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Reunions come in many shapes and sizes. The questions vary: Who got fat? Who went bald? I thought that shark ate you? But a common thread is the sensible wariness we exhibit around those who know who we were but may no longer see that person before them.

Invitation to the Class of ’84, 40th Reunion—From Tony Brennan

Livira

Livira found herself pinned to the floor even though she should be able to fall right through it. Her assailant’s fingers knotted into Livira’s robe, their grip deathly tight. Wordless shrieks evolved into a shouted repetition of her name.

“Livira! Livira! Livira!” Carlotte, now straddling Livira, paused to haul in a breath. “How are you here?” And without giving Livira a moment to answer: “Don’t leave! You can’t leave! I won’t let you leave!” Jolting her with each demand.

“I’m.” Livira fought to get the words out. “Not. Going—”

“Serra Leetar?” Carlotte seemed to notice the others for the first time. “Is that you?” She focused on Yolanda. “Someone’s shrunk Deputy Yute!”

“Can I get up?” Livira asked.

Begrudgingly Carlotte got off Livira’s midsection and let her find her feet. Though Livira noted that the girl kept one hand clutching her librarian’s robe.

“So.” Livira brushed herself down. “You have questions.”

“Do I smell awful?”

It wasn’t the question Livira had been expecting.

“I do, don’t I? Gods, I must stink.” Carlotte buried her nose in her shoulder ruff and inhaled. “I’m a ghost. I can’t touch anything. Not even water. I haven’t washed in years!” She looked at her hand in sudden shock. “Wait! I can touch you!” She yanked on the material to prove her point, making Livira stagger. “I’m cured?” Without releasing her hold, she lashed out at the bed with one leg. Her foot passed effortlessly through the nearest of the four ornately carved posts. “I’m not cured! What’s going on?”

Livira eyed Carlotte dubiously, waiting to see if another torrent of questions would follow, but it seemed she was being given leave to answer this time.

“We’re all ghosts. You came here through a pool that took you into the past. None of us truly exist here—”

“Though some of us have fifty-foot-tall statues in the main square.” Leetar found her voice at last, still raw with grief, her eyes red. Carlotte seemed too overwhelmed by their arrival to notice such details.

A shout rang out in the corridor they’d just come down. “Carlotte? Carlotte!”

“Speaking of your husband…” Livira shot Carlotte a speculative look.

“We should leave,” Yolanda said. “If we speak to him it will just make the damage worse!”

“Damage?” Carlotte looked at her bedroom door. The faint strains of the orchestra beyond stopped mid-flow.

“Come on!” Livira led off towards the bedchamber’s rear wall, trusting Carlotte’s death-grip on her robe to bring the queen with her.

All four of them passed through nearly a yard of stone and found themselves standing in an empty dining hall with great displays of swords and pikes on the walls, empty suits of plate armour standing sentinel in the corners and midpoints.

“Can anyone else see you?” Yolanda asked urgently.

“What? No.” Carlotte seemed surprised at the child taking over the conversation.

“How long have you been here?” Yolanda asked.

“In the palace?”

“With the man who can see you,” Yolanda clarified.

“Uh…” Carlotte counted on her fingers. “Plague, palace, good year, this year. Four. Four! You left me here four years, Livira!” She tugged accusingly on Livira’s robe. “Four!”

“How are you queen?” Livira looked around the room. She couldn’t imagine that this palace was any less grand than the one King Oanold had been burned out of.

Carlotte released Livira, folding her arms. She mixed outrage, accusation, and pride into one stare that she swept across all of them. “I had to do something when you left me here. That was you. I know it was. Somehow that assistant was you.”

“In a way,” Livira admitted. “But the pool you escaped the canith by didn’t lead here. You must have gone to the Exchange. The forest with the doorways.”

“I did go to an orchard.” Carlotte nodded. “But it was very boring, and there are only so many apples you can eat. They’re terrible for the digestion. I mean if that’s all you eat. And then where do you go when you need to…I mean…Behind a tree? I did see a guinea pig once but—”

“How much have you interacted with this man?” Yolanda interrupted.

Carlotte peered down at her. “Who is this child? And why doesn’t she behave like one? Is something wrong with her?”

Livira stepped between them before Yolanda said anything that might start a fight. Carlotte had always enjoyed a good shouting match, and four years with only one person to talk to might have worn away at her self-restraint.

“How are you queen, Carlotte?”

Carlotte sniffed. “It turns out that I’m not as useless as Master Logaris used to say I was. I found Chertal could see me and hear me, and some of the things I know were not known here. They proved to be quite lucrative.”

Yolanda covered her eyes with a white hand.

“I remembered the basics of making black powder. Gods know I was never very interested in alchemy lessons, but that recipe stuck for some reason. It was rather gruesome after all. You know you need to fill a big barrel halfway with wee and then fill the rest with dung and ferment—”

“What else?” Yolanda demanded. “What else did you tell him?”

“Uh…how to make steel. Just the basics. It was enough to get him very rich. After that I did a lot of spying for him. Secrets turn out to be worth far more than new inventions. You can cash them in quickly too.”

“So, you…married…him?” Livira enquired, frowning deeply. “How does that work? I mean, they must call him the mad king? And the other stuff…” Her eyes strayed to the wall that now separated them from the bedroom.

Carlotte slumped. “Well, to answer the child’s question about how much interaction the king and I have had: not nearly as much as either of us would like. Imagine being able to see everything and touch nothing! So frustrating. So yes, both of us have itches the other can’t scratch. And the rest of them do laugh at Chertal behind their hands. But whenever I catch any of them at it, they get posted to some border town, which always makes everyone mind their tongue for a bit.” She brightened up suddenly and grabbed Livira’s arm in both hands. “I can touch you! You can’t imagine how that feels. Just put me in front of Arpix and I’ll show him a whole new area of study. The boy won’t know what’s hit him. I’ll—”

“He’s got a sweetheart now,” Livira said. “Kind of. At least I think—”

“Nooo!” Carlotte released Livira and spun around, looking for a target for her ire. Her gaze settled on Leetar. “I bet she’s pretty, and well read, and tall. Very tall. I hate her already.”

“Taller than he is…” It pained Livira to talk about Arpix given what he’d said to her less than an hour ago. But she had been both amazed and glad and slightly jealous to see how he and Clovis had moved around each other, and she had been desperate to share it with someone, Carlotte most of all since Carlotte lived for such gossip and all its attendant drama. “Anyway, you’re married. To a king.”

“I’d rather be married to a peasant if I could touch them. Even a fat one that didn’t bathe.” Carlotte frowned, belatedly registering what Livira had said. “Taller than him?”

Yolanda interrupted. “This is very bad. Very dangerous. It might be as bad as what the canith brothers did with the ganar siblings. Not as bad as what Livira and Evar did with the book, of course.”

“Who’s Evar?” Carlotte looked pointedly at Livira. “You never mentioned any Evar before!”

Leetar, seeming to decide that the catching-up had gone on long enough, lifted her red-eyed gaze from the ground and answered for Livira. “Evar is Livira’s sabber lover.” She delivered the blunt truth of the matter without giving Livira a chance to wrestle it into something Carlotte might find easier to swallow. “And I think this Arpix of yours is the target for the sabber’s sister. And”—Leetar’s voice dried up and she forced the next words out wrapped around a painful sob—“Meelan is dead.”

It should have been the first news Livira delivered. She flinched beneath it as if slapped. That was what it felt like each time the fact of it was given space in her mind: a blow.

Carlotte closed her open mouth with a snapping sound. A stricken look took possession of her face, and she staggered back as if injured. Yolanda used the moment of hurt silence as an opportunity to seize control of the conversation again.

“We need to leave here, now. Then I need to find a way to get us back to when we should be. We can only hope that the wound you’ve opened in reality’s fabric is still of a size that can heal itself!” She turned to Livira. “You bring your friend. I’ll take Leetar.” And with that, she reached out for Leetar’s wrist then shot skyward, dragging her aristocratic cargo with her. The vaulted ceiling swallowed the pair from sight as they passed through it.

Carlotte, overwhelmed by a series of what Livira had to admit were pretty huge revelations, could only stare as the pair left. She didn’t even manage to protest about the flying part.

Livira held her hand out towards Carlotte, a question in her eyes.

“I can’t leave Chertal,” Carlotte said, a tear for Meelan running down her cheek. “Not just like that. He’s been my only friend all this time, and this citadel is on the edge. I mean, there’s cliffs on every side, but the entire kingdom is poised to fall. He needs me.”

Livira hadn’t forgotten the village in the forest or the ballistae on every roof of the citadel. Yolanda was right though, they had to go. “He needs you to watch him die?” Livira regretted the words immediately but what could a ghost do?

“If that’s what has to happen, yes.” Carlotte looked grim. “I owe him that much.”

Livira sighed and tried to put herself in Carlotte’s place. “Who’s attacking?”

“The ganar.” Carlotte shuddered.

Livira frowned, puzzled. She’d been chased by a giant mechanical killing machine created by one ganar’s misguided hatred. But her reading had led her to believe that the ganar were a non-violent species barely half the height of men. A species that had been enslaved both by humans and by canith many times across millennia of recorded history. “Are they sending their engines against you?”

“Worse,” Carlotte said. “They’ve managed to breed a slave-species up on the moon. A monstrous variant on some native Attamast creature. And now they’ve come down in their night-ships to multiply their soldiers and take the world for their own.” She shuddered again. “Our armies can’t stand against these creatures, Livira. They’re some kind of insect. We call them the skeer.”