He landed in a corridor.
Concrete underfoot. Fluorescent lights overhead, most of them working, one of them stuttering through a pattern that was either a malfunction or morse code for something he preferred not to interpret. The ceiling was low enough to make taller people uncomfortable. The corridor ran in both directions, identical in both directions, and smelled of old ventilation air and something faintly chemical.
He knew this place.
The PATH system: Toronto's underground pedestrian tunnel network. Thirty kilometers of connected corridors threading beneath the downtown core, linking office towers and transit hubs and malls and hotels and parking garages, a city under the city that had been built piecemeal over fifty years and showed it. Wei had walked through it sometimes in winters when the wind off the lake made the streets genuinely miserable. He had gotten lost in it. Everyone got lost in it. There were maps, but the maps were aspirational.
At this hour—whatever hour it was in a realm he'd just fallen into through a crack in supernatural bureaucracy—the PATH was empty.
He stood in the corridor and listened. The stuttering fluorescent. The background hum of HVAC. Somewhere far off, a sound that was almost a footstep and was therefore probably nothing.
He tried to assess his situation. He was dead. He had been claimed by three different entities representing, as far as he could tell, at least two major world religions and one piece of maritime classical antiquity. The claims had conflicted violently enough to crack the floor. He was now in an empty underground pedestrian tunnel in downtown Toronto, in his dead delivery jacket, without a body and without any particular plan.
He had his backpack. He looked inside. Wallet, empty. Keys to a house he could no longer enter. Phone, dead—dead differently from him, dead in the ordinary phone-ran-out-of-battery sense. His Pearson Airport logistics coordinator ID badge in its plastic lanyard holder. A half-eaten granola bar. He stared at the granola bar for a moment, feeling something that was not quite appetite and not quite grief, and put it back.
He turned right, for no reason he could articulate.
"Hey."
The voice came from a doorway—a service door, ajar, that he'd almost walked past. Flat voice. Neutral.
In the doorway, slumped against the frame: a young woman, maybe twenty, in clothes that looked like they'd come from a thrift store somewhere in the early 2000s. Low-rise jeans, a hooded sweatshirt. Her face was hard to hold in focus—he'd look at her and get a general impression of a face without quite being able to assemble it into features. Like trying to remember a dream while waking.
"Hey," he said back, carefully.
"Are you new?" she said.
"I died a few hours ago." He paused. "Probably. Time is—I don't know if time is—"
"Same," she said, with a flatness that suggested shared exhaustion. "I don't know how long I've been down here. A while. I can't find a way out." Her head rolled against the doorframe. "I can't remember how I got here."
Wei looked at her.
He was not a paranoid person by nature, but he was a night-shift logistics worker who had spent three years moving packages around a warehouse in the dark, and that occupation selected for a specific quality: the ability to notice when something wasn't where it was supposed to be. The girl in the doorway had the general form and sound of a lost new ghost. She had a voice and she moved and she answered in ways that tracked. But there was something about the way she held still when he wasn't looking at her—he could feel it at the edges of his vision, a stillness that was too complete, a waiting that had too much patience in it.
Not new. Not lost.
"Come on, then," he said, anyway. "I know these tunnels a little. We'll find a way up."
She peeled away from the doorframe and fell into step behind him. He kept walking, kept the pace steady, kept his hands loose at his sides. He thought about the system text: UNCLAIMED SOUL. TEMPORARY PROTECTION. He thought about what the word temporary usually meant.
She stayed half a step behind him. Then a quarter step. Then close enough that the temperature dropped—not the temperature of the air but the temperature of something more local, a cold that pressed in from his left like a hand that hadn't quite made contact.
He stopped and turned.
She was right there, much closer than she should have been, and her face—still blurred, still unresolved—was doing something it hadn't been doing before. The edges of her were pulling inward, the way smoke draws when you open a window. And her hands, which he now saw were extended toward him, were not solid.
Nothing about her was solid. He could see the flickering fluorescent light right through her chest.
"I just need," she said, and her voice had changed—still flat, but layered now, like multiple people speaking very quietly at the same moment, "a little—"
Dark gold text detonated in his vision:
HOSTILE ENTITY DETECTED. TYPE: DISSOLUTION SHADE. CLASSIFICATION: FORMERLY-HUMAN, IDENTITY DEGRADED > 85%. CURRENT BEHAVIOR: ASSIMILATION ATTEMPT. WEAKNESS: ANCHOR OBJECTS / LIVING WARMTH / NAMED AUTHORITY.
Wei Chen grabbed the lanyard around his neck and shoved the Pearson Airport logistics ID badge directly into the shade's face.
He had no idea if it would work. It was all he had.
The shade recoiled.
Not dramatically—it didn't scream, didn't burst into flame, didn't dissolve. It lurched backward with a sound like wet paper tearing, and the many-voice layering of its speech collapsed into a single sharp hiss, and it put a foot back, then another, and its hands dropped. It looked at the laminated plastic ID badge with the expression—insofar as a thing without a face could have an expression—of something encountering an obstacle it had not anticipated.
"Chen Wei Liang," Wei said, reading from the badge, voice flat and clear. "Employee number B-7741. Pearson Airport Freight Terminal." He met where its eyes should have been. "I have a name. You are not getting it."
The shade hissed again, the sound spreading in all directions, bouncing off the corridor walls. Then it pulled itself backward into the service doorway and the darkness beyond it, and the door swung shut, and the corridor was empty and fluorescent and smelling of ventilation air.
Wei stood there for a moment. His hands were shaking. He was dead, which meant he had no blood and presumably no adrenaline, but something was performing a reasonable simulation of both.
He looked at the badge. His photo looked back—poorly lit, the angle too far down, the way all ID photos looked because the person taking them never adjusted the camera height.
"Good thing they use laminated plastic," he said, to the photo of himself.
The photo didn't answer.
He turned and walked quickly in the direction that he calculated was north, toward the surface, toward Yonge Street. Behind him, from somewhere in the service corridors, something that was no longer pretending to be lost made a sound that might have been language in a tongue that no longer had anyone to speak it.
He walked faster.
The stairs came up and he took them, and the heavy door at the top opened when he pushed it, and he came out onto Yonge Street at whatever hour this was—not dawn, not yet, the sky the particular depthless charcoal that sits between three and four in the morning.
He stood on the sidewalk and breathed, despite not needing to breathe.
He was getting out of the habit of not needing things he'd always needed. He suspected that would become a problem.
A faint, rhythmic pressure tapped behind his eyes. Not a headache, but the sensation of a clock ticking down. A legal expiration date, pressing inward. 167:58:20, a dark-gold flicker at the edge of his vision suggested, before he blinked it away.