The Ram ProMaster van is parked outside Halcyon City limits. Roksana Mahdavi, aka Facet, sits in the driver’s seat, staring at a laptop that’s been propped up by a baby booster seat on the passenger side. Her partner, Kamley Saunders, aka Iconoclast, sits in the back of the van, at the center of a messy mixture of electronics, glowing containers, and Uline wire shelves bolted to the interior of the vehicle. 90’s alternative rock is blaring from the speakers.
'Turn it down," shouts Kamley.
Roksana glances into the back. Kam’s hearing aid is out. She ignores the command. After all, how can her partner hear it?
“I said, turn it down.” Kamley throws a spool of wire up front, narrowly missing Roksana.
The woman up front pauses music playback on her phone, and the speakers cease. “How could you tell?” she demands.
Kam puts her hearing aid back in, and Roksana repeats the question. “Vibrations in the superstructure, dumbass,” Kam snaps. “Sound is a vibration. That’s the whole point of all this equipment. I need to feel the etheric acoustics, and you are messing with it by playing that, that, whatever it is.”
“It’s Third Eye Blind.”
“I don’t care if it’s Both Ears Deaf, which is what you’ll be if you keep blasting it. Take it from me.”
“You Oughtta Know,” quips Roksana.
“How are the signal levels?”
Roksana checks her laptop. “Minus 84 dBm. No change. You sure you got the right wires?”
“You wanna come back here and do this?” barks Kam.
“If I can’t listen to my music, then yeah, may as well.” Roksana slips out of the driver’s seat and crouches her way into the back. “Move over, let a real technician at this.”
“Fine.”
Both women fiddle with the apparatus, until Roksana holds up the cables in triumph. “Found it! This cable is bad. Look at this under a light. See the core here? See how it’s just kind of gray and dull? There’s no metallic luster. Either Max didn’t order good quality cable, or the supplier sent us this garbage.”
“So, it’s not my fault?” Kamley sounds dubious that her partner would make such a concession.
“Nah, it’s not your fault.” Roksana lightly punches her shoulder with a grin. “You’re brilliant, except in your taste in music. There you’re hopeless. Stick with me, I’ll set you straight.”
Kam snorts. “‘Straight’ is not something I’ll ever be, but whatever.” She finishes her wiring work, then starts piling things back onto the wire shelves.
Roksana hands over a handful of zip ties, and Kamley starts attaching the equipment to the shelves, so nothing will fall during a bumpy van ride. The two women argue for a minute about who’ll be driving, but Kamley wins. Roksana gets comfortable in the passenger’s seat, with the laptop in her lap - and resumes the music, but at a lower volume.
“I think we’re ready to resume ghost fishing,” Roksana says presently, after reviewing the data on the laptop’s screen.
“Once Max shows up,” Kamley replies. “And we need more relics, right?”
“Yeah. They’ve just been fishing up randos like a catch-and-release deal. It sounded like they need the right kind of bait to fish for the big game.”
“Long as we don’t have to do any of that.”
“Agreed.”
The van drives off, into the night.
Summer relays her findings to Charlotte. The latter considers the matter in silence, while Summer stays busy checking her phone.
Charlotte speaks at last. “They still kidnapped Power Pony. They’ve done worse, but whatever good they think they’re doing for the living and the dead, I can’t allow them to go about it in harmful ways.”
Summer nods, and Charlotte smiles at her. “Besides. I disagree with Ghostheart on one important point. I don’t think it’s right that we just wall off the afterlife either. I’ve spent time closing wounds around the world, and sometimes the past made a great deal of difference. We must learn from the mistakes, and the feelings, of the departed. We must make things right when they couldn’t. We can’t use the land of the dead as our emotional landfill, it’s true, but we can’t simply wall it off, so the smell doesn’t reach us any longer.”
“What’s our next move?” asks Summer.
Charlotte lets out a sigh. “I’m reluctantly compelled to say I do not know. Ghostheart isn’t acting at the moment, and we can’t learn their goals until they do. As for Rook’s motives, well. We may learn something there, but I hold little hope of that bearing fruit. And I wouldn’t ask either you or your sister to face Rook again, even if you wanted to. No. I think this is now between Ghostheart and myself. I’ll tell you what you can do to help, when the time is right.”
Summer nods again, and the pair go their separate ways. But Charlotte continues to wonder. Rosa Rook sought to use the wounds in the world before. Now she seems intent on crossing another similar boundary. But for what?
She knows she’ll find out in the end. But the end may be too late.