They do not, of course, figure it all out the next morning.

The smell of the day bothers Este more than it typically does. She doesn't particularly like the stench of cigarettes, nor the stale fabric of the new scarf, mauve and not purple, that she has wrapped around the bottom of her face. It isn't cold enough to justify it, but Este does not want to be recognized. Este is determined to solve problems before they come up.

Lydia has followed suit, mostly to keep her vocal cords warm. She hasn't sung yet. Lydia had thought about it, in the kitchen with Barry. With the sleeves of their shirt rolled up and sweaty beading on their brow caused by the heat of the stove, Barry looked like the kind of man women would serenade. The cold air helps clear Lydia's head. She couldn't talk to Barry about what she learned, how there is some relief to the symmetry. How could she explain to Barry that some part of her had wondered if he had killed her, and the relief that he didn't is more comforting than anything else she has been given in this second life?

"We're almost there," Eva stamps out the butt of her cigarette. She ruffles her hair up once more, walking through the street.

Este's eyes dart around the street. She hasn't asked questions, as requested. No one has. Only Lydia asked a question.

Can I come too?

They reach the street corner. It's ten in the morning on a Wednesday, and if she is correct, her mother won't be home. Eva hasn't been back here in weeks. Her lungs seem to freeze. It's not the cold, but a constriction. As if the cavity that her lungs should fill has been stuffed with dirt. Her body was buried shallowly, but maybe she swallowed all of it.

"What's our plan?" Lydia asks, looking around.

She doesn't live in this neighbourhood. Her family's home is in a much nicer area, not far from the place Este led her. She's local but seeing these houses after so many years in living near the Opera House is different. Tall yellow grass litters some houses. There are few sidewalks in Chelster and none here. One house has years of abandoned things on the lawn, but there is someone sitting on the porch. The woman looks as worn as the rusting bicycle on her lawn, as settled in as the stack of tires with as the mustard-coloured wildflowers growing from the centre.

Eva exhales. With Este and Lydia on either side of her, she speaks in a hushed voice, "house with the twelve. In the upstairs bedroom, there's money in the sock drawer. Two big fuzzy pairs at the back. We're emptying it."

Lydia looks around. Este reaches behind Eva and snatches Lydia's hand, forcing her back in.

"Keep it cool," Este says.

Lydia wipes the tip of her nose. It's cold. Her eye is going to twitch if she doesn't stop it. She feels the stress again.

"You can look out," Eva tells Lydia. "Este and I will go in."

Lydia nods, fast. She tips her head just slightly, and a sharp pain squeezes through her skull. Her hand flinches up, and she forces herself forward with the others. They get to the house, and Lydia goes to her position next to the house, on the opposite side of the empty driveway.

Once they are at the door, Eva grabs the handle.

"This your place we are robbing?" Este asks, her voice hush. It doesn't matter to her, but it might matter in how they approach this house.

Eva isn't sure how to answer. Correctly, no. It's not her house. It never was. Eva grew up in Chelster but not here. She didn't play on this living room floor, didn't slide down the bannister, and didn't dance to music while making cookies with her mother. Then again, the house Eva lived in, in a much nicer neighbourhood, wasn't this house either. When Eva was very exceptionally bad, a terribleness that couldn't even be corrected by locking her in her closet for the weekend, her mother would send her here.

Eva's aunt is just as rotten as her mother, but Eva knows she works on Wednesday mornings.

"It's no more my place than anywhere else is," Eva tells Este. "We're dead."

The door is unlocked, like Eva expected. It creaks as they open it. The smell hits Eva, the smell of the mould that's under the wallpaper. Above them, there are bats sleeping in the attic. Eva steps inside.

Este looks at Eva, and hurries upstairs. She doesn't want to be here any longer than necessary, and Eva asked her to attend for a reason. Este is someone who can get things done.

She gets to the room upstairs. There are only two rooms above them. The place feels cursed, and not from the way each stair creaks and the banister feels like any pressure will make it slip under her fingers. Este leaves her fingerprints. She leaves proof that she is alive. No, the place feels cursed from how small it is inside, somehow even smaller than it looks. It's the reverse of a magical bag in a fantasy epic. Este ignores it.

She gets to the bedroom and only glances to make sure no one is in the bed. She opens the drawers and finds one with socks. The smell of the room, even with her scarf, makes her gag. There is a bag of take-out on the floor, and more dirty dishes than days in a month. She grabs the fuzzy socks and opens them.

Cash.

She fists it into the pockets of her jacket, bills and bills. Then. She puts the socks back and shuts the door. Este bolts down into the entryway, worrying that her heavy footsteps will make the stairs break under her feet. Then, she grabs Eva, still standing in the doorway, and pulls her out of the house.

Eva does shut the door.

They head over and meet Lydia, who is shaking her hands to keep them warm and to ease her racing mind.

"Got the money," Este tells Lydia.

Eva seems to nod along as well. She's not sure any penny was worth it. She'll need every dollar to pay for all the showers at the truck stop to wash off the memory.

~~~

The others are inside discussing their plan, and Kaia wasn't keen to listen in. They want to unfold the details of what happened to them as to why they were brought back. Their papers had answers. Kaia's had questions. Her arms need to reach further back, than two years prior. The answers aren't in a church basement she's only been in since her death.

Kaia was never meant to be underground, at least not long-term. The Church doesn't have an expansive property, but what is there is nice. The smell of the trees outside the church are certainly better than being within its walls. Kaia walks around the front, around the flowerbeds with dying plants, and back toward the empty parking lot.

Barry is there. She doesn't think she's spoken to them much, outside of one or two interactions. At least, Barry has made it clear they despise this place more than she does.

They don't notice her at first, as she approaches. Barry is buried in the poem they write, deeper than the Church basement, or Lydia's body, or the hollowness it left inside him. Then, he looks up and sees Kaia and adjusts his hunched posture.

"It's weird to see the sunrise after waking up," Kaia looks over.

It's already in the sky, getting higher with each passing second. It doesn't feel like it's out though. Only know are they starting to adjust to time, five days into their new existence. Kaia sits on the edge of the parking lot and the grass seems to snap and crunch beneath her. The earth is dry now, without any give to it. She couldn't imagine anything alive underneath it. Not even a worm.

"It's weird to see stars out here," Barry notices. "There's nothing major for hours, I guess."

"No light pollution," Kaia agrees.

Barry traces the words on the paper, writing in crayons. They can see how Kaia is trying not to look, but they shrug and pass it to her. Art was never something Barry was good at creating. They worked as a custodian at an opera house, with no room for them in sets or costuming or props or the orchestra, or anything that tried to create. Lydia was always that person, and Barry was happy to be that person behind her. Poetry was all they really had.

You once told me your hair was dirt brown
And I became a gardener
Flowers bloomed from the soil
Bluer than the sky, more golden than the sun, redder than the sweetest of apples
And when visitors would come to see my garden
I would show them the dirt.

"It's..." Barry tries to explain.

Kaia feels the waxy crayon on the paper. She feels it in her chest, and she feels the space where Rory should fit. It's hard to imagine loving again after her last memory. This makes it easier.

"You love her even if she doesn't remember you?" Kaia is not remembered by Rory.

Barry nods, "a thousand years could go by. All the flowers in the garden could die, and it could be paved over, and they could put a city like Chelster on top of it. The world wouldn't have to remember. She doesn't. So long as I do."

~~~

Their meeting wasn't organized. Audrey, Clare, Leo, Fallon, and Nico were all there. There wasn't much for Nico to contribute, but Nico wanted to listen all the same. It was more of a sharing of information than a generation of ideas, but Nico needed to establish themselves as one of the people who could be relied on. The world is still spinning. Nico's head is not.

Audrey already explained what they knew; over the course of the past eleven years, all of them had died one way or another. Lydia was the first and Barry within a few weeks, and Fallon and Eva were the most recent, days apart from each other. None of their deaths were connected, only a few deaths had some similarities. Kaia's specific cause of death is undetermined, as are a few others like Barry and Este who was missing rather than found dead. Only Chelster has them tied into each other, and since they are bound to the town it is unlikely this has happened in other places.

Clare goes next, mostly because she has little of value to add. Neither she nor Ambrose found anything of value in the forest. She does ask a question Ambrose posed, who wasn't wearing shoes when they died?

"I wasn't," Nico says.

Audrey scribbles with a pen they stole from the library. This detail feels important.

"I wouldn't have been either," Fallon adds.

Audrey continues to write down, putting the end of the pen to their lip before they pose a question, "you're wearing your own shoes though, correct?"

Fallon nods.

"Several things were missing off my body when I woke," Clare adds for Audrey's sake. "My gun and my walkie, for example."

This might mean something to Audrey. It's a curse, maybe, one that stripped them of some essential items but added others. Or perhaps, there is some scientific explanation to it all, and the shoes were added posthumously for a benefit that is unclear to them now. Regardless, Audrey circles one point on the bottom of their notes.

EXCAVATION?

"I thought this would be important," Fallon asks. She braces herself, before raising her shirt, showing the healed-over scars. "These weren't here before. I was stabbed to death."

Leo glances over, but otherwise, his face is straight. Someone else is scarred too. With Fallon, who by all accounts is melancholy but lovely, joined in with his suffering, it feels less cosmic. At least, it's scarred not just him but her too. Leo has dedicated his life to justice, to atonement. Now, it feels less as though he alone is marked as vile.

"Ajay's a medic, right?" Clare asks, looking at Leo. "Well, he was an aircraftsman, but didn't he mention something about that when Nico had a stomach ache?"

"He's in medical school," Nico clarifies. "Only in his first year of it, when he passed."

Clare would not know as much as him, but she does know things. She asks Fallon if she may, and Fallon steps closer. Audrey leans over, carefully peering over Clare's shoulder with her eyes that seem wider than any other feature on her face.

"Individually, none of these seem necessarily fatal," Clare points out. "Although, there are a lot of them. It would be unusual to survive so many stab wounds, but not impossible."

"You don't have a gunshot wound, do you Clare?" Audrey glances over, looking through her.

Clare shakes her head. She's washed herself down in the bathroom enough times now that she would have felt a scar or even seen one on her stomach. That's where she was shot, reportedly. She might have seen his face through the trees before she died.

"My scars," Leo swallows. "They weren't there before this either. I died in a fire."

"Most people who die in fires die of smoke inhalation," Audrey decides. "Pre or posthumous? It's unclear?"

They go back to her notes, circling the final point once more.

In that second, Fallon lowers her shirt. She wonders the same question as Audrey. Were they the first or the last? Perhaps, they were both. Fallon thinks of music, of her college, and the first note an orchestra plays. Corrin was the artist, but she was too. There's more math to music. Twenty-seven stabs, each one a note on a staff, and Fallon is glad she can't remember the sound of it all, cannot remember the pitch of her scream.

Leo clears his throat and starts to explain, careful to avoid looking at Constable Clare Canosa as he does. Something is strange about the police. They aren't investigating, and they haven't taken their statements, and none of them have been put in a motel yet today like they asked yesterday.

"It's best we avoid the police anyway," Audrey offers. "A good impulse when we weren't sure we were dead, but now that we are, I'd rather us not become a media spectacle. Or even experimented on."

They say it so plainly, and Nico can't understand how the thought flows from Audrey without a pacing moment. Nico sits on their hands to keep them from shaking. The plan isn't to go to the police.

"We can still tell our families, right?" Nico asks.

Audrey looks at them, scrunching their nose, "I mean, that might be a case-by-case basis, but it probably isn't safe."

"We can trust the Chelster police," Clare adds. "I mean, they just don't have the resources to deal with this, and I bet they have RCMP driving down, but it'll take days to get them here by car from the closest outpost that isn't too busy for whatever excuse the police have made."

Leo shakes his head, "it's something weird. Ajay... I don't know."

"Judgement-free zone," Audrey clicks the pen twice, waiting for Leo to press on.

Clare leans in. She knows the officers around her. Well, she was a rookie, but she should know them. Chelster has crime, but there isn't some secret criminal underbelly. There are break-ins and drunk driving and shopping-lifting and drugs, and even illegal cigarettes, but the police here don't bury cases. Clare wouldn't work for people like that.

She thinks about a boy who pled not guilty.

She doesn't add anything.

"Ajay just, I think he had a weird vibe too," only now does Leo look at Clare, hoping to tell her what's in his mind.

It's not just a vibe. They are dead and undead, and their deaths are both clear and unclear, and they were buried as they were but not entirely. Leo cannot be certain of much. He tries to tell Clare what he thinks in his head but doesn't want Audrey to find out.

Ajay is hiding something.

~~~

It's not like Ajay to wind up in a pew. The basement had questions, the outside world could have answers, but Ajay just wants quiet. He sits on the hard wooden benches of the church. The stained-glass windows are nice. Before he died, he'd never been inside this church. His parents were practicing Hindus. They were the only Indian family in the entire town. This place holds nothing but current memories to him, and it's easy to dwell on his thoughts here.

Ambrose looks down at Ajay from his spot in the upstairs section where the Church choir sings. The empty room is built for echoing. Ambrose swears he can hear the remains. Their harmonies at sermons on Sundays, the prayers of old women whose children work in the oil sands, the cries of widowers at funerals, the laughter of children at weddings. It all is still in the walls, hundreds of years of it. Ambrose, he too is what remains. He is remains.

When Ambrose stands his steps echo. Ajay's head turns to look at Ambrose. Ajay listens to each step as Ambrose makes his way down. Soon enough, Ambrose sits down in the pew next to Ajay.

"You seem at home here," Ajay notices.

Ambrose is looking at the ceiling above him. The white arches cover it. This is not a Catholic Church and certainly lacks the decadence of one.

"I didn't like church before this," Ambrose offers no further explanation. The feelings of living things are never as interesting as legacies, and the him from before was unfortunately alive. "Now it feels fitting."

"How so?" Ajay asks.

There is too much to explain, too many words to write on a tombstone. Ambrose looks at Ajay, "you don't like it here. The others can tell too."

"I'm not Christian," Ajay chuckles.

Ambrose shakes his head, "you look at the walls like they are the inside of a coffin."

Gripping his fingers on the wood of the pew in front of them, Ajay breathes in the stale air. Ambrose is right. Ajay does not like this place. There isn't much of a way out. It does not feel like a coincidence that the officer mentioned the bell tower. Ajay wonders if the man knows what is inside it. Telling the others will cause panic, and they've got no money and cannot leave town even if they did.

"Talking about that will make everyone freak out," Ajay hisses. "At least it's only my coffin."

Ambrose shrugs, "you didn't tell the police today, when you could."

"I don't trust them."

"Correctly," Ambrose agrees. "The lawyer I was summering for had them on his payroll. The priest might too."

Ajay looks at Ambrose, furrowing his brow, "you didn't tell me earlier."

"It was only my coffin," Ambrose tells Ajay, trying to understand Ajay.

The walls of a coffin would feel snug to Ambrose. He once made his mother cry by crawling into an empty one at a funeral home as a child. He could have lied in one forever. The universe did not agree with his predisposition.

It does not agree with them now.

~~~~~

This was a whole bunch of words. Like, it feels like not enough, but it also feels like too many, so deal with it. I should update this more frequently! I pumped out around 60K last month and needed a few days to recuperate. Hope you enjoy!

Also, who's next steps freak you out the most? Like, who are you most worried for in their plan? Personally, I cannot say because I know too much.