Chapter 52
JUDE
I gave meditation and rage exactly three minutes before the need to do something overrode it.
Pacing the small room, my attention was snagged by an artifact that seemed utterly alien among the ancient tomes: a functional, if dusty, fax machine.
I drifted toward it. The green light on the power switch was on.
A single, curled piece of thermal paper sat in the output tray, blank.
I reached out, my spectral finger hovering over the dusty keypad, wondering if the machine did anything. I hit the send button. Nothing. Then punched a few more random keys. Nothing.
How many digits did phone numbers in the afterlife have? Maybe it wasn’t phone numbers. Did the threads have numbers? I typed out a random number.
The machine whirred to life with a sound like grinding gears. The screen flickered: Dialing…
Then, with a startlingly loud scree-chunk-wriii, the paper in the tray began to feed through. Words emerged, not printed neatly, but burned into the paper in jagged, frantic type:
Who is this? Identify or be terminally disconnected.
Ouch. I punched the power button. The machine let out a low, protesting groan before the grinding gears fell silent. The glowing green power light on the side flickered and died.
I slumped back into the leather chair, waiting for my nonexistent heart to stop pounding.
For a long minute, I just stared at the beige box, half-expecting it to shudder back to life or for the door to burst open, revealing some cosmic security guard ready to give me a celestial beat down for trespassing.
Could you get arrested when you were dead? Worse—could you get re-dead?
The silence stretched, the room thick with stillness and sterility. The studio felt more like a tomb than ever. But under the worry, a stubborn itch took root. The machine worked. It connected to somewhere. It was a line to somewhere.
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. I didn’t know any official codes.
But this wasn’t about official channels.
This was about resonance. About a pattern so personal it might slip past the ‘terminal disconnection’ protocols.
What did every person have in common? Death and taxes, sure, but we couldn’t have either without the original start date.
I didn’t know Angel’s birthday. The realization was a small, sharp ache. We’d been too busy surviving cosmic horror to have a normal calendar moment. I made a silent vow to fix that, if I ever got the chance.
But I knew Ivan’s.
Holding a breath I didn’t need, I reached out and pressed the power button. The green light winked back on with an accusatory glow. The machine whirred softly, waiting. When nothing spit out with more warnings, I breathed a sigh of relief.
My hand hovered over the number pad. This was probably a spectacularly bad idea, but I did it anyway. I typed Ivan’s birthdate into the fax machine, year and all, then hit send.
The machine screeched to life. The screen flickered through a dizzying array of codes and symbols. Then, with a sound like a sigh, the feed mechanism engaged. A fresh piece of thermal paper, stark white, slid slowly from the tray. Words formed, one painful, burned-in letter at a time.
Ivan:
Are you there?
A second sheet followed.
Ivan:
Please. Just tell me you’re okay. Nox said you can talk to me this way.
How did I write back on this thing? Handwrite a message? Was it really Ivan? I tapped at the screen, finding I could use the number pad like an old-school BlackBerry and type out words, though it wouldn’t let me add my name like Ivan had.
I’m here.
Ivan:
Where?
The old keypad was a clunky, uncooperative piece of junk. It beeped angrily at my spectral touch, had a character limit shorter than a pre-Veil tweet, and made me delete and retype my reply. But, another came in while I was trying
Ivan:
Is it bad? Are you safe? Can I help? Please, Jude, don’t go yet.
Each question hit like a punch. The last thing he needed was more chaos in his life. I stabbed at the keys, fighting the machine’s sluggishness.
I miss you. Don’t be sad.
A pause. Then, a single, heartbreaking symbol burned onto the paper.
Ivan:
:’(
I stared at the curled, emotive scrap of thermal paper. I wanted to reach through it. I wanted to kick the damned fax machine for its limitations, for reducing my little brother’s fear to a typed crying emoji.
Ivan:
Jude…
The trailing dots were worse than any words. I could hear the silence after them, heavy with everything he wasn’t typing.
Ivan:
Angel’s here. He misses you.
The words branded themselves onto the hollow space where my heart used to be. A phantom organ gave a violent, painful lurch. Tears I didn’t think I could still produce burned hot and sudden at the corners of my eyes.
My fingers, trembling with desperation, flew over the clunky keys.
Love him. He’s my heart.
The sound of a hand on the door handle cut through the machine’s final groan.
I killed the power and shoved the stack of incriminating messages under a landslide of older scrolls just as Nat stepped inside.
His gaze swept the room, landing on me just as I dropped into the worn leather chair, trying to look like a soul at rest and not a ghost who’d just been hacking the afterlife’s landline. He carried a stack of books.
“Hey,” I said, trying to fill the silence. “Everything okay?”
“For the moment,” Nat agreed, placing the books on the table nearest the chair I sat. “I brought you some reading.”
I took the heavy tomes. The first title translated in my head to something like Fundamental Thread Tension and Longevity.
The second was more cryptic: Principles of Anchored Manifestation.
It sounded like the syllabus for Metaphysics 101, taught by a ghost. These looked like things Nox would have brought. “Weirdly specific.”
“They are speculative,” he said, his gaze drifting toward the door as if listening for something. “For most, there is no… interim. No waiting. You arrive as you are, and you are processed as such. Your presence here is an anomaly. A fold in the page.”
“As a reader, that’s a criminal metaphor,” I mused. Then the chill of it hit me. Folds get smoothed out. Or torn free. “What does that make me? A correction waiting to happen?”
Nat didn’t answer. Instead, his eyes held mine, and in their endless depth I saw no judgment, no verdict, only a vast, patient stillness, like a library where every answer was written in a language I couldn’t yet read. Frustrating and timeless.
Finally, he met my gaze. “You are not ready for the deep end of any pool, Jude. Be grateful I am not tossing you into the shallows just to enjoy five minutes of quiet. Whatever waits for you in the beyond will still be there whether your soul is whole or whittled down to fragments.”
And that sounded terrifyingly ominous.