This fanfiction article, The Shape of a Séance, was written by LastnameSilverLastname. Please do not edit this fiction without the writer's permission.

THE SHAPE OF A SÉANCE[]

With visiting hours winding down, and the meal rush on its way, the hospital was in a flurry. Orderlies and nurses bustling with trays of medicines, meals, and material changes for bed cots and patients bedbound alike.

Nothing more to do in the room, Hariette McVey stepped out of the room and the hospital, finding sanctuary in an out-of-the-way quad, cloistered on all sides by covered walkways around a verdant green pasture, like someone sliced out the heart of a park, and surrounded it with white walls and window frames.

Absent a meal of her own, and without credits to her name, she’d instead scanned her temporary ID to raid the vending machines on her way. Leveraging the status of the military hospital, and her own as a military asset, she set up shop with a pair of puckfruit slices and 13 centimetre sandwich roll. Squashed into its monoethyl and sagging on one end, the pasty interior oozing around the edge of the plastic. Tasteless, soggy bread and chicken paste filler. Or rather, chicken-flavoured paste filler.

It beat the hunger pains, at the very least, so she choked it down with a swig of tepid citrus drink, wrapped in a gaudy bronze package, a smiling orange sun on its front.

Sparing a glance around the quad, some few others were scattered around. Seeking refuge in the solace, away from the turbulence of rush hour. Languishing on benches beneath trees, striding up and down the flower beds, enjoying the pastels of a sky turning from burnt gold to a tender azure.

It almost made the sandwich tolerable.

Almost made her miss the voice that called out from her left, too.

“Spare a parlay, Ms McVey?”

She chewed, paused, and turned her head.

He was halfway up the path, a smile on his face. Dressed in a simple pair of slacks and leather shoes, a black suit, flanged and tinted with grey undertones. She watched and the material rippled, the ONI Logo on his left breast animated and shining. A lapel and button train started at his right shoulder, and cascaded down to his left hip, sweeping across his neckline in a backwards 7.

But that wasn’t what drew her eyes.

No, the things that most drew her eye to the man were the things that weren’t there.

He had no grace, only a mechanical certainty to his movements. A spindly sense of graceless poise. Gliding over the tiles rather than landing footfalls on them. Never quite lifting his leg enough for them to be considered steps, yet always enough to not scuff his shoes. No footsteps, no heel or toe scuffs. Not even the creak of leather on the tile.

And he wasn’t wearing a hospital card. No visitor lapel, military ID, or even nurse escort. He had materialised from the shadows between the quad trees. Lights plumed down between the branches of the building-wrapped parkway, draping about his shoulders. Halfway towards her before her threat assessment kicked in. Was she just sloppy?

Shaking her head, she fixed the man with a furrowed glare.

“Excuse me?” she said, swallowing down her bite and leaning away from the man as he approached.

His hands raised, he wore no jewellery, no marks, no varnish or polish on the nails. Yet even still, there were no markings, blemishes, or imperfections. Even his skin was smooth as ebony rock. His eyes weren’t focused, sweeping over her face, from her auburn hair to her shoes. Away from the moment, in his own calculations, pruning his own dataset.

It would’ve been rude in anyone else except an ONI Agent. From him, it just gave her the impression of pins and needles down the nape of her neck. A whispering breath skimming down her cheek. Hackles raising at the unknown. Instinct locked on, chambered, and the bolt slammed back when let go with a click in her head. Cycling between combat protocols and officer decorum—she didn’t know whether to salute or slice his neck.

She’d half expected him to take off his face to reveal a convincing synthetic Autoserve beneath it all. But the more he approached, the more she could see. Augmented vision, and threat assessment. A bead of sweat running down his temple, the misfolded collar catching a fold of skin on his right. A scar touching the tip of his ear and sweeping back, leaving a pale tanned line through his hair.

It should’ve been comforting, knowing it was a human approaching her. She could see them. The sweat, the scar, the misplaced fold of cloth. But she filed them as data points. Markers of a target. Catalogued. Irrelevant. Not the blemishes of a superior officer coming to chat. Not a sign of life.

He was gliding towards her, pinging every combat impulse she had. Human. Flesh and blood.

And yet simply not there.

He paused a few steps away from her. Smiling, he showed off ivory-white teeth. Holding his hands palm-out towards her, she filed that away as him not holding any weaponry. Why did she do that?

“A moment of time for a sitting with a spook?” he asked.

The tension banished in an instant, she rolled her eyes and sighed. “Oh Lethe.” Hari tossed the sandwich down onto the bench by her side, and stood up. “Schedule one, if you wanna talk about New Alexandria. Otherwise leave me be.”

“I’m not seeking to rehash what’s been done before,” he told her. “Not about anything that’s come prior.”

Pausing, Hari turned back around and shook her head. Mouth open first, and then she parsed what he said. A delayed fuse on a trigger pull, she shook her head. “Then why?” she asked. “I’m taking a break, you know.”

“A few questions.” He reached behind his back.

Hari turned to one side, quick as a blade strike, offering the Agent her dominant and honed edge.

The Agent pulled out a dossier wrapped in manilla. Harmless and inert. Real paper, printed and stamped with blood red seals, clipped with a classification order flapping in the light breeze. Not imitation, wood pulp and ink, nothing laminated or set in-between the fibres.

“Lyzander,” he said.

Her pupils dilated. Her face became flushed as her blood vessels followed. The subtle markings of adrenaline that she could feel, so she knew he could see.

His eyes darted around her face, never settling on her eyes.

“A Spartan by that name lies in your past, yes?”

She didn’t move from her stance, only folded her arms over her chest, and redistributed her weight. “I knew a Spartan by that name, yes.”

“He knows you still,” the Agent said. With one hand he flicked the dossier open with the same practice as a switchblade, and licked his other thumb to rifle through the pages. “Some time ago, post-assignment on a civilian freighter,” a pause, pregnant with silence as his eyes flicked up to her. Suddenly still. “Rattled he was,” the man continued. “Seemed like he saw a ghost.”

Delayed fuse. His words had an odd cadence. Lilting and stuttered, but not stumbling. The staggered leapfrog of a fire-and-move. Intentionally suppressing.

Hari shook her head. “A Spartan assigned to civilian outreach?”

“A specialised transportation, moreso.” He said with a shrug. “Bus fare booked.”

“So,” Hari took a breath, steeled nerves frayed at the edges patted down with a roller of steady practice. She was running on combat instincts still. Including her calming methods. “So what’s all this actually about, then? What does this have to do with me?”

“Debriefing performed by Eidogram Assay,” he scanned his eyes over the page, before looking back up at Hari and searching her face. He always searched her face. She could never pin his gaze, always chasing his pupils.

“You know what that is?”

“No,” she said.

He smiled.

She shuddered.

“A perceptual questioning technique.”

“Meaning?” Hari asked.

A tilt of his head from side to side and he shifted his weight to his left. “You could call it a ritual.”

Hari blinked, pinched her eyelids together and fluttered them twice. “You debriefed him with a ritual?” A tilt of her head to one side, and he grinned.

“In a way.”

Hari huffed out a laugh, shaking her head. “How’d that go for you?”

“We seek not the information itself, but the space left behind by an absence of it. Makes it harder to withhold it, when a confession isn’t needed. Think of a… a surface scan looking for caves.”

Her cheek twitched and he honed on it. She intentionally tilted her lip up and he focused on it. He was reading her.

“So, an interrogation?” Her folded hand came free of her arm and offered up the explanation. “Must be hard trying to get anything out of a Spartan,” she allowed the tilt of her lip to increase.

He snapped the dossier shut with a flutter of paper and a thump of rushing air. She flinched as though a grenade went off.

A smile. A slow blink. The only time she’d ever seen his eyes find hers and stay there. “You go by what the planchette says.”

“How does that work?” She shot at him.

“How does anything work?” He shot back. “Pressure points and material strength. You should know this well, yes?”

Hari shook her head, reached up a hand to rub at the bridge of her nose. A migraine began to thrum behind her eyes, worse than any other time she’d had to deal with the Office and their mannerisms.

“Why are you coming to me about an interrogation with Ly? Sander.” She corrected, ditching the nickname like a scuffed piece of armour that was no longer needed. The silence cut between the syllables and left a gouging hole.

He looked up at her. Long seconds stretched out taut before snapping shut with his next blink. He broke it by shifting the manilla in his envelope, pinched nails sliding over the edge of it with a scraping sound.

A lead weight dropped into her heart, like she’d just ceded valuable ground. A tactical objective lost.

“Because of what words came up on the ouija board,” he said. “A virtual particle is detected by the space it leaves behind. The silhouette is transformed to a two-dimensional representation, and the load-bearing pylons analysed.”

His eyes wouldn’t let their hold on hers go. Even when she turned her face, their eyes remained locked together.

He blinked.

She could breathe again.

“An Eidogram Assay does that for information that nobody wants to give up.” He slid the manilla back behind him, pressing it down into the back of his jacket, a matching black leather bag sat around the small. Hari didn’t see a strap anywhere, giving it the illusion of disappearing into thin air the way he’d summoned it.

“A snapshot,” he mimed with his right hand, index finger tugging a clicker, or a trigger. “A polaroid picture, the shadows resonate, and those are what we look at.”

Hari sighed. “Ah,” she allowed herself a laugh. “He managed to stonewall you, did he? Need me to pick through his head? Must be desperate.”

He grinned right back.

The smile on Hari’s face withered.

“The opposite,” he gloated. “We finally have the time to run with the results. The harder you fight to suppress the information,” he let that hang there for too long, tilting his head. “And the more your training kicks in, the easier it is to see the ripples on the bromide.”

He stepped forward, flicked his wrist, produced a small folded piece of card stock. She hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t been watching his hands.

“While the film develops.”

She reached out a hand. He kept his still, and hers was shaking.

Hari grit her teeth and snatched the card. She was being stupid. Unfolding it, she peered down. It was a mess of jumbled hexagonal shapes, connected with lines, some coloured, some dark, some half and half. She looked at the paper, and sighed. “Am I meant to be seeing something here?”

Hari looked back up at the Agent.

He’d gotten closer by a step, bent at the waist as though to peer over the card lip. But he wasn’t. He was looking at her face.

“Well,” he said with pursed lips. “Why does this silhouette,” he reached out, tapping the card, “say that the one you call Ly recognised someone from his time onboard a civilian freighter? It shows your face in remarkable clarity. In a manner of speaking.”

Her teeth stayed gritted. Face deadpanning. Default to training, he’d wormed intel out of her, even described the exact methodology he was using; though she didn’t know the process, it didn’t matter. It was working. And now she had to shut it down.

Hari folded the card back up. “That’s what it says?”

“That’s what was concluded.” He nodded.

Hari’s head tilted. “And you agree?”

A shrug. “No reason not to.”

They watched each other. This time Hari made no experimental shift of her face, suppressing it. Steadying her breathing, letting out a long, deep breath while she lined up her next round.

Holding a hand out, the Spartan handed the card back over. “I've never set foot on a civilian freighter.”

“Of course not,” he said with a smile, plucking the card from her hands with two deft fingers, and tucking it away behind his jacket. He clasped his hands, standing as still and at ease as a statue in a courtyard. “We have cycle logs of your activities years old. We make it a habit to know the whereabouts of our Spartans.”

“And yet,” he sighed. He reached up and brushed his cheek with a hand, the raking sound of stubble on skin reached her augmented ears and made her teeth itch.

“And yet why does the after-image, conjured by man-and-machine hours, pieced together from information in the gaps left behind by redundancy, point to a certain person?” He clasped his hands together as though praying, and tilted them towards her. “Why does the after-image point at you?”

“So what?” She shrugged. “You think I was in two places at once?”

“Too cute a choice of words, but,” he shifted his weight subtly. “Eliminating the impossible, here.”

“Impossibility aside,” she blinked, quite intentionally. And then sucked in an annoyed breath. He was pressing too many buttons, and she didn’t like having no control over her actions. Huffing, she shook her head. “This isn't an interrogation. I’m not obligated to answer."

“You’re innocent in this.” He said quickly. “That’s predetermined. Relax.” He smiled at her.

The Spartan felt every muscle tense up at his voice.

“It was never an interrogation,” the Agent said. “You choose the manner of your answer. We just seek the shadows to illuminate. Oracles interpreting star signs."

"Then I choose to say nothing. This is a waste of my time."

She turned around to walk away.

"Nothing has a shape all its own,” he called after her.

She paused mid-step, turned her head over her shoulder. Not fully visible, the Agent lurked and lingered on the very distant edge of her peripheral.

“Dark matter is Nothing,” he continued. “And it opens our slipspace portals. Majorana particles are Nothing, and they are what allow AI to think and feel. Lyzander chose to say Nothing, and that Nothing came out in the shape of you, Ms McVey. What will your Nothing say?"

She faced him. Locked her eyes with his and opened her mouth. She shut it right after with a click of her teeth. It didn’t matter if she spoke or didn’t.

It was never an interrogation, and it never began, because from the first time she laid her eyes on him, he was working his angle. She’d only just now caught up. Because the Eidogram Assay of his had only just now begun.

"I want to see Lyzander’s interrogation," she demanded in a soft voice.

"There’s…” he hesitated, laughing, offering up his empty palms. “Well, there’s nothing in them, you could say—"

"Then they won’t be classified or have a clearance level, will they?" she shot back.

"But they wouldn’t be clear at what they say without the training to see the pattern."

"How convenient,” she said. “That only a select trained few can see the shapes."

"Without that training,” he began pointedly, nodding his head in the ensuing silence between symbols. “You would be chasing those ghosts with no scanners, following shadows without a light source. Ultimately, it is not the task of the douser to find the water, it’s the task of the rod, and I am that rod."

"You have a God complex, agent?" Hari smirked.

"God is a silhouette made of other shapes,” he said. “I chase the shapes of ghosts, Ms McVey."

Bristling under his gaze, she balled her fists. “Don’t call me that.”

“It’s your name,” he said with a tilt of his head.

She arched her eyebrow and smiled a mirthless smile, showing teeth to a predator. “Then stop using it.”

“You don’t like me using your name.” He said. Not a question. “What value do you think a name has?” There was the question.

And for some reason, it pimpled her skin with goosebumps.

Hari held up a finger towards him. “No more of this bullshit.”

“Do you know the name of God, Spartan?” He blinked away her retort and kept pressing.

Hari’s brow knitted together, and her eyes became wide. “I’m about to send you to meet one, you can find out for yourself.”

“You would tell me if you knew, yes?” His own eyes widened, searching her face. Searching. Stripping her flesh down to the marrow, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it.

“By the—” She shook her head and began to turn. “I’m leaving. Do not follow me.”

“God to a soldier is muscle memory,” he said, interrupting her movement. She furrowed a brow in confusion.

“Salvation is making the right call,” he said.

She swallowed. A flashbang of conjured thoughts filling the space between neurons with images of her team in their hospital beds.

“Scriptures are your training,” the Agent pressed down. “And you recite them daily. Do you study your scriptures?”

Hari stepped closer to him instead of leaving. Holding up an index finger, she brought it right up to his chin. “You stay out of my head.”

He looked at her hand, hummed, tilted his head, and ran his eyes over her limp fingers, ignoring the rigid one aimed to his head.

Hari’s gaze flicked between her hand and his eyes. She pulled her hand back and balled it, hiding it behind the curve of her hip.

He looked up at her from under his brow. “Four, eight, and twelve. Next number in the sequence, minus one?”

“The King of Norway, look, the hell is this?”

“What value is training to the trained, if it can’t un-train the trained?”

She growled, shaking her head, looking up at the sky. “Did you have to take a class to learn Bullshitese, or does it come naturally to you Spooks?”

“You run a rifle check,” he ignored her. Kept his flaying eyes roaming over her face. “The firing mechanism malfunctions, the power cell leaks in the barrel shroud. What do you do?”

“Obviously change it,” she strained, speaking through strained annoyance, sieved through her teeth and spat like spent brass. “Hydrogen cells have logic gates that fail, if one goes, they all go.”

He was a surgeon. “When was the last time you saw God?” Armed with scalpels drawing painted lines down her skin, leaving trails of crimson he used to divine his answers.

She shook her head, blinking rapidly. “I don’t—”

“When was the first time you saw God?” Surgical cuts, pressing deep to excise and flay. Laying her bare for him to explore.

“Listen—” She squirmed. She hated it.

“When was the worst time you saw God?” The sweeping glint of its edge, carving her open, laid bare to rifle through her memories as though laser-guided.

Against the backdrop of the quad’s silence, left with only her heartbeat and his eyes, she may as well have been naked.

“Shut up!” She demanded.

“When did God’s silence become unbearable?” He pressed the blade in to the hilt, and her synapses fired on pure instinct alone.

Pupils dilated, nostrils flared, the flashing of neurons behind her eyes conjured memories. Pressure points and material strength, he’d said. So she decided to pressure him.

“Shut the fuck up!” She grabbed his suit, stretched the material, dug her fingers into the cloth with a straining stretch of the fibres beneath. Small holoprojectors winked with static and fell dark, revealing the grey undertones in a blotchy stain like spreading blood. She lifted him clean off the ground, shoes dangling.

And the man didn’t even flinch.

He reached a hand up to hers, wrapping it about her wrist. Feeling for her veins, two fingers pressed down on her pressure point, keeping fingers touched to the thrumming marker of her pulse. It was steady and fine—too fine. Training held vice-like grips around her heart and mind, slowing down time to match the reflexes needed to dodge bullets.

But words weren’t bullets, and there could be no cover from them. The Agent parted his lips and she could see the skin wrinkle. Sense the air brush against her hands before she heard the words graze her ears, with the same whizzing sound as a shot over her head.

“A tyre, sabaton, thruster pack, and a magazine sit in a line,” he continued, the insipid question like a flashbang to her senses. “Which is the odd one out?”

“Wh—” she drew back, her grip slackened. His own on her wrist tightened, and her heartbeat didn’t even hasten.

“You stand in front of a mirror,” he said, his voice gentle. “A ghost is in front of you. It stands there crying. What do you feel in your heart while it weeps, Spartan?”

“Like I should turn you from spook to ghost for ruining my day!” The words tumbled from between her lips before she could stop them, as hard and sharp in their sibilant hissing as thwipping gas from a blowback pistol. A baker’s-dozen trigger pulls spat into his face, for no joy.

“When does someone stop casting a shadow?” he asked.

“When your lights go out.” The words spilled out. Threatening, reflexive. Instinctual. A hard edge of fight whittled and honed from a block of malleable flight. She could no longer refuse to play his game. The rules were already written. Every word spared from between his lips was a hook, and now the strings were worried deep into her flesh, she was made to dance.

Even when she threatened him. Even when she showed him the strength she had, he’d just touched his fingers to her wrist like he’d expected it. Planned for it. Or even worse intentionally guided her to that point specifically, slithering beneath her Self like a parasite seeking warm blood.

His grip around her wrist felt like the weight of a tungsten vice, despite its gentle pressure. Her heart thrummed, and his finger beat a rhythm right back as though threatening to break the bone.

He smiled. “When did Ly last become a ghost, to you?”

She gulped a mouthful of nothing. “The very second I last saw him.”

“And the first time? When did he stop casting a shadow?” He slid his hand off of her pulse, letting the sensation of the wind take the warm part of her hand, cooling it back to background.

Her eyes stung. “Our training grounds.”

“Hmm,” he wetted his lips. “What’s the last piece of gear you check before you deploy?”

“Myself.” She said, “If I’m broken, the gear might be too.”

“If the mirror with a ghost in it reflects you, why would you be crying?”

She pressed her teeth together, lines of her jaw hardening. Eyes burning with something beyond rage. “I wouldn’t be.”

“Two sundials sit in the sand. One doesn’t cast a shadow. Why?”

Her hand began to strain from holding him up, but she still didn’t drop him. He still didn’t seem to care.

“Deserts have mirages,” she said.

“What if you couldn’t help a weeping Ghost? How would you stop them from crying?”

Shaking her head, Hari looked down at the smaller man. “Cover their mouth,” she said. “Like I should cover yours.”

“Your visor pings a target that isn’t there. What’s broken; you or the helmet?”

“Neither. Av-Cam leaves VISR Pings.”

Both of his hands reached up to grab her arm this time. One at the wrist, one down at the muscle nearest her elbow. He took in a breath, closed his eyes, and let it out in a meditative billow through pursed lips.

He opened his eyes. “When you lost God, what command did muscle memory give in its place?”

“To survive,” she said.

Her eyes locked on his, and for an eternity held in one beat of her heart, the world receded—a dark fog descended, filled with memories of a deep cavern, golden light, and the soft, persistent echo of loss.

Her own face stared back from his eyes.

“What did you see when you lost God?” His voice a resonant spectral wail, that brought them into sharp focus through the fog.

She dropped him. Sharp and quick, the movement wrenched her fingers off of his cuff like a burning coal dropped by a child. She turned to one side. Presenting her dominant edge; her leading arm, head tilted down while he dropped.

The movement left him wobbling towards her. Hari stepped back from him

“You need to leave,” she said. “Me alone,” she tacked onto the end, pinching an index finger and a thumb. “Leave me alone.”

He cleared his throat, shook his head, and fixed his uniform. Brushing off the grey splotch where the projectors had been damaged, he smiled up at her. “I got what I needed, thank you. But,” he looked her up and down. “Not at all what I expected.”

“So we’re done.” She said. Not a question or a request. Fists balled. Muscles tensed.

“We’re done,” he answered.

She whispered out, her voice a menacing and ghostly murmur. “Then leave. Don’t work this hypno-bullshit on me ever again.”

Her shrugged off Hari’s protest with a tilting hand. Balanced, mechanical movements of his body while he continued to dust off his clothes. “It isn’t hypnosis,” he said. “It’s just topology.” As though proving his point were as simple as drawing a line between her emotions and his process.

She closed the distance between them in a heartbeat, holding a finger up to his cheek, almost touching it by a hair's width, lips twitching into a vicious snarl. “If you come near me again, try to get in my head, I will kill you, and I won’t lose any sleep while they cart me off to the gallows.”

He stepped back, nodding—a polite smile, empty of commitment. Detached, far-and-away from what he’d done to her, from the state he’d left her in after rummaging through her frontal lobe. “You have a nice night, Spartan.”

With that, he turned, and meandered down the path he came from. His boots never scuffing the pavement, the sound of his footsteps never reaching her ears.

Hari sat down on the bench in the quad, buried her head into her hands, and gave out two quiet sobs.

There were metal detectors in a staggered line between X-Ray machines at the entrance. He sidestepped them on his way out of the door. Before he got to the front desk beyond, he hooked left, stepped into the security office, and flashed his ONI lapel, silencing the dissenting security guards, who scurried from the room at the flick of his head

The Agent reached back to the same bag that held the manilla, and brought out a foldable datapad, flicking it open, and keying the single button on its interface. Almost immediately, it drank his fingerprint in and analysed it, unlocking with a perfunctory welcome message. A silhouette appeared, greyscale, with no profile. Only two words over the ‘CALL’ button, that flashed red when he touched it.

It didn’t ring for long. The only way he could differentiate the dial tone from an active connection were the numbers ticking upward on the call log.

“Agent,” a synthesised voice greeted him.

He smiled into the screen. “Auditor.”

“How did it go?” they asked him.

The Agent blew air through his lips. “Some fascinating implications for ad-hoc hybrid Eidogram Assays,” he said. “I didn’t even really follow the formula. Just instincts.”

A hum sounded from the other end. A simple syllable of disapproval. “Then how can we be sure of the veracity of the info?”

“I’ll be pulling telemetry,” he assured with a nod.

“You have not done so already?” The voice asked.

“I didn’t need it in the moment,” he said. “I definitely need it now, though.”

A long second of silence split the distance between them. A second hum, this one much more lilting. Tinged with an unprofessional curiosity.

“Something on your mind, Agent?” The Auditor asked. “You called for a reason, no?”

“The shapes don’t make sense,” he said into the screen, not looking at it, but rather over it. Like one might when processing new information, eyes darting between left and right. Collating, filing. “I went digging for God, and instead found a corpse.” He focused on the screen again. “But the God in her head is herself. Something happened to kill her in her own eyes, as surely as if she saw her own open grave, body still there.”

“She thinks she’s dead?” The Auditor asked.

“Nothing so literal,” he waved. “Something made her think she isn’t enough to save herself. And it’s the same shape Ly had in his head.” His eyes glazed with something akin to realisation, but not quite. “It’s the shape of her own face.”

“What if she always thought that?”

“No.” he shook his head. “A corpse is proof that something once lived…” he paused. This time, realisation did take over his face. “So, the question is:” he licked his lips. “What killed her God?”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking…” He grinned at the Auditor in his datapad. Teeth showing back in the camera display of his face in the corner. Reflecting the light of the grey-silhouette display. “That we need to have a talk about Oh-Five-Five.”