Daeman was on his way back from the forest and headed toward the noon gathering when he saw the ghost. He was carrying a heavy canvas bag filled with firewood on his back and wishing that he’d been on sentry duty or hunting detail that day instead of having to chop and haul wood when a woman stepped out of the forest only a dozen yards from him.

At first he saw her only in his peripheral vision—enough to know that it was a human being, female, and therefore part of the Ardis community rather than a voynix—and for a few seconds he kept walking, flechette rifle in his right hand but pointed downward, eyes lowered as he hitched up the heavy pack on his back, but when he turned her way to call a greeting, he froze.

It was Savi.

He straightened up and the huge load of wood in his makeshift canvas rucksack almost toppled him over backward. It would not have been an overreaction. He could only stare.

It was Savi—but not the gray-haired, older Savi he’d watched being murdered and dragged off by Caliban in the caverns under Prospero’s hellhole of an orbital isle almost a year earlier—this was a younger, paler, more beautiful Savi.

A resurrected Savi? No.

A ghost was Daeman’s dual stab of thought and fear. His era of old-style humans did not even believe in ghosts, did not truly have the concept of ghosts; he’d never heard of ghosts outside mentions in the turin drama or heard a ghost story until he started sigling the ancient books in Ardis Manor the previous autumn.

But this had to be a ghost.

The young Savi did not seem completely substantial. There was something—shimmery—about her as she saw him, turned, and began walking straight toward him. Daeman realized that he could see through her, more even than he’d been able to see through the hologram of Prospero up on the orbital isle.

Yet somehow he knew that this was no hologram. This was… something… real, real and alive, even as he noticed the soft, pale glow her entire body gave off and the fact that her feet did not seem to be touching the ground with any weight as she strode through the high, brown grass toward him. She was wearing a thermskin and nothing else. Daeman knew from experience that thermskins—not as thick as a coat of paint—made one feel more naked than naked, and that’s how she looked now as she began walking in his direction. Naked. The thermskin was a pale blue but showed every muscle working as she walked, emphasized rather than hid the slight bobble to her breasts. Deaman had grown used to Savi in thermskins, but where there had been slightly sagging breasts, slack buttocks, and floppy thigh muscles with the older Savi, this apparition showed high breasts, a flat stomach, and powerful, young muscles.

He freed his arms from the straps, dropped the load of firewood, and gripped his flechette rifle with both hands. Daeman could see the new inner palisade more than two hundred yards away and even a dark head moving above the line of logs, but no one else was in sight. He and the ghost were alone in this wintry field at the edge of the forest.

“Hello, Daeman.”

It was Savi’s voice. Younger, even more vibrant with life than the mesmerizing voice he remembered, but definitely Savi’s.

Daeman said nothing until she stopped within arm’s reach. Her very solidity seemed to flicker—one second complete, the next transparent and insubstantial. When she was substantial, he could see even the areolae around her slightly raised nipples. The young Savi, he realized, had been very beautiful.

She looked him up and down with those familiar dark eyes he remembered so well. “You look well, Daeman. You’ve lost a lot of weight. Gained muscle.”

Still he did not speak. Everyone who went out into the forest carried one of the high-decibel whistles they’d dug from the ruins. His was on a lanyard around his neck. He had only to raise it and blow it and a dozen armed men or women would be running his way in less than a minute.

Savi smiled. “You’re right. I’m not Savi. We’ve never met. I know you only from Prospero’s descriptions and video recordings.”

“Who are you?” he asked. His voice sounded hoarse, tight, tense, even to himself.

The apparition shrugged as if her identity were of little importance. “My name is Moira.”

The name meant nothing to Daeman. Savi had never mentioned anyone named Moira. Neither had Prospero. For a wild second he wondered if Caliban could be a shapeshifter.

“What are you?” he said at last.

“Ah!” The syllable was launched in Savi’s husky laugh. “A wonderfully intelligent question. Not ‘Why do you look like my dead friend Savi?’ but ‘What are you?’ Prospero was correct. You were never as stupid as you seemed, even a year ago.”

Daeman touched the whistle on his chest and waited.

“I’m a post-human,” said the Savi apparition.

“There are no more post-humans,” Daeman said. With his left hand, he raised the whistle slightly.

“There were no more post-humans,” said the shimmering woman. “Now there are. One. Me.”

“What do you want here?”

She slowly extended her hand and touched his right forearm. Daeman expected her hand to pass through him but her touch was as solid and real as that of any of the Ardis survivors. He could feel the pressure of her long fingers through his jacket. He could also feel an almost electrical tingle there.

“I want to come with you to watch the discussion and then the vote on whether Noman can borrow your sonie,” she said softly.

How in the hell does she know about that? he wondered. Aloud, he said, “If you show up, there probably won’t be a discussion and vote. Even Odys … Noman… will want to know who you are, where you’re from, what you want.”

She shrugged again. “Perhaps. But none of the others will see me. I will be visible only to you. This is a little trick Prospero built into my sisters when they went off to become gods and I decided to keep it for myself. It comes in handy from time to time.”

He fingered the whistle with his left hand, slipped the index finger of his right hand into the trigger guard of the flechette rifle, and looked at her as she shifted slightly from full focus to transparency back to full focus again. There was too much in what she just said to allow him even to frame the proper questions right now. His intuition was that the best thing he could do was keep her around. He couldn’t explain even to himself why that made sense. “Why would you want to come to the discussion?” he asked.

“I am interested in the outcome.”

“Why?”

She smiled. “Daeman, if I can be invisible to the other fifty-five people there, including Noman, I could certainly have remained unseen by you. But I want you to know I’m there. We will talk about things after the discussion and after the vote.”

“Talk about what things?” Daeman had seen the dead, brown, mummified corpses of what Savi, Harman, and he had thought were the last of the post-humans up in the thin, stale air of Prospero’s dying realm. All female. Most of them chewed on by Caliban centuries ago. Daeman had no clue if this apparition was what she claimed to be. To him, she more resembled the goddesses from the turin drama he had watched only on occasion—Athena perhaps, or a much younger Hera. Not as beautiful as the glimpses he’d had of Aphrodite. Suddenly he remembered that almost a year ago, in Paris Crater, there had been word of street altars being set up to the gods from the Trojan War turin drama.

But everyone in Paris Crater now was dead, including his mother. Murdered and eaten by Caliban. The city buried in that blue-ice gunk by Setebos. If the people of his home city had ever prayed to the turin gods and goddesses, it had done them no good. If this was a goddess from the drama, he was sure that she would do him no good.

“We can talk about where your friend Harman is,” said the spectral figure who called herself Moira.