Join the Dear Soul Mail Club and receive exclusive illustrated prints delivered to your door every month, featuring carefully crafted artworks and stickers based on The Soultihon, created as collectible pieces of inspiration. The fog pulled back like a tide going out, and what it left behind hit her all at once. The subway car. The murky yellow light. The stone scales. The number burned into her wrist. It was too much to hold, and for a while, she didn’t try. She just sat where she’d landed, knees pulled to her chest, and let herself cry the way she hadn’t let herself cry in a year. Not carefully. Not quietly. The whole weight of the last twelve months came up at once, the debt, the double shifts, the version of herself that used to have a life before it got replaced by a commute and a spreadsheet of medical bills, and underneath all of it, the one thought she didn’t let herself finish. Jin would know what to— She stopped herself before the sentence could land anywhere. Some thoughts about her sister she’d learned not to walk all the way to the end of. Eventually, the crying wore itself out, the way it always did, and left her hollow and a little embarrassed, like she’d made a scene in front of an audience that didn’t care. She wiped her face and looked at her own hands, and there it was again, that faint blue at the edges of her, so pale she kept doubting she’d really seen it. What am I even supposed to do with this? She didn’t have an answer, so she did the only thing that had ever worked for her when a problem was too big to solve in one sitting: she got up, and she started moving, because moving was easier than sitting still with it. The city, once she was inside it, wasn’t what she expected. From the outside, it had looked like something dead, towers and gears and fog. Inside, it was full of people. Souls, she corrected herself, except they didn’t look like ghosts; they looked like a crowded street back home: something that resembled shopping. It was almost funny. It was almost comforting, in a horrible way, proof that whatever this place was, it hadn’t stopped being full of people trying to hold onto normal. She let herself wander a little longer than she should have, half out of shock, half because some small stubborn part of her was hoping. Hoping that if she just kept walking, kept looking at stores, handbag boutiques, watch counters, a whole economy of the dead going about their faces, she might see one she recognized. It was a stupid hope. She knew it was stupid. She kept walking anyway. If people end up here when they die, and Jin— She didn’t finish that one either. Jin wasn’t dead. Jin was in a hospital bed with a feeding tube and amputated legs, waiting for a mind that hadn’t come back yet. That was the whole reason Gina had spent a year working herself into the ground. That was the debt on her phone. That was the thing she was supposed to be protecting. So why does some part of me feel like I’d almost be relieved to find her here? She hated the thought the second it arrived, hated herself for having it, and shoved it down hard enough that her chest actually hurt from the effort. That was when the soul walking toward her lurched violently and slammed into her, hard enough to nearly shatter her thin, translucent body. It was a dark-haired girl about Gina’s age, but her soul was as turbid as stagnant water, mottled with a sickly yellowish-green. The moment she brushed past, a pungent wave of industrial sulfuric acid rolled off her, sharp enough that Gina’s eyes stung. Gina stared, unable to look away. The girl’s feet seemed sunk into some invisible mire, each step a visible fight against a weight nobody else could see. Worse, far worse, her skin was completely encrusted with luxury handbags, dozens of them, erupting from her flesh like malignant tumors, some trailing along the ground behind her, dragging with a sound like something being torn. It looked like the sheer accumulated weight of them had anchored her in place, like she’d spent so long collecting things that the things had finally started collecting her instead. Gina’s stomach turned, not from disgust exactly. From recognition of something. Whatever this place was, it clearly didn’t let you leave your worst habits behind. It turned them into something you had to carry, literally, in your own skin. The commotion drew attention, but not toward the girl. Gina realized it a half-second too late. Dozens of dull, glassy stares had already swung toward her instead, and a ripple of hushed, urgent whispering spread outward from where she stood. She hated it instantly, the vulnerable, pinned feeling of being looked at like a specimen. She ducked her head and quickened her pace, aiming for a narrow side alley, already half-panicking. “Strange,” she muttered to herself, once she was clear of the worst of it, looking down at her own hands. “Is it my color?” She lifted her arm and sniffed it. Nothing. No acid, no chemical reek, nothing at all. Not like the girl, not like anyone. “No smell either,” she said, quietly, mostly to hear her own voice say something ordinary. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s what they—” She didn’t get to finish the thought. The whispering hadn’t stopped when she ducked away. It had spread. A man near the mouth of the alley slowed as he passed her, the way you’d slow near a bakery without meaning to, drawn by something before he’d consciously registered why. Then he turned around. Gina kept walking, faster, telling herself it was nothing. But a few seconds later, she heard footsteps behind her, his, and glanced back to find him closer than he should have been, his head tilted, nostrils, if that’s even what they were anymore, flared like he was trying to place a smell he couldn’t quite name. “You,” he said, low, almost reverent. “What are you?” “Nothing.” She kept moving. “Sorry. Excuse me.” He didn’t back off. Worse, two more souls nearby had stopped what they were doing and turned, drawn by nothing she could see or hear, just some current in the air that apparently ran straight through her. A woman broke off from a shop doorway and drifted toward her, unhurried, her expression gone slack and hungry in a way that had nothing to do with hunger for food. “Do you feel that?” the woman said to no one, to everyone. “Do you feel that?” Gina’s heart kicked hard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” More turned. Five, then eight, then more than she could count, all of them drifting toward her the way iron filings drift toward a magnet, slow at first and then not slow at all. Someone’s hand grazed her arm, and she flinched back so hard she stumbled, and the contact seemed to do something to the person who’d touched her. Their aura flared, brightened, and their face went slack with something that looked disturbingly like relief. They can feel it, she realized, with a cold drop in her stomach. Whatever I am. They can feel it, and they want more of it. “Please,” she said, backing up, hitting a wall of bodies behind her that she hadn’t seen coming in. “I don’t have anything.” “You smell like nothing,” someone murmured, close to her ear, and it should have been a strange thing to find frightening, except it wasn’t strange at all. It was the tone. Craving. The crowd tightened. Hands, more of them now, reaching. Not violent, not yet, just desperate, the way a starving person reaches for bread without thinking about whether it’s rude. Gina did the only thing that made sense in the half-second she had to decide. She went low, ducked under an outstretched arm, and shoved sideways into the gap between two bodies before it could close. She didn’t think about it as a strategy. It wasn’t a strategy. It was the same animal instinct that had once gotten her out of a stalled elevator packed too tight to breathe in. Move first, panic later. She broke free into a side alley and ran without looking back, her lungs burning in a body that technically didn’t need to breathe, until the sounds behind her thinned out and finally stopped. She pressed herself against a wall of cold brass and shook. They wanted something from me, she thought, and the thought was so absurd and so true at the same time that a small, horrified laugh came out of her before she could stop it. Not my body. Whatever’s inside it. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” She spun, half a scream already in her throat, and found an old man standing a careful distance away, hands raised, palms out, like he’d seen this exact reaction before and knew better than to get close too fast. “I’m not one of them,” he said gently. “I promise you that much. Though considering what you just walked through, I understand if that promise isn’t worth much right now.” Gina stared at him, chest heaving, and for once didn’t have the energy to be suspicious. “What am I?” she said, and her voice cracked on it, small and scared instead of demanding. “Why did they look at me like that?” “I’m William,” he said, not answering yet, which somehow felt kinder than if he had. “Let’s get you somewhere quiet first. Then I’ll tell you everything I can.” She looked at his wrist without meaning to and found a faint, glowing number. 85.50. “Is that the same thing?” she asked. “The thing they wanted from me.” “Yes,” he said. “And no. It’s a long answer, and you’re standing in the open.” He glanced past her shoulder, toward the mouth of the alley, where the murmur of the crowd hadn’t quite faded. “Please. Walk with me.” She almost said no. Some old habit, some year-old instinct to trust no one who offered help for free. Then she thought about Jin, about how the whole reason she was even letting herself hope this place had answers was Jin, and the fear in that thought was so much simpler and cleaner than the fear she
