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Ghosts
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The alley in Star's End bled shadows under rain so thick it looked like spilled oil from the night itself. Steam coiled from gutter grates like the world was exhaling its last breath. Sammy slumped against the wall, a mural of rot and graffiti peeling behind her shoulder like old war paint. Red streaked down her abdomen, thick where her fingers failed to stop the leaking. Her cigar flared a dying orange in the dark, clinging to life in defiance of the downpour.Ghosts
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She didn’t move. She didn’t have to.
The last body she put down was still twitching somewhere near the dumpster. Plasma had split the air like a chorus, and now the only sound was rain tapping her armor like an impatient medic. Her head lolled back against the brick, breath shallow, slow. One leg stretched out, the other bent to cradle her in her usual ruin of a resting posture; half collapsed, half throne.
She was soaked, blood mixing with rain, oil, and maybe something older that clung to the alley walls like rot. Her arm cannon hung limp at her side, still humming faintly, cooling like a god’s wrath she hadn’t fully caged. Steam hissed from its vents. Sammy’s lips pulled around the cigar again, daring it to live.
It flickered. So did she.
"Well," she muttered, voice rasping over gravel, "that was loud."
Her fingers trembled as they brushed the doll clipped to her belt. Ragged hair. Crooked smile. One eye missing like a wink frozen in time. The kid had given it to her. She never named it, but she kept it. A promise in stitches.
A shimmer bloomed in front of her, not with noise but weight; an absence pressing into the air like the world hesitating. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t even blink.
The boy sat there, just as she remembered. Small. Too thin. Federation-gray scrubs and that busted grin he wore when she pulled him out of the wreckage on her zero mission. His chest still rose and fell, rhythm too perfect to be real. Eyes too steady.
"Hey, Sammy," he said, soft as rain on bone.
Sammy chuckled, and it hurt. She coughed, and that hurt worse.
"Ghosts now? C'mon, kid. I already died three times this week."
"You’re not dead."
She gestured at her side with a half-hearted shrug. “Could’ve fooled me. Hole in my chest, lungs full of static. You’re here. Pretty sure that means I’m on my way out.”
The boy; his name lost to files she never bothered memorizing just smiled. Same smile he had on the table before the medics called time. Not grief. Not fear. That absurd calm some kids find before the world fails them.
"You won," he said.
"Always do."
"And now you’re quitting?"
"Not quitting." She shifted, grimaced, exhaled fire. "Just... paused."
He stepped closer, feet not quite touching the ground. The doll bobbed as if reacting to him, and she hated how it made her chest clench harder than the bullet wound.
"You said it’d protect me," she whispered, almost too quiet for herself.
“I did. And I meant it.” He knelt beside her. "But Sammy... I wasn’t talkin’ about your body.”
"Then what, huh?" Her voice cracked into something harsh, raw. "I’ve got a year, maybe. Maybe. Before the decay makes me eat dirt or start screaming blood while I lose my goddamn mind. I'm not built to last, kid."
“You’re built to burn. Not fade.”
He poked the doll gently. It twitched like it remembered too.
“You said it yourself. ‘Voice of the voiceless,’ remember? That doesn’t stop just 'cause you’re tired.”
"Tired?" She let out a bark of laughter, short and sharp. "Kid, I ain't been tired in forever. Since I pulled the trigger on my own blood and didn’t know until after."
The rain pressed harder. It washed the soot from her cheeks but not the streak of old warpaint smeared under her eye. The ghost watched her in that way dead things did; patient, eternal, cruel in their kindness.
"You’re scared," he said, like he wasn’t stating the obvious.
"Everyone's scared," she snapped. "Only difference is I don’t run from it. I run with it. I ride it."
"Then ride now. Not later. Not when they’ve rebuilt what you just tore down." He leaned close, and his voice dropped. "You got too much fire left to rot in an alley."
Sammy closed her eyes. For a moment, it felt like being a kid again. Fresh out of the vat. No scars. No names. Just a number and orders. The first time someone handed her a gun and told her to "make it loud."
“You know what the Federation said about me?” she murmured. “Said I was defective. That I smiled too much. That I laughed when I should’ve been silent. You ever wonder why I kept laughing, even after they started dying?”
He shrugged. “To keep yourself alive in the noise.”
“Yeah.” She flicked ash from her cigar, now barely glowing. “And maybe so I wouldn’t forget I was still Sammy.”
She felt the doll shift on her belt. Not pulled. Not touched. Just… shifted. As if leaning forward with her.
The ghost boy slugged her shoulder; not hard, but not gentle either. Enough to jolt something.
“Get the fuck up,” he said, grinning. “And raise hell.”
Sammy barked another laugh, raw as rust. Her side flared, the ache sudden and deep, and for a second she saw stars behind her eyes. The pain was real. So was the heat behind it. The storm in her lungs. The taste of iron and fire.
“Shit,” she groaned, dragging one leg beneath her. “That’s the worst pep talk I’ve ever gotten.”
“But it worked.”
She paused. Then nodded, the motion slow, rain dragging rivulets down her cheeks like mock tears. She looked down at the cannon, its faint hum starting to rise again, like it could sense her pulse pushing back into rhythm.
The world spun as she stood, every inch a protest. Her spine popped. Her ribs screamed. But her boots found purchase on slick concrete, and her eyes too bright, too alive cut through the gloom like twin plasma arcs.
“I swear to whatever god stitched me together,” she muttered, “if I find a third lung hole I’m shooting the next bastard with my left hand just to spite reality.”
The boy laughed, fading now, the edges of him unraveling into mist. But his grin stayed. The doll twitched again, subtle as breath. The alley brightened just a little as if the rain had pulled back to watch.
Sammy lit another cigar.
This one caught.
She took a long drag, the ember reflecting off the blood slick on her jaw. Then she rolled her shoulders, holstered Old Reliable, and flexed the arm with the cannon until it hissed a warning to the sky.
"Still Sammy," she said aloud, to no one and everything.
And then she walked.
Toward the noise. Toward the fight. Toward whatever hell waited with open arms.
Because she wasn't done. Not yet.
And ghosts didn’t lie.