion?” I asked, shocked.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Communion …” I repeated. And that did it for me. I got loud. “Then how can you believe that this is anything but God’s place to decide? How can you think about voting yes?”

Mulray picked up her EGs and pointed to mine. She ran me through the bookmarks in her search history: Unbounded-Media and CRMs: Perception Expansion or Mass Delusion? What if it’s Our Diets? All Those Psychotropic Supplements. Climate Particles & Fast Evolution.

And on.

“It’s this stuff that makes me less sure,” Mulray said. “What if it isn’t God? Or what if there’s more than God?”

I pulled off my EGs sharply.

Mulray took off hers. “Why are you so sure?”

She said it so calmy I just started to talk. About how much the Libs argued with each other, never coming up with an answer. About how, bottom-line, they’d been wrong about ghosts, and we’d been right, the whole time. About 1 Chronicles: For everything in the heavens and on earth belongs to God. About what Dad had said when the ALS had finally gotten Mom, that God kept the living and dead separate to make it easier. And about Tyler. How God would keep him—all of us—out of Heaven if the referendum passed.

Mulray glanced outside. “Do you ever wonder why some of them don’t come back?”

“Don’t come … You mean gh—spirits?”

Mulray nodded, then rubbed the frame. “Noah,” she said. “Cancer. We still haven’t fixed that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, then prayed out loud, an Our Father.

She didn’t stop me.

“I haven’t seen him once since he died,” Mulray said, her tone wavering for the first time. “Isn’t that weird? Doesn’t he love me or the girls? Did he stop? Is that what happens? He’s moved on? He just …”

I clasped both of her hands in mine. “Oh, no. No, no, no,” I said. “The ones that come back, that stay, they’ve got something God wants them to do. Like Tyler. If your husband isn’t here, he’s in Heaven. And he’ll be waiting. Thanks to the spirits we know that now, for sure. He still loves you. He does.”

Mulray smiled. “Are you sure?”

I nodded hard, clenching her hands.

We talked a little more, about our girls, about the world now, and about what we wanted. I brought it back to God when I could, thinking about Tyler.

Gently, Mulray released from my grip.

“Do you know what Noah said?” she started. “He said there’s only one reason people believe in God: Because it makes them feel good. They might say people existing can only happen if there’s a God, or that living His way is the only way to have purpose. But Noah didn’t buy it. How are you sure? he’d say to someone at lunch after church. Eventually, they’d all, kind of frustrated, say, I have faith. But Noah still wouldn’t stop, even when I’d get a little mad. But why? he’d say. And that’s when they’d get very P-O’d. I just like it, okay! they’d yell. It makes me feel good! What the fuck is wrong with that? Then they’d apologize for swearing, so embarrassed, and Noah would apologize too. But he’d also fight a little smile, I could tell, because he’d been right. And, even if he could be an asshole, he was right a lot of the time. I know that. I loved him for that.”

But I crunched up inside like I’d been stabbed. “I just like it,” people had said? Noah had forced them to say?

“Or maybe,” I said, trying not to shout, “He was a total asshole sometimes. Tyler can be. But God is real. Ghosts are real. How can you not—”

Mulray shook her head, the way a teacher does when you have a point, but not enough of one.

“We all want things that make us feel good,” she said. “Things that help us. I think about that with this vote. Can you imagine how much the dead could teach us? There’s the history too. When, in all the decades, has giving more …people … the chance to vote been a bad thing? I wish I could know there’s a God and what they really want, like you do. That wouldbe better than all this doubt. But I can’t. So, I’ve got to choose.”

She trailed off, picking up the picture frame.

Her trailing off, her doubt—it kept me from going nuclear.

She wasn’t sure.

There was an opening.

“I want you to feel better,” I said, softly and quickly. “I’ll pray for you. I will. And I’ll come back. Alright?”

Mulray, eyes misting, nodded.

I left.

When I saw the spirits at the end of the driveway, I gave them a smile and the sign of the cross. And the finger.

*     *     *
Tyler and his ghost buddies were waiting for me. I explained about Mulray. “She’s gettable. She could vote no.”

I told them about her husband, about her wondering why he’d never come back. “He’s been dead a year,” I asked. “Can you find him?”

Tyler’s buddies exchanged looks like they sometimes did when I was around, but one piped up, “Yeah. Yeah.”

I fixated on Tyler. “Can you?”

He surveyed his buddies. “Sure. Show us, Gorgeous.” He pointed to our feed receiver, which gave us all the info we needed—so much was public these days. I found info on Noah Mulray.

Before they left, I tried to grab Tyler. “Are you sure?”

He did what he could to run a finger over my cross and my collarbones. “Daniel 4:34: His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His kingdom endures. We’re working for Him, Gorgeous. He’ll help us. I’m sure.”

I spent the day chatting with other organizers, discussing last-ditch rallies. But everyone was so crazy, so scared and angry, that we couldn’t agree to much. Afternoon turned to night. I had no idea what it took for Tyler and them to travel into the dead places, or where they went—I’d know it when it was time, he’d always said. So, I toked some weed and ran through my socials. People were saying such ugly things about Lakeside Hill. About us. Eventually, exhausted, I prayed and went to bed.

It’s still hard to explain what it’s like when one of them comes into your house, but you know. Maybe our brains were changing a little, like Mulray said. Or maybe God had tuned us in better these days. I shuddered, wondering why He’d do that. Seemed like an End-Times sign, didn’t it? But I headed to the living room.

Tyler sat in the dark. Before I could say anything, he waved to my EGs. Once I had them on, he sent me to my socials.

The video was everywhere, A big bonfire burned on the beach that I could just tell was in Lakeside. A crowd gathered around it, ghosts and people both—including folks I knew.

Professor Reddy and Alice Kuma stood near the fire. There was a pile of something next to them. I couldn’t tell what it was until Reddy reached down and snatched up a leather-bound book marked in gold.

A bible.

“This damn … superstition,” he said to the crowd. “This,” he went on, as Kuma plucked one too. “If we don’t show them, they’ll come for us. That’s how it always goes.”

Then, as if as practiced as dancers, they tossed their bibles into the fire.

I gasped so loud I jumped, ready to—ready to, I don’t know what, but the sense of my soul already burning poured over me like boiling fat.

And it got worse.

Mulray waded through the group. Without a word, she grabbed a bible and threw it in.

“No …” I heard myself say, words dry. “She wouldn’t!”

Tyler shook his head.

“It could be a deepfake!” I said, getting face to face with him. “How do we know?”

He leaned towards me hard, the fuzziness of him enough to back me down. “She lied to you, Gorgeous, right to your face.”

She couldn’t have. Wouldn’t.

But the other option was that Tyler was lying.

And why would a ghost lie?

“Gorgeous, you know what this means?”

I shook my head, teeth grating.

“Got to make an example of her,” Tyler said. “That’s what God wants.”

That couldn’t be what He wanted.

But then I thought of those burning bibles.

Who was I to question God?

*     *     *
I had to see Mulray one more time.

I got there in the morning but found no protestors—people or ghosts.

But what I did find stopped me short.

Mulray furiously sprayed at her garage with her hose. In the cold, the water had to be so icy that it probably wanted to freeze by the time it ran the length of her driveway. Meanwhile, Mulray’s occasional whimpers as she cleaned put a stall on my fury.

So did the message painted in blood on her garage door:

VOTE “NO” OR YOUR HUSBAND WILL STOP LOVING YOU

I walked with my mouth open. Also, I was probably heavy-heeled, because Mulray spun.

“You. Get the fuck out of here!”

Still speechless, I managed to send a link to her EGs. The bible-burning video.

“Are you serious?” she said, killing the link. “Can’t spot a fake? Really?”

“If it’s fake,” I said, aiming a finger at her garage door, “then why did someone do that?”

Mulray shook her head. She cranked the nozzle to a sharper spray and the blood started to run off. I thought she was done with me, but then she threw more words over her shoulder.

“You know what the problem is? The rest of us, me, we don’t know what’ll happen. It might go bad. But we accept that. We’re willing to try. To give things a chance. But you, you’re always so afraid. It owns you.”

And for the first time, it felt like she was talking down to me.

I blew up.

“You told us we were stupid,” I shouted. “Dumb as pigs! You said ghosts weren’t real! But we were right! And you still thing we’re wrong about God! You were wrong, Lib!”

The spray went limp.

“Don’t lump me in with anyone,” Mulray said. “I just wanted to help. Everyone.”

“Help … ” I knew I was lit up. I knew I was. But I couldn’t … “They aren’t alive! They’ve got no stake in our lives. Forget God, if you want to. How can you not see that they can’t be the same as us?”

Mulray bored into me with eyes that said she could blow up too and was barely holding that back.

“Who,” she said, “says what ‘alive’ means these days? You?”

My wrath was shameful, I admit that, but I ran right up to Mulray. All I could see was that family picture of her at Communion. All I could think of was her prick husband.

“Things got hard,” I hissed at her, “And you gave up, didn’t you? Not just on God, but on anything being right or wrong. Is that how you help everyone, by giving up?”

Then words came out that I wasn’t sure were mine, or didn’t feel totally mine anymore, but come out they did.

“I feel bad for you,” I said, “but I get why your husband won’t see you.”

Mulray’s eyes went wide. Her voice, though, came out cold and flat.

“At least,” she said, pointing a dead-looking arm at her garage, “I didn’t pick the side of terrorists.”

My mouth fell open, to say who knows what, my words or old words that would have once been mine, but Mulray had had enough.

She blasted me in the face with the hose, the water even icier than I’d guessed.

“Leave!” she screamed, while I backpedaled. “Never talk to me again!”

*     *     *
Tyler leaned on our gun safe. Once I’d grabbed the auto-rifle, he and his spirit buddies corralled me into a prayer circle. The more serious members of the church, the living ones, joined soon after. We prayed until it got dark. We all hugged. Then a few hustled me into a floating GM Air Pickup.

Above Mulray’s, in the pines, we prayed once more. Then they fanned out, living and spirits, only Tyler sticking behind.

In her den, Mulray watched feeds through her EGs, her windows so bright and the night so dark she could have been a glowing feed herself.

I sighted the rifle. Actually, it sighted itself. When it lit up green, I just had to fire.

Mulray stood, wine in hand. She started swaying. EGs still on, she danced. My heart sped up worse than it had already drummed.

“Do it,” Tyler whispered, fuzzy and harsh. “It’s the only way. They’ve got to be shown.”

But doubt crept up my throat. It burned like a claw-fingered hand of acid.

How were Tyler and his dead buddies so sure this was what God wanted? Had they even found Mulray’s husband, the one who’d never come to visit her?

Do you ever wonder why some of them don’t come back?

What if God hadn’t sent them? What if something else had?

What if there’s more than God?

If ghosts and God were real, then what else was? The Devil?

What if that’s why Tyler couldn’t go to Heaven? He’d never been perfect. Neither had I. And what if we were wrong?

I thought of the millions—the billions—of them. The ghosts. People have been dying for so very long.

Why would a ghost lie?

Tyler blew me a kiss. But I didn’t like it. It was like one of those kisses you got sent that meant sex but not love. Now, but not later.

I thought of all of us who were still alive.

Billions and billions of us. Like Kiara.

Who would be alive in the future. Like her children, if she had them.

And I thought about Tyler and his dead friends. Telling us they knew things … but not telling us how they knew them.

The gun tracked Mulray.

If she voted yes, if the dominoes fell …

The dead could have so much power over us. Tyler and his friends.

And whatever else might be out there, with them.

I hoped Mulray, inside her EG world, danced with her husband.

The sight went green.

I shot.

*     *     *
We took our seats in front of Council’s table. They’d refused to cancel the meeting. Unanimously. But there was no hot blood in the room tonight. There were just bodies breathing and shifting their weight as we stared at five empty chairs. Even the spirits fidgeted.

Someone hissed my name from the other side:

“It had to be her. Remember what she said about her gun?”

Tyler rubbernecked, but I didn’t.

I focused on Mulray’s empty seat. At church, when I was a girl, I’d sometimes found myself staring at the priest’s empty chair when he was at the pulpit. It had never really seemed empty, that throne-looking thing. I’d thought something was there, even when the priest wasn’t. It just wasn’t a thing that could be empty.

I scanned the room. Neither the living nor the spirits showed off flags or signs this time—except for one. A little redhead who couldn’t have been older than seven held up black letters on yellow paper:

Let The Dead Vote!

Kuma came in first, grabbing everyone’s attention. No EGs on, she sat with a look that said she wished she had a gun. Mary came next, hands folded in prayer. Franklin followed, shaking his head. Reddy came last, wiping at tears but seeming determined not to make a sound.

After what seemed like a painfully long pause, Franklin started. “I call to—”

“Dammit, Franklin, are we going to take it or not?” Kuma cut in. “We said we’d take it. Just do it.”

I felt the fuzzy tingle of Tyler reaching for my thigh.

“Sure,” Franklin said, no bass in his hollow voice. “Sure.”

Kuma leapt up. “Does the Council believe that—”

“That’s not the rule, Alice,” Mary said, though without any of her usual boldness. “Someone’s got to make a motion. We’ve still got to follow the rules. We do.”

“Oh, let’s just do it,” Franklin said. He looked down table. “Professor?”

Reddy dabbed his eyes and nodded, sharp and clear as a fuck you.

“Simple voice vote,” Franklin said. “Is it the belief—”

The crowd, at least our side, suddenly seemed to understand what was going on. Shouts rose around me on warm breath and dead tongues, but Franklin silenced everything but the Council by killing their EG and Implant mics. The spirits seemed to get it and quieted too.

“Is it the belief of this Council,” he said rapidly, “that Councilwoman Mulray should still be allowed to vote on Referendum 2?”

In any other meeting, I do believe at least half the room would have rushed him. But not tonight.

“Aye,” Kuma said, folding her arms.

“Aye,” Mary said, crossing herself.

“Aye,” Reddy said.

“Aye,” Franklin said.

And then Beth Mulray came into the room. Spirits didn’t quite glow as much as have a sheen to them, like a soap bubble, and that’s how Mulray looked. She wore the same sweater she’d worn last night, though it was clean. The blood must not have …

I swallowed. Lots of folks looked my way.

Mulray took a position behind her old chair. She looked all over the room, if never at me.

Kuma’s face had expanded into a mix of shock and grief, but she still got out her words. “Do it, Franklin.”

Franklin also seemed horribly mesmerized by Mulray, but his Main Participant halo began to pulse.

“On the matter of Referendum 2, which …” He hauled in a big breath. “Well, you know what it says. On 2, what say the Council?”

“Aye,” Kuma said, voice cracking.

“No,” Mary said, clasping her hands before her face as she shut her eyes. “No, no, no.”

“How can we not?” Reddy said, voice hollow. “Aye. I say aye.”

Franklin rolled his lips over his teeth. “Beth, I’m sorry, but I still can’t. Forgive me, but no, I vote no.” He crumpled into his seat, a hand covering his brow.

Mulray stood with her arms at her sides, staring at us all.

Shouldn’t we listen to the ones we already have?

“Beth?” Kuma said.

Never talk to me again!

Mulray found me. Gasping heads spun.

"I,” Mulray said boldly, but then broke down. “No. I vote no. Let them make their own damn mistakes."

And with that, she sobbed so loudly I swore she could have still been alive. She fell towards Kuma, who tried to grasp her, but couldn’t, of course. They eventually found a way to position themselves in what looked like a hard hug.

The room exploded, screeches so loud it felt like The Rapture had ripped open the ground right below us, joy and horror then all sounding the same.

*     *     *
It was a mess outside, people and ghosts mobbing the lawn, when I finally found Tyler. His eyes had their drowsy look, but his spirit’s forehead creased right down the center.

I said all I could, all I’d been thinking. Boiling on. “Aren’t you glad?”

He threw me an ugly look. “Glad? Glad? It happened. It still happened.”

A crowd across the lawn flagged down two cops. Some of them pointed at me. There were even some church parishioners with them. Parishioners who’d been with us in the trees above Mulray’s last night. Parishioners who’d seen what I’d done with my rifle.

Tyler put his nose to mine. “Don’t you get it? She voted. She was dead and she voted. It’s over. It’s done.”

The cops and crowd seemed surprised when I stepped clear of Tyler and threw them a wave. Some of their mouths unhinged when I made a path to meet them. Spirits drifted all over the lawn and I tossed my EGs into the grass. The spirits remained in my sight, if fuzzier, as did the living. I didn’t see Mulray among them, though I thought I would soon.

At least, I hoped.