He took off his glasses. Without them, his eyes were small and very human. “It means you’ll see everything I’ve seen. Every failed upload. Every corrupted memory. Every person who tried to cheat death and ended up as a stutter in a hard drive. You’ll feel their loneliness, Kestrel. All of it. At once.”

Mister Rom Packs smiled. “We’ll find him.”

“It’s a ghost,” he said finally. “Not a dead person’s ghost. Something stranger. You know how the city has its own network? The SpireNet?”

“Those,” he said, “are for stories that haven’t been written yet.”

“That’s my knock,” she whispered.

“I found it ,” Kestrel said, shivering. “It found me first. Crawled out of a disposal vent in Level 7. It was trying to type on a dead terminal. What the hell is it, Mister?”

The connection hit her like a fall.

“Do it,” she said.