It was four weeks after the Orpheus team returned from Bolivia. There had been virtually zero pigment activity in the City. No sign of Bishop or his minions. It was a week before Christmas, and this Friday Orpheus Group would be holding its first-ever office Christmas party.
Around lunchtime, Agent MacMillian was having coffee with Walter Hanley. Hanley asked if MacMillian had ever "encountered" any of her family — the family she had lost in the car crash that made her a projector — since they died. She said she had not. Hanley nodded, saying that he had searched for his wife, who had died of cancer, for a year after developing projecting abilities. He never found her. Eventually, he realized that this was a good thing. It meant that his wife had not fallen afoul of whatever kept ghosts tied to their miserable existence; that she had moved on to wherever it was her spirit should be. Hanley said that he felt this was really the most important thing Orpheus Group did; finding these lost souls and helping them move on to where they were supposed to be. "It's like... something's gone wrong with death, somehow," he said. "And we're the only ones with the ability to fix it."
MacMillian agreed, and noted that however noble their war against the pigment trade had been, she missed the days when Orpheus was primarily about helping individual people. Walter told MacMillian that of everyone who worked for Orpheus, she was the one he least wanted to see burn out.
He slid a mission folder across the table to her. "I was saving this for a new hire, but I want you to have it. It's a milkrun, and all the prep work's already been done. All you have to do is go back to the office, project, get Tommy to drive you to the spot. Take you maybe two hours. If you go now, you'll make it back in time for the Christmas party." MacMillian looked skeptical. "Trust me on this," said Hanley. "You'll like this. It'll make you feel good about what we do."
MacMillian opened the folder.
Earlier that morning, Agent Herschler was in his apartment, fixing himself breakfast before coming in to work. He turned to scrape the eggs onto his plate, and Bozzie was standing there in the doorway.
"Sorry," he rasped. "Knocking takes a lot out of me these days."
Bozzie wanted a favor. He had to meet someone today, he said, and he had to do so "in the flesh". However, ever since his bar burned down, it's been difficult for him to do anything that required a great deal of vitality. "With ghosts," he explained, "it's easy to get a lot of yourself tied up in a special person or a special place. Then, when you lose it, it takes a piece of you with it." Bozzie needed someone to come with him and feed him vitality during the meeting, so he could maintain solid form. "I'd really owe you one, man," he said.
Herschler agreed to meet him after lunch. As Bozzie turned to go, Herschler noticed smoke trickling out of the ghost's tracheotomy, usually a sign that Bozzie was in distress. He asked if everything was all right.
"Oh yeah," said Bozzie. "Just a bit nervous, is all."
Early afternoon, shortly after lunch. Agent McGee spotted Walter Hanley digging through some files, making exasperated noises. He asked if he could help.
Hanley explained that back when Tad Eccles was in charge of Orpheus Group, Hanley had given a number of company files to former Agent Emile Markham, information he thought Markham would be able to use to undermine Eccle's control. Hanley had tried to recover everything before Agent Markham left the company, but he was still missing a few. He needed someone to head up to Markham's old house and find the missing files.
McGee volunteered.
"I'd appreciate it," said Hanley. "I don't want you to miss the party, though — if it starts getting late and you haven't found them, don' t worry about it. But I'd really like to get this straightened up before the holiday break."
McGee shrugged. He hadn't been planning to attend the Christmas party in any case.
Later that evening, about half an hour before the party was to start. Agent Watts was in the mostly empty office, taking care of some last-minute paperwork. Suddenly his cell phone rang; it was Scott Archer, who had dropped out of sight during the last two weeks.
Archer had done some investigation on his own while the rest of the group was in Bolivia, and had been following up on certain leads for the last couple of weeks. He said he had found something very disturbing, and he needed to talk to Watts right away. No, he couldn't talk about it over the phone. No, it couldn't wait. "I'm in the campsite parking lot at Madley Forest Preserve, Bring Lane, if you can, but don't tell anyone else."
Watts asked if he should project.
"I think it would be a bad idea to leave your bodies at Headquarters," said Archer.
Agent Lane was not pleased with the idea of driving out to the City limits half an hour before the party started; he had fought hard for an office Christmas party for many years, and was not keen on missing it. But Watts eventually convinced himi to come along, and the two of them drove out into the snowy night to meet Archer.
Earlier that afternoon, Agent MacMillian arrived at her mission site: a nice house in Elsevier Heights, decorated with Christmas lights. She entered the house silently and invisibly, and found a husband and wife inside, sitting in quiet misery.
Down the hall, in a child's bedroom, MacMillian discovered the ghost of a little girl named Angie. Angie explained that she had bought her mom and dad's Christmas present early and hidden it away, but then got sick and died. Now it was nearly Christmas, and she wanted to tell her parents where the present was, but she didn't know how.
Angie showed MacMillian where the present was — in a shoebox hidden in a crawlspace behind her bedroom closet. MacMillian then left the house, manifested physically, and knocked. When the parents answered, she explained that she was from Orpheus, and had a message from their daughter.
After the parents discovered the shoebox, MacMillian saw Angie sitting on the edge of her bed, with brilliant motes of light dancing around her. Surreptitiously, she channeled vitality toward the little girl, and Angie, her fetters finally resolved, ascended and disappeared.
At about the same time, Agent Herschler met Bozzie on a snowy street corner in Eastside. Bozzie led him to the front stoop of an aged, run-down brownstone.
"Okay," said Bozzie, "I'm going to manifest all the way, then go knock. All you need to do is keep feeding me juice, so I can stay phyical for a while. Don't say nothing, don't manifest, just sit back and read a magazine if you want, just keep feeding me juice."
With that, Bozzie took a deep breath, manifested physically, then went up the stairs and knocked.
A haggard-looking woman — about as old as Bozzie would have been if he hadn't died — answered the door, blinked, and smiled. "You came back," she said.
Bozzie grinned. "I always do."
They went inside. The woman offered Bozzie coffee. They talked for two or three hours, with Bozzie mostly asking questions about how the woman had been doing the last year, and gently deflecting her questions about his own situation. The woman had been going to art school; she had done a few paintings but hadn't gotten them into any galleries yet. Her mother was still sick. Her sister still would not talk to her. Throughout the conversation, Herschler noticed that Bozzie was actually gaining vitality, not fast enough to replenish what he was rapidly losing in order to stay solid, but fast enough that Herschler needed to channel significantly less than he'd expected.
Finally, after a long lull in the conversation, the woman asked Bozzie if he could stay this time. Bozzie looked down at his coffee. "You know I can't do that, baby. I got to get going." The two exchanged farewells, and Bozzie stepped back out onto the street.
He took a deep breath, and the snow began to fall through him again.
Later that evening, as the Christmas party was just getting started back at Headquarters, Agent McGee entered Emile Markham's old house with a spare key provided by Hanley. Almost immediately, the walls of the foyer began to bleed, and a voice thundered, "YOU DARE DISTURB THIS HO—oh, you're one of Emile's colleagues. My apologies."
Morrot materialized in the hall. "Emile doesn't live here anymore. What brings you to this place?" he asked.
McGee explained the purpose of his visit, to retrieve Emile's old files.
"Ah, yes, the files. Emile was very meticulous about his files. Very idiosyncratic in their organization. I'm afraid you'll spent the better part of the night searching for them. Or, I could tell you where they are, if you can do something for me. Sit down and talk. Indulge an old ghost in conversation."
Morrot led McGee into a dingy study. Most of the room was occupied by a huge aquarium filled with dead and decaying plants. McGee sat down on a sheet-covered chair.
After a few minutes of awkward chatter, Morrot began to describe a "dream" that he had been having recently, during times of quiet reverie. "I dream of an ancient city, with roads and bridges and towers built of black iron. The lords of this city wear masks, and trade in the very souls of their subjects for their power. It is a terrible place, but it is also a beautiful place, filled with purpose and order. And as I walk through its streets, I feel like I could be part of this order, that indeed I might one day be one of those masked lords myself, looking down on the streets from my own black tower. But always with these dreams comes a terrible sense of loss, for somehow I know that this city exists no more; that it has fallen to rust and ruin, its purpose forgotten. And I will never know what it is like to walk its streets, except in these dreams."
Morrot then begged McGee to destroy him, to end his miserable, purposeless existence. All of his fetters — the things and people that ghosts become emotionally invested in, that if resolved allow them to ascend to a true afterlife — had long since died or disappeared and there was no salvation possible for him. He told McGee that the files he sought were on a shelf right behind him, and he only asked that in return, McGee would grant him the oblivion that he craved.
Without hesitation, McGee shot Morrot with a black bullet, destroying him utterly.
The room became pitch black. In the distance, McGee could make out a blinking red light. As he walked closer, he heard gravel beneath his feet, and realized that he was walking along a country highway. The red light in front of him was the tail light of a car, pulled over on the shoulder. McGee remembered that his old car — the car he had been driving when the band of thugs had forced him off the road, killed his girlfriend, and left him for dead — had one tail light burned out.
McGee could just make out the feet of someone lying still on the gravel, in the car's shadow.
Another car was approaching from behind. It slowed and stopped next to McGee, and the passenger-side window rolled down. The driver leaned over, and it was the albino.
"Get in," he said. "It's time to show you something."
At about the same time, on the highway north of town, Agents Watts and Lane were driving through the driving snow towards Madley Forest Preserve. Suddenly, the Christmas music from the radio cut off, and the staticky voice of Radio Free Death filled the car.
"Hello, are you receiving? Is anyone receiving?"
"We're here," said Watts. "What is it?"
"What's your location? Where are you right now?"
"We're on the road, heading north."
"You're not at headquarters?"
"No."
"You have to—" the voice cut off in a hiss of static.
At that moment, the car died. As Watts wrestled it onto the snow-covered shoulder, Lane noticed something skittering across the hood. A moment later, thousands of cockroaches boiled out from the car's engine compartment.
"Well, hello there," drawled a voice from the back seat.
They turned. It was Rook. Headlights from a second car behind them beamed in through the rear window.
"I guess we're through fucking around with you," Rook said, and cocked his gun.
Just minutes earlier, shortly before the Orpheus Christmas party got started, Agent MacMillian swam up to consciousness in her projecting creche. The lid hissed up, and Neel Shivani smiled down at her.
Walter Hanley leaned over and smiled as well. "How are you feeling?" he asked. "Come on, I'll walk you down to the party."
MacMillian hesitated, but Shivani indicated the next creche over, where Agent Herschler's body awaited reintegration. I just have to wait for Herschler's unit to go green," he said. "Shouldn't be but a few more minutes. You two go on ahead; Hersch and I will catch up." He laid his hand gently on MacMillian's elbow. "Maybe later, you and I can go somewhere... and just talk."
Hanley and MacMillian took the elevator up to the ground floor and walked down a long hallway, towards the sound of laughter and singing. "I remember Neel joined up right about the same time I did," Hanley remarked. "He's a good guy, a good guy."
At that moment, all the lights in the building went out.
Shivani rushed over to Herschler's creche and slapped the emergency power override switch. Nothing happened. He slapped it again, cursed, and popped the lid. Herschler's spirit was caught halfway through reintegration — he couldn't project out, and his body was going into cardiac arrest. Shivani yelled for assistance, but everyone was upstairs at the party. Frantically, he started administering CPR.
"Why haven't the generators kicked in?" Hanley wondered aloud.
A shadow appeared at the far end of the hall. It waved and started walking towards them.
"I think that's Podlowski," muttered Hanley. "Hey, Podlowski!" he yelled. "You know what's going on?"
As Podlowski drew closer, they could see that something was wrong. He walked with a jerking, shuffling gate, and held something clenched in his right hand. Wires dangled down from his fist, curving up to something bulky underneath his jacket. "I can't — " he gasped, his voice half-strangled, "— they have — please — help me —"
"Walter, he's being puppeteered!" shouted MacMillian.
"Emma, run," hissed Hanley. He grabbed her and shoved her as hard as he could down the hallway, away from Podlowski. "RUN!" He ran with her for several yards.
Then he stopped. He turned back. He sprinted towards Podlowski.
Everything goes silent, except for the slow pulse of a heartbeat, filling the soundtrack:
Heartbeat. Hanley dives at Podlowski, reaching for the hand holding the device.
Heartbeat. Shivani shoves down on Herschler's chest. Again, and again.
Heartbeat. McGee stands before the albino's car. The passenger door swings open.
Heartbeat. Men with trenchcoats and shotguns surround Watts' car, pumping their weapons.
The heartbeat pauses.
Podlowski lifted his thumb, and a button on top of the device popped up.
And every window of the Orpheus Group Headquarters building blew outwards in a fiery explosion.
Cut to credits.