Excerpt

Despite the run she broke into several times over the course of her commute, Selene ended up late to her first appointment anyway. The trains were delayed due to a "person on the tracks" who'd already been cleaned up but was still causing back-up, and then she couldn't find her ID despite dumping the contents of her tote bag all over the lobby, which meant she had to call Frank to walk her in. And unfortunately, the person waiting for her beneath the abstract, unobjectionable office art was Mr. Ryosuke Kudo, who she didn't have a path for yet. Fuck.

"Sir. I promise you. We are working on it. We will find someone to watch your paracontagion." She hated to call it his, even though it was technically correct: the paracontagion was currently bonded to him, and would remain so bonded until someone else came into the office and watched the video it was housed in.

"There's only two more days."

"Yes, I understand. Two more days after..." she quickly checked the bright red numbers on her computer screen. "Seven o'clock tonight. The system's a bit busy right now so connections are a little tight, but, it's okay. Our goal today is to take care of the folks whose chains are expiring tomorrow. I'm sure by... oh, tomorrow afternoon we'll have someone lined up to be your path."

"What if there's nobody?"

The fear in their voices never failed to tickle even the parts of her brain she thought had turned to steel. It was obvious how much terror consumed the incidentals like Mr. Kudo, who had volunteered to help a neighbor but now found himself in a hall of closed doors, with no one to reciprocate the favor. Some of her regulars, the "professionals" who used pathing compensation as side income and came in as frequently as the law allowed, tried to hide the fear, joking even as their remaining hours whittled down into something sharp and shank-like. But she eventually realized that even they were mostly staying sedated to endure the anxiety of not knowing with absolute certainty that the system would provide them a path. Jesus take the wheel, one of her regulars always said. If Jesus rams me into a tree then I'll be the first to tell him thank you.

"There's five hundred thousand people in this city." The weight of that number spread, icy, across Selene's desk and around Mr. Kudo's throat. Five hundred thousand strangers walking obliviously across the grate he lay beneath. She had never asked for details about his family, but she knew his emergency contact was his landlord. Everybody has somebody, don't they? People said that all the time—when declining to volunteer to path, when passing on their paracontagion to someone else, when changing the subject—but Selene didn't think it was true. Frankly, she'd seen too many people for whom it wasn't true. That was why pathing offices existed. Finding "somebodys" for people who didn't have anybody was exactly what she was paid to do.

What she said instead was the same thing she said to Mr. Kudo now: "There's always somebody." If nothing else worked—if they couldn't get a hold of anybody on the volunteer list and no walk-ins arrived and a last-minute urgent request for volunteers solicited no one—then they would go to the city jail. "I've never lost anyone, and I don't intend to start now."

Would that be reassuring? She hoped so. The old man nodded.

There had to be more she could do. There was always more. "What kind of symptoms are you having? Hallucinations?" Another nod, more cautious this time. "Okay. Visual or audio or both?"

"Mostly I... feel her? I don't see her face. I don't hear her voice. But I can tell she's there."

Selene glanced at the computer screen—who was "she," again?—and saw a jumble of words that she couldn't make perfect sense of at a split-second's notice, except—

Mr. Kudo kept talking: "She lives in red light."

She fought off the chill that seeped out of his mouth by confirming vigorously to herself that yes, that tracked—there were a lot of "she"s jumping out of the screen, and an approximately equal number of "red"s. Really, she was furiously treading water at the surface of the pool so she wouldn't have to look down beneath. "Okay," she said, "That's normal for this paracontagion."

"It feels like she comes closer every day. At first it was just... the traffic light turns red and I feel like someone is staring at me. Like the red light is a window and she's looking through it at me. It went very fast. And I thought, well, that's not so bad. I can get through this week. But then the lights at the office started turning red too. Only for me, only when I was alone. And she was... stronger, you know? This morning the light in my... my bathroom was red and I could feel her... standing on the other side of the door. And pushing against my ribs. Heavy."

What she could offer suddenly felt so small, so inconsequential, so insufficient for propping up this man's woe. But it was all she could do. "Here's a four-day prescription for a mind relaxant. It won't make the hallucinations go away but it tends to make the experience feel less severe. You can fill it at your regular pharmacy."

He stared, befuddled, at the piece of paper she'd handed to him. "But it's only two days left."

"Sometimes the... symptoms can last for a couple days after the attachment's been broken."

She didn't know why she felt the need to add it—maybe the abyssal depth of the terror in Mr. Kudo's eyes?—but out it came, before she could hold it in: "It's not time to worry yet. I'll tell you when we get to that point."

After Mr. Kudo left, she saw another shape move into her doorway. Frank, spooning up the last of his breakfast yogurt. "You're still saying it."

"Saying what?"

"We. When we get to that point."

Selene wanted to protest that "we" was accurate—the government had put together a PSA campaign called We're In This Together when they launched the pathing program—but she knew that in the private spirit if not the public letter of government policy, Frank was correct. Privately, pathing agents received federal guidance that while they needed to exhaust every approved option for creating a pathway for each of their exposed cases before their seven days expired, they were not to attach themselves—emotionally, psychologically—to any single case. Privately, every paracontagion path began and ended alone.

"Okay. Here's a proper we. Do we think St. Eloi got any new volunteer paths since last week?"

"Define volunteer." The city council had given the St. Eloi halfway house a grant to funnel recovering addicts toward the T Street pathing office, but neither St. Eloi nor the volunteers were particularly eager about the arrangement, and often needed to be persuaded with additional perks. "Anyway, West isn't authorizing any emergency aid packages, so don't even ask."

"I have twenty bucks," she offered, and although money was of course still exchanged across various paracontagion paths, whether through official government compensation or under-the-table handshakes, something about sliding a vulnerable person an untraceable twenty-dollar bill to be sent to hell for seven days still made her feel vaguely sick.

Frank shook his head. "Don't. Call your regulars. Someone will come. Someone always does."